How Naive Can You Be?

The White House never, ever understood the GOP Plan.

The Obama legislative agenda was built around an "advancing tide" theory.

Democrats would start with bills that targeted relatively narrow problems, such as expanding health care for low-income children, reforming Pentagon contracting practices and curbing abuses by credit-card companies. Republicans would see the victories stack up and would want to take credit alongside a popular president. As momentum built, larger bipartisan coalitions would form to tackle more ambitious initiatives.

The president stacked his administration with Capitol Hill veterans to help get the job done. Vice President Biden had served in the Senate since 1972. Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel had been a rising star in the House. Senior advisers Pete Rouse and Jim Messina, budget director Peter Orszag and legislative affairs director Phil Schiliro had close ties to key lawmakers.

By the end of June, Congress had sent 10 major bills to Obama, including tougher tobacco regulations, a new public service initiative, and recession-related efforts to provide mortgage relief and curb predatory banking practices.

But Republican votes never materialized -- at least not in meaningful form that the White House had in mind. The first hint of GOP obstruction had emerged in January, when Obama made an early trip to Capitol Hill to urge support for his stimulus bill.

January.  As in "within days after Obama was sworn into office."    They never figured it out.

Standing at the microphones in the Ohio Clock corridor after the closed-door meeting with House Republicans, Obama expressed hope that his adversaries could "put politics aside" and support the bill.

But even as he spoke, House GOP leaders were urging their rank-and-file to vote against the rescue package. Obama had just departed when House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (Ohio) issued a statement calling the plan a "wasteful and unfocused package."

The bill received zero Republican votes in the House. Eight months later, by the time bipartisan health-care talks collapsed in September, the GOP outreach effort was effectively dead.

As I said for months now, the GOP long ago decided that there was no additional downside to unilaterally obstructing every single piece of Obama's legislation, knowing that if nothing got done and Americans saw the country was going to hell, Democrats would get the blame.   The GOP would simply play the victim card.  They never had any intent at bipartisanship.  Ever.  They were never going to come around.  They were never going to work with the President on anything.  Let America burn.  Let them all go to hell.  But let them blame the Democrats when they get there.

And at every turn the Democrats relented so that the resulting legislation was toothless and ineffective.  It assured that the Dems couldn't take credit for what did pass.  The GOP had the Dems figured out before Obama was ever sworn in, and the Dems were in the trap from day one.

They got played for fools.  And now America will pay the price for their staggering stupidity.

The Lesson Of Scott Brown

If you don't want to win, you'll lose.

Money talked in the Massachusetts special election last week that reshaped the U.S. political landscape by filling Ted Kennedy's Senate seat with a Republican.

Democratic pollster Celinda Lake revealed Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union" that Martha Coakley, the Democratic candidate, ran no polls for several weeks in the short campaign because she lacked funding.

According to Lake, Coakley, the Massachusetts attorney general, asked national Democratic organizations for funding for her campaign but was turned down. Lake said Democratic officials told Coakley, "You don't need it."

By contrast, Brown ran daily field polling from Dec. 31, said Republican pollster Neil Newhouse. Brown's campaign received strong backing from conservative groups and national Republicans.

And it will only get worse from here as the SCOTUS decision assures unlimited money by corporations can be spent in the final 60 days of an election.  Of course, national Republicans proved they could win an election without that benefit.  With that benefit, there's no safe seat for the Dems.  None.

Here endeth the lesson.

Keeps Getting Funnier Every Time I See It

This week's Bobblespeak Translations are up.

DeMint: we’re seeing a sudden American awakening of people alarmed that a black man has the power
to spend and build up debt

Moran: I noticed that

DeMint: incredibly Obama opposed tort reform so
we can’t take him seriously

Moran: I couldn’t help notice that Scott Brown didn’t call himself a Republican

DeMint: we’ve got to earn the trust of the American people by
saying Obama took power three years ago

Moran: anything else

DeMint: also waving posters of Obama as a witch doctor in Auschwitz

Menendez: hey stupid - George Bush blew a surplus and handed Obama a Depression

Moran: yeah but Obama wasted all his time on a health care plan ABC news doesn’t like

Menendez: he prevented a Great Depression!

Moran: I see your mouth moving but all I hear is you’re not bipartisan

DeMint: look I’ve never heard of this ‘George Bush’ you’re talking about but the American people are very angry at this black man is steamrolling them will all this spending and debt

Menendez: that Bush created

DeMint: who is this ‘Bush’ person you keep
referring to?

It hurts when I laugh because it's true.

Juggling Priorities

The hard reality is that 10.0% unemployment rate figure simply isn't counting the millions of Americans who have simply left the work force altogether, and at the state level, the picture is devastating.

In another nationwide trend, long-suffering states like California and Michigan saw their jobless rates stabilize even as they continued to bleed jobs. That's because thousands of frustrated workers gave up hunting for work and dropped out of the labor force, which means they aren't included in the unemployment rate.

California lost 38,800 jobs. But its unemployment rate was unchanged at 12.4 percent, the fifth-highest in the nation. That's because 107,000 people, or 0.6 percent of the state's workforce, gave up and stopped job-hunting.

Michigan shed 15,700 jobs, but 31,000 people left the labor force. That caused the state's jobless rate to fall slightly, to 14.6 percent from 14.7 percent. Michigan has the nation's highest unemployment rate.

Nationally, more than 600,000 people left the labor force in December, according to government data. The large exodus from the labor force indicates that "unemployment is a lot worse than the numbers suggest," Koropeckyj said.

The latest U-6 estimate for the country is 17.3%, but even that doesn't count all the people that have simply left the labor force. Millions of Americans, perhaps tens of millions, have simply given up looking for jobs at all.  The government estimates are far too low.  We're talking about a real unemployment rate in this country of upwards of 20%.  Some states are at 25% or higher,  and individual counties are topping 30% or more.

It's bad, folks.  If you're wondering why Americans are scared and angry at Obama, it's because the GOP long ago mastered playing the fear card.  It's a testament to just how bad the times are, just how effective the GOP spin masters have been, and just how wholly unprepared Obama and the Democrats were for this mess that Bush left.

The country's about to hand the whole thing back over to the Republicans as a result.  Six months ago the Dems were actually looking like they could pick up seats in 2010.  Of course, six months ago, the Dems were looking like they were going to pass health care reform, too.

You Can't Always Get What You Want

Or in the case of Democrats and health care reform, you can't get anything.

A day after former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe is elevated to a more senior adviser status at the White House and the DNC, Plouffe pens an op ed in the Washington Post in which he seems to suggest that much of President Obama's promise to ban pre-existing conditions is now being jettisoned. Plouffe wrote in the op ed, which was certainly cleared with the White House, if not written by them:

Parents won't have to worry their children will be denied coverage just because they have a preexisting condition.

Their children? The original promise - even the bad Senate bill - protects everyone, of any age, from being denied coverage because of pre-existing conditions. Now it's just children?

And before anyone argues that Plouffe was simply using children as an example - that the legislation could still cover everyone - look at what else happened in the last two days. CBS News reported that the pre-existing conditions promise was now looking unlikely. But even worse, the NYT talked to folks on the Hill and health policy experts, and they were told the compromise package might just protect kids under the age of 19 from being denied for pre-existing conditions. No one else.

It would sure be one hell of a coincidence if Plouffe, on behalf of the White House, is now talking about kids being protected from pre-existing conditions when the growing chatter in town is that only kids may now be protected from pre-existing conditions - that the rest of us are about to get tossed under the Martha Coakley bus.

Not a coincidence at all.  It's looking like passing the "Republican health care plan" was the plan all along.  Massachusetts voters said time and time again the health care plan wasn't good enough.  The White House's response appears to be "make the plan worse and have the Republicans sign on to it too."

No bed wetting, Plouffe says, while unzipping his fly and peeing over the balcony onto the crowd below.  Pass a meaningful health care reform bill, Plouffe says, while looking to neuter it. Don't accept any lectures on spending, he says while President Obama is talking about deficit reduction. Make sure voters understand what the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act did for the economy when he remarks when the White House lost that battle back in February because they gave in to the GOP and made it too small.

If you guys don't pass a kick ass health care bill, you're done. It really is that simple.

[UPDATE 12:05 PM] Wisdom from BooMan:

I have to laugh.  They're still worried about provisions of a bill, when the whole bill is virtually dead.  Worry about the whole bill, for chrissakes.  This has been the problem on the left all year long.  

Yep.

The Mask Slips Again

Thanks to the internet, it's much easier to catalog the incidents where Republican politicians slip and tell the truth about how they view people, particularly the least among us.

South Carolina Republican Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer said Saturday he could have chosen his words more carefully when he compared people who take public assistance to stray animals Friday.

But Bauer, in an interview with The State Saturday, said a furor over his comments doesn't change this fact: South Carolina needs to have an honest conversation about the cycle of government dependency among its poorest residents.

Bauer, a two-term Republican who is running for governor, said there are parents who are dependent upon the government for food and shelter, but who are unwilling to engage in their children's education. This, he said, robs children of a chance to break out of poverty.

And as a candidate for governor, Bauer said, now is the time to start talking about something that others are unwilling to tackle. Bauer said he wants to lead that conversation.

"Why shouldn't you have to do something?" Bauer asked of people receiving food stamps, free school lunches and public housing. "In government, we are too often giving a handout instead of a hand up."

Friday, Bauer said giving food to needy people means encouraging dependence. It also gives the recipients a license to have children who will also be dependent on public aid, he said.

"My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals," Bauer told a Greenville-area crowd. "You know why? Because they breed.

"You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that. And so what you've got to do is you've got to curtail that type of behavior. They don't know any better."

To Bauer, "an honest conversation about poverty" means "Why the hell do we have to help these people?  They're not even human."   If you think Bauer didn't choose his words carefully and said exactly what was on his mind about South Carolina's poor in a Southern state facing 12.6% official unemployment and an unofficial rate close to 20%, you're crazy.

Bauer simply spoke the truth.  And the best part is there are enough people in the Palmetto State who will agree with him and are more than willing to throw millions of their neighbors to the wolves rather than place the blame on the Republicans who got the economy into this mess (never mind the racial undertones about comparing poor people to stray animals who breed.)

Rich banks got greedy.  You had to pay to fix it.  Now let's make those who can least afford it pay you back!

Hell of a platform to run on.  But it's a winning message in 2010 for Republican candidates so far.

Time For A Reboot Of Populism.exe

President Obama's weekly address focuses heavily on the SCOTUS decision giving American corporations free reign to advocate directly for candidates in primary and general elections.  Greg Sargent sees a strategy here:

* The fight Obama needs? The President devotes his whole weekly address to slamming the SCOTUS decision, saying it will make it easier for special interests and corporations to stomp all over the public interest. He vows to make it a “priority” to develop a “forceful, bipartisan response.”

The White House seems to see in the SCOTUS decision a chance to mount a clean, easy-to-understand populist crusade that might enable Obama to reboot, as he might put it. By Obama’s own admission, a year’s worth of sometimes-sordid backroom negotiating over health care has left his administration looking like part of the problem — as if it’s been subsumed by the D.C. insider culture and its insular and corrupted governing practices.

So perhaps White House advisers hope this fight will enable him to achieve separation from that culture and reclaim his reformer mantle.

It's possible. But not while health care hangs out there like the ultimate pink elephant in the room.  I'm glad that on economic issues he's finally coming around (he has no choice with Helicopter Ben's nomination on the rocks and Timmy in trouble as well) but until he convinces America that government intervention in health insurance is something we need, the rest is meaningless.

The Republicans will correctly be able to say "Yeah, Obama's changing the subject.  How's that insider deal on health care going, Mr. Populist?"

Fix health care.  Now.

Last Dance, Last Chance

News this morning that this weekend, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are working to save health care reform and most likely the Democratic party.  Steve Benen reads the tea leaves:

Politico reports that there will apparently be some talks this weekend that may save health care reform (and save the Democratic Party, and save the lives of uninsured Americans, and save countless families from bankruptcy).

Struggling to salvage health reform, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have begun considering a list of changes to the Senate bill in hopes of making it acceptable to liberal House members, according to sources familiar with the situation.
The changes could be included in separate legislation that, if passed, would pave the way for House approval of the Senate bill -- a move that would preserve President Barack Obama's vision of a sweeping health reform plan. [...]

The changes are being worked on this weekend with plans for Pelosi to present them to her caucus next week, according to sources familiar with the situation. But, sources stressed, neither Reid nor Pelosi know if this strategy can win the support of their members, but they are attempting it because it is the quickest path to passage.

As recently as last week, in the midst of lengthy discussions at the White House, a wide variety of changes were agreed upon by House and Senate negotiators. The idea, of course, was to craft a final bill to be approved by both chambers. Voters in Massachusetts have since made this approach impossible.

But if Reid and Pelosi can package those already-discussed improvements, and agree to approve them through reconciliation after the House passes the Senate bill, then there's still hope that a fiasco for the ages can be avoided.

It's the plan I've been talking about for weeks:  the House passes the Senate Bill in exchange for the Senate passing improvements in reconciliation.  The alternative...a scaled-down so-called "Republican health care reform plan"...will be a disaster for the country and for the Democrats.  This has got to go through right now or it's basically over for the Dems.  They know it.

Do they have the courage to do it?

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• The official death toll from Haiti's earthquake is now well over 100,000.
• Iraq is facing environmental ruin as dozens of contaminated sites are polluting the country.
• NASA scientists report that 2000-2009 was the warmest decade on record globally.
• U.S. stocks had their worst week in months as China's lending and proposed "Volcker Rules" knocked banks for a loop.
• Amazon's Kindle may have been first, but even Amazon is taking steps to see its Kindle software store survive in light of Apple's coming tablet.
  

Last Call

My generation is giving up on the political process after just a year and change.

It appears there is a potentially huge problem for Democrats going into the 2010 election cycle: young people simply are not voting. Part of Martha Coakley’s problem in Massachusetts was the incredibly low turnout among voters between 18-29. The findings of a Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement poll state:

About 15% of Massachusetts citizens between the ages of 18-29 turned out to vote.* For citizens age 30 and older, turnout was about 57%.
For comparison: 25% of young citizens (age 18-29) voted in the 2008 Massachusetts presidential primaries, and 47.8% of young Massachusetts citizens voted in the 2008 presidential elections, according to CIRCLE’s analysis. Seventy-eight percent of under-30 voters in Massachusetts chose Barack Obama in the 2008 general election; 20% chose John McCain.

This was not a one-time event. Youth turnout in the 2009 gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey was similarly very low.

The optimist in me says we need to give the younger generation a reason to vote.  All they have known is the post-1994 Republican Party of partisan stupidity, bigotry, hatred and racism.  They reject it soundly. They are the embodiment of hope.

Of course, the cynic in me says all they have known of the Democratic Party is the spinleless losers who fail to get things done even with huge majorities, only to get crushed at the polls and leave us with the Republicans running the show.  In the end, the greedy bad guys win, and the alternative is a bunch of losers. Why bother?

Here at 34, my entire adult political experience has been watching Clinton's '92 election in high school turn into a nightmare in college as the Republicans decimated them in 1994, six years of triangulation followed by impeachment, the dot-com bust, then Bush's stolen election, 9/11 and eight years of suck, and now Obama's Democrats are falling apart again after one year in power.

Literally any time anyone in my generation has seen a green shoot of political hope, it has been beaten with a sledgehammer and set on fire, then the ashes collected and rubbed into the wounds of puppies flayed open with strips of dead baby seal leather studded with broken glass.

Why Bother?

That's the advice of National Journal's Ronald Brownstein, who thinks in a world of sixty vote supermajorities that the best course of action is nothing at all.

Obama's first year demonstrated once again that in this deeply polarized political era, big legislative crusades aimed at big national problems produce only big political headaches. President George W. Bush learned that when his failed drive to restructure Social Security helped trigger his precipitous second-term political collapse. And now, like President Clinton, Obama is at risk of cracking his presidency on the immovable rock of health care reform. Democrats control the White House, the House, and, even after the Massachusetts vote, 59 Senate seats, more than either party has held since 1980, except during the past several months. Yet much of Washington assumes, probably correctly, that Democrats are now condemned to gridlock.

Republicans believe that Obama's problem is that he's pushing so much government intervention in the economy. That's undoubtedly part of the story. But Obama's larger difficulty is that he's pushing so much change at a time when filibuster threats are so common that it requires 60 Senate votes to pass almost everything -- and the minority party won't provide the president votes on almost anything. We are operating in what amounts to a parliamentary system without majority rule, a formula for futility.

Republicans would likely be facing equivalent troubles if they had the power to advance their goal of retrenching government. Does anyone imagine that a President John McCain would be flourishing if he had spent 2009 attempting, over unified Democratic resistance, to impose his campaign agenda of eliminating the tax incentive for employer-provided health care and reducing the growth of Medicare spending? Or that House Republicans would be thriving if they could enact their 2009 budget proposal to literally end Medicare for Americans now younger than 55 and replace it with a voucher to buy private insurance?

In that alternate universe, Democrats would almost certainly be the ones celebrating off-year upsets. The common thread is that it's extremely difficult to sell this country on big change, in any direction, without at least some bipartisan validation. That's especially true in today's communications maelstrom, where overtly partisan media sources tirelessly incite the opposition party's base against the president.

 Ahh, good old moral equivalency.  Because ending Medicare for those under 55 is exactly as insane as trying to cover the 50 million Americans without health insurance, and both are equally silly goals for America.

59 votes in the Senate is now gridlock.  That can't possibly be the problem, can it?

Grab Them By the Wallet

And their hearts and minds will follow.

A highly influential labor leader Friday suggested congressional Democrats might not the full support of unions in the upcoming midterm elections due to their struggles passing healthcare reform.

Service Employees International Union President Andy Stern chided House Democrats for contemplating scaled-back healthcare reform in favor of passing the Senate bill through the House. 

“It’s gonna be incredibly difficult to stay focused on national politics if by the end of 2010 we have minimal health care and minimal changes on what’s important to our members,” he said in an interview with liberal blogger Greg Sargent.

Stern said the House Democrats' apparent new plan as "fear masquerading as a strategy."

Here's the wacky part:  this week's Supreme Court ruling basically throwing out limits on campaign finance reform renders Andy Stern's threat much less effective that it would have been just days ago.  The influx of corporate cash in 2010 will simply drown anything the labor unions can come up with anyway.  Which ever side has the corporate money will win in 2010, and that's going to be the Republicans.

The real panic you've seen in the last 48 hours on health care is the insurance industry and financial industry going "You will kill this agenda or we will have you replaced by people who will.  We can outspend your campaign 100-to-1 now if we have to in order to do so."  The Dems are running scared because the lobbyists now have unlimited cash to decide elections, and Scott Brown's campaign showed the Republicans how to do it.

I'm surprised nobody's glomed on to this.  It's perfectly obvious.

Return Of The GOP Plan

Remember what I've been saying for a year now:  The GOP will never allow a health care plan to pass if the Democrats can take credit for it.

But if the Republicans can take credit for it?

On Thursday, House Democrats debated two ways of getting a health care reform bill passed. The first is to pass the Senate's bill -- though only on the condition that additional reforms would be tackled in a separate filibuster-proof bill, to be passed through a process called reconciliation. The second approach is to pare down the package -- stripping it to its unobjectionable core (insurance regulation, money to help people buy care, etc.) -- and use that as a building block for future legislation.

That the latter strategy is being seriously considered by progressive lawmakers is a testament to how large an albatross health care reform has become for the party. But the worry, for some, is that it could lead to Republicans claming victory.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell "will have his whole caucus vote for it and make it a political win for the Republicans," one well-connected Democratic health care strategist said. "They'll say, 'This was the Republican plan from the beginning. We're glad the Democrats joined us.' And take all the credit for passing reform."

Lo and behold, on Thursday, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich suggested that the Republican Party do just that, arguing that it would be "clever" for the GOP to pass non-controversial reform measures with "huge bipartisan majorities."

Alternately, some Democrats might welcome such a move. "Hell yeah," a Democratic congressional aide said. "We would have created a bi-partisan bill. We would have shown leadership. And we'd get credit for that."

No you wouldn't.  The Republicans would.  And you would get annihilated in 2010. Completely.  Hell, I would vote for them just because they would prove they could actually get things done.

If the Dems fall into this little black hole in a box, we really do deserve the GOP majorities in Congress from a simply Darwinian perspective.  The Dems would be too stupid to allow to live.

Just A Question Of How Many They Lose

Nate Silver's new Senate rankings show a deadly grim picture for the Dems, with almost zero chance of any Democratic pickups outside of the five open Republican seats, and a lot of Dem carnage much more likely.

Right now, the program is showing that Democrats will retain an average of 54.7 seats in the 112th Congress. The distribution, however, is slightly asymmetrical, so the median number is 54, and the modal number is 53.

And things could, potentially, get a whole lot worse than that; the program recognizes that the outcome of the different races are correlated based on changes in the national environment. Between the surprise in Massachusetts, and races like California and Indiana which are potentially coming into play, there's about a 6-7 percent chance that Republicans could actually take control of the Senate, and another 6 percent chance or so that they could wind up with a 50-50 split. On the other hand, there's still a 7-8 percent chance that the Democrats could regain their 60th seat if the national environment shifts back in their direction.

Not good odds, especially if you factor in the very real possibility that Evan Bayh, Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman especially could jump parties/caucuses if the Republicans pick up 7 more seats, and Bayh's seat is frankly in real play now by itself.  Nate's top seven flips are all Dem seats, followed by the open Missouri seat that the Republicans are defending and then Bayh's seat.  If all of those break the GOP's way, that's 51-49 Dems, and Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson looking for the exits.


Even Barbara Boxer and Russ Feingold's seats are in play according to Nate.  Knocking out those guys and defending all 5 open seats would be a hell of an order for the GOP.   But it would give them 51 seats.


Scott Brown has changed the math, whether I like it or not.  And the Dems are on the verge of simply surrendering anyway.

Start The Bus, Baby

In the immortal words of Dick Vitale, "It's over baby, start the bus, get it warmed up, cause you're gonna be driving home wondering how you lost this game and it's a long trip home."

There was some talk among Senate leadership on Thursday of putting together a letter signed by 51 Democratic senators pledging to pass a cleanup bill if the House would pass the Senate bill. But that effort fizzled when support for it didn’t materialize, insiders said.

“The Senate moderates’ viewpoint is, ‘We passed our bill. We’re not going to spend three weeks on some other bill,’” said a Democratic lobbyist who represents clients pushing for reform.

“There’s a real possibility it doesn’t get through,” said another Democratic lobbyist.

Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) said one possibility involved having the Senate pass the cleanup bill first. But there’s a question as to whether the Senate can amend a bill that is not yet law, officials said. Reid would also want some assurances ahead of time from the parliamentarian that key elements of the cleanup bill would not be struck from the bill, officials said.

House Democrats are angry with the Senate for passing a bill that divided their base, angering labor unions with a tax on expensive health plans and progressives by abandoning the public option. House members are frustrated that the Senate assumes they will roll over whenever the upper chamber demands it and that they took until late December to pass a bill.

 Unless something magical happens between now and the SOTU address, health care reform is dead and gone.

And so are the Dem majorities in Congress.  We need leadership.  We're getting "change is haaaaaard.  We don't wanna do it."

If this truly, really is over, then the Dems deserve what they get.  Obama says he'll never stop fighting, but it's irrelevant if the Dems in Congress have already given up.

[UPDATE 2:43 PM]  Chris Dodd is calling for a break until March on health care reform.  Sure, that'll make it easier to pass, six weeks of Village hit jobs and GOP attacks!