Forawrd Off The Cliff

America has a long history of third parties handing elections over to Republicans, with Ralph Nader getting enough votes in Florida in 2000 to cost Al Gore the state and the country, and Jill Stein, the Russian operative Green Party candidate and her successful sabotage of Hillary Clinton in enough states to give Trump the win in 2016. Here and now, it's time for a new generation of Horseshoe Theory "alternatives" to prepare for dirty tricks against Dems in 2024, and they're getting a head start in 2022 with names like Andrew Yang, and Christie Todd Whitman.

Dozens of former Republican and Democratic officials announced on Wednesday a new national political third party to appeal to millions of voters they say are dismayed with what they see as America's dysfunctional two-party system.

The new party, called Forward and whose creation was first reported by Reuters, will initially be co-chaired by former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang and Christine Todd Whitman, the former Republican governor of New Jersey. They hope the party will become a viable alternative to the Republican and Democratic parties that dominate U.S. politics, founding members told Reuters.

Party leaders will hold a series of events in two dozen cities this autumn to roll out its platform and attract support. They will host an official launch in Houston on Sept. 24 and the party's first national convention in a major U.S. city next summer.

The new party is being formed by a merger of three political groups that have emerged in recent years as a reaction to America's increasingly polarized and gridlocked political system. The leaders cited a Gallup poll last year showing a record two-thirds of Americans believe a third party is needed.

The merger involves the Renew America Movement, formed in 2021 by dozens of former officials in the Republican administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and Donald Trump; the Forward Party, founded by Yang, who left the Democratic Party in 2021 and became an independent; and the Serve America Movement, a group of Democrats, Republicans and independents whose executive director is former Republican congressman David Jolly.

Two pillars of the new party's platform are to "reinvigorate a fair, flourishing economy" and to "give Americans more choices in elections, more confidence in a government that works, and more say in our future."

The party, which is centrist, has no specific policies yet. It will say at its Thursday launch: "How will we solve the big issues facing America? Not Left. Not Right. Forward."

 

No actual policies yet, other than putting a Republican fascist in the White House, that is. I'm hoping these idiots will run out of money before they can peel enough support away from Biden to assure even a Trump win, never mind DeSantis or another competent fascist getting the nod. 

Sadly, I'm betting there will be billions of bucks thrown down the pit over the next couple of years to drive a wedge in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida and Texas to ensure that Democratic votes are split, allowing a plurality (and not a majority!) of Republicans to win those states in 2024.

Trump may not have to try to steal the Electoral College this time in order to win thanks to these assholes.

Last Call For The Good Package

Pelosi doesn't have the votes for the Good Package, folks.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., may not bring the bipartisan infrastructure bill to the House floor Monday as she had previously committed to, she said Sunday.

"I'm never bringing to the floor a bill that doesn't have the votes," Pelosi told ABC "This Week" anchor George Stephanopoulos, adding it could be Monday.

"You cannot choose the date," Pelosi said. "You have to go when you have the votes in a reasonable time, and we will."

Pelosi had previously agreed to put the bipartisan infrastructure bill on the floor to be considered by Sept. 27, after moderates in her caucus demanded a vote.

Still, she said of the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill, "Let me just say, we're going to pass the bill this week."

House progressives have warned leadership they will not vote on the bipartisan bill until the larger $3.5 trillion human infrastructure bill is also ready for a vote. Pelosi acknowledged, "In order to move forward, we have to build consensus."

Pelosi said the price tag for that larger bill could drop in negotiations with concessions.

"I know the budget committee passed a resolution calling for $3.5 trillion, but it sounds like you acknowledge that the final number is going to be somewhat smaller than that," Stephanopoulos pressed.

"Yeah, I mean, that seems self-evident," Pelosi responded.

 

Now, she still plans to have the votes for something later this week.

 

There is actual hope as she's mostly there.

Two of the nine House centrists who demanded Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) bring the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill to the floor by Monday are now publicly promising to vote for the separate $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation package, Axios has learned.

Why it matters: By explicitly announcing their support for a big package targeting climate change and expanding the social safety net, Reps. Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas) and Filemon Vela (D-Texas) are trying to convince progressives to vote for the infrastructure bill this week. 

Nonetheless, the two lawmakers also make it clear the House needs to vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill as soon as possible. 

“We support swift passage of the president’s $3.5 trillion reconciliation package,” they write in a joint statement obtained by Axios. “The bipartisan infrastructure framework would, on average, deliver $1.2 billion per congressional district.” 

“However, the idea that denying passage of the Senate’s Bipartisan Infrastructure bill [BIF] somehow exercises 'leverage' over some of our more fiscally conservative members is wholly misguided."

Between the lines: It’s unclear how many of the nine centrists who forced Pelosi to schedule the vote by Sept. 27 are actually on board for a big spending bill.

 

So we're still at the tender mercies of President Manchin and Vice-President Sinema now.  This all reminds me of Obama's stimulus package, which was pared down mightily thanks to Presidents Collins, Snowe, and Lieberman.

 

But what form will the final bill take?

 

Nobody knows right now.

Chasing Those Trump Voters Again

Democratic strategists are once again back to "Only more rural white men can save the party from doom".

Former Democratic Sens. Heidi Heitkamp and Joe Donnelly, who both lost their 2018 re-election races in North Dakota and Indiana, respectively, are launching the One Country Project to help their party win back rural voters ahead of the 2020 cycle. Their team looked at rural votes by county and state from 2000 to 2018 and found that if Democrats don't break their performance with rural voters, they're projected to once again win the popular vote but lose the electoral college in 2020.  

Details: Their focus is primarily on Democratic Senate races and the presidential election, but they eventually want to work with races up and down the ballot in these rural areas.

Heitkamp and Donnelly will work with campaigns before the election, giving them messaging, data, polling, and a strategy to break through with these voters who "didn’t feel that we shared their beliefs" in past elections, Donnelly told Axios in an interview.

"Culturally, they’re focused on faith and family and country, and Donald Trump tells them all the time that we’re not, even though we are."

What they're saying: "What we heard on the ground is that the Democratic Party no longer speaks for the entire country," Heitkamp said. "They’ve forgotten the middle of the country and forgot to even show up. Even past Democratic voters didn’t recognize the Democratic Party of 2018."

By the numbers: Their data, shared exclusively with Axios, projects that Democrats' popular vote would increase from +2.1% in 2016 to +3.6% in 2020.

But, using a similar margin that Obama won by in 2012, One Country Project estimates Democrats would end up with just 232 electoral college votes in the upcoming presidential cycle. (Hillary Clinton won 227 in 2016.)

They also project Democrats would be poised to have a better performance in states like Arizona, Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, Texas and Georgia.

Assuming these trends among rural voters continue, the team predicts Minnesota, Maine and New Hampshire will become even more competitive in 2020.

The reason why Republicans are doing better in those states is massive voter suppression efforts of black and Hispanic voters, not because of "rural white voter trends".

We can do both, but getting rid of the voter suppression is far more important than making Trump voters comfortable enough to maybe not vote for Trump.

No Labels, No Honor

It seems our old centrist friends at No Labels, the triangulating anti-Democrat group disguised as "moderate bipartisans", were behind the sad plan to get rid of Nancy Pelosi as Speaker.

Before saying that its opposition to Nancy Pelosi’s House speaker campaign had nothing to do with her record, the nonpartisan group No Labels was exploring a primary challenge to her back home in San Francisco.

And she wasn’t the only Democrat the centrist nonprofit wanted to go after.

No Labels bills itself as “a movement for the tens of millions of Americans who are fed up with the dysfunction and will no longer put up with a government that does not represent the interests of most Americans.” Among the group’s past co-chairs are the former Republican presidential candidate and current ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman and the former Democratic and independent Senator Joe Lieberman, who oversaw the presentation of No Labels’ “problem solver’s award” to Donald Trump during the 2016 Republican primaries.

The nonprofit’s super pac supports the Problem Solvers Caucus, which has 44 equally divided Democratic and Republican members in the House and purports to be working on real solutions to issues that divide Congress.

But over the past year, No Labels’ leaders considered primary challenges to at least three incumbent House Democrats—starting with Pelosi, in January 2017. They also discussed running a primary challenge to freshman Darren Soto, a Florida Democrat. He had been elected with No Labels’ support but had in early 2017 accepted a mostly honorific position as an assistant whip for the House Democrats.

Now Soto is one of the nine Democrats from the Problem Solvers Caucus who is among the holdouts in Pelosi’s bid to win another term as speaker. Those nine currently have considerable influence as she works to reach the number of votes she needs to be elected speaker. Soto and his fellow Democrats in the caucus announced last week that they would not support Pelosi unless she agreed to rule changes that they argue would “break the gridlock.” Pelosi is scheduled to meet with its members on Tuesday, though she preempted the conversation by having an aide put out a statement arguing that she’s already agreed to many of their proposals and gone further.

Getting rid of Pelosi and weakening the Democrats was always the point of No Labels, and it always will be.  These guys are bad news, and Pelosi should kick them all to the curb.

Last Call For Return Of The Centrist Daleks

Utter failure of a Dem strategist Mark Penn and Trump-vsupporting NYC millionaire Andrew Stein know exactly how Democrats can win in 2018 and 2020...by going back to 1996 and 1998 to TRIANGULAAAAAAAAATE!

The path back to power for the Democratic Party today, as it was in the 1990s, is unquestionably to move to the center and reject the siren calls of the left, whose policies and ideas have weakened the party. 

In the early 1990s, the Democrats relied on identity politics, promoted equality of outcomes instead of equality of opportunity and looked to find a government solution for every problem. After years of leftward drift by the Democrats culminated in Republican control of the House under Speaker Newt Gingrich, President Bill Clinton moved the party back to the center in 1995 by supporting a balanced budget, welfare reform, a crime bill that called for providing 100,000 new police officers and a step-by-step approach to broadening health care. Mr. Clinton won a resounding re-election victory in 1996 and Democrats were back. 

But the last few years of the Obama administration and the 2016 primary season once again created a rush to the left. Identity politics, class warfare and big government all made comebacks. Candidates inspired by Senator Bernie Sanders, Senator Elizabeth Warren and a host of well-funded groups have embraced sharply leftist ideas. But the results at the voting booth have been anything but positive: Democrats lost over 1,000 legislative seats across the country and control of both houses of Congress during the Obama years. And in special elections for Congress this year, they failed to take back any seats held by Republicans. 

Central to the Democrats’ diminishment has been their loss of support among working-class voters, who feel abandoned by the party’s shift away from moderate positions on trade and immigration, from backing police and tough anti-crime measures, from trying to restore manufacturing jobs. They saw the party being mired too often in political correctness, transgender bathroom issues and policies offering more help to undocumented immigrants than to the heartland.

Got that?  Screw everyone but white Catholic Midwest working-class straight guys.  Only they matter. Everyone else must take a back seat: black voters, immigrants, women, LBGTQ folks, atheists, the ultimate identity politics are the ones this country was born from.  Forget the DREAMers, forget Black Lives Matter, forget the pink pussy hats, forget the Pride flags, we gotta get those white men back in the party or else!

Americans are looking for can-do Democrats in the mold of John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton — leaders who rose above partisanship to unify the country, who defended human rights and equality passionately, and who also encouraged economic growth and rising wages. That is the road back to relevance, and the White House, for the Democrats.

It's the road back to relevance for white men, and they already have an entire political party just for them.  If Dems go down the same road, they'll arrive at the same place.

Centrist Dalek Horror Theater Presents: The Schoening

As the New Hampshire primaries get underway today, former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg confirms this week that he is considering entering the 2016 presidential race as an independent, something that made the rounds as a trial balloon two weeks ago.  Now however Bloomberg himself is saying he's considering making the jump.

The billionaire media mogul and three-time former New York mayor told Financial Times in an interview published Monday that he is “looking at all the options.”

Fellow New York billionaire Donald Trump has been leading polls on the Republican side for months, and Hillary Clinton only narrowly escaped Iowa with a victory over a self-described "democratic socialist." Bloomberg, who is considering running as an independent, said Americans deserve “a lot better.”

Bloomberg has set a March deadline to determine whether he will run, and should he decide yes, he told the FT he would have to begin getting his name on ballots next month. He has signaled he could spend at least a billion dollars of his own money to sustain a campaign, according to a New York Times report citing anonymous sources briefed on his deliberations.

That's not the funny part.  The funny part is who's advising him.

Bloomberg's pollster, Douglas Schoen, outlined the case for his boss's potential White House bid in an op-ed last week for the Wall Street Journal.

Pundits are missing a large group of centrist voters who opt out of partisan primaries, Schoen argued, pointing to the low turnout in Iowa.

“That’s the new silent majority: the millions of Americans who don’t participate in Democratic or Republican primaries. They are equally as fed up with the status quo, but they have a different approach to problem-solving and different policy prescriptions than those on the ideological extremes,” Schoen wrote.

That has created an opportunity for someone to mount an independent run, he argued:

“Who fits the bill? Michael Bloomberg, a centrist with a clear (and arguably unique) record in business as an entrepreneur and in politics as a three-term mayor of New York. Mr. Bloomberg is a fiscally prudent conciliator who advances pro-growth policies and takes tough stands."

That's right, the guy running Bloomberg's numbers is none other than our old friend Doug Schoen, the obnoxious No Labels/Americans Elect centrist grifter that warned Obama could never win re-election in 2012 and that Hillary had to primary him, that Obama had to champion the Simpson/Bowles Catfood Commission, that the Democrats were the real extremists, that Obama had to become a right-wing Democrat in order to attract Tea Party votes, that Trump should have gotten into the race in 2012 as in independent, and my personal favorite, that Barack Obama should have dropped out of the 2012 race completely for the good of America.

It looks like Doug has found his Trojan Horse to sink the Democrats and get his massive austerity cuts by splitting votes in favor of the GOP in Bloomberg, so if there was any doubt that a Bloomberg run is more Nader than Perot, the fact that Doug Schoen is involved should have you running for the exits.

The Centrist Daleks are baaaaaack!

Last Call

Orange you glad No Labels is back?

Next week when Obama addresses the House of Representatives and the Senate in a joint session, 40 lawmakers from the two parties hope to add some beef: Under their official congressional lapel pins, they’ll wear orange buttons identifying themselves as Problem Solvers and displaying their pledge, “Committed to fix not fight.”

With congressional approval ratings at historic lows, the 23 Democrats and 17 Republicans say they want to move beyond mere symbolism as they tell their peers that they’ve pledged to try to end hyper-partisanship and work across the aisle to solve the country’s most pressing problems.

“We’re meeting on a regular basis, Democrats and Republicans just talking about areas where we think we can work together in a bipartisan way,” said Rep. Ami Bera, a California Democrat who defeated incumbent Republican Rep. Dan Lungren in November.

“The idea is we’ve got to move past being only Democrat or Republican,” Bera said in an interview. “It’s very evident in my freshman class. All of us got elected knowing there was an expectation that we would work together.”

Aww.  Aren't these guys precious?  And let's remember, the top priority of these totally bipartisan sentinels of awesome bipartisanship that is bipartisan is the House GOP Super Austerity Budget so we can get rid of that awful debt crisis that doesn't actually exist.  And yet they're against sequestration, too...because that would cut defense spending, a big no-no.  See, the kind of deficit reduction these guys are looking for has to be made up of all of us taking it in the shorts so the 1% can get more money, and then gift us with life like the overclass they were always meant to be.

In short, the primary constituency of No Labels is totally Villagers like Joe Klein.

For those of us who consider ourselves political moderates, life is a dispiriting slog, a sorry mix of rectitude and ineptitude. We simmer with anticipation each time a new bipartisan initiative or Gang (of Six, of ... anything) is offered--and we are inevitably disappointed. The results are either too pedestrian, in a Solomonic slice-the-baby way, or far too ambitious. Abolish the Electoral College! Grant public funding for election campaigns! Start a third party! In 2012 there was a megafoolish, if well-funded, effort by a group called Americans Elect to raise an independent Cincinnatus to run for President via an Internet draft. It flopped, spectacularly. Oh, there are worthy think tanks with names like the Bipartisan Policy Center and Third Way. And there is the memory of a centrist research group, the Progressive Policy Institute, that provided Bill Clinton with many of his best proposals in 1992. But we moderates generally suffer from too much righteousness, too little populist grit and too many compound sentences.

I am, however, slightly optimistic again. On Jan. 10 I witnessed a public act of humility by 24 members of Congress, equally divided between Republicans and Democrats. The event was sponsored by a centrist group called No Labels. It was revolutionary not only in its humility but also in its agenda. There was no agenda. They simply agreed to start talking to one another.

Oh there's an agenda there.  It completely involves bipartisan agreement to streamline and fix broken Washington and the political process, which I agree with.  They want to really, actually, totally reform the filibuster, which I agree with.  They want the parties to come together to form a large majority to pass major legislation, together, which I agree with.  They want to form a huge voting bloc of power enough to break the deadlock of Washington politics, which I agree with.

And then they want to take those badly needed structural repairs to our political machine in order to immediately ram through a massive austerity package and cause economic suffering of an overwhelming majority of American citizens for the benefit of enriching people with eight or more digits in their personal net worth numbers, which I kinda have a major friggin' problem with.

So yes, you No Labels guys can take your Right Ideas Used For Impressive Amounts Of Evil and go have a seat during the State Of The Union addy.  Thanks.

Manchin On The Hill

To my surprise, WV Dem Sen. Joe Manchin is doing a lot more than just playing ball on universal background checks for firearms sales:  he's co-sponsoring the bill in the Senate.

Sens. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) are collaborating on legislation to expand requirements on background checks to purchase firearms.

"We are working together to find an amenable background-check proposal," a Kirk staffer told The Hill on Thursday afternoon.

Proposals to increase background checks are widely popular with the public, according to polls, and are the least controversial of a number of gun-control measures proposed by President Obama. But gun-control legislation has gotten off to a rocky start because of resistance from Republicans and some red-state Democrats.

Kirk and Manchin, close friends who represent states that normally elect members from their opposite parties, could be crucial to any gun-control debate. Kirk has long backed an assault-weapons ban and is one of the most pro-gun control Republican senators. Manchin, a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association, has also emerged as a key player in the current gun-control debate. He's called for a wide-ranging discussion on how to cut down on gun violence, including new firearm restrictions, and on Thursday morning came out in favor of increased background checks.

Could we actually be seeing reasonable, actual, bipartisan legislation as intended?  Don't get your hopes up.  Republicans will still look to block the measure in the Senate, and I doubt any gun control measures will again, even get a vote in the House.  It's a definite way for Kirk and Manchin to get bipartisan cred without anything actually having to happen.

We'll see where this bill goes.

Last Call

If there is going to be a fiscal cliff deal before January 1, it's quite possible that the late Sen. Daniel Inouye's seat will have to be filled in order to have someone on hand to help break a guaranteed GOP filibuster. 

In his last wishes, Sen. Inouye expressed his desire to have current Rep. Colleen Hanabusa replace him by sending a personal deathbed letter to Gov. Neil Abercrombie, but that's apparently causing something of a stir in Sensible Centrist circles, who are apparently arguing that Abercrombie should fight back against Hawaii's old guard political machine and appoint somebody else.

Political analyst and University of Hawaii political science professor emeritus Neal Milner said Inouye knew exactly what he was doing when sent the letter to Abercrombie. It was meant to put the governor on the spot.

“What’s pretty elegant about this is how straightforward this is,” Milner said. “It’s about as straightforward as it can be and it’s about as dramatic as it can be. It certainly does raise the ante.”

It had been assumed that Hanabusa would be Inouye’s successor when the senator eventually left office, and over the years it appeared the senator had taken a liking to the congresswoman, according to political experts. The two even had lunch just before he entered the hospital.

Milner said it’s also likely that when the senator looked around at his options that he saw a “thin bench” of replacement candidates.

“If you put yourself in his position and looked around to see who was qualified to take his position there’s not much to look at,” Milner said. “The pool gets narrowed very quickly if you look at it through the eyes of the senator. He’s not interested in pulling someone out of nowhere and giving him or her the seat. That just wouldn’t register with him.”

It's also political maneuvering, something Inouye knew a lot about.

Whoever Abercrombie does appoint will most likely serve out until the end of their days in the seat, given the state's politics. 

Abercrombie is said by several close to him to prefer other candidates over Hanabusa. They include Blake Oshiro, his deputy chief of staff, Brian Schatz, his lieutenant governor — even Ed Case, with whom he served with in Congress. Case, 60, announced Sunday he was applying for the job.

Age may also be a consideration. Oshiro and Schatz are in their early 40s, meaning they could theoretically serve longer in the Senate and build up greater seniority. Hanabusa is 61 and Hirono is 65.

Harry Reid wants Abercrombie to make up his mind pretty quickly, regardless.  We'll see what happens.  This flap seems to be all about getting somebody other than Hanabusa in the office, and again a lot of that favors moderate Ed Case.  Frankly, I've got no problem with Hanabusa in the office, and I'd take Ed Case in Kentucky in a microsecond, but I think this is meddling with the Hawaii Democratic Party, plain and simple.

I think Abercrombie will go with Hanabusa.

Last Call

What?  You didn’t think you were going to get through the DNC without unsolicited advice for President Obama from The Centrist Concern Troll Twins in the Wall Street Journal, did you?  Oh, you silly dears.  Roll the tape, Claude!

What voters are looking for—and particularly what swing voters, independents, and disillusioned Obama voters are looking for—is a new direction for America based on fiscal discipline, a balanced budget, and economic growth and leadership. 

More than anyone else in this race, Paul Ryan has spoken of the need for fiscal discipline and economic growth—two themes that have been largely absent from the Obama-Biden campaign—which explains a large part of the Ryan-inspired Romney bump.

That bump is like 0.75 points, but who cares.  Dorka Schoen and Give ‘Em Caddell need not your facts.  Centrist Daleks will Tri-ang-u-laaaaate!  And hey, Paul Ryan is a Centrist too!  You should listen to his Very Serious Centrist Positions on tesseract marathon running and the joys of children conceived through coercion and force.

For his part, President Obama needs to change direction—immediately and decisively. His campaign strategy has been to divide the country on the basis of class, demonize the wealthy, call for higher taxes and unceasingly attack Mr. Romney. Yet poll after poll has shown that while voters embrace the idea of higher taxes on the rich, it does not translate into votes. 

In 2008, Mr. Obama promised to help unite America in a “post-partisan” Washington. But the 2012 campaign has been one of the most negative in memory. What he needs to do is acknowledge that he’s made mistakes and that he wants to pursue a substantive approach to governance. Put another way, he needs to bring back “hope and change” and abandon his divide-and-conquer strategy.

Should he do this before or after he announces he’s not running in November because it’s really tragically unfair of him to have broken such a historic streak of white men running the place, you know.  It’s the right thing to do.

It has been said before, but only because it’s so true: Mr. Obama should follow the lead of President Bill Clinton, who emphasized in both his terms in office the need for unity and consensus to achieve fiscal restraint. Inviting Mr. Clinton to speak at the convention Wednesday night is a sure sign that the Obama campaign understands the need to move to the center, if not in substance then in style. 

Yet nothing would appeal to independents and swing voters more than if the president were to embrace the findings of the 2010 Simpson-Bowles deficit-reduction commission and make it clear that he too has a plan to revitalize the U.S. economy, reduce the deficit, reform entitlements and spur economic growth through a fairer and leaner tax system.

So President Obama has the unique opportunity to be the adult in the room by handing control of the country over to the nice folks who aren’t all that sure about evolution because the open-minded scientist must question the theory, but they believe tax cuts magically create additional tax revenues because rich people will spring forth from the nothingness like Orks from Warhammer 40K (and reach a collective critical mass of entrepreneurs, a WAAAAGH! of small business owners who will run around franchising at everything, paint their businesses red because they’ll create jobs faster, and leave nothing but career opportunities in their wake of mass construction.  Sure).

Yeah, I’ll buy that.  President Obama should totally listen to these guys.  (Also, Centrist Daleks versus Small Business Orks.  Somebody make that happen.)

If You Walk Down The Middle Of The Road...

...eventually you get run over.  That is the reality of our political system:  it no longer rewards compromise, cooperation, or comity.  It rewards fighting for your base.

David Brooks bemoans this of Paul Ryan:

Ryan’s fantasy happens to be the No. 1 political fantasy in America today, which has inebriated both parties. It is the fantasy that the other party will not exist. It is the fantasy that you are about to win a 1932-style victory that will render your opponents powerless. 

Every single speech in this election campaign is based on this fantasy. There hasn’t been a speech this year that grapples with the real world — that we live in a highly polarized, evenly divided nation and the next president is going to have to try to pass laws in that context. 

It’s obvious why candidates talk about the glorious programs they’ll create if elected. It fires up crowds and defines values. But we shouldn’t forget that it’s almost entirely make-believe. 

In the real world, there are almost never ultimate victories, and it is almost never the case (even if you control the White House and Congress) that you get to do what you want. 

While Andrew Sullivan bemoans this of Barack Obama.

The paradigm can still be shifted. Obama can say he didn't embrace the original commission because the necessary majority in the Congressional committee couldn't be rustled up. He can openly and rightly blame Ryan for torpedoing the sanest, most practical debt reduction we have on the table. He can tell his own party that they have to tackle entitlement spending and using the Mediscare tactic is not worthy of the constructive change Obama promised four years ago. He can even say he regretted not going out on a limb - but he thought a grand bargain could be reached through negotiation instead. GOP fanaticism stopped it.

The reason - incredibly - that Obama has not done this is a dislike of the big defense cuts and queasiness over muddying the Medicare issue against Romney. This shouldn't matter. What matters is that Obama should declare his first priority on being re-elected would be a grand bargain on the lines of Bowles-Simpson. Force Romney to say no. Isolate him on his tax extremism and defense spending boom. Show you're more serious on entitlement reform than Ryan's ideological fantasies - because you're backing the most credible, practical option available. Re-capture that sliver of the middle that wants to know what Obama wants to do in his second term. 

Both men argue their candidate can win by embracing the horrible Simpson-Bowles plan that would put the burden of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security squarely on the shoulders of the poorest Americans through sharply regressive taxes and draconian social program cuts.  Ryan won't raise taxes, he'd rather cut them on the rich.  The middle-class would lose.  Obama won't make those cuts, but he'll raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans.  The wealthy would lose.

But Simpson-Bowles is "everybody loses, enjoy your austerity instead".  The real losers would in fact be the poorest Americans, socked with gas and VAT taxes on food and clothing so they "pay their share" while the middle class would get that, plus losing all the tax deductions they're used to.  The net result would be the wealthy would indeed get that tax cut and come out ahead, although not as much as they would under Ryan.  But the rest of the country would get reamed.

Funny how that's the only way out for our Village Centrists.

Pusillanimous Populist Pugilism

Steve M. has a real point here:  the latest focus group from the Carville camp shows that working class white men really are winnable by the President...at least the ones truly worried about the economy and not FOX News.  What it also shows is that deficits don't matter to voters nearly as much as not kicking the blocks out from under them right now.

It is elites who are creating a conventional wisdom that an incumbent president must run on his economic performance – and therefore must convince voters that things are moving in the right direction.  They are wrong, and that will fail.  The voters are very sophisticated about the character of the economy; they know who is mainly responsible for what went wrong and they are hungry to hear the President talk about the future.  They know we are in a new normal where life is a struggle – and convincing them that things are good enough for those who have found jobs is a fool’s errand.  They want to know the plans for making things better in a serious way – not just focused on finishing up the work of the recovery.

We are losing these voters on the economy, but holding on because Romney is very vulnerable.  They do not trust him because of who he is for and because he’s out of touch with ordinary people; he is vulnerable on the Ryan budget and its impact on people; he is vulnerable on the choices over taxes.  But in the current context, it produces a fairly diminished embrace of Obama and the Democrats, the lesser of two evils, without much feeling of hope.

The message here is that the Centrist Dalek refrain of "cut the deficit!" is the last thing that voters want to hear.

These participants—especially the non-college-educated men who have been affected personally or know someone who has—are very sensitive to cuts in Medicaid, to disability, and food stamps.  People rely on these programs–and the protection of Social Security and Medicare.  They just can’t fathom billions of dollars in cuts to these programs.  Anger increases when the proposal is juxtaposed with cutting taxes for millionaires.  In addition, the college-educated men seemed to recognize that when these programs are cut at the bottom, the whole economy is affected because people are unable to get ahead, spend money, and get the economy going again.

Carville may be a meathead, but he's right here.  President Obama can engage on this and he can win on this.  It's the Republicans who say Obama can't win on hope.

Meet Pete, Austerian Elite

If you've not heard the name of Wall Street tycoon Peter J. Peterson, you've seen the ads his foundation has put out.  If America has a king of the Austerians, it's this guy.

Peter Peterson, a Wall Street billionaire who has been calling for cuts to Social Security and other government programs for years, is hosting a "fiscal summit" Tuesday that brings together Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, former President Bill Clinton, Rep. Paul Ryan, House Speaker John Boehner, Tom Brokaw and Politico's John Harris, among a host of other elites who will gather at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium.

Now, how can a guy like Peterson have that much pull with Clinton, Paul Ryan, Orange Julius, and the Village press?  Real simple:  He's spent close to a half a billion dollars in 4 years in order to convince Democrats, Republicans and the Village that it's time to end government programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

According to a review of tax documents from 2007 through 2011, Peterson has personally contributed at least $458 million to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation to cast Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and government spending as in a state of crisis, in desperate need of dramatic cuts. Peterson's millions have done next to nothing to change public opinion: In survey after survey, Americans reject the idea of cutting Social Security and Medicare. A recent national tour organized by AmericaSpeaks and largely funded by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation was met by audiences who rebuffed his proposals.

But Peterson has been able to drive a major shift in elite consensus about government spending, with talk of "grand bargains" that would slash entitlements, cut corporate tax rates and end personal tax breaks, such as the mortgage deduction, that benefit the middle class.  

That's right, much like the Koch Brothers, Peterson is putting his fortune where his ideas are, and those ideas are that the majority of the tax burden in this country has to fall on the middle class while the rich are spared.  The idea of our "spending crisis" and "debt crisis" in the Village press comes directly from Pete Peterson hosting summits like this and spending hundreds of millions of dollars of his own personal fortune in order to talk America's lawmakers into throwing the middle class and the poor under the bus.

Peterson is in this debate for the long haul: He's even working on children. Earlier this month, Columbia University's Teachers College released a new curriculum about the federal budget and fiscal policy that will be distributed free to every high school in the country. "Understanding Fiscal Responsibility" was introduced at a ceremony featuring Peter Orszag, a former Obama administration official who left to join Citigroup. The Peterson Foundation has already given $1.6 million of a promised $2.4 million for the curriculum.

The first two lessons are titled "Social Security and the National Debt" and "Medicare and the National Debt." The curriculum wants teens to ask, "How high a value do we place on guaranteeing quality health care to the elderly?"

Another effort to persuade America's youth about the shakiness of the entitlement programs is a joint venture between the Peterson Foundation and mtvU, the campus-based network created by MTV Networks, called Indebted. Peterson has already shelled out nearly $2 million to fund this effort to convince college students that Social Security won't be there for them, so therefore it should be slashed now -- a self-fulfilling policy prescription if ever there was one. 

So yeah, stuff like this makes Peterson one of the most dangerous guys in America, a billionaire trying to buy trillions in government spending cuts so that they can be given directly to the the richest Americans in tax cuts and loopholes.  Pete Peterson is literally quite rich enough to buy our government.

And he's been doing it for the last five years.  Think about that.  And now with Citizens United, he can buy the Congress he needs to make his twisted fantasies of millions of Americans losing their safety nets to make him billions come true.

Ain't America great?


 

Compromise Is You Do Exactly What I Want And I Approve Of It

Compromise?  Indiana Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock has your gorram compromise right the hell here.

Richard Mourdock, fresh off of defeating Dick Lugar in the Indiana Senate primary, hit the ground running with a quote everyone is talking about this morning:

MOURDOCK: I certainly think bipartisanship ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view. … If we [win the House, Senate, and White House], bipartisanship means they have to come our way, and if we’re successful in getting the numbers, we’ll work towards that.

That’s the Republican nominee on MSNBC.

"If we win, screw the Democrats.  If the Democrats win, they must have cheated and the people really demand the Republican point of view.  What's the problem here, anyway?"

There are no moderate Republicans.  There are no compromise artists left.  They will all be gone by 2014 or 2016 at the latest, and the remainder will all be exactly like Richard Mourdock, who will tell you straight out that mandates only matter if the Republicans have one, and if you don't agree with them, you don't matter, you're not American, and you should really stop thinking you have any place in the political process.

This is bipartisanship.  But both sides are guilty of this, right?

This Week In Village Idiocy

Tom "The Mustache Of Understanding" Friedman shows once again how maddeningly clueless he really is.  As usual, he starts out identifying the problem clearly:

DOES America need an Arab Spring? That was the question on my mind when I called Frank Fukuyama, the Stanford professor and author of “The End of History and the Last Man.” Fukuyama has been working on a two-volume opus called “The Origins of Political Order,” and I could detect from his recent writings that his research was leading him to ask a very radical question about America’s political order today, namely: has American gone from a democracy to a “vetocracy” — from a system designed to prevent anyone in government from amassing too much power to a system in which no one can aggregate enough power to make any important decisions at all? 

“There is a crisis of authority, and we’re not prepared to think about it in these terms,” said Fukuyama. “When Americans think about the problem of government, it is always about constraining the government and limiting its scope.” That dates back to our founding political culture. The rule of law, regular democratic rotations in power and human rights protections were all put in place to create obstacles to overbearing, overly centralized government. “But we forget,” Fukuyama added, “that government was also created to act and make decisions.”

Now.  There's a distinct difference between the two political parties on this central issue of the role of the federal government.  The Democrats believe there should actually be a federal government, the Republicans don't.  It's that simple, but where does Friedman go with this?  You got it, right into the Hell Of Both Parties Do It.

For starters, we’ve added more checks and balances to make decision-making even more difficult — such as senatorial holds now being used to block any appointments by the executive branch or the Senate filibuster rule, effectively requiring a 60-vote majority to pass any major piece of legislation, rather than 51 votes. Also, our political divisions have become more venomous than ever. As Russ Feingold, the former Democratic senator, once remarked to me: At the rate that polarization is proceeding, partisans will soon be demanding that consumer products reflect their politics: “We’re going to have Republican and Democrat toothpaste.” 

In addition, the Internet, the blogosphere and C-Span’s coverage of the workings of the House and Senate have made every lawmaker more transparent — making back-room deals by lawmakers less possible and public posturing the 24/7 norm. And, finally, the huge expansion of the federal government, and the increasing importance of money in politics, have hugely expanded the number of special-interest lobbies and their ability to influence and clog decision-making. 

Indeed, America today increasingly looks like the society that the political scientist Mancur Olson wrote about in his 1982 classic “The Rise and Decline of Nations.” He warned that when a country amasses too many highly focused special-interest lobbies — which have an inherent advantage over the broad majority, which is fixated on the well-being of the country as a whole — they can, like a multilimbed octopus, choke the life out of a political system, unless the majority truly mobilizes against them. 

Again, everything he describes here describes one party over the last three years especially, but he blames both again and again.  We'll be trapped in this hell, Mustache says, until we get rid of the artificial blockages.

We'll actually be trapped in this hell until we get rid of the lobbyists and the GOP.

Somehow I Don't Trust These Guys

The latest round of Americans Elect nonsense is at CNN.com this weekend as a technocrat appeals to the iGeneration about voting, the Sensible Centrist Austerity way.  Now with technology!

This digital revolution is more than just innovating for convenience. Something deeper and more significant is at stake: the integrity of our consent, the underpinning of our government's legitimacy and authority.

"Consent of the governed" only exists if it can be expressed, and that is an increasingly difficult task. When we vote for president, we don't simply vote for the best candidate; we vote for the best candidate who has previously been ratified by one of two political parties.

This creates a philosophical "blackout" space in which no candidate, because of his or her beliefs, will ever be elected president (see Jon Huntsman). This blackout space should concern all of us, because of its appeal to the general electorate, who will never get that option. What's worse is that this space is growing with each cycle. It's not clear that either Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton would get through their primaries today.

That's why the Americans Elect innovation is so exciting -- because it relieves us of anachronistic structures that harm our political system. It's the iTunes of politics.

Status quo apologists and those who benefit from partisan gridlock might pooh-pooh this idea, particularly if the candidate doesn't get to Ross Perot levels in November. But these critics miss the point. Americans Elect is not just about running for the White House in 2012. It's about electing our leaders in a new way so that the governed are truly consenting.

Right, because removing the political party middlemen from the traditional process of the rich buying our elections makes it that much better solely on the purity factor, except for the fact that they are lying about doing it.  Primaries are for suckers, now engage in our primary!

That particular cargo shipload of manure up there was written by Nathan Daschle.  You know, son of former Dem Senate Leader Tom Daschle.  Just a reminder that it's not just wealthy, obnoxiously centrist Republicans flogging the Throw Your Vote Away movement here in an attempt to make the "reasonable" case for crushing austerity amid tax cuts for the one percent because it's our duty, being good serfs, to pay for our lords.  It's feel-good political euthanasia, designed solely to put down resistance to the status quo of "We're your betters, now here's what you need to do for us."  To help you remain tranquil in the face of almost certain electoral death, smooth jazz will be deployed in 3...2...1...

Daniel Larison nails these guys to the wall:

There is a powerful case to be made that a two-party system that operates within the very narrow confines of bipartisan consensus on many major policies is harmful to the country. Americans Elect isn’t making that case or anything like it. What the Americans Elect project represents is an effort to produce the distilled essence of everything that is wrong with the current two-party system and then pretend that it is an exciting, new alternative.

S'truth right there, folks.  By comparison, Paul Ryan is at least somewhat honest about his plans to Soylent Green us all.  And let's remember that there's nothing Centrist about the GOP.

Last Call

The most interesting part of William Saletan's NY Times book review of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt's dissection of the partisan brain, The Righteous Mind, is that Saletan's snide construction that today's liberals prove Haidt's theories is in and of itself proof of Haidt's theories.

Let's follow this meta rabbit hole, shall we?

To the question many people ask about politics — Why doesn’t the other side listen to reason? — Haidt replies: We were never designed to listen to reason. When you ask people moral questions, time their responses and scan their brains, their answers and brain activation patterns indicate that they reach conclusions quickly and produce reasons later only to justify what they’ve decided. The funniest and most painful illustrations are Haidt’s transcripts of interviews about bizarre scenarios. Is it wrong to have sex with a dead chicken? How about with your sister? Is it O.K. to defecate in a urinal? If your dog dies, why not eat it? Under interrogation, most subjects in psychology experiments agree these things are wrong. But none can explain why. 

The problem isn’t that people don’t reason. They do reason. But their arguments aim to support their conclusions, not yours. Reason doesn’t work like a judge or teacher, impartially weighing evidence or guiding us to wisdom. It works more like a lawyer or press secretary, justifying our acts and judgments to others. Haidt shows, for example, how subjects relentlessly marshal arguments for the incest taboo, no matter how thoroughly an interrogator demolishes these arguments. 

To explain this persistence, Haidt invokes an evolutionary hypothesis: We compete for social status, and the key advantage in this struggle is the ability to influence others. Reason, in this view, evolved to help us spin, not to help us learn. So if you want to change people’s minds, Haidt concludes, don’t appeal to their reason. Appeal to reason’s boss: the underlying moral intuitions whose conclusions reason defends. 

And since conservatives put a whole lot of stock in those underlying moral institutions and control them, it's why they keep winning.  Home field advantage.  Or as Tommy Lee Jones put it best in Men In Black:

A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.

Saletan continues with what that means for the mighty backlash against liberalism in 2012:

One of these interests is moral capital — norms, prac­tices and institutions, like religion and family values, that facilitate cooperation by constraining individualism. Toward this end, Haidt applauds the left for regulating corporate greed. But he worries that in other ways, liberals dissolve moral capital too recklessly. Welfare programs that substitute public aid for spousal and parental support undermine the ecology of the family. Education policies that let students sue teachers erode classroom authority. Multicultural education weakens the cultural glue of assimilation. Haidt agrees that old ways must sometimes be re-examined and changed. He just wants liberals to proceed with caution and protect the social pillars sustained by tradition. 

Another aspect of human nature that conservatives understand better than liberals, according to Haidt, is parochial altruism, the inclination to care more about members of your group — particularly those who have made sacrifices for it —than about outsiders. Saving Darfur, submitting to the United Nations and paying taxes to educate children in another state may be noble, but they aren’t natural. What’s natural is giving to your church, helping your P.T.A. and rallying together as Americans against a foreign threat. 

How far should liberals go toward incorporating these principles? Haidt says the shift has to be more than symbolic, but he doesn’t lay out a specific policy agenda. Instead, he highlights broad areas of culture and politics — family and assimilation, for example — on which liberals should consider compromise. He urges conservatives to entertain liberal ideas in the same way. The purpose of such compromises isn’t just to win elections. It’s to make society and government fit human nature. 

The hardest part, Haidt finds, is getting liberals to open their minds. Anecdotally, he reports that when he talks about authority, loyalty and sanctity, many people in the audience spurn these ideas as the seeds of racism, sexism and homophobia. And in a survey of 2,000 Americans, Haidt found that self-described liberals, especially those who called themselves “very liberal,” were worse at predicting the moral judgments of moderates and conservatives than moderates and conservatives were at predicting the moral judgments of liberals. Liberals don’t understand conservative values. And they can’t recognize this failing, because they’re so convinced of their rationality, open-mindedness and enlightenment. 

In other words, the point of liberalism is to try to move cultural and moral institutions forward, just not in a way that makes meaningful changes to cultural and moral institutions.  It's almost like change is hard or something, and being stuck in a social rut is a lot easier.  Go figure.  But Saletan lets us know that Haidt is convinced that being stuck in these moral institutions is freedom and open-minded inclusiveness.  Hey, conservatives have been doing that number for years now.

So yes, if you're going to toss logic and reason and argue that changing social institutions is the only way liberals can win, then yes, it's going to be hard.  Only took 232 years to get a black President, after all.  But if human nature is so awful, why should the goal be to make society and government fit it, rather than try to improve human nature through society?

If anything, trying to change society and government to fit human nature is exactly what the problem is with the Republican Party.  It doesn't mean liberals should as a rule give up.

Haidt's theories have some merit, but even Saletan sees where it falls apart:

But to whom is Haidt directing his advice? If intuitions are unreflective, and if reason is self-serving, then what part of us does he expect to regulate and orchestrate these faculties? This is the unspoken tension in Haidt’s book. As a scientist, he takes a passive, empirical view of human nature. He describes us as we have been, expecting no more. Based on evolution, he argues, universal love is implausible: “Parochial love . . . amplified by similarity” and a “sense of shared fate . . . may be the most we can accomplish.” But as an author and advocate, Haidt speaks to us rationally and universally, as though we’re capable of something greater. He seems unable to help himself, as though it’s in his nature to call on our capacity for reason and our sense of common humanity — and in our nature to understand it. 

Haidt is reasonably trying to explain to us how conservatives are unreasonable, so that liberals should just compromise.  It's certainly different to see someone take this approach from a scientific perspective, but it's just the same Sensible Centrist Village nonsense we've been fed since the Clinton era:  you guys will at least compromise, and the conservatives will never do so, so just give in already, will you?

No thanks.

Pulling One Snowe-ver On Us

Jon Chait argues this morning that Sen. Olympia Snowe's surprise announcement that she's quitting the 2012 race is really nothing the Dems should be cheering, because all indications are that the real reason behind her bowing out is that Americans Elect and their Sensible Centrist shenanigans are afoot, judging from her outro statement.

This sounds exactly like the kind of rhetoric emanating from Americans Elect, the third-party group that believes that both parties should put aside partisanship and come together to enact an ever-so-slightly more conservative version of Barack Obama's agenda. Moderate retiring senators often deliver lofty, vacuous paeans to bipartisanship on their way to a lucrative lobbying career. But Snowe's statement seems unusually specific ("unique opportunities to build support for that change from outside the United States Senate") about her intent to do something.

I suspect it may not be coincidental that David Boren, the former Democratic senator from Oklahoma and oil industry lickspittle, came out for Americans Elect today. The group is set up so that its presidential and vice-presidential candidates need to come from opposing parties. The process is set up to, at least putatively, allow the voters to choose the ticket. But Americans Elect and its well-heeled funders have maintained tight control over the proceedings to ensure their envisioned ticket pairing establishmentarian insiders can prevail over candidates like , say, Ron Paul who might be able to actually win an open vote.

Snowe and Boren would make for the kind of ticket Americans Elect is looking for. Is that the plan?

Americans Elect is definitely designed to take votes away from one candidate and give a "less than 50% popular vote but 270+ electoral vote" situation, which will faithfully be interpreted by the Village as a "you don't have a mandate so you'd better listen to us" win.  That would be more effective if used against Barack Obama, but I'm not entirely convinced that the Americans Elect ticket would hurt only the President, especially given Romney as the GOP nominee.

On the other hand if you believe that there's going to be a brokered convention leading to a crackpot wingnut non-Romney nominee however, Americans Elect is exactly the vehicle that could give that nominee the win in November.

On the gripping hand, Romney keeps winning the GOP primary voters whose motivation is solely defeating Barack Obama.  It's also very possible that the anti-Obama vote will line up behind Romney, and with Americans Elect in the mix, it could be enough to put Mitt in the White House even with an otherwise depressed GOP base.

And yes, Snowe would have won re-election easily, unlike Arlen Specter or Evan F'ckin Bayh or Joe Lieberman.  She bailed for a reason, and Cohn's argument as to why makes sense.

Greek Fire, Part 52

And this time, Greek Fire is literal.

Lawmakers in Greece voted early Monday to approve another round of austerity measures, sought in return for a new eurozone bailout of the debt-stricken country.


As lawmakers debated, police turned tear gas and stun grenades on protesters outside Greece's Parliament. Several buildings, including a bank, cafes and a movie theater, in Athens were set ablaze.

Twenty-five protesters and 40 officers were injured in the clashes, which occurred throughout the city, police said. Authorities detained at least 30 people.

The package, which includes deep cuts in government spending, wages and pensions, will help pave the way for eurozone finance ministers to sign off on the new €130 billion ($172.6 billion) bailout deal. It passed Parliament in a 199-74 vote.

Greece needs the funds in order to meet €14.5 billion in debt repayments due next month.

The riots in Athens are ugly.  Not as bad as the ones that gripped Britain last year, but then again if they tried in Britain what they are doing in Greece right now, you'd better believe people would be in the streets.

Sadly, when they try that austerity crap here, it's called Very Serious Centrist Economic Policy.

Wyden Load Sign Ahead

By enlisting Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon to go along with the latest iteration of his plan to privatize Medicare, Paul Ryan has the Centrist Daleks in an absolute tizzy today.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) is teaming up with Paul Ryan, the House’s top budget guy and the author of the GOP’s controversial budget which proposes phasing out traditional Medicare and replacing it with a private plan. The two announced via The Washington Post that they’ll be teaming up on a different version of that Medicare plan — one that closely mimics plans offered by leading GOP presidential candidates Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, and a proposal authored by former Sen. Pete Domenici and former Clinton budget director Alice Rivlin, which loomed large in the Super Committee’s failed negotiations.
 
The move makes Wyden the first elected Democrat to endorse creating a premium-support system to compete with traditional fee-for-service Medicare, and for Ryan represents a de facto admission that his own plan was too radical to ever gain bipartisan support. That’s bound to affect how congressional and presidential candidates approach the issue, which will feature prominently in next year’s elections. But it raises a number of other questions, both about the merits of the policy and of the political calculus behind it.

Two things here:  one, I don't want to hear how President Obama is the one "putting Medicare on the block" anymore with Wyden buying into this cockamamie scheme.  Backing a Paul Ryan plan -- any Paul Ryan plan -- is what the end of Medicare as we know it looks like.

Secondly, the plan is basically turning Medicare into the PPACA.

The policy itself allows insurers to compete with traditional Medicare turning Medicare essentially into a public option on a private insurance exchange. Wyden and Ryan would give patients subsidies that could be applied to either private insurance or fee for service Medicare. It has features of both a “defined contribution” and “defined benefit” program. All plans including Medicare would have to meet a high benefit standard. But if seniors were to choose plans that exceeded a benchmark cost they would be required to pay the difference out of pocket. If Medicare itself were to come in below the benchmark, it would function no differently than Medicare does right now. If Medicare were to exceed the benchmark, though, seniors would have to pay more out of pocket to enroll in it. 

And here's where we get into all kinds of ugly problems:  the odds of a for-profit insurer being able to provide something as good as or better than Medicare's benefit standard for less money is, well, a complete and utter fantasy.  That's going to leave Medicare as the only option to buy into for a huge percentage of seniors.

And it's a moot point anyway:  no Baby Boomer will ever have their Medicare or Social Security benefits touched.  My generation on the other hand, well, let's just say we're going to be told to accept this new plan or something like it or else.  There's not going to be any cost savings for the next twenty years or so out of the Medicare end of things, which means the only serious question is "What will await my generation when I'm supposedly ready to retire in 35 years?"

Most of us are convinced it will be "nothing".  The way the Tea Party is going, government itself will be outlawed by then and we'll all live in anarcho-capitalist city states like 21st century Spartans. 

Pit-kicking will be on Thursdays.