The political media remains obsessed with the propriety of using budget reconciliation to pass health care reform. Unfortunately, many of them continue to not understand what they're talking about. Let me explain again. Last year, some Democrats considered using the reconciliation process – an expedited procedure that can't be filibustered -- to pass health care reform.

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).

Everyone remembers that George W. Bush’s first tax cut was contentious when Congress considered it back in 2001. So contentious, in fact, that the Bushies didn’t even try passing it under normal Senate procedures. The GOP leadership, worried that it couldn’t collect 60 votes to overcome a Democratic filibuster, relied on reconciliation, the Senate rule that allows budget-related measures to pass with a simple majority.

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

“The cruel God of the Jews has you beaten too.”--Racine

From chatting with people on the Hill these past few days, it's clear that there's a lot of pessimism about the Senate passing a big climate bill this year. (And if nothing passes in 2010, next year won't be any easier, given that Democrats will likely lose a bunch of seats in the midterms.) The dour predictions aren't surprising, given that even health care reform is in peril right now.

Dear Nervous and Frustrated House Democrat,

It’s up to you.

A few days ago, after a year of debate, you were on the verge of achieving a goal that’s eluded progressives for nearly a century: Creating a national health insurance program. But now the whole effort could fall apart.

When Scott Brown takes his seat in the U.S. Senate, the Republicans will have 41 members in their caucus--enough to stop passage of any bill if they stay united. They’ve promised to do just that when and if they get to vote on the final version of health care reform--the one that recent House-Senate negotiations produced.

You’re depressed: Brown inherits the seat that once belonged to Ted Kennedy, who had made health care reform a lifelong crusade.

You’re angry, either for taking politically difficult votes or compromising your ideals in order to move the process along.

And, let’s face it, you’re scared. If a Democrat can lose in Massachusetts, any Democrat can lose anywhere. That includes you.

Now you have a choice.

The temptation will be to drop health care, change the subject, and hope for the best. After all, the voters clearly don’t like what they’re hearing and seeing out of Washington. And health care is all they’ve been hearing and seeing for the last few months. The polls suggest more people oppose the plan than support it. And the right wing is having a field day with it.

I dimly remembered that Mohammed Atta and at least three of his brothers (a big word in Islam) had been known to security agencies at least a year before 9/11 as "likely members of a cell of Al Qaeda operating in the United States." This quote is from an August 9, 2005 article written by ace- investigator-of-intricate-matters Douglas Jehl for the New York Times.

In a local radio interview this morning, Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson indicated that he remains a "no" for now. He's not satisfied with the compromise on abortion that Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey proposed. He's not happy about the burden the Medicaid expansion places on states. He's not content with the level of cost control. He could be posturing, of course, but this is entirely consistent with what he's been saying all along.

Via Politico, here's what Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson said as he left a White House meeting with the rest of the Democratic caucus a little while ago:

I’m not on the bill. I have spoken with the president and he knows they are not wrapped up today. I think everybody understands they are not wrapped up today and that impression will not be given.

Copenhagen's nabbing all the headlines, but there's been some big climate news in the Senate this week. Yesterday, John Kerry, Lindsey Graham, and Joe Lieberman unveiled an outline of their "tri-partisan" climate legislation. You can see the rough framework here. As expected, it's similar to the House climate bill, only with more subsidies for coal, nuclear, and offshore drilling.

More news from Speaker Nancy Pelosi today: She indicated that the House might be willing to pass the Senate's latest public option proposal, which entails offering new non-profit plans across the country and making Medicare available to some workers over 55. If true, that would eliminate a major point of contention between the two chambers.

So are those leaked East Anglia e-mails having much effect on the Senate climate debate? It doesn't seem so. Here's The Hill's Ben Geman:

Centrist Republican Sen. Susan Collins (Maine) argues that the "climategate" e-mails should be probed on Capitol Hill, but the e-mails haven't changed her views on global warming.

What would it take to get Susan Collins on board with the health reform bill? After months of sending hot and cold signals about the bill, the Maine Republican made remarks yesterday that suggested she might be willing to support the legislation if certain amendments were put through. "I have made very clear I cannot support the bill as it is currently drafted and that there would have to be substantial changes, but I certainly hope that that will be possible,” Collins said after meeting yesterday with White House health reform director Nancy-Ann DeParle and HHS health reform director Jeanne Lambrew. And what are the types of changes that she’d like to see? Politico has some of the details:

raising the penalty on hospitals with high rates of hospital-acquired infections, changing the small business tax credit to prevent it from discouraging hiring and increasing wages and boosting the affordability of insurance.

Taken at face values, these ideas might not drastically roll back reform—in fact, some of them could help broaden its reach.

While Collins didn’t go into great detail about her proposals, there are signs of what she’s likely to put on the table. Under the Senate bill, hospitals with the greatest hospital-acquired infection rate would be subject to a 1% penalty under Medicare beginning in 2015; in addition to raising the penalty rate, Collins would reportedly propose moving start date two years earlier. The small-business tax credit is currently limited to firms with less than 25 employees and average wages of less than $40,000. Like fellow centrists Mary Landrieu and Olympia Snowe, Collins seems inclined to support expanding the credit to larger firms and raising the income threshold.

It’s hardly a secret or an accident that much of politics revolves around the elimination of doubt among voters on public policy issues. Base-mobilization strategies for elections typically involve convincing people with clear preferences but weak civic engagement (or doubts about their own “team”) that any given trip to the ballot box is of epochal importance. Swing-voter persuasion strategies also tend to focus on efforts to convince the undecided that one’s party or candidate will make the country a much happier place. And while doubt’s evil twin, fear, most definitely has a place in both base and swing strategies, it’s still aimed at convincing voters there is a clear and unambiguous, if largely negative, difference between the consequences of voting this way or that.

I mention the dubious political status of doubt in the context of a long and fascinating piece I just published on The Democratic Strategist by Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, director of The Progressive Project, entitled “Zero For Thirty-One: Lessons From the Loss in Maine.” A veteran of the struggle for LGBT rights and marriage equality, Beach-Ferrara concludes that ballot measures to stop gay marriage keep winning in no small part because equality advocates don’t talk much to conflicted voters, particularly those for whom religious dogma pulls them away from their own personal sense of fairness--i.e., non-bigots who are lumped in with bigots in most LGBT-rights strategies.

Based on her first-hand interviews with torn voters, Beach-Ferrara contends that marriage equality activists would do well to spend some time convincing such voters to reflect their true convictions by conscientiously passing up the opportunity to make a choice they aren’t prepared to make. In other words, rather than pushing people to come down on one side or the other, activists should have looked at doubt as a political asset.

• Why Americans Hate to Love the Government, by John B.

PPP has a striking new poll out regarding Olympia Snowe's popularity with Maine voters:

WASHINGTON--Here's a story you may have missed because it flies in the face of the dreary conventional wisdom: When advocates of public programs take on the right-wing anti-government crowd directly, the government-haters lose.

One of the most frustrating consequences of an Election Day like Tuesday is that it invariably (if fleetingly) transforms moderate politicians with no particular insight into the dynamics of public opinion into all-knowing sages. More to the point, it elevates their perfect-for-every-occasion view of politics, which says that if your party suffers a setback, the reason must be that it was too far to one side of the political spectrum, and so the answer is obviously to move back to the middle. And, of course, "the middle" is almost never a coherent worldview or set of policy preferences, but simply 10 or 25 or 50 percent less than what one side or the other proposes. So, for example, you get stuff like this from Ben Nelson and Olympia Snowe in Politico:

"People need to be saying slow it down and don’t add more to the deficit," Nelson said. "And what have many of us been talking about? We don’t want to see anything added to the deficit unless there’s cost containment." On health care, Nelson said: "Let’s see coverage extended, … but at what cost?’

Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe, the lone Republican to vote for a health care bill, said Tuesday’s results should slow Democrats down on health care — and "certainly gives pause on how you approach things.

Or take this from today's Wall Street Journal:

"What the exit polls showed was real voter fatigue with how crowded the plate is," said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D., Va.). "We need to take a deep breath, step back and clean the plate before we add to it." ...

"I do consider Virginia a bellwether state," said Rep. Gene Taylor of Mississippi, a conservative Democrat. "I would encourage the leadership to get back to the center."

But why would "too liberal" or "too expensive" or "too crowded" be the most plausible reading of what voters said Tuesday? Wouldn't an equally plausible reading be that voters don't think the economy is improving or that Washington is making it better, regardless of where those efforts lie along some dubious ideological spectrum? 

For the moderate view of politics to be right, it would have to be the case that the average voter has a well-worked out worldview, and that he or she gets upset when politicians deviate even a couple ticks in either direction along the ideological spectrum. Or it would have to be the case that the average voter has fairly precise, well-thought-out ideas about the "right amount" for Congress or the White House to have "on its plate" at any given moment. Deviate from those preferences, and the voters will rise up to punish you.

On the whole, I agree that one shouldn’t be fooled by the conservative euphoria associated with the GOP’s all-but-assured victory in Virginia and possible wins in New Jersey, Maine, and New York’s 23rd district. That being said, I also don’t think Democrats should underestimate the new organizing momentum--and campaign cash--that’s sure to come flowing to the RNC after Election Day.

Judging from Jeopardy, economics needs a lot more popularizing.

Is America's long-term unemployment problem looking downright European?

The 'did Lehman cause the crisis?' debate continues.

Now this is why I was rooting against that Olympia Snowe vote in the Senate Finance Committee:

“The best way to move forward is to include a public option with the opt-out provision for states,” Mr. Reid, of Nevada, said at a news conference. “I believe that a public option can achieve the goal of bringing meaningful reform to our broken system.

Maine voters will decide on November 3 whether to repeal a law, signed by the governor in May, that legalized gay marriage. A Public Policy Polling survey released Tuesday shows that voters are split evenly on the issue: 48 percent of respondents said they'll vote to keep the law ("No On 1"), while another 48 percent said they'll vote to nix it ("Yes On 1").

Maine's gay marriage opponents recruited Frank Schubert, the p.r. strategist behind last year's Proposition 8 advertisements in California, to employ his signature tricks--including telling voters that, if the law remains as it is, gay marriage will be taught to schoolchildren. The law includes no language about altering school curricula, and last week, Maine's attorney general confirmed that her "analysis of the issue reveals no impact" on what students are taught. But Yes On 1 is still pressing the point--and hard. Brian Brown, executive director of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), which is backing the Yes On 1 campaign, told me there's plenty of evidence that the law will allow gay marriage to infiltrate classrooms. "We don't have to guess or create hypotheticals. We already know," Brown insisted. "Let's not argue about the fact that this is what same-sex marriage proponents want."

Evidence aside, however, there's a nagging question about Yes On 1's chief grievance: What exactly does it mean to "teach gay marriage"?

Darren Samuelsohn dusts off the crystal ball and tries to figure out if the climate bill can garner 60 votes in the Senate.