“Why They Are Dead, Horribly Wrong”: What Democrats Whine About When They Whine About ObamaCare
Democrats have reacted to crushing losses in November’s midterm elections in the usual manner: with a circular firing squad. And one of the targets has been the signature policy of the Obama administration, the Affordable Care Act.
Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York took the lead earlier this month, arguing that it was a mistake for Democrats to pass comprehensive health care reform. Retiring Sen. Tom Harkin (Iowa) has come to the same conclusion for different reasons.
While it’s not surprising that this argument has intensified after the midterm bloodbath, it isn’t a new one. Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank was saying the same things in 2012, and former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel urged Obama to abandon health care reform in 2010, after the election of Scott Brown to the Senate cost Democrats their brief filibuster-proof majority.
But whether made now or at the time, whether from the left, right, or center, whether driven by policy or pragmatism, all of these arguments have one thing in common: they’re dead wrong. Horribly wrong. Wrong about the ACA, wrong about what was possible in 2010, and wrong about American political history in general.
Before analyzing each variation of the claim that Democrats were wrong to pass the ACA, it’s important to start with this: the ACA has been a remarkable policy success. It has substantially reduced the number of Americans without health insurance, and in so doing has alleviated a great deal of needless suffering, anxiety, and financial stress. It has slowed the growth in health care costs. And its medley of wonky reforms has improved health outcomes.
Furthermore, had it been allowed to work as intended, rather than having its Medicaid expansion ineptly re-written by the Supreme Court and obstructed by Republican statehouses, the scope of the achievement would be even greater.
The ACA doesn’t represent optimal health care policy by any means — to find a better one you need only throw a dart at a map of Western Europe. But it’s a success that Democrats should be very proud of, one that can stand alongside the great achievements of the New Deal and the Great Society.
Arguments that Democrats should not have done health care face a very, very high burden of proof. And they don’t even come close.
Democrats should have focused on something else.
This is a recurring theme in the anti-ACA arguments being made by Democrats. Schumer says Democrats should have focused on the “middle class” rather than health care reform, while Frank argued that the Democrats should have emphasized financial reform instead.
The main problem with these arguments is that no alternative course of action would be remotely worth trading for the ACA. As Paul Krugman points out, “focusing” on the economy in and of itself has no value, and Schumer can’t point to any concrete policy that would have passed had the Democrats not pursued comprehensive health care reform. There was not going to be a second major round of stimulus no matter what. The Obama administration didn’t do nearly enough for underwater homeowners, but this failure was independent of the ACA.
The only alternative policy course that could have arguably been preferable to the ACA would have been legislation addressing climate change. But given the Senate’s heavy tilt towards conservative fossil-fuel states, cap-and-trade legislation was always going to be stillborn. The idea that two Democratic senators from North Dakota, two Democratic senators from Montana, Mary “I’m going to my political grave defending the Keystone pipeline” Landrieu, and other relatively conservative Democrats were all going to vote for major climate change legislation is fantastical. In addition, much of what cap-and-trade would have accomplished can be addressed through regulatory action, which is not the case with health care.
Democrats should have waited for a pony.
Harkin’s argument is somewhat different — and is superficially more appealing — than Schumer’s. Instead of arguing that health care reform was a misguided priority, Harkin argues that the ACA wasn’t good enough. “We should have either done it the correct way or not done anything at all,” he asserts. Democrats should have tried for “single-payer right from the get go or at least put a public option [which] would have simplified a lot.”
This is like saying that Democrats should have gotten “two weeks at the penthouse suite at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco…or at least a night at the Motel 6 in Tulsa.” It misleadingly conflates two very different policies with two different political possibilities. Single-payer would certainly have been a better policy than the ACA, but it would be hard to get 20 votes for it in the Senate, let alone 60. (It’s worth noting that Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2009 single-payer bill had a grand total of zero co-sponsors.)
The question of the public option is more complicated. There are variants of the public option — most obviously a universally available Medicare buy-in — that would have been major reforms, representing a pathway to single-payer. But that is precisely why a robust public option was as DOA in Congress as single-payer itself. The public option in the House bill — which would not have been universally available or cheaper than private alternatives — was small potatoes that would not have made the ACA simpler, more popular, or significantly more progressive. And even so, there almost certainly weren’t the votes in the Senate to pass even the neutered version of the public option.
Should the Democrats have just given up then, as Harkin suggests?
No. Let’s put this in historical perspective. Harry Truman tried and failed to pass comprehensive health care reform. Lyndon Johnson, in extraordinarily favorable circumstances, failed to pass comprehensive health care reform. Ted Kennedy’s efforts under the Nixon administration failed. Bill Clinton’s efforts failed. The idea that Democrats will nationalize the health insurance industry the next chance they get is just the purest wishful thinking. And the idea that millions of people should be denied health insurance for such a long-odds gamble is not merely wrong but immoral.
Democrats would have avoided big losses in the midterms.
At the core of these arguments is the fact that the ACA is unpopular, which presumably played a major role in the Democratic Party losing big in the 2010 and 2014 midterms. This argument might be the least convincing of all.
Let’s set aside the fact that Democrats held on to the Senate in 2010 and 2012, despite the ACA’s unpopularity, as well as the presidency. The argument, at its core, is deeply problematic. It presumes that Democrats should maintain power as an end in itself. But it’s not an end in itself — the point of being elected is to do things that benefit your constituents. What’s the point of political capital if you don’t spend it?
Again, it’s worth putting things in historical perspective. The problem with waiting for the perfect, risk-free time to pass major reform legislation is that there’s never a perfect time. There have been three major periods of progressive reform legislation in Congress between the Civil War and 2008. (The fact that there have been only three should give pause to those who think that Obama, Reid, and Nancy Pelosi are worthless sellouts because they failed to completely transform the American political economy in Obama’s first two years.) In 1966, Great Society Democrats lost 47 seats in the House and three in the Senate, a preview of the crack-up of the Democratic coalition that would (with a detour created by Watergate) lead to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. In 1938, New Deal Democrats lost 72 seats in the House and seven in the Senate, and this tally doesn’t account for the failure of FDR’s efforts to defeat anti-New Deal Democrats in the primaries. In 1874, the Reconstruction-era Republicans lost 93 (out of 293) seats in the House and a net of seven seats in the Senate, effectively ending Reconstruction.
Does this mean that Lyndon Johnson shouldn’t have signed the Civil Rights Act? That FDR should have waited until he didn’t need Southern segregationists to pass New Deal legislation? That Republicans should have nominated Andrew Johnson rather than Ulysses S. Grant in 1868? Of course not.
The perfect response to these kind of arguments was made by Pelosi: “We come here to do a job, not keep a job. There are more than 14 million reasons why that’s wrong.” This is exactly right. The window for progressive reform in the United States is always narrow and treacherous — you get the best you can get when you have the chance. The unpopularity of the greatest progressive achievement passed by Congress in nearly five decades is unfortunate, but misguided Monday-morning quarterbacking isn’t the right response.
By: Scott Lemieux, Professor of Political Science at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, N.Y.; The Week, December 11, 2014
“Whose Civil War Is Worse?”: Personal Distrust Far More Intense Among Republicans. They Really Don’t Like One Another
For some reason that I should probably determine one day, I’ve always found internal disputes with the conservative movement/Republican party somewhat more interesting than internal disputes within the liberal movement/Democratic party. Perhaps it’s because, as a liberal, I get a little Nelson Muntzian charge out of watching the folks on the other side tear themselves apart. Or perhaps it’s because, immersed as I am in the liberal world, the disputes on the left make more sense to me and therefore plumbing their mysteries isn’t so compelling.
Regardless, it has often been the case that one side is unified as the other is engaged in intramural battles; for many years, it was the Republicans who were together while the Dems were in disarray, while in the last few years the Democrats have been more united while the GOP has been riven by infighting. But could both sides now be at their own compatriots’ throats? And if so, whose internal battle is more vicious? Charles Krauthammer insists that it’s the Democrats who are on the verge of all-out civil war:
I grant that there’s a lot of shouting today among Republicans. But it’s a ritual skirmish over whether a government shutdown would force the president to withdraw a signature measure—last time, Obamacare; this time, executive amnesty…
It’s a tempest in a teapot, and tactical at that. Meanwhile, on the other side, cannons are firing in every direction as the Democratic Party, dazed and disoriented, begins digging itself out of the shambles of six years of Barack Obama.
To summarize him, congressional Republicans may be repeating the battles that led to a government shutdown, but Chuck Schumer made a speech that some other Democrats disagreed with, so obviously it’s the Democrats who are practically on the verge of dissolution.
Now let’s take a look at what conservative journalist Byron York is reporting:
A headline by Breitbart News—”Boehner Crafts Surrender Plan on Obama Executive Amnesty”—echoes the idea that GOP leaders will back down even when they have full control of Congress. It’s a view that is shared by many conservatives, from Twitter devotees to radio talk-show hosts.
Underneath it all is a toxic distrust among Hill Republicans. In conversations and email exchanges in the past few days—none of it for attribution and some of it completely off the record—GOP aides on both sides of the issue have expressed deep suspicion of the other side’s motives.
“Conservative Republicans believe leadership will cave to Obama because conservative Republicans are not stupid,” said one GOP aide. “Leadership is bound and determined to never have a funding fight on executive amnesty.”
“Ask them what their backup plan is after the government shuts down,” said another GOP aide, referring to the forces who want action now. “They don’t have one. They know their plan is a dead-end strategy, but they don’t care. All they care about is making themselves look good to the Heritage Action/purity-for-profit crowd.”
In both cases, there’s wide agreement on policy. There really isn’t any significant policy that Ted Cruz supports but John Boehner doesn’t, and you could say the same of almost any two major Democratic figures. Everybody’s arguing about tactics. But the differences seem much more meaningful on the Republican side, where the question is whether they should engage in a kamikaze mission to shut down the government, not whether some new phrasing to describe longstanding ideological values might yield a few more votes. And the personal distrust and dislike York describes seem far more intense among Republicans. They really don’t like one another.
The other major difference is that the GOP is actually divided into organized factions in a way that Democrats aren’t. As Joel Gehrke reports, there could be as many as 50 to 60 House Republicans who will vote against John Boehner’s plan to fund the government, which would mean Boehner would once again need to go on his knees to Nancy Pelosi asking for her help to avoid a shutdown. There’s nothing remotely comparable on the Democratic side.
But if it makes people like Krauthammer feel better to say, “We’re not the ones in disarray, they are!”, then I guess they should go right ahead.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, December 5, 2014
“Democrats Against Reform”: Democrats Should Be Celebrating The Fact That They Did The Right Thing
It’s easy to understand why Republicans wish health reform had never happened, and are now hoping that the Supreme Court will abandon its principles and undermine the law. But it’s more puzzling — and disturbing — when Democrats like Charles Schumer, senator from New York, declare that the Obama administration’s signature achievement was a mistake.
In a minute I’ll take on Mr. Schumer’s recent remarks. But first, an update on Obamacare — not the politics, but the actual policy, which continues to rack up remarkable (and largely unreported) successes.
Earlier this week, the independent Urban Institute released new estimates of the number of Americans without health insurance, and the positive results of Obamacare’s first year are striking. Remember all those claims that more people would lose coverage than would gain it? Well, the institute finds a sharp drop in the number of uninsured adults, with more than 10 million people gaining coverage since last year. This is in line with what multiple other estimates show. The primary goal of health reform, to give Americans access to the health care they need, is very much on track.
And while some of the policies offered under Obamacare don’t offer as much protection as we might like, a huge majority of the newly insured are pleased with their coverage, according to a recent Gallup poll.
What about costs? There were many predictions of soaring premiums. But health reform’s efforts to create meaningful competition among insurers are working better than almost anyone (myself included) expected. Premiums for 2014 came in well below expectations, and independent estimates show a very modest increase — 4 percent or less — for average premiums in 2015.
In short, if you think of Obamacare as a policy intended to improve American lives, it’s going really well. Yet it has not, of course, been a political winner for Democrats. Which brings us to Mr. Schumer.
The Schumer critique — he certainly isn’t the first to say these things, but he is the most prominent Democrat to say them — calls health reform a mistake because it only benefits a minority of Americans, and that’s not enough to win elections. What President Obama should have done, claims Mr. Schumer, was focus on improving the economy as a whole.
This is deeply wrongheaded in at least three ways.
First, while it’s true that most Americans have insurance through Medicare, Medicaid, and employment-based coverage, that doesn’t mean that only the current uninsured benefit from a program that guarantees affordable care. Maybe you have good coverage now, but what happens if you’re fired, or your employer goes bust, or it cancels its insurance program? What if you want to change jobs for whatever reason, but can’t find a new job that comes with insurance?
The point is that the pre-Obamacare system put many Americans at the constant risk of going without insurance, many more than the number of uninsured at any given time, and limited freedom of employment for millions more. So health reform helps a much larger share of the population than those currently uninsured — and those beneficiaries have relatives and friends. This is not a policy targeted on a small minority.
Second, whenever someone says that Mr. Obama should have focused on the economy, my question is, what do you mean by that? Should he have tried for a bigger stimulus? I’d say yes, but that fight took place in the very first months of his administration, before the push for health reform got underway. After that, and especially after 2010, scorched-earth Republican opposition killed just about every economic policy he proposed. Do you think this would have been different without health reform? Seriously?
Look, economic management is about substance, not theater. Having the president walk around muttering “I’m focused on the economy” wouldn’t have accomplished anything. And I’ve never seen any plausible explanation of how abandoning health reform would have made any difference at all to the political possibilities for economic policy.
Finally, we need to ask, what is the purpose of winning elections? The answer, I hope, is to do good — not simply to set yourself up to win the next election. In 2009-10, Democrats had their first chance in a generation to do what we should have done three generations ago, and ensure adequate health care for all of our citizens. It would have been incredibly cynical not to have seized that opportunity, and Democrats should be celebrating the fact that they did the right thing.
And one related observation: If more Democrats had been willing to defend the best thing they’ve done in decades, rather than run away from their own achievement and implicitly concede that the smears against health reform were right, the politics of the issue might look very different today.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, December 4, 2014
“You Can’t Elect A President And Then Just Sit Back”: Why Democrats Should Treat Republicans Like Their Mortal Enemy
Why do Democratic voters refuse to turn out in midterms? Why is the drop-off so large? Why is it so hard to convince them that the vote is important?
This is the existential crisis for the party of Roosevelt, Kennedy, Johnson, Clinton, and Obama.
In trying to solve it, the political world has come up with a number of provisional explanations, none of them satisfying. Democratic pollsters blame the party and its message, primarily. Liberals blame the party and its lack of a message. Political demographers attribute the disparity to the over-performance, the too-blue blushing, of Democratic voters in urban areas during presidential years. My own guess is that it has something to do with persuasion.
In the latest New York Review of Books, Michael Tomasky offers an answer that has a real ring of truth to it: Republican voters think about politics differently. They see politics as an enduring contest, not a series of discrete events. They are more apt to see the big picture, and therefore are easier to motivate.
Republican voters, being older and somewhat wealthier and more likely to own property, are more apt to see politics as a continuing conflict of interests that roll over from one election to the next — they can always be convinced that some undeserving person is coming to take away what they’ve earned. [NYRoB]
Democrats, by contrast, “are less likely to view politics in such stark terms.”
Younger voters, minority voters, single women, the non-propertied, might have more to gain from an active government, but it is much easier in general to motivate people if they fear they’re going to lose rights and privileges and stuff. Especially stuff. Especially stuff that they earned.
In a way, though, progressives who identify as progressives definitely see politics as a struggle; the elites see the Republican Party as revanchist, as standing athwart progress yelling “illegal immigrant!” and generally the biggest obstacle to a fair and just society where everyone’s material dignity is respected. What Tomasky is saying, I think, is that the mass of Democratic voters who share these values do so more in theory than in operation. They don’t live like they have much to gain; they live and vote to preserve losses.
Add to this the historical facts that the Democratic coalition is broader and harder to corral than the Republican coalition, and that the GOP has become more openly conservative (and therefore closer to the real views of their base voters) in the past 20 years, and the midterm imbalance begins to make more sense as part of the deep structure of both American politics and political identity.
GOP “extremism” attracts a larger share of voters than liberal “extremism” does. Extremism here is used not as a proxy for extreme views on issues, but as a way of describing a worldview, the set of issues it encompasses, what it takes to motivate people to act on those issues, and the lengths a party is willing to go to trigger that motivation. As James Vega notes in his latest memo for The Democratic Strategist, this strategy “views politics as essentially a form of warfare and political opponents as literal enemies.” It is not a new strategy for the GOP, or for conservatives. But it works better when the party, as it has done during the past several years, actively synchronizes its actions with its words — when the party that says that government is bad actively acts like government is bad.
No wonder why Democrats have been reluctant to habitually vote in midterms — the government they see is a discredited, delegitimized government of failed promises and total dysfunction.
Can Democrats change this? Republicans are not going to abandon their strategy anytime soon, especially as demographic change slowly chips away at their ability to win presidential elections.
Well, Democrats can teach their voters to think more like Republican voters in off-year elections. Tomasky describes a “massive and very well-funded public education campaign” that would basically drill into the heads of everyone who votes Democratic during presidential years that “they can’t just elect a president and just sit back and expect that he or she can wave a wand and make change happen.”
But how?
What’s the magic formula of words and threats that somehow makes this real for Democratic voters?
Maybe the party is too broad for a single perfect message to exist. Or maybe it will take casual language like Tomasky’s, a bunch more losses, and actual pain that is easily attributed to Republicans before these drop-off Democrats will understand that they need to view the Republicans like the Republicans view the Democrats: as an enemy.
For good-government, consensus, let’s-get-along, politics-can-be-pure types, this is a horrible message.
Can it be true that the only way for Democrats to vote their true strength is to treat the opposing party just as poorly as the opposing party treats the Democrats? Can it be true that the only way to break the logjam is to embrace a politics that is even more loathsome, more unctuous and more uncivil than it is today?
Maybe, yes.
By: Marc Ambinder, The Week, December 3, 2014
“The Tough Reality Of Politics For Women”: Learning From My 2014 Mistakes; A Year Of Reckoning For Democrats
Thanksgiving is a great time for writers to reckon with whatever we got wrong over the year – and to be grateful that in this day and age we get to write every day, and put mistakes behind us quickly. So with the 2014 midterm election rapidly disappearing in the rearview mirror, I thought I’d reckon with my one big political mistake this past election cycle, as well as one big thing I got, sadly, right.
In July 2013, long before the midterm, I wrote this piece: “Red state women will transform America.” I was pretty darn excited about the prospect of Wendy Davis, Alison Lundergan Grimes and Michelle Nunn stepping up and running in Texas, Kentucky and Georgia. In hindsight – or maybe even at the time – I showed some irrational exuberance. So did a lot of Democrats.
Maybe more significantly, I participated in wishful thinking shared by many more Democrats – believing that the women’s vote is the party’s ace in the hole and that, in addition to solid support from non-white voters, it will give them a lock on the White House, and will even turn red states blue over time. I’m less optimistic about that now. The Democrats’ continuing troubles with white women, and white married women, doomed all three once-promising white female Democratic candidates.
Of course, none of them were perfect candidates. I will always be grateful for Davis’s brave filibuster of horrible Texas anti-abortion legislation. But I overestimated her political skills. Reams have been written about her poor campaign; I don’t need to kick her here. In the days before the election, silly #tcot folks tried to pretend I’d written my Davis praise recently, not more than a year before the race. But I did get overexcited.
Likewise, Grimes wasn’t quite the pro I thought she was, although she had admirable political skills. Michelle Nunn, who actually came closest to being elected of the three, had little to recommend her besides her father’s famous name and her detachment from partisan bickering thanks to a career in business, not politics.
Even at the time, I overlooked what is still the tough reality of politics for women: Frequently, they get their big political breaks only when more experienced men size up a race and find it too dangerous. I still believe Texas will turn blue again, but state and national Democrats knew it wouldn’t happen in 2014. In Kentucky, experienced pols like Rep. John Yarmuth and Gov. Steve Beshear didn’t take on Mitch McConnell. And in Georgia, ambitious Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed knew he was at least a cycle too early for Georgia to turn blue.
I’m not blaming any of these men, by the way, for making the women in question sacrificial lambs or scapegoats. But the truth is, women often get their big “chances” when they run as sacrificial lambs. I should have reined in my optimism about their political potential much sooner.
My faith that white Democratic women could win over red state white women voters was particularly misplaced. CNN exit polls showed that Michelle Nunn lost white women to David Perdue 69-27; Wendy Davis lost them 66-31; Alison Grimes lost them 55-41. For now, the Democrats’ oft-touted advantages with “women” – which should always be described as “all women except for white women” — are outweighed by their difficulties with whites.
Right now, for complicated historical, cultural and racial reasons, white women vote more like “whites” – mostly Republican, though less than white men – and less like other women. Single white women and college-educated white women defy that trend more than others, but any 2016 prognosticating that relies on white women as Hillary Clinton’s secret weapon shouldn’t be trusted unless there’s data behind it. And I haven’t seen any.
What did I get right? Well, lots of things, if I do say so myself, but the most obvious late-cycle story was that Republicans and Fox News were ginning up a minimal Ebola threat as a powerful political weapon – and too many mainstream media outlets, and even Democratic politicians, participated. In the post-election mayhem, this seemed like too small a point to raise, but as we start bidding goodbye to 2014, I couldn’t resist it. I’d like to say Democrats learned from this one, too, but again, I’m not sure.
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes looked at media overkill on Ebola, especially at Fox and CNN (and also at the fact that it did nothing for ratings, which is heartening). Of course the right was disgusting, with Michael Savage dubbing Obama “President Obola” (the genteel Daily Caller settled for “President Ebola,” trusting their readers to get the African association with the Kenyan Muslim president’s unusual name).
Mainstream media skipped the name-calling, but went along with the hysteria: ABC News dubbed Ebola “the official October surprise,” and on CNN Don Lemon asked if it was “Obama’s Katrina.” Within a few weeks, though, Ebola was gone from our shores (though not from West Africa), the few American cases successfully contained by competent public health officials – but the story of its disappearance (let alone the media’s malpractice) went virtually uncovered.
In the end, CNN exit polls showed that while the public, early on, thought the federal government was doing an adequate job handling the threat, by election night that had shifted – 50 percent of voters polled disapproved of the federal government’s handling of Ebola, while 44 percent approved. Democrats lost so badly it’s unlikely that Ebola made the difference in any race. Still, it’s worth remembering how conservative and even supposedly moderate Republicans used Ebola politically – and how the media let them get away with it.
Sure, Senators-elect Tom Cotton and Thom Tillis were particularly insane on the topic, suggesting terrorists with Ebola might cross the Mexican border and combining the GOP’s three primal fears: terror, disease and swarthy illegal immigrants. But let’s take a moment to remember 2016 contender Gov. Chris Christie’s craven posturing, quarantining “Ebola nurse” Kaci Hickox when she came back from a trip treating Ebola patients. Christie dared Hickox to sue him: “Whatever. Get in line. I’ve been sued lots of times before. Get in line. I’m happy to take it on.”
The dignified humanitarian health worker won the round, getting released to her home in Maine and declaring Christie’s move not the “abundance of caution” he said it was, but “an abundance of politics.” Democrats could learn from Hickox; too many cowered in the face of GOP (and media) demagoguery on the small threat posed to Americans by the disease. Vulnerable Democrats Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Mark Udall of Colorado and Mark Pryor of Arkansas all defied Obama and came out in favor of travel restrictions on people coming from Ebola-plagued nations; all lost their races anyway.
Even in real time it was obvious what Ebola panic was designed to do, but voices who said exactly that were drowned out by hysterics. And when hysteria prevails, the GOP wins. That dynamic trumps the Democrats’ demographic advantages and will for a while. Democrats lose when they’re overconfident about demography and underestimate the power of fear. I was one for two on those issues last cycle; I’ll try to do better next time around.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, November 28, 2014
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