“Humming Along Today”: Despite Rocky Beginnings, 5 Other Government Programs Suggests Glitches Get Fixed And Forgotten
The Obama administration’s struggle with debugging the HealthCare.gov website is causing critics to ask whether ObamaCare is “Obama’s Iraq war,” and to dismiss Obama’s signature policy achievement a “quagmire.”
Media coverage is becoming increasingly hysterical, meaning some historical perspective is in order. Many large-scale government programs that are now embedded in American society also began with rough rollouts that are now mostly forgotten.
Here are five programs that are humming along today, despite their rocky beginnings:
1. Social Security
In the program’s early days, many employers failed to include worker names and their new Social Security numbers in their earnings report, leaving the government without the basic information needed to calculate benefits and cut checks. Syndicated columnist Drew Pearson turned the “John Doe” problem into a crusade, writing about the snafu once a week for two months and stoking panic that the government would be unable to pay out the promised benefits to millions. But new procedures were established to follow up with delinquent employers, and within a year the number of John Does was slashed. Today, the crisis is dismissed as a blip, while Social Security historians view the effort to build a nationwide social insurance system from scratch before the age of computers as “Herculean” and “amazing.”
2. Medicare
Last week, historian and Bloomberg columnist Stephen Mihm chronicled the myriad problems that beset the 1966 Medicare rollout. More than 700,000 eligible seniors initially refused to sign up because they mistakenly believed it meant giving up Social Security. Some Southern cities were left without any participating hospitals because the Medicare law required hospitals to comply with the new Civil Rights Act, yet many in the South remained segregated. It was more commonplace at the time for doctors to bill patients directly, and excessively long waits for Medicare reimbursement checks frustrated seniors. But as Mihm notes, “The government and the private insurers worked out most of the kinks, and by the late 1960s the system was working reasonably well.”
3. Medicare’s Prescription Drug Benefit
It wasn’t all that long ago that another presidential health care initiative ran into an online buzzsaw. In 2005, the Bush administration rolled out its new Medicare Part D program, providing seniors coverage for prescription drugs. But the debut was bedeviled by website problems. The Washington Post noted at the time that the launch was delayed twice over the course of a month. Then on the day it actually launched, “Visitors to the site could not access it for most of the first two hours. When it finally did come up around 5 p.m., it operated awfully slowly.” The glitches continued throughout the open enrollment period, but as Jack Hoadley of the Georgetown Health Policy Institute reminded in a blog post this month, “The program added both phone lines and customer service representatives and implemented other upgrades over the weeks. The website — both its functionality and the accuracy of its information — was the source of ongoing frustration for its users, but it did get better over time. By the end of open enrollment in May 2006, over 16 million successfully enrolled for drug benefits in Part D … And today, Part D enjoys widespread popularity.”
4. The Peace Corps
President John F. Kennedy established the Peace Corps by executive order shortly after taking office in 1961. Skeptics worried that the program would be overrun with immature draft-dodgers. And that concern was seemingly confirmed when one of the first volunteers mistakenly dropped a postcard before it could be mailed, telling her stateside boyfriend that her host country of Nigeria suffered from widespread “squalor and absolutely primitive living conditions.” A horrified Nigerian student discovered the postcard, made copies, and distributed it widely. It sparked an international incident. Riots ensued, and the volunteer had to be sent home “cloak and dagger” for her safety. Still Kennedy forged ahead, shrugging off the setback by joking to a new batch of volunteers, “Keep in touch, but not by postcard!” And two years later, the Christian Science Monitor reported that foreign governments were “so pleased with [the Peace Corps’] work they have called again and again for more … Although the ‘postcard incident’ in Nigeria seemed to confirm some fears that the program might do more harm than good, that has been far from the case…”
5. The income tax
It was 100 years ago this month when President Woodrow Wilson first enacted the progressive income tax that finances much of our government today. Now, few Americans would claim to be fans of our current tax system — but many of them are fans of what the income tax system helps pay for. In the early days of the rollout, however, plenty of people were sent over the edge because of the forms’ perceived complexity. As tax historian Joseph Thorndike noted, one lawyer made headlines in 1915 by saying of the forms, “It is so complicated that it is utterly impossible to understand its meaning save by consulting a palmist.”A 1915 The New York Times headline characterized the forms as “Income Tax Riddles.”
Now, some may say the tax forms have only gotten worse over the last 100 years. But by and large, the public has accepted the nature of tax forms as a governing necessity, and no politician has gotten very far in the past century campaigning against the progressive income tax. As Thorndike noted in Barron’s, “The income tax has survived because it does two things reasonably well: It raises money, and it satisfies popular notions of economic fairness.”
The lesson? History suggests that glitches get fixed and forgotten, people get acclimated to new programs, and policies rise and fall on their merits. If past is prologue, ObamaCare will be judged on the quality of the coverage, not on the first incarnation of the website.
By: Bill Scher, The Week, October 23, 2013
“Speaker In Name Only”: Why John Boehner’s Failures Don’t Affect His Job Security
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has struggled since grabbing the gavel 33 months ago, but the last few weeks have been especially brutal. He didn’t want a government shutdown, but his own members rejected his advice. Boehner didn’t want a debt-ceiling crisis, either, but his members balked at following his lead on this, too.
Even last night, after the Speaker endorsed a bipartisan resolution to the crisis his own caucus created, most House Republicans rejected the plan Boehner grudgingly supported.
Indeed, just 24 hours ago, National Review’s Robert Costa had breakfast with some House Republican lawmakers who said they’re “losing faith in their leadership.”
So how much trouble is Boehner really in? Not as much as common sense might suggest.
House conservatives said Wednesday that Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) is in no danger of losing his post, despite presiding over a Republican defeat in the fight over government funding and the debt ceiling.
“I don’t think Speaker Boehner has anything to worry about right now,” said Rep. Raúl Labrador (R-Idaho), a conservative who refused to vote for Boehner in January.
When Boehner hosted a caucus meeting yesterday, breaking the news that the House would have to pass the Senate’s bipartisan compromise, he received a standing ovation – even though most House Republicans opposed and rejected the plan.
Roll Call added, “GOP lawmakers from across the conference say there are no coup attempts in the works and few complaints over the job Boehner did on the shutdown and debt limit fights.”
How is this possible? As implausible as this may seem, congressional Republicans are pointing a lot of fingers this morning, but none of them are pointed at the Speaker. GOP pragmatists are blaming Tea Partiers; Tea Partiers are blaming pragmatists; and they’re both blaming the media. Republicans are furious with President Obama for not caving the way they expected him to, and are even angrier with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for making them look bad.
But Boehner, at least for the time being, is in the clear. He took orders from his followers, so for now, they’re satisfied.
Stepping back, though, the bigger picture offers a good-news/bad-news dynamic for the embattled, accomplishment-free Speaker. The good news is, Boehner’s GOP conference still likes him and sees no need to replace him.
The bad news is his members intend to keep ignoring his wishes and rejecting his advice.
In other words, Boehner is still the Speaker. He’s also still the Speaker In Name Only.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 17, 2013
“A Ransom By Any Other Name”: The Larger Concern Is That Republican Tactics Are Too Dangerous And Destructive
Words have power and meaning, especially in politics, which is why the parties and their pollsters invest so much energy in choosing the most effective phrases possible. Fox News didn’t push “slimdown” as an ideologically pleasing alternative to “shutdown” for entertainment’s sake — it’s about winning an argument by defining the parameters of the debate.
Professional news organizations are often careful on this front because they don’t want to advance one set of talking points over another, and this in turn sometimes leads to interesting media pushback.
Last week, for example, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney used a variety of metaphors during a press briefing to describe congressional Republicans extortion strategies, but as Scott Wilson noted, one in particular was not well received.
[I]t was “ransom” — a word Obama has used repeatedly to describe Republican negotiating tactics — that struck the last press corps nerve. The usual briefing room decorum, such as it is, broke down entirely when Carney said finally that Obama would sign a debt-ceiling extension but not if it meant “paying a ransom” to Republicans.
“The president will not pay ransom for … ” Carney began.
“You see it as a ransom, but it’s a metaphor that doesn’t serve our purposes … ” NPR correspondent Ari Shapiro shouted back with broad support from other confused reporters.
There’s an official transcript online if you want to see the complete context, but it appears that “ransom” was a bridge too far for some of the journalists covering the White House.
I’m not unsympathetic to reporters’ concerns — “ransom” is not exactly a neutral term. Republicans have acknowledged publicly that they’ve held the debt ceiling “hostage,” but they have not gone so far as to accept “ransom” as a broadly agreed upon term.
But under the circumstances, I’m also not sure which word would satisfy the political establishment as less shrill.
Congressional Republicans threatened a government shutdown unless their demands were met, then they threatened a debt-ceiling crisis, too. GOP officials not only embraced the word “hostage” and threatened to do deliberate harm to the country unless they were satisfied by Democratic offers, but they also said they expected Democrats to make concessions in exchange for nothing — except the release of their metaphorical hostages.
If “ransom” is excessive, what’s the alternative that’s both temperate and accurate? Payoff? Is that better or worse?
It’s challenging to apply terms to circumstances like these, in large part because the conditions are so unusual. We’re just not accustomed to seeing major political parties threaten the nation with deliberate harm in order to get their way, and these radical tactics force us to use descriptions that would probably be overly harsh during more traditional political times.
Sometimes, though, a word may be provocative, and may even carry a politically charged meaning, but it may also be right. In the case of the latest Republican hostage crisis, I’d argue the larger concern isn’t whether “ransom” is too mean but whether the tactics are too dangerous.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 14, 2013
“The Mythical Republican Moderates”: Taking Visibly Moderate Stands While Quietly Siding With Their Party
Until recently, moderate Republicans had succeeded in flying under the radar during the shutdown crisis. Initially, journalists focused on Speaker John Boehner. Journalists have a penchant to personalize, and Boehner is the most prominent Republican. Some commentators described the current impasse as a result of Boehner’s inadequacies. They offered a Not-So-Great Man theory of history.
Political scientists would be skeptical. In a classic study, Joseph Cooper and David Brady argued that effective leadership style among House speakers is a function of the preferences in their party caucuses. A cohesive party will allow a speaker to exercise a lot of authority. A divided one will reduce the most talented speaker to the role of a broker among factions.
More insightful analyses focused less on Boehner’s alleged failings than on a few dozen “Tea Party” representatives in the House Republican Conference. This is a better reading of the situation than a narrow focus on Boehner, but it still leaves out a lot. Boehner’s adherence to “the Hastert Rule” (bringing forward only bills favored by a majority of the majority party) does not explain how a few dozen Tea Party legislators can determine party policy. In fact, the current crisis is not simply a result of the intransigence of a small number of Republicans on the fringe of their party any more than it is a simple product of Boehner’s leadership style. A much larger group of GOP representatives, not identified as Tea Partiers, are loath to challenge that faction.
Now journalists’ attention is finally turning to House GOP moderates. For several days, more than two dozen House Republicans have expressed support for a “clean CR,” or continuing resolution without provisions relating to the Affordable Care Act which President Obama and congressional Democrats would accept and which could end the shutdown.
On paper, these moderate Republicans combined with the House Democrats control enough votes to pass such a resolution. Then why doesn’t it happen? Saying Boehner won’t bring up the resolution that moderates claim to support leaves out the fact that these same moderates refuse to sign a “discharge petition” that could bring a continuing resolution to the floor.
Monkey Cage congressional procedure maven Sarah Binder has described the challenges of using the discharge petition procedure in a series of posts. Yet as Josh Barro notes, it’s simply not the case that these Republicans have explored all the procedural options and taken all opportunities to force an end to the shutdown. They have voted against Democratic “motions to recommit” on GOP “mini-bills” that would reopen the government. Effective tactics might involve voting down a rule, or rejecting a ruling of the chair, steps that would be considered quite radical within the partisan context.
And that’s the point, really. Too narrow a focus on rules obscures a more profound political reality; GOP moderates have been unwilling to break from their party on the shutdown issue. In general, Congressional moderates are more closely aligned to their parties than is understood. Often their defections from party ranks occur when it is clear that their party does not need their votes to prevail on a given issue. Moderates frequently represent constituencies in which their parties are not very popular. This gives them a political incentive to create the impression of a certain distance between themselves and their party. Leadership understands this and does not punish legislators for such behavior.
Congressional scholars, including my colleague Frances Lee and Sean Theriault, have shown that legislators are much more likely to stick with their party on “procedural votes” like rules in the House and cloture in the Senate than on up-or-down or “final passage” votes. Procedural votes and discharge petition signatures are harder for voters to understand than final passage votes, but they determine whether a bill ever reaches the final passage stage. For members who want to stay “on the team” the solution is clear: Criticize your party’s extremists, pay lip service to bipartisanship and vote for the eventual compromise when the leadership decides to bring it to the floor. But do not force the leader’s hand or undermine his position.
Why would members engage in this seemingly devious behavior? There are a few reasons. One factor is fear. Even moderates who represent districts in which they see no gain in being identified with the Tea Party brand still fear primary challengers. Recall that Rep. Mike Castle, who had been in office for decades, lost his primary to an opponent who later had to spend the general election denying she was a witch — and not in Utah or in Mississippi, but in Delaware, a state that had voted Democratic in the last five presidential elections. Similarly, the party switch of the late Arlen Specter was based on an understanding that he would lose the impending Republican Senate primary in purple Pennsylvania. Steve Lonergan, the GOP’s current Senate candidate against Cory Booker in deep blue New Jersey, is a Tea Party ally.
In short, GOP primary voters are perfectly capable of nominating Tea Party or other very conservative candidates and unseating more moderate incumbents, even in blue states, and Republican representatives know this. It is unlikely that most of them would lose renomination simply because they broke from their party on the shutdown issue, but it would be a very high-profile defection that would enrage many conservatives, and elected officials are risk-averse.
Secondly, there is substantial pressure within Congress not to break ranks. Some of this is psychological. Members of Congress spend less time mingling across party lines than they used to and “us vs. them” feelings are intense. There is also some price to pay for going against the party leadership. For example, at the end of the last Congress, some Republicans who had bucked the leadership once too often lost committee assignments.
Finally, we should take far more seriously the under-discussed possibility raised by journalists like Matthew Yglesias and Congress scholars like Robert Van Houweling that some of these legislators are not as moderate as they pretend. Most elected officials were once party activists, a group that is much more polarized than the general public. Moderate Republicans who refuse to sign a discharge petition may not be Tea Partiers in their hearts of hearts, but it is likely that deep down they are more conservative than most of their constituents. Taking visibly moderate stands while quietly siding with their party on “procedural matters” that insure that their moderation will not have any impact allows these legislators to reconcile their personal policy preferences with their electoral concerns. Of course, if these tactics were better understood by the voters and the media that informs them, they would be much less effective.
By: David Karol, The Washington Post, The Monkey Cage, October 8, 2013
“Our Democracy Is At Stake”: It’s Not Just Obamacare, President Obama Is Defending The Health Of Our Democracy
This time is different. What is at stake in this government shutdown forced by a radical Tea Party minority is nothing less than the principle upon which our democracy is based: majority rule. President Obama must not give in to this hostage taking — not just because Obamacare is at stake, but because the future of how we govern ourselves is at stake.
What we’re seeing here is how three structural changes that have been building in American politics have now, together, reached a tipping point — creating a world in which a small minority in Congress can not only hold up their own party but the whole government. And this is the really scary part: The lawmakers doing this can do so with high confidence that they personally will not be politically punished, and may, in fact, be rewarded. When extremists feel that insulated from playing by the traditional rules of our system, if we do not defend those rules — namely majority rule and the fact that if you don’t like a policy passed by Congress, signed by the president and affirmed by the Supreme Court then you have to go out and win an election to overturn it; you can’t just put a fiscal gun to the country’s head — then our democracy is imperiled.
This danger was neatly captured by Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, when he wrote on Tuesday about the 11th-hour debate in Congress to avert the shutdown. Noting a shameful statement by Speaker John Boehner, Milbank wrote: “Democrats howled about ‘extortion’ and ‘hostage taking,’ which Boehner seemed to confirm when he came to the floor and offered: ‘All the Senate has to do is say ‘yes,’ and the government is funded tomorrow.’ It was the legislative equivalent of saying, ‘Give me the money and nobody gets hurt.’ ”
“Give me the money and nobody gets hurt.” How did we get here? First, by taking gerrymandering to a new level. The political analyst Charlie Cook, writing in The National Journal on March 16, noted that the 2010 election gave Republican state legislatures around the country unprecedented power to redraw political boundaries, which they used to create even more “safe, lily-white” Republican strongholds that are, in effect, an “alternative universe” to the country’s diverse reality.
“Between 2000 and 2010, the non-Hispanic white share of the population fell from 69 percent to 64 percent,” wrote Cook. “But after the post-census redistricting and the 2012 elections, the non-Hispanic white share of the average Republican House district jumped from 73 percent to 75 percent, and the average Democratic House district declined from 52 percent white to 51 percent white. In other words, while the country continues to grow more racially diverse, the average Republican district continues to get even whiter.”
According to Cook, the number of strongly Democratic districts decreased from 144 before redistricting to 136 afterward. The number of strongly Republican districts increased from 175 to 183. “When one party starts out with 47 more very strong districts than the other,” said Cook, “the numbers suggest that the fix is in for any election featuring a fairly neutral environment. Republicans would need to mess up pretty badly to lose their House majority in the near future.” In other words, there is little risk of political punishment for the Tea Party members now holding the country hostage.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court’s inane Citizens United decision allowed a single donor, Sheldon Adelson, to create his own alternative universe. He was able to contribute so much money to support Newt Gingrich’s candidacy that Gingrich was able to stay in the Republican presidential primary race longer than he would have under sane campaign finance rules. As a result, Gingrich was able to pull the G.O.P.’s leading candidate, Mitt Romney, farther to the right longer, making it harder for him to garner centrist votes. Last month, for the first time ever in Colorado, two state senators who voted for universal background checks on gun purchases lost their seats in a recall election engineered by gun extremists and reportedly financed with some $400,000 from the National Rifle Association. You’re elected, you vote your conscience on a narrow issue, but now determined opponents don’t have to wait for the next election. With enough money, they can get rid of you in weeks.
Finally, the rise of a separate G.O.P. (and a liberal) media universe — from talk-radio hosts, to Web sites to Fox News — has created another gravity-free zone, where there is no punishment for extreme behavior, but there’s 1,000 lashes on Twitter if you deviate from the hard-line and great coverage to those who are most extreme. When politicians only operate inside these bubbles, they lose the habit of persuasion and opt only for coercion. After all, they must be right. Rush Limbaugh told them so.
These “legal” structural changes in money, media and redistricting are not going away. They are superempowering small political movements to act in extreme ways without consequences and thereby stymie majority rule. If democracy means anything, it means that, if you are outvoted, you accept the results and prepare for the next election. Republicans are refusing to do that. It shows contempt for the democratic process.
President Obama is not defending health care. He’s defending the health of our democracy. Every American who cherishes that should stand with him.
By: Thomas L. Friedman, Op-Ed Columnist, the New York Times, October 2, 2013
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