01-21-2010, 02:20 PM
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/01/p...-fail.html
This is expanded upon by Nate Silver:
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/01/p...-fail.html
Here’s my attempt: The bills before Congress are politically partisan and substantively bipartisan.
What does that mean? The first part is obvious. All 60 Senate Democrats and independents voted for the bill, and all 40 Republicans voted against it. The second part is the counterintuitive one. Yet it’s true.
The current versions of health reform are the product of decades of debate between Republicans and Democrats. The bills are more conservative than Bill Clinton’s 1993 proposal. For that matter, they’re more conservative than Richard Nixon’s 1971 plan, which would have had the federal government provide insurance to people who didn’t get it through their job.
Today’s Congressional Republicans have made the strategically reasonable decision to describe President Obama’s health care plan, like almost every other part of his agenda, as radical and left wing. And the message seems to be at least partly working, based on polls and the Massachusetts surprise. But a smart political strategy isn’t the same thing as accurate policy analysis.
The better way to describe the Obama agenda, I think, is that it’s ambitious (even radical) in its scope and sharply different in direction from the Reagan-Bush era, but mostly moderate in terms of how far it goes on any single issue.
This is expanded upon by Nate Silver:
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/01/p...-fail.html
Back in 2008, the smart liberal spin on "post-partisanship" -- one which I frankly bought into -- is that it was in part an effort to put a popular, centrist sheen on a relatively liberal agenda. Instead, as Leonhardt points out, what Obama has wound up with is an unpopular, liberal sheen on a relatively centrist agenda.
It's not just on health care -- but let's talk about health care for a moment. The bill that the Senate Democrats passed did not substantially restructure the system of private insurance, nor the health care delivery system. It did not include a public option. It did, rather, about the minimum that you could do if you want to prevent people with pre-existing conditions from being denied health care. You can't require insurers to cover people with pre-existing conditions unless you're willing to put a mandate into place (otherwise, everyone's premiums would rise substantially). And you can't put a mandate into place without having some reasonably generous subsidies (otherwise, a lot of folks would go broke.) The Senate's bill was about the least radical way to achieve something approaching universal coverage that can be imagined. It is nevertheless a bill that would do a tremendous amount of good for a tremendous number of people, and so I've advocated for its passage. But with the possible exception of Wyden-Bennett (which not identifiably left or right although much more radical than what the Congress is considering), virtually any attempt to achieve universal coverage would be further to the left of this bill.
The stimulus? The pricetag was much less than what most economists were advocating for. And about half of it was tax cuts -- although you'd never know it from the White House's poor messaging on the subject.
Cap-and-trade? It's a market-based solution, and one that includes significantly less ambitious emissions targets than have been adopted by virtually any other Westernized country. The version of the climate bill that the Senate would consider would in all likelihood have included offshore drilling and an expansion of nuclear energy, making it almost literally identical to the one that John McCain advocated on the campaign trail.
