"Unless" war is necessary? -- or until?

Like Peter Beinart, I'm mildly heartened by evidence that "Obama's backbone vis Bibi [is] proving infectious" on Capitol Hill.  Yet  I'm troubled by a perhaps random note in Barney Frank's otherwise forceful message to Bibi to back off (as reported by the Hill's Julian Pecquet):

Attention, Barney Frank: Obama was the partisan warrior when it counted most

Scott Lemieux does a nice job rebutting Barney Frank's contention that health care reform was an inevitable loser for Democrats (and strategic error for Obama) because "When you tell [people with health insurance] that you’re going to extend health care to people who don’t now have it, they don’t see how you can do that without hurting them." So Frank told  Jason Zegerle in a long debriefing published this week. Lemieux, bemused that the normally combative and often courageous Frank would avoid that heavy lift, retorts:

This is – uncharacteristically — essentially an argument against most progressive change. Anything that challenges privilege and disrupts the status quo carries risk and disrupts people’s sensitivities.

Frank's anomalous pusillanimity with respect to health reform was evident at the crisis hour when Scott Brown won the special election for Ted Kennedy's Senate seat in January 2010, ending the Democrats' filibuster-proof majority and thereby endangering reconciliation of the passed House and Senate versions of what became the Affordable Care Act.  Frank led the cut-and-run chorus, putting out  this statement on January 19:

I disagree, Mr. President

Obama is offering another olive branch to Republicans -- or is he trying once again to outflank them?  His message, as always, is subtle -- I think too subtle. It may not be quite what it seems, but it doesn't satisfy. Here's his exchange with Stephanopoulos regarding partisanship:

OBAMA:...I noticed that some of the Republicans are saying well, we actually wanted to do health care. We just didn't want...


STEPHANOPOULOS: Michael Steele said that to me this morning.
 
OBAMA: Exactly. So now in fairness, I think it's important to remind everybody that part of this process was having conversations with Republicans for months and asking them what exactly they wanted to do and what their solutions were to these problems.

Frank-ly disgusting

There's probably no point in continuing to howl at the moon as assorted Democrats rush for the exits on HCR. But I can't help myself. Barney Frank is the latest to cut off all chance of following through:

I have two reactions to the election in Massachusetts. One, I am disappointed. Two, I feel strongly that the Democratic majority in congress must respect the process and make no effort to bypass the electoral results. If Martha Coakley had won, I believe we could have worked out a reasonable compromise between the House and Senate health care bills. But since Scott Brown has won and the Republicans now have 41 votes in the senate, that approach is no longer appropriate. I am hopeful that some Republican senators will be willing to discuss a revised version of health care reform. Because I do not think that the country would be well served by the health care status quo. But our respect for democratic procedures must rule out any effort to pass a health care bill as if the Massachusetts election had not happened. Going forward, I hope there will be a serious effort to change the senate rule which means that 59 are not enough to pass major legislation, but those are the rules by which the health care bill was considered, and it would be wrong to change them in the middle of this process.

Respect for democratic procedures? It would be "wrong" to change "the rules by which the health care bill was considered"?  "Procedure" is the cross on which the Democrats have hung themselves. It's the procedure -- dragged out for the better part of a year by Republican bad faith and Democratic accommodation and infighting -- that has disgusted voters, not the substance of the two quite well-constructed bills now pending.
Whom does Frank think he's dealing with? Respect for "procedure" means acceding to concerted Republican malpractice - in the bad faith negotiations that Baucus allowed to drag on for months, giving the Republicans in the 'gang of six' most of what they wanted; in the relentless demagoguery of the summer; in Republican rejection of a bill that is as "Republican" as any Republican with any integrity (that is, today, none) could wish, in its privatization of near-universal care and deficit discipline; in the Republicans' successful obstruction of every step of the process until they breached the Democrats' filibuster-proof majority. And of course, there is absolutely no violation of proper Congressional procedure in the House passing a bill that the Senate has already passed.

Down girl, down! Dowd sics herself on Wall Street

Oh dear. Maureen Dowd's gone demagogue, as she occasionally does when her rhetorical weaponry is set loose in a target-rich environment.

On Wednesday she unloosed a fearsome smart-bomb barrage against banking mogul excess. Today, she carpet-bombed Wall Street. Making money from money "must unhinge you." Those who awarded bonuses should be prosecuted, the money disgorged.

Reality check:

1) Done right, allocating capital efficiently is as important as making good widgets. You don't get good new widgets made without the capital. The problem was regulation gone awry (or AWOL), not the existence of people whose function is to make money from money. Like lawyers, they're unpopular but useful. You could argue that poor regulation made the field so lucrative that there's too many of them, but that's different.*

2) Dowd quotes Barney Frank without comment: "Paulson let the cat out of the bag...and it can't be gotten back." Frank's right. You can't claw back, let alone prosecute, unless someone broke a law. TARP was riddle with holes. The Obama Administration and Congress can fix the second half but not siphon back what's been pissed away.

3) Dowd ridicules Rudolph Giuliani for saying that cutting Wall Street bonuses would mean less spending in restaurants and stores. Restaurants, schmestraurants. The bonuses constitute a huge chunk of New York's decimated tax base.

There's a balance to be struck with regard to bonuses. They're more than half of a lot of financial people's yearly compensation, they're supposed to be based on the money you make, and some people did make money for their firms. Yes, TARP should radically limit them, particularly for those with 7-figure compensation and more. More to the point, as first Raghuram Rajan* and then Martin Wolf (hardly a pair of flaming radicals) wrote in the FT a year ago, the bulk of bonus money should be tied to long term performance -- locked up for up to 10 years and clawed back if today's bets wreak mass destruction tomorrow. But the whole system can't be obliterated at a stroke.

*As an index investor, I find them only indirectly useful, as there'd be no indexes without paid professional investors vainly trying to beat them.

**Former chief economist, IMF