Month: February 2010

One Size Fits All

by digby
 
If anyone out there remains unconvinced that the political pundits pull pre-digested narratives off the shelf, I offer this piece by Ron Brownstein from 2005, in the wake of a couple of special elections:

Call it intelligent design or survival of the fittest, but between now and next November’s midterm elections, the two parties are in a race to evolve. Each appears to have reached the limit of its strategy over the last year. The winner next year may be the side that best adapts to changed circumstances.

After Tuesday’s election results, the threat is most visible for Republicans. From the federal intervention in the Terri Schiavo case to the unsuccessful attempt to add private investment accounts to Social Security, President Bush aimed his 2005 agenda mostly at the preferences of his Republican base…

Last week’s elections demonstrated those numbers have consequences. Jerry W. Kilgore and Douglas R. Forrester, the defeated Republican gubernatorial candidates in Virginia and New Jersey, were routed in socially moderate, upscale suburbs. Their deficiencies as candidates obviously contributed to those results. But few Republicans denied that swing voters’ disillusionment with Bush compounded the problem.

The days immediately after the Kilgore and Forrester losses demonstrated that elections have consequences too. GOP moderates, already anxious about the party’s standing with swing voters, blocked conservative-driven tax- and budget-cut plans in the House and the Senate late last week.

If history is any guide, the GOP leadership eventually will beg, borrow and coerce the votes it needs. But the uprising, which forced the House leadership to withdraw its $54-billion budget-cutting bill, should send Republican leaders the same message as the Virginia and New Jersey results: On many fronts, the party has tilted its agenda so heavily to the demands of its conservative base that moderates feel alienated…

Democrats were understandably elated by the election results. But during the celebration, they may have missed a crucial warning sign in an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll last week: Amid all the bad news for the GOP, the survey found that more Americans credit Republicans than Democrats with offering a vision for the future. Key GOP strategists say that if that perception persists through next November it will restrain Republican losses, and they may be right.

The poll’s findings partly reflect the inherent difficulty Democrats face in communicating to the public while Republicans control every lever of the federal government. But it also reflects the reality that Democrats have focused more on blocking Republican initiatives than defining their own.

Through the last year, Democrats have proved surprisingly disciplined at resisting many of Bush’s plans. What they haven’t done is coalesce behind comprehensive solutions to the problems most concerning the country.

Contrary to popular perception, the problem isn’t a shortage of ideas. Consider the energy issue. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) recently offered an innovative deal in which Washington would relieve the auto companies of some of their retiree healthcare costs in return for the companies accepting higher fuel-economy standards. This month, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) unveiled an impressively comprehensive energy plan centered on a requirement that oil companies invest some of their record profits in renewable energy sources, or contribute to a federal fund that would.

But the Democrats’ own divisions have prevented them from seriously promoting almost any idea more ambitious than a legislative jab. One fissure is between those who want to aim at swing voters and those who want to emulate Bush with an agenda intended to excite their base. The more important disagreement is between those who want the party to promote its own ideas and those who want to stay low while Bush is struggling.

The Democratic paralysis over Iraq crystallizes both disputes. Liberal activists and a growing number of Democratic House and Senate challengers are pushing to begin the withdrawal of U.S. troops. But almost all of the party’s Washington leadership considers those proposals substantively and politically misguided and prefers to avoid a concrete alternative on the war.

Raising questions about Bush’s priorities has worked well for Democrats in 2005. But if Democrats don’t adapt to offer more answers about their own priorities, 2006 may not prove as rewarding as they expect.

Well, there you have it. The only difference, of course, is that unlike Bush, Obama didn’t actually cater to his base, but is wrongly accused of it. And Bush was in his fifth year, not his first. But move a few words around and you have the exact critique we are seeing against Obama and the Democrats today.

Can anyone argue that the village just sees all electoral losses as a result of the losing party failing to be “centrist” and “bipartisan” enough?  It doesn’t matter what  the real factors are that drove the electorate. As far as the gasbags are concerned, it’s always because the voters were upset that the party in power went too far. Sometimes that might be true, of course,  but sometimes it isn’t.  At the very least it can’t always be true, can it?

This is how the establishment maintains its dominance. Politicians who listen to them are foolish.

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Pokerface

by digby

I assume many of you have already seen this, but if you haven’t, it’s mercifully short: Rush Limbaugh “dancing” to Lady Gaga at the miss America pageant.

Honestly, it’s got to be drugs.

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Extras And Necessities

by digby

Obama is in New Hampshire saying again that the deficits are a huge current problem and that the government needs to pull in its belt just like families are doing with their budgets all over the country. The government can’t afford to keep buying all these “extras” in times of economic crisis(although he didn’t spell out exactly know what those are.) He said something about how the Republicans wanted to buy a boat but refused to fix the boiler. And we don’t need to fix the bathroom if its still working either. (Also Paygo is awesome and all problems are caused by people playing politics as usual and a lack of bipartisanship.)

He made a good joke pointing out that the congressional deficit commission, which he endorsed, didn’t pass because seven Republicans who had originally sponsored the bill didn’t vote for it. The audience laughed uproariously. It was pretty funny, especially if you really do believe that cutting entitlements should be a big priority and that the only way to accomplish that is by circumventing the normal democratic process. Which he apparently does since he later made the point that we need “an honest conversation” about entitlements in order to deal with these deficits. Bipartisanly, of course.

It’s all rhetoric so far: commissions, “freezes”, bipartisanship, deficits are a huge, huge problem, etc. Obama goes to some lengths to thread the needle by talking about investment vs “extras” and speaks with pride about funding initiatives in the same breath (which sounds a little dissonant to me, although YMMV). But at the end of the day, people are left with the impression that deficits are the most serious threat we face and worse, that democratic politics are not adequate to solve the problem. In other words, Pete Peterson has won.

Update: I should add that his description of the health care plan was great. If everyone understood it that way, it’s hard to see how anyone would object to it.

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Deficit Fever

by digby

Suddenly, you can’t turn around without getting a panicked lecture about the deficit. But in all the discussions about the horrifying, worse-than-terrorism, scarier-than-nuclear-war threat to everything we hold near and dear, nobody ever seems to discuss the fact that much of the deficit is due to unemployment. (Gosh, it turns out that if everyone were working, they’d be paying more taxes and the government would have more money!) We are supposed to believe that the deficit stems from profligate spending on old people and undeserving little dark children who refuse to get a job.

The Pete Peterson crew have been poised for some time to make this move. They are very slick and they are sending out massive amounts of scare literature to everyone in the chattering and ruling classes. And they are working overtime to convince the American people that fixing the deficit is imperative if they want the economy to improve. And it’s working. Not the economy — the propaganda.

Sadly, part of the reason it’s working is because the president and his people keep saying that the federal budget is just like the family budget and you have to pull in your belt at times like these, when the opposite is true. It’s a terrible way to discuss this issue — unless you really do want to hamstring your administration and keep it from being able to do the things it needs to do to bring employment back.

I appreciate the administration’s desire to bring the Republicans’ “plans” into the light, particularly those that want to privatize social security for people under 55 and give them “vouchers” for health care to keep costs down. (Out of vouchers? No dialysis for you!)If they do a good job of exposing the Republicans’ true intentions, it could reap partisan loyalty from many, many millions of people. I sincerely hope that’s what they plan to do.

But in the meantime, you have Tim Geithner begging the Republicans to help with deficit reduction in a bipartisan way. Here’s what I would love to know: what does the administration think a reasonable bipartisan compromise on deficit reduction would look like?

If the Democrats could do one simple thing, it would be to repeatedly explain that deficits will never go down unless we put everyone in this country back to work — it would go a long way to evening the Peterson Playing Field. As it stands, the alleged reason for the deficit is the “entitlements” which the conservative owners of America have been itching to eliminate from the moment they were conceived. If they manage to get it done at this moment of extreme insecurity, it will be one of the great propaganda and Shock Doctrine achievements of all time.

If ever people need the security of an old age pension and guaranteed medical care in their unhealthy golden years its now. It would be too ironic (and sad)if they were manipulated into giving that up under the misapprehension that the country’s current woes can be fixed if they do.

(And the kids had better get that extra room ready because mom and dad are going to be moving in.)

If you want to hear a smart discussion of the deficit from an actual liberal, here’s James Galbraith on the Jim Bohannon show.

Update:

The Vice President actually came to the set to be grilled by Mrs Alan Greenspan.

Here’s her first question:

First of all the budget … and these deficits.. Deficits, red ink as far as the eye can see! Even if you can achieve your very optimistic goal,s and that is to bring down some of these deficits by 2015, they go back up again by 2019 and 2020! beyond the level that is considered sustainable. Larry Summers, long before he was in the Obama White House has said,”how long can the world’s greatest borrower remain the world’s greatest power?”

Have we reached a point where our deficits have become a national security issue?

Joe Biden said no, but it could happen if we don’t bring down spending.

You know, when I wrote at the beginning of this post that deficits were worse than terrorists, I was exaggerating. Now, I realize they are actually going to go there. Oh boy.

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What A Coincidence!

by tristero

On Monday, the odious Ross Douthat published a dreadful piece of typing urging that public school kids in Alabama be taught that there are no health benefits to masturbation, if their parents want that kind of sex education.* I blogged about it here.

Well, this morning I read in WaPo an article that points to a new study that claims that abstinence-only programs might work. Coincidence that Douthat addressed the subject the day before? I don’t think so, but that’s another subject.

The thing is, the article is so badly written that it is all but impossible to find out what the study actually found. In fact, the article mostly reports the spin on the study, not the study itself, and the spin is predictable, with the typical lunatics insisting that this proves abstinence only is a fucking great idea – well, actually, a not-fucking great idea, but you know what I mean.

But if you read the article carefully as well as the actual study, or rather the abstract because the study is only available to subscribers, that’s not quite the case. It’s worth going through in a little detail.

There was a randomized controlled trial of 662 African American students from the 6th and 7th grades. They were assigned to different kinds of sexuality education:

An 8-hour abstinence-only intervention targeted reduced sexual intercourse; an 8-hour safer sex–only intervention targeted increased condom use; 8-hour and 12-hour comprehensive interventions targeted sexual intercourse and condom use; and an 8-hour health-promotion control intervention targeted health issues unrelated to sexual behavior. Participants also were randomized to receive or not receive an intervention maintenance program to extend intervention efficacy.

From the article we can glean the following details about the “8 hour abstinence-only intervention” that “targeted reduced sexual intercourse:”

It did not take a moralistic tone, as many abstinence programs do. Most notably, the sessions encouraged children to delay sex until they are ready, not necessarily until married; did not portray sex outside marriage as never appropriate; and did not disparage condoms.

“There is no data in this study to support the ‘abstain until marriage’ programs, which research proved ineffective during the Bush administration,” said James Wagoner, president of Advocates for Youth.

In other words, what the study found was that when kids were taught scientific facts, not religious or cultural doctrine, ie, when kids were told the simple truth, namely that sex is best delayed until you’re emotionally ready and that sex outside of marriage carries no moral stigma, nor does the use of condoms… well, only about 1/3 of the kids in that group had sex over the next two years.

All of this sounds perfectly reasonable to me. I have no problem with teenagers having sex when they’re ready. And likewise, I have no problem teaching teenagers to delay having sex until they’re ready. But that is not what’s normally meant by abstinence-only education. This is:

As Defined By Section 510(b) of Title V of the Social Security Act, P.L. 104-193

For the purposes of this section, the term “abstinence education” means an educational or motivational program which:

has as its exclusive purpose teaching the social, psychological, and health gains to be realized by abstaining from sexual activity;

teaches abstinence from sexual activity outside of marriage is the expected standard for all school-age children;

teaches that abstinence from sexual activity is the only certain way to avoid out-of-wedlock pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and other associated health problems;

teaches that a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the expected standard of sexual activity;

teaches that sexual activity outside the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical side effects;

teaches that bearing children out-of-wedlock is likely to have harmful consequences for the child, the child’s parents, and society;

teaches young people how to reject sexual advances and how alcohol and drug use increase vulnerability to sexual advances, and

teaches the importance of attaining self-sufficiency before engaging in sexual activity.

And in fact:

Jemmott and colleagues [the authors of the study] indicated that the abstinence-only program used in the study was unusual. In fact, it would not have qualified for abstinence-only federal funding because it did not rely on moral principles, nor did it criticize condom usage.

As far as I can tell, nothing in this study points to the effectiveness of teaching much of the accepted definition of “abstinence only sex education:”

They specifically did not discuss abstinence from sexual activity outside of marriage.

They did not teach that abstinence from sexual activity is the only certain way to “avoid out-of-wedlock pregnancy [what a ridiculous, insulting phrase], sexually transmitted diseases, and other associated health problems.”

They did not teach that “a mutually faithful monagamous relationship n the context of marriage is the expected standard of sexual activity;”

They did not teach that “sexual activity outside the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical side effects.”

Again: All the study did find was that many kids who were taught the facts and urged to delay (or presumably stop) sexual activity until they felt ready did indeed delay having sex at higher rates than kids who were simply taught the facts but not urged to delay sexual activity.

Not only do I find this unsurprising or unobjectionable, I see nothing whatsoever for the abstinence-only fanatics to crow about. It appears that the only reason the researchers called the encouraging to delay sex program “abstinence-only” was for marketing reasons, ie, to sell this kind of curriculum to school districts who want a program called “abstinence-only.” (Needless to say, there is enormous potential for this promotional gimmick to get abused, that is for genuine – and genuinely worthless, not to mention unconstitutional – abstinence only programs to sneak in and get funding. )

Of course, we would need to see the actual curriculum to see if the experimenter’s characterization of the delayed-sex group as “abstinence-only” is as misleading as it appears to be. And I have some questions about the design of the study, the most obvious and important being whether the kids in the other groups were taught only the mechanics of sex and how to use condoms and left to draw their own conclusions… or whether they were also urged to delay sex until they were ready. If – if – the latter is so, then there just might be a slight suggestion that teaching condom use may work against delaying sex until ready. But far more focused studies would have to be run to see if indeed that were so.**

In any event, this study confirms what we already knew: straight talk about sex works; bullshit doesn’t. There is simply nothing for the Douthats of the world to trumpet in this study’s results.

*In fact, masturbation has numerous health benefits, according to this little article I found on America’s Most Trusted News Source. Yeah, yeah, it’s about masturbation, so the tendency is to snicker and snark. Go ahead. But here’s the serious point:

Douthat is saying that even if there is scientific evidence that masturbating is good for you, parents have the right to demand that sex education in their school district teach the exact opposite, or at the very least ignore the scientific evidence altogether.

That’s nothing to snark at. That’s something to be alarmed about.

** There is apparently another possible reading of this study. According to the description of the different curriculums in the MedPage article linked to above (and again here, it seems to me quite reasonable to conclude that the students did as they were encouraged. The ones who were encouraged to delay, delayed. The ones who were encouraged to use condoms, used condoms. Not surprising.

Douthat’s Problems With Sex

by tristero

Yesterday, by accident (I don’t normally bother to read him), I started the lead to Ross Douthat’s latest Times-subsidized typing lesson.

Liberals hated almost everything about George W. Bush’s presidency…

and immediately thought, “This creep just wrote at least two demonstrably false lies.”

Unfortunately, something sucked me in and I actually read the entire column, a genuinely terrible way to begin a new month. Lucky you, Amanda Marcotte has an accurate summary:

Shorter Ross Douthat: we’ll let your kids be perverts, if you let our kids be tortured and shamed.

In other words, if people in Alabama want to teach their kids that masturbation is unhealthy (I swear, that’s the example Douthat used), they should have that right and no big bad federal government should say otherwise. Why? Because stats show that sex education really doesn’t work – not just abstinence-only, but all sex education in school. So, if sex education doesn’t work and you can’t get rid of it because liberals insist… well, Douthat says, then fuck it, teach the brats whatever the fuck you want (I’m paraphrasing his words here), It’s a local issue, for local schoolboards. You know, like teaching evolution.

It will come as no surprise to the vast majority of sentient beings – ie, those who hated the presidency of George W. Bush – that the truth bears little resemblance to Douthat’s distortion of it. Kate Harding does a pretty good job here of going through it all, debunking , among other things, the notion that ignorance of contraception among teenagers is a trivial issue without profound personal and even national consequences. Then:

…back when teen pregnancy rates were still declining, the Guttmacher Institute found that although trends in contraceptive use were mixed, only about a quarter of the drop could be attributed to increased abstinence; the other 75 percent was the result of sexually experienced teens managing not to get pregnant. Furthermore, that report noted that “The greatest change is an increase in the proportion of sexually experienced teenagers who report having used a method at first sex.” While that obviously doesn’t tell us about long-term contraceptive use, a 2004 CDC report stated, “Teenagers who do not use a method of birth control at first intercourse are about twice as likely to become teen mothers as teens who do use a method at first intercourse.” Twice as likely! So educating kids about contraception before they start having sex probably does matter, as it turns out! Oh, and about when they start having it? According to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, 55 percent of Mississippi teens have had sex by ninth grade — versus 27 percent of New Hampshire high school freshmen. Just FYI.

So, one really big problem with not encouraging Berkeley values in Alabama is that kids who grow up with Alabama values have babies at much higher rates. (Alabama has the No. 12 teen birthrate; California’s No. 28.) Even if communities and families have more of an effect on teens’ behavior than schools do, it is abundantly clear that kids growing up in environments where they learn something about sex and contraception beyond “Don’t do it, and then you won’t need it” are less likely to get pregnant. So, not for the first — or 50th — time, I have to ask: Do the folks who insist on keeping their children ignorant actually want to prevent teen pregnancies?

While it should go without saying that not every teen pregnancy is a sad story in the long run — our president seems to have turned out all right, and Salon contributor Amy Benfer has written numerous times about the daughter she had at 16, whose awesomeness I can vouch for — there’s no question that it’s in society’s best interest (not to mention most teenagers’) to reduce the number of them. There is no question that abstinence-only education doesn’t help with that. And there is no question that in a nation where church and state are meant to be separate, public schools should favor curricula that offer comprehensive, scientifically accurate information over those that offer limited and sometimes false information based on a narrow, usually religious worldview.

Exactly. Oh, and obviously. The worst part of providing the cognitively deranged a widely-seen forum for their distortions (eg, Douthat in the Times or Beck on Fox) is that an enormous amount of effort is spent in simply correcting their grossly misleading assertions and stating the obvious. It’s a goddam waste of everyone’s valuable time.

And that, of course, is the reason they do it. Because the more time we spend correcting them, the less time there’s left for actually doing something constructive. As has been said many times, not just by me, while it is vital that we have a serious discussion of the complex problems and issues this country faces, unfortunately, modern conservatives are neither serious nor capable of having a serious discussion. It is simply disgraceful that these professional bozos are given the opportunity to influence our discourse while truly intelligent people… ehh, you’ve heard it before.

The Times, to its credit, has never run an astrology column because, you know, obviously misleading hokum is not – to coin a phrase – fit to print. And they have had, and still have, many truly great reporters, among the best in the biz. Yet they seem perfectly fine not only publishing Kristol or Douthat (or Brooks or Seelye or Friedman or Dowd or…) but letting them collect a regular salary.

Strange Times.

Note: What, you ask, were the “at least two demonstrably false lies” referred to at the beginning? Oh, please, isn’t this exactly the point I’m trying to make, wasting time restating the obvious? Okay, okay:

1. It wasn’t just liberals who “hated almost everything about George W. Bush’s presidency.” It was anyone in the world with either a brain or a heart, and certainly everyone who had both.

2. I, a liberal, didn’t hate “almost” everything about the Bush administration. It was all hateful, all of it, from the wars, murders, and wholesale neglect of American security and safety right on down to the fake turkeys.

Method to The Madness

by digby

Tucker Carlson’s new Huffy Pose reports:

An unusual thing happened as President Obama’s budget director, Peter Orszag, spoke Sunday evening about the White House budget proposal being unveiled on Monday.

Orszag, touching on the country’s long-term fiscal instability and its connection to health-care costs, raised a Republican lawmaker’s idea on how to fix the problem. The mention of Rep. Paul Ryan, Wisconsin Republican, was completely unilateral by Orszag, without any prompting.

“I would note on this point that there have been alternative proposals put forward. For example, Representative Ryan has come forward with a proposal that does restore long term balance to the federal budget,” Orszag said.

He did it again, again of his own accord, during an interview with Bloomberg TV Monday morning at the White House.

“Republicans have put forward ideas. Rep. Ryan … has a plan for the future of the budget. That’s great,” Orszag said.

On the conference call Sunday, Orszag said that under Ryan’s plan, which moves Medicare recipients 55 and younger into a system where they get direct payment vouchers instead of government payment for each medical visit or procedure, the “voucher would not keep pace with ongoing health-care costs.”

Orszag called the plan “one approach” but said it “may not be the one that the American public favors.”

When Ryan’s name came up yet again at a Monday press conference, Orszag said his plan, while “impressive,” is “a dramatically different approach in which much more risk is loaded onto individuals.”

[…]

“I obviously didn’t expect to get this kind of attention,” Ryan said in a phone interview Monday. “But I’m very happy about it because … they can no longer say the Republican party has no ideas.”

The dynamic was on display Friday in Baltimore, when Obama told the House Republican caucus that he had read Ryan’s 93-page plan for American’s fiscal future and was familiar with it. The president, who was at times combative during a question-and-answer session and dismissed some questions by other Republican lawmakers, showed respect for Ryan’s ideas, even though he expressed disagreement.

“Paul … has looked at the budget and has made a serious proposal,” Obama said. “I’ve read it. I can tell you what’s in it. There are some ideas in there that I would agree with, but there are some ideas in there that we should have a healthy debate about because I don’t agree with them.”

Republican pollster Frank Luntz, who attended the session, said the nationally televised session will be a significant boost for Ryan’s political profile.

“When the president shows you that much respect the media is sure to follow, and the president acknowledging and emphasizing that he had read Paul’s materials shows you they are serious and significant,” Luntz said in an interview.

You have to assume that they want to elevate Ryan and others like him so that they can engage in a concerted, long term ideological battle. At least that’s a possibility I’m seeing in the weeds of those comments. And if that’s the case, then my knee jerk opposition to the president appearing before the lunatics in the spirit of bipartisanship may have been wrong.

If they manage to educate the voters about what’s wrong with conservative ideology in this process then more power to them. It’s going to take a very sustained effort to get people out of their funk and beyond their tribal impulses to engage in this battle in a serious way but if they do it well it could be an important step forward. It’s definitely going to take a lot more than sending out Obama to parry questions — average people don’t have time for that. If they decide to go this way I hope that they devote considerable resources and political brainpower to making these argument well, in ways that people can understand. It’s risky in this environment. But there is no good time to wage this kind of campaign.

I do think they need to be careful about emphasizing t “bipartisan” part of this message because the villagers are primed to hear only that and nothing else. (And I honestly don’t think anyone’s going to buy the two cute by half idea that the Republicans are failures if they don’t compromise.) But if they do this right, find the right ways to talk about liberal ideology through these policies and expose the bankruptcy of conservative policies at long last, then it could be valuable for liberalism as well as the president, regardless of what happens in November. If they could do this all the way up until 2012 and run the pre4sidental campaign on this basis instead of Obama’s personal star power, I think it would be great.

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What Atrios Said

by digby

The one thing Dems need to understand is that while people want their goodies, they’re very very quick to get angry if they think that perceived Dem constituencies (unions, people with dark complexions) are getting more goodies than they are. “Nebraska” doesn’t fit cleanly into this model, but “Democratic senator” does.

More generally, it’s the problem with small-bore incremental liberalism, as opposed to programs that are now universal like Social Security and Medicare. Without universality, it’s always easy to make it seem like someone else (someone less deserving, of course) is getting the goodies making good programs unpopular.

It’s a peculiarity of American culture that we can only be compassionate as long as the wrong people aren’t benefiting at the perceived expense of the right ones.  And since all Americans like to believe they are personally among the “right” ones and people they don’t like are the wrong ones, it presents a bit of a problem in constructing social insurance programs. Americans don’t like to believe that bad things happen to good people unless the people in question are themselves.

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The Grown Ups

by digby

David Shuster interviewed  two old lions, Trent Lott and John Breaux about  how the president should be leading:

Breaux: I think it’s time for the president to call the leaders of both parties down to the White House and talk about those thousands of pages of the budget and say, “look, neither one of us are going to win by ourselves and if we don’t get a bipartisan agreement, we’re not going to get an agreement.” I think it was a good day when he met with the House Republicans and I think he’s going to do the same thing with the Senate Republican caucus.  He’s going to have to bring them both into the oval office and say, “look, it’s time we start working together.” That’s what the American people want, it’s the only way you’re going to get a document out of it.”

Right, absolutely.  If only the president would just tell the Republicans and Democrats that they need to work together.  Why on earth didn’t he think of that before?  And if it doesn’t happen, well I guess that just proves that Obama is a failure as a leader. Excellent plan.

Meanwhile, here’s Trent Lott hilariously explaining how “bipartisanship” works for both sides:

Lott: Talking about the Bush tax cuts.  As a matter of fact when we got those tax cuts, we really wanted like 1.2 or 1.3 trillion dollars. But John Breaux and some of the moderate Republicans and Democrats said “that’s really more than we can do” and we wound up cutting it back by about 300 billion dollars and we actually got it done.

See, they compromised and only gave their mutual benefactors a trilliion dollar gift! Yes we can!

Shuster points out that the political environment isn’t exactly friendly right now but Breaux insists that the president can fix that:

Breaux: Well you have to help create it. A leader and a president can do this.  Bring them in and say “look, we’re not going to leave this room until we get some type of a framework about how we’re going to do this budget.  If we just want to beat each other up fine, but everybody loses if we do that.  The country loses.”

I don’t know why he keeps saying  “they both lose.”   Whether the country loses is one thing. But the fact is that one party will win and one party will lose and the Republicans have made it crystal clear that they believe that by obstructing Obama’s agenda they don’t think it will be them. I guess they could change their minds,  but I’ve seen nothing to indicate that.  What they see as advantageous is having the president put it all on the line for bipartisanship and then saying, “see, he can’t deliver on  his promises” when they fail to meet him halfway.  It’s a suckers play.  If they can get him to compromise on something that’s of great importance to his supporters (the very best kind of compromise from their perspective) they get what they want and he loses the base. If they simply obstruct, it makes him look like he can’t lead at all.  In other words, they hold all the cards.  And they only have 41 votes in the Senate. 

Meanwhile, Lott explains that Obama has no choice but to clean up the mess he and his cohorts left behind:

Lott: The president did take a step in the right direction by freezing discretionary spending.  The problem is that it’s a very small part of the spending. … you’ve got a problem.  Some of it was caused by the spending things that were put in place by the previous president and the previous congress.

And now it’s on this congress’s watch. And you’ve got to deal with it now or five years from now it will be a lot worse.

And when it’s all nice and cleaned up (our way) we’ll come roaring back into power and mess it all up again. The circle of life.

Update: It seems the White House agrees with Breaux:

GIBBS: One party is not going to solve these — not going to solve all these problems. One party is not going to make –
QUESTION: Why not? Why is one party not capable –
GIBBS: Because of the –
QUESTION: — when one party controls the House, Senate and the White House?
GIBBS: No, no, no, no, no — welcome to Washington. One party is not going to get — one party is not going to be able to solve all these. The American people want both parties to work together to solve these.

 
Gregg Sargent writes: “This is the emerging talking point from the White House and Congessional leadership: It is a mathematical impossiblity that Dems will ever be able to get anything done without cooperation from Republicans.”

Perhaps voters will buy the idea that we have a Republican congress even though the Democrats have a huge mathematical majority in both houses, and blame them for failing to get anything done. (Do they have an agreement that the GOP won’t run against the “Democrat Congress?”)  

If that’s their plan then Obama  going before the congressional Republicans and answering their questions makes much more sense to me.  They are elevating them on purpose. It’s a very complicated strategy, but maybe it will work. 

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Anything’s Possible

by digby

Susan G reports:

The banksters love Scottie Brown:

In a six-day span just before the US Senate election, Republican Scott Brown collected nearly $450,000 from donors who work at financial companies, a sign the industry is prepared to spend heavily in the upcoming midterm elections to beat back new controls and taxes President Obama wants to impose.
The donations, from hundreds of financial executives, far exceeded what Brown received from doctors and others in the health care industry in the final days of the campaign. While Brown saw donations from all quarters explode in mid-January, as polls showed him closing fast on opponent Martha Coakley, the donations from financial workers coincided with several key developments that would affect their companies.

This wasn’t a “kill health care” Senate seat purchase. This was a “preserve my $100 million bonus” Senate seat purchase.

Tell it to Chris Matthews, who still insists the race was about voter rejection of the public option.

Speaking of which, if you haven’t had a chance to call your representative to ask them to vote for a public option if the health care bill goes to reconciliation, do it today.  The PCCC has been able to get 81 Reps on the record supporting such a move in just a week, using this handy tool to help you do that.

It’s hard to know where this is going, but it seems obvious that any deal is going to have to include a reconciliation package and if that’s the case, the public option should be on the table again. It’s clearly a budgetary item that can fit into the reconciliation framework and they only need 51 to pass it. 

Click here for an easy tool to help you call.  I wouldn’t have thought that a teabagging Republican male centerfold could win Teddy Kennedy’s seat in Massachusetts, but he did. Anything’s possible.

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