“Obamacare After Obama”: The Next President Should Be Grateful To Have A Universal Health Care Program On Which To Build
The morning of the recent Republican debate, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that the number of uninsured Americans in 2014 had dropped by about 9 million from the year before. This was thanks, of course, to the Affordable Care Act.
So it did cross one’s mind that at least one of the Republican presidential candidates might lend a kind word to Obamacare. After all, some of the largest gains in health coverage were among moderate-income families, a group including much of the Republican base.
A futile hope. Not even Govs. John Kasich of Ohio and Chris Christie of New Jersey — who, to their credit, had accepted the law’s expansion of Medicaid coverage in their states — offered a shred of praise. Instead we heard vows to basically blow it up, the main difference being the number of dynamite sticks to use.
Grudging appreciation for Obamacare has also extended to significant parts of the Democratic base. In the 2012 election, many Democratic candidates actually avoided discussing it. You see, a flood of anti-Obamacare propaganda — which Democrats had neglected to counter — caused support for the program to swoon in the polls.The new Census Bureau numbers show that African-Americans and Latinos have enjoyed an especially sharp rise in health coverage under Obamacare. And that makes it painful to contemplate these groups’ dismal turnout in the 2014 midterm elections.
Back then, the newly won guaranteed health coverage was under grave threat. Republicans had tried to repeal Obamacare dozens of times. Had a case before the U.S. Supreme Court gone badly, the program could well have been destroyed.
You’d think that low-income Americans would have marched to the polls waving Obamacare flags. Problem was their so-called advocates had moved on to immigration and income inequality and saw the elections as an occasion to blame Democrats for what they held was inadequate progress. They forgot there was something precious to defend — and that Obamacare was a huge advance against said inequality.
Nowadays, Hillary Clinton not only is waving the flag but has hired a brass brand to march behind it. We await the details of her proposals for improving the program. Same goes for Joe Biden, should he choose to run.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent seeking the Democratic nomination, gives Obamacare two cheers but not enough credit. In a recent CNN interview, he said he wants a “Medicare-for-all single-payer health care system.”
Expanding Medicare to everyone happens to be a super idea. But we must note that Medicare is not single payer. It is a multi-payer program combining government and private coverage. As such, Medicare is more like the top-ranked French and German health care systems than it is the good, but not-as-good, Canadian single-payer program.
Because Medicare has strong public support, Medicare for all can be imagined. It would be a very hard political sell, however. Recall that Democrats couldn’t even get the “public option” past Congress. That was to be a government-run health plan to compete on the new insurance exchanges with the private ones.
Sanders’ own Vermont tried but failed to put together a modified single-payer health plan. If Vermont can’t do single payer…
Suffice it to say, it would take a master politician to get a greatly expanded Medicare passed in this country. A master politician Sanders is not. But may his vision live on.
Happily, Obamacare now seems safe. Its imperfections well-documented, it remains a work in progress. But whoever is the next president should be grateful to have a universal health care program on which to build.
By: Froma Harrop, The National Memo, September 22, 2015
“It’s Hogwash, But People Never Seem To Learn”: The Outsider Delusion And The Fallacy Of ‘Getting Things Done’
As you will read in a hundred news stories over the next few weeks, the outsider’s moment in the presidential campaign has arrived. This is going to be the prevailing narrative of the 2016 race, until a new one comes along. It’s perfectly accurate (for now, anyway), but we should ask just what voters are seeking when they gravitate to outsiders, and what they’re likely to get.
First, the latest numbers. A new Marist/NBC News poll of Iowa and New Hampshire shows Donald Trump holding a healthy lead in both states, with Ben Carson coming in a strong second in Iowa and third in New Hampshire; Carson’s rise is not quite as entertaining as the Trump campaign, but it’s nearly as significant. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders has cut into Hillary Clinton’s lead in Iowa and moved ahead of her in New Hampshire, where the race between the two has been closer for some time now. And a new Economist/YouGov poll shows Trump moving even farther ahead nationally, with his support at 36 percent, followed by Carson at 11 percent.
Most reporters have decided, based not just on poll numbers but also on their conversations with voters and the evidence they gather on the trail, that the state of the race can be explained by the American people’s dissatisfaction with “politics as usual.” Fed up with Washington’s gridlock and its inability to solve big problems, voters turn to outsiders who promise to do things like “shake up the system” and “change the way Washington does business.” These candidates supposedly possess fresh ideas and new perspectives that can turn everything around.
It’s hogwash. But people never seem to learn.
On the Democratic side, you can at least make a reasonable case for Bernie Sanders’ brand of outsiderism. Sanders is no political neophyte — he has held public office for most of the past 35 years, which gives him an insider’s understanding of how the system works. And his argument is a focused one, centered on the influence of big money and how it helps produce and sustain inequality. While tackling that problem is extremely difficult, one could at least imagine a President Sanders making some progress on it.
On the Republican side though, the two leading outsiders, Trump and Carson, have nothing so specific in mind. They argue that they’ll get things done, Trump through the force of his will, and Carson because he is untainted by politics. Ask either one of them about a specific policy issue, and it quickly becomes clear that when it comes to the issues a president deals with, they’re utter ignoramuses, which is perhaps understandable, if less than reassuring. I’m sure Marco Rubio doesn’t know much about brain surgery, which Carson knows a great deal about, but he’s not running for Brain Surgeon in Chief.
If you’re a voter attracted to these outsiders, you’d do well to ask yourself: What, precisely, will an outsider do as president that an insider wouldn’t? Would they pursue a fundamentally different set of policies? Not likely — the policies they’ll pursue will by and large be those of their party. Ben Carson may be a political newcomer, but the policy positions he takes are essentially the same as those of the other Republicans. And any Republican will appoint most of the same people to the thousands of executive branch positions. When it’s out of power, each party maintains what is essentially an executive branch in exile, spread among Washington think tanks and advocacy organizations, waiting to move back into government. It isn’t as though the outsider candidate can fill these positions from somewhere else.
And when it comes to things like government gridlock, you have to ask the question again: What is the outsider candidate going to do differently? Outsiders talk about things like “shaking up the system” and “changing the way Washington does business,” but they seldom get too specific about what those things might mean in practice. What would a shaken-up system look like? For instance, would it mean that Congress would swiftly and efficiently pass a bunch of bills instead of being consumed by bickering?
If that’s your idea of what the system ought to produce, then electing an outsider president isn’t the way to do it. The way to do it is to give one party control of Congress and the White House, preferably with at least 60 votes in the Senate to overcome filibusters. Then you’ll see the system work.
President Obama had that for a time in his first term, and Congress was extremely productive, passing a large economic stimulus, financial reform, health-care reform and a bunch of other stuff you’ve probably forgotten about by now. If you don’t remember that period as one in which the system worked the way it’s supposed to, it’s probably because you didn’t like the particular things Washington accomplished. The real problem you had wasn’t with how smoothly the system operated, but with the substance of what it produced. In fact, Republicans often complain that the Affordable Care Act was “rammed down our throats” — in other words, they think the legislation wasn’t mired in gridlock for long enough (the fact that on Planet Earth it actually passed after more than a year of hearings, debates and negotiations isn’t really the point).
Plenty of voters say they want to get beyond partisanship and just find someone who’ll “get things done,” but that’s not what they really want. Everyone has an agenda. They want some things to get done, but not others. No conservative looked at Obama’s first two years and said, “I don’t like his policies, but I do admire the fact that he’s getting things done, so I’d like him to keep going in the same direction.” When George W. Bush tried and failed to privatize Social Security, no liberal said, “I’m disappointed that he wasn’t able to get things done.”
It’s perfectly understandable that Republicans are attracted to outsiders at this particular moment in history. As I’ve noted before, the real source of discontent among GOP voters with their party’s leaders is less about the rift between the establishment and the tea party than it is about the belief that the party’s leaders are ineffectual. They keep promising their constituents that they’ll destroy Barack Obama, repeal the Affordable Care Act and cut government down to size, but they never deliver. So when someone like Trump comes along and says he’ll sweep aside every problem and make all their dreams come true, it’s quite compelling, no matter how removed it is from reality.
But the truth is that voters of any persuasion don’t want to shake up the system when it isn’t getting things done; they want to shake it up when it isn’t doing the particular things they want. Washington may not be working, but what we really care about is whether it’s working for us.
By:Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, September 7, 2015
“Because Hillary Clinton Is Hillary Clinton, Running For President”: Why Nothing Can Quell The Media’s Addiction To Clinton Scandals
If there’s any constant in presidential campaigns, it’s that at the first sign of difficulty, everyone who wants one particular candidate to win has an iron-clad critique of the candidate’s decisions thus far, which goes something like, “If only they’d get their heads out of the sand and listen to what I have to tell them, they wouldn’t be having these problems.” You only have to get two or three partisans in a room (or an exchange on email, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to quickly learn that the answers to what the candidate should have done before and ought to do now are as clear as a bright spring morning; it’s just that the candidate and his or her advisers can’t see the wisdom of the true path to victory.
The fact that this complaint is as predictable as the sunrise doesn’t mean it’s always wrong; candidates do screw up, and sometimes there was a better alternative to something they did, an alternative that really would have produced dramatically different results. And the ability to be an armchair strategist is part of what keeps campaigns interesting, just as the ability to second-guess coaches and players helps keep sports interesting.
Right now, Hillary Clinton is the target of lots of this advice, apparently because, 13 months before the actual voting will occur, she hasn’t yet put this election to bed. Anxiety is creeping among the legions of politicians, advisers, insiders, and in-the-knowers (anonymous and otherwise) who will happily share their opinions with journalists looking to populate their “What’s Wrong With the Clinton Campaign???” stories with the thoughts of worried Democrats, an amply populated species. And most of it revolves around the story of her State Department emails, a story that “won’t go away,” as everyone is saying.
“Clinton’s standing has been eroded both by her own shaky handling of the e-mail controversy and by the populist energy fueling the challenge of Sen. Bernie Sanders,” says The Washington Post. “Democratic leaders are increasingly frustrated by Hillary Rodham Clinton’s failure to put to rest questions about her State Department email practices,” says The New York Times, in an article for which they spoke to “more than 75 Democratic governors, lawmakers, candidates and party members.” I’ve heard similar things from any number of liberals and Democrats myself.
But here’s a piece of advice: If you find yourself starting a sentence on this topic with “If only she had…”, stop and take a breath.
I say that not because Clinton didn’t do anything wrong. It was plainly a mistake to set up her private email account in the first place, and if she used emails for communication that should have been confined to official cables, then we can criticize her for that. The most informative recent piece I’ve seen on this topic comes from David Ignatius, who notes that the fact that her server was private isn’t actually relevant to the question of classified information passing through it, since employees aren’t allowed to send such information through state.gov emails either. More importantly, multiple officials tell him that classified information passes through non-classified channels all the time; it shouldn’t happen, but it does.
Nevertheless, the important thing to understand about the politics of what’s happening now is this: There is nothing—nothing—that Hillary Clinton could have said or done differently since this became a public issue that could have made this go away, or that she could do now to “put it to rest.”
That’s not because it’s such a dreadfully serious issue, or because the American people care so deeply about the question of State Department email security that they’d never elect anyone to the White House who exercised anything less than the greatest of care with their communications, adhering to not just the spirit but the letter of every regulation. If you asked most voters what this is all about, they’d probably say “Um … something about emails?” No, it’s because Hillary Clinton is Hillary Clinton, and because she’s running for president.
That means that Republicans will never be satisfied with any answer she gives on this topic, or any other for that matter. She could read Trey Gowdy every email she ever wrote while giving him a foot massage, and it wouldn’t change their conviction that there was still something nefarious hidden somewhere in something they hadn’t seen. She could have personally delivered her server to Roger Ailes’s office on the day the story broke, and it wouldn’t change their determination to figure out what she’s hiding.
Nor will the news media ever be satisfied. Bill and Hillary Clinton have always been treated by a different set of rules than other politicians, one that says that any allegation about them, no matter how little evidence there may be for it, must be presented as the leading edge of what will surely turn out to be a devastating scandal. The New York Times, which despite its reputation as a liberal newspaper has what can only be described as an unquenchable desire to find Clinton scandals whether they actually exist or not, can be counted on to run blaring front-page articles about alleged Clinton scandals without the barest hint of skepticism, no matter how many times their reporting turns out to be based on false tips or bogus interpretations of mundane facts (the phantom “criminal referral” of a month ago was only the latest).
Then once the Times puts out its story, the rest of the media are off to the races, and conservatives just about lose their minds with glee, because this time they’ve really got her. Then inevitably, the alleged wrongdoing turns out to be either nothing at all or too little to care much about. But we only figure that out after Republicans in Congress have launched investigation after investigation, each one the engine for story after story about the scandal that won’t go away.
If you think that how Hillary Clinton responds to all this (Did she say she just “regrets” what she did, or did she actually apologize? Did she seem dismissive? Could she have used different words? Could she have framed the whole thing with this clever argument I just thought of?) would make any difference at all, then you must not have been around in the 1990s.
To repeat, I’m not defending everything Clinton did with regard to her emails, but that’s just the point: This cycle will spin whether she did anything wrong or not, and no matter how she conducts herself once the story breaks.
Eventually, all the facts do come in, and it’s at that point that we can really judge. For instance, multiple investigations of what occurred in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, have shown that it was a terrible tragedy, but there was no “stand-down order,” there was no criminal negligence, and there was no impeachment-worthy malfeasance, no matter how fervently Republicans might wish it. Yet their investigations go on. In fact, at this point it’s impossible to see how anything other than Clinton losing the 2016 election will ever stop them. If she becomes president, they’ll go on investigating it for the length of her time in the Oval Office.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer The American Prospect, August 31, 2015
“The Hillary Doubters Are Wrong”: Yes, She’s Vulnerable, But She’s Still The Heavy Favorite
When it comes to Hillary Clinton and her place in the presidential primary, the political media needs to start being able to hold two ideas in mind at once. The first, and most familiar to anyone who has followed this campaign, is that Clinton is vulnerable.
Her email—and use of a private server—has grown from a scandal to a fiasco. The FBI has stepped in with an investigation to see if Clinton’s system was compromised by foreign hackers, and to see if she knowingly passed classified information—including “top secret” intelligence—through her server. Clinton is also due to face a House select committee for a public hearing on the 2012 attack on an American consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Maybe she’ll perform well and avoid missteps. But she might stumble, exposing herself and her campaign to more attacks and scrutiny.
There have also been challenges on key policy questions. To the most vocal progressive activists, Clinton still needs to account for her role in the Bill Clinton White House on issues like mass incarceration, police militarization, and the drug war. As first lady, for example, she pushed the “three strikes” provision of the 1994 crime bill and supported greater prison time for offenders. “There is something wrong when a crime bill takes six years to work its way through Congress and the average criminal serves only four,” she said at the time. The same is true for her positions in the Senate, where she voted in favor of federal police funding that flowed to SWAT teams and other vectors for militarization. There’s also her economic record: As a senator from New York, she backed a 2001 bill that would become the much loathed (among liberals) 2005 bankruptcy law. And she still hasn’t acknowledged or apologized for the racially tinged rhetoric used by her campaign in the most heated moments of her 2008 race against Barack Obama.
But, again, this isn’t the whole story. There’s still that other idea about Clinton to keep in mind, even as we consider her problems and weaknesses: Clinton is winning the Democratic presidential primary, and it’s not even close.
Despite the reporting around it—which has treated her as a losing candidate—the latest Quinnipiac poll shows Clinton with a wide lead over her opponents. She wins 45 percent of the Democratic Party, to 22 percent for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and 18 percent for Vice President Joe Biden. Aggregate polls show a similar picture; in the Huffington Post Pollster average, Clinton holds 48.9 percent of the primary vote, compared with 22.5 percent for Sanders and 12.5 percent for Biden. There’s no contest.
There’s an easy and obvious rejoinder: What about 2008? Wasn’t Clinton winning at this point in that primary; wasn’t she “inevitable”? And look what happened: She lost to a popular upstart with the public behind him.
This sounds persuasive, but it doesn’t fit the facts. As writer Harry Enten notes for FiveThirtyEight, Clinton was much weaker in the previous primary than she is now. “Back in 2008,” he writes, “she was trailing in early Iowa polls. She earned only a third of the vote in early New Hampshire polls and was below 40 percent nationally.” Now, by contrast, she’s well ahead in national polls, well ahead in Iowa, and only somewhat behind in New Hampshire.
Moreover, because primaries aren’t popularity contests, the most important measure of success is party support. Barack Obama wasn’t an upstart; behind his run was the party machinery, or at least the part that didn’t want Clinton. Today, where do Democratic fundraisers stand? What do Democratic interests groups think? How will Democratic lawmakers act?
On each score, Clinton isn’t just winning—she dominates. Most fundraisers are in her corner; it’s why Biden will have a hard time raising money if he decides to run. Interest groups are still quiet, but Democratic lawmakers are overwhelmingly pro-Hillary. Clinton has more than 100 endorsements from sitting Democrats, including seven governors and 29 senators. Biden, who doesn’t appear to have decided whether to run yet, has two. Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley has one. Bernie Sanders has none. This is unprecedented. Not only is Clinton ahead of her previous endorsement total, according to analysis by FiveThirtyEight, but she’s racked up more endorsements of significance at this stage of the race than any nonincumbent Democratic presidential candidate, ever. At this point in 1999, for instance, Al Gore had two-thirds as many endorsement points (a measure that weights senators and governors more than House representatives) as Clinton does now; at this point in 2003, John Kerry had less than one-tenth Clinton’s current support; at this point in 2007, Obama had less than one-sixth. The closest analogue to Clinton isn’t anyone in the Democratic Party—it’s George W. Bush, who had much greater endorsement support than Clinton at this stage of the 2000 Republican presidential primary and ultimately won easily, despite an early challenge from John McCain.
Of course, life is arbitrary, and Hillary’s campaign could still fall apart. It’s not hard to imagine how it might happen: The FBI investigation could lead to indictments, ending Clinton’s campaign with a court appearance. Or, she could refuse to answer any questions on her previous positions and open space for a challenger.
Then again, neither email nor crime is an impossible albatross; other candidates have had worse. George H.W. Bush had to deal with fallout from Iran-Contra, while Al Gore had Bill Clinton’s impeachment in the background. Both won their respective nominations with little difficulty. Sure, Clinton could lose. But it’s hardly a live possibility.
By: Jamelle Bouie, Slate, August 27, 2015
“The Nature Of Campaign Reporting”: The Circular Logic Behind Media Coverage Of The Clinton Email Story
Yesterday, Hillary Clinton took some questions from the press about her emails, a story that jumps back on to the front pages whenever there’s some new development, whether it’s truly meaningful or not. And without much indication of serious malfeasance on Clinton’s part, we’re reaching the point where a circular logic is taking over: the story is a story because it’s a story, and therefore we need to keep talking about it because it’s a story.
A reporter asked Clinton at that press conference: “Is this an indication that this issue isn’t going to go away for the remainder of your campaign?” It was an all too familiar meta-inquiry, not about the substance of the issue (though there were questions about that too) but about the questions the reporters themselves are asking, and whether the candidate thinks reporters are going to keep asking them. Unfortunately, candidates get questions like that all the time. How will this controversy affect your campaign? Why aren’t these questions going away? Doesn’t this issue suggest that this is an issue? It’s as if the reporter decides that asking about the substance isn’t getting anywhere, so they might as well treat the candidate like a panelist on The McLaughlin Group. And the candidate never says anything remotely interesting or informative in response.
Now before the chants of “Clinton apologist!” begin, let me say that like many liberals, I have complicated feelings about Clinton, some positive and some not so positive. I’ve written many critical pieces about her in the past; I’ve even criticized her for setting up a private email server.
But we have to be clear about just what it is we’re looking for in this story.
Republicans are no doubt hoping that lurking somewhere in Clinton’s emails is evidence of a terrible crime she committed whose revelation will destroy her career forever and deliver the White House to the GOP for a generation. But just for the sake of argument, let’s assume that no such horror will be revealed. What do we have then? Well, we have the plainly foolish decision to use a private server for work email, which we’ve known about for months. Maybe you think that a person who would do such a thing is unfit for the presidency, or maybe you don’t (though that would disqualify Jeb Bush).
Then there’s the possibility that she discussed sensitive or classified material in emails. She says she didn’t, but as yet we don’t know for certain. You might or might not consider that disqualifying as well. But the government classifies an absurd amount of material, even things that are publicly available; what would really matter is the details, like whether somebody else said something about a classified matter in an email to her (which wouldn’t be her fault), and more importantly, what specifically the material was. And while some argue that private email servers are more vulnerable to hackers and therefore it’s particularly bad if she ever discussed classified information there, government systems get hacked all the time. That isn’t to excuse the original decision to set up the private account, it’s just to say that if there’s going to be a new accusation, like “She received classified information!”, then we should get as specific as we can about it so we can judge how serious it is.
Or maybe you want to argue that this issue is important because it shows that Clinton has a “penchant for secrecy.” Which she obviously does, but you have to go further and say exactly what that means and how it might affect her presidency. It isn’t enough to say, “Cuz, um, Nixon!” The problem with Richard Nixon wasn’t that he was secretive. All presidents are secretive to one degree or another. The problem with Nixon was that he and his aides committed dozens of crimes, for which many of them went to prison. Out of Watergate we got the oft-repeated cliche, “It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up,” but that’s completely misunderstood. It’s the cover-up that gets you caught; the crime is what matters (and in Nixon’s case, the cover-up involved committing more crimes).
We’re still waiting for somebody to explain the crime Hillary Clinton committed. And to repeat, maybe there is one; who knows. Reporters who find this story interesting should keep digging into the substance, and eventually they and the investigators looking into it will be able to tell us definitively whether there’s anything there.
But the campaign reporters trailing Clinton around aren’t adding much of anything to the story, they’re just asking whether they’ll be asking more questions about it. That’s partly the nature of campaign reporting, and partly because with a Democratic race that’s far less compelling than what’s going on over on the Republican side, they’re starved for things to talk about (and they’d be much more interested if Bernie Sanders and Clinton were attacking each other, which they aren’t). It’s also because of what are often referred to as the “Clinton Rules,” which state that when it comes to Bill and Hillary Clinton, you can whip up a faux scandal out of nothing, then keep talking about it because it’s “out there,” regardless of whether anything problematic has actually been discovered.
The email story may not be the most ridiculous fake scandal in the history of the Clintons, because there’s a lot of competition for that title. As has often been the case, it was a poor decision Hillary Clinton made that got the scandal ball rolling. But there are only so many times you can ask “What is she hiding???” before you have to come up with something that she might actually be hiding.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, August 19, 2015
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