Bart Stupak sounds like a man who has backed himself into a corner, realizes he's wrong (which he is), but can't quite admit it:

The ideal outcome, Stupak said, might be for the House Democratic leadership to get the votes they need without him and for the bill to pass.

“You know, maybe for me that’s the best: I stay true to my principles and beliefs,” he said, and “vote no on this bill and then it passes anyways. Maybe for me is the best thing to do.”...

“It’s caused a lot of internal conflict. ‘Am I doing the right thing,’ you know?” he said. “I believe everyone should have healthcare. In all my correspondence — I’ve been saying for years — it’s a right, not a privilege.”

You may, or should, be familiar with Todd Gitlin's terrific book "The Sixties." It turns out he also has a lot of fascinating observations about the 70's as well:

Bad ideas traveled fast without even the benefit of the Internet. Heavy drugs helped (though Nixon didn’t seem to need anything more than alcohol). Conspiracy theories spawned theories of who benefited from conspiracy theories. There was gold at the end of Gravity’s Rainbow. Even Oliver Stone was not necessary. For example, Wheen notes, “It was A Clockwork Orange which convinced [Arthur] Bremer that he must shoot George Wallace [because he couldn’t get close to his first choice, Nixon], and Bremer’s assassination diaries then inspired Paul Schrader to create the character of Travis Bickle. So: without Bremer there would be no Taxi Driver, and without Taxi Driver John Hinckley Jr. wouldn’t have become so obsessed by Jodie Foster that, to prove himself a worthy rival to Bickle, he shot Ronald Reagan.” He’s not making this stuff up.

The whole review is worth a read. Also, this gives me an idea for Gitlin's next project.

Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson explains why it's fiscally irresponsible for Democrats to cover the uninsured even if they pay for that coverage with savings and new taxes:

[W]e have learned that the president and congressional leaders are not serious about entitlement reform. The problem here is not only accounting tricks and the assumption of unprecedented courage on the part of future Congresses when it comes to Medicare cuts -- though these are bad enough. The main source of irresponsibility is that the revenue-gaining measures in the health bill -- particularly Medicare cuts and taxing "Cadillac" health plans -- would be used to create a new entitlement instead of repairing an existing one. The greatest cost of the current reform is its opportunity cost.

The unfunded liability of America's current entitlements is more than $100 trillion. Medicare will eventually require a massive infusion of cash under a congressional entitlement fix. Both the Congressional Budget Office and the Medicare actuary have pressed the point that Medicare savings can be used to pay future Medicare benefits or to finance new spending outside Medicare -- not both. When the entitlement crisis arrives, Obama will have already spent much of the resources required to meet it, leaving growth-killing new taxes as the main remaining option.

So Gerson thinks it's irresponsible for the government to take on the responsibility of providing health insurance to 30 million Americans who lack it, even if it's completely paid for, because other liabilities are not completely paid for. This is the same man who relentlessly champions the Bush administration's creation of a new entitlement in Medicare that was 100% deficit financed.

Now, not all conservatives are as wildly hypocritical as Gerson, because not all of them favored the prescription drug bill. But Gerson is espousing a common conservative position: They think it's fiscally irresponsible to cover the uninsured, even if the measure saves the government money, because it doesn't solve every future fiscal liability the government faces. The logic here is useful in assessing the GOP's reassuring argument that they just want to go step by step, first controlling costs, and then covering the uninsured. Gerson makes the case in unusually blunt terms. He's saying, first you have to find $100 trillion in savings for Medicare and Social Security. And then maybe we can talk about the uninsured.

Let's pretend that could happen. Okay, we've permanently solved the long-term liabilities of Social Security and Medicare. Let's try to imagine how the Republicans would behave in a situation where they believed, or at least claimed, that all the long term needs of the federal budget had been solved.

Actually, we don't have to imagine. It happened in 2001. Facing a temporary surplus swollen by the height of an economic and stock market boom, Republicans claimed -- against Democratic objections -- that the federal government would soon completely pay off the national debt, and it was therefore time for a huge permanent, regressive tax cut. Here is George W. Bush delivering a major address to Congress that I believe Gerson had a hand in:

We have increased our budget at a responsible 4 percent. We have funded our priorities. We paid down all the available debt. We have prepared for contingencies. And we still have money left over.

Yogi Berra once said, "When you come to a fork in the road, take it."

(LAUGHTER)

Now we come to a fork in the road. We have two choices. Even though we have already met our needs, we could spend the money on more and bigger government. That's the road our nation has traveled in recent years.

Last year, government spending shot up 8 percent. That's far more than our economy grew, far more than personal income grew and far more than the rate of inflation. If you continue on that road, you will spend the surplus and have to dip into Social Security to pay other bills. Unrestrained government spending is a dangerous road to deficits, so we must take a different path.

(APPLAUSE)

The other choice is to let the American people spend their own money to meet their own needs.

(APPLAUSE)

I hope you'll join me in standing firmly on the side of the people. You see, the growing surplus exists because taxes are too high, and government is charging more than it needs.

Notice that covering the uninsured did not count among those needs.

Basically, the New Yorker cartoon above summarizes the Republican position on covering the uninsured. How about never -- is never good for you?

James P. Gavin at National Review thinks the term "McCarthyism" is bigoted:

McCarthy is an ethnically identifiable Irish Catholic name, yet it describes despicable political behavior that transcends ethnic and religious backgrounds. No other American ethnic, religious, or racial group has been so stigmatized for so long, with so little public outcry, by a word that is acceptable in polite society. ..

Consider the following thought experiment: In 1953, around the same time the term “McCarthyism” was coined, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for conspiracy to commit treason by passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Suppose that some hard-right anti-Communist polemicists had coined the word “Rosenbergism” to describe such acts of treason. We know what would have happened: Men and women of good will — left and right, Christian and Jew — would have raised an immediate and justifiable uproar over the slur. Editorials would have quite properly pointed out that the word served to degrade politics by attaching ethnic connotations to a terrible act — treason — that transcends ethnicity. There would be thundering sermons from pulpits from coast to coast reminding congregations that even if the word was used merely in a descriptive sense, its ethnic specificity put it beyond the pale. Why didn’t this happen to “McCarthyism”?

Right, like if somebody with a Jewish name like "Marx" started a political ideology, concern for Jewish sensitivity would definitely preclude society from giving that ideology a label involving that name. I would also suggest that Gavin have a talk with his fellow conservatives about the term "McGovernite."

I love right-wing political correctness.

By the way, searching for a photo to accompany this item, I entered the term "McCarthy" into a Google image search, assuming Joseph would comprise the vast majority of them. Not quite. Of the 20 images on the first page, 3 were of this man:

One was of this man:

One was of this man, who I've never heard of:

And 15 featured this woman:

Her career shows no sign of having suffered due to a stigmatizing association with right-wing witchhunts.

A couple days ago, I quoted a bit from Dana Milbank's column, where he showed that Tea Party honcho Dick Armey's historical knowledge is less than firm:

A member of the audience passed a question to the moderator, who read it to Armey: How can the Federalist Papers be an inspiration for the tea party, when their principal author, Alexander Hamilton, "was widely regarded then and now as an advocate of a strong central government"?

Historian Armey was flummoxed by this new information. "Widely regarded by whom?" he challenged, suspiciously. "Today's modern ill-informed political science professors? . . . I just doubt that was the case in fact about Hamilton."

Alas, for Armey, it was the case. Hamilton favored a national bank, presidents and senators who served for life and state governors appointed by the president.

As a historian, Armey was all hat and no cattle. But at least he had a good hat -- a "downright stylish and manly" Stetson 200X beaver, which he donned for the audience.

Rick Hertzberg, who is not a historical illiterate, fleshes this out a bit more:

By the way, having state governors federally appointed was Hamilton’s fallback position. He actually favored eliminating the states altogether and replacing them with freshly-drawn administrative districts of roughly equal population. This would have been an excellent idea for many reasons, one of which is that it would have avoided the absurd business of cities (e.g., New York) that are stuck in a multi-jurisdictional “tri-state area.”

No doubt Armey is equally unaware that Hamilton favored a federal “negative”—that is, investing Congress with the power to nullify state laws at will. Madison was on board with a federal negative, too. Jemmy was also against the two-senators-per-state nonsense. He argued that states with bigger populations should have more senators, an idea he called “proportional representation.”

You won’t find this stuff in the Federalist Papers, which were written after the Constitution’s text was a fait accompli. Once the deals were done, Hamilton and Madison (and Jay) loyally sucked it up and presented a united front. But what they wrote for post-convention public consumption tells you very little about the government they would have designed if they hadn’t had to make so many compromises with hard-core slavocrats and wee-state paranoids.

And TNR alum Noah Kristula-Green captures a great photo at yesterday's Tea Party Rally:

Of course, you could probably dig up an anti-government-sounding Hamilton quote if you really tried, but this isn't a very good one. Hamilton is defending "a zeal for firmness of government" and opposing the "zeal for people's rights." The protester probably likes the line because she thinks "people's rights" means a right to health care. But that's not what Hamilton was getting at.

I recently wrote a TRB column arguing that the Republican position on health care has increasingly come to be defined by a belief that the issue is a matter of personal responsibility:

The core of this philosophical divide was on display in last week’s health care summit. Senator Tom Harkin, a traditional liberal, denounced policies that “allow segregation in America on the basis of your health.” Harkin’s point was that the only way to protect the sick is to pool them with the healthy. Conservatives seized upon Harkin’s remark. “Having people pay their own way,” mocked an incredulous Jeffrey Anderson, a former health care speechwriter in the Bush administration, “is apparently an injustice akin to segregating them by race or creed.”

“Pay their own way”--that gets to the heart of the party’s new vision of health as a consequence of personal morality. “I think a national health care act substitutes for a lack of personal responsibility,” complained Republican Representative Steve King last August. Newt Gingrich gloats that Americans have moved “away from the idea of government-run health care and toward more personal responsibility.”

This spirit was on display, in a rawer and cruder form, at a recent rally pitting pro- and anti-reform protestors outside the office of Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy:

At one point, fifty seconds into the video, a pro-reform protesters, whose sign indicates that he has Parkinson's disease, approaches the opposing side. One anti-reform protester shouts:

If you're looking for a handout, you're in the wrong part of town. Nothing for free, you have to work for everything you get.

Another throws a dollar at him, and yells,

I'll pay for this guy. Here you go. Start a pot. I'll decide when to give you money. Here, here you go, here's another one. Here you go.

A third protester can be heard yelling, "No handouts!"

It's a jarring video. But it also captures the heart of what animates the staunchest opposition to health care reform -- a principled opposition to the idea the fortunate should be forced to subsidize the unfortunate. A person who has Parkinson's, unless he is very affluent, is not going to be able to afford the cost of his own medical care. He is going to need to be subsidized by healthier or wealthier people -- either by being lumped in with them in an employer-based insurance pool, or getting government-provided insurance like Medicaid, or government subsidies, or the enactment of regulations that force insurers to offer him insurance at a regular price (meaning healthy people would pay higher rates.) Any way you slice it, somebody else is going to have to pay for his health care. But that's the kind of redistribution the right increasingly cannot stomach.

Charles Krauthammer says that Americans resist universal health care, in part, because we're refugees from big government Europe:

This spirit of being independent and not wanting to be controlled by the government is something that is intrinsic in America. It’s the essence of America. And it’s what distinguishes Americans who are essentially refugees of the old society in Europe. That’s why it’s always been harder to make Americans break to the yoke of government, as happened in Europe.

Matthew Yglesias replies, "My ancestors fled Europe more because of the pogroms than because of the Czar’s efforts to expand the welfare state." Likewise, Ayn Rand fled Russia to escape Bolshevik redistribution. On the other hand, my ancestors fled Russia in large part because of the onerous military draft, and now I'm a liberal hawk. (Though still opposed to Russian military aggression.)

So I'm not sure what any of this tells us. I'd chime in that those Americans most generationally close to the old European immigrants are also the most comfortable with single-payer health care. People on Medicare seem to have been broken to the yoke of big government quite comfortably. It's true that this generation tends to oppose health care reform, but their concerns deal more with not wanting to share the big government yoke with others than any desire to throw it off.

I don't usually wring my hands about partisanship, but this, per Luke Russert, is pretty extreme:

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer offered a resolution to honor the University of Maryland for making the NCAA Tournament and for having the ACC Player of the Year, as well as the Coach of the Year on the same team.

Well, California Rep. John Campbell (R) spoke against the measure because last year, Hoyer apparently pulled a resolution from the floor honoring the University of California Irvine's Men's Volleyball team for winning the 2009 national championship.

Campbell made a point of saying Maryland wasn't that special because they didn't win a national title and have only made the tournament. He then laid into the Terps for having an 8% graduation rate.

Campbell went on to ask for a recorded vote on the measure, which almost never happens. The vote started around 6:00 pm ET.

...and the obvious best way to address it. From the NBC/WSJ poll:

The survey found a 21-point enthusiasm gap between the parties, with 67% of Republicans saying they are very interested in the November elections, compared with 46% of Democrats. "If the Democrats are going to close that gap, they've got to get their people excited. And I don't see how you get those people if you vote no" on the party's health-care legislation, said Democratic pollster Peter Hart, who conducted the survey with Republican Bill McInturff.

Indeed, if they fail to pass the bill, the enthusiasm gap will probably grow.

David Leonhardt of the New York Times has a good rundown of the deficit and the political options for reducing it. I did, however, trip over this one line:

I’ll confess that I have a hard time seeing how any of this will happen in the next few years, no matter what the deficit commission recommends. Congressional Republicans have shown little willingness to consider any tax increases, and Mr. Obama has shown no indication of breaking his $250,000-and-under pledge.

The part about Republicans is an understatement. The part about Obama "showing no indication" that he'd consider new taxes for Americans making less than $250,000 -- what about the fact that he's proposing this commission in the first place? Isn't the whole idea of it to give him cover to raise taxes on Americans making less than $250,000 a year, in exchange for giving Republicans cover to cut entitlement spending?

Today's New York Times lays out Mitch McConnell's overarching strategy:

Before the health care fight, before the economic stimulus package, before President Obama even took office, Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, had a strategy for his party: use his extensive knowledge of Senate procedure to slow things down, take advantage of the difficulties Democrats would have in governing and deny Democrats any Republican support on big legislation....

For more than a year, he pleaded and cajoled to keep his caucus in line. He deployed poll data. He warned against the lure of the short-term attention to be gained by going bipartisan, and linked Republican gains in November to showing voters they could hold the line against big government.

On the major issues — not just health care, but financial regulation and the economic stimulus package, among others — Mr. McConnell has held Republican defections to somewhere between minimal and nonexistent, allowing him to slow the Democratic agenda if not defeat aspects of it. He has helped energize the Republican base, expose divisions among Democrats and turn the health care fight into a test of the Democrats’ ability to govern.

“It was absolutely critical that everybody be together because if the proponents of the bill were able to say it was bipartisan, it tended to convey to the public that this is O.K., they must have figured it out,” Mr. McConnell said about the health legislation in an interview, suggesting that even minimal Republican support could sway the public. “It’s either bipartisan or it isn’t.”

First of all, McConnell is correct. He has played his hand as well as it could be played. As he suggests, the public is not well-attuned to the details of legislation, and tends to base its opinions on broad heuristics. If they see a bill that has zero bipartisan support, and see democrats arguing amongst themselves for month after month, they will assume the Democratic plans are probably bad. So the strategy of cajoling his caucus to withhold all support has made the process more partisan and contentious, ultimately hurting Democrats.

Polls over the last year have shown the Republican Party remaining highly unpopular, but the public also taking out its frustrations on the Democrats. McConnell probably realizes that public opinion is going to focus on the majority party, and thus the dangers of seeming "too obstructionist" are minimal. The benefits of actually obstructing the majority's agenda, or at least delaying it and making it more partisan, are much higher than the costs.

Asa policy matter, it was also clear from the outset that given the Democrats' enormous majorities and the economic crisis, they were going to lose a lot of seats in 2010, especially if McConnell's political strategy succeeded. The main question was how much change they could enact during this two-year stretch. McConnell pursued a completely unprecedented strategy of filibustering everything -- low-level appointments, measures that would go on to pass 97-0, etc. -- in a simple attempt to run out the clock. This, too, has worked.

Let me be clear about something: I am not blaming McConnell. Establishment Washington tends to view these matters through a moralistic lens -- obstructionism means the minority party is too mean and selfish, and the solution is for them to start acting nice and public-spirited. That's not the right way to look at it. Electoral politics is a zero-sum competition. Most democracies have systems where the opposing parties work in open conflict to each other, and, contra David Brooks, this does not result in Hutu vs. Tutsi slaughter.

Yes, there was a long period in American politics where racial cleavages created a situation where the parties had little internal ideological cohesion, and as a result Washington developed a series of cultural norms discouraging the practice of cohesive parties maximizing their electoral self-interest. Over time, though, such social norms will never hold up. Ultimately, the parties are going to maximize their partisan self-interest as allowed under the rules. If you don't like the result, you need to change the rules.

The next time Democrats find themselves in the minority, there's going to be a lot of establishment pressure not to follow the McConnell model. Be bipartisan. Don't obstruct. That would be terrible advice. I hope that Democrats would remember 2009-2010 well enough to favor a reform of the Senate to disallow holds, the filibuster, and other counter-majoritarian tactics. But if they can't succeed in changing the rules, they should follow McConnell's example, because he has shown the way to do it.

The controversy over the "deem-and-pass" strategy will probably end very quickly. (I expect Democrats to conclude it's not worth the hassle.) But it's another telling episode in the health care saga. Conservatives have spent the last day in a fit of outrage at the prospect that House Democrats might enact the Senate health care bill and changes to it in one vote rather than two. ("We have entered a political wonderland, where the rules are whatever Democrats say they are," huffs the Wall Street Journal.

Congressional scholar Norman Ornstein has a sharp riposte:

Any veteran observer of Congress is used to the rampant hypocrisy over the use of parliamentary procedures that shifts totally from one side to the other as a majority moves to minority status, and vice versa. But I can’t recall a level of feigned indignation nearly as great as what we are seeing now from congressional Republicans and their acolytes at the Wall Street Journal, and on blogs, talk radio, and cable news. It reached a ridiculous level of misinformation and disinformation over the use of reconciliation, and now threatens to top that level over the projected use of a self-executing rule by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In the last Congress that Republicans controlled, from 2005 to 2006, Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier used the self-executing rule more than 35 times, and was no stranger to the concept of “deem and pass.” That strategy, then decried by the House Democrats who are now using it, and now being called unconstitutional by WSJ editorialists, was defended by House Republicans in court (and upheld). Dreier used it for a $40 billion deficit reduction package so that his fellow GOPers could avoid an embarrassing vote on immigration. I don’t like self-executing rules by either party—I prefer the “regular order”—so I am not going to say this is a great idea by the Democrats. But even so—is there no shame anymore?

As I said, this latest procedural outrage is likely to die down soon. Before that, though, conservatives were apoplectic that Democrats might approve health care despite opposition. Here's a disgusted reaction from Redstate:

ObamaCare is not popular.  The people don’t want it.  The people have rejected it.  Yet President Barack Obama, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) are going to ram it down the throats of the American people using a special Congressional procedure that avoids a filibuster in the Senate - The Health Care Nuclear Option.  The Obama Administration and Leaders in Congress have shown contempt for the opinions and views of the American people.  They just don’t get it and they don’t care what people think about this plan.

Here's the Journal (again):

So after election defeats in Virginia, New Jersey and even Massachusetts, and amid overwhelming public opposition, Democrats have decided to give the voters what they don't want anyway.

Ah, the glory of "progressive" governance and democratic consent.

Even David Brooks reacted with apoplexy:

The country is now split on Obama, because he is temperate, thoughtful and pragmatic, but his policies are almost all unpopular. If you aggregate the last seven polls on health care reform, 41 percent support it and 51 percent oppose.

Many Democrats, as always, are caught in their insular liberal information loop. They think the polls are bad simply because the economy is bad. They tell each other health care is unpopular because the people aren’t sophisticated enough to understand it. Some believe they can still pass health care even if their candidate, Martha Coakley, loses the Senate race in Massachusetts on Tuesday.

That, of course, would be political suicide. It would be the act of a party so arrogant, elitist and contemptuous of popular wisdom that it would not deserve to govern.

Recently, though, the polls have swung back in favor of health care reform. Last night's NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows 46 % in favor of Obama's plan and 45% opposed. The public is now split on passing Obama's bill. So what about those intense arguments about public opinion and democratic consent?

The striking thing about this debate is the degree to which Republicans have devoted the bulk of their energies to putting forth disingenuous arguments. The have deep-seated reasons to oppose health care reform, but they spend an enormous amount of time on arguments that they would never were the situation reversed. I don't doubt that there's some political benefit to this -- the GOP base already opposes health care reform on the merits, so the way to keep them whipped into a state of outrage is to produce a stream of new process arguments about how the Democrats are doing violence to the beloved system of the Founding Fathers. Swing voters, meanwhile, do favor both the general proposition of health care reform and most of the provisions of the plan, but have recoiled at the process. So there's a logic behind the constant stream of process complaints from the right. It's just created a stupid debate.