Bill Daly, potential Obama Chief of Staff: [The Obama administration] miscalculated on health care. The election of ’08 sent a message that after 30 years of center-right governing, we had moved to center left — not left.
Ezra Klein: The health-care law the president signed was modeled off of the health-care law the Republican governor of Massachusetts had signed, which was in turn modeled off of the health-care law the Republicans in Congress had proposed in 1993. That’s “left”? And meanwhile, Daley thinks the country had moved substantially leftward over that period — “after 30 years of center-right governing, we had moved to center left” — but that even a compromise bill based on Republican ideas was too far left for the country, which would imply that the administration he served in the early-’90s, which pushed a more ambitious health-care bill when the country was further to the right, bordered on communist.
Lemkin: Yep, and do we really want anyone who has ever been quoted peddling that particular brand of horseshit running the President’s days in the inevitable “Eliminate ACA or we destroy the economy of the United States of America now and forever through default!” battle that will be coming on in, oh, five or six weeks? I say no, but then I’m less than skilled in multi-dimensional chess…
Tag: ezra klein
The end result [of Elizabeth Edwards pushing her husband to make a comprehensive and universal health-care reform plan the centerpiece of his second presidential campaign] was that the three candidates ended up fighting over who would do more to pass a universal health-care bill the fastest, which meant they made repeated promises that, in Obama’s case, he eventually found himself having to keep. Without Elizabeth Edwards’s involvement, the Edwards campaign would likely have come out with a more modest effort, and the Obama and Clinton campaigns would have taken a similarly incremental approach, and none of the campaigns would have made as many promises on the subject as they did, and health-care reform might never have passed.
Ezra Klein remembers.
The Edwards campaign really had an outsize impact on the de facto Democratic platform as a whole, “progressivizing” it much more than Kucinich ever did; presumably because Edderds was seen as a very serious candidate, at least in the early going, and had to be responded to, in detail, in a way that Kucinich just never did.
The old “remarkable woman behind a deeply flawed candidate”…in another era, John would have been the Billy Carter dragging on her campaign.
The Edwards campaign really had an outsize impact on the de facto Democratic platform as a whole, “progressivizing” it much more than Kucinich ever did; presumably because Edderds was seen as a very serious candidate, at least in the early going, and had to be responded to, in detail, in a way that Kucinich just never did.
The old “remarkable woman behind a deeply flawed candidate”…in another era, John would have been the Billy Carter dragging on her campaign.
Quiet Down, We’re Playing the Inside Game
Good roundup of the Bush tax cut extension negotiations by Ezra Klein:
When the deal was cut, the president took an oblique shot at their preferences, saying “the American people didn’t send us here to wage symbolic battles or win symbolic victories.” And this came a mere week or two after the White House announced a federal pay freeze. The pattern, for progressives, seems clear: The White House uses them during elections, but doesn’t listen to, or consult them, while governing. In fact, it insults them, and then tells them to quiet down, they got the best bargain possible, even if it wasn’t the one they’d asked for, or been promised.
[…]That the Obama administration has turned out to be fairly good at the inside Washington game of negotiations and legislative compromise and quite bad at communicating to the public and keeping their base excited is not what most would have predicted during the 2008 campaign. But it’s true.
Filibuster Reform
Democrats have exactly two chances to see filibuster reform: The first comes in a few weeks, when they can reform it in any way they see fit and pass said reforms with a simple majority; preserve what they think is good, eliminate the parts they think are choking the system currently. The linked proposal is the best I’ve seen, really. It preserves the notion of unlimited debate but makes it punishing for the minority to keep the debate going: they have to have more and more members on the floor as the debate extends. This setup would work perfectly well if you were, say, defending Social Security; not so well if you were throwing a one-Senator temper tantrum and secretly holding all nominees…there’s simply no way you’d reach the ratcheting floor requirement in the absence of a truly objectionable nominee or bill, so why even bother. And it removes the ridiculous current requirement that the majority be there 24/7 to defeat repeated quorum calls by the sole minority Senator who needs to be there to push the debate ever onward. Likewise you’d lose the foolish “marinating” process that the GOP deftly uses to extend debate without actually, you know, extending debates.
The second “chance” at altering filibuster rules comes the instant the GOP next is in control of the Senate, maybe as soon as 2012. The filibuster will be the first thing they eliminate. And eliminate it they will, at least for Democrats.
The Wrath of the Bond Vigilantes
At first, the vigour with which Dublin wielded the spending axe won plaudits from bond markets. But the deflationary impact of the cuts has since seen the deficit widen.
Clearly the answer to this is simply deeper cuts. But only to services for the poor and unemployed. Couple that with a massive tax cut for the top 2% and you’ve got yourself a recipe for runaway growth…
To the Ring Fence!
… these potential savings can be realized if we are willing to make an honest examination of the cost, benefit, and rationale of the extensive U.S. military commitment overseas, which in large part remains a legacy of policy decisions made in the immediate aftermath of World War II and during the Cold War. Years after the Soviet threat has disappeared, we continue to provide European and Asian nations with military protection through our nuclear umbrella and the troops stationed in our overseas military bases. Given the relative wealth of these countries, we should examine the extent of this burden that we continue to shoulder on our own dime.
All I have to say about this is: Finally.
Naturally, the Serious People advocating harsh austerity are already heading to the barricades to put a stop to even a discussion about scaling back the Pentagon’s baseline, non-war funding to some remotely rational fraction of the national budget. Rest assured our potential GOP majority feels exactly the same way insofar as they even think about policy decisions such as these. They know who butters their bread, and it certainly isn’t the people standing in the bread lines.
There’s a trap, and it’s the same thing that happened with fiscal stimulus. You do something in the right direction that’s inadequate, and then people say, well, that didn’t work, and instead of increasing the dosage and proving it right, you give the thing up altogether.
All of this is very familiar if you studied Japan in the ‘90s. In fact, we’re doing worse than the Japanese did. Our monetary policy is a bit more aggressive, but our fiscal policy has been less aggressive. We have a larger output gap than they did, and we’ve had a surge in unemployment that they never had, and our political will to act has been exhausted much faster than theirs was. On the current track, we’re going to look at Japan’s lost decade as a success story compared to us.
Paul Krugman bringin’ the optimism.
What business should want, in theory, is a Republican Party that advocates for its interests. That is to say, a Republican Party willing to send 20 senators and 50 House members to the table when Democrats are writing a huge health-care bill that has the votes to pass. The Democrats would’ve given anything for some votes from across the aisle, and whatever it is that business wanted, it could’ve gotten. But since the Republican Party wasn’t interested in governing or negotiating, business didn’t have that leverage. Insofar as the GOP is the party of business, they failed their constituents: They neither stopped the bill nor – with the exception of Olympia Snowe – fully participated in the process behind it. Or take the stimulus bill, which major business groups like the Chamber of Commerce supported, but which the Republicans abandoned.
Ezra Klein describing some mythical GOP that’s actually interested in governing; the one we haven’t seen in this country in a decade or two.
To the Mondale-Phone!
Ezra Klein, 2010:The argument for taxing people who make more than $250,000 isn’t that they’re bad people, and it isn’t that they won’t notice the tax increase. It’s that we’ve got a very large budget imbalance, and we’re going to need to do a lot of things to correct it. Taxes on the rich have dropped even as the incomes of the rich have skyrocketed. So one of the obvious things to do is update the tax code to correct for that drift. But eventually, we’ll need to do much more than just increases taxes on the rich, and though politicians have tried to sell this one as a change that most Americans won’t notice and needn’t worry about, eventually, they’re going to have to start talking about changes that people will notice, and should worry about.
Walter Mondale, 1984: By the end of my first term, I will reduce the Reagan budget deficit by two-thirds. Let’s tell the truth. It must be done, it must be done. Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won’t tell you. I just did.
Lemkin, 2010: Oh for those heady, brutally honest days of the first Mondale administration.
There is no policy that President Obama has passed or proposed that added as much to the deficit as the Republican Party’s $3.9 trillion extension of the Bush tax cuts. In fact, if you put aside Obama’s plan to extend most, but not all, of the Bush tax cuts, there is no policy he has passed or proposed that would do half as much damage to the deficit. There is not even a policy that would do a quarter as much damage to the deficit.
Ezra Klein – Putting the $3.9 trillion extension of the Bush tax cuts in context (via southpol)
Yep. And, if you’re The Democrat, you shall never speak of this. Ever. Too complicated, apparently.
Yep. And, if you’re The Democrat, you shall never speak of this. Ever. Too complicated, apparently.
Lemkin 