Why the "Obama didn't fight hard enough" and "Obama got out-negotiated" memes are wrong

Megan McArdle has a great post about the realities of the bargaining situation for the healthcare bill that must be read by everybody who thinks that Obama, Reid, Pelosi etc. got rooked by the GOP and conservative dems in the negotiating process:

Krugman, and the commenters, seem to imagine that negotiation is a process where you ask for huge concessions, and then bargain your way down to splitting the difference. So naturally, the reason that liberals have ended up with nothing in the way of a public option is that they were too nice to Republicans and conservative Democrats, and did not start out demanding single payer, and the nationalization of the coal mines.

Negotiation doesn't work that way. There is a zone of possible agreement (known to those who study this sort of thing as the ZOPA). You can't negotiate your way out of that zone no matter where you start. Nor does starting from a more aggressive bargaining point always mean that you will do better in the negotiation. It can often mean you do worse, because you poison the process.
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This bill is, at this point, hideously unpopular. I'm pretty sure you've got a bunch of senators who would really, really love not to vote for it. Ultimately, the moderates had a very good alternative to negotiated agreement, and the progressives didn't, and that was crystal clear from Day 1. That meant the progressives were never, ever going to get very much. This was not a failure of political will or political skill. It was the manifestation of a political reality that has long been obvious to everyone who wasn't living in a fantasy world. If progressives decide that the lesson from this is that they haven't been sufficiently demanding and intransigent, they are going to find themselves about as popular with the rest of America as the Bush Republicans, and probably lose their party the House next year.

The other thing to note here, for folks who think Obama should have "fought harder" for the bill is that there's a very limited amount of leverage that he has over the Senators who have been the key choke points. In Nebraska, Obama is less popular than Ben Nelson - Ben Nelson repeatedly wins statewide elections in Nebraska, and Obama lost the state (other than Omaha). Obama polls below Nelson in Nebraska. If Obama went to Nebraska and went around talking about what a jerk Nelson is, the end result would not be that Ben Nelson would be replaced by a more liberal senator -- Ben Nelson would either win anyway and then work against everything else Obama does, or else liberals would stay home or vote for a non-viable 3rd party vandidate and Nelson would lose to a Republican who would be vastly more hostile to progressive policy goals than Nelson is. The same thing is pretty much true for Blanche Lincoln.

Obama has some better leverage in bluer states, but even there it's somewhat limited. In 2006, Obama backed Ned Lamont against Lieberman, and Lieberman won anyway and is now hostile to Obama. Historically, it's just very hard for even very popular presidents to purge troublesome senators from their own party. FDR tried it in 1936, at the very height of his popularity, and it was a dismal failure. A homegrown, viable primary opponent can make something happen (witness Joe Sestak pushing Arlen Specter ever-leftward in PA), but it's just not that helpful for a sitting president to get into a public pissing match with senators from his own party.

It's also critical to remember that, as big a deal as the healthcare bill is, Obama has 3 or 7 more years of governing left, and a lot he wants to accomplish- climate change, energy policy, education reform, Afghanistan and Iraq. All of those things are going to require 60 votes in the Senate- which means they'll need Lieberman, Nelson, Lincoln, etc. Would it feel great to have Obama grab Lieberman by the jowls and toss him bodily from his committee chairmanship? Sure. But one of the reasons a lot of us supported Obama for president over the hot-headed other guy was because he takes the long view.

Thoughts on the drinking age

At one point in college, I served on a joint student/faculty/administration counsel on student alcohol consumption (something my friends at the time thought was highly amusing), and one of the members was Barrett Seaman, a college trustee. Since that time, Seaman has written a book on college binge-drinking ("Binge: Campus Life in an Age of Disconnection and Excess") and has started a group called Choose Responsibility that has been lobbying to overturn the Federal mandatory 21 year old drinking age.

Seaman's argument, which makes a lot of sense to me, is that the the mandatory drinking age creates a college culture where drinking is pushed underground, leading to dangerous excess (a greater tendency to poison yourself drinking shots of vodka in your dorm room instead of waiting in line to get a beer at a party or a bar). It also socially separates adults from teenagers at a critical moment in teenagers lives. They lose the chance to see adults responsibly consuming alcohol, and also removes a way for students and professors to bond outside of class. A number of times my fraternity tried to invite professors to our more, er, "upscale" events, but they never showed up because of the risk of being around a lot of underage drinking. That brings up the third problem- because underage drinking is so pervasive in college, it creates a situation where large numbers of otherwise law-abiding folks are forging government documents, endangering the welfare of minors, etc - which is risky for the people involved, and also breeds a general contempt for the law.

Seaman also notes that the main selling point of the current drinking age is a sham:

The other side almost invariably trots out the same statistics supporting their claim that MLDA 21 has reduced drunk-driving fatalities by some 13 percent, allegedly saving nearly 1,000 lives a year on the nation's roads. I know I can knock that one right out of the park with the simple observation — backed by peer-reviewed studies — that Canada, during roughly the same period, had an even greater reduction in drunk driving deaths without changing any of its provinces' 18- or 19-year-old drinking age limits.

This is an interesting area where, much like marijuana legalization, you'll find that a lot of policymakers tacitly agree there should be change, but right now the politics are so toxic it's almost impossible to do. Any governor who opted to buck the Federal highway money (the Federal Government basically bribes the states to go with a 21 year drinking age by making a condition to get a portion of the state's federal highway dollars) and drop the drinking age back to 18 would inevitably have the DWI deaths of every 18-21 year old hung around his neck at the next election- even if the overall rate of DWIs for that category stayed the same.

In any event, Barret's piece in the Hamilton College alumni mag (available here) is a good read on this topic.

Laura Ingraham can't even trivialize the holocaust properly

Rightwing squawker Laura Ingraham has her take on the classic holocaust poem "First they came..." -

"First they came for the rich. And I did not speak out because I was not rich. Then they came for the property owners, and I did not speak out because I did not own property. Then they came for the right to bear arms, and I did not speak out because I was not armed. Then they came for me and denied me my medical care, and there was no one left to speak for me,"

Not only is this in pretty terrible taste, but it also makes no sense. In the original , when the Nazis "came for the communists," or the trade unionists or the Jews, they actually showed up, carted them away and imprisoned or killed them. That's why the kicker- "there was no one left to speak for me" works, because all of those people were actually gone and thus not able to speak.

Unless Ingraham is vastly more paranoid than I think she is, she can't actually believe that people are coming for the rich. At the worst, maybe the government will take a bit of money from the rich, or insist that gun owners put trigger locks on their guns so their kids don't shoot themselves accidentally or what have you... but never fear Laura, when they come to take your healthcare or whatever, the rich, armed, property owners will still be around to speak for you.

Don't Kill the Senate Healthcare Bill

Howard Dean, for whom I generally have a lot of respect, today calls for liberals to unite to "kill the bill" - scrap the Senate healthcare reform bill and try again later by going back to the House for a new bill that would be easier to get through the Senate using budget reconciliation- and critically needing only 51 votes.

The problems with this are numerous- There's a lot of chance that, having failed once in the Senate, the House (which only passed their bill by a small margin) won't pass it- many reps will be loathe to stick their necks out for what they perceive to be a failing process. Even if it gets through the House, there's no guarantee that there is any willingness in the Senate to push it through the reconciliation process.

Are there problems with the compromise bill? Sure- removing the medicare buy-in and the public option makes it much less likely that the bill will "bend the curve" of healthcare costs. Does it rankle that Lieberman and Ben Nelson are shoving progressives around? Yeah, it really does.

However, passing the bill will have real consequences- 30 or so million Americans who currently don't have health insurance will get it. That's huge- by far the biggest progressive domestic legislation since LBJ. Over time it will save hundreds of thousands or millions of lives. This country will have made an affirmative statement that healthcare is a right and not a market commodity. That's what's at stake.

We can always go back and try to add the public option or medicare buy-in later - and frankly we'll probably have to do so, as something will have to be done about geometrically rising costs. We can punish Lieberman by stripping him of his Homeland Security Committee chair. These are all things for tomorrow, but for today- let's keep our eyes on the prize.

Cowardly silence from Senators opposed to marriage equality

During this week's "debate" in the NY State Senate leading up to the 38-24 defeat of the marriage equality bill, there were a number of heart-wrenching statements by those in favor the bill, particularly Sens. Diane Savino and Ruth Hasswell-Thompson. On the "no" side, however, only Democratic Senator Reuben Diaz spoke, in a rambling statement largely complaining about how Dems had stabbed him in the back and how gays never gave him any money.

The "no" voters need to explain themselves- they didn't do it in the Senate and they haven't done it for their constituents. The video below shows a constituent of Western New York's George Mariaz asking why he's opposed to letting the questioner marry her partner, and get all the legal security that comes with it. Mariaz, coldly and cowardly, merely says that he doesn't support marriage equality because he believes marriage is between a man and a woman.

After seeing the video, I sent Mariaz the following email, with questions that need to be asked of every Senator who voted "no" this week:

You owe your constituents and the citizens of this state a real answer about why you don't support marriage equality, not a mere conclusory statement that you oppose the bill. Why do you believe marriage is only between a man and a woman? If your only basis for that belief is religion - say so, and then explain why your particular religious beliefs are a legitimate basis for state legislation. If you have another reason, explain it. Your constituents and this state deserve better.

The Price of Torture

Last night I watched a pretty amazing interview on the Daily Show with journalist Maziar Bahari who was imprisoned by the Iranian regime for several months after he covered the protests this summer. One of the most amazing things Bahari said was that, despite the fact that the interrogators beat him, they tried to win him over by saying that what they were doing was not nearly as bad as what the US did at Abu Ghraib- no leashes and dog collars, no waterboarding. It's a pretty sad spectacle when a morally bankrupt and brutal regime like Ahmadenijad's can try to make itself look better by comparing themselves to the US.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Maziar Bahari
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Doug Hoffman blaming nonexistent Oswego County ACORN for "vote tampering"

Doug Hoffman recently sent an email to his supporters, claming that the recent special election in NY-23 was "stolen," and blaming ACORN and the unions for "vote tampering."

He specifically cites problems in Oswego County:

A recanvassing in the 11-county district shows Owens' lead has narrowed to 3,026. In Oswego County, I was reported to lead by only 500 votes with 93 percent of the vote counted election night, but inspectors found I actually won by 1,748 votes

Let’s force them keep this recanvassing active! Let’s give this election a chance to end differently!Oswego County elections officials blame the mistakes on "chaos" in their call-in center that included a phone system foul-up, and on inspectors who read numbers incorrectly when phoning in results. This sounds like a tactic right from the ACORN playbook.

I'm from Oswego county and my family and I have been very active in Democratic politics- my dad is an elected town judge, and my mom and in-laws have worked on a number of national, state and local campaigns within the county, and none of us have ever encountered ACORN staff or volunteers active in the county.

Moreover, the county government in Oswego and Jefferson counties is dominated by Republicans, and they use all the old-school patronage tools to make sure that county employees (like the ones staffing the polling sites) are good Republicans. These are also really small town places, where everybody knows each other - there's no way that ACORN (even if it existed in the district) would be able to have operatives sneaking around and fiddling with the voting machines without drawing the attention of the poll workers, who have probably worked together on the same crew for every election for decades.

Oswego County (and I believe other counties in the district) had brand new voting machines, and each machine covered multiple election districts, unlike the old manual machines that were one to a district. The new machines printed out a slip at the end of the night that listed the results for each of the EDs covered by the machine. My mom was working some of the polling sites for the New York Democratic Lawyers' Council, and told me that it would be really easy for the poll-workers to call in just the results from the first ED on the slip.

By blaming ACORN for his defeat, Hoffman is further showing that he's a creature of the national right-wing, completely tied up with national right-wing boogeymen, and just as completely out of touch with the realities of political life in NY-23 (perhaps because he's never lived in the district).

GOP nonsense about the new mammogram recommendations

“This is the little toe in the edge of the water,” said Representative Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee. “This is where you start getting a bureaucrat between you and your physician.”

This is the Republican reaction to the recommendation of the U.S. Preventive Service Task Force that women between 40 and 50 not receive annual mammograms. The Wall Street Journal piled on, blaming the result on "Obamacare" and cost-cutting. The WSJ article focuses entirely on the fact that by not screening women from 40 to 50, some number of women in that range will not catch a tumor in time. That is true. What the article ignores, however, is what's on the other side of the scale- some serious negative consequences of screening women in that age-range:

The task force advised on Monday that most women should not start routine screening until they are 50, as opposed to the current standard of 40. The reason, according to the task force, is that studies show that “the additional benefit gained by starting screening at age 40 years rather than at age 50 years is small, and that moderate harms from screening remain at any age.”
While the downsides of mammography have not received much attention, cancer researchers say they are real and include excess biopsies, unnecessary anxiety and the discovery and treatment of tumors that would not cause problems if let alone.

In addition, some research has found that mammograms themselves, because of the radiation dose, lead to an increased risk of cancer.

This line of thinking is not, as the GOP would have you believe, a brand new thing brought on by Obama's desire to heartlessly kill off old people. For years, the American Cancer Society and other groups have recommended that men not be screened for prostate cancer, because screenings lead to unnecessary treatments (radiation therapy and surgery) that are oftentimes more dangerous than the cancers they are treating.

One final point- with all the squawking about how "government bureaucrats are getting in between patients and doctors," you'd think that the task force was made up of federal employees, right? Probably a bunch of unqualified hacks and bean counters sitting around dreaming up ways to screw over patients.

In fact, looking at a list of the members of the panel shows that these are actually pretty qualified people- the Dean of the College of Public Health at U. Iowa, the Director of Women's Health Services Research at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in LA, the Medical Director of HealthPartners Co. in Minneapolis, the Dean of the School of Nursing at the Medical College of Georgia, a professor from Johns Hopkins Medical School, etc. You know, the sort of people who might have a better idea of how to interpret cancer research literature than Congresswoman Blackburn, whose only work experience outside of elected office is selling textbooks door to door.

What shall it profit a man...

Matt Yglesias has a post today that probably should be tacked on the wall of every elected official- reminding them that their job is to accomplish something, not to stick around forever:

But that’s okay—it’s not the job of an elected official to lurk around in office forever and ever. The job of an elected official is to do things. Hopefully things that make the world a better place. Winning an election is an opportunity. Not an opportunity run for election again—you can run again if you lose—but an opportunity to change the world. Look up any former legislature in the history books or on Wikipedia or what have you and you’ll see that he or she is remembered (or not) for his or her accomplishments (or lack thereof). Everyone leaves congress sooner or later, maybe in defeat or maybe in a coffin, but what ultimately matters is not how long you stay but what you leave behind.

This is particularly important for folks in tough seats like Blanche Lincoln and co. - the demographics of the southern electorate are changing, and it's going to be increasingly tough to get elected as a Democrat. To keep these seats is probably going to require a series of increasing compromises and capitulations, until one day you have to think these folks are going to wake up and have trouble remembering what they were trying to do when they first got into politics.

The dishonesty of Joe Lieberman (updated)

Joe Lieberman was on Fox this weekend discussing why he will filibuster a Senate healthcare reform bill with the public option:

LIEBERMAN: A public option plan is unnecessary. It has been put forward, I’m convinced, by people who really want the government to take over all of health insurance. They’ve got a right to do that; I think that would be wrong.
But worse than that, we have a problem even greater than the health insurance problems, and that is a debt -- $12 trillion today, projected to be $21 trillion in 10 years.

WALLACE: So at this point, I take it, you’re a “no” vote in the Senate?

LIEBERMAN: If the public option plan is in there, as a matter of conscience, I will not allow this bill to come to a final vote because I believe debt can break America and send us into a recession that’s worse than the one we’re fighting our way out of today. I don’t want to do that to our children and grandchildren.

I've met Lieberman, and I can say that unlike some other Senators (Ben Nelson, I'm looking at you), Lieberman is not a stupid man. He also has had some terrific staffers working for him in the past, and I imagine he still does. Consequently, I can only take the factual and logical errors in the snippet above to be pure dishonesty.

The bill coming out of the Senate, with the Public Option, has been scored by the CBO to reduce the deficit by over $100 billion over 1o years. Consequently, if Joe is actually worried about the debt and the deficit, it seems like he would like this feature of the bill. Moreover, the Public Option, by offering competition in states and locations that currently have local monopolists providing health insurance, would lower health insurance costs by providing competition.

The Public Option, as it exists in both the House and Senate bills, would get an initial boost of start-up funding from the government, and then be completely self-sufficient- which means that it's operation would, aside from an initial minimal cost - have zero impact on the national debt.

Joe tries to dress this all up in a "think of the children" kind of way by appealing to what the future will be like under some hypothetical recession brought on by the zero additional debt of the public option. This of course does not take into account the 40 million uninsured Americans, all of whom are somebody's children or grandchildren, and of whom 45,000 a year or so die because of lack of insurance.

On a completely unrelated note, Joe's wife Hadassah is a senior healthcare and pharmaceutical lobbyist for Hill and Knowlton.

*UPDATE- I had originally titled the post "The Perfidy of Joe Lieberman", when a friend noted that the term paired with a Jewish Senator has some negative connotations- see perfidis judaeis. I had no intention to evoke that connotatio- merely pointing out that Lieberman, as one who's caucusing with the Dems and owes his seniority and committee positions to the Democrats, seems particularly treacherous for backstabbing them on healthcare reform using obviously specious reasoning.

Before we jump to conclusions...

Whenever something like the Ft. Hood shooting happens, there's a real urge to jump to conclusions and use the event to score political points. I was halfway through doing so myself this morning. I scrapped a halfway drafted post that was going to be about how the shooting undermines the idea that we need to allow concealed weapons in order to thwart armed maniacs, because hey, this guy was on an army base and everybody's carrying there, right? -- until I learned that concealed weapons are banned on military bases, and the only weapons are stored away on firing ranges.

Before everybody gets too worked up about jihad in the ranks and banning Muslims from the military- take a look at the photo below (and others like it here):

What matters vs. what gets on TV

Cable news (especially Fox) is abuzz today with Michelle Bachman's "takeover" of the capitol, where some number of teaparty folks are rallying on the steps to hear John Boehner say that the healthcare bill is the "Greatest threat to freedom I've seen in 19 years." *
We also get some yahoos with banners showing skeletons and corpses bearing the legend "National Socialist Healthcare: Dachau 1945", which frankly displays a knowledge of history I'd typically thought wasn't present in these folks.

However, away from the fun and games at the Capitol, Obama quietly announced that the healthcare reform plan (presumably some mish-mash of the Senate and House plans) has now been endorsed by the AMA and AARP. The AMA represents ~250,000 doctors, and the AARP represents 35 million seniors. My guess is that, when watching the news tonight, you won't see that.

The other thing you probably won't hear about is the Republican "healthcare reform bill", which just got scored by the CBO, with the following interesting results:

• Right now aboyut 17% of Americans don't have health insurance. After 10 years of the GOP reform... 17% still wouldn't have healthcare.
• The GOP plan would shave about $68 billion off of the deficit. That sounds great, except the Democratic Senate plan would take $104 billion off of the deficit. While covering all but 4% of Americans.

But hey, don't let the facts get in the way of your banners.

*On his website, Boehner has the text of a Floor Statement on the 9/11 resolution, where he calls the terrorists Enemies of Freedom and conveniently lists a number of acts committed by these enemies:

On September 11th we came face-to-face with evil. But it wasn’t the first time. During the 1990s, the enemies of freedom used terror and violence in futile attempts to intimidate the United States and the cause of freedom.
On February 26, 1993, the 1st World Trade Center Bombing killed six people and injured more than 1,000 others.
On June 25, 1996, the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia killed 20 people and injured 372 people.
On June 7, 1998, the Kenya Embassy Bombing killed 213 people and injured 5,000 people.
On June 7, 1998, the Tanzania Embassy bombing killed 11 people and injured 68 people.
On October 12, 2000, the U.S.S. Cole bombing killed 17 people and injured 39 people.

Oddly, even though all of these events, plus the 9/11 attacks, were made by enemies of freedom during the past 19 years, they clearly, to Boehner, pale in comparison to a public healthcare plan.

The real news buried under the tea leaves

Lots of commentators on both sides spinning pretty wildly last night and this morning about what the results of last night's election mean for support for Obama and his agenda. A couple salient points:

• Corzine was an already-unpopular governor who was a.) in charge when the economy went in the tank, and b.) tied to Goldman Sachs, one of the villains of this recession. Anybody surprised that he lost?
• Deeds had already lost once to McDonnell in a statewide race for AG. He ran a lousy campaign focused mostly on McDonnell's master's thesis while McDonnell talked about jobs. Again, anybody surprised he lost?
• VA and NJ have, since 1985, consistently elected governors of the opposite party of whoever was holding the Whitehouse.
• Exit polls showed broad support (consistent with non-election-related approval polls) of Obama in NJ and VA.
• NY-23 showed two things- a.) that the tea-bagging fringe of the GOP is stronger than the moderates, and has the desire and ability to take out moderate candidates in primaries; and b.) moderate Dems will beat tea-baggers, even in conservative districts.
• In NY, a moderate Republican was replaced by a moderate Dem. In California (in the race to replace Ellen Tauscher, who's an Assistant Sec. State), a moderate Dem was replaced with a progressive Dem. Thus two seats in the House shift left, making it easier for Pelosi to get 218 votes for the public option.

The races last night will have some significant impact on policy in VA and NJ (and also, sadly, on Gay and Lesbian couples in ME), but nationally- this was not a "find a silver lining" night for Dems, because they lost where expected, and showed that they can continue to win by keeping a big tent while the GOP continues to devour itself.

Center for Global Development: U.S. is worse for global security than New Zealand?

The Center for Global Development has put together an interesting interactive chart rating developed countries on a variety of metrics as to how their conduct affects the developing world. The US rates high on trade, and pretty high on security. Everything else is either in the middle or low.

The metrics that CGD is using seem pretty flawed to me. For instance, I’m not entirely clear how New Zealand has us roundly beat on the “security” metric. Does their navy guarantee the freedom of the seas for the entire world? I don’t think so, and that freedom allows international trade to take place, which has a higher impact on global welfare than any Swedish foreign aid. If the US military closed up shop tomorrow, there would be a much greater net negative impact on global security and global well-being than if you removed the militaries of any other nation listed on the chart.

Note- I’m saying this with the full understanding that our actions in Iraq, and to some degree Af/Pak, have contributed to instability in their regions.

Also, the "technology" metric mostly counts government subsidies for technological development, and thus puts Spain as the number one country for technology that benefits the developing world, and the US is in the middle. I presume that's because Spain, unlike the US, developed the internet, hybrid drought and pest-resistant seeds, and things like Twitter that encouraged the Iranian dissident movement.

The proof is in the Krugman

Paul "the Krug" Krugman writes in today's New York Times that the charges being bandied about in the healthcare "debate" of 'death panels' show that Pres. Obama's stated goals of postpartisanship and avoiding the pitched battles of the 1990s are at worst conceptually unsound or at best merely yet unfulfilled. Part of the evidence in his argument is that the media continues to let the 'death panel' meme move forward without rebuttal and continues to identify Sen. grassley as a moderate Republican, even after he speaks immoderately.

To me, Krugman accidentally proves the point that Obama is trying to make. You have to ignore the things that whipped up the partisan battles of the 1990s, rapid-response policy "debate," and 24-hour cable news in order to deafeat them.

How many people do you know were really considering their support or opposition to the President's healthcare plan and thought, "I like the focus on reducing medicare costs, and I like the potential insurance reform, but wait a minute, this plan has death panels in it, so.... maybe not." That's never, ever what happens.

Instead, people decide to engage or not engage, they think about momentum and political capital. And then, they make decisions based on whether or not they generally trust or favor the people proposing things. This process has some very important feedback effects, because people have opinions, but they only vote once every two years (if ever). Congressman vote week or so, not only by voting on bills, but also by voicing support or opposition to other politicians, and very importantly, by feeding the feedback loop. The TV shows 'vote' basically every day or two.

Death panels, Harry and Louise, smoking guns that turn in to mushroom clouds, and a thousand other little passenger pigeons get some people excited. Getting some people excited makes news. Making news manipulates the feedback loop. To use the ready musical analogy, I'm all for a little grind in the lead guitar sound, but Krugman is listening to the distortion that comes from the amp, not the music that comes from the guitar.

I like Obama's way better. I can almost guarantee that we will not win the healthcare debate by aggressively rebutting the aspersions of least responsible opponents. We might win, however, by talking about healthcare.