Watch the bouncing party line.

Commentary's Jennifer Rubin, January 27th:

So it seems that the doubling-down on ObamaCare crowd exists mostly in the punditocracy. Congress wants to move on. Who knows if this is what Obama “wants.” He is, in a sense, a bystander to the wreckage of his own failed first year. The survivors are walking away from the crash, bruised and battered. Whether he acknowledges this failure tonight remains to be seen. But it matters not at all what he says on the subject. The country has spoken, the Congress is finally listening, and the jig is up. ObamaCare is dead.

Commentary's Pete Wehner, February 25th:

I think ObamaCare will die; and it will die because liberals are badly losing the arguments on the merits. The sooner liberals like Chait accept that unpleasant truth — the sooner they re-engage with reality — the better off they will be.

Slowly, though, the right-wing line has turned from gloating that health care reform is dead, and mocking anybody who suggests otherwise, to warning that the democrats will suffer terrible consequences if reform passes.

Commentary's Pete Wehner, March 1st:

Nancy Pelosi is asking many House Democrats to sacrifice honors, prestige, and their chosen career in behalf of a single issue: ObamaCare. I don’t think they will do it; and in fact they would be very wise to turn down her invitation. To go down in flames for a plan that is both noxious and unpopular is not the political epitaph most lawmakers want. But if Ms. Pelosi has her way, it’s an epitaph more than a few Democrats will end up with.

Rubin today:

Yes, they may pass a comprehensive bill, but at a steep cost.

I'm holding steady: 60% chance of passage.

Eric Massa has enjoyed a brief career as a conservative media hero. Rush Limbaugh devoted an extensive rant to Massa's claim that the allegations of sexual harassment are nothing but a Democratic plot to punish him for opposing health care reform:

He was asked in this appearance: "Well, why don't you rescind your resignation?"  He said, "The only way I can do that is if this becomes a national story."  So Congressman Massa, we're doing our part here to make it a national story.  But he then said, "But you have to understand something, if I don't quit, the ethics investigation continues and they're going to ruin me that way."  What would you do if you were him?  What would you do, Snerdley, what would you do?  They're going to ruin him anyway.  He sounds ticked off enough that I would stay.  This guy is as fired up as anybody I've ever heard anywhere opposed this, and the process and how they're getting it done.  This guy is going to have so much support from people.  We'll see.  He's got five hours or four hours unless I was missing something here and he's said today that he's going to go ahead and resign and I haven't seen that.

This campaign is starting to look a little dicey. Of course, it was pretty obviously nonsensical from the outset -- as the New York Daily News reported, at the time Massa resigned, his absence did not benefit health care reform. Only the subsequent decision of Nathan Deal (R-GA) to delay his resignation made Massa's departure significant. But now Massa's story looks really dicey:

The House ethics committee has received allegations that former Rep. Eric Massa groped at least three male staffers and conducted himself improperly with interns as well as full-time aides, a source familiar with the matter tells POLITICO. 

One incident allegedly occurred when Massa traveled to San Francisco with an aide for a fundraising trip, a second source said.

This seems to be another case of life-imitates-The-Simpsons -- specifically, the episode where incarcerated attempted murderer Sideshow Bob calls into (the obvious paraody of) Limbaugh's program and casts himself as a conservative unfairly railroaded by the liberal justice system. Limbaugh turns him into a martyr. See this video, starting at approximately 4:40 and continuing for about two minutes:

If you haven't yet read John Judis's latest article about Craig Becker and President Obama's labor problem, you should do so right away. John lays out the way that Democrats reached a consensus with Republicans on staffing up the currently-paralyzed National Labor Relations Board, only to see the GOP renege under right-wing pressure. It's a great piece that says a lot about about labor, Obama, and dysfunctional government.

Let me pull out this somewhat ancillary passage:

Created in 1935, the NLRB was a cornerstone of the Second New Deal. The board was designed to protect the right of workers to form unions--by preventing companies from intimidating organizers and employees, as well as by overseeing workplace votes on unionization. In carrying out this mandate, the NLRB laid the basis for a new American pluralism in which the growing power of business could be countered by that of organized workers. The board functioned reasonably well for its first 44 years, but, toward the end of the Carter administration, with Republican conservatives on the rise, it became a political battleground.

Pluralism is a shared obsession for John and me. It's an analysis that supposes that relatively decent, broad-based policies can emerge from a political system in which organized interests represent a broad swath of the population -- unions represent workers, business represents capital, and so on. In its classic form, the pluralist model is a defense of a political process in which interest groups play a heavy role in influencing policy.

I don't think the pluralist model does a good job of describing American politics over the last couple decades -- which is to say, I think that interest groups do wield enormous influence but the public interest is not reflected in the outcome. What I do think is that the pluralist model does a good job of describing policymaking within the Democratic Party. In the Democratic Party you have a strong labor influence, but also a strong business influence to counteract it. The proportion of Democrats on the left who tend to closely reflect the labor perspective is roughly counterbalanced by Democrats on the right who align themselves with business. This kind of pluralism is reflected in policy initiatives undertaken by Obama. Health care reform, cap-and-trade, various regulatory reforms, the deficit commission -- all these things represent attempts to cobble together a rough consensus among stakeholders that advances the public interest. They're generally imperfect compromises that still clearly make the country a better place, which is to say, they're a hallmark of the sorts of reforms that characterized the pluralist postwar consensus period.

The catch, of course, is that the Democrats don't have total control of government. Republicans still have the ability to gum up the works. And Republicans represent the most ideological and narrowly self-interested portions of the business community. And that's the problem with the interest group balance in Washington over the last three decades. You have power alternating between one party that reflects a roughly balanced array of interests and another that reflects a tiny elite. The end result is, therefor, badly skewed.

Surprise! Under the new budget plan by the rising star that conservatives are flipping over, the rich would pay a lot less, the poor and middle class a lot more. I'd have never guessed.

Earlier today I puzzled over what exactly Bart Stupak might be negotiating for:

What I don't understand yet is how the procedure would work. I doubt they can change any abortion language through a reconciliation bill. So would the plan be to pass the Senate bill through the House, pass a reconciliation patch, and then pass a third bill handling abortion? Or do they imagine some deal involving an executive order, a vote that may not take effect, or something else? I'd love to hear exactly what they're negotiating over.

Reader Eric Altshule, a former chief of staff to Bart Gordon (D-TN), writes in with a nifty solution:

In reading the excellent article by Timothy Noah, the solution for the Stupak issue becomes obvious.  Stupak’s main concern is that the Hyde language fully extends to the subsidized policies available in the exchanges.  However, the Hyde language is not permanent law – it is an amendment in the HHS appropriations bill that expires every fiscal year.  That is the basic challenge – Stupak wants to make a permanent law that mimics a temporary law that is annually renewed during an annual appropriations process.

The solution is to get the Appropriations Committee to promise to include language extending Hyde to the exchanges as part of the HHS Appropriations bill later this year.  It will be part of the bill (just like the current Hyde language), and while it can be taken out of the bill by amendment on the floor, there are not the votes to do that.  If there is an amendment to repeal the Hyde language on the House Floor this summer, Stupak will probably welcome that.  Stupak and all his supporters will have their unambiguous vote against abortion coverage in HCR, and they will win.  Pro-choice voters will be disappointed in the HHS fight, but there will be no reason to vote against HCR now.  Stupak will get his language exactly the way the Hyde language exists now, and we will all get HCR.  It is a win-win for everyone.

...is a twenty-something former Bush aide named Christopher Michel, who rose from unpaid White House intern to deputy director of speechwriting in a dizzying five-year run. As Bryan Curtis puts it in his Daily Beast profile, "Michel had somehow emerged from ruins of Bush's second term with his c.v. burnished rather than destroyed."

Curtis notes that Michel was one of basically three people who earned the distinction of being "Bush's voice"--the other two being Karen Hughes and Michael Gerson. Which makes this nugget especially interesting:

Michel's rise was so rapid that the Israeli Knesset episode stood out as a detour, a rare false note. On May 15, 2008, Bush was set to toast Israel's 60th birthday, and Michel wrote a tribute that Latimer said should have been his pièce de résistance as a speechwriter. But after the draft got a working-over in editing, Bush stood in the Knesset and attacked those who would negotiate with terrorist groups as offering "the false comfort of appeasement." It sounded like Bush was blasting then-candidate Obama—and from foreign soil, no less. In his memoir Speech-Less: Tales of a White House Survivor, Latimer says the line was inserted by Thiessen and approved by Bush. (Michel and Thiessen refuse to comment.) Critics dubbed the "appeasement speech" a low moment in Bush rhetoric.

Sounds like Bush was better off defering to his "voice" than his actual voice (or at least his instincts)...

The Economist has a new poll out showing a majority (53-47) support for President Obama's health care plan. This is very big news. Now, that is the only poll right now showing majority support for Obama's plan. But, as Democracy Corps notes, it's clearly part of an overall trend. Note the trendlines at the Pollster.com average of all poll results:

As I've been arguing for a while, there is clearly room for support to grow further. That has been clear for a while. Strong majorities of the public favor some kind of comprehensive reform, and a large chunk of the opposition to the Democratic plans has come from the left. As Democracy Corps points out:

While the uptick in support is certainly encouraging to supporters of reform, almost all of these surveys still show at least pluralities in opposition to the current reform measure being debated. However, when Ipsos probed further, they showed a surprising result. Of the 47 percent who oppose reform, 37 percent do so because reform does not go far enough (meanwhile, of the 41 percent who say they support the current proposals, 12 percent say they do so because they think the current proposals will stop reform from happening). Combining these results shows a majority - 53 percent - that supports reform or something that goes further. Yet, just 35 percent want to kill reform because it goes too far.

This data is further amplified by other recent surveys showing that a wide majority continues to demand health care reform, and has no interest in Congress or the president giving up on the effort. Back in mid-February, ABC/Washington Post asked whether lawmakers in Washington should keep trying to pass a comprehensive health care reform plan or give up on it. They found that, by a two-to-one margin, Americans want Congress to push forward on passing an overarching reform bill (63 percent to 34 percent).7 Furthermore, Pew Research had similar findings – 61 percent of all Americans either support the current reform proposals or want Congress to keep working toward a solution to achieve reform.

Why is support rising? My guess is that it's related to Obama's emergence as the primary advocate of reform. For months, the message was mired in Congressional sloppiness and deal-making. Obama is far more popular than Congress, and he commands a stronger platform to communicate the virtues of reform. The best way to win the battle for public opinion is to pass the bill. Then you get a signing ceremony, media coverage of how the legislation will work (the details are popular) rather than the grimy lawmaking process, and a chance to unify support among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents who have felt the bill doesn't go far enough.

There are two ways to get health care reform through the House. The first is to try to minimize the number of Democrats who defect over abortion along with Bart Stupak, while flipping an equal number of Democrats who voted against the first bill (but might favor an approach more like the Senate bill.) The upside of this plan is that it's procedurally pretty simple. The downside is that it requires turning Nos into Yesses, which is the hardest political sell for Democrats.

The second way is to make a deal with Stupak. And it sounds like Stupak is receptive:

Rep. Bart Stupak said he expects to resume talks with House leaders this week in a quest for wording that would impose no new limits on abortion rights but also would not allow use of federal money for the procedure.

"I'm more optimistic than I was a week ago," Stupak said in an interview between meetings with constituents in his northern Michigan district. He was hosting a town hall meeting Monday night at a local high school.

"The president says he doesn't want to expand or restrict current law (on abortion). Neither do I," Stupak said. "That's never been our position. So is there some language that we can agree on that hits both points — we don't restrict, we don't expand abortion rights? I think we can get there."

The political upside here is clear: Stupak's supporters all votes for the original bill, so they have little to gain by flip-slopping and a ton to lose if reform goes down. What I don't understand yet is how the procedure would work. I doubt they can change any abortion language through a reconciliation bill. So would the plan be to pass the Senate bill through the House, pass a reconciliation patch, and then pass a third bill handling abortion? Or do they imagine some deal involving an executive order, a vote that may not take effect, or something else? I'd love to hear exactly what they're negotiating over.

National Review editor Rich Lowry makes the case that Republicans can repeal health care reform if it passes:

Obama's original choice for health-care czar, Tom Daschle, warned Democrats long ago that bulldozing reform through on a narrow basis would make it liable to repeal. He cited the example of Australia, where reforms were passed, repealed, and passed again throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In the U.S., Obamacare-style insurance reforms were passed, then fully or partially overturned in Kentucky, New Hampshire, and Washington after those states suffered spiraling premiums and insurance-market meltdowns.

I don't know anything about Australian health care reform, and I suspect Lowry doesn't either. This article in Health Affairs about the Australian system suggests that his analogy is a very poor one. The Australian parties have jostled over the shape of health care reform -- conservatives favor an Obama-style program relying on private insurance, and liberals favor more of a Medicare-type approach -- but universal health care was never repealed:

Labor’s election victory in late 1972 led to the establishment of Medibank, a compulsory and universal health insurance system many of whose features are incorporated in the current Medicate system. Opposed by the organized medical professions and by non-Labor state governments, full implementation of the program in all states was delayed until October 1975, when the last state signed a Medibank agreement to accept the carrot of fifty-fifty hospital cost sharing with the federal government. In December of the same year, Labor was defeated by the Liberal/ Country coalition. In the election campaign, the leader of the Liberal party promised to maintain the popular new Medibank system, despite his party’s former opposition. The promise lasted less than a year, with changes in October 1976 heralding a series of policy changes that had effectively dismantled Medibank by the time Labor again won office in 1983.

The major modifications to Medibank were designated as Medibank II, III, and so on, but while the program retained the original name, it came to look quite different with each of the conservative government’s revisions. These changes both supported the ideological views of the government in power and formed part of its macroeconomic strategy. Changes were justified in terms of freedom of choice (of private insurance as an alternative to Medibank) and of reintroducing markets into health care.

More importantly, policy change is procedurally simple in Australia -- unlike the United States, which has multiple checks and balances plus a supermajority requirement to implement changes like repealing health care. Australia could completely re-write its health care system with a simple flip of party control, but that can't happen in the U.S. (We'll make some conservative advocates of Senate reform yet.)

Second, Lowry is utterly incorrect that "Obama-style insurance reforms" have been passed in Kentucky, New Hampshire, and Washington. Lowry's talking about state plans to just impose a small part of Obamacare -- regulations requiring that insurers not discriminate against people with preexisting conditions. As advocates of comprehensive reform have been saying, when you try to impose piecemeal regulatory reforms without bringing everybody into the system and subsidizing coverage for those who can't afford it, the whole system quickly falls apart. This is an example of the failure of reforms Obama's opponents have urged him to do as an alternative to what he is actually proposing.

The closest thing to Obamacare in the United States is the plan enacted in Massachusetts. It was put into place by Mitt Romney, who National Review endorsed for president in 2004, and is still defended by current Tea Party darling Scott Brown. In the last poll, 11% of Masschusetts residents favored repeal. I don't think it's going anywhere.

On top of that, in every other advanced nation, universal health care schemes (almost all of which are far more government-intensive than Obama's plan) are durable and popular. Conservative parties in such countries run on slogans like "Tories Will Cut The Deficit, Not The NHS." Lowry might argue that the United States is "exceptional," and perhaps Massachusetts isn't really part of America. But the same phenomenon has happened here with Medicare, a single-payer health care plan right-wing which Republicans are currently trying to protect by imposing a new supermajority requirement to cut a single dollar from it.

Medicare is different than Obama's plan, and not just because it's far more left-wing in its design. Medicare enjoyed a great deal of Republican support in 1965, wheras today's far more partisan and right-wing version of the GOP unanimously opposes Obama's considerably more moderate plan. Lowry focuses on the fact that Medicare's Republican support protected Medicare. I think the more important dynamics is that it protected Republicans from the accusation of opposing Medicare. If health care reform passes, Democrats are going to have a clean shot at Republicans  for years or even decades to come. The principle of universal coverage may be difficult to enact in a political system gripped by stasis and special interest capture. But, once in place, allowing all citizens access to regular medical care strikes nearly everybody as an obvious requirement of civilized society.

Harvard economist David Cutler today goes through the ten possible ways to control medical costs, and grades President Obama's plan. Bottom line:

So reform gets full credit on six of the 10 ideas, partial credit on three others, and no credit on one. The area of no credit (a public option) is because Republicans opposed the idea. One area receives only partial credit because of Democratic opposition (malpractice reform) and two other areas reflect general hesitancy to increase taxes (taxing Cadillac plans and taxing drivers of obesity).

Why is reform viewed so negatively? In part, it may reflect the perfect being the enemy of the good. If the only passing grade is 10 out of 10, then reform clearly fails. But given where the Republican Party is on a public option, no reform will get a passing grade. If both parties were willing to raise taxes and Republicans negotiated malpractice reform for their overall support, we could probably get a nine out of 10.

Cutler also makes an argument that's been mostly lost in this debate: the administration's multiple programs to nudge medicine toward more efficient practices don't get "scored" as saving money by the Congressional Budget Office because they're new, but that doesn't mean they won't work:

Reform is also viewed negatively because official scorekeepers do not believe anything on this list other than reducing prices will save much money. The Congressional Budget Office has consistently estimated that policies built around changing incentives and thus encouraging more efficient care will not have any effect on cost trends. My own calculations, mirrored by other observers and a host of business and provider groups, suggest that the reforms will save nearly $600 billion over the next decade and even more in the subsequent one.

Mark Halperin and Michael Moore have columns that, oddly enough, express the same essential delusion about American politics. The delusion is that political outcomes are primarily determined by presidential style. Moore's column is a populist fantasy that Obama could have enacted appreciably more left-wing policies if he simply demanded them of Congress. Here's Moore imagining himself as chief of staff:

you and I are going to be up at 5 in the morning, 7 days a week and I am going to get you pumped up for battle every single day (see photo). Each morning you and I will do 100 jumping jacks and you will repeat after me:

"THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ELECTED ME, NOT THE REPUBLICANS, TO RUN THE COUNTRY! I AM IN CHARGE! I WILL ORDER ALL OBSTRUCTIONISTS OUTTA MY WAY! IF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE DON'T LIKE WHAT I'M DOING THEY CAN THROW MY ASS OUT IN 2012. IN THE MEANTIME, I CALL THE SHOTS ON THEIR BEHALF! NOW, CONGRESS, DROP AND GIVE ME 50!!"

Then we will put on our jogging sweats and run up to Capitol Hill. We will take names, kick butts, and then take some more names. If we have to give a few noogies or half-nelson's, then so be it. In our pockets we will have a piece of paper to show the pansy Dems just how much they won by in 2008 -- and the poll results that show the majority of Americans oppose the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and want the bankers punished. Like drill sergeants, we will get right up in their faces and ask them, "WHAT PART OF THE PUBLIC MANDATE DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND, SOLDIER?!! DROP AND GIVE ME 50!"

Halperin, meanwhile, argues that Obama has mistakenly followed George W. Bush's organizational and personnel-related mistakes. It's not so much wrong as wildly mistaken about what actually drives political outcomes. Halperin is expressing the dominant drama critic style of political journalism, which downplays or ignores fundamentals and focuses on minor dramas.

Jonathan Bernstein counters:

While I'm ready to criticize Obama when he deserves it, I think most of the recent chatter (the Rahm stuff, the NYT Axelrod piece) derive from one straight line that goes from the economy to Obama's approval ratings to a search for a scapegoat, without any pause to consider whether the administration is responsible for those approval ratings.  Indeed, I think a far better argument could be made that Obama's approval ratings are higher than the economic situation would predict; in other words, I think he's doing a pretty good job with the spin portions of the presidency.

Obama's political choices are obviously neither perfect nor meaningless. The question those who assert that various political blunderings have caused Obama to fail need to answer is: given economic conditions, what level of popularity would you expect given competent political tactics?

Republican spokesman Michael Goldfarb:

“I was excited about Palin; I’m more excited about Liz,” he says. “The same sort of excitement you get when you hear her father, except she’s this petite blonde with five kids … There’s just something about her. You see that response across the activist portion of the party. It’s the response you saw to Palin … She gets people worked up. She connects to people. She is in harmony with where the base seems to be. She’s right on the issues.

“You have a little crush on her,” he gushes. “It’s hard not to.”

It's not really that hard.

(hat tip: Andrew Sullivan.)