Harold Pollack is the Helen Ross Professor of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago and a Special Correspondent for The Treatment.

Raymond Carver: Collected Stories
By Raymond Carver
(Library of America, 1019 pp., $40)
 

Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life
By Carol Sklenicka
(Scribner, 578 pp., $35)

In the summer of 1984, the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami and his wife traveled to the remote coastal town of Port Angeles, Washington, to visit Raymond Carver in the glass-walled “Sky House,” overlooking the ocean, which he shared with his partner, the poet Tess Gallagher. It was more of a pilgrimage than a social call. Murakami, who had run a jazz bar in Tokyo before taking up writing six years earlier at the age of twenty-nine, admired Carver more than any other writer. Although they had never met, he considered Carver “the most valuable teacher I had.” Murakami had embarked on the epic task of translating all of Carver’s writings--stories, poems, essays--into Japanese. He had somehow concluded that Carver must be “thin and delicate,” and was surprised by his massive shoulders and big hands. As Carver sipped black tea instead of the alcohol he had sworn off after thirty years of dangerously heavy drinking, Murakami felt that his idol “sat on the sofa with his body crouched up as if to say that he had never intended to get so big.”

WASHINGTON -- The word "partisanship" is typically accompanied by the word "mindless." That's not simply insulting to partisans; it's also untrue.

If we learn nothing else in 2010, can we please finally acknowledge that our partisan divisions are about authentic principles that lead to very different approaches to governing?

One reason people are skeptical of health care reform is that they don't believe it will help reduce their insurance premiums. On Monday, President Obama will give at least some of these people reason to rethink that skepticism.

When the administration proposes a final vision for health care reform, in advance of Thursday's bipartisan meeting, it will propose giving the federal government more authority to block exorbitant premium increases, at least for people buying coverage on their own (rather than through an employer).

It's not just Anthem Blue Cross in California that wants to pass along huge premium increases to some of its customers. Today the Department of Health and Human Services is releasing a report documenting large rate hikes that Blue Cross affiliates (along with some other insurers) have sought in a half-dozen other states.

It was always going to be tricky for Congress to pass a big climate-change bill this year. And now, post-Scott Brown, the odds are looking even bleaker. A lot of panicky Dems are blanching at the thought of another knockdown legislative brawl before the midterms, and there's even been talk of a smaller "energy-only" bill that would dish out subsidies for various technologies but wouldn't set hard limits on greenhouse gases. Cap-and-trade still has its backers in the Senate, but picking up 60 votes looks increasingly daunting.

President Obama is going to address another Congressional gathering today. The audience will be more friendly this time: It will be the Senate Democratic caucus. But the stakes will be just as high as they were when Obama spoke to Republican House members last week.

Health care is bound to come up at the meeting. I assume Obama will raise it during his prepared remarks; if not, he'll get questions about it. And the big controversy right now is whether the Senate is willing to amend its bill through the budget reconciliation process. It's the only way to make changes to health care at this point, since the Republicans have vowed to filibuster the final vote--and, thanks to the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts, they have the forty-one votes necessary to sustain it. (In reconciliation, a minority can't block the final vote.) And such changes appear to be necessary, because the House has made clear it won't approve the Senate's bill without some changes.

The problem is that Senate Democrats aren't very happy about taking a reconciliation vote right now. Some worry that the move smacks of partisan politics at a time when the public wants, or says it wants, bipartisanship. Some worry it will seem like trying to bend legislative rules, at a time when voters are clearly angry about the deals Democrats made with special interest groups and some of their own members in order to pass the original bill. And some just want to be done with health care reform, because voters are clearly tired of it and want to hear about jobs instead.

The anxiety is, as you might expect, most pronounced among senators who represent more conservative states and/or are up for re-election this year. Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln, who is probably the most vulnerable Democrat running this year, has made clear she'd prefer not to take a reconciliation vote on health care. Her Arkansas colleague, Mark Pryor, has said similar things, as have Indiana Senator Evan Bayh and Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu. The Democrats can afford up to nine defections and still prevail. But you can conjure up five possible to probable "no" votes pretty quickly--in addition to Bayh, Landrieu, Lincoln, and Pryor you'd include Connecticut's Joe Lieberman.*

The best arguments for moving forward are the ones all of us have been discussing over the last week. All of these senators voted for health care reform already. Republicans will attack them for it no matter what. Their best bet is to pass the bill into law, since that will give them an accomplishment they can tout and clear tangible benefits they show to voters. (As Kevin Drum noted in a must-read analysis, this isn't merely speculative. New polling data suggests Democrats do no worse--and perhaps a little better--politically if they pass a bill. And I'd argue the poll question actually understates the jump, since there's no way for people to know how they'll vote ten months from now.)

Voting for reconciliation will also change the media narrative and clear a path for passing more legislation going forward, even with a "mere" majority of 59 votes.

But there is at least one other reason the Senate ought to go forward with reconciliation.

By sheer luck, I think I picked a fairly good time to go on vacation. Mainly what I missed is a bout of hysteria and elected Democrats coming around to the obvious. Last Wednesday, in the wake of the Coakley fiasco, I predicted that health care reform remained a better-than-even bet:

For Democrats to pass health care reform, which has already passed the House and Senate, they merely need the House to pass the Senate pass and then have both houses pass a budget reconciliation measure to iron out the outstanding disagreements. The view in official Washington, however, is that this would be Wrong. This belief comes through loud and clear in this passage in the New York Times:

Last weekend began with Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican National Committee, clinging to his job primarily via implicit racial blackmail. Steele’s tenure has consisted of a string of gaffes and managerial blunders, but Republicans had concluded that his color made him un-fireable. “You’re not going to dump the first African American chairman,” an influential party strategist told Politico, “That’s the only reason.”

WASHINGTON -- A politically shrewd Senate Democratic staff member chatting about the future of health care negotiations stopped in midsentence late Tuesday afternoon as news flashed across his computer screen. "My God," he said. "Byron Dorgan is retiring."

Harold Pollack is a professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration and Special Correspondent for The Treatment.

As we enter health reform’s final lap, critical details remain uncertain. Blue dogs and progressives must both be appeased. Critical financing issues must be resolved. House and Senate bills must be reconciled. Lots could still go wrong, but it seems likely that a 2,000 page behemoth will be thwonked onto the President’s desk. However President Obama manages the endgame to reach that point, he should roll that grand presidential desk onto Air Force One and fly it to Hope, Arkansas where he should sign that final bill.

Some of my fellow early Obama supporters may be appalled at my last sentence. You may remember the Democrats' tough nomination fight. I certainly do. I supported Barack Obama from the beginning because I was done with Bill Clinton after his lapses of personal integrity cost the nation so dearly. I was furious with both Clintons at various points in the 2008 campaign. Politics is a tough business. It could hardly be otherwise.

These disputes provide all the more reason to bring Democrats together for what promises to be a genuine historic achievement. Fifteen years ago, the Clintons took a big gamble that they could send a big package to Congress and get the thing passed. They lost, but their effort was more substantive, skillful, and worthy than is commonly remembered.

Now that the EPA has laid the groundwork to go forward with its own set of greenhouse-gas regulations, p observers have suggested that this will put pressure on Congress to pass a climate bill next year, rather than leaving everything up to the executive branch. But is there any actual evidence of this pressure? Maybe so. Here's Arkansas Democrat Mark Pryor:

The most obvious tragedy of the Washington police shootings is the deaths of the four police officers. The fact that the suspected gunman is a convicted felon from Arkansas whose 95-year prison sentence was commuted by then-Governor Mike Huckabee in 2000 is a tragedy for anyone currently in prison in Arkansas who might hope to one day receive executive clemency. Just consider what happened in Massachusetts after Willie Horton.

Tonight, at around 8 p.m., the Senate will vote on a "motion to proceed" with the debate over health care reform.

To be clear, this isn't actually a vote on whether to pass health care reform--or even a vote on whether to hold such a vote. It's a vote on whether to begin talking about whether to have a vote on whether to pass health care reform.

For years, advocates of climate-change legislation have struggled to find a sales pitch that will sway even the most hardened of skeptics. Polar bears, green jobs, urgent pleas to think of the grandkids … none of them have quite done the trick. But recently, a new argument has come to the fore: the national security case for cutting carbon emissions.

The NYT has a short piece today that gives us yet another reminder of why it's so much fun to tell lawyer jokes. (Don't get me wrong: As a journalist, I appreciate this line of humor--much the way residents of Arkansas appreciate the existence of Mississippi when it comes time to whip out the jokes about poor, dumb, toothless, inbred crackers.)

... or not.

In the Ben Smith piece Mike cited earlier, Huckabee has some choice words for Pat Toomey:

Huckabee met in the spring with Pat Toomey, then the president of the Wall Street-backed Club for Growth, which had attacked him during the 2008 campaign for raising taxes in Arkansas.

I don't want to get too Noam-y here, but I love Dave Leonhardt's new column raising--if not quite endorsing--the possibility that current economic pessimism is overstated, and that another boom could be hiding around the corner. In particular I find this compelling:

The saga of Rush Limbaugh and his failed attempt to acquire a piece of the St. Louis Rams may be the quintessential postmodern American racial incident. When word first leaked of Limbaugh's potential ownership, a couple of sportswriters, joined by a handful of cable news talking heads, repeated what turned out to be totally unsubstantiated quotes by Limbaugh praising slavery and James Earl Ray. (Documented outrageous Limbaugh-isms were available but generally ignored.)

How states and local governments differ in choosing sources of tax revenue.

Some possible negative consequences of zero interest rates.

Arkansas has the highest rate of serial marriage.

Politico's Jonathan Martin has an excellent piece up on Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty's diligent, under-the radar preparation for a presidential run in 2012: the PAC he's opened, the donors and advisers he's been gathering, the operatives (some of whom worked for Mitt Romney in '08) he's been feeling out.

A good ProPublica investigative article on Blue Dog Democrat Mike Ross's business dealings with a pharmacy chain:

Ross sold the real estate in Prescott, Ark., to USA Drug for $420,000 -- an eye-popping number for real estate in the tiny train and lumber town about 100 miles southwest of Little Rock.

Now that Chris Dodd has decided to keep his chairmanship of the Senate banking committee, it looks like Tom Harkin will leave his agriculture post to go take Ted Kennedy's former spot atop the HELP committee. To the dismay of a lot of food-policy reformers, this means the more conservative Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas will be next in line for the Ag Committee gavel (there are more senior members on that committee, but they all have other, more powerful chairmanships already).

It's not unreasonable to ask if this will really make a big difference as far as agricultural policy's concerned. After all, Harkin was a corn man from Iowa who always had a kind word for Monsanto; the farm bill during his tenure was as subsidy-laden as ever, and, more recently, he was praising House Ag Chair Collin Peterson's extortionist moves on climate-change legislation, even suggesting that Peterson didn't go far enough in his attempts to immunize farmers from the effects of the bill. How much worse could Lincoln be?