Continuous commentary from The American Prospect Online.
Seriously, this is a real question: What are the prospects (assuming they exist at all) for anything approaching Democratic unity on Iran? And how might it be achieved? On Social Security, Dems stayed in line -- partly because defeat would have been catastrophic, and partly because they were persuaded that they could win. And it worked. Can Dems be persuaded that a debate over Iran can be won, too? Matt smartly suggests a broad, longer-term approach to winning this and other future arguments -- attack the "network of ideas" that brought us Iraq and threaten to bring us war with Iran. In a shorter-term, more tactical sense, it's never too early to come up with a core message on Iran that Dems might see as a winner -- and hence might be willing to unify around.
So: Is there such a message? My first nomination would be one of John Avarosis's suggestions: "George Bush is the wrong man to be launching yet another war." His whole list is worth a read, but that one seems particularly potent. It dovetails with the incompetence argument, reminds voters of the Iraq fiasco and Bush's central role in creating it and promising easy victory, and raises the specter of Bush as reflexive warmonger, which could make voters less willing to listen to the White House's pro-war rationale. And recent polls -- including this eye-opening one -- suggest the electorate may be ready to question the wisdom of GOP militarism and the arguments undergirding it. Yes, yes, I know, Dems can't possibly win an argument about national security, right? But things change -- sometimes even for the better. Maybe GOP hegemony on these issues is coming to an end. And not a moment too soon.
--Greg Sargent
While Reid and Pelosi and Rahm and Chuck might bitch about Dean 'not playing the traditional party chairman's role', where were they in February of 2005 when the elections were held? Why did they let uber-local pol Donnie Fowler become a near kingmaker? Why didn't they endorse or get involved in a serious way? There was an election for this position, a position that was clearly going to control hundreds of millions of dollars and party resources in the next few years. Was this election below them? Apparently. Well Dean was elected and he is doing what he promised.Correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't Pelosi, Reid, et al backing Indiana's Tim Roemer? I mention it only because I remember learning it from, well, MyDD (and here). Can't win for losing, I guess.
As for Scheiber's article on Dean, the piece's thesis, once you cut through the weird overuse of messianic language, is that Dean is hostile to big donors, overly-focused on a 50-state strategy, and certain portions of the party are nervous about this. No real surprise. I'd work up some concern, but given that the Democratic Party easily survived the constraints of McCain-Feingold, if Dean ends up raising a bit less than Terry McAuliffe did, I've trouble believing that the difference won't be made up elsewhere. Add in that online and small-donor fundraising will likely be far more advanced come 2008 Democrats should have little trouble reaching the relatively low saturation point (above which additional cash hardly matters). Folks will remember that John Kerry, now whining about how little he had to spend, finished the election with $15 million in the bank.
Don't get me wrong, I'd like to see Dean do a bit better with the large donors -- his 50-state strategy could only benefit from more money -- but Scheiber's article strikes me as a frustrated bellow from sources put out by Dean's new methods. Had McAuliffe's tenure gone better, I might give them more credence, but given the fortunes of the Democrats under his direction, I'm more than willing to give Dean's new ideas a chance. Indeed, the interesting article here would be the inverse of Scheber's: what does the 50-state strategy look like? How's it progressing? And what sort of chance does it stand at success? I've already heard that Dean's doing the old things wrong, now I'm interested in knowing if he's doing the new ones right.
--Ezra Klein
--Sam Rosenfeld
Conversely, despite their reputation, Baby Boomers turn out to be uptight, crazy, and reactionary, featuring rightwing views on "lifestyle issues and crime" and, generally speaking, "are often characterized by taking strong, relatively extreme positions on issues." Similarly, they like to panic: "large majorities of Baby Boomers express greater concern than any other generational grouping with virtually every specific issue examined in the survey." But, equipped with extremist opinions and high level of concern, they're convinced nothing can be done: "Baby Boomers have substantially more negative and pessimistic perceptions of the political process than any other generational grouping."
--Matthew Yglesias
Liberals are going to want to have a sober assessment of what the real odds are for various outcomes in November and not get seduced into false expectations; moreover, I'd suggest people think a bit harder about the Democrats' leadership in the House and what the alternatives are. At the risk of repeating myself regarding the whole Dems-aren't-so-lame discussion, let me bear down on Pelosi's performance specifically. Recall that this week saw the fruits of a deft parliamentary jujitsu move administered by Pelosi regarding the House immigration bill. Also recall that the Republicans left for recess last week having failed, under the new leadership of John Boehner, to pass a budget bill for this year; the context for that failure was set by Pelosi ensuring a unanimous and united Democratic front of opposition, just as she had in 2003, 2004, and 2005. (Yes, budget bills have always been major party-line votes, but the minority under Pelosi has also held ranks for other budget and appropriations bills that were scuttled due to GOP divisions.)
If liberals would rather cast their lot with a Minority Leader Hoyer, that's their prerogative, though I'd love to have the rationale for such thinking spelled out for me sometime.
--Sam Rosenfeld
I've got nothing against insiders dishing on the Kerry campaign, but the idea that they would dish to Klein to support whatever pernicious and destructive narrative he'll be concocting about how we all hate America demonstrates a tremendous lack of judgment.We've glimpsed the narrative Klein has created. In the Time magazine excerpt of his book, Klein says Kerry was "smothered" by his consultants. Whatever one thinks of the Kerry campaign, or of consultants in general, I think it's clear that Klein's assault is really a back-door way of launching a familiar attack on Dems: That Democrats will say or do anything to get elected -- including abandon their core moral principles. That is the tale that the press used to destroy Al Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004, and now Klein has hauled it out again and is waving it as he dances his jig on the grave of Kerry's presidential aspirations.
How eager was Klein to tell the story this way? One Kerry campaign insider who refused to talk to Klein -- chief strategist Robert Shrum -- claims Klein was so eager that he cooked the facts to do it. Klein's chief piece of evidence for Kerry's inauthenticity in the excerpt is that Kerry didn't talk about the Abu Gharib torture scandal because his consultants told him not to. As I reported below, Shrum insisted in an interview with me that Klein's account was "misleading" and "inaccurate." Klein vigorously rejects the claim. Maybe once the book hits other Kerry insiders will come forward and say whether they think Klein's depiction is accurate.
Either way, Klein's new attack begs a question: If Kerry had made Abu Gharib a big issue, how would Klein have reacted? Klein routinely blasts liberal Dems who fault Bush on national security issues. He reportedly said that the message of the party's liberals is that they "hate America." Now he's hammering a Dem who didn't fault Bush sufficiently on torture as craven and inauthentic. If Kerry had taken up torture, would Klein have hailed Kerry's principled stand -- or hammered him as a weak-kneed liberal? We'll never know. Maybe Klein would have played against type and praised Kerry. Or maybe not. The point is, in a broad sense commentators like Klein routinely box Dems in: Either they're phonies who paper over their true beliefs or they're wild-eyed radicals who hate America. It's a pretty neat trick, really.
--Greg Sargent
Rather, there's a widespread view on the American right that it's always a mistake to reach diplomatic agreements with "evil" regimes. There's also a widespread view on the American right that, contra the examples of Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, nuclear deterrence won't work against "crazy" leaders. At the intersection of those two opinions is the conclusion that we ought to be very, very, very, very willing to use unilateral preventative military force against countries that have nuclear weapons programs or that we merely vaguely suspect of having nuclear weapons programs. Both of those ideas are foolish and dangerously wrong, but they're also widespread -- not private oddball notions of Bush's. If liberals want to push this country's foreign policy in a better direction over the next five-to-ten years, we need to attack the whole network of ideas (including a non-trivial number of ideas whose origins are inside the Democratic coalition) that gave us the Iraq War and that threaten to give us the Iran War.
Bush's poor leadership skills have made and continue to make things worse than they might otherwise be, but the basic problems here are much bigger than the man himself.
--Matthew Yglesias
Not only are the current banking behemoths grossly ripping consumers off through transaction and ATM fees, but geographical inequities abound, with large swaths of the (poor) populace lacking access to any sort of accredited, serious financial institution, and turning instead to sharkish corner stores and money order merchants. Were Wal-Mart to enter the game, many of those inequities would instantly vanish, millions of poorer folks would have access to a serious banking alternative, and some of the more useless charges and inefficiencies retained by the sclerotic banking industry would rapidly prove unsustainable. Reflexively mistrustful of Wal-Mart though I am, I've a tough time opposing that.
--Ezra Klein
The fact that some powerful media figures still won't accept accountability for their pre-war blunders is awfully discouraging -- it suggests that they're fully prepared to commit those blunders all over again. Case in point: Today's Washington City Paper has an extraordinary interview with Hiatt, in which reporter Eric Wemple notes that the Post editorial board hasn't yet apologized for its role in spreading the Bush administration's pre-war deceptions, and asks Hiatt if they'll ever issue a mea culpa. Says the piece:
The Post's editorialists bought the White House line in full, yet they haven't gone the mea culpa route. They flirted with accountability in an October 2003 editorial, which reads in part: "Were we wrong? The honest answer is: We don't yet know."In other words, take your demand for accountability and shove it deep into your posterior.Well, that was two and a half years ago. Do we know enough now to admit the mistake? When asked that question, Hiatt responded, "I'm not getting into that subject...I guess what we have to say about that I would say in an editorial."
Over at The Times, meanwhile, Keller has shown himself to be far more responsible and professional than Hiatt. He's taking questions at nytimes.com this week, and this is part of what Keller said in response to queries about Judith Miller (scroll down):
[T]he best answer to bad reporting is good reporting...the experience last year has certainly raised our editorial vigilance and underscored the importance of the checks and balances that operate to assure fair and accurate news coverage, especially in sensitive areas such as national security, where reporters rely on sources who cannot speak for attribution. Newsrooms necessarily operate with a large degree of trust...But the operative principle is Ronald Reagan's: trust but verify.Keller's answers are encouraging. As I noted below, he was far more churlish about the blogosphere than necessary, and The Times's handling of the Miller saga was anything but perfect. Still, the key point is that Keller appears prepared to learn from past mistakes, a refreshing trait which is oddly absent among his media establishment colleagues.
Keller, I'm sure, is well aware that his legacy may rest largely on how he handles the run-up to Iran -- just as his predecessor Howell Raines's legacy was tainted partly by the paper's handling of the run-up to Iraq. What's more, given America's degraded international relationships and all the talk about nukes, this time the stakes are arguably higher -- The Times and other big news orgs simply have to get it right, or the consequences could be dire. In a way, the lead-up to a possible war with Iran is really a big opportunity for the media -- a chance for the big news organizations to redeem themselves for their disastrous failings last time around.
Bill Keller seems to understand this. Fred Hiatt, sadly, doesn't -- or if he does, he couldn't care less.
--Greg Sargent
--Ezra Klein
But as TAP founder Bob Kuttner pointed out in his speech on "American Foreign Policy as Political Failure" earlier this weak, effective leadership from the opposition has been sadly lacking in recent years. With the surprising (but heartening) exception of Jane Harman, I haven't seen any congressional Democrats engaging with what's going on at the moment.
--Matthew Yglesias
Sigh. I can't imagine that there is anything to say about the Judy Miller episode that I have not already said, publicly and to The Times staff, over and over. At The Times, as in most of the media-watching world, we have registered the Miller saga as an important cautionary tale, and moved on. But the story has an afterlife in the impending trial of Scooter Libby, and, as our Q&A mailbag demonstrates, the subject has settled into some quarters of the blogosphere as a partisan obsession and an object of grassy-knoll conspiracy theories. The hard-core enthusiasts feed on blogs that have little to offer but harebrained speculation. (And they think Judy Miller was credulous!)...I can understand Keller's frustration both with the blogs and with the fact that the Judy Miller saga just won't die, and I know the fact that this is being published on a blog may, in his and others' eyes, diminish its worth in some intangible way. Still, I think I can offer Keller some clarification that might nonetheless have some value. In the runup to the Iraq war, the Bush administration practiced an extraordinary amount of deception, the depths of which we are only just learning now; every passing day brings yet another example of pre-war duplicity, each more startling than the last. Yes, The Times is partly responsible for digging up what we're learning now. But let's face it -- it's too late. Because of this war, over 2,300 Americans are dead and over 50,000 (the most recent count I've seen) are severely wounded. With Congress in GOP hands, the public's last line of defense against an administration as mendacious as this one is the media. Without a tough, vigilant media the public -- not to say the young men and women losing eyes, arms, legs, everything -- are helpless.[T]he experience last year has certainly raised our editorial vigilance and underscored the importance of the checks and balances that operate to assure fair and accurate news coverage, especially in sensitive areas such as national security, where reporters rely on sources who cannot speak for attribution. [emphasis added]
Now the administration is making agressive noises yet again, this time towards Iran -- and the grunts and chest-thumping sound startlingly similar to the ones we heard in 2002 and 2003. There's every reason to fear that the administration will fall back on the same tactic of spreading intelligence it knows to be false while suppressing intelligence that undercuts its case for war. Given the media's dreadful complicity with the administration's propagandizing last time around, there's simply no reason to assume that it will do a better job this time around. And this time -- because of all the talk about nukes, plus the tattered state of America's relations with the rest of the world -- the stakes are arguably greater. In other words, this is damn serious business.
So if people are obsessing about the Miller affair, maybe it's because they're thinking about the future, not the past. They're hoping -- praying, pleading -- that this time reporters will be far less willing to spread White House lies in exchange for the passing pleasure of getting a scoop, and that the press this time will be far more aggressive and skeptical when it counts, i.e., before the war, not after. It's good to hear Keller say that the Miller fiasco has raised the paper's "editorial vigilance," but come on -- the burden going forward is on The Times and other media to prove that this is so. In fact, one might see the leadup to a possible war with Iran as a chance for The Times and the other big news organizations to redeem themselves for their performance on Iraq. It's an opportunity, really. Let's hope the media will seize it.
Are blogs frustratingly awash in misinformation at times? Are they imperfect in many other ways? Yes, and yes. But I think Keller's irritability towards bloggers is misplaced. Blogs hammered The Times for Miller, yes, but not because the majority of left-liberal bloggers want to embarrass The Times for the fun of it or otherwise tear down big news organizations. Rather, they want The Times and the other big news orgs to be better than they've been. And they need to be better when it counts -- in other words, Bill, right now.
--Greg Sargent
So while my sympathies go out to all those Gilded Age apologists out there, you just can't explain away the central economic problem of our time -- accelerating, unchecked inequality so pervasive that we're seeing an economic "recovery" with continuing wage slippage and poverty increases -- by claiming that the poor receive too much health care.
--Ezra Klein
“Some people say Kleenex when they mean tissue,” Norquist said. “We will jealously guard the real phrasing the way Kleenex and Coca-Cola do. We will sue anyone who says it wrong and make lots of money.”Ah Grover, what would we do without you?
--Ezra Klein
"From a strategic point of view, Democrats were not going to help Republicans pass the bad Sensenbrenner bill," said Jennifer Crider, spokeswoman for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco). "With the felony provision in there, it is a poison pill, as we've seen from all the rallies around the country."Quite so. In the end, the creation of a new felon class wasn't nearly enough to sour congressional Republicans on Sensenbrenner's legislation, revealing exactly the cold, cavalier attitude towards immigrants that Democrats wanted to highlight. There's a contrast being drawn here, and for once, congressional Democrats are refusing to blur it.Crider said that Republicans were the majority party in the House, and if they truly wanted to change the House bill, they could have.
"The bottom line is that 65 Republicans voted for that provision, and the rest voted for that provision when they voted for the final bill," she said.
--Ezra Klein
In the end, though, a bill like this doesn't penalize outsourcing, it doesn't help the unexpectedly unemployed, and it doesn't do anything about globalization -- it just whips up some resentment again foreigners. If Democrats want to seriously address the downsides of free trade, they should (it'd be damn well about time). Instead, they want to look like they're addressing the downsides of free trade, while not actually making any of the hard decisions or substantive trade offs a coherent policy response would require.
--Ezra Klein
According to the AP, the story goes something like this: After James Sensenbrenner brought his endearingly medieval outlook to the issue, a hastily called confab of unions, civil rights groups, and religious organizations met in California. The consortium decided to sponsor some rallies with a simple purpose: against Sensenbrenner's legislation, for some undefined path to citizenship. Outreach was conducted primarily through Hispanic radio, e-mail, and churches, with the Service Employees International Union and the Catholic Church eventually taking the lead, particularly on funding. The rallies tapped into the Hispanic community's unexpectedly deep desire to find their voice, and so the protests became rallies, and the rallies emerged a movement. For May and others of his ilk, that authenticity and spontaneity may be the scariest explanation of all.
--Ezra Klein
Dean, at this morning’s Prospect breakfast meeting with roughly two dozen journalists, said, "We are going to call, probably today, for the declassification of the report.” He wouldn’t say whether he had already spoken to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi about this strategy, but one source said that such conversations would commence today, and that Dean would likely appear on television this afternoon to press the claim. “If the [Post] story is accurate,” Dean said, “…then the onus is on the president to prove that he did not mislead the country.” He sharpened this point later, saying that if the Post was correct, then Bush did mislead the country, and it was either a case of “incompetence, or it was deliberate. And those are both very, very serious.”
The trailers, and their alleged ability to produce biological weapons, comprised a central administration claim on the urgency of the need to attack Iraq. The Post story does not make it explicitly clear that Bush would have known on May 29, when he claimed that the weapons of mass destruction had been found, that the DIA analysts had reached the conclusion that the trailers weren’t a threat. Dean wants to find out if Bush knew of their May 27 findings.
More breakfast tidbits throughout the day.
--Michael Tomasky
--Alec Oveis
As things stand, it's always worth noting that European economic growth could be boosted rather easily if the European Central Bank would loosen monetary policy. My understanding is that they've been maintaining a tighter-than-necessary monetary policy in order to deliberately provoke economic pain in the hopes that this will inspire voters to agree to adopt additional labor market flexibility and cuts in social welfare expenditures. Europeans probably should make their labor market more flexible (I'm radically less convinced that Europe's big welfare states are a problem) but European elites should consider the possibility that this would be easier to accomplish under conditions of prosperity. Obviously, nobody's going to want to make it easier to fire people under conditions where nobody has a reasonable expectation of getting a new job after they're laid off.
--Matthew Yglesias
The first pitch of the Washington Nationals’ second season at Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium was low and away, bouncing in the dirt before being scooped up by catcher Brian Schneider. For that, Vice President Cheney received a round of boos from the home crowd this afternoon.By all other accounts in the press and rather plainly on the Post's video, Cheney was getting booed from the beginning just as you would expect.
--Matthew Yglesias
Prodi's coalition is a gamut of nine parties — running from two Communist parties at one extreme to liberals and Catholics at another — all of them unable to agree either on political ends or on means. It should be child's play for Berlusconi or any opposition to bring down such a government and return to the routine of the last 50 years, in which Italian prime ministers have come and gone in rapid succession as though through revolving doors.The famous fact is that during the immediate post-WWII era, Italy had something like fifty governments in fifty years (The Donnas beat that pace by a wide margin) which seems excessive. This "instability," however, masked a great deal of underlying sameness. A single political party was the dominant force in all the governing coalitions during that period. What you had was personnel turnover -- a lot of cabinet shuffles due to personal or factional in-fighting or the machinations of minor parties. But new cabinets tended to include many of the same people as the previous one (possibly in a new job) and someone who got booted out of cabinet stood an excellent chance of coming back during the new shuffle.
The main upshot of this wasn't a lot of chaos and back-and-forth policy churn. Rather, practical authority was concentrated to a large degree in the permanent bureacracy which made policy just beneath the high-level personnel turnover (the US, it's worth remembering, has an absurdly large number of political appointees in our cabinet agencies by European standards) and much of the country was basically run by very stable networks of bribery and extortion. Genuine instability is a phenomenon of the post-Tangentopoli era in which a huge wave of scandals destroyed all of the old system's major political parties and created the current dynamic where power alternates between a corrupt rightwing coalition and a hopelessly divided leftwing one.
--Matthew Yglesias
The only way to make this work would be to put carrots on the table. "Give up your nukes and we'll lift our sanctions and grant you diplomatic recognition, or else I'll use force to slightly delay the point at which you can go nuclear." This will work, of course, only if Iran would prefer diplomatic and trade relations with the US to having a nuclear bomb. But if that is their preference, then the threat of airstrikes adds nothing to the equation -- you could just put the straight-up nukes for sanctions trade on the table and you'd get the same result one way or another. Airstrikes would be pointless in any case, and precisely because they're pointless there's no point in threatening to use them.
Now, conservatives will say we shouldn't offer carrots because Teheran can't be trusted. Bush thinks it's wrong to offer concessions to "evil" regimes (it's appeasement, see) and that's why he won't put any on the table. If that's your mindset, there are only two options -- let the evildoers go nuclear (see North Korea) or launch a disastrous war (see Iraq). It'd be nice to find a middle ground, but there's really nothing there.
--Matthew Yglesias
In the piece, Klein asserts that Kerry allowed himself "to be smothered by his consultants," and cites as a key example the campaign's handling of the Abu Gharib scandal:
Perhaps the worst moment came with the Bush Administration torture scandal: How to respond to Abu Ghraib? Hold a focus group. But the civilians who volunteered for an Arkansas focus group were conflicted; ultimately, they believed the Bush Administration should do whatever was necessary to extract information from the "terrorists." The consultants were unanimous in their recommendation to the candidate: Don't talk about it. Kerry had entered American politics in the early 1970s, protesting the Vietnam War, including the atrocities committed by his fellow soldiers in Vietnam. But he followed his consultants' advice, never once mentioning Abu Ghraib -- or the Justice Department memo that "broadened" accepted interrogation techniques -- in his acceptance speech or, remarkably, in his three debates with Bush.But now Shrum is disputing Klein's version of events. When I contacted Shrum, he said that Klein's characterization of the campaign's response to Abu Gharib is "inaccurate." "It is misleading to say that the campaign reaction to Abu Gharib was to hold a focus group," Shrum told me, adding that while the torture scandal may have come up from time to time, there was never a session devoted to it: "We held focus groups all the time. In those focus groups I have no doubt that Abu Gharib was mentioned. But coming out of that there was no recommendation to the candidate that he should never talk about it. I would have known if this recommendation was going to be made."
Shrum added: "[Kerry] never received any advice not to talk about Abu Gharib. I certainly never gave him that advice."
The dispute is noteworthy, because Klein's version of Kerry's focus-grouping appears to be a key piece of his indictment of the campaign, at least in the excerpt. The book, a broad indictment of the "pollster-consultant industrial complex," is called Politics Lost.
When we contacted Klein about Shrum's comments, he dismissed the accusation, saying that Shrum refused to speak to him for the book. Klein emailed us the following statement:
Everything in the Kerry section of the book was double and triple-sourced. I spoke directly to the person who conducted the focus groups. A Kerry pollster told me that the consultants' view of Abu Ghraib was unanimous, which was confirmed by Kerry staff members and other Kerry consultants. And, of course, the proof is on the record: Kerry did not mention Abu Ghraib -- or, equally important, the Bush Justice Department Torture Memo -- in either his acceptance speech or the three debates. I like and respect Bob, but I find it odd that he was willing to talk to you and not to me, despite repeated requests during the writing of this book.It's worth noting that Kerry himself has said that he called for the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld based partly on Abu Gharib. Either way, this fight is only going to get worse in coming days, when Klein's book comes out and those indicted in the book blast back.
--Greg Sargent
--Matthew Yglesias
One reason for the reluctance of the French and the Italians to stick by what the politicians see as needed changes is the longtime insecurity of governments, in contrast to relatively stable political situations in countries like the United States and Britain.Doesn't seem like a very good state of affairs to me, but then I, unlike the conservative chorus gleefully criticizing the French, believe in a strong centralized government...In Italy, there has been a history of short-lived governments in much of the time since the end of World War II, albeit many of these governments were populated by the same politicians. Mr. Berlusconi has been an exception, managing to last a full parliamentary term.
In France, change has been much slower in one way — Mr. Chirac has been in office for more than a decade — but French governments seem to be less confident in their mandate. French history is full of violent changes in government, not least the French Revolution, and current politicians can remember 1968, when some thought that student protests in Paris and other cities were about to force President Charles de Gaulle to resign.
--Ezra Klein
Meanwhile, former DeLay (and Dennis Hastert) aide John Feehery's Sunday Washington Post op-ed is worth a read for the dirt it dishes on DeLay's rogue minions, Ed Buckham, Mike Scanlon, and Tony Rudy. Do be wary of the good-man-wronged-by-perfidious-underlings narrative Feehery is aiming for, however.
Given the prominence of the K Street Project in discussions of DeLay's legacy (see Michael Barone's delightfully forthright defense of the gambit from last week), it's worth noting that Feehery himself is a direct and emblematic beneficiary of the Project. When, in 2004, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) hired a Democrat as its new president, furious congressional Republicans retaliated by excising tax credits to movie studios from an international tax bill. The MPAA got the message and promised to hire several Republicans for top positions. One of those hires: John Feehery, now the MPAA’s executive vice-president.
--Sam Rosenfeld
Now onto a different matter: Does anyone else miss those desperate pleas for more subscribers? I certainly do.
--Alec Oveis
--Matthew Yglesias
In addition to Ezra’s sharp fact-check on the A-Pox-on-Both-Their-Houses section of Sebastian Mallaby’s column, it’s worth noting the common, but silly, assumption underlying Mallaby’s analysis. He accuses the congressional Democratic leadership of “hav[ing] mastered the art of obstructionism but [being] light on policy proposals.” That assumes that Democrats and Republicans share broad agreement about what problems the nation faces in most areas. But, on many issues, the parties disagree not merely about means but about ends. Republicans think the tax code is too progressive, Democrats think it’s too regressive. So yes, Democrats attempt to “obstruct” efforts to make the estate tax repeal permanent and offer no “alternative.” But what’s wrong with that? The Dems are simply holding their principles.Indeed. When a merciless majority is pushing destructive legislation and impeding all minority proposals, effective obstruction may be the best idea of all...Anyway, obstructionism or lack of ideas is not a fair accusation to throw at a minority party particularly under this ruthless brand of majority leadership. It is not as if the Republicans, particularly in the House, will give the Democrats’ bills a fair vote. So, even if Mallaby’s assertion, were factually solid (it is not), it would be an illogical point anyway.
--Ezra Klein
The Republicans' dismal performance could shake their grip on power -- much as the gold-ingot episode upset Japan's politics. But the top congressional Democrats seem barely more attractive than the Republicans; they have mastered the art of obstructionism but are light on policy proposals. In Japan in the 1990s, the collapse of the cronyistic ruling party was expected to usher in economic change that would pull the country out of its financial swamp. Instead, reform proceeded at a glacial pace, and it took a full decade for the economy to get going again.Sigh. It's not clear why Mallaby thinks Democrats lack a sufficient number of ten-point plans, but the sectors he cites -- safety nets, retirement security, environmental regulations, and food inspection -- are pretty much covered. I've made it part of my beat to remain relatively atop the constantly advancing horde of health care, pension, and entitlement expansion proposals, and if Mallaby wants, I'd be happy to dump some of the white papers weighing down my desk onto his. But maybe Mallaby just shares the weird pundit obsession with the new, rendering perfectly good but slightly aged ideas invalid for his purposes. In which case he could check out the superteam of Robert Rubin, Roger Altman, Jason Bordoff, and Peter Orszag who've put their magical econwonk rings together to form The Hamilton Project, which even distributes their ideas in pleasing and convenient PDF format.The paradox of politics is that government is at once essential and dysfunctional. Globalization, demographic change, the sheer fact of economic growth: All these shifts create demands for government to step in, as a provider of safety nets for workers; retirement security for seniors; and public goods such as environmental quality and food safety, which become priorities as societies grow richer.
As for environmental regulations, thanks, but I don't think they require new thinking so much as the application of old thinking. Same with the underfunded FDA, which is perfectly capable of inspecting food, if only they had the bank account to hire enough employees. Mallaby may be frustrated with the country's worrying direction and its sclerotic policy discourse, but he's proving himself the problem, not the solution. As someone who regularly wades through the work of progressive wonks, I assure him that the Democratic Party wouldn't look nearly so intellectually bereft if Washington Post columnists like Mallaby would use their megaphones to broadcast some of the fresh, resonant ideas swirling quietly about rather than simply sniffing at an intellectual landscape that seems barren because smug, lazy pundits refuse to populate it.
--Ezra Klein
Well, almost.
--Mark Leon Goldberg
On that score, Mr. Sheen was offered an opportunity to see how his character's appeal would play in a real-life campaign. Not long ago, he said, he was approached by Democratic Party representatives from his native state, Ohio, to see if he would be interested in running for the United States Senate after he left the show. Though he would have had little trouble drafting a campaign platform — he is a fierce opponent of nuclear power and the war in Iraq, and a champion of human rights — he turned them down.So Paul Hackett wouldn't have been the only telegenic neophyte punching his way through the primary. Intuitively appealing as a Bartlett candidacy might be, though, Sheen made the right decision turning them down. It's one thing for a party to court celebrity when they've a dearth of good candidates -- see California's decimated Republican Party and Arnold Schwarzenegger. But in a state with Sherrod Brown and Paul Hackett, among others, leapfrogging qualified, hungry applicants in favor of an ultraliberal television actor is both bad precedent and, probably, poor politics.
--Ezra Klein
--Matthew Yglesias
Is there any question about this now? Indeed, the only question is that it seems so ludicrously obvious that they might not do it just to throw us a curve. Incredibly, Jacques Steinberg’s piece in today’s Times about how the writers flipped from a Vinick win to a Santos victory after the real-life John Spencer died didn’t even go into the veepstakes scenarios.
The episode, by the way, was great. And even though Santos won South Carolina and Vinick Vermont, it otherwise was rich in verisimilitude, with no hint that the fate of the nation was hanging on the results from Berkshire County.
--Michael Tomasky
There's a lot that could be said about this issue, but how about this one for starters -- information operations are always a part of war, but it should give you some pause when your main information operations are aimed at misleading people as to the fundamental nature of the conflict you're dealing with. Basically, the administration is trying to create an entirely fictional war in which the USA has over 100,000 troops stationed in Iraq because they're fighting al Qaeda. That simply isn't what they're doing. A policy that's only publicly justifiable in the context of massive deception is almost certainly going to be a bad policy.
--Matthew Yglesias
But funding for scientific research really shouldn't be a partisan issue. These grants don't interfere with the market so much as kickstart it: 70 percent of scientists filed their patents through their university's technology transfer office (the arm that commercializes university research). The rest went the entrepreneurial route, resulting in a full quarter of scientists who've received patents reporting that they've founded businesses. The taxpayer dollars fund basic research that may or may not have commercial application, but it turns out that the scientists themselves are making sure their findings leap from dry journal to the marketplace -- and a good thing, too. For all the noise Bush made about training young scientists during his State of the Union address, you'd think supporting the eggheads we've already got would be a bit more of a priority for his administration.
--Ezra Klein
Now, needless to say, as effective as the Democrats might get at this kind of stuff, they'll never hold a candle to the sweet, sweet scandal-mongering that TAP regularly deploys through its investigative pieces. (Recall that Joe Conason is the magazine's investigative editor.) Apologies for breaking the editors' promise, but here's one last request (really!): Subscribe to the Prospect, and/or help us out a bit. You'll be better for it.
--Sam Rosenfeld
In that piece, Waas reported that a classified one-page summary of the now-notorious National Intelligence Estimate was given to Bush, which says that some intelligence officials had serious doubts about the claim that Saddam wanted aluminum tubes for nukes -- and that Bush was given this summary before repeating the tubes claim in his speech.
Let's state this as clearly as we can: Wass says there is a piece of paper out there which constitutes hard evidence that Bush withheld critical info from the American public as he made the most critical decision a president can make -- the decision whether to go to war. Jaded DC hands will say, "Old news -- everyone knew there was dissent within the bureaucracy." Fine. But Wass's story says more than that -- he says there's proof of the extent to which Bush knew of that dissent, that he deliberately concealed it from the public, and that Rove thought this fact could "severely damage" Bush's reelection prospects if it surfaced.
The latest Libby revelations suggest, yet again, just how spooked Bush and his advisers were about the possibility that the truth about the runup to the war would come out. They suggest, yet again, that there's a great deal we don't know about the biggest story of this presidency. Waas's piece gives us a key chapter in that story. His piece finally did get attention from a big news org today: The Times cited it in an editorial, demanding a "thorough accounting" of the selling of the war. But it hasn't yet been mentioned in The Times's news pages -- or, for that matter, by the Washington Post, L.A. Times, Boston Globe or many others.
Memo to the nation's premiere investigative reporters: When are you going to get your hands on that piece of paper?
--Greg Sargent
So now’s that moment, at the end of the fund-drive, where the hosts say you only have five more minutes to join. That’s not entirely true in our case, but still, please subscribe. This is the last you’ll hear about subscriptions for at least a few months.
--The Editors
The Pod makes three points, all of which are soon to be chanted in unison by countless winger commentators. He says:
1) The leak wasn't really a leak because it was authorized by the president, and a "leak" is the "unauthorized release of government information."
This one's easy to knock down. First, a leak doesn't suddenly become a non-leak because it was secretly "authorized" by a higher-up. Plenty of info is leaked with tacit authorization from above, and we all agree to call that "leaking." This info certainly was leaked, in the sense that it was passed on confidentially by Libby to a reporter who wasn't supposed to reveal the source of it. In other words, the info was supposed to get out -- without anyone knowing where it came from or who authorized it. By contrast, if the info had been "released," to use Pod's preferred word, the administration would publicly own up to being the source for it. So yes, it was a leak.
As for Pod's argument that the president "can't leak" -- another pushback rapidly gaining currency -- keep in mind that the president isn't the one who is accused of doing the leaking. Rather, Bush is accused of authorizing the leak. Libby carried it out.
2) Pod also argues essentially that Bush was pushing back against Joe Wilson's slander, so it was OK.
Pod appears to be saying that this isn't a leak because the motive behind it was defensible. This is just silly -- and indeed, it undermines his own case. Even if you agree that the administration's rebuttal of Wilson was correct, that doesn't change the simple fact that Bush's authorization of the leak was political in nature. Indeed, if the argument is that Bush had to protect himself against a political attack with some sort of pushback, that reinforces, rather than undercuts, the idea that the leak was political. So Libby revealed that Bush authorized the leaking of classified info to achieve a political goal -- and that's a no-no.
3) Pod's final argument is that much or all of the National Intelligence Estimate was public already, so it couldn't have been leaked. Pod says:
On Oct. 7, 2002, nine months before Bush's supposed "leak," the administration released an unclassified version of the very same NIE at the urging of Senate Democrats.This is startlingly flimsy. Pod is talking about the fact that in October 2002, then Senator Bob Graham demanded the declassification of parts of the CIA's NIE before the congressional vote on the war. Graham subsequently said some parts had been declassified -- but by no means was the whole NIE, or even much of it, declassified. How do we know this? Because on July 18, 2003 -- after Bush authorized the leak -- a senior administration official held a press briefing in which he declassified key portions of the NIE. Pod can read the briefing itself right here. It was also covered the next day in The Times, Washington Post and elsewhere. So why would this senior official have held this declassification briefing if, as Pod says, an "unclassified version" of the NIE had been declassified "nine months" earlier? Answer: He wouldn't have.
What's more, it's obvious that whatever was declassified in October 2002 wasn't the portion that Libby says Bush authorized for leaking. Why, if Pod were right, would Libby have needed to ask Cheney lawyer David Addington if leaking the info was kosher, as he had testified? Answer: He wouldn't have. And why would Addington have opined that the president's authorization effectively declassified the info if, as Pod says, it was already declassified? He wouldn't have.
So to recap: Libby has revealed that Bush authorized a leak of classified info for political purposes. End of story.
--Greg Sargent
--Matthew Yglesias
Individual mandates cross an important practical and philosophical line: once we accept the principle that it is the government’s responsibility to ensure that every American has health insurance, we guarantee even more government involvement with and control over large portions of our health care system. Compulsory, government-defined insurance opens the door to even more widespread regulation of the health care industry and political interference in personal health care decisions. The result will be a slow but steady spiral downward toward a government-run national health care system.Yahoo!
--Ezra Klein
Take the question of caucus discipline. The lack of comparative context underlying liberal critics' incessant carping on this front is glaring -- compared to both recent and much more longstanding historical precedent, the current Democratic opposition has not only been disciplined and unified, but effective. Improvements can always be made, but it's simple ignorance to portray the state of the congressional caucuses under Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi as indistinguishable from what we saw under Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt in the early Bush years or, for that matter, what we saw from Democrats during the 1990s, when first Democratic congressional majorities confirmed Clarence Thomas and completely flubbed a major opportunity for universal healthcare legislation, then later Democratic congressional minorities joined ranks with Republicans on any number of illiberal, corporate-friendly initiatives. The current Democratic caucus is more ideologically unified, more disciplined in their votes, and on most scores more liberal than it has been in recent history.
Many factors have led to that, including long-range ones like the dwindling ranks of the last conservative (mainly southern) Dem hold-outs as well as the effects of George W. Bush and Tom DeLay's brand of GOP hyper-partisanship, which deliberately shuts out traditional Democratic collaborators from participating in legislation and attempts to cut off K Street funding for Democratic lawmakers. But it's also the result of important shifts in both personnel and strategic outlook within the Democratic leadership. Enforcing party ranks is extremely difficult in the American political system; on both sides of the aisle, it is done to a greater extent than we've seen in a long time, perhaps ever. And to the extent that we're now seeing cleavages and disarray growing among the GOP on things like budget bills, that's in part a credit to unified opposition by Democrats, which sets a context in which all Republicans must hang together or nothing passes.
The pervasive scorn for Pelosi is particularly odd, because on issues where there really remain intra-Democratic divisions, she's on the same side as liberals. When 72 Democrats voted for the bankruptcy bill last year, outraged bloggers cast it as still more evidence of Democratic cravenness and disarray. But that same faction of Democrats -- generally, K Street-friendly members aligned with Steny Hoyer -- had been quietly voting in favor of that same bankruptcy bill since the late 1990s. It was only under Pelosi that, for the first time, an actual intra-party fight broke out, with Pelosi leading the liberal faction, arguing that it's bad policy and bad politics for the caucus not to maintain united opposition to such bills.
Obviously more can always be done, pressure should always be maintained, and complacency should always be avoided. (TAP subcribers, of all people, know that.) But it remains the case that the actual state of the Democratic congressional caucuses, from the perspective of ideological liberals seeking disciplined and effective opposition, is better than it has been in awhile. That's worth acknowledging from time to time.
--Sam Rosenfeld
--Ezra Klein
--Ezra Klein
"If there's a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is," Bush told reporters at an impromptu news conference during a fund-raising stop in Chicago, Illinois. "If the person has violated law, that person will be taken care of.Now parse it. I'm sure Bush would like to know if there were any leakers in his administration. Who wouldn't want that information? And if a person violated the law, exposing the rest to criminal prosecution, I've no doubt that he'd be "taken care of." But, in this case, no laws were broken. The president can declassify information at will, so his involvement renders the leak no different than any other background tip. His comments were totally truthy, his actions fully legalesque. John Kerry never dreamt of such nuance.
Update As Al notes in comments, the leak in question was from the National Intelligence Estimate, not Plame. My mistake.
--Ezra Klein
Moreover, the upshot of that doctrine is to cut against Friedman, not Rumsfeld. The point is that if you will an end -- the liberation of Iraq by force of American arms -- you're committed to taking responsibility, morally, for the means your end necessarily entails. Meaning, in this case, the unilateral invasion of Iraq overseen by the actual government of the United States deploying the resources that were actually at its disposal. Subscribers will recall Harold Meyerson's Friedman section in his war pundits article spelling how far off this mark Friedman's been.
--Matthew Yglesias
A senior administration official, speaking on background because White House policy prohibits comment on an active investigation, said Bush sees a distinction between leaks and what he is alleged to have done. The official said Bush authorized the release of the classified information to assure the public of his rationale for war as it was coming under increasing scrutiny. (Emphasis added.)In other words, a leak isn't really a leak. Or it isn't really a leak when President Bush authorizes it. Or it isn't really a leak when President Bush is caught authorizing it. Or something.
--Greg Sargent
For more on fake moderate Shays, visit Midterm Madness. Also, be sure to see the incomparable "Fraud Caucus" article I co-wrote with Mark "Fast Leon" Goldberg. And, of course, subscribe so you can read this sort of awesome print content when it actually comes out.
--Matthew Yglesias
--Ezra Klein
Still, Mitt Romney will say this law makes him a worthy candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. And he's right. Politics should reward officials who accomplish something in office. And while it will undoubtedly annoy some progressives who don't love the plan or think he's taking credit for an idea (and favorable circumstances) that fell into his lap, they should be thankful for this development.Exactly.Thankful, because nationally the most important impact of this new law may be on politics, not policy. Once Romney starts boasting about how he achieved universal health coverage in Massachusetts, it will become that much harder for conservatives to demonize the very concept as "big government." Oh, they'll try--and they'll have at least some success. But now Democrats will have this retort: If a Republican governor and leading presidential contender with strong conservative credentials thinks universal health care is a good idea, how radical an idea can it be?
--Ezra Klein
Gosh leads Sudan’s Security and Intelligence Services and is the Himmler-esque organizational mastermind of the Darfur genocide. He is also a known US intelligence asset. So when I obtained the annex and saw his name, I argued that whether or not the US pushes to include his name on a final list of officials to be sanctioned would be a test for how seriously this administration takes the genocide in Darfur.
Last night, the administration failed that test, horribly.
Evelyn Leopold of Reuters reports:
The United States is opposing the inclusion of any Sudanese official on a potential U.N. Security Council sanctions list of individuals blocking peace in Darfur, two diplomats said on Wednesday.It’s too early to talk about specific names? Please.Britain and other nations on a council sanctions committee have recommended a list of eight names of people including some government officials who would be subject to a travel ban and an assets freeze. All 15 council nations have to approve….
Washington expects to include names of government officials in the future, a U.S. official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. It wants to be able to gradually increase pressure on Sudan and to make sure there is a solid case against any people on the sanctions list, he said.
Richard Grenell, spokesman for the U.S. mission to the United Nations, said, "Stay tuned."
"Although it is a bit too early to talk about specific names, the next action will be a down payment for the full purchase of justice and accountability," Grenell said.
The genocide has been continuing apace for over three years. Two UN teams have collected information in the field. The first, conducted under the auspices of a UN Commission of Inquiry into suspected crimes against humanity, yielded 51 names. (These were eventually forwarded to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.) A year later, the annex I obtained -- assembled by a panel of human rights investigators working on the ground in Sudan -- produced 17 names.
The US is obviously uncomfortable with the idea of holding accountable those who have committed genocide in Darfur. So long as this is the case, a culture of impunity will inform the actions of the Sudanese aggressors. It’s no coincidence that the genocide is spilling over into Chad. There has not been any consequence for Khartoum’s counter-insurgency by genocide in Darfur, so why not invade Chad and burn a few towns there?
So, dear reader, do you feel that righteous outrage coursing through your veins? Do you need an outlet to channel your frustrations? Why not subscribe to TAP!
--Mark Leon Goldberg
Semantics aside, the new bill Frist's pushing allows illegal immigrants who've been here five plus years to apply for citizenship, three to five years to leave the country and reapply for citizenship on some sort of fast track, and those here less than two years to simply leave. That, of course, won't happen, and the distinctions based on time rather than, say, income or language mastery or work status, make no sense. Given that any bill passed by the Senate will have to be reconciled with the House's draconian legislation by a team of negotiators handpicked by the Republican leadership, Democrats seem thoroughly screwed, and should probably just smother the legislation and hope to revisit it from a stronger position after the 2006 midterms. Conversely, if you wait until after the midterms to subscribe to The American Prospect, you'd miss all our awesome election coverage, not to mention hundreds of thought-provoking, well-researched articles. And you don't want that.
--Ezra Klein
If you need a refresher on what the bill looks like, see my post from yesterday. If you want an in-depth look, see Leif Wellington Haas's excellent overview. And if you want my verdict, a thousand apologies, but it's just too early. The MA plan, of course, is not my ideal. It's an individual mandate, which is better than an employer mandate, but worse than instituting government-sponsored health care. The subsidization scheme looks sound and relatively generous, but that'll depend on funding from year to year. As Nathan Newman notes, it's a bit odd to have the penalty for an individual refusing insurance rest at $1,000 while a negligent employer is docked under $300. But to some degree, that's all optics: MA should've totally sliced the Gordian knot connecting health care to employers, and simply adjusted the necessary taxation and subsidization schemes accordingly. Little is more anti-worker than forcing them to depend on their employer for medical care.
The real test of the plan will come in two parts: funding and regulation. Funding because, as Eileen McNamara points out in the Boston Globe, the program has no dedicated revenue stream, and it can fall prey, as Michael Dukakis's plan did, to the funhouse politics of the yearly budget. Truth be told, though, I'm not actually that worried about the funding. Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney wants this accomplishment too bad to deny it the promised operating budget, and the Democratic legislature certainly won't kill their baby. Add in that Massachusetts has a large and advanced pro-health care lobby that will fight for the program's actualization, and I think the little guy will get his allowance right on schedule.
More interesting is how serious the regulation will be. The danger in an individual mandate plan -- as Matt Holt has explained -- is cream-skimming, the insurance industry's nasty habit of herding the young and healthy into cheap, high-deductible plans and sectioning the old and/or ill into unaffordable, stingy policies. Generally, that prices folks out of the market, but with an individual mandate, they can't really opt-out without paying a serious penalty. The answer is heavy regulation of the insurance industry, forcing them to stop "underwriting" plans based on individual health histories and risk factors and begin offering pools based on the community average. Insurers don't like doing this because it cuts into their profits drastically. They could be smacked into shape by the long, open palm of the law, but that presupposes a willingness on the part of the MA government. Spare the rod, spoil the insurer.
Unfortunately, I think MA will, for now, spoil the insurer, so I'm not as enthused as I could be. But the plan is nevertheless a step in the right direction, and new regulations can be imposed if the situation turns dystopic. With Romney on his way out and a Democrat likely to replace him, I'm cautiously optimistic that what's currently a slight improvement to the status quo could emerge a truly laudable example of comprehensive reform. But, for now, it's a decent structure with the wrong incentives: The penalty for lacking care is too low, the likely cost of care will be too high, and the state isn't addressing the pernicious insurance practices that drove so many out of the market in the first place.
--Ezra Klein
In other words -- yes, Virginia, there are better ways of advancing global humanitarian goals than dropping huge quantities of high explosives. If you subcribe now, you'll get to read the long version of this argument in the print magazine in a few months.
--Matthew Yglesias
That reporters with enough clout to get Zalmay Khalilzad to return their calls find this credible is a testament to our ambassador's apparently considerable powers of persuasion, but it still doesn't make any sense. For a person to quote a loyal servant of the Saudi Arabian despotism as an authority on (simultaneously!) abstract political morality, how to build a democratic Iraq, and how to advance the American national interest is somewhat mind-boggling. That the Saudi government thinks it will serve their interests for America to engage in an open-ended military occupation of Iraq is certainly interesting, but the relevance of this insight to what we should actually do escapes me.
Needless to say, TAP relies on the financial support of readers like you. But barring that, we may need to turn to other sources of financing and you'll be deprived of these piercing insights into the geopolitics of the Gulf.
--Matthew Yglesias
Then, when TPM called out CNN on it, CNN posted a new version of the picture on their home-page-- apparently scrubbed clean of the logo. But there was just one problem: CNN forgot to clean up the photo on the story's site. TPM called CNN out on that, too.
Well now, guess what? CNN has gone back in again and cleaned up the version on the story's site, too. You gotta ask -- wouldn't it have been easier for CNN to just credit the source, rather than keep scrubbing away any and all evidence of where the picture came from? I mean, wouldn't it have taken less effort?
This type of thing seems niggling, but it's a big deal for bloggers who are trying to inject reporting into the opinion-dominated medium of blogging. Getting credited by the big news orgs for breaking a story gives bloggers credibility as reporters -- which leads sources to see the blogger in question as a credible destination for inside info. That, in turn, leads to more stories, and to more credibility, and so on. So, for the blogger, it's a big deal. And for the big news organizations? Giving a lowly blog credit shouldn't be a big deal at all. But it often is. Go figure.
--Greg Sargent
One reason we have a healthcare cost crisis is that the genius of American consumers is kept at arm's length in the healthcare universe. If you establish a base minimum of insurance, subsidize individuals who need financial help, and mandate a universal requirement, you then force everyone to pick and choose from a variety of insurance plans in an insurance "exchange". Inevitably, in such an exchange, you're going to have intermediaries trying to sell various policies, market them, and provide clear consumer advice about what's in them. You get a real market, in other words, where consumers can see trade-offs and make sane decisions. (The current exchange in Massachusetts is currently restricted for smaller businesses, but the principle holds for a more general application.) Make co-payments a percentage of the actual price of drugs, rather than being a standard lump sum, and you could ratchet up the market impact still further.The "genius" of American consumers? I had no idea that the enthusiastic consumption of total crap qualified us for membership in Mensa. Alright, let's go through this, but slowly: Health care, as it stands, is a supplier's market, which is to say that the suppliers of medical technology and health services exert far more power than individual, or aggregate, consumers of health goods. Sullivan's implication is that this power imbalance is a simple trick o' the light, easily fixed by forcing individuals to bear more risk. Based on that, Sullivan would not qualify for Mensa.
The problem here is that health care is not a traditional good. If I shatter my leg while rock climbing (‘cause I'm extreme like that), call an ambulance, and find I don't like the hospital's pricing scheme or service explanations, wandering on home is not really an option. Now up the ante. If your wife has aggressive breast cancer, but you think the drug Avastin, which costs $100,000, is excessively priced, you don't get to wait around. Your wife. Will. Die. And Genentech, Avastin's producer, knows that. Genentech can wait for you to come around, but you can't wait for Genentech to be visited by the ghosts of Christmas past. So they will win, and you will lose.
The secret of the American consumer is not genius, but market share. There are so many of us, and we have so much money, that when banded together we can force enormous efficiencies and cost-savings out of suppliers. But we don't actually coalesce into purchasing cooperatives. What we do is patronize large retailers who purchase on our behalf. Enter Wal-Mart, or Costco. They, and retailers like them, act as countervailing powers to major suppliers, leveraging their enormous market share for better prices. Currently, some of that work is done by large employers, working in concert with large private insurers. Under an individual mandate in a fractured insurance system, less of that work will be done, period. Neither set-up restores enough power to the buyer to force the market back into equilibrium, much less into a balance favoring the consumer.
What would -- what has -- is to make government a purchaser. The Veteran's Administration, through centralized purchasing, gets their drugs for 50-80 percent less than the private insurers participating in the new Medicare Drug Benefit. Canada gets theirs for 50 percent less. Governments are simply bigger than competing insurance companies, and they can thus exert more leverage on suppliers. And, unlike private insurers, the government doesn't have to add in a profit margin atop the price. So they can leverage a larger market and have fewer extraneous costs -- that's why countries with nationalized health systems have lower per-service prices than we do, and why we spend twice as much, per person, as the highest spending universal system. Were the American consumer really such a genius, he'd demand that his country emulate the lower-spending, higher-performing systems of Western Europe and Japan. But the American consumer is not a genius and, worse yet, he has a lot of self-interested ideologues and plutocrats convincing him that the path of wisdom and intelligence is the one that proves the ideologues right and makes the plutocrats rich. And the American consumer is a weakling, because all though he knows better, he ends up listening to them.
--Ezra Klein
The series is reminiscent of the televised images of Vietnam that eventually eroded public support for that war -- a type of imagery that the Bush administration has largely been successful in suppressing, with its efforts to bar photographs of returning coffins and so on. The liberal web rightly jumped all over Bush and company for those efforts, and so now that more horrifying and unvarnished imagery of the war is getting through -- now that the truth is getting through, in other words -- you'd think more liberal commentators would be all over it. After all, this was a courageous thing for the LA Times to do, particularly now in the face of the GOP's campaign to scapegoat the press for Iraq.
It's also eye-opening to read through the comments that the series has been generating -- there's far less of the usual "media-aids-and-abets-our-enemies" humbug than you'd expect, and a great deal of expressions of profound anguish and moral revulsion at what the troops are being put through. My bet is there's a real opening here for Democrats and liberal commentators to better tap into the sense of moral anguish that millions of Americans feel right now about Iraq, by speaking more forcefully in moral terms about this dreadful situation and about our duty to the young men and women mired in it. People are craving not just "competent" leadership, to use the Dems' favorite word of late, but moral leadership as well. It would be politically smart as a shield against the right's "Dems-don't-support-the-troops" flim-flammery, and even better, it would be the right thing to do.
And incidentally, in an era when so much political commentary is cynical process and horse-race analysis, The American Prospect isn't afraid to speak in moral terms -- yet another reason why you should subscribe today.
--Greg Sargent
--Matthew Yglesias
--Matthew Yglesias
TAP subscribers rest easy knowing that this publication's periodic Anna Nicole Smith covers are both tasteful and accurate. Unlike fair Smith, alas, we lack the luxury of 90-year-old billionaire sugar daddies and instead must rely on reader generosity for support.
--Sam Rosenfeld
What emerged, while not glorious, is a distinct improvement on the status quo. Single adults making less than $9,500 will receive free care with no deductible, those netting up to 300 percent of the poverty line ($48,000 for a family of three) will be subsidized on a sliding scale, and individuals with the resources but not the willingness to purchase health care will be fined about a $1,000 annually, presumably through taxes. The bill has no dedicated funding source, so there's a certain amount of apprehension over its implementation, but look for it to get the money it needs -- not only does the cash exist, but Romney desperately wants to tout this achievement in 2008.
The program also boasts a serious pay-for-performance element, so there's some actual innovation in the structure that could prove an interesting test run for future P4P systems (for more on P4P, see this book review of mine). All in all, it’s interesting stuff. And if he wasn't there already, look for Romney to immediately leap into the top tier of Republican presidential contenders -- this sort of bipartisan compromise and executive BigThink is exactly the sort of thing the David Broders of the world go nuts for.
Update: Apologies, David, in comments, reminds me that Romney has simply said he will sign it, but he's not physically put pen to paper yet. That was a silly oversight by me, the sort of thing normally caught by the squad of ace factcheckers we employ at the magazine. To see our pieces filtered through their handiwork is to touch the face of transcendence, and the best way to do that is to subscribe.
--Ezra Klein
The only plausible alternatives to Jafari at this point are members of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and nothing about SCIRI control of the government will even resolve any of the things that are said to be problematic about Jafari's administration. The West seems to be banking on SCIRI man Adel Abdul Mehdi, who people are choosing to pretend to believe is secretly a pro-Western moderate because he once lived in southern France for a period of time. Why a secret pro-Western moderate would have spent long years of his life as a loyal member of an Iranian-controlled Islamist revolutionary organization, I couldn't quite say. Nor is "spent time in France while exiled" a very solid historical indicator of moderate views -- see, e.g., Pol Pot, Vladimir Lenin, etc. TAP subscribers, by contrast, really are people you can count on for intelligent views and a well-informed perspective.
The real kicker, though, is that if Jafari is booted in favor of Mehdi, and Mehdi does turn out to be a sweet and wonderful guy, Mehdi will just wind up losing power. The issue is structure, not personalities. Iraq isn't governed by nice, compromise-oriented secular liberals because nice, compromise-oriented secular liberalism has no significant social base in the country, not because the US government is incapable of locating some nice guy somewhere and installing him in power.
--Matthew Yglesias
On a completely different subject, subscriptions are still available. It's a sweet deal for a sweet magazine.
--The Editors
Call it a coincidental sign of our digital times or a reason to stay up late and stare at the clock. Either way, early Wednesday morning the time and date will be 01-02-03-04-05-06.You know what's not a chronological oddity? A subscription to The American Prospect Online. It's just $14.95 for a year -- and you don't have to stay up late to check it out.At 1:02 a.m. and three seconds on Wednesday, April 5, 2006, it will be the first hour of the day, the second minute of the hour, the third second of that precious minute in the fourth month and the fifth day of ... uh oh. It's not really the sixth year.
It's actually 2006 — only in our shorthand is it '06.
"It just happens to be a chronological oddity," said Geoff Chester, spokesman for the U.S. Naval Observatory, an official world atomic clock timekeeper.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
Supporters of a guest worker program that would let illegal immigrants stay in the United States said Tuesday they don't have enough Senate votes to overcome objections from conservatives who oppose the measure on grounds it amounts to amnesty.So you think Bill Frist will stick to his guns and demand that his caucus give McCain's bill an up-or-down vote? Yeah, me neither. But I do think all you good progressives out there will stick to your guns, reach for your wallets, and subscribe for an extended monthly dose of liberal intelligence. After all, what's the use of an echo chamber if nobody's in it?As negotiators worked on a compromise to let those who have been here longest remain, Sen. John McCain (news, bio, voting record), R-Ariz., said a majority in the 100-member Senate support his and Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (news, bio, voting record)'s proposal to provide green cards to illegal immigrants after they've worked in the U.S. for six years.
But it takes 60 senators to overcome opponents' parliamentary tactics, and McCain said he doesn't have that many.
--Ezra Klein
The Bush Mars plan has a lot of critics, both within NASA's bureaucracy and on the Hill. It just lost one of its most powerful champions, and thus could be imperiled if enough people were first alerted to the fact that the plan still actually exists and isn't merely some stillborn P.R. gambit from two years ago.
UPDATE: Alkali reminds me in comments to point out that The American Prospect probably can deliver to Mars; it's that dynamic and forward-looking. Also worth mentioning: In space, no one can hear you donate.
--Sam Rosenfeld
"It's because they hate private property," Mr. Berlusconi, 69, said, "because they see savings as something that should be taxed." The prime minister also warned that the center-left alliance, which includes Communists, would reintroduce inheritance taxes, which had been cut by his government.This poses roughly the same question as does the comparable debate in America: Why is the debate on this issue so skewed? Why does the party of the left think it wouldn't be viable to tax estates worth "only" a few million euros? If you don't happen to be a multi-millionaire, the best legacy you can leave for the next generation is the gift of knowledge and wisdom. The kids these days don't really read dead-tree magazines, but an e-subscription to The American Prospect costs even less than a standard subscription and offers access to all our content while making the ideal graduation present.Looking irritated, Mr. Prodi, 66, a former prime minister and until 2004 president of the European Commission, countered that he was tired of having words and programs put in his mouth. "This is the mystification of truth," he said, pointing out that he had specified that inheritance taxes would be applied only to estates worth "many millions" of euros. "I think people can trust my word."
--Matthew Yglesias
Fine, no flowers and chocolates for them.
The issue at hand is the concentration of participating insurers in certain regions. With so many offering plans, specific areas were a mess. The administration's fix? Reduce the number of plans each insurer could provide from three to two -- or sometimes three, circumstances depending. Brilliant. What was needed was a regional cap on plans, but that would hurt various insurers (read: contributors) and the Bush administration lacked the courage to actually face down corporations even in limited, region-specific contexts. The American Prospect, thankfully, suffers from no such problems, and offers three easy, instantly understandable plans to choose from:
• A year's subscription to the print edition for $19.95, delivered straight to your mailbox;
• A year's subscription to the online edition for $14.95, delivered straight to your e-mail inbox;
• Or a tipjar, where you can simply give us money.
The American Prospect: Always thinking about you.
--Ezra Klein
Millions of hardworking immigrants, thousands of small businesses, and the country’s economic prospects are going to be affected by the outcome of the nasty debate taking place in Congress. Which is what makes the substance of what Clinton has been saying, and the circumstances of today’s press conference, all the more puzzling. She fires off one truly excellent line, about how the Sensenbrenner bill would criminalize Jesus, ensuring headlines the next day and deftly summarizing her staunch opposition to the most reactionary proposal. She’s in favor of “a path to earned citizenship.” But then she goes back to playing the role she’s had for most of this debate: cautious bystander. “I support several of the bills,” she says. “I’m trying to create a compromise for a bipartisan bill . . . We need comprehensive reform . . . A harsh position doesn’t end the problems.”She's a national leader who refuses to lead (unlike The American Prospect, which you should subscribe to, yada yada yada), and it's not clear to me why progressives need any of those. Smith's article outlines how Clinton is triangulating towards a foreign policy, and the tensions that are erupting as she attempts it. It's good stuff, and well worth a read.
--Ezra Klein
According to the lobbyist's former associate, Abramoff sat with the ambassador in the skybox and described an elaborate and costly plan to blunt the effect of pressure from Christian groups with money and travel, two of the methods Abramoff frequently deployed in his Washington lobbying campaigns.And do you know how we at the Prospect resist financial entanglements with shady lobbyists and genocidal governments? Why, through donations and subscriptions from viewers like you of course!He said some of the money would be sent to the Christian Coalition and some would be spent encouraging Christian leaders to visit Sudan and talk with the government. Other money would be spent on a grass-roots campaign to promote a better image of the country in the United States.
The former associate said Abramoff repeatedly told the ambassador that he would arrange for his friend Reed to push the idea with Christian groups.
There was a follow-up discussion with the former associate when the Sudanese foreign minister came to Washington months later. The Cabinet minister, Mustafa Osman Ismail, met with Abramoff's former associate at the Sudanese Embassy. Ismail seemed interested in Abramoff's services, the former associate said, but asked for guaranteed results, which Abramoff could not provide. The proposed deal went no further.
--Mark Leon Goldberg
This passage, describing the process that led to his decision, caught my eye:
I made a speech last week, and that pretty much cinched it for me. A good friend of mine, Dr. Rick Scarborough, who started -- and I urged him, and we've worked together over the years -- an organization called Vision America, which is out recruiting pastors to get involved in the political arena. He asked me to come speak. He was having a conference on the war on Christianity. So I made a speech on Wednesday. It was covered by C-Span and, frankly, a bunch of cameras. I felt very good, very free about giving that speech. The reaction was incredible -- just an outpouring of love and support from the audience. It was probably the one single event that convinced me: I can DO this. I could keep fighting for the things I believe in, outside of Congress.DeLay goes on to indicate that it will be these Christian right causes he'll be championing the most out of office. It's rather hard to imagine a money man like DeLay focusing solely on social conservative activism in retirement, though the man is born-again and these activists were certainly the last ones standing with him as the heat came down last year. I wrote a bit about Scarborough and those around his and DeLay's orbit last year. Scarborough organized the recent "War on Christians" conference here in DC, at which he tossed off a stellar line about DeLay's current troubles: "God always does his best work right after a crucifixion." We can all look forward to his brand new book entitled (no joke) Liberalism Kills Kids.
Talking with him last year, I found Scarborough to be personally a rather nice guy. But for what it's worth, he's never written for The American Prospect and I don't anticipate him doing so any time soon. You should subscribe.
--Sam Rosenfeld
The list may seem obvious, like those "Do not use in water" tags that come with electrical appliances—except that Bush & Co. have been spinning fan blades in bathtubs around the world the past four years. This is the advantage that the Democrats hold at the starting gate: The Republican administration has violated so many precepts of International Relations 101 that clichés take on the air of wisdom. It may be that the Dems don't need to put forth their own agenda; promising to pull the plug out of the socket might be sufficient.Here, at The American Prospect, we don't even take baths; quick showers at the gym are about all we can afford. You can change all that by subscribing, though!
--Ezra Klein
That said, Sirota is quite right that there is an opportunity in the western and western mountain states which have a strong tradition of rugged individualism and libertarian suspiciousness -- as I noted in this February item about reactions to the NSA wiretapping -- to take a more aggressive stance against the Patriot Act. Sirota has a good round-up of some of what's been happening on the ground:
For instance, in Montana - a state that borders the North Dakota that Schumer says he's really worried about - the state legislature near-unanimously passed a resolution condemning the Patriot Act. The same thing happened in the red states of Colorado and Alaska. And it was Idaho Congressman Butch Otter who led the opposition to the Act in the House. In North Dakota - again, the state that Schumer says he really understands - the state has been a battleground for populist outrage at the very kinds of privacy infringements the Patriot Act touches on. For instance, the archconservative Eagle Forum notes that 72% of voters voted in a referendum to overturn a state law that relaxed privacy protections.Montana, where Sirota lives, is a success story of a local Democratic Party that rebuilt and recruited and organized and has seen major dividends from its work at the electoral level. But a lot of other states aren't there yet, and it will take some time for them to get there and provide Democratic candidates with the kind of grassroots energy that Democrats in Montana can rely on. North Dakota, no matter what its voters say they think in surveys, is a place where the local Democratic Party simply does not yet have the same kind of energetic, progressive grassroots organizing to bolster it.
If Sirota is angry that the views of people in Montana and North Dakota are not being properly represented in Washington, the people to go after are the red state senators whose populist citizens have voted at the local level to oppose the Patriot Act -- and not Schumer. If Sirota thinks Kent Conrad is not doing a good job of representing the people of North Dakota because he supported the Patriot Act and its extension, he should say so. Or if he thinks that Democrats John Morrison or Jon Tester won't be taking principled stands on the issues that matter to Montanans in the race to unseat Conrad Burns, who already trails them in the polls, he should go after them. But Schumer's job is to listen to them, and not make their races harder if he can help it. If they won't take the lead on opposing the Patriot Act or other issues in ways that Sirota respects, that's on them, not Schumer.
UPDATE. Wow. Sirota takes the bait and pretty much accuses Kent Conrad, John Morrison, and Jon Tester of "standing for nothing." Harsh. More importantly, I think Sirota and I have different visions of how political change happens. I think politicians are lagging indicators, as I explained in the long post "Of momentum and movements" in January, and that political change comes from the grassroots and the ground up. He thinks it comes from the top down and that leaders create followers. There's truth in both analyses, I'd wager -- and I think we can both agee that right now Democrats need about as much of both as they can find.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
Besides future progressive legislative leaders, progressive magazine bloggers could learn a lesson or two as well -- everyone seems to have forgotten about this week's TAPPED subscription drive. On a DeLay-led blog, those failing to mention the urgent need to subscribe to The American Prospect would no doubt be facing dire consequences as we speak. Writers would groan under this oppressive yoke, but at the end of the day we'd all be stronger for hanging together.
--Matthew Yglesias
As for Time magazine's exclusive scoop on this story last night, as a major Mike Allen fan it pains me a bit to point out this error from his piece:
Regardless, DeLay was forced to vacate his post as majority leader because of a House Republican rule (known as "the DeLay rule," because it was enacted amid concern about his legal situation) that requires a leader under indictment to step down.Of course, that's the opposite of what the DeLay rule was. The rule barring indicted House officials from retaining GOP leadership roles dated back to the Gingrich Revolution. 2004's GOP conference vote in favor of "the DeLay rule" eliminated that older standard so as to accommodate the majority leader at a time when an indictment seemed likely to come. It was only reversed when the political heat forced the conference into retreat.
That incident does help to remind one of just how much of DeLay's troubles can be traced back to what, in retrospect, looks like both his crowning moment of political audacity and his moment of crucial overreach: the 2002 re-redistricting gambit in Texas. The financial shenanigans involved in gaming the 2002 state elections to stack the legislature sufficiently to push the plan through; the fracas regarding the fugitive Texas Democratic legislators; Ronnie Earle's criminal investigation of DeLay's 2002 fundraising efforts; the truce-shattering ethics complaint filed in 2004 by Democrat Chris Bell, a casualty of the new redistricting plan; the ethics committee’s admonishments of DeLay and the subsequent gutting of the panel and its bylaws, which garnered much more high-profile criticism than Republicans had anticipated; DeLay's indictment, and his stepping down from the leadership; John Boehner's surprising ascension to the majority leader post. Each development followed logically from what had preceded it, and it all generally traces back to the Texas redistricting power play, which gained the GOP a few new House seats in 2004, but may lose a good deal more for them in 2006. (Obviously the Jack Abramoff scandals played an equally important and independent role here as well.)
--Sam Rosenfeld
That's gotta be the first time anyone's ever referred to the former Brooklyn congressman as a Reagan Democrat. I know there's a movement afoot in some parts of the blogosphere to try to change the rhetorical and interpretive frames governing our politics, but doing so credibly means more than just shifting the goal-posts willy-nilly and acting as if liberal Democratic New Yorkers were secretly from Macomb County.
The exchange was kicked off by Ryan Lizza's typically excellent story (can I get a macro for that?) on Schumer in New York magazine. I just want to highlight the bit about Schumer trying to take care of his "marginals":
Part of the reason Schumer took the job is that he was able to join Minority Leader Harry Reid’s Senate leadership team, which allows him to craft the party’s message with an eye toward the Senate races. He has embraced that job as if he’d spent his career representing Dubuque rather than Brooklyn. He is obsessed with the health of what he calls his “marginals,” red-state Democrats who live in fear of being too closely associated with, well, New York liberals like Schumer. He treats the marginals like fragile vases in constant danger of being knocked off their pedestals.It is very difficult for people who live in the coastal cities to understand the extent to which this is the case. I've spent some time in recent weeks interviewing people who work for state Democratic Parties in some of the reddest precincts in the nation, and all I can say is that based on how little support they have on the ground from interest groups, progressive activists, or the national Democrats (though they have more now than they used to, thanks to Howard Dean), it's somewhere between a miracle and a testament to the constancy of the American people that Democrats continue to win national office in some of these places. Even though the present political environment would seem to be the most favorable Democrats have faced in a long time, the president's weakness must be measured against the Democrat's even greater on-the-ground weakness in rather electorally critical parts of the nation. Schumer knows what he's doing. The Democratic Party nationally cannot make any sudden moves until it has rebuilt at the local level or else it really will simply shift off its very weak moorings. Of this I am now 100 percent convinced.Schumer considers every Washington debate in terms of how it will affect the marginals. “There were some in our caucus that wanted to let the Patriot Act lapse,” he tells me. “I said that I think we got to change it, and I’ll work to change it, but to let it lapse would be a disaster, particularly for our Democrats in red states. You know, when I go to a drawing room in Manhattan and they say, ‘You got to appeal to our base!’ I say, ‘There is no base in North Dakota!’”
Ezra's right to point back to Nick Confessore's piece on the myth of the Democratic establishment. Because as mythical as it is inside Washington, the Democratic establishment is ten times more so out where the marginals live.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
All that said, it's worth noting for the historical record that Stoller has disliked Obama from the get-go and that his current comments thus do not constitute much of a shift in opinion. During the summer of '04, Stoller was briefly brought on to do some blogging for the Democratic National Convention Committee -- until his criticisms of Obama, the break-out star of the convention, on BOPNews.com led Democrats to sever the connection with him.
Wrote Stoller of Obama in summer of '04:
To be honest, I don't get the big deal. I've seen him speak a few times. He seems very charismatic, but I have yet to cross that bridge with him where I feel like he's saying anything really interesting or useful.Two years later, Stoller has yet to cross the bridge:
Obama is a brilliant man, but it's not clear to me if he is anything but an charismatic local politician writ large who just follows the political winds. I hear that he was different in Illinois, that he really was a leader there, and that he's just biding his time in the Senate, like any good freshman should. Maybe. But I don't know. I just feel slimed whenever I hear him speak as the promising young star of the Democratic Party, since he seems to epitomize the leadership-by-charisma that has destroyed our party, instead of the leadership-by-principle that can save our country.This is no turning against; this is a being against from the get go, and ought to be considered as such. Some writers just don't like some politicians, for whatever reason. Stoller doesn't get Obama and isn't going to, but that idiosyncrasy doesn't mean anything in particular about the liberal blogosphere in general.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
But now, with last night’s plot twist (SPOILER: John Spencer’s Leo McGarry, Santos’ veep choice, died in last night’s episode, which took place on Election Day), I think I see where things are going. Santos wins a squeaker. And, after a proper mourning period for McGarry and bucking tremendous pressure from his party elders and perhaps even Josiah Bartlet himself, as his vice president, he names: Vinick!
Right? This is perfect television politics: A national unity administration. Santos shows the kind of bold leadership that yada yada yada, and Vinick, for the sake of this great nation, decides that yada yada yada. They even end up seeing eye to eye on nuclear power!
The wingnut woman adviser to Vinick, who keeps pestering him to campaign in the South and forget these swing voters in these pusillanimous purple states, is put in her place (as a stand-in, of course, for the America she represents); Ron Silver probably gets a piece of the action, but he has to report to Bradley Whitford. America is healed.
I bet I’m better at this than I was at the office March Madness pool. And by the way, I’d also do a better job with the national political map, because a couple of turns last night were surprising, especially given that the writers know their politics. Santos carrying South Carolina? I can only assume that this is the exit-polls-are-unreliable plotline, and the Palmetto State will be taken off the board.
But worse was some aide’s carrying on about how Massachusetts looked blue in the early exits, but Berkshire County hadn’t come in yet. Berkshire County?!?!?!? This rang suspiciously of Lawrence O’Donnel (a WW writer who grew up in Boston and Bay State politics) dreaming that Silvio Conte (the one-time Western Mass Congressman, a liberal Republican) and the kind of Republicanism he represented are still alive or something.
Two points: A.), Berkshire County is as liberal as it gets -- the very liberal Democratic Congressman, John Olver, didn’t even have an opponent last time, and Bush has never received more than 35 percent of the vote in his district; B.), Since presidential elections operate according to (news flash!) electoral college totals, it might have occurred to them that Berkshire County would be quite unlikely to undo the deep blue handiwork done over in Boston, and thus was entirely irrelevant. Maybe O’Donnell has a house in Stockbridge and it was an in-joke, but it just looked stupid.
--Mike Tomasky
The first thing you might notice is that the Democrats implicitly reject almost everything the Bush administration says about how Sept. 11 changed the world, or our perception of it.Castigating the Dem plan for failing to match such grandiloquence, Hiatt continues:President Bush believes that the United States "is in the early years of a long struggle," according to his own national security strategy released last month, against "a new totalitarian ideology." (Emphasis added.)
...they also reveal a different world view, one that is far more cramped and inward-looking...what is the vision? What does bring security? (Emphasis added again.)To Hiatt, the Democrats' woeful tendency to focus on the practical and the attainable shows a lack of "vision." It's worth pondering what exactly Hiatt means by "vision" here. He appears to suggest that Bush has vision but has failed at execution. So does "vision" mean a willingness to sketch out wildly unrealistic doctrines -- such as that of preemptive warfare -- which simply can't practically be implemented in any far-reaching sense throughout the world? As Matt has written, the Iraq war can't even be cited as a test case for this doctrine, since it didn't pre-empt anything in the first place. Or might "vision" mean imagining, as Bush does, an ongoing global conflict in impossibly vague terms -- as a war without end against an ill-defined foe -- ensuring that there can never be any way of measuring whether it's been won or lost?
Also note Hiatt's reliance on weasel words. The Dems have "implicitly" rejected Bush's post-Sept. 11 world view and "reveal" a different one. Presto -- those words allow Hiatt to ascribe to Dems something they simply never said.
Is the Dem plan specific or comprehensive enough? No, it isn't. As Sam noted below, a Dem plan focused mainly on domestic initiatives won't solve the party's national security image problem. But the point is, there's a moment when vision crosses over into platitude, and Bush has long since crossed that line, if he was ever on the "vision" side of it in the first place. Slamming Dems for articulating implementable solutions, rather than matching Bush's taste for platitudes, is simply unfair and absurd.
Hiatt also reaches into his top hat for that old trick of comparing current Dems unfavorably to an idealized version of past Dems. He says today's Dems don't measure up on foreign policy to John Kennedy and, interestingly, Clinton, writing: "Bill Clinton and Al Gore, by the time they left office, had formed a view. The United States was the 'indispensable nation,' as Clinton said..."
Wouldn't you know it, but back when Clinton was actually articulating that doctrine, Hiatt wasn't nearly as charitable towards it. Back in 1998, he wrote (not linkable):
"We are the indispensable nation," Albright said not long ago. "We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future."So when a Dem (Clinton) articulated an outward-looking vision with global ambitions, Hiatt decried it as "arrogance." But when Dems (Reid, Pelsoi) avoid such self-inflating global pronouncements, he slams them for lacking vision.Even an administration prepared to tackle the hardest problems -- prepared to act on that vision of America as champion of the world -- should think twice before making statements of such breathtaking arrogance. This administration shouldn't make them at all.
--Greg Sargent
Former Senator Tom Daschle (who also wrote a piece for the Prospect report) served as moderator for the discussion, which centered on an issue near and dear to the folks in his home state of South Dakota: ethanol production. Panelist David Morris, vice president of the Institute for Local Self Reliance, proposed changing part of the federal ethanol tax exemption to a direct-payment to ethanol producers, in a way that would incentivize local ownership of bio-refineries and account for fluctuations in the price of ethanol’s main competitor, gasoline.
Rep. Stephanie Herseth, another Democrat from South Dakota, alluded to plans among congressional Democrats to release a strategy in the coming weeks to wean America off of oil in 10 years by ramping up domestic alternatives. The effort is part of the Dems so-called “Innovation Agenda,” but the prospects for passing additional energy legislation so soon after the ’05 energy bill are murky at best. Herseth also alluded to efforts by farmers, enviros and others to get ethanol incentives into the 2007 farm bill, a project that Dascle is pushing along with former Senator Bob Dole.
For a refreshing dip out of policy and into reality, businessman David Hallberg was on hand to demonstrate how some of this really works. His business uses manure to power a plant that yields ethanol and cattle feedstock. Honestly, who’d a thunk it?
--Nelson Harvey
You know what else is affordable? A subscription to The American Prospect. It’s just $19.95 for 12 issues.
--The Editors
For a nice, complete takedown of this perspective, take a trip in the Prospect's wayback machine and read this excerpt from Bob Kuttner's Everything for Sale. And while you're basking in that bit of brave economic counterintuitivism, marvel at how free and user-friendly the Prospect's wayback machine is, and think about how you should subscribe to the magazine in order to support its continued maintenance and operation.
--Ezra Klein
The Democratic Party's power-sources are discrete, and largely in tension. The official party carries no recognizable center of power, just a procession of competing camps tied together by amorphous, continually-mutating webs of alliance. Nancy Pelosi is close to Jack Murtha but tacitly undermined by her deputy, Steny Hoyer. Howard Dean theoretically controls the official party apparatus but is routinely smacked down by individual senators and luminaries. Unions have powerful funding authority but little actual solidarity, especially in the aftermath of SEIU's break from the AFL-CIO. GLBT, ethnic, and environmental groups have influence with important constituencies but limited actual leverage so long as Democrats remain in opposition. And so on, and so forth.
The fact of it is it's fairly easy to become part of the party's "establishment." And the netroots have made it. Harry Reid speaks at blogger conferences, Barack Obama pens missives to DailyKos, candidates shuffle forward with their begging cups out...bloggers are behind the curtain, and it turns out there's not much there. But that's why I like Markos and Jerome's new book. As Hayes notes, for a gatecrasher's manifesto, it's surprisingly intent on rather small procedural changes and more efficient approaches -- they're like management consultants for the campaign class.
But maybe that's what's needed. After all, with the netroots firmly ensconced behind the curtain and now receiving supplicants, it's time for them to demand something a bit more tangible than rhetorical fealty to techno-futurism. And having a powerful portion of the Democratic establishment force the adoption of best practices may make them the most interesting interest group of all.
Speaking of demanding fealty, it's Spring Subscription Week at The Prospect. This blog attracts many hundreds of thousands of unique visitors each month, but this magazine boasts a subscription rate which is, err, somewhat less than that. It shouldn't be that way. And you can change that. Subscribing to the print edition is a snap, and it grants you access to all our print content, not to mention the exhilarating rush of opening your mailbox to find 60-some-odd pages of liberal goodness. In addition, since the magazine is the blog's reason for being rather than the other way around, you'll be supporting this site, and the work we do daily on it. So c'mon, subscribe. Do it for the children.
--Ezra Klein
--Matthew Yglesias
Brooks' subject was a series of leaked requirement lists used by political advance teams to ensure the comfort and contentment of their peripatetic employers. Dick Cheney, famously, needs all his televisions preset to Fox News, while John Kerry doesn't like celery. The documents include favored meals, disfavored foods, bottled water, and all the rest. It's obvious stuff: guidelines for advance teams who need to scope out dinner locations while their bosses give speeches, or add in some snacks so they've a few reliable comfort foods or healthful meals while on the road.
Brooks, for his part, spins these documents into an extended meditation on the nature of the political character. The whey protein and bottled water and Caesar salads are, he writes, the best guarantors of "sensual pleasure" that these pols and their hyperambitious staffers could come up with. Successful politicians, he says, have repressed their "Dionysian side" in order to achieve intellectual actualization, moving to DC ("a city with an erogenous zone the size of a pea") and sacrificing sex, drugs, and rock and roll for a "dweeb decadence" of bottled water, preset televisions, and fine tea selection.
It's all very gracefully written and the column is, in places, piercingly funny. The only problem is the premise: It's simply not true. The lists weren't a rundown of Kerry or Cheney's deepest desires; they were prep documents for advance teams that have to provide meals without the diner's input. Moreover, Kerry and Cheney, whatever else you'll say about them, are hardly men who lack sufficient taste for the finer things: JK is a notorious gourmand who constantly visits the world's finest ski resorts, loves nothing more than to hang with the many classic rockers he calls friends, and routinely windsurfs. Dick Cheney just shot a dude in the face, but he did so during a lavish hunting trip set on the rolling estate of an unimaginably rich donor. And I don't think anyone dares accuse Bill Clinton of having been too much a mentor magnet or A-student to enjoy life's more sensual pleasures.
In this way, the story is classic Brooks. The thesis is flawed from the start, but the column built upon that cracked foundation is so gracefully constructed, so wonderfully compatible with our own internal biases, that you hardly notice the basement crashing in. The intellectual set that Brooks writes for is, deep down, certain that they could do Kerry or Cheney's job better, and not at all certain why they didn't rise to the same elevated position as the soporific senator or sneering grand vizier. So Brooks gives them a reason: They live too good, love too much, eat too well. Their erogenous zones are bigger than a pea. But even such fully developed pleasure centers are dwarfed by the vast territories devoted to schadenfreude, and this is the territory that David Brooks seeks to conquer.
--Ezra Klein
That just seems unlikely to me. The current legal prohibition on polygamy lacks efficacy. Realistically, most people don't live like that because they don't want to. Modern economic conditions allow almost everyone in America to live well above a level of bare subsistence and afford women much more social and economic independence than existed in traditional societies where polygamy was the norm. However, since gay marriage is never going to go through if people think it will lead immediately to legal polygamy, it's probably good for prominent gay marriage advocates to write articles about how terrible polygamy is. Then we'll get gay marriage, and sometime later the prohibition on polygamy will probably be dropped and everything will work out fine in the end.
--Matthew Yglesias
Mexico is the second-most populous Catholic nation in the world, and many of the most Catholic counties in America lie along the Mexican border. Los Angeles, whose Cardinal Roger Mahony has led the charge on behalf of illegal immigrants, is 40 percent Catholic, and also the single largest diocese in America; an estimated three quarters of L.A. Catholics are Hispanic. California is anywhere from one-quarter to one-third Catholic, depending on which survey you look at, and I wouldn't be the least surprised if much of the continuing strength of the Catholic Church in California were due to the influx of immigrants into the state from Mexico. According to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, 71 percent of the growth in the U.S. Catholic population nationwide since 1960 has come from Hispanics.
What this means, basically, is that the future of Catholicism in the U.S. is in the hands of Hispanics, and any effort to reduce the number of Mexican immigrants -- 95 percent of Mexicans are Catholic -- winds up also being a direct assault on the growth and power of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States.
I have trouble believing that Republican strategists didn't think this through before going off on their current crusade against illegal immigrants. It is, after all, one thing to go after a legally and electorally powerless group that is also poor and unable to defend itself in English -- and quite another to set up a policy war with Rome.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
For one thing, as far as energy conservation measures go, altering the structure of time is a little extreme. More to the point, there's no evidence that this actually works. Even if it did work, the amount of possible savings is minimal since all it targets is electric lights which are a very minor component of overall energy usage.
--Alec Oveis
