Month: September 2009

Cirincione

by tristero

He rarely gets on the Tube, and chances are you haven’t heard of him, but Joe Cirincione is one of the finest liberal voices out there. I’ve been reading him since sometime in late ’02/early ’03 when he was authoring studies for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the folks who got WMD and the outcome of the Bush/Iraq war exactly right, who proposed a viable alternative to invasion to contain Saddam (coercive inspections) and who were completely ignored or dismissed, even by highly respected liberal bloggers.

In this post for Huffington, he praises Maddow’s assertive discussions with former Bush officials of the cooked WMD intelligence. Towards the end, he concludes:

Rachel Maddow, to her credit, refuses to let these officials off the hook. She says on her show September 2, that we cannot “look back at the rational for the Iraq war now and say, “well, none of those reasons for the war turned out to be true but what does that matter?”

She is right. Policy matters. Bad policy leads to seriously bad consequences.

Why are we still threatened by Al Qaeda? Because we diverted troops from capturing Osama bin Ladin to overthrowing Saddam Hussein.

Why are we trapped in a losing war in Afghanistan? Because we decided invading Iraq was more important than stabilizing Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Why do we have a skyrocketing deficit? In part, because we will spend $1 trillion on the war in Iraq.

Why are we threatened by nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea? Because we shunned effective means to shut down those programs when they were a fraction of their current size in the vain hope that we could overthrow those regimes as we had Iraq’s.

Exactly, succinctly right.

Fairness For Me But Not For Thee

by digby

No need for balance:

A new Fairness Doctrine, which could be imposed either by legislation or through FCC rule changes, wouldn’t achieve more balance. Rather, it would obliterate political talk radio. If a station ran a popular conservative show — say, Hugh Hewitt’s — it would face pressure to run a liberal alternative, even though almost all left-leaning efforts to date have failed to capture either listeners or advertising revenue.

[…]

[The contention that there should be “balance” in the broadcast spectrum] is absurd in our era of satellite radio, cable television and myriad websites.

Ueah, that’s so true. Anyone can just go to a web site or watch their favorite cable network or pick up a newspaper to get the other side of any argument. the fact that a few huge conservative corporations control media doesn’t mean there’s any imbalance in political dialog on radio or TV. That’s just crazy talk. There’s siompluy no need for anyone to worry that people don’t have access to all points of view and there’s no need for any concerted effort to provide “balance.”

Well, unless a Democratic president is trying to pass progressive legislation:

House Republican Leader John Boehner is asking the broadcast networks to make time for a GOP response to President Obama’s Joint Session speech Wednesday night.

I don’t see anything wrong with providing the Republicans a platform to make their own case on health care after Obama’s speech. But I do find it rather inconsistent that they expect “balance” on these sorts of speeches while holding that any attempt to break up the monopoly of conservative speech on radio and TV to be unnecessary because there are so many diverse outlets for political discussion. Why should the broadcast networks feel any responsibility to provide “balance” in this case when the conservative message on health care is beamed out to millions and millions of people 24/7 without any balance on the other side? Just asking.

.

We Have A Jobs Problem

by dday

The jobs report for August showed another 216,000 losses. That’s far less than previous months, in fact the smallest in a year, but still not very good. The unemployment rate jumped up to 9.7%, and it’ll basically be a matter of time before we’re at 10%.

The AFL-CIO released a stunning report about young workers, showing their struggles in the past decade, where they have less jobs, worse jobs and no security.

Some of the report’s key findings include:

31 percent of young workers report being uninsured, up from 24 percent 10 years ago, and 79 percent of the uninsured say they don’t have coverage because they can’t afford it or their employer does not offer it.
Strikingly, one in three young workers are currently living at home with their parents.
Only 31 percent say they make enough money to cover their bills and put some money aside—22 percentage points fewer than in 1999—while 24 percent cannot even pay their monthly bills.
A third cannot pay their bills and seven in 10 do not have enough saved to cover two months of living expenses.
37 percent have put off education or professional development because they can’t afford it.
When asked who is most responsible for the country’s economic woes, close to 50 percent of young workers place the blame on Wall Street and banks or corporate CEOs. And young workers say greed by corporations and CEOs is the factor most to blame for in the current financial downturn.
By a 22-point margin, young workers favor expanding public investment over reducing the budget deficit. Young workers rank conservative economic approaches such as reducing taxes, government spending and regulation on business among the five lowest of 16 long-term priorities for Congress and the president.
Thirty-five percent say they voted for the first time in 2008, and nearly three-quarters now keep tabs on government and public affairs, even when there’s not an election going on.
The majority of young workers and nearly 70 percent of first-time voters are confident that Obama will take the country in the right direction.

At the low end, workers are often paid under the minimum wage and cheated out of overtime pay.

This is just not sustainable. A thin layer of the super-rich exploiting a permanent underclass, with many out of work or unable to gain independence, will not result in a workable society. Social unrest is a more likely outcome. That’s basically driving much of the craziness out there.

You can talk about demoralized bases and broken promises, but at some level the problems the President and the Democrats are having come down to fundamentals. With the jobs picture as it is, it was always going to be a hard sell to tell people who are losing their job that the stimulus and the President prevented things from getting worse. The problem lay in the lack of job creation in the stimulus itself, rather than job saving. Those who follow these things closely may understand that the stimulus really saved us from a deep recession if not a depression. But we also know it didn’t go far enough to truly bring about recovery. Those who are busy with their own lives and don’t pay attention to the day-to-day debate only see that they and their colleagues can’t find work. The White House may eventually get some credit for economic recovery, but only if it includes jobs. A second stimulus simply won’t happen now, and we’re basically at the mercy of large firms and when they decide to hire at this point, which isn’t likely in the near term if they can increase productivity without bringing anyone back.

The Democratic Party has stopped caring about this, in many respects. They are becoming reliant on the professional class instead of the working class, and it leads to policy that doesn’t help workers. The shrinking unionized sector, and the inability to create policy to reverse that trend, will come back to hurt the so-called “party of the people.”

Labor’s lack of clout to pass EFCA in even the most overwhelmingly Democratic — and progressive — Congress in decades is an indication that we already have a successful progressive movement in which labor plays only a modest role. Union support was less crucial to Obama’s nomination and his general election victory than it was to any previous Democratic president, which is why he’s not obligated to twist arms to pass the bill. Many Democratic victories in 2008 were in states and districts where labor is weakest, like Virginia and North Carolina. And I know dozens of engaged liberals who have no idea why EFCA matters.

The new progressive coalition follows the lines of the “emerging Democratic majority” that Ruy Teixeira and John Judis predicted in their 2002 book of that name: minority, professional, and younger voters, with help from a large gender gap. This is a coalition that can win without a majority of white working-class voters, whether union members or not. (Those who were union members were always solid Democrats.) In many ways, that’s good because it helps to bring an end to the culture wars that limited the party’s ability to speak clearly about matters of fundamental rights and justice.

But it’s also dangerous. A political coalition that doesn’t need Joe the — fake — Plumber (John McCain’s mascot of the white working class) can also afford to ignore the real Joes, Josés, and Josephines of the working middle class, the ones who earn $16 an hour, not $250,000 a year. It can afford to be unconcerned about the collapse of manufacturing jobs, casually reassuring us that more education is the answer to all economic woes. A party of professionals and young voters risks becoming a party that overlooks the core economic crisis–not the recession but the 40-year crisis–that is wiping out the American dream for millions of workers and communities that are never going to become meccas for foodies and Web designers.

I think the lack of connection between Democrats and the working class reflects itself in all these jobless recoveries we’re seeing. Policy just isn’t made for the mass of people, but of, by and for the rich. And those rich people know that one party serves them much better. If Democrats don’t start creating policies that get regular people jobs, they will be doomed by fundamentals as surely as the Republicans were in 2006 and 2008.

.

Stoopid

by digby

Monica Novotny: John, what about this controversy over opposition to Obama’s speech to school children?

John Harwood: I’ve got to tell you Monica, I’ve been watching politics for a long time and this one is really over the top. What it shows you is there are a lot of cynical people who try to fan controversy and let’s face it, in a country of 300 million peopl there are a lot of stupid people too because if you believe that it’s somehow unhealthy for kids for the president to say “work hard and stay in school,” you’re stupid!

Novotny: (laughter)

Harwood: I’m worried for some of those kids of those parents who are upset. I’m not sure those parents are smart enough to raise those kids.

I heard these parents are taking their kids out of school to keep them from hearing it. It sounds pretty stupid to me.

.

Keep Hope Alive

by digby

I understand why many in Congress and the White House believe that it doesn’t matter if liberals get disillusioned and disappointed: they assume we have nowhere else to go. And I get that they believe (erroneously) that it’s always a positive to punch a hippie — Cokie says the Real Americans want them to. But there is a problem for Democrats ahead if they continue down this path.

Politics requires appeals to emotion. It just does. There are very few people who sit down and read the campaign platforms of the candidates and the parties, set up a spread sheet and analyze the issues pro and con. And frankly, they don’t need to. Humans have highly developed systems to evaluate other humans based on a whole lot of sophisticated, subliminal criteria. A good politician’s appeal is partly based upon policy, to be sure, but largely people vote for them on tribal identification and personal attraction.

It’s complicated but when you boil it down, in American politics, you have two political tribes — the fear and resentment tribe and the inspiration and progress tribe. I think it’s obvious which are which — it’s no accident that the last two Democratic presidents both ran with “hope” as their slogans. People respond to the parties based largely on their own temperament and sense of belonging in that particular tribe. (I had a relative who told me that she didn’t really think too much about politics, she just felt that if she voted for a Democrat it would feel like she was a cat having her fur brushed backwards.)

Obama brought out a huge number of people, particularly idealistic young people and African Americans, because of idealism. Although we political junkies were all impressed with his “cool” and his brains, that wasn’t the main thing most people found attractive about him. What they saw was that he was the inspirational, living proof of progress and it was a powerful symbol and message.

All successful presidents find ways to keep their own tribe happy while appropriating enough of the other sides’ heuristic identifiers to appeal to a few who would normally go with other tribe. But they have to make sure that their own followers maintain their identification with them as well. So Democrats have to keep hope alive. Obama is flirting with failure on that count and I think it’s dangerous. His success, and the party’s future, depends upon maintaining an enthusiastic base of young and idealistic people long enough for their attraction to Obama to gel into long term political commitment. Because Democrats depend upon inspiration and optimism, it’s imperative that they deliver progress. Cynicism, anger and fear either demobilize the base or send some of them to a third party or even the other side. It’s a danger that Democrats don’t seem ever see and I don’t understand why, especially after what happened in 2000. We’ve seen that it can be fatal.

Hopefully, Obama will understand this before he does real damage to his coalition and loses the support of the most promising members of the Democratic Party. The PCCC is sending him the message that he needs to pay attention to this now:

Many progressives have expressed frustration with President Obama’s refusal to commit to a government-run health insurance plan. If the Progressive Change Campaign Committee has their way, the president will soon hear from them directly.

The PCCC is fundraising to put out an ad featuring former Obama campaign workers, volunteers, voters, donors and staffers telling the president to insist on a public option in health care reform.

The group is circulating a petition among Obama supporters who are disappointed by recent news out of the White House.

Here’s the email from the PCCC:

We didn’t plan to email you again today. But yesterday, news broke that President Obama will make a big speech to Congress next Wednesday on health care — an issue we know you care about. And according to news reports, “although House leaders have said their members will demand the inclusion of a public insurance option, Obama has no plans to insist on it himself.” * In response, we got a truly depressing email from Christian S. in Texas: “Your recent health care ads are great, they hit home. But Obama has decided to drop the public option and for breaking his campaign promise I am dropping out of political activism for the time being.” This fight is absolutely not over, but Christian’s feelings are real. If Obama doesn’t stand firm on the public option, millions of people will lose hope. So today, we’re launching a petition to President Obama signed by those who volunteered, staffed, voted for, or donated to Obama’s campaign in 2008, asking him to please stand firm on the public option. If that’s you, can you sign this petition today? Click here. Then, please think hard about others you know who worked for change last year — and forward them this email. The petition says: “We worked so hard for real change. President Obama, please demand a strong public health insurance option in your speech to Congress. Letting the insurance companies win would not be change we can believe in.” We’ll make sure the White House gets our message. In addition to delivering the signatures and personal notes from the petition page, we’re planning an ad featuring the voices of those who sign. Obama’s speech “is still being debated in the West Wing.” * That means there’s still time — we have one week to persuade Obama to do the right thing. Can you sign this petition to President Obama today? Click here. Then, please forward this to others. Again, we have until Wednesday, September 9. Thanks for being a bold progressive.

* links fixed
.

Fighting Blitzkrieg With A Wet Noodle

by tristero

UPDATED

The Obama-is–gonna-turn-our-kids-commie story that both Digby and I have blogged about was front page above the fold in the NY Times this morning.. Here’s the lede:

President Obama’s plan to deliver a speech to public school students on Tuesday has set off a revolt among conservative parents, who have accused the president of trying to indoctrinate their children with socialist ideas and are asking school officials to excuse the children from listening.

Here’s grafs 4 and 5 (graf 4 begins on page one):

“The thing that concerned me most about it was it seemed like a direct channel from the president of the United States into the classroom, to my child,” said Brett Curtiss, an engineer from Pearland, Tex., who said he would keep his three children home.

In short, the entire front page exposure of the story in the NY Times was a repetition of totally screwy far-right paranoia. And it’s inaccurate: nothing on the front page of the Times gives the reader the slightest clue that this paranoia was fomented by Republican party leaders in Florida and the usual GOP enablers in rightwing media.

Now, there are obvious, dignified, and appropriate ways to respond to this trash. For example:

“Highly-paid Republican operatives are behind the ludicrous accusation that the President of the United States intends to indoctrinate America’s children in socialism when he talks to them on Tuesday about the importance of working hard in school. In their ridiculous efforts to bamboozle Americans, Republicans once again are perpetuating the dangerously divisive and unserious politics of the last Republican presidency, a presidency marked by a nearly perfect storm of disasters – from an unnecessary war in Iraq to a financial meltdown to the Republican administration’s thoroughly incompetent response to Hurricane Katrina. “

How does the Obama administration actually respond? Here you it is, in Graf 7 – deep inside the paper, of course, where few will actually read it:

“This isn’t a policy speech,” said Sandra Abrevaya, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education. “It’s designed to encourage kids to stay in school. The choice on whether to show the speech to students is entirely in the hands of each school. This is absolutely voluntary.”

O…kay…

For the sake of argument only, let’s agree that both Obama’s personality and his political instincts to personally avoid this kind of cynical posturing are both admirable and politically astute. Let’s also concede – even if we do so with tremendous reluctance and reservation – that when his administration also refuses to treat Republican dead-enders with the contempt they so obviously deserve, they are behaving the way the executive branch should behave if our discourse were healthy. Even granting all of that, which is granting one helluva lot:

Where the fuck are the Democrats?

Democrats should be all over this. Republicans have just lobbed the most perfect softball their way – telling kids to study in school is a message Republicans don’t want schoolchildren to hear??? Democrats should let them have it with both barrels. And the counter-attack should come at exactly the same level – state leadership, if not higher.

If you’re serious about 21st Century American politics, you don’t let the insane charge that the President of the United States is trying to corrupt the Youth of America go unanswered when it’s being made at the highest levels of the Republican party. Why?

Because if you refuse to fight back, it creates the distinct impression that there’s some truth to it. These aren’t merely deranged talkshow hosts accusing the President of fomenting subversion; these are leaders of a major political party. They cannot be ignored. So again:

Where the fuck are the Democrats?

[UPDATE: BarbinMD of Daily Kos finds out that Republicans practice the indoctrination of schoolchildren they preach against:

RESIDENT REAGAN: Well, thank you very much. Please, be seated. You know, this is a real treat for me, having you here, and to have in a little while the chance to answer some of your questions. Let me also offer a special hello to those of you who are watching on C-Span, or the Instructional Television Network. Thank you for inviting us into your home or your school today …

And that is a vision that goes beyond economics and politics, it’s also a moral vision, grounded in the reverence and faith of those who believe that with God’s help, they could create a free and democratic nation …

Because you see, the taxes can be such a penalty on people that there’s no incentive for them to prosper and to earn more and so forth because they have to give so much to the government …

There was talk about having a gun ban in California. It didn’t go through. But I got a letter from a man in San Quentin Prison. And from the prison he wrote me the letter to tell me he was in there for burglary, he was a burglar. And he said, “I just want you to know that if that law goes through, here in San Quentin there will be celebrating throughout the day and night by all the burglars who are in prison.”]

Four Years Ago Today

by digby

Sad, funny … and true:

.

This Could Change Everything

by digby

It’s hard for me to believe that discredited, wingnut quack David Bossie of Citizens United is still out there causing trouble, but this time he may have done something that is truly catastrophic:

You’ve probably heard by now that next week the Supreme Court will break up its summer recess to hear argument, for the second time, in Citizens United v. FEC. You may have the sense that this doesn’t happen often and that something important is going on. If so, you’re right and then some.

The case involves a film, Hillary: The Movie, that was produced by Citizens United, a conservative, non-profit corporation, to coincide with the 2008 presidential primary season. The case began as a fairly sleepy challenge to the Federal Election Commission’s (FEC’s) decision to treat the film’s production and release as corporate electioneering subject to campaign finance regulations, but was transformed by an order issued by the Supreme Court on June 29th. Here are five reasons why Citizens United is now a truly momentous case:

1. President Palin, Courtesy of Chevron: Let’s start with the biggest and most obvious reason this is a momentous case. Citizens United is arguing that expenditures by corporations in elections should be treated identically to those of individuals. If the Court accepts this argument, it would do away with a distinction that has been in place in our Constitution since the Founding and our statutory law since the Tillman Act of 1907 (as explained in the brief CAC filed in Citizens United), and allow corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money in elections. To appreciate how scary this change would be, consider that, according to the FEC, the Republican and Democratic parties combined spent slightly more than $1.5 billion between January 1, 2007, and December 31, 2008, while Fortune Magazine reports that the 10 most profitable companies during the same period earned combined profits of over $350 billion. This contrast reveals that unleashing even a tiny fraction of corporate profits – from just a handful of companies – could overwhelm the campaign system with money that represents the narrowest interests of private, profit-driven entities.

2. A Reargued Case in September is like a Snowstorm in July: This case is loaded with Supreme Court rarities, starting with the fact that the Supreme Court failed to decide this case the first time it was heard last Term. Also rare is that the Justices have decided to come back from summer vacation a month early for a pre-Term special session in order to rehear the case, and have specifically asked the parties to brief the question of whether they should overturn not one, but two prior rulings (Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, and the parts of McConnell v. FEC that uphold regulation of corporate spending in candidate elections). Ironically, the last time the Court interrupted its summer recess for a special session was to hear one of those cases, McConnell v. FEC, six years ago. Before McConnell, the Court hadn’t returned to DC for a pre-Term summer session since 1974, when in United States v. Nixon it ordered President Richard M. Nixon to surrender his secret Watergate tapes.

3. A Cast of a Thousand Stars (and a lawyer’s trick you should not try at home): Citizens United will be a scene of debut performances and veteran stars of the Supreme Court. It will be the first case to come before Justice Sonia Sotomayor and the first case argued before the Supreme Court by Obama’s Solicitor General Elena Kagan, who will argue on behalf of the FEC. The remaining line-up of participants in this case include the most experienced Supreme Court practitioners alive today – former G.W. Bush Solicitor General Ted Olson (representing Citizens United), former Clinton Solicitor General Seth Waxman (representing Sen. John McCain and other backers of the 2002 McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, or BCRA) and preeminent First Amendment litigator Floyd Abrams (representing Sen. Mitch McConnell and others who opposed BCRA). Olson will be attempting the lawyer’s equivalent of a quadruple lutz: getting the Supreme Court to overrule case law he successfully convinced the justices to make just six years earlier. (As Solicitor General for President Bush, Olson defended BCRA in McConnell.)

4. The Alito Court: A lot of attention has focused in recent months on whether and how new Justice Sotomayor will change the Supreme Court. But oral arguments in Citizens United on September 9th should snap our focus back to a far more momentous change in the Court’s make-up: the 2006 replacement of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor with Justice Samuel Alito. It is only over time that we are seeing how significantly that change moved the Court’s center of gravity rightward. As in so many areas, Justice O’Connor emerged during her tenure as the Court’s critical swing vote in campaign finance cases and in McConnell in 2003 she provided the fifth vote necessary to uphold key portions of BCRA. In Citizens United, the Court has asked the parties to brief whether important parts of Justice O’Connor’s and Justice Stevens’ joint opinion for the Court in McConnell should be overruled.

5. The Roberts Court and Stare Decisis: In a 2007 campaign finance case, FEC v. Wisconsin Right to Life, Inc., the Court’s five conservatives mostly agreed on the merits, but clashed angrily about whether to overrule prior rulings of the Court including Austin and McConnell, with Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito joining together on the controlling opinion, which limits these cases without overruling them. This prompted Justice Scalia to unleash his famously acerbic pen on his new Chief, saying at one point that Roberts’s “faux judicial restraint is judicial obfuscation.” Citizens United will help answer a profoundly important question about whether there is in fact a meaningful difference of opinion among the conservative justices on the question of what justifies overturning prior rulings of the Supreme Court. The answer to this question will go a long way toward determining whether the Court’s shift to the right will be gradual or sharp in the coming years.

Anybody want to take bets on whether or not the Roberts Court is going to move sharply to the right?

.

Calling Rick Perlstein

by digby

Ok, I consider myself a pretty decent observer and interpreter of the right wing. I grew up in a right wing family and have followed the right closely over they years. I usually get why certain issues and events grab their imagination.

But I confess that this one caught me by surprise:

“As the father of four children, I am absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama’s socialist ideology. The idea that school children across our nation will be forced to watch the President justify his plans for government-run health care, banks, and automobile companies, increasing taxes on those who create jobs, and racking up more debt than any other President, is not only infuriating, but goes against beliefs of the majority of Americans, while bypassing American parents through an invasive abuse of power.

“While I support educating our children to respect both the office of the American President and the value of community service, I do not support using our children as tools to spread liberal propaganda. The address scheduled for September 8, 2009, does not allow for healthy debate on the President’s agenda, but rather obligates the youngest children in our public school system to agree with our President’s initiatives or be ostracized by their teachers and classmates.

“Public schools can’t teach children to speak out in support of the sanctity of human life or traditional marriage. President Obama and the Democrats wouldn’t dream of allowing prayer in school. Christmas Parties are now Holiday Parties. But, the Democrats have no problem going against the majority of American people and usurping the rights of parents by sending Pied Piper Obama into the American classroom.

The Democrats have clearly lost the battle to maintain control of the message this summer, so now that school is back in session, President Obama has turned to American’s children to spread his liberal lies, indoctrinating American’s youngest children before they have a chance to decide for themselves.”

This is all over talk radio and the dittoheads are getting all feverish. But I don’t really get it. Is this just another crude attempt to delegitimize the president? A furtherance of their goal to destroy the public school system by having people remove their kids and homeschool them?

It’s hard to believe really think that Americans in general find it inappropriate or unusual for a president to speak to kids. It’s so common for them to do it during campaigns and presidential visits, it’s almost like they are more school board president than U.S. president. Remember this?

What is it about Obama speaking to schoolchildren that has them all excited? They’re so stimulated you’d think he was a child molester. (Maybe that’s where they’re going with this …)

.

Self-Preservation Strategy

by dday

House liberals will not go quietly, Mr. Emanuel.

In a letter delivered to the White House moments ago, the two leaders of the bloc of House progressives bluntly told President Obama that they will not support any health care plan without a public option in it — and demanded a meeting to inform him face to face.

The not-yet-released letter — the first joint statement from progressives since news emerged that Obama might not address the public option in next week’s speech — is their sharpest challenge yet to the president, given the extraordinary sensitivity of this political moment. The letter urges him to mention the public option in his speech.

“Any bill that does not provide, at a minimum, a public option built on the Medicare provider system and with reimbursement based on Mediare rates — not negotiated rates — is unacceptable,” reads the letter, which was sent over by a source. It was signed by Reps. Lynn Woolsey and Raul Grijalva, the two leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

They’re buttressed by the Speaker of the House, quoted again as saying that a bill without a public option cannot pass the House and that its elimination would be a major victory for insurance companies. Not much room to climb down from those remarks.

Some chin-scratchers are wondering why the public option, the so-called “sliver” of the legislation but not its entirety, has taken on such prominent significance. I think this gets at part of it.

To help understand, I think it’s useful to read past the sarcastic opening to this Chris Bowers post and read him lay out the strategic thinking in detail. I think what you’ll see is that while the movement on behalf of the public option certainly wants a public option and believes the public option is important, the larger goal is to “to try and make the federal government more responsive to progressives in the long-term” by engaging in a form of inside-outside organizing and legislative brinksmanship that’s aimed at enhancing the level of clout small-p progressives in general and the big-p Progressive Caucus in particular enjoy on Capitol Hill.

That requires, arguably, some tactical extremism. If you become known as the guys who are always willing to be reasonable and fold while the Blue Dogs are the guys who are happy to let the world burn unless someone kisses your ring, then in the short-term your reasonableness will let some things get done but over the long-term you’ll get squeezed out. And it also requires you to pick winnable fights, which may mean blowing the specific stakes in the fight a bit out of proportion in the service of the larger goal.

There’s more to it than that, however. First of all, whatever the state of the public option on offer – and I don’t think it’s sufficient – can be improved upon if it just gets past the post and into circulation. I cannot believe that Ezra Klein would think that something like a public option could be introduced as an add-on later, as long as the “basic structure” of universality gets enacted now. A government-administered insurance plan is not a minor fix; getting one installed for Medicare or Medicaid took a number of years and tough battles, and we still leave out everyone under 65 who isn’t impoverished. Adding it later would not be a “relatively simple matter,” as he says. We get a crack at this now, or we create a forced market through an individual mandate that makes it a crime not to buy private health insurance. Given our crack regulatory structure in the US of A, that won’t hold, the insurance companies won’t live up to their end of the bargain, and costs for everyone will continue to soar. And if the subsidies are too low, this won’t even get out of the gate – both parties would be clamoring to repeal it. Adding the public option offers far more opportunities to improve upon the system, rather than not having that option and having to do a supreme lift to get it. I agree that the coverage subsidies and the design of the exchanges are important, but the public option stands with those as a pillar of the plan.

And I know that because none other than Max Baucus told me so in his original white paper on the subject.

Tell me how this sounds for a health care reform plan.

• A national health care exchange
• Buy-in to Medicare at age 55
• No discrimination against those with pre-existing conditions
• No waiting period for Medicare for disabled
• CHIP covers up to 250% of poverty level
• Credits for small businesses and individuals to make health care affordable

Oh, and don’t forget this bit:

• A public option

Now, it may surprise you to learn this. But the architect of this program is none other than Max Baucus–the guy who has been pushing against a public option since the insurers were allowed to drive this debate. Here’s the language from his white paper–dated November 12, 2008–on the public option:

The Exchange would also include a new public plan option, similar to Medicare. This option would abide by the same rules as private insurance plans participating in the Exchange (e.g., offer the same levels of benefits and set the premiums the same way). Rates paid to health care providers by this option would be determined by balancing the goals of increasing competition and ensuring access for patients to high-quality health care.

There was a time (known familiarly as “last year”) when conservative Democrats tried to determine how to best deliver a quality health care bill, and some dumb-as-a-stick bloggers and activists went ahead and looked at the proposals and actually agreed with them. Silly rabbits!

And contrary to popular opinion, Blue Dogs actually need health care reform far more than progressives. Sure, they want to do it in such a way that preserves corporate profits. But progressives can see the desire to pass something and exploit that for their own ends, which is approximately how politics works, basically.

The reason I disagree with Klein is fairly simple: if no health care legislation passes, and Democrats lose seats as a result, Blue Dogs are the people who will lose the seats, not Progressives. Even if Klein is correct and Democrats lose a bunch of seats because Progressives blocked it, Blue Dogs are actually the ones who will bear the brunt of those losses. As such, Blue Dogs have more to lose if health care fails to pass than Progressives […]

If we feel that we have to protect Blue Dogs at all costs, then of course it will be impossible for Progressives to have as much leverage as Blue Dogs. However, as soon as we make it clear that we don’t feel much of a need to protect Blue Dogs, then they are the ones who have a lot more reason to cave into our demands. If another Republican wave really is coming, Blue Dogs will be the first Democrats to lose.

I see nothing wrong with a maximalist strategy, which also corresponds to the stated goal of cutting health care costs and helping people get coverage. It does have an importance for future fights. But it also has an importance for right now. A health care reform that forces people to buy private insurance will destroy the party that builds it. And because of the emphasis placed on the public option, which is really out of the control of Washington at this point, a failure to incorporate it into the final legislation will dispirit the base and lead to a slaughter in 2010. In addition to being smart politics, the progressive revolt is a self-preservation strategy for the Democratic Party.

.