Conservatives are very excited about Paul Ryan and his budget roadmap. Liberals are also excited, for very different reasons, about Ryan and his roadmap. This tells you that the roadmap is a highly clarifying document.
One of the oddities of the health care reform saga is that, amid a debate that raises profound questions about a citizen’s right to medical attention and the appropriate structuring of an entire industry, public discussion has come to focus on an issue that is both picayune and utterly phony: the legitimacy of Democrats using budget reconciliation to pass a final bill.
February 26, 2010
President Barack Obama
Senator Harry Reid Majority Leader
Senator Max Baucus, Chairman, Committee on Finance Senator
Tom Harkin Chairman, Committee on Health Education Labor and Pensions
Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi Speaker of the House of Representatives Congressman
Charles Rangel Committee on Ways & Means
Congressman Henry A. Waxman Committee on Energy and Commerce
Congressman George Miller Committee on Education and Labor
Harold Pollack is a professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration and Special Correspondent for The Treatment.
I have before me two tomes. The longer one is a somewhat rushed and tedious product whose guiding ideological vision and fuzzy presentation of crucial details repelled independent voters the last time it was put to an electoral test. The second document is somewhat more succinct and engaging but remains open to criticism for its embarrassingly padded margins and large print that makes it seem so much longer than it actually is. I'll leave you to guess which one is Sarah Palin's memoir and which is the Senate health reform bill.
If you listen to Republicans, they oppose that Senate bill because it is a Rube Goldberg contraption that is just too complicated, too opaque, and fills too many pages. Yesterday, Lamar Alexander gave full voice to this objection speaking with Ezra Klein: "One thing is you can’t be sure what’s in the Senate bill because it's 2,100 pages long. You just know there are surprises in it." He may have good reasons to oppose the Senate bill, but I'm pretty sure that its length and complexity are not his real beef. Congress routinely passes cinder-block-sized tomes that could provide valuable armor plating for tanks headed to Iraq.
Politicians who say that they oppose a bill because it's too long and complicated are generally fibbing. The only mystery becomes: What are they really thinking? In like fashion, a politician who says that she opposes something because it amounts to large-scale social engineering is more likely to believe what she is saying, but she is still telling an untruth. No doubt about it; health reform is ambitious social engineering. So was welfare reform. So were Reagan and Bush (43) tax cuts. So was No Child Left Behind. So was knocking down high-rise public housing here in Chicago. Privatizing Social Security and converting Medicare to vouchers (two favorite Republican ideas) are huge and messy social engineering projects, too.
Sunday, February 7, 3:28 p.m. Among the convention’s several last-minute saves—opening the conference to media, replacing one speaker who fell ill and another who dropped last minute—was bringing on Andrew Breitbart.
It’s been nearly a year since I wrote a post titled “What Realignments Look Like.” In it I reflected on how disorienting it was to see the Democrats take the White House, increase their margins in the Congress, and confidently pursue a progressive policy agenda. Having politically come of age during Reagan’s presidency, when the Republican critique of liberalism seemed to permeate the political consciousness of the nation, such a thing seemed unthinkable.
Mori Dinauer goes after Ramesh Ponnuru:
WASHINGTON -- The nation owes a substantial debt to Justice Samuel Alito for his display of unhappiness over President Obama's criticisms of the Supreme Court's recent legislation -- excuse me, decision -- opening our electoral system to a new torrent of corporate money.
These days, liberals don’t know whether to feel betrayed by or merely disappointed with Barack Obama. They have gone from decrying his willingness to remove the public option from his health care plan to worrying that, in the wake of Democrat Martha Coakley’s defeat in Massachusetts, he won’t get any plan through Congress. On other subjects, too, from Afghanistan to Wall Street, Obama has thoroughly let down his party’s left flank.
This week marks Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, a national holiday. Decades after his first civil-rights marches, what is the meaning of King's legacy? And what do we know about the man himself? Below, read some of the best TNR articles from our archives:
"A Moral Revolutionary" by Garry Wills (09/13/82) The life and trials of MLK.
It’s been a tough first year for President Obama, as critics throughout the body politic bemoan that Mr. Change-We-Can-Believe-In is looking more and more like Mr. Politics-As-Usual. With the coming new year, however, POTUS has a prime opportunity to regroup, reload, and revamp his image. He could start by ditching golf.
President Obama gave a pretty good speech when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. Maybe it was a little too eloquent. I don’t much like soaring rhetoric; I know there are times to soar, but Obama does it, or tries to do it, every time. Plain speech is also useful, and there was some plain speech in Norway—particularly the reiterated insistence, directed, I think, to our European friends, that sometimes making war is the only way to a just peace.
A new Washington Post poll of Republicans records the remarkable extent to which today's rank-and-file GOPers can't identify much in the way of any clear-cut Republican leaders.
If there was one thing that seemed certain about the Obama administration, it was their commitment to Keynesian deficit spending to boost the economy out of its slump. But Keynes beware: With unemployment at a whopping 10.2 percent, and probably rising, the White House has begun trumpeting its commitment to Hoover-style deficit busting. On November 13, the White House warned cabinet departments of a spending freeze.
Ex-Bush strategist Matthew Dowd has a perplexing op-ed in today's WaPo. Looking to chart a path by which Sarah Palin can reasonably reach the Oval Office, he lists a handful of steps she should take. His bullet-point categories are as follows:
"Quality over quantity." Dowd advises Palin to skip the constant tweeting, political pep rallies, and photo ops in lieu of more serious, gravitas-building appearances.
Ever on the lookout for ways to shrink the party’s tent still further, a few of the masterminds at the Republican National Committee are pushing a resolution to establish an ideological purity test for prospective GOP candidates. Those who fail on three or more of the following ten criteria would be deemed ineligible for RNC funding and endorsement:
(1) We support smaller government, smaller national debt, lower deficits and lower taxes by opposing bills like Obama’s “stimulus” bill;
(2) We support market-based health care reform and oppose Obama-style government run healthcare;
(3) We support market-based energy reforms by opposing cap and trade legislation;
(4) We support workers’ right to secret ballot by opposing card check;
Via TPM, I notice that Palin said this to Barbara Walters, after Walters asked whether Obama was lying when he said that death panels were not a part of the health care bill:
Agence France-Presse reports, unsurprisingly, that Sarah Palin's speech to the CLSA Investors' Forum in Hong Kong met with divided opinion.
Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right
By Jennifer Burns
(Oxford University Press, 459 pp., $27.95)
Ayn Rand and the World She Made
By Anne C. Heller
(Doubleday, 559 pp., $35)
I.
The current era of Democratic governance has provoked a florid response on the right, ranging from the prosaic (routine denunciations of big spending and debt) to the overheated (fears of socialism) to the lunatic (the belief that Democrats plan to put the elderly to death). Amid this cacophony of rage and dread, there has emerged one anxiety that is an actual idea, and not a mere slogan or factual misapprehension. The idea is that the United States is divided into two classes--the hard-working productive elite, and the indolent masses leeching off their labor by means of confiscatory taxes and transfer programs.
Riffing on Norman Podhoretz's new book Why Are Jews Liberal?, Robert Stacy McCain offers these thoughts on what he calls the "town-and-country divide" in American politics:
Think of Reagan, riding horses and clearning brush at his ranch -- it is an image that appeals to the "country" side of the town-and-country divide, embodying as it does the antique ideal of the American frontier homesteader.
Arthur Laffer, Reagan economic advisor, co-author of Proposition 13, and creator of the Laffer Curve:
Attention was understandably focused on Sonia Sotomayor this week, as her confirmation hearings unfolded. But what about Obama's other judicial nominees? The president has so far nominated five judges to federal circuit courts. On average, these nominees are 55 years old, more than a decade older than Sotomayor was when she was nominated to the Second Circuit. (She was 43.) For years, Republicans have been nominating sharp young conservatives to the lower federal courts.
For a while there, it was looking like we were going to spend the next four years arguing whether Barack Obama’s foreign policy was actually different than George W. Bush’s.
