Partisans on both sides have a tendency to want to believe that their party's troubles can be solved by moving away from the center and instead locking down the base. It's usually not true. In this case, however, there seems to be strong evidence that an unenthusiastic base is in fact the Democrats' biggest problem.
Scott Brown did not win in Massachusetts because Democrat Martha Coakley believed that Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling liked the Yankees. If you want to see the same chilling pattern that elected Brown in erstwhile Democratic Massachusetts, look at the latest Franklin and Marshall poll on Pennsylvania politics. Pennsylvania has voted for a Democratic president since 1992.
I continue to hear people saying that Martha Coakley’s defeat in Massachusetts had nothing or very little to do with the approval of the Obama administration in that state. For those who continue to adhere to this opinion, let’s look at some other states where the decline in a candidate’s polls can’t be explained away by the Democratic candidate’s ineptitude. What you find in those states is that in polling for the 2010 senate and gubernatorial elections, the Democrat was initially ahead but began to fall behind at roughly the same time as Obama’s approval ratings also began to fall.
Seems like the conventional wisdom in Washington right now is that there's no way the Senate passes a climate bill in 2010—especially after that long, gory health care battle we just saw. Here's The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza: "No matter what Obama and his advisers said… there is now no chance that the Administration's climate-change proposal will come up for a vote in the Senate prior to the 2010 election.
This morning, three key moderates--Republican Susan Collins, Independent Joe Lieberman, and Democrat Arlen Specter--announced the introduction of a cost-containment amendment to the health-care bill that sent a promising signal about their desire to support the overall Senate bill. The announcement was the strongest indication yet that Collins is a gettable vote and that Lieberman is more persuadable than he previously signaled. Describing the amendment as a “tri-partisan effort,” Collins described the overall bill as containing “a number of promising ideas” that they were hoping to bolster. Their amendment offered some changes that could actually improve--not water down--the reform effort, in part by strengthening the hand of government. At a press conference today, the three Senators described the measure’s five main provisions:
1) Improve transparency and availability of physician quality reporting data by setting up a website for comparison shopping, rewarding Medicare beneficiaries if they use doctors “deemed to be high-performing in a cost-effective way according to these reports,” Lieberman said.
2) Strengthen reporting requirements for insurance companies to increase transparency for consumers, requiring them to publish how many claims were denied and how many denials were overturned.
3) Improve the provisions penalizing hospitals who have the most hospital-acquired infections, doubling the penalty from 1% to 2% of their Medicare reimbursements from the government and moving up the start date from 2015 to 2013.
4) Give HHS more authority to implement a pilot program that would bundle Medicare payments to hospitals and physicians and allow them to implement the program more broadly without needing additional Congressional approval.
5) Evaluate previously launched health-care pilot programs, eliminate those deemed ineffective, and expand the implementation of those that have proven to be effective.
While none of the provisions would be considered radical changes to the bill, there are a couple of things that are worth noting, both in terms of the politics and the substance. Most significantly, the amendment would not only improve accountability on the part of hospitals and doctors, they would also empower the government in being able to incentive the changes they want and penalize undesirable behavior. Compared to the Republicans’ relentless rhetoric about a “government takeover” of health care, it’s a strikingly different message.
Congressional Quarterly's Shira Toeplitz has a good rundown on all the ways in which presumptive Pennsylvania GOP Senate nominee Pat Toomey has moved to the center ever since Arlen Specter bolted for the Democratic Party. Which makes me again wonder whether it was a mistake for Obama to encourage Specter's defection.**
The new Kerry-Boxer climate bill in the Senate shows a lot of love for the natural-gas industry, as Brad noted yesterday.
First it was Arlen Specter announcing that he was switching parties explicitly because he didn't think he could be reelected as a Republican. Next, of course, it was Sarah Palin eschewing politics as usual by vacating the Alaska governor's mansion eighteen months before the conclusion of her term.
