Tag: obama

I still support our President.

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Jacob S. Hacker is the Stanley B. Resor Professor of Political Science at Yale University.

From the New Republic:”…Since the first campaign for publicly guaranteed health insurance in the early twentieth century, opportunities for serious health reform have come only rarely and fleetingly. If this opportunity passes, it will be very long before the chance arrives again. Many Americans will be gravely hurt by the delay. The most progressive president of my generation–the generation that came of age in the anti-government shadow of Ronald Reagan–will be handed a crippling loss. The party he leads will be branded as unable to govern….

The public option was always a means to an end: real competition for insurers, an alternative for consumers to existing private plans that does not deny needed care or shift risks onto the vulnerable, the ability to provide affordable coverage over time. I thought it was the best means within our political grasp. It lay just beyond that grasp. Yet its demise–in this round–does not diminish the immediate necessity of those larger aims. And even without the public option, the bill that Congress passes and the President signs could move us substantially toward those goals.

As weak as it is in numerous areas, the Senate bill contains three vital reforms.

First, it creates a new framework, the “exchange,” through which people who lack secure workplace coverage can obtain the same kind of group health insurance that workers in large companies take for granted.  Second, it makes available hundreds of billions in federal help to allow people to buy coverage through the exchanges and through an expanded Medicaid program. Third, it places new regulations on private insurers that, if properly enforced, will reduce insurers’ ability to discriminate against the sick and to undermine the health security of Americans.

These are signal achievements, and they all would have been politically unthinkable just a few years ago….So a bill must pass. Yet it must be a better bill that passes. And  it must be understood by the President, the Congress and every American as only a step–an important but ultimately incomplete step–toward the vital goal that the campaign for the public option embodied: good affordable health care for every American.”

(Emphasis mine)

see: http://www.tnr.com/blog/the-treatment/why-i-still-believe-bill

We can learn from Judah the Maccabee

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Aaron Zelinski, HuffPost:

“Tonight is the first night of Chanukah. Modern celebrants (including Senator Hatch) focus on the miracle of the Menorah, which tradition tells us stayed lit for eight days on a single day’s oil. However, Chanukah is also the political story of a few determined Maccabees leading an uprising against the much stronger Seleucid Empire.

Though the events Chanukah commemorates took place over 2,000 years ago, the historical story of the Maccabees provides useful lessons for our modern era. From the Seleucids, we see how not to fight a guerrilla insurgency. From the Maccabees, we learn how to rally a people and a nation.

Here are Chanukah’s five geopolitical lessons:

1) Corrupt governments propped up by outsiders are inherently unstable. …Massive military force cannot prop up a deeply corrupt regime indefinitely. If we want to end the insurgency, we must clean up the corruption.”

2) Insurgencies feed off charismatic leaders…In the modern fight against terrorism, the United States should not create figures like Judah, charismatic leaders for the other side to rally around. President George W. Bush did exactly the opposite: He promoted the cult of Bin Laden after September 11th, focusing the world’s attention on one man who was wanted “Dead or Alive.” Such pronouncements give guerilla insurgencies a guiding symbol.

3) Rebuilding symbolic structures matters… The literal meaning of Chanukah is “rededication.”

4) Israel was an independent state when much of Europe was untamed wilderness. The modern State of Israel is not a post-Holocaust reparation to the Jewish people, but rather the restoration of an ancient independent state of the Jewish people.

5) The world marches on…For us, even as we confront difficult decisions in Afghanistan and Iraq, we must not lose sight of the broader political ebbs and flows of the world.”


Fox ‘News’? NOT!

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From AlterNet: “Eight Reasons Fox is Not a news Organization.

Even before Barack Obama was elected to the presidency, Rupert Murdoch had declared war on him via the personalities of Fox News Channel, a subsidiary of Murdoch’s media conglomerate, News Corp.

Since Obama’s election, the cable channel’s hosts and paid analysts have launched a full frontal assault on the president, smearing his nominees, calling him a racist and suggesting that his administration was trying to persuade disabled veterans to off themselves.

Now the fearmongers at Fox are crying foul since the president and his aides declared Fox not to be a news organization. Earlier this month, White House Communications Director Anita Dunn called Fox an “arm” of the Republican Party. Obama went even further, suggesting this week that Fox “is operating basically as a talk-radio format,” and we know what that means: A format in which the most provocative opinions dominate the discourse and facts are optional.

Yet that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Setting Fox apart from the two other cable news networks is its ownership by a corporation whose CEO and major shareholder is a mogul with an ideological agenda — who operates his News Channel as a propaganda machine for his anti-government cause.

He even has his own community organizer, a fellow named Glenn Beck, who can turn out a mob on a dime at your local town-hall meeting. His big ratings-getter, Bill O’Reilly, is a professional bully, handsomely paid to physically intimidate progressive commentators — on video — and to vilify others.

Murdoch’s agenda is simple: He’s against regulation of any kind. Famous for smashing the unions at his U.K. properties, Murdoch also has a pronounced disdain for labor.

In essence, Murdoch’s agenda tracks closely with that of the current GOP, that far-right rump of a party that once claimed to embrace a range of views under the canvas of a big tent. So he uses the Fox airwaves to raise funds for Republican political action committees…

Why Fox News is not a news operation:

1. Glenn Beck, the community organizer — No other news operation in memory has ever hired its own community organizer, at least not one tasked with the mission of organizing paranoid people to march through the streets of the nation’s capital with signs depicting the president of the United States as a mass murderer.

Through his 9-12 Project, which he promotes on his Fox News Channel program, that’s exactly what Beck did, organizing with other right-wing organizations the 9-12/Tea Party march on Washington — AlterNet reported marchers sported signs comparing Obama to Hitler and Stalin.

Beck was also instrumental in turning out angry mobs to disrupt this summer’s town hall meetings, where members of Congress attempted to discuss health care reform with their constituents. After participants in a scuffle at a Tampa, Fla., town hall named their local 9-12 Project site as their inspiration, the national 9-12 Project site stopped accepting comments.

Despite the loss of some 80 advertisers from The Glenn Beck Show, thanks to a campaign by Color of Change, which targeted the show’s sponsors after Beck claimed the president had “a deep-seated hatred for white people and white culture,” Beck remains on the air at Fox. Could that be because he’s more valuable to his boss-daddy as an organizer than as a conduit for advertising dollars?..

2. Fox’s alliance with the corporate-funded astroturf group Americans for Prosperity — We’ve scratched our heads trying to come up with an analogous relationship between a cable news channel and a corporate-funded group that organizes fearful people to disrupt public meetings, but we came up empty.

Americans For Prosperity, a group that received funding from Koch Industries, an oil-and-energy company and major polluter, also organized this summer’s town hall disrupters. Although they kicked off their rabble-rousing campaign by galvanizing opposition to health care reform, their real target appears to be energy reform, especially the cap-and-trade provision that will make dirty industries pay a pretty penny to pollute.

3. On-air fundraising for Republican PACs — Fox News personalities encourage viewers to contribute money to, and visit the Web sites of, specific Republican-affiliated political action committees. We can’t find a single instance of either CNN or MSNBC doing anything of the kind for Democratic causes.

Oh, sure, Keith Olbermann raised money for free health clinics for the uninsured, but it’s our understanding that there are uninsured Republicans. And Rachel Maddow raised money for jerseys for an Iraqi baseball team (who learned the game from American troops), but last time we looked, baseball was the Great American Bipartisan Pastime.

4. Bill O’Reilly, stalker of those whose opinions he doesn’t like — We exhausted all avenues of research trying to find a news show host at another cable news channel who pays his producer to stalk people whose opinions he or she doesn’t like. Came up with bupkus. Nor could we find one who locked the media out of remarks she or he was delivering in acceptance of an award from a nonprofit group.

At the annual conference of the religious-right political group, Family Research Council Action, O’Reilly received an award for his vilification of Dr. George Tiller. Tiller was an abortion provider who was gunned down in his church by a man who obviously took to heart references by O’Reilly and others, “Tiller the baby-killer.”

5. Sunday talk-show host who promotes Republican falsehoods — Once upon a time, Chris Wallace, son of the aforementioned Mike, was a real journalist, just like his dad. Then he joined the Fox team, as host of Fox News Sunday, which airs on the Fox’s broadcast network.

6. Fox News anchors, show hosts and pundits parrot GOP press releases, or just make up stuff — Promoting the notion that their organization is on some sort of Nixonian White House “enemies list,” Fox News personalities first trotted out the “enemies list” theme in August, when they suggested that the White House, asking for Americans to send the administration any unsolicited e-mails they received that promoted false information about health care reform legislation, was actually compiling an “enemies list.”

7. Fox News hosts urge viewers to join a particular political group — During the run-up to the big right-wing 9-12/Tea Party march on Washington, Fox News entities and personalities repeatedly flogged viewers to join the Tea Party Express, a bus tour of anti-Obama activists.

Advising viewers on “how you can join” the tour, Fox and Friends hosted Tea Party Express organizer Mark Williams, vice chairman of the Our Country Deserves Better PAC, who is a part of the birther conspiracy movement of people who contend that Obama wasn’t born in America. At the Fox Nation Web site, viewers were treated to a promotional piece that asked, “Will You Join the Tea Party Express?” We don’t see the other cable news outlets soliciting members for, say, MoveOn.org.

8. Glenn Beck, deranged inventor of paranoid conspiracies — Here’s a Beck exclusive you won’t hear on any of the other cable news networks: OnStar, the GPS/emergency-alert system available in General Motors cars, is being indirectly funded by the auto-industry bailout so the government can spy on you.

To be fair, Beck said this on his radio program, which is not a Fox News product, which is also where he compared the situation of Fox News to that of Jews during the Holocaust (with other news outlets acting as silent bystanders). In the same segment, he cast Obama as a “brutal dictator.”

But statements such as these seem to serve no detriment to his Fox News career. (Compare this to MSNBC, where David Shuster got sidelined for a month during the height of campaign season for a bad choice of words regarding Chelsea Clinton stumping for her mom.) And there’s no shortage of outrageous and paranoid material to choose from from Beck’s television show, much of it reported, blogged or cataloged by AlterNet.”

see:http://www.alternet.org/story/143456/8_reasons_fox_is_not_a_news_organization?page=entire

Have heart- approval rising for Health Insurance Reform!

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The ship is turning!

Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Trevor Tompson, Associated Press

WASHINGTON — The fever has broken. The patient is out of intensive care. But if you’re President Barack Obama, you can’t stop pacing the waiting room. Health care overhaul is still in guarded condition.

The latest Associated Press-GfK poll has found that opposition to Obama’s health care remake dropped dramatically in just a matter of weeks. Still, Americans remain divided over complex legislation that Democrats are advancing in Congress.

The public is split 40-40 on supporting or opposing the health care legislation, the poll found. An even split is welcome news for Democrats, a sharp improvement from September, when 49 percent of Americans said they opposed the congressional proposals and just 34 percent supported them.

Anger about health care boiled over during August. Lawmakers returning home for town hall meetings faced outcries that the government was trying to take over the system, ushering in higher costs, lower quality — even rationing and euthanasia.

“It’s very significant that there’s an upturn in support for the plans because after August there was a sense that the whole effort was beginning to decline and would not come back in terms of public support,” said Robert Blendon, a Harvard professor who tracks public opinion on health care.

“Even with this,” added Blendon, “the country is still divided over whether or not moving ahead is the right thing to do.”

Behind the shift seems to be a growing determination among Democrats that going forward would be better. Meanwhile, political independents don’t appear as alarmed about the congressional proposals as they were just a few weeks ago. Still, opponents remain more passionate in their convictions than do supporters.

In a significant change, opposition among older Americans dropped 16 percentage points. Seniors have been concerned that Congress would stick them with the bill by cutting Medicare to pay for covering the uninsured. Among the most reliable voters, they were much more wary of the changes than the public as a whole. The gap has narrowed.

The poll found that 68 percent of Democrats support the congressional plans, up from 57 percent in early September. Opposition among independents plunged from 51 percent to 36 percent. However, only 29 percent of independents currently support the plans in Congress.

Among seniors, opposition fell from 59 percent in September to 43 percent now. Almost four in 10, 38 percent, now support it, compared with 31 percent in September…Republicans remain solidly against the congressional health care plans, with four out of five opposed.

Americans overwhelmingly say it’s important that health care legislation have the support of both parties.

Blendon credits Obama’s speech to Congress in early September and his blitz of media interviews and appearances since then for moving public opinion toward the positive column. What some have criticized as presidential hyperactivity, many Americans took as a sign that the president was taking ownership of the issue, Blendon said.

Before his prime-time speech to Congress, 52 percent disapproved of Obama’s handling of health care. Now the public is split, with 48 percent approving and 47 percent disapproving.

“Getting more directly involved in the outcome is what people expect a president to be doing,” said Blendon.

There’s still deep skepticism that the government can fix the health care system to expand coverage and tamp down rising costs…

The congressional bills would require all Americans to get health insurance, either through an employer, through a government program or on their own. Tax credits would be offered for many of those who buy their own coverage but failure to comply could result in a fine.

“I don’t think that the government should supply health care to the people,” said Newcomb.

The AP-GfK poll was conducted Oct. 1-5, based on a nationally representative sample of 1,003 adults age 18 or older, contacted by telephone on land lines and cell phones. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points for results based on the entire sample.”

(Emphasis mine)

see:http://www.cleveland.com/healthfit/index.ssf/2009/10/opposition_to_obamas_health_re.html

Progress on our public option

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Don’t despair, the public option is still there…

Robert Creamer writes in HuffPost: “In a surprising vote Tuesday, ten Democrats voted to add a public option to the most conservative of the five health insurance reform bills working their way through Congress. That’s just two votes short of passage.

This robust support for the public option — in what most observers consider the most conservative committee in the Senate — signals a sea change in Congressional opinion toward the public option. The odds are now very high that some form of public health insurance option will be included on the final bill when it emerges from a House-Senate Conference Committee later this fall and is ultimately passed by Congress.  In the midst of the right-wing, town hall onslaught last August, the pundits…

The three bills that have passed House Committees, and the Senate Health Committee bill, all contain a public option. And increasingly it appears that the strongest form of public option will come out of the House.

A Robert Woods Johnson Report indicates that over the last ten years wages have gone up 29%, health insurance rates have gone up 120% and the profits of the private health insurance industry have gone up 428%. No wonder they don’t want competition.

So why the resurgent Congressional support for a strong public option? There are three reasons:

1) First and foremost, voters’ support for a public health insurance option is as strong as ever. All of the right-wing talk about a “government takeover” has not fooled voters who are forced every day to deal with the stranglehold that the private insurance industry has on their health care.

Last weekend’s New York Times poll showed that 65% of all voters support giving Americans the choice of a public option and only 26% oppose it.

More importantly, the public option is also popular in swing Congressional districts. The firm of Anzeloni Liszt just released the results of a poll it conducted in 91 Blue Dog, Rural Caucus and Frontline districts. The poll found that 54% of the voters in these battleground districts support the choice of a public option.

And the poll also found that the voters in these districts want reform and want it this year. The polling report says:

Overall, 58% of voters believe the health care system is in need of major reform or a complete overhaul, and almost 59% are concerned that Congress will not take action on health care reform this year. The risks of inaction to Democrats in swing districts increases if voters perceive opposition stems from ties to the insurance industry, as 74% are concerned that the health insurance industry will have too much influence over reform.

Those kinds of polling results get the attention of Members of Congress.

2) Members of Congress have begun to realize that they will have to live with the consequences of what they pass for years to come. And what the voters will care about in the future will not be slogans or ideology. Once the program is passed, the voters will care most about one thing: affordability.”

see: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-creamer/growing-momentum-for-publ_b_303415.html?view=print

How will the growing number of ‘no religion’ voters impact politics?

How will the boom in Americans claiming “no religion”—25 percent of the country will fit into that category in 20 years, according to a Trinity College survey out today—alter national politics?

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Dan Gilgoff, US News:”How will the boom in Americans claiming “no religion”—25 percent of the country will fit into that category in 20 years, according to a Trinity College survey out today—alter national politics?

I see four big ways:

1. Secular voters will become an increasingly important component of the Democratic base.

In the 1990s, so-called religious nones comprised 6 percent of the Democratic Party and 6 percent of theGOP. Today, there are two and a half times as many nones—34 million Americans, or 15 percent of the country—and they account for 16 percent of Democrats, compared with just 8 percent of Republicans. Three in four of them voted for Barack Obama in the last election. Every indication is that these political trends will continue.

Even as the Democratic Party has seriously stepped up its faith outreach, then, the fact that the fastest-growing religious group in the United States is those with no religious affiliation—and that members of that group are leaning dramatically in the Democratic direction—will make the Dems pay closer attention to them.

2. American politics will become more polarized.

As more Americans leave religion, the ones left in the pews are those most committed to their faith. In a nation where church attendance is one of the best predictors of voting behavior—the more often you attend, the more likely you are to vote Republican—this polarization of religious life will spill over into the political arena, setting off more culture-war battles.

3. Republicans will have to choose between becoming a more overtly religious party and reaching out more seriously to the growing secular middle.

Secular voters once constituted an important part of the GOP coalition, but fewer than 10 percent of religious nones under age 30 are Republican. “Republican nones are getting older and continue to show an affinity to the GOP,” says Juhen Navarro-Rivera, a Trinity College research fellow who helped compile the new report. “But they’re not making new Republican nones.”

Navarro-Rivera is still running the numbers, but his hunch is that the new generation of religious nones has been scared away from the Republican Party because of its ties to the Christian right. Does the GOP continue to embrace that movement or move more to the middle? Call it the Sarah Palin option versus the John McCain option. (Though opposition to healthcare reform, it should be noted, is helping bring the two camps together.)

4. If secular voters become more aggressively antireligious, the Democrats’ newfound faithiness faces big challenges.

If religious nones congeal into a coherent voting bloc with their own issues, Democrats will have to pay more attention to their political agenda. Most religious nones aren’t hostile to religion; few are atheists. “They’re aligning with the Democrats because the party has lots of religious people, but they’re not pushy about it,” says Navarro-Rivera.

At the same time, religious nones aren’t crazy about a huge role for religion in government and politics. And as their numbers grow, some expect them to turn more overtly antireligious. Will they continue to tolerate a party leader who invites Rick Warren to his inauguration and who refuses to decide whether religious groups can hire based on religion with government funds? Doubtful.

see: http://www.usnews.com/blogs/god-and-country/2009/09/22/4-ways-the-no-religion-boom-will-alter-american-politics.html

Obama (And America) won August!

The worst thing that could have happened to Democrats — and the one thing that needed to happen in order to kill health reform — did not happen

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Why? How? When?

Marc Ambinder, the Atlantic: “…the White House was taken aback by the ferocity of the health care debate, the media was confused, activists were alarmed, and Republican enthusiasm shot up. But a funny thing happened on the way to the morgue…

The worst thing that could have happened to Democrats — and the one thing that needed to happen in order to kill health reform — did not happen. The Democrats held together. Moderates were not intimidated. Don’t confuse their constituent meeting pander with changed minds.

Did more than a handful — if any — Democrats who were leaning towards voting “yes” on health care before August change their minds during August? Probably not. Another irony: the public option debate helped. It helped by offering itself up as a sacrifice. The new Maginot line, drawn by advocates of a single payer system, turned out to be a bit of a feint because it was never the sine qua non of reform.  Initially, given the GOP success (aided by progressive elites who essentially agreed) in framing the option as essential to health care, its putative failure and demagoguery seemed to be a significant blow to the White House. But — and here is the key point — it became something for the Blue Dogs to “oppose” and thus satisfy their constituents’ concerns about reform in general…the White House would rather have the bill they’re probably going to get now and worry about Netroot anxiety later. From the start, the least convincing argument made to the White House about strategy starts with the premise that compromising with recalcitrant Republicans is inherently bad.
After August, under the worst case scenario, there is majority support for the following major changes to health care: real (albeit limited) competition in the insurance industry (even absent a public plan). A cap on what a person pays for catastrophic illnesses. An end to insurance company recision policies. Guaranteed issue. A basic benefit package. Significant subsidies to help people who earn as much as $64,000 a year pay for health insurance. Better cost and coverage incentives. And lots more. Say what you will about these reforms — maybe they’re incremental — but they’re a foundation for center-left policy in the future.”
My anxiety is reduced – thanks!

see: http://politics.theatlantic.com/2009/09/why_obama_won_august_really.php

Obama’s Progressive Progress

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Jacob Heilbrunn: writing in the HuffPost: “The verdict on President Obama is already in and it’s not a pretty one: he’s bungled health care. The economy is going nowhere. The Republicans are making a comeback….

By the end of this year, Obama will be in a very strong position. Congress will pass a health care bill — not a perfect one, to put it mildly, but it will be the first step toward creating comprehensive coverage. Obama will be able to claim it as a big win, as will congressional Democrats.

Then there’s the economy. Unemployment will remain high, but Obama will be able to point to a revival, not just in the stock market, but also in jobs creation. With a reviving economy, the Democrats will be in an impregnable position by the 2010 midterm elections. The Republicans who are counting on an off-year for the Democrats should think again.

What about foreign policy? Obama will have greatly curtailed the American presence in Iraq. Within a year, it will also become clear whether his approach to Afghanistan — upping the number of troops — is working. In addition, Pakistan seems to be stabilizing. Both would count as big wins for Obama.

Despite all the caterwauling about Obama, then, he remains firmly on course to become one of the most important Democratic presidents in history. It’s always tempting to demand more, to see betrayal of the cause. It’s what conservatives have been doing for decades, as they declared that even George W. Bush wasn’t conservative enough.  There is no reason to panic about Obama. His sobriety and sound judgment are his greatest assets. So far, the most significant thing about Obama isn’t that he hasn’t accomplished more, but how successful his presidency has already been.”

see: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jacob-heilbrunn/stop-panikcing-about-obam_b_267140.html

The Public Option is still alive!

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For those feeling down about the public option, Robert Creamer, in TruthOut:

“Hasty headlines to the contrary, it is very likely that a strong public option will be part of a final health insurance reform bill when it finally passes Congress this fall. There are three reasons:

1). A Public Option is the most elegant and politically viable solution to a major practical problem.

Three basic models have been adopted by Western industrial nations to provide universal health care to their populations.

The government can directly employ doctors and hospitals to provide service

That is the system they have in Britain where they spend 40% less per person on health care than in the U.S. and get pretty good reviews from their citizens. It’s the same system that we use to provide health care to veterans through the Veterans Administration.

The government can provide heath insurance for everyone as it does in Canada – or as we do in the U.S. with Medicare. Medical practices and hospitals are in private hands, but the health insurance fund is managed by the government. Again, that system seems to work quite well and also does a good job at controlling costs.

The third approach is to require individuals and businesses to purchase insurance and leave it to private insurance companies to provide that coverage. The problem with this approach is that requires some mechanism to control costs. That is particularly true in the United States where insurance companies are one of only two industries (Major League Baseball being the other) that are excepted from the anti-trust laws that are aimed at insuring competitive markets. In fact, most major health insurance markets are dominated by two or three companies so there is no real competition – particularly with respect to price.

Once everyone is required to buy insurance, the companies can have a field day raising prices and profits using the government to guarantee they are paid – either through subsidies or the imposition of fines. You can see why, from an insurance company perspective, this would be a great deal.

But from the point of view of the taxpayers – and the insurance ratepayers – it would be a disaster. It would be like giving the insurance companies a license to take your money – with no regulation – all enforced by government edict.

This, of course, is basically what happened with the prescription drug benefit – Medicare Part D. But there is a big political difference. A huge percentage of the money used to pay the insurance and drug companies in Medicare Part D comes from the taxpayers (or deficits). Most of the money that will go to pay for health insurance in a new system will come from ratepayers – individuals and companies who will feel the sting of rate increases directly…There are only two real practical solutions to this problem. On the one hand, you could set up a public health insurance option that does not have the same incentives to increase profit or CEO salaries and would compete against the private insurance companies and keep them honest. That is what President Obama has proposed. Or you could regulate health insurance rates…

That’s why the President and his top advisors support a public option.

2). The politics of Congress and the White House. There are a couple of political givens:

• Both the White House and Democratic Leadership understand that they must pass health insurance reform. Defeat is simply not an option. Both the Carter and Clinton administrations foundered because they proposed major policy initiatives and failed to achieve them…

3). Inclusion of a public option is necessary to assure a mobilizable base to counterbalance a highly-motivated right wing and make passage of any health insurance reform possible. The public option has become an iconic symbol for Progressives. Without it, many would lose the passion that sends them to town meetings, phone banks and demonstrations. Without a public option to fuel this passion, the forces for reform would likely be overwhelmed by the shock troops of the right wing.

When you put all of these factors together, it is very likely that later this year President Obama will sign a health insurance reform bill into law that will indeed include a strong public option – not simply because the President clearly supports it, but also because of the practical policy and political considerations that make it critically necessary to success.

THANK YOU BOB!

Italics Mine.

see: http://www.truthout.org/081809R?print

Health Insurance Reform Status

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Nate Silvert, 538:”The beltway consesnsus seems to be that the Democrats’ prospects of passing meaningful health insurance reform this year have become much slimmer, if they haven’t already entirely evaporated. Like Ezra Klein, however, I’m not really sure what everyone was expecting. There is a lot of money — and political capital — at stake here. Were opponents of health care reform going to roll over and play dead? Has anything proceeded that differently from how we might have expected it to proceed ahead of time?

Over at Intrade, the bettors currently assign a 43 percent chance that a health care bill with a public option will be passed by the end of the year. There is no market, unfortunately, on the prospects for passage of a bill without a public option (something which could still happen under any number of scenarios). What’s interesting about this contract, though, is that it’s not particularly higher or lower than it has ever been. Sure, health care has had a bit of a rough go of things of late, but perhaps not a particularly rougher go than we should have been “pricing in” to our expectations:  To hear the defeatism and paranoia on some liberal blogs this afternoon, the “timeout” that Harry Reid and the Senate called on health care today — they won’t vote on the measure before the August recess — is just about the stupidest thing since Chris Webber, pictured at left, called a phantom timeout in the 1993 finals, costing his team a technical foul and the Michigan Wolverines the national championship.

It isn’t. It is, first of all, inevitable, and second of all, about as likely to do the Democrats some good as some harm, although that may depend on certain exogenous factors that are relatively outside of their control.

Ten days ago, I wrote a piece entitled, “Why Democrats Have No Time to Waste“, the thesis of which was basically that Obama’s approval ratings were liable to decline over the near-to-medium term and so Democrats had better get busy on health care while they could.

But a couple of things have happened since then.

Firstly, the media environment has become very treacherous. There’s been all sorts of piling on, for instance, about last night’s satisfactory press conference — this is almost certainly the most sustained stretch of bad coverage for Obama since back when Jeremiah Wright became a household name after the Ohio primary.

I don’t think the media has a liberal bias or a conservative bias so much as it has a bias toward overreacting to short-term trends and a tendency toward groupthink. The fact is that there have been some pretty decent signals on health care. Yes, it has stalled in some committees, but it has advanced in others; yes, the Mayo Clinic expressed their skepticism but also the AMA — surprisingly — endorsed it; yes, the CBO’s Doug Elmendorf got walked into a somewhat deceptive and undoubtedly damaging line of questioning about the measure’s capacities on cost control, but also, the CBO’s actual cost estimates have generally been lower than expected and also favorable to particular Democratic priorities like the public option. This all seems pretty par for the course, even if you wouldn’t know it from reading Politico or Jake Tapper, who giddily report on each new poll telling us the exact same thing as though there’s some sort of actual news value there.

The media likes to talk about “momentum“. It usually talks about the momentum in the present tense — as in, “health care has no momentum”. But almost always, those observations are formulated based on events of the past and sloppily extrapolated to imply events of the future, often to embarrassing effect: see also, New Hampshire, the 15-day infatuation with Sarah Palin, the Straight Talk express being left for dead somewhere in the summer of 2007, the overreaction to “Bittergate” and the whole lot, and the naive assumption that Obama’s high-60’s approval ratings represented a paradigm shift and not a honeymoon period that new Presidents almost always experience.

I also believe that the media can, in the short term, amplify and sometimes even create waves of momentum. But almost always only in the short term. And that is reason #1 why it’s not such a bad thing that the Democrats are getting a breather on health care. They’re at, what I believe, may be something of a ‘trough’ or ‘bottom’ as far as this media-induced momentum goes. By some point in August, the media will at least have tired of the present storyline and may in fact be looking for excuses to declare a shift in momentum and report that some relatively ordinary moment is in fact the “game changer” that the Democrats needed. This is not to say that the real, underlying momentum on health care has especially good — and the Democrats’ selling of the measure certianly hasn’t been. But it hasn’t been especially poor either . As I’ve said before, the health care process has played out just about how an intelligent observer might have expected it to beforehand.

The second reason why the delay might be OK for the Democrats is because of the economy. Nobody much seems to have noticed, but the Dow is now over 9,000 and at its highest point of the Obama presidency; the S&P is nearing 1,000 and the NASDAQ has gained almost 55 percent since its bottom and has moved upward on 12 consecutive trading days. There are ample reasons to be skeptical about the rally — it isn’t supported by strong volumes, and it’s almost entirely the result of surprisingly solid corporate earnings numbers rather than the sorts of figures that Main Street cares about. But, there are two big dates to watch out for. On July 31, an advance estimate of second quarter GDP growth will be released, and on August 7th, we’ll get the monthly report on the unemployment situation. If either of those reports reflect the optimism elicited by the corporate earnings numbers — in this context, a job loss number under ~250,000 or a 2Q GDP number somewhere close to zero — there will be a lot of quite optimistic chatter about the end of the recession which might not penetrate to Main Street, but which will at least have some reverberations on Capitol Hill.

A few hours ago, I asked our readers what they expected Barack Obama’s Gallup approval rating to be on August 31st, when the Senate’s recess will be just about over and the health care sausage-making will begin again. The average guess was 55 percent, which is exactly where it is today (a new low for Obama, we should mention). I should caution that our readers lean probably 2:1 or 3:1 liberal, and so there might be some optimism bias in this unscientific sample. But that strikes me as about the right assessment. Obama’s numbers don’t have much more room to fall before they hit the 53 percent threshold that actually elected him last November. And I don’t think they’re liable to go too much below that mark unless something actually and tangibly bad happens — a bad unemployment report (or a sharp reversal of the market rally), the actual collapse of health care, some bona fide major gaffe, etc. Any of those things, indeed, could happen. But just as likely Obama will benefit from some good economic numbers or simply some reversion to the mean as the media firing squad picks up and plays golf for a month.

The Democrats could find themselves in a better position after the August recess or they could find themselves in a worse one — how’s that for a bold prediction! But liberals’ doom-and-gloom, conservatives’ glee, and the media’s nearsighted reporting are all equally uncalled for.”

see: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/07/rumors-of-demise-of-obamacare-have-been.html