Author Page for Scott Lemieux

ACA Second-Guessing, From the Right

Jim Webb gives us a familiar story:

Webb voted for the law, but also for more than a dozen GOP-offered amendments to it.

“If you were going to do something of this magnitude, you have to do it with some clarity, with a clear set of objectives from the White House,” added Webb, who opted not to run for a second term this year. “…It should have been done with better direction from the White House.”

He faulted Obama for playing too passive a role in shaping the legislation. Taking a lesson from Bill Clinton’s failed 1994 health-care overhaul effort–which was faulted for its micromanagement of the details of the bill–Obama opted to spell out a broad set of goals, and let Congress work out the details.

As always, it’s impossible to know for certain if this kind of baseless counterfactual speculation is correct. But we can say that it is extremely implausible. The biggest problem — which Tumulty, to her credit, notes — is that what Webb is describing is the Clinton strategy, which Obama had very good reasons not to use since it was a complete disaster. The resulting process in the World’s Worst Deliberative Body was highly inefficient, but it’s not clear how that’s Obama’s fault. At any rate, I think it’s pretty clear that had Obama tried a more high-handed approach Webb would now be complaining about how Obama failed to treat the members of the Greatest Legislative Body There Absolutely Ever Was with due respect and this explains why the bill is unpopular.

But what would a better approach have been? Here, Webb gives away the show:

Webb also said that if Obama had opted for a smaller measure, he would have stood a chance of winning the support of a significant number of Republicans on Capitol Hill.

So ultimately this is Frank’s argument from the right — what Obama did wrong was actually tying to get some kind of serious health reform passed. He should have done something “small” enough to attract “significant” Republican support; presumably, the “give lots of money to insurance companies while cutting Medicaid and not requiring them to cover anybody” act.

But Webb does make clear what we’re dealing with. The Webb/Frank critique is at least coherent — essentially, it’s that Obama’s mistake was trying to pass any kind of significant health care legislation, and continuing the status quo for another generation would have been fine. But the critique from the left — that Obama could have used the Game-Changing Political Capital of the BULLY PULPIT to get the Senate to pass a robust public option — is about as clearly wrong as a counterfactual can be. You have no negotiating leverage over people who don’t care if anything passes, and Webb and the other conservative Democrats who held the balance of power in the Senate can’t even be bothered to pretend that they cared.

Public Ignorance of the Supreme Court

That only about a quarter of the public can name the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is not surprising. One implication of this, given the speculation that will surround the forthcoming ACA decision, is that whatever the Supreme Court does will probably have less effect on the presidential election than most people think. And, in particular, as to the idea that the public will oppose a Supreme Court decision a majority doesn’t disapprove of on the merits because the reasoning isn’t convincing enough or because it’s only 5-4 — that’s not going to happen.

Pining For Lochner

Janice Rogers Brown, appointed by George W. Bush to the august D.C. Circuit., argues that the courts should start throwing out economic regulations she doesn’t like. Based…well, not on any specific constitutional provision, but because the Constitution generally establishes “cowboy capitalism.” It’s becoming hard for me to follow these arguments since I still don’t have that secret Federalist Society Constitution with the word “suckers” in it.

It seems worth noting again that it’s amazing that the media portrayed the Gang of 14 as some sort of compromise, and it’s even more amazing that some Republicans thought that their senators had sold out. It was a massive, massive Republican win.

Actually, I Think All Americans Should Come Together And Admit That I’m Right About Everything

Shorter Tom Friedman: I shall celebrate my Wanker of the Decade title by writing a column about how we need a third party candidate who represents moderate conservative values already vastly overrepresented in the Beltway for the 8 millionth time.

Suck On This

Hard to argue with this choice.

The thing about the definitive “suck on this” moment is how utterly asinine the surrounding analysis is. How, exactly, is terrorism like a stock-market bubble? But when you defend disastrous wars in exclusively in terms of business-book cliches and vacuous catchphrases, it allows you to avoid stating things in specific enough terms that their stupidity becomes more transparent — i.e. “we need to randomly kill a bunch of people so we can deter suicide bombers.”

Frankly Wrong About Health Care Reform

I greatly enjoyed Jason Zengerle’s interview with Barney Frank, but I’m puzzled that Frank continues to take the Rahm Emanuel line on health care reform:

I think we paid a terrible price for health care. I would not have pushed it as hard. As a matter of fact, after Scott Brown won, I suggested going back. I would have started with financial reform but certainly not health care.

And if you’d done it with that sequencing, you could have still gotten health care before 2012?
I’m not sure, but I think you could have gotten some pieces of it. And yeah, if we’d held the House, we could have gotten it.

1)The assumption that the Democrats may have held the House had they not pursued the ACA is extremely implausible. It may explain why they did even worse than could have been expected, but there was essentially no chance of holding the House in that context.  Moreover, presumably the same political logic would apply after the imaginary successful 2010 midterms, only worse because it’s a presidential election year.

2)This is – uncharacteristically — essentially an argument against most progressive change. Anything that challenges privilege and disrupts the status quo carries risk and disrupts people’s sensitivities.

3)If not then, when? Comprehensive health care reform has failed repeatedly. Political conditions as favorable as 2009-10 are pretty rare. Essentially, Frank is arguing that the Democrats should just abandon serious health care reform, which I think is very wrong.

4)Even if the assumptions discussed in point 1 is true, at some point, so what? The point of majorities is to do things. Maybe the Democrats would have held the South longer had they not passed the CRA, but (and I stress that I’m not comparing it to the ACA in terms of impact) that’s no reason not to do it.

5)The only way this argument works is if leaving health care for the next generation would have allowed for a similarly important goal to be addressed.   But it’s hard to see how this could be true.   The most obvious candidate – climate change — got no traction at all, which puts the burden of proof on those who think that different sequencing would have led to major climate change legislation.   And it’s hard to see how it would have made sense to dump health care to focus on it.   Given the uniform Republican opposition, it’s a substantially less promising political arena than even health care — the benefits more diffuse and long-term, the powerful opposition broader and harder to buy off.    I would estimate the chances of passing major climate change legislation at roughly zero no matter how much Obama prioritized it.   I also very much doubt that a significantly stronger financial reform bill could have been passed, and even if it could it would be much easier to reform and evade than a major new entitlement.

I admire Frank, but I think he’s pushing risk-aversion too far here. Whatever other mistakes Obama made on healthc are he was right to keep pushing even after the Brown election.

Particularly Good Mad Men Episode

Merits a particularly strong MZS essay.

“It illuminates nothing; it humiliates its writer.”

Virginia Heffernan reads Katie Roiphe so you don’t have to:

Over a series of bad-faith and gibberish paragraphs, she sets up the reader as a hayseed who is turned on by lite porn because she’s never seen how they do it in Berlin or whatever; or—worse still—so unsuccessfully feminine and so outside of the charmed circle of female literary power that she’s satisfied by regular guys who don’t hit her. Thanks.

Giving another person false and heavily proscribed choices (would you rather be bruised or battered?) is a rhetorical trick used by polemicists all the time. It allows them to propose a third way—their own archcuriosity and cynicism, usually—and then force surrender. “Spanking Goes Mainstream” is quick-and-dirty propaganda, done on deadline at the behest of a harried and opportunistic editor. We’re not talking Goebbels here. When done this sloppily, this kind of rhetoric usually inspires defiance. Sure enough, Twitter is alive today with tweets like this one: “Women don’t want to be spanked. They just want to spank Katie Roiphe into hushed obscurity.”

Best way to stop the S&M cycle of feminine sophistry and showboating? Just don’t read the article. It illuminates nothing; it humiliates its writer.

Eric Gregg Lives!

The pitches thrown to Cody Ross in the last AB in today’s Red Sox/Rays game. 3 were called strikes. If you pay attention to such things you probably could have identified this immediately as the work of Larry Vanover.

Vaonover is a real throwback. In the worst sense — a throwback to umpires of the 80s, who were not merely egregiously incompetent but proudly and belligerently incompetent. When Vanover was just starting out he called out Moises Alou out on a pitch in the opposite batter’s box that was also low. Alou walked back to the dugout and muttered something with his back turned to Vanover, who tore his mask off, started screaming at Moises, and tossed him. He hasn’t improved at all, but somehow he keeps cashing his paychecks.

The War On Women

Has actual casualties:

But the reality is that a shockingly high number of American moms are dying for preventable reasons. The U.S. Maternal Mortality Ratio (the number of maternal deaths per 100,000 live births) is shockingly high, well above the average for the developed world, and higher than virtually all of Western Europe as well as some countries in Asia and the Middle East. Even more troubling, U.S. maternal mortality has increased in the last two decades, and is now more than twice as high as it was in the late 1980s. The Affordable Care Act included provisions designed to help stop this scary trend—not just by expanding health care access (many maternal deaths could be prevented with proper care)—but also through the Maternal, Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting program, created as part of ACA, which provides nurses and social workers to work with high-risk moms, starting before they give birth, to help them have healthy pregnancies and deliveries and support their babies’ health and development after birth.The program is modeled after programs, such as the Nurse Family Partnership that have a strong track record of improving maternal and child outcomes, preventing abuse and neglect, increasing fathers’ involvement in their kids’ lives, improving kids’ school performance, reducing crime, and saving the taxpayers a boatload of money over the long term. But all that could go the way of the dodo, if ACA is struck down or repealed (and some of the right wing fear-mongering about this program must be seen to be believed).

And the negative consequences of striking the ACA down stand in stark contrast to the utter triviality of the rights claims being made against it.

Don’t Forget Catharine MacNerdington!

There are several indications that an article is not going to be worth your time unless you’re a blogger looking for something really dumb to make fun of. The first is that it appears in the Dartmouth Review. But if that’s not enough for some reason, this one makes it clear early:

Writing on CNN.com yesterday, columnist Megan Carpentier broke from the issue’s traditional fault lines to rebuke Mr. Buffett’s tax proposals on radical new ground. Donning the persona of the late Andrea Dorkin, the author argues that the primary problem with a proposal that reeks of Occupy-style class warfare isn’t its spurious economic underpinnings or its assault on success; rather, its most glaring deficiency is its architect’s insistence on calling his “personal assistant” a “secretary.”

Andrea Dorkin? Was that a character in one of the American Pie sequels?

I actually kind of appreciate that. The ratio of wingnut pundits who invoke Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin — the most powerful actors in 20th century American political life — to the wingnut pundits who could tell you a single thing about either of their work is roughly three million to zero. Getting one of them confused with a nickname you or another asshole in your frat gave to a girl in high school with glasses that weren’t cutting edge enough just gives up the pretense.

The War on Parody, Punditry Edition

This article about how Obama is such a “bully” that he’s willing to criticize political opponents is pretty much all comedy gold, but I especially treasure the bit about how “Obama’s campaign moved to distance the president” from comments made by a Democrat who is not connected to the administration.