In 1994, when they were killing Bill Clinton's health care plan, Republicans promised over and over they just wanted to do it right. Start fresh and pass a real health care plan without all the bad socialist stuff:

"We don't have to do it all this year," [Bob Dole] said in the closing address to committee members. "We don't have to do any of it this year. You know, Congress meets every year.

"I see a lot of bright spots to (acting) next year." ...

"If they come up with something I can live with, I would support it, " said California state party Chairman Tirso del Junco, a surgeon. "But I do not believe that the plans presently on the table would be approved by the American people. To rush this through is bad news."

Of course, the Clinton plan died, and Republicans proceeded to do absolutely squat for the next fifteen years.

This year, when they're doing everything possible to kill President Obama's health care plan, Republicans again insist they just want to start over fresh, have a chance to enact a real bipartisan plan. Why do they say that? This is why:

I don't put much stock in the public's ability to really define "comprehensive" reform. But it's pretty clear that the Republican pretense to really want to do reform, only just not this reform and not right now, is rooted in an understanding that their real position does not reflect public sentiment. There's been an enormous amount of bluster about popular repudiation of the Democratic health care plan. If Republicans truly thought the public shared their beliefs, they wouldn't be talking constantly about starting over and doing it right in a bipartisan fashion.

I've been critical of Rahm Emanuel recently. But this line of attack seems a little unpersuasive:

Democrats in Congress are holding White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel accountable for his part in the collapse of healthcare reform. ...

The lawmaker said Emanuel misjudged the Senate by focusing on only a few Republicans, citing Maine Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins as too narrow a pool.

“In the Senate, you have to anchor in the middle and build out," said the lawmaker.

“They just wanted to win," the source said of Emanuel and other White House strategists. "Their plan was to keep all the Democrats together and work like hell to get Snowe and Collins. The Senate doesn't work that way. You need a radius of 10 to 12 from the other side if you're going to have a shot."

That's what they tried! The White House let Max Baucus spend months trying to woo Charles Grassley, Orrin Hatch, and Mike Enzi, in addition to Snowe and Collins. All signaled very strongly that they would not cooperate with any significant reform. In the end, Snowe voted for the Senate Finance Committee bill, then backed away, eventually voting to declare the individual mandate (a cornerstone of the bill she voted for) unconstitutional.

If there's one thing that's clear in retrospect about the health care negotiations, it's that pressure from the GOP leadership and base made any Republican participation in health care reform impossible. Anything that Obama supported was going to be seen as socialism. The Senate bill ended up more conservative than the bipartisan Dole-Baker-Daschle proposal. It's like Romneycare, the plan that enjoys the continued support of Scott Brown, but with delivery reforms to control costs. And they see it  as socialism. It's astonishing to me that there are Democrats who think the answer to this problem would be to try to enlist the support of Republicans even more conservative than the ones who spurned them.

George Packer has taken some heat for mourning the way new media have crowded out time for books:

Marc Ambinder, The Atlantic’s very good politics blogger, was asked by Michael Kinsley to describe his typical day of information consumption, otherwise known as reading. Ambinder’s day begins and ends with Twitter, and there’s plenty of Twitter in between. No mention of books, except as vacation material via the Kindle. I’m sure Ambinder still reads books when he’s not on vacation, but it didn’t occur to him to include them in his account, and I’d guess that this is because they’re not a central part of his reading life.

And he’s not alone. Just about everyone I know complains about the same thing when they’re being honest—including, maybe especially, people whose business is reading and writing. They mourn the loss of books and the loss of time for books. It’s no less true of me, which is why I’m trying to place a few limits on the flood of information that I allow into my head. The other day I had to reshelve two dozen books that my son had wantonly pulled down, most of them volumes from college days. I thumbed idly through a few urgently underlined pages of Kierkegaard’s “Concluding Unscientific Postscript,” a book that electrified me during my junior year, and began to experience something like the sensation middle-aged men have at the start of softball season, when they try sprinting to first base after a winter off. What a ridiculous effort it took!

Speaking for the techno-utopian set, Matthew Yglesias fires back:

A person who chose to never read a single piece of post-1960 fiction could still live a rich and full life. He could even adopt a sneering attitude toward people who insisted on reading new novels. And people who subscribe to cable television (later: DVRs). And people who buy VCRs (later: DVD players). And people who read blogs (later: Twitter feeds). But what does it really amount to? To take advantage of new opportunities to do new things means, by definition, to reduce the extent to which one takes advantage of old opportunities to do old things. One shouldn’t deny that the losses involved are real—of course they are—but simply point out that it’s unavoidable. To say, “aha! this is the thing—this Twitter, these blogs—that’s crowded books out of my life” is a kind of confusion. Life is positively full of these little time-crunches. The fact that something displaces something of value doesn’t mean that it has no value, it just means that it’s new. To displace old things is in the nature of new things, and to cite the fact of displacement as the problem with the new thing really is just to object to novelty.

Yglesias is missing Packer's point. Packer is not making a version of the complaint that "nobody listens to records anymore and records are really cool." He's saying that he and many of his friends are reading fewer books and are unhappy about that fact. People who have DVRs don't complain about the fact that they don't watch their VCR anymore. Their unhappiness suggests that something more is going on here than people substituting a newer and better technology for an older one.

Packer is suggesting two factors at work. First, there's so much information to keep up with, as emails and blog posts and Twitter messages keep flying in, that people find themselves on an information treadmill they can't get off. Second, the constant imbibing of this information can alter our mental habits in such a way as to make long-form reading more difficult even when we do have the time. That's the point Packer is making when he says that he pulled out a volume of Kierkegaard and couldn't believe he had once been able to immerse himself in it. Maybe twentysomethings have managed to avoid this. Packer's complaint rings true to me.

Marc Ambinder:

"If the primaries were this year, I suspect she'd be nominated," a senior adviser to one of Sarah Palin's potential rivals confides.

One the one hand, Palin is less likely than any of the plausible Republican alternatives to beat President Obama in 2012. On the other hand, if conditions are bad enough -- say, persistently high unemployment -- even Palin could win. And that could be, to put it mildly, a historical disaster.

Former Dick Cheney aid Cesar Conda has a post at National Review announcing that he has switched his loyalties in the Florida Senate race from Charlie Crist, once seen as the prohibitive favorite, to Marco Rubio, conservative darling and now all-but-inevitable Republican nominee:

Last May, I wrote about why I thought Florida governor Charlie Crist was an acceptable fiscal conservative (the Cato Institute had given him an "A" on its Fiscal Policy Report Card) and why I believed he gave Republicans the best chance to retain Florida's U.S. Senate seat.  Even though I was chided by fellow conservatives for saying something favorable about the governor, who had embraced Obama's nearly $1 trillion stimulus package (which by the way has failed to reduce unemployment), I believed that a more important goal was to stop the Democrats from strengthening their filibuster-proof Senate majority.  I subsequently donated to Crist's Senate campaign and even met with him once to discuss tax- and budget-policy ideas.

But since then, I've changed my mind and made the switch to Marco Rubio.  For one thing, Governor Crist's fiscal-responsibility score has fallen.  According to Cato's Chris Edwards in an October e-mail to the St. Petersburg Times:  "But as the report's author, I am concerned that the governor has fallen off the fiscal responsibility horse since the report was written in mid-2008. In particular, Crist approved a huge $2.2 billion tax increase for the fiscal 2010 budget, even though he had promised that $12 billion in federal 'stimulus' money showered on Florida over three years would obviate the need for tax increases." But more important, I had a chance to meet with Rubio right before Christmas. He struck me as someone who was geniunely interested in nitty-gritty of public policy; a true policy wonk who had championed 100 reform ideas when he was the Speaker of the Florida house.

Charlie Crist is not going to have a lot of Republican friends left. My favorite part of this post, aside from the rank opportunism -- does anybody think they'd be reading this if Crist still led by fifty points? -- is the description of Rubio as a "true policy wonk." Here's an example of the true wonk applying his great intellect to one of the issues of the day:

Earlier this week, I spoke out against President Obama’s wrongheaded decision to place an onerous and punitive new tax on the financial institutions Americans rely on to loan them money to buy homes, safeguard their money, and fund their businesses. Since then, I have been subjected to vicious attacks from Democratic party operatives, liberal bloggers, and even some in the media. Tired old stories long ago proven meritless were rehashed with new sinister headlines. Even the bank that gave me a line of credit on my home was dragged into this.

This is life in Obama, Reid, and Pelosi’s America, where not only is free enterprise attacked, but so too is anyone who dares to defend it. ...

President Obama’s bank tax is about finding new ways for the Democrats who control Congress to confiscate more money to pay for their big-government takeover. It won’t recoup money for the taxpayer because taxpayers will ultimately pay for this tax in the form of higher costs of banking, lost jobs, and a freeze of economic activity. This tax is a cynical and intellectually lazy attempt at pitting the American people against American enterprise in the hopes that we will all forget about this president’s and this Congress’s failures in addressing job losses, reckless spending, and soaring debt.

What a policy wonk! It's such a loss for the world that he's running for public office rather than devising brilliant new insights as chairman of the Harvard Economics department or something.

I still find it strange how little understood President Obama's political method is. The first person I know who identified it is Mark Schmitt, over two years ago. At the time, many liberals viewed Obama's inclusive rhetoric as a sign that he intended to capitulate the liberal agenda for the sake of winning Republican agreement. Schmitt disagreed. Obama's language is highly conciliatory, he wrote, but the method isn't:

One way to deal with that kind of bad-faith opposition is to draw the person in, treat them as if they were operating in good faith, and draw them into a conversation about how they actually would solve the problem. If they have nothing, it shows. And that's not a tactic of bipartisan Washington idealists -- it's a hard-nosed tactic of community organizers, who are acutely aware of power and conflict. It's how you deal with people with intractable demands -- put ‘em on a committee.

Last year I wrote a column making a similar point. Obama uses a similar approach toward Republicans as foreign enemies like the Iranian regime: take them up on their claim to some shared goal (nuclear disarmament, health care reform), elide their preferred red herrings, engage them seriously, and then expose their disingenuousness:

This apparent paradox is one reason Obama's political identity has eluded easy definition. On the one hand, you have a disciple of the radical community organizer Saul Alinsky turned ruthless Chicago politician. On the other hand, there is the conciliatory post-partisan idealist. The mistake here is in thinking of these two notions as opposing poles. In reality it's all the same thing. Obama's defining political trait is the belief that conciliatory rhetoric is a ruthless strategy.

Obama health care summit is a classic example of the Obama method. Once again, skeptics are viewing it as a plot that depends on securing Republican cooperation. Here, for example, is the New York Times analysis:

One big question about President Obama’s bipartisan health care summit, scheduled for Feb. 25, is whether American voters will really get a full and open competition of ideas and emerge with a clearer sense of whether they support or oppose the various proposals put forward by Republicans and Democrats.

Skeptics around Washington are already warning that the summit will be nothing more than Kabuki theater, allowing each side to grandstand on television while providing little in the way of substantive debate or additional understanding for the folks watching back home.

That's not the point. Obama knows perfectly well that the Republicans have no serious proposals to address the main problems of the health care system and have no interest (or political room, given their crazy base) in handing him a victory of any substance. Obama is bringing them in to discuss health care so he can expose this reality.

I'm not saying this is some kind of genius maneuver. I'm not even saying it will work. (I wouldn't bet against it, though.) I'm just saying that this -- not starting over, and not pleading for bipartisan cover -- is what Obama is trying to accomplish.

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--Matthew Yglesias puts former Rumsfeld speechwriter Marc Thiessen on the couch

--David Brooks likes Joe Biden

--The Democrats' bipartisan health care plan

--John McCain's primary challenge

The Washington Post has an article today about Democratic efforts to repeal the filibuster. The article is evidence of how far reformers have to go to make headway against elite opinion.

The main theme of the article is that majority parties regularly threaten to abolish the filibuster, but later come to their senses when they find themselves in the minority:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) chuckled as he recently reflected on his effort, five years ago, to change nearly century-old filibuster rules.

"God, that was a dumb idea," McConnell said.

Back in 2005, McConnell had "majority" in his leadership title, and Republicans -- confident about their majority status -- pushed unsuccessfully to obliterate filibusters of judicial nominees. Now the shoe is on the other foot.

First of all, the filibuster rules are not a "century old." The rules have changed over time, and more importantly, so has the practice. The imposition of a routine supermajority requirement is new, as is the practice of massive blocking of low-level presidential appointments. When Medicare was first debated, the Democrats did not face a supermajority requirement.

Second, there is an important difference between what the Republicans were attempting in 2005 and what some Democrats would like to see now. Republicans wanted to abolish the filibuster only for judicial nominations. But judicial nominations are the one aspect of policy where a filibuster can be justified. The rationale for majority rule is that the majority party should have a chance to enact its program, if it can win the support of a majority in two chambers plus the president. If that agenda proves unpopular, the public can vote out the Congress and president and overturn that agenda, also by majority vote. Judicial nominees, by contrast, have lifetime appointments, so some protection against irresponsible majorities is justifiable. (I'm perfectly happy to just have a clean abolition of the filibuster, but keeping it for everything but judicial nominations is the worst possible policy.)

Third, the article treats Senate reform as a purely partisan exercise, as if there were no good government rationale for it. This premise comes through most clearly in this passage:

Now many Democrats are hoping that if health-care reform dies in a messy filibuster, there will be a groundswell of support for rules changes. But this comes as independent handicappers predict Democrats could suffer net losses of four to seven seats in the November midterm elections. In 2012 and 2014, Democrats have to defend twice as many seats as Republicans, making it possible any abolition of the filibuster in the year ahead could hand over a majority-wins-all power to the GOP in a couple years.

In fact, many of the liberals who oppose the filibuster also opposed it when Republicans had the majority. Here's a 2005 column by Jonathan Cohn carefully arguing why liberals were mistaken to defend the sanctity of the filibuster. And here's a 2005 column by me ridiculing the hypocrisy of those same liberals who were defending the filibuster.

The possibility that Republicans may gain control of the Senate isn't the main impediment to reforming the filibuster. It's the best chance. Right now, Republicans are defending the filibuster, or more frequently simply ignoring any principled arguments against it. But they have no chance to implement anything resembling a coherent agenda in a world where everything can be stopped with 60 votes. In fact, if Democrats follow the Republican practice of wantonly obstructing even uncontroversial bills and appointments merely to throw sand into the machinery of governing -- and I hope they will -- Republicans may come to see the virtues of a reformed system.

The fairest way to abolish the filibuster is to set the abolition for some point in the future -- at least four years, and perhaps eight, so that neither side can be sure which party will benefit. A system where one Senator can put a halt to scores of presidential appointments is not a rational way to advance the public interest.

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The Hill reports,"House Democrats say leadership has their work cut out in convincing the public to support a tax increase on those making more than $250,000."

Really? Three-quarters of Americans favor raising taxes on Americans who earn more than $250,000 a year. Higher taxes on the rich is among the most durably popular elements of the liberal policy agenda. Pretty much any way you phrase it, Americans want to sock it to the rich. Americans want to tax the rich to pay for health care reform. They think upper-income earners are paying too little:

File all this away for the next time Republicans win power. They'll claim it's a mandate to implement their agenda, will will consist primarily or entirely of upper-income tax cuts. But that is not going to be what people really want.

As for the Democrats, I don't doubt that they're hearing complaints from their high-income constituents. But that isn't the same thing as having trouble convincing "the public."

Steve Clemons, with whom I worked at the New America Foundation in 1999, has some advice for President Obama:

Set up a Team B with diverse political and national security observers like Tom Daschle, John Podesta, Brent Scowcroft, Arianna Huffington, Fareed Zakaria, Katrina vanden Heuvel, John Harris, James Fallows, Chuck Hagel, Strobe Talbott, James Baker, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and others to give you a no-nonsense picture of what is going on.

That seems, ah, problematic. The only two people who could actually be useful here, Daschle and Podesta, already sit in the outer-advice circle. Then you've got some journalists who won't (and can't) get involved in politics, along with a greatest-hits collection of left-wingers and hard-core "realists." I not only ail to see how this would solve Obama's problem, I can't think of any kind of problem that could be solved by assembling this panel.

This is pretty much the Republican program for you:

My favorite is budget cuts crossed out, replaced with tax cuts. Yup, that's it in a nutshell.

As I said before, President Obama's bipartisan health care panel, which he unveiled yesterday, serves two basic purposes. The first is to expose the GOP as lacking any feasible solutions to the problems of access and cost control. The second is to help answer the "backroom deal" perception. An example of this perception comes from Politico:

Perhaps more interesting was the discussion about whether Dems should try to pass reform using reconciliation. There is a concern that the maneuver will be viewed by the public as an attempt to change the rules mid-game, which could hurt Democrats politically, the source said. And reconciliation would require the same kind of dealmaking that Democrats used to pass the Senate bill -- deals like the so-called Cornhusker Kickback that further soured the public on reform. It's a concern that moderate Democrats have expressed for weeks, especially as many Americans view the Massachusetts election as a repudiation of health reform.

Of course, none of these concerns make any sense. First, reconciliation isn't "changing the rules," it's using a thirty year-old rule, the provision of which was put in place specifically for health care last year. Second, yes, it will require "dealmaking," but all legislation involves dealmaking. That's not a reason to abandon reconciliation, it's a reason to abandon passing any law. As to whether reconciliation will involve grubby parochial deals like the Nebraska handout -- well, the easy answer for that is don't include any more of those handouts. The good news is that reconciliation makes it easier to avoid that sort of thing, since it avoids the 60 vote requirement that lets every Democratic Senator demand a king's ransom.

The "Massachusetts election" argument is equally vacuous. I guess the idea here is that Scott Brown's election was some kind of representation of the popular will, a proxy national election on health care reform, and Democrats would be flouting democracy to disobey it. But one special election shouldn't bind the other 534 members of Congress. And Brown, as I argued, opposed health care reform specifically and repeatedly on what he called "parochial" grounds: Massachusetts already has a plan like this, so why should they pay for the rest of the country to enjoy the benefits of a program their state already has? Whatever the merits of that argument, it's hardly one that should bind the rest of the country.

Merits aside, clearly Democrats are spooked by the fear that using reconciliation to patch the Senate health care bill will be seen as somehow sneaky or undemocratic. That's what Obama's panel is about. You have something that's open and televised, and demonstrate that his plan was arrived at because it's the most minimalistic way to achieve what most people see as necessary changes to health care. Then you take out the Cornhusker kickback, fix the House-Senate disagreements and pass the thing.