Jonathan Chait's Blog, page 119

Dept. Of Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

Wall Street Journal editorial page columnist Kimberly Strassel lays out the next parts of the Affordable Care Act that Republicans will attack:

If the GOP is to dismember ObamaCare, it must pressure Democrats into helping. That's what Republicans did this week. Next up for debate will be other odious elements: the individual mandate, taxes on kids' braces, restrictions on health savings accounts, cuts to Medicare. The GOP will highlight each one and then ask 2012 Democrats what they are willing to defend.

What holds these elements together? They're all elements of the program that reduce deficits. The conservative attack of the PPACA has centered around the claim that the deficit-reducing elements aren't sustainable because Congress won't follow through with them. And now conservatives are trying to make that a reality by systematically proposing to reduce tax revenues and raise expenditures.

I don't think they'll succeed. But if they do, it won't prove their objections were correct. It will only prove that deficit reduction is very difficult in a political culture in which one party is totally unconcerned about the deficit.

The Persecution Of Rush Limbaugh

The newest issue of Commentary has an ode to the goodness of Rush Limbaugh, authored by Wilfred M. McClay. Apparently, Commentary staffer, former Bush administration Minister of Propaganda and designated Jonathan Chait Blog Fodder Provider Pete Wehner called Limbaugh to inform him he was being so flattered, leading to this entertaining on-air exchange:

RUSH: Last night I'm minding my own business, actually reading a novel and I get an e-mail from my buddy Pete Wehner saying, "Hey, if you haven't seen it there's a great piece at our magazine, Commentary magazine: How to Understand Rush Limbaugh."  And I thought, "It must be if Pete's pointing it out to me."  This guy, Wilfred McClay, writes about,  how to put this... we're into our 23rd year here and he raises things that have not been asked before other than by Zev Chafets in the book Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One.  So we've linked to it at RushLimbaugh.com.   ...

RUSH: Okay, to the phones.  We'll start in Greenville, North Carolina, and Sarina.  I'm glad you called.  It's great to have you here, and hello.

CALLER:  Hi, Mr. Limbaugh.  How are you?  It's such an honor to speak to you.

RUSH:  Thank you very much.

CALLER:  Anyway, I'm calling to tell you I'm a little bit mad at you because I got up this morning and I got on my Facebook and I saw the post that you had to look at that article on how to understand Rush Limbaugh, and I read the entire thing and it's absolutely excellent, and you told your viewers that you "hardly" recommend it, but it's excellent.  Why?

RUSH:  Well, no, no, no. I said I "heartily" recommend it.

CALLER:  Oh, heartily! I misunderstand. That's my mistake.  I thought you said you "hardly" recommend it.

RUSH:  Why would I bring it up if I don't want to recommend it?

CALLER:  That's true.  I just wanted to tell you that I love you, I listen to you every day, I'm seven months pregnant, so I've got a genuine Rush Baby in utero.

As for the article itself, the only thing keeping the author from declaring that he, too, has a Rush Baby in utero is his lack of uterus. The many criticisms of Limbaugh (see for instance, David Frum's piece on the subject) are ignored or, at most, referenced only in the most oblique way. Of course, in so doing, McClay forces himself to miss the only things that distinguish Limbaugh from every other Republican talking head. Here, for instance, is McClay's account of Limbaugh's dust-up with the White House in January 2009:

Limbaugh had just stunned the country, days before Obama was inaugurated, by summarizing his feelings about the new president in four simple words: “I hope he fails.” Limbaugh impatiently brushed aside the happy talk about compromise and bipartisan cooperation and scoffed at the claim that Obama was a pragmatic, post-ideological, post-partisan, post-racial conciliator and healer. Instead, he saw every reason to believe that Obama would aggressively pursue a leftist dream agenda: an exponential expansion of government’s size and power, a reordering of the American economic system, and a dismantling of America’s role as a world power. Limbaugh was not alone in such views, but he was the only major figure on the right willing to stick his neck out at a time when the rest of the nation seemed dazed into acquiescence by the so-far impeccably staged Obama ascendancy.

The notion that Limbaugh was the sole right-winger unwilling to pledge himself to a bipartisan lovefest with Obama is, obviously, more than a bit strained given that GOP leaders came out in total opposition to Obama's economic rescue program even before he was sworn in. What actually set Limbaugh apart was not that he disagreed with Obama's economic program, or that he hoped it would fail legislatively, which would be a perfectly normal thing for a partisan to believe, but that he believed that Obama's plan was not even intended to spark the economy. Limbaugh wanted Obama to fail because he believed Obama was actually trying to foment an economic collapse. He said so repeatedly:

We have plenty of external threats, enemies across oceans, but we have a threat inside as well.  This is something that I've never felt. I never feel that we had a president actually governing against the country, against the will of the people.  I know we've had liberals. Clinton and Hillary were, and are. They're pedal-to-the-metal liberals.  But they didn't want to destroy things.  This bunch does...

Why aren't we growing jobs in this country like we used to?  Why aren't we?  It's not hard to do.  There's all kinds of textbook evidence, real-life historical evidence of how to do it.  We're not doing it; we're not doing it on purpose.  It's payback time. 

Or, for another example, here:

Obama is joyfully overseas talking about the decline of the US economy, happily presiding over it, implicitly acknowledging the decline of American dominance.  It's what he's all about.  He's happy he's made it happen.

The assumption that Obama is deliberately subverting the economy, not just pursuing misguided policies, dovetails with the notion of Obama as an alien subversive, which Limbaugh is also happy to encourage:

All right, little Barry is back in Indonesia, and they're all happy over there.  Little Barry Soetoro is back and they're all happy over there in Indonesia.  In fact, he was someplace in India, he was introduced by somebody from Kenya, and the woman says, "As a fellow Kenyan, Mr. President," of course everybody looked the other way, "What do you mean fellow Kenyan, we don't want to hear this," and now little Barry is back. 

This kind of delirious, conspiratorial talk had been heard from ranters appearing at the late stages of McCain-Palin campaign rallies, but the campaign had vigorously distanced itself from it. The significance of Limbaugh's rant was a mainstreaming of what had been a marginal set of beliefs -- Obama not merely as a liberal, but as an alien, conspiratorial figure posing a fundamental threat to American liberty and working deliberately to subvert its strength. That is a genuine intellectual contribution, though McClay can't acknowledge it.

The only way an uninformed reader might be able to glean that Limbaugh has any controversial beliefs is McClay's reference to his manifold, powerful enemies:

He conducts his show in an air of high-spiritedness and relaxed good humor, clearly enjoying himself, always willing to be spontaneous and unpredictable, even though he is aware that every word he utters on the air is being recorded and tracked by his political enemies in the hope that he will slip up and say something career-destroying. Limbaugh the judo master is delighted to make note of this surveillance, with the same delight he expresses when one of his “outrageous” sound bites makes the rounds of the mainstream media, and he can then play back all the sputtering but eerily uniform reactions from the mainstream commentators, turning it back on them with a well-placed witticism.

"Surveillance" is funny word to use here -- it is generally thought to apply to the unwanted monitoring of private conversation, not the practice of listening to political diatribes broadcast on national radio so as to rebut them.

And why do Limbaugh's enemies "surveill" his program in the belief that he will destroy his career? McClay won't come out and explain, so allow me: Limbaugh is a racial demagogue. He plays constantly upon the racial paranoia of his audience. If he were black, we would call him a "race man."

Limbaugh is obsessed with race. In his telling, racism against whites does not just happen here or there, it has overwhelmed -- indeed, completely replaced -- traditional white-on-black racism. "Racism in this country is the exclusive province of the left," he says. In Limbaugh's world, minorities deploy racism endlessly and with impunity against whites, who are hamstrung by out-of-control political correctness. He presents Obama's agenda as the blacks' revenge against White America for slavery and Jim Crow. ("He's angry, he's gonna cut this country down to size, he's gonna make it pay for all the multicultural mistakes that it has made, its mistreatment of minorities.") Even such disparate events as a random school bus fight between a couple kids who happen to be black and a kid who happens to be white reveal, in Limbaugh's fevered mind, a widespread pattern of racial victimization against whites triggered by Obama:

You put your kids on a school bus, you expect safety but in Obama's America the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, "Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on," and, of course, everybody says the white kid deserved it, he was born a racist, he's white.

This is another interesting quality of Limbaugh's. He stands in stark contrast to the general pattern of a Republican Party that has steadily distanced itself from racialized appeals to whites. McClay, obviously, can't acknowledge that, either. Instead he offers up descriptions of Limbaugh such as "he reminds one of the affirmative spirit of Ronald Reagan and, like Reagan, reminds his listeners of the better angels of their nature."

In Defense Of Walter Lippmann (And Against Fred Astaire)

Paul Krugman writes, "even high-minded intellectuals are a lot more likely to watch old Fred Astaire movies than to read old Walter Lippmann commentaries."

Am I the only person who has read old Walter Lippmann commentaries but has never seen a Fred Astaire movie? Don't get me wrong, I've consumed plenty of pop culture candy. An old movie based on dancing just has no appeal to me, whereas an old Lippmann commentary does.

By the way, Ron Steel's biography of Lippmann is very good.

Democrat Proposes To End Individual Mandate

Peter DeFazio (D-OR) has a proposal to accommodate the philosophical and legal objections to the individual mandate while still fulfilling the core objective of preventing people from free-riding on the regulated insurance market:

Defazio (D-OR) proposes that people be allowed to opt out of the insurance mandate altogether -- but if they do, they will not be allowed to free-ride on the new health care system.

Under his plan, a person opting out "must file an 'affidavit of personal responsibility' with the state exchange. Such a filing will waive their rights to: 1) Enroll in a health insurance exchange; 2) Enroll in Medicaid if otherwise made eligible; and 3) Discharge health care related debt under Chapter 7 bankruptcy law," DeFazio wrote in a letter to colleagues Tuesday.

Under his plan, if a person wants back into the system, they'd need to buy insurance on their own, out of pocket, for five years. The idea here, and with other, similar plans, is to moot one of the constitutional complaints about the mandate -- that it penalizes "inactivity."

Since those conservative objections are utterly sincere, I'm sure Republicans will be happy to join together to pass a law to eliminate the hated individual mandate and improve the health care law. This is about freedom, right?

Right?

Health Care Repeal And Populist Delusions

Orrin Hatch had an item for National Review yesterday entitled "Listening To The People By Repealing Obamacare," which emphasized over and over how totally the public supports repeal:

But the White House didn’t listen. They moved full speed ahead, using every budget gimmick and procedural trick in the book to jam their bill through both the House and the Senate despite growing opposition from all across America. ...

But the American people did not forget how they were slighted in this debate. Last November, they sent a clear message at voting booths across the country that they would not be ignored and that they wanted Congress to overturn Obamacare.

Unlike the Democratic majority before them, House Republicans listened to the overwhelming message of their constituents and two weeks ago voted to repeal this monstrosity of a law. ...

Yet, those on the other side who have themselves acknowledged that this law should be fixed remain determined to ignore the will of the people, and they blocked our efforts to repeal this fundamentally flawed law and start over....

I rest easy knowing that I am standing with my fellow Utahns and the people of this country, whose distrust of Obamacare grows as they learn more about it.

To borrow from Justice Scalia, the American people despise Obamacare because the American people love democracy and the American people are not fools. They know that this law was enacted in a totally partisan manner, and over the loud opposition of a majority of Americans.

The sheer, monotonous repetition of this simple point has been echoed by Republicans, who have chanted about the "overwhelming" support for repeal for well over a year. In reality, the public never opposed health care reform by anything like "overwhelming" margins. And since the debate has turned from passing the bill to repealing it, opinion is even more closely divided. (Indeed, the last two polls show outright opposition to repeal.)

I understand the propaganda benefits of claiming the high ground of public opinion. I do wonder, though, if Republicans are actually falling into the trap of believing their own bullshit. The party blundered into the government shutdown fiasco under Clinton in large part because its propaganda apparatus asserted that the people agreed with them so loudly and repeatedly that Republicans came to believe it.

Consider this new poll from the GOP firm McLaughlin & Associates. It asks:

Regarding the health care law passed by Congress, should Congress repeal it and replace it with a bill that focuses on lowering health care costs by taking a few modest steps like allowing the purchase of insurance across state lines to improve competition, ensure that individuals with pre-existing conditions have access to affordable insurance, and curbing lawsuits against doctors, would you prefer that alternative bill or the law which Congress recently passed?

Any pollster understands that a question like this is an attempt to demonstrate public support, not a legitimate attempt to measure public opinion. It stacks the deck by contrasting the law passed by "Congress" (which is way less popular than President Obama) with a hypothetical alternative that contains entirely popular features with no negative ones. Now, I am quite confident that Republicans will never produce a plan like, this in part because crafting such a plan would be impossible. But that isn't my point. My point is that Republicans did not, in fact, vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with this fantasy plan. It voted to repeal it, full stop.

So, of course, that polling question bears no relationship to the actual vote. And McLaughlin does not poll on the question of should we repeal the health care bill and then hopefully create some possible alternative somewhere down the line. I suspect the firm realizes full well that such a poll would not create the desired results.

It's possible that the poll was designed to (very subtly) warn Republicans not to allow themselves to be painted as opposing reform. I doubt many Republicans have picked up on the subtlety. Jeffrey Anderson of the Weekly Standard cites the poll as yet more evidence that the repeal vote constituted "listening to the American people and giving them what they want."

The most straightforward interpretation of this is that Republicans are actually drinking their own Kool-aid. It's bizarre. Of all the things for a party to delude itself over, public opinion seems like the worst.

The Politics Of the Coming Budget Fight

Last month, in a little-noticed move, House Republicans voted to give massive power to House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan:

[T]he new rules also include a stunning and unprecedented provision authorizing the Chairman of the Budget Committee elected in the 112th Congress, expected to be Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, to submit for publication in the Congressional Record total spending and revenue limits and allocations of spending to committees — and the rules provide that this submission “shall be considered as the completion of congressional action on a concurrent resolution on the budget for fiscal year 2011.” In other words, in the absence of a budget resolution agreement between the House and the Senate, it appears that Rep. Ryan (presumably with the concurrence of the Republican leadership) will be allowed to set enforceable spending and revenue limits, with any departure from those limits subject to being ruled “out of order.”

This rule change has immediate, far-reaching implications. It means that by voting to adopt the proposed new rules on January 5, a vote on which party discipline will be strictly enforced, the House could effectively be adopting a budget resolution and limits for appropriations bills that it has never even seen, much less debated and had an opportunity to amend. (There is no requirement for Representative Ryan to make his proposed spending and revenue limits available to Members or the public before the vote on the new rules.)

The maneuver here is "deem and pass," a procedural tactic that Democrats briefly contemplated during the health care debate and abandoned when conservatives threw a fit of apoplexy. Essentially the House deems a law -- in this case, Ryan's budget -- to have passed without a direct vote. It's certainly a less transparent way to do conduct votes.

I don't, however, have a real problem with it. If the opposition understands what's happening, it shouldn't allow the majority to hide its votes from public scrutiny. The vote to adopt the rule becomes the vote to adopt the policy. And so Democrats are attacking Republicans for supporting Ryan's budget cuts:

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is targeting 19 House Republicans they believe are "vulnerable." Fifth district Congressman Robert Hurt is on their list.

Hurt says he's not surprised and that he welcomes comments or criticism, but he says there are some accusations they have wrong. The DCCC is running radio ads, web ads and more in the district this week as part of their Drive to 25 campaign. One of the ads says Hurt has plans to cut education and research by 40 percent. Hurt says he's on a committee that studies proposals, but that the claim isn't true.

"Because I'm a member of that committee, somehow that means that I want to cut education by 40 percent or something like that. I mean it's just totally made up out of whole cloth. I don't know where its coming from," he said.

Sorry, Rep. Hurt, but when you voted to empower Ryan to reshape the federal budget, you voted for his priorities. So it doesn't matter that Hurt has not voted to cut education and research by 40 percent. (That's the portion of the federal budget where Democrats clearly believe Republicans are most vulnerable.) Every Republican who supported it can be held accountable for the policy. If they don't like being held accountable for the power they defer to Ryan, they can go back to the old, more transparent system. 

"World's Most Interesting Man" Talks

Nick Paumgarten interviews the actor who plays "The World's Most Interesting Man" in a series of Dos Equis commercials. He turns out to be, if not the most interesting man in the world, pretty interesting:

A montage of highlights from the real life of Jonathan Goldsmith might include (had there been cameras present) footage of him rescuing a stranded climber on Mt. Whitney, saving a drowning girl in Malibu, sailing the high seas with his friend Fernando Lamas (the inspiration for his Interesting persona and, according to Goldsmith, “the greatest swordsman who ever lived in Hollywood”), and starting a successful network marketing business (“I was a hustler, a very good hustler”), which, for a while, anyway, enabled him to flee Hollywood for an estate in the Sierras. Among the outtakes might be glimpses of his stint as a waterless-car-wash entrepreneur. “I love the old philosophers,” he said. “I have a large library. I am not a die-hard sports fan. I love to cut wood.”...

He had an equally peripatetic career off the lot, the particulars of which he’s saving for a book. He divulged one old surefire tactic: knowing that Warren Beatty kept a penthouse suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, Goldsmith used to wait in the lobby for the young women who’d been summoned there, and he’d intercept them, saying, “Warren sent me down. I’m terribly sorry, but he had to cancel the meeting.”

Today In Doublethink

Probably the most effective element of the Republican campaign against the Affordable Care Act was its successful effort to persuade older Americans, the only age demographic that opposed the law (and they opposed it overwhelmingly) that efforts to expand coverage to the uninsured would come at their expense. Here, for instance, is one Republican gloating that the Scare Granny tactic works:

Take the question of Granny. In a speech last Friday defending his health-care law's effect on seniors against GOP attacks, Mr. Obama said, "I can report that Granny is safe." She may not feel that way if she's one of the 700,000 seniors whose private Medicare Advantage insurance policy was not renewed last year because her insurance provider quit the business.

Yet at some level, Republicans feel a little dirty about this, and want to believe that the public is prepared to entertain serious cuts in entitlements. They won power in part by demagoguing even painless cuts in wasteful Medicare spending, and now they think they have a mandate to impose serious, substantive reductions in Medicare benefits:

Thanks in good measure to Mr. Obama's profligacy, the entitlement crisis is no longer a vague, abstract concern. More and more Americans understand the current course leads to a disaster for the nation's finances. And so the public may be willing to go places and do things that in the past it may not have.

This is an unusual and fluid moment. My hunch is voters are more inclined than ever to reward the political party that addresses entitlement reform—and more inclined than ever to punish the one that fiddles while America's fiscal house burns.

The odd thing is that both these arguments appear in the same op-ed, by Karl Rove.

The Obama Polling Dissuasion Effect

As some have pointed out, President Obama's recent polling surge has only a modestly suggestive impact on his reelection odds, but but one clear effect is to dissuade potentially strong challengers. Such as John Thune:

South Dakota Sen. John Thune just landed two plum posts in the Senate — seats on the influential Finance and Budget committees — that crystallize the decision he now faces: Stay in the Senate to climb the leadership ladder, or jump into the 2012 presidential contest.

The betting among Republicans is that Thune remains in the Senate, and the senator himself acknowledges he might stay put.

“It’s a different scenario maybe than some of the other candidates who don’t have a job,” he said with a laugh Tuesday in an interview in his Senate office. “This is a great place. This is a great job. We all complain about it. It’s frustrating at times ... but it is a place where ultimately you can be engaged in the big debates about the issues."

As Thune notes, many of the other contenders do not have jobs, so they're pretty much all-in on 2012. But Thune can pick when he wants to run for president, and running against a fairly popular incumbent president may not be the best time to pick.

&c

-- Ed Kilgore pricks the "Huntsman 2012" trial balloon.

-- In Iowa, a young man stands up for his mothers.

-- Marc Ambinder with the inside story on the White House's response to events in Egypt.