Here is the ultimate paradox of the Great Health Care Showdown: Congress will divide along partisan lines to pass a Republican version of health-care reform, and Republicans will vote against it.
Yes, Democrats have rallied behind a bill that large numbers of Republicans should love. It is built on a series of principles that Republicans espoused for years.
Harold Pollack is the Helen Ross Professor of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago and a Special Correspondent for The Treatment.
Howard Fineman reports that Dennis Kucinich will vote for health care reform. Kucinich may be crazy but he's not... well, he is kind of stupid. Okay, he may be crazy and stupid, but he's not completely indifferent to the plight of the disadvantaged. So he's got that going for him.
National Review's Daniel Foster has been pre-spinning:
Most progressive members of the House will vote for health care reform. But there are a handful of liberals making loud noises about rejecting it. They may not be bluffing. Some of them, like Dennis Kucinich, actually cast nay votes against the House bill last November. But this time, every vote will count. So, those liberals may be the difference between success and failure.
My post from a couple days ago, about how my instincts about Howard Dean from 2004 have been vindicated, made me think of something: Just how awful was the 2004 Democratic primary field? Go through the list, and try to imagine any of these men as a presidential nominee, let alone (shudder) a president:
David Jarman points out that National Journal's "most conservative/most liberal" rankings make no sense:
Just in case the California Legislature's passage of a landmark water bill earlier this week had convinced you that John Judis is wrong and that things are finally looking up for the Golden State, William Voegeli's essay in the current issue of City Journal might put things back in gloomy perspective. Voegeli asks a worthwhile question: Given that the overall tax burden in California is fairly high relative to other states (with some complicating factors), why aren't public services like roads, schools, and police in California any better than in low-tax jurisdictions like Texas? Voegeli's answer is that a substantial percentage of California tax revenue funds generous public-sector salaries and social programs for low-income residents, rather than true public goods that all residents can use.
I have two quarrels with Voegeli's argument. The first is that, while he hypothesizes that California's tax burden is a primary factor in driving residents out of the state (this is the first decade in which California will have negative net migration), he doesn't offer any evidence for that conclusion. Surely the fact that the median home price is more than $100,000 higher in California than in Texas has more to do with the states' migration patterns than the $1300-per-year difference in tax burden Voegeli identifies.
Second, it seems wrong to lump together public-employee salaries and welfare payments into a generalized category of wasteful spending. While it's certainly hard to justify the generous compensation that, for instance, California prison guards receive (thanks to their politically powerful union), there's an obvious rationale for the state's social safety net spending: Californians are more willing to use the power of the state to improve the lot of the working class than Texans are. (This was more true before the last few rounds of budget-cutting in California, but it's still the case.) That may be a good choice or a bad choice, but it doesn't make California's government objectively less efficient or effective than Texas's. It's just a different set of values.
That said, much of Voegeli's argument about the poor state of public services in California is sound. My question is: what does that say about the California Republican Party?
Alex Jones is a husky man with short sandy hair, weary eyes, baby cheeks, and the kind of deep, gravelly voice made for horror-movie trailers. And it’s horror he has in mind. "Your New World Order will fall!" he screams through a megaphone at the shiny façade of a nondescript office building. "Humanity will defeat you!"
Reporting out TNR's Ohio Primer, the phrase I heard most often from pollsters and political scientists was, "Hillary should do better than Obama in that district, but not 60% better." Districts with an even number of delegates might have favored Hillary, but her lead wasn't supposed to be lopsided enough that she'd win an extra delegate.
Despite Hillary's aggressive attempt to mobilize the local machine, early news from Hawaii sounds good for Obama. Caucus turnout--which has never exceeded 5,000--is expected to reach as high as 12,000 (the Obama people are saying 15,000-18,000).
In 2008 news, Dennis Kucinich has announced he will soon, well, announce:
Once upon a time, the Democratic family consisted of two basic types of politicians--those who supported the Iraq war and those who were against it. As the war dragged on and the political climate changed, however, varied new species began to evolve, with all manner of ideas and opinions about the occupation. For months, these different Democratic factions lived more or less in harmony. But Pennsylvania Representative John Murtha's dramatic call last month for a fast U.S. exit from Iraq was like a climate-altering asteroid event.
