Drew Westen doesn't know what the president believes in either, and thinks it would nice if he knew himself

Pretty crazy political strategy, right? Unfortunately for us, the R's have the good fortune to be up against a White House political operation that makes them look like geniuses.

"People in the center will follow if you speak to their values, address their ambivalence (because by definition, on a wide range of issues, they're torn between the right and left), and act on what you believe. FDR did it. LBJ did it. Reagan did it. Even George W. Bush did it, although I wish he hadn't.

"But you have to believe something.

"I don't honestly know what this president believes. But I believe if he doesn't figure it out soon, start enunciating it, and start fighting for it, he's not only going to give American families hungry for security a series of half-loaves where they could have had full ones, but he's going to set back the Democratic Party and the progressive movement by decades, because the average American is coming to believe that what they're seeing right now is "liberalism," and they don't like what they see. I don't, either.

"What's they're seeing is weakness, waffling, and wandering through the wilderness without an ideological compass. That's a recipe for going nowhere fast -- but getting there by November."

-- Drew Westen, in "Leadership, Obama Style, and the Looming Losses in 2010: Pretty Speeches, Compromised Values, and the Quest for the Lowest Common Denominator," on HuffPost

by Ken

When it comes to understanding (a) policy issues, (b) what the public is thinking, and ( c) how you create interaction between the two, I trust Drew Westen. On Nov. 2 HuffPost published a piece of his called "Leadership, Obama Style," about which I wrote here at some length, starting off with this quote:

Genuine leadership means setting the agenda. It means taking tough stands. It means telling people the truth forcefully and evocatively in a way that makes them want to listen and act. It means drawing lines in the sand when you must, and refusing to compromise your values even if you have to compromise on some of the policies born of those values when you have no other choice. It means fighting for what you believe in and taking on powerful vested interests when people's lives and livelihoods are at stake. And it means looking backward at the past so you don't make the same mistakes, looking sideways at alternatives so you know your options, and using that vision to move the nation forward.

Leadership is a quality Barack Obama showed on the campaign trail. It is a quality he has failed to show as president.

Now Drew is back, expanding from that perspective to sound an alarm for this presidency. As he points out,

"Somehow the president has managed to turn a base of new and progressive voters he himself energized like no one else could in 2008 into the likely stay-at-home voters of 2010, souring an entire generation of young people to the political process. It isn't hard for them to see that the winners seem to be the same no matter who the voters select (Wall Street, big oil, big Pharma, the insurance industry).

Obviously I'm not privy to what goes on behind the scenes in the White House, and it may be unfair to single out Master Rahm Emanuel for responsibility, simply because we know what a sleazy hack he is -- well, that and the fact that the ineptitude in defining policy goals, the uninterrupted fellating of Big Money interests, the knife-to-the-ribs coercion applied to political allies. the political ineptitude of treating voters as morons to be hornswoggled, this is pretty much the Political Gospel According to Master Rahm. I don't know what David Axelrod and all those other geniuses with access to the Oval Office are advising the president. But I do know that it's both crappy politics and crappy policy.

And one thing that sets Drew Westen's thinking apart from that of the Obama brain trust is that Drew insists that good (and bad) politics and policy are actually connected! He makes a spectacular example of the immigration issue:

Joe Wilson yells, "You lie." So instead of acting like a man and going after Wilson on the spot (the man just attacked him in front of the entire nation in a joint session of Congress), he accepts his apology the next day, and a day later rewards Wilson for his incivility and bigotry by tightening the rules so that illegal immigrants can't even buy insurance themselves on the health care exchange the Democrats are creating sometime between 2013 and 2025 (depending on how many seats they lose in the meantime, and hence how long, if ever, it takes for the exchange to get set up).

Good policy? No. Not only is it inhumane -- can you imagine being really sick or in terrible pain but being too afraid even to go to a clinic because you might be deported? -- but it's a public health hazard for sick people not to get care and spread their illnesses, a drain on American taxpayers as illegal immigrants who finally have no choice but to find their way, when they're incredibly ill, to emergency rooms or public clinics, and a despicable policy toward their children, many of whom are American citizens, but who in either case shouldn't have to be sick, in pain, and without preventive care as their bodies and minds are developing, no matter where their parents come from.

Is it good politics? No. During the election I tested messages on just this issue, and a strong progressive message beat the most convincing anti-immigrant message we could throw at it by 10 points. Two weeks ago, I tested messages on just this issue as it applied to health care, and that margin had doubled.

If you just talk sensibly with Americans, they are sensible people. But ask them one-dimensional polling questions like, "Do you think illegal immigrants should get health care?" and you'll entirely miss the art of the possible.

The Obama advisers are making believe, or maybe, Incredibly, actually believe, that the president's political problems are caused by nattering leftists, and we assume that they vilify us so freely in the belief that this will win the allegiance of the "center" they're so enamored of. As Drew points out, it can't be us lefties causing their problems, because amazingly in less than a year this administration has managed to lose the confidence of the center as well as the left.

What's costing the president and courting danger for Democrats in 2010 isn't a question of left or right, because the president has accomplished the remarkable feat of both demoralizing the base and completely turning off voters in the center. If this were an ideological issue, that would not be the case. He would be holding either the middle or the left, not losing both.

What's costing the president are three things: a laissez faire style of leadership that appears weak and removed to everyday Americans, a failure to articulate and defend any coherent ideological position on virtually anything, and a widespread perception that he cares more about special interests like bank, credit card, oil and coal, and health and pharmaceutical companies than he does about the people they are shafting.

Drew goes on to break look at these three areas (regions?) of failure, with especially illuminating reference to what he takes to be the president's preference, in exercising leadership, for the lowest common denominator. While I'm urging you to read the whole piece, because with Drew Westen the brilliance is in the details, this section I really have to reproduce intact:

That means you don't really have to fight, you don't have to take anybody on, you don't take any risks. You just find what the public is so upset about that even the Republicans would stipulate to it if forced to (e.g., that excluding people from health care because they have "pre-existing conditions" is something we can't continue to tolerate) and build it into whatever plan the special interests can hammer out around it.

Unfortunately, what Democrats just can't seem to understand is that the politics of the lowest common denominator is always a losing politics. It sends a meta-message that you're weak -- nothing more, nothing less -- and that's the cross the Democrats have had to bear since they "lost China" 60 years ago. And in fact, it is weak.

Want health care reform? Let Congress work it out, and whatever comes out, call it a victory. It's telling that when the Senate triumphantly announced that it had the 60 votes for cloture on Friday, insurance stocks hit a 52-year peak.

Energy? Okay, if you don't really want to mess with the oil and coal industries, let the caps slip higher and higher and industry will cut pollution around the edges. It won't really solve the problem, but it's the golden mean between the right thing to do and the wrong thing to do, which is the essence of Obampromise. It also hamstrings you in Copenhagen, but oh well, they could use a little global warming there this time of year anyway. Have you noticed it's cold as hell over there?

Financial regulation? The president's all for the good stuff: regulating derivatives and other fancy financial products no one but the people making bundles off of them who crashed the economy (and now run it) understand. Tell bankers the days of wine and roses are over. But if we have to have half-reform so Goldman Sachs is willing to keep sending its best and brightest through the revolving door at Treasury, that's okay; the Dow is up. So jobs are bleak and the average American is enraged that Wall Street had a bumper year -- with record bonuses -- as they're losing their homes. But you know the old adage about a half a loaf.

That's in fact what the health care debate is over. We shouldn't have had to settle for half a loaf. If the president had simply placed appropriate blame on the health insurance industry for its pre-existing conditions, it's cutting off care for breast cancer victims in the middle of treatment, and its doubling our premiums and co-pays during the Bush years, he would have harnessed populist anger and pushed this bill through six months ago, and it would have looked like the change we were told to believe in. But if you cut backroom deals with every special interest who is part of the problem and offer the American people no coherent message while the other side is messaging straight out of the messaging memo written by Frank Luntz ("government takeover," "a bureaucrat between you and your doctor"), you can expect half a loaf. And the other half will be paid for by middle class taxpayers, as in the Senate bill, which includes provisions like taxing good middle class tax plans like PPOs, which will disappear as soon as insurance companies and big businesses have the excuse of the missing tax break. Remind me, when we've just had the largest transfer of wealth to the upper 1 percent of the country from working and middle class Americans in a century, why it would be such a terrible thing instead, as in the House bill, to ask people who make over a million dollars a year to pony up for the health care of their (and their friends') housekeepers, instead of taking away health care plans union workers traded for salary increases?

The president's biggest success has been on the international stage: He's not George W. Bush, and he's eloquent to boot. He's done a great deal with that eloquence to speak to Muslims around the world and to make clear to others in the international community that America is back -- mostly. But that international community is just starting to learn that his eloquence doesn't always have much behind it.

I've already quoted Drew's conclusion, at the start of this piece. I'm going to draw my ending from the middle, with this remarkable paragraph:

The problem with the president's strategic team is that they don't understand the difference between compromising on policy and compromising on core values. When it comes to policies, listen all you want to the Stones: "You can't always get what you want" (although it would be nice if the administration tried sometime). But on issues of principle -- like allowing regressive abortion amendments to be tacked onto a health care reform bill -- get some stones. Make your case to the American people, make it evocatively, and draw the line in the sand. That's how you earn people's respect. That's the only thing that will bring Independents back.

Is anyone in the White House listening?


STOP THE PRESSES! THE PRESIDENT THINKS
HE'S REALLY DELIVERING

For the record, President Obama disagrees that he has compromised too much. The Washington Post's Scott Wilson reports:
President Obama rejected in an interview Tuesday the criticism that he has compromised too much in order to secure health-care reform legislation, challenging his critics to identify any "gap" between what he campaigned on last year and what Congress is on the verge of passing.
What the president means, of course, is that many things he mentioned in the campaign are mentioned in the bill. Like "the 30 million uninsured Americans projected to receive coverage." Note that these are the reporter's words, not the president's. I'd be very surprised if the president actually said that those 30 million people are going to "receive" coverage, because, as we know, they are going to be forced to buy coverage -- hideously crappy coverage at preposterous prices, which most of them can't afford.

So yes, those uninsured folk are sort of addressed in the bill, but possibly not in a way they might have expected from candidate Obama's campaign promises.

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Rhetorically Speaking Obama Knocks One Out Of The Ball Park-- And Now For The Hondelling

President Obama:

I am not the first President to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last. It has now been nearly a century since Theodore Roosevelt first called for health care reform. And ever since, nearly every President and Congress, whether Democrat or Republican, has attempted to meet this challenge in some way. A bill for comprehensive health reform was first introduced by John Dingell Sr. in 1943. Sixty-five years later, his son continues to introduce that same bill at the beginning of each session.

Our collective failure to meet this challenge-- year after year, decade after decade-- has led us to a breaking point. Everyone understands the extraordinary hardships that are placed on the uninsured, who live every day just one accident or illness away from bankruptcy. These are not primarily people on welfare. These are middle-class Americans. Some can’t get insurance on the job. Others are self-employed, and can’t afford it, since buying insurance on your own costs you three times as much as the coverage you get from your employer. Many other Americans who are willing and able to pay are
still denied insurance due to previous illnesses or conditions that insurance companies decide are too risky or expensive to cover.

...The plan I’m announcing tonight would meet three basic goals:

It will provide more security and stability to those who have health insurance. It will provide insurance to those who don’t. And it will slow the growth of health care costs for our families, our businesses,
and our government. It’s a plan that asks everyone to take responsibility for meeting this challenge-- not just government and insurance companies, but employers and individuals. And it’s a plan that incorporates ideas from Senators and Congressmen; from Democrats and Republicans-- and yes, from some of my opponents in both the primary and general election.

Here are the details that every American needs to know about this plan:

First, if you are among the hundreds of millions of Americans who already have health insurance through your job, Medicare, Medicaid, or the VA, nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have. Let me repeat this: nothing in our plan requires you to change what you have.

What this plan will do is to make the insurance you have work better for you. Under this plan, it will be against the law for insurance companies to deny you coverage because of a pre-existing condition.
As soon as I sign this bill, it will be against the law for insurance companies to drop your coverage when you get sick or water it down when you need it most. They will no longer be able to place some
arbitrary cap on the amount of coverage you can receive in a given year or a lifetime. We will place a limit on how much you can be charged for out-of-pocket expenses, because in the United States of
America, no one should go broke because they get sick. And insurance companies will be required to cover, with no extra charge, routine checkups and preventive care, like mammograms and colonoscopies-- because there’s no reason we shouldn’t be catching diseases like breast cancer and colon cancer before they get worse.That makes sense, it saves money, and it saves lives.

That’s what Americans who have health insurance can expect from this plan-- more security and stability.

Now, if you’re one of the tens of millions of Americans who don’t currently have health insurance, the second part of this plan will finally offer you quality, affordable choices. If you lose your job
or change your job, you will be able to get coverage. If you strike out on your own and start a small business, you will be able to get coverage. We will do this by creating a new insurance exchange-- a
marketplace where individuals and small businesses will be able to shop for health insurance at competitive prices. Insurance companies will have an incentive to participate in this exchange because it lets them compete for millions of new customers. As one big group, these customers will have greater leverage to bargain with the insurance companies for better prices and quality coverage. This is how large companies and government employees get affordable insurance. It’s how
everyone in this Congress gets affordable insurance. And it’s time to give every American the same opportunity that we’ve given ourselves.

...This is the plan I’m proposing. It’s a plan that incorporates ideas from many of the people in this room tonight-- Democrats and Republicans. And I will continue to seek common ground in the weeks
ahead. If you come to me with a serious set of proposals, I will be there to listen. My door is always open.

But know this: I will not waste time with those who have made the calculation that it’s better politics to kill this plan than improve it. I will not stand by while the special interests use the same old
tactics to keep things exactly the way they are. If you misrepresent what’s in the plan, we will call you out. And I will not accept the status quo as a solution. Not this time. Not now.

Everyone in this room knows what will happen if we do nothing. Our deficit will grow. More families will go bankrupt. More businesses will close. More Americans will lose their coverage when they are
sick and need it most. And more will die as a result. We know these things to be true.

That is why we cannot fail. Because there are too many Americans counting on us to succeed-- the ones who suffer silently, and the ones who shared their stories with us at town hall meetings, in emails, and in letters.

If you're reading this right after President Obama's speech, you're reading as I'm driving. I'm on my way to the Air America studios in Burbank where I'll be one of the guests trying to figure out the implications of the speech (from 7 to 8, PT). First, for the sephardim (and other non-Ashkenazi) among us, you need to grok the concept of hondelling-- because that's the whole ball game from here on:


Substantively, the president's two main points tonight were to hold down costs-- and end unfair practices like prior conditions and recission-- for those who already have health insurance and to come up with a way to offer affordable coverage to those who don’t. Ideologically and politically there aren't half a dozen Republicans in Congress, despite Sarah Palin's misleading OpEd in today's Wall Street Journal who care at all about the second goal and there aren't many more who-- along with Blue Dogs and other conservative Democrats would prioritize the first goal over the interests of the Medical-Industrial Complex and Insurance Industry that has bumped well over a billion dollars into lobbying and thinly-veiled bribes over the past four and a half congressional terms alone! There's a lot of nervousness that Obama is insisting on reforms that are aimed at cutting back drastically on the unsustainable-- if not suicidal-- growth in the cost of health care (which has doubled in the same period that those industries mentioned above have spent all that money on Congress). There is no indication whatsoever that without drastic measures that growth rate will slow or even not continue to increase.

This morning Nate Silver did a thorough district by district analysis showing clearly that it isn't their constituents that Blue Dogs fear to anger by supporting the public option. Their constituents-- or most of them-- want that kind of meaningful health care reform. It's the Blue Dogs campaign donors who want to kill it. Silver finds a "relationship between support for the public option and the poverty rate. Kentucky and Nebraska, for instance, each gave Barack Obama 41 percent of their vote. But in Kentucky, the public option is supported (barely) at 46-45, whereas in Nebraska it's opposed 39-47. What's the difference? Kentucky is much poorer than Nebraska-- 17.0 percent of its residents are impoverished, versus 11.5 percent in the Cornhusker state. Likewise, Nevada gave Barack Obama 55 percent of its vote, whereas Cooper's TN-5 gave him 56. But in Nevada, the public option is supported 52-40, whereas in TN-5, the margin is much larger: 61-28 in favor. TN-5's poverty rate is about 50 percent higher than Nevada's."

Republicans barely even make believe they give a damn about poor voters; few Republicans court them or win their votes and Republican policy is, at best, unfriendly towards their and their families' aspirations. Blue Dogs would rather not, but they generally have to count on these voters and they do pay attention to them-- though usually only every other autumn. Going back to that Palin OpEd referenced above, it is clear that the Republican Party is still as eager to terminate Medicare as it is to end Social Security and phase out the minimum wage. Get them started and we'll wind up with an electorate based on property qualifications for white male voters and everyone else will have to count on the good will of those who, like father, know best.

Palin's protestations are nothing more than classic conservative fear-mongering against the march of progress towards equality and away from elitism. GOP trolls like David Vitter follow her but few serious legislators take her seriously, although many are delighted that she can rile up the hysterical low info base that now calls the shots for the GOP. "Common sense," her ghost writer claims, "tells us that the government's attempts to solve large problems more often create new ones. Common sense also tells us that a top-down, one-size-fits-all plan will not improve the workings of a nationwide health-care system that accounts for one-sixth of our economy. And common sense tells us to be skeptical when President Obama promises that the Democrats' proposals 'will provide more stability and security to every American.'" Let's look at a fact check of Palin's and the GOP's fear and smear tactics against health care reform:

DEATH PANELS

The conservative-leaning Associated Press looked into this outlandish claim by the clueless ex-governor and found it to be devoid of anything resembling veracity. Back on August 11th they reported that "nothing in the legislation would carry out such a bleak vision. The provision that has caused the uproar would instead authorize Medicare to pay doctors for counseling patients about end-of-life care, if the patient wishes. Here are some questions and answers on the controversy: Q: Does the health care legislation bill promote ‘mercy killing,’ or euthanasia? A: No. Q: Then what's all the fuss about? A: A provision in the House bill written by Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) would allow Medicare to pay doctors for voluntary counseling sessions that address end-of-life issues. The conversations between doctor and patient would include living wills, making a close relative or a trusted friend your health care proxy, learning about hospice as an option for the terminally ill, and information about pain medications for people suffering chronic discomfort. The sessions would be covered every five years, more frequently if someone is gravely ill.”

Three days later the NY Times said much the same thing more succinctly: “The stubborn yet false rumor that President Obama’s health care proposals would create government-sponsored ‘death panels’ to decide which patients were worthy of living seemed to arise from nowhere in recent weeks.” Well, not exactly from nowhere. They were invented by propaganda specialists from the Insurance Industry and put into the public forum by a worthless, money-hungry shill, one Sarah Palin. FactCheck.org agreed that Republicans were blatantly lying and doing so for partisan gain at the expense of American families.

On former Sen. Fred Thompson’s radio show, former lieutenant governor of New York Betsy McCaughey said that the House’s proposed health care bill contained a provision that would institute mandatory counseling sessions telling seniors how ‘to do what’s in society’s best interest … and cut your life short.’ House Minority Leader John Boehner made a slightly more measured statement, warning that the same provision ‘may start us down a treacherous path toward government-encouraged euthanasia if enacted into law.’ In truth, that section of the bill would require Medicare to pay for voluntary counseling sessions helping seniors to plan for end-of-life medical care, including designating a health care proxy, choosing a hospice and making decisions about life-sustaining treatment. It would not require doctors to counsel that their patients refuse medical intervention. … McCaughey misrepresents the content of page 425 of the bill. That section would require Medicare to pay for some end-of-life planning counseling sessions with a health care practitioner. … At least two Republican leaders have echoed this end-of-life distortion. On July 23, Republican Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, the House minority leader, released a statement, along with Republican Policy Committee Chairman Thaddeus McCotter of Michigan, saying that the bill would encourage euthanasia.

Both conservative Republican Senator Johnny Isakson (GA), who called her "nuts," and Politifact pointed the finger of Truth right at Palin: "Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska, urged her supporters to oppose Democratic plans for health care reform on her Facebook page. ... We have read all 1,000-plus pages of the Democratic bill and examined versions in various committees. There is no panel in any version of the health care bills in Congress that judges a person's 'level of productivity in society' to determine whether they are 'worthy' of health care. Palin's claim sounds a little like another statement making the rounds, which says that health care reform would mandate counseling for seniors on how to end their lives sooner. We rated this claim Pants on Fire! The truth is that the health bill allows Medicare, for the first time, to pay for doctors' appointments for patients to discuss living wills and other end-of-life issues with their physicians. These types of appointments are completely optional, and AARP supports the measure. ... But that's not what Palin said. She said that the Democratic plan will ration care and "my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care." Palin's statement sounds more like a science fiction movie (Soylent Green, anyone?) than part of an actual bill before Congress. We rate her statement Pants on Fire!"

Her state's own senior senator, Lisa Murkowski, like Isakson a conservative Republican, cringed at Palin's lies and fear-mongering: "It does us no good to incite fear in people by saying that there's these end-of-life provisions, these death panels. Quite honestly, I'm so offended at that terminology because it absolutely isn't (in the bill). There is no reason to gin up fear in the American public by saying things that are not included in the bill.”

Extremist Republican hacks like Palin and Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan have done more than just fallen back on tried right-wing methods of spreading fear and misinformation. They've also come up with proposals to roll back gains working families have made since the Great Depression. Doubling down on the fear and confusion they've helped incite, these reactionaries are now angling towards privatizing or abolishing Medicare. Obama's speech tonight was not for die hard obstructionists in Congress and not for misguided dittoheads and KKK sympathisizers who kept their children home from school Tuesday. But what Obama has to face up to is that even the so-called "moderate" Republicans-- all one of them-- oppose, when push comes to shove, meaningful and effective health care reform: