A modest post-King proposal

Political science blogger Jonathan Bernstein is one King v. Burwell watcher who does not discount the likelihood that Republicans in Congress will come under intense pressure to keep the subsidies flowing through healthcare.gov if the Supreme Court rules for the plaintiffs, Knowing this, I was nonetheless a bit surprised to read this morning that he thinks a more or less unconditional Republican surrender is a real possibility.

Imagine, Bernstein writes, that Republicans write a bill restoring the subsidies along with a poison pill like repeal of the individual mandate, and Obama vetoes it. What then? With most GOP senators and House reps wishing the "opportunity" to throw 8 or 9 million people off their insurance plans to go away, the party could swing either way:

We've seen similar cases in the last Congress: Republicans eventually decided to allow Superstorm Sandy relief and the Violence Against Women Act to pass, while they never permitted votes on a comprehensive immigration plan or on a bill prohibiting employer discrimination based on sexual orientation or identity. In each case, most Republicans wanted to oppose the measure in the event of a vote, though there were enough votes to pass it anyway. The question was whether enough Republicans wanted the legislation to pass while publicly voting "no." And they probably didn't know what they would do until the situation played out.

And here's his call;

My guess is that if this does happen (the court may, and should, rule the administration has read the health-care law properly), Republicans would be under heavy pressure to allow a simple fix to pass, and would probably give in. But it's hardly certain.

I think there's a third possibility: with both sides under heavy pressure and public opinion as to who's to blame hanging in the balance, Republicans might settle for amending the ACA in a conservative direction without destroying it. (See Michael Leavitt, Bush Jr.'s HHS Secretary, on this.) But how much amendment would be enough to satisfy the wrath of the party's base?

Here's one possibility: detoxify Bernstein's poison pill a bit. Give each state the option of repealing the individual mandate.

No, Obama is not plunging neck-deep in the Big Muddy

"We don't have a strategy yet." Those words of Obama's in an Aug. 28 press conference so flipped out the foreign policy establishment and media that no one heard heard what Obama was saying.

A translation: The conditions are not yet in place for significant U.S. military action against ISIS in Syria. Our efforts now are concentrated on beginning to create such conditions.

Those who fear that Obama is poised to plunge neck-deep in the Syrian muddy (here's to you, Mr. Sullivan) might look again at how he has elaborated this point repeatedly  -- in press conferences on Sept. 3 and Sept. 5, and in his Meet the Press interview with Chuck Todd that aired Sept. 7.

Here's how he put it on Aug. 28:

Reporters read insurance execs' testimony before yesterday's House ACA hearing. Looks like GOP reps didn't

Last week, the House Energy & Commerce Committee put out a mendacious report claiming that insurance company executives had submitted data to them showing that just two thirds of ACA private plan enrollees had paid their first month's premium. ACA signups tracker Charles Gaba shot that rotten fish in a barrel within an hour of the report's release:.

...they're VERY clear about what they're claiming: that as of 4/15/14, only 67% of all QHP enrollments via Healthcare.Gov had paid their first month's premium, right?

Well, there's a serious problem right there, because out of the 8 million or so enrollments as of 4/15, only 5 million of the first month's premiums were even due.

Gaba was the first of many; the claim was widely debunked. That didn't deter the Committee from calling health insurance executives to a May 7 hearing,  presumably to ratify their statistical legerdemain.  Unsurprisingly, the hearing, conducted by the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, did not go as planned. Jonathan Bernstein marvels at the manifestation of an apparent feedback loop:

But yesterday, a House subcommittee invited insurance company executives to testify and, according to the Hill, Republicans on the panel were “visibly exasperated, as insurers failed to confirm certain claims about ObamaCare, such as the committee's allegation that one-third of federal exchange enrollees have not paid their first premium.”

We don’t have to rely on reporter interpretations (here’s another one). It made no sense to hold the hearing unless Republicans were (foolishly) confident that the testimony would support their talking point, instead of undermining it.

The only plausible explanation is that closed feedback loop. Either members of the committee managed not to be aware of the criticisms of their survey, or they mistakenly wrote off the criticism as partisan backbiting.

Kevin Drum piles on:

Obviously Republicans were caught off guard at yesterday's hearing, and that could only happen if they really and truly believed their own flawed survey. And that, in turn, could only happen if they get pretty much all their information from Fox News and don't bother with anything else. 

The bubble is apparently more airtight even than Bernstein and Drum fathomed, because the executives' prepared testimony had already hit the newswires before the hearing started. Bloomberg's Alex Wayne had the whole gist in a story that ran on Wednesday morning, prior to the hearing:

This subsidized health insurance was brought to you by...?

Urging caution in response to current ACA signup stats and polling results, Jonathan Bernstein reiterates his  favorite question with regard to the political fallout:

How many of those in the exchanges, in expanded Medicaid, and newly eligible for their parents’ insurance plans are aware that they are covered by Obamacare? I’ve consistently guessed that a large number of people wouldn't make the connection, but we still have no data.

I have always found the possibility that some people would sign up for coverage made available through the ACA without knowing that the ACA (or "Obamacare") was responsible fascinating and challenging. Sometimes Bernstein emphasizes that over time -- say, five years from now -- a lot of people who buy Qualified Health Plans or sign up for Medicaid on Healthcare.gov or the state exchanges won't know that their options originated with the new law. That seems easier to credit than that a significant percentage, if not a majority, of this year's signups would not know that "Obamacare" was the source of their coverage.

Regarding awareness among this year's signups, a few thoughts:

1. It takes a village:  Drew Altman, President of the Kaiser Family Foundation, points out that in California, which spent more on ACA outreach than all the federal exchange states combined, relatively few of the uninsured signed up on their own:

Who took your Medicaid away?

In the long, long runup to full implementation of the Affordable Care Act, Jonathan Bernstein was fond of predicting that many people who gained coverage through the new law would not be aware that the ACA -- or "Obamacare" -- was responsible. Over time, the ACA would "disappear." The state exchanges make no reference to the Affordable Care Act -- and neither, for that matter, does Healthcare.gov. As for the Medicaid expansion, Medicaid is Medicaid.

That forecast will probably come true over time -- though perversely, the exchanges' malfunctioning in the early months probably made more people aware of them in the first signup season.  Meanwhile, the political insight underlying the forecast -- that most people pay very little attention to government initiatives and political battles -- makes me wonder about a shorter-term political question.

Red states' ACA exchanges: lab or slab?

Austin Frakt has launched a multi-post-and-tweet campaign arguing that the Affordable Care Act is an essentially conservative chassis amenable to conservative reform, and that conservative healthcare wonks should be aiming to mend it, not end it. (Subtext: they'd be doing just that  if they were not playing for Team GOP.)

The penultimate post in the series dangles conservative wonk-bait via a list of potential reforms in ascending order of disruptiveness to the current ACA structure, e.g., paring back essential benefits and allowing more catastrophic plans on the exchanges (not so disruptive) and creating high risk pools or universal zero- or low-premium catastrophic insurance (very disruptive).  But how to move GOP lawmakers and their think tank supporters off their "repeal and replace" schtick and onto a "revise and reform" track?

Frakt's most recent post suggests an answer by misdirection:

My conclusion is that the ACA is far more amenable to more conservative reforms than to more liberal ones. Of course, this could change. A public option could be added, for example. But, having had that political fight recently, I doubt it will. The most likely pathway leftward (in the sense of toward single payer) would be if the ACA failed in a sense that could be interpreted as market failure.

In fact, I do expect the ACA to fail in some states, but not in the ones that are most likely to adopt a state-level single payer program. Exchanges may fail where support for and enrollment into them is discouraged by political leaders and other institutions. Ironically, this is more likely to happen in states whose leaders are more ideologically supportive of market-based approaches.

If some state exchanges fail, and Republicans do not at that time control presidency, Senate and House, then what? Looking back at GOP state governments' refusal to run their own ACA exchanges, Jonathan Bernstein offers a might-have-been that's also, it seems to me, a may-be-yet:

Imagine if, right now, there were only a handful of states in the federal exchange, and some of the more aggressive and innovative conservative governors were running their own exchanges...suppose that several Republican governors had pushed for a deal in which they would implement Obamacare, including setting up exchanges in their states, if and only if they were given waivers and allowed to try some conservative policy ideas. The pressure would have been intense on the administration to allow at least some of them. After all, the administration never wanted to build all those different state exchanges in the first place. And certainly the president didn’t want obstruction verging on sabotage from Republicans across the board, as is de rigueur now. In order to get some Republican buy-in, there’s a very good chance Obama would have been extremely willing to cut deals, even if liberals would have been appalled at the results for the affected states.

Recall also that back in 2011 Obama supported legislation that would have moved the starting line for state waivers enabling alternative means of reaching near-universal coverage from 2017 to 2014 -- and further, that the administration has proven receptive to rather radical, privatized variations of the Medicaid expansion.

In short, O'Barkis is willing.  Too bad Republican governors and legislatures are more interested in sabotage than in genuine conservative policy innovation.  If and when, however, they're stuck with the corpse of a state exchange (or one on life support), and the ACA is still the law of the land, Republican governors may cook up some fetching Frankenstein monsters of their own. 

Okay, so our problem is GOP extremism -- but what's driving that?

Jonathan Bernstein advances a kind of Bad Man theory of contemporary American politics -- the bad man being Newt Gingrich, the GOP's Faust. The problem with U.S. politics, he argues, isn't structural, and it's not political polarization per se:

No, the problem is the Republican Party, which has developed a weird and dysfunctional set of incentives along with the legacy of a handful of role models they would be better off without. There’s the race to be the True Conservative, which requires staking out ever-more-crazy positions in order to differentiate from RINOs and squishes – and the reaction by mainstream conservatives who are terrified at losing their conservative credentials and therefore cling as close as possible to the nuttiest radicals out there. There’s the lucrative conservative marketplace, which thrives on incivility and conflict – that’s one set of perverse incentives – and which also thrives when Democrats are in office, which is another set of perverse incentives. There’s the conservative closed information feedback loop, with Republican Party actors and politicians failing to see the U.S. that the rest of the nation sees.

Why I'm glad that Democrats didn't change the Senate rules

Almost since Obama took office, almost every writer on politics whom I enjoy reading most, driven mad by GOP obstruction in the Senate, has urged filibuster reform.  Let Harry Reid's latest complaint stand in for a long statistical litany of GOP obstruction: he has had to deal with over 400 Republican filibusters, compared to Lyndon Johnson's one. 

Without doubt, Senate rules could use some rational tweaking. But I have argued since 2009 that the problem is not so much with the Senate rules as with the GOP destruction of governing norms. Instead of a loyal opposition we have had a nihilist one, unwilling to let the majority govern (with a rational level of resistance and negotiation to shape laws more to the minority's liking) and abide the electoral consequences of the laws they pass, unwilling to let the executive branch be staffed so it can perform its constitutional functions, unwilling to allow the lengthy enactment process to work for laws already passed and signed.

The problem is not so much the rules as the GOP; such nihilist opposition is dangerous, and bespeaks graver danger should the extremist party gain control of the presidency and both houses of Congress. Against that very real possibility the filibuster stands as a bulwark: I would rather let the GOP inhibit the Democrats' ability to pass legislation and fill vacancies than enable the GOP to wreak legislative havoc unrestrained if it has not moderated before the next time it gains power.

In which Bernstein's "anti-quagmire president" conforms to type

Last week, I noted that in the unfolding of the news that Obama was stepping up aid to the Syrian rebels, it was possible to glimpse Obama pushing back, or holding back, against those trying to promote a more extensive commitment.  There was less to the step-up than meets the eye, the administration seemed to signal.

Last night I watched the Syria segment in Obama's interview with Charlie Rose. And there he made it quite clear that notwithstanding the Sully's fears, Larison's expectations and Marc Lynch's anxieties, he is determined not to get sucked in to another middle east quagmire.  When Rose challenged him on the perception of timidity, this exchange followed:

When the public supports the president's position...then what?

I have learned from political scientists including Brendhan Nyhan and Jonathan Bernstein that presidents generally can't sway public opinion via appeals from the bully pulpit.  National Journal report George Condon, relaying the thoughts of political scientist George C. Edwards III, encapsulates the accepted wisdom:

“It is true for all presidents. They virtually never move public opinion in their direction,” Edwards tells National Journal. Citing polling numbers for six decades and multiple presidents, he says, “It happened for Ronald Reagan. It happened for FDR. It happens all the time. You should anticipate failure if you’re trying to change people’s minds. The data is overwhelming.” What Edwards learned is that presidents succeed in rallying the public when the public already agrees with them.

With regard to Obama, however, Edwards' cited examples do not fit his categories. His analysis -- perhaps sharply abbreviated by Condon -- glides over the ambiguities involved in "rallying the public when the public already agrees":

I get nervous when I read sentences like this

from Greg Sargent:

But there is no realistic scenario under which Democrats agree to serious entitlement cuts without new revenues, so until this position changes, we’re very likely going to remain stuck in extended sequestration.

It seems to me that progressive watchers of the budget wars like Sargent and Brian Beutler tend to underestimate Obama's capacity to move the goalposts on itself. Remember his alleged retort to Boehner's opening offer late last year to raise about $800 billion in new revenue over ten years via (unspecified) loophole closures: "I get that for free"?  He didn't. And as Sargent's post implies, he won't any time time soon. Relatedly, remember Obama's not-quite-hard line about the Bush tax cuts -- that they would not be extended for households earning over $250k? They were (up to $450k).

Wait, Jonathan Bernstein has a point

In my last post, I suggested that Jonathan Bernstein was warning Obama against an unlikely pitfall in suggesting that Obama not waste his energy chasing a "liberal Reagan" myth -- that is, imagining he "can win arguments for a generation by choosing exactly the right words at the right time."

Obama, I suggested, in seeking to implement his alleged realization that "you can only change [Washington] from the outside," is focused on marshaling public opinion that already supports his policy proposals, not on attempting to change public opinion from the bully pulpit.  My evidence was twofold. First, he's tried the former (tapping opinion that's already on his side) repeatedly over the last eighteen months, asking supporters to lobby their Congressional reps on behalf of "balanced" deficit reduction,  the payroll tax cut, and low interest rates for student loans, and more recently tapping public disgust with debt ceiling brinksmanship to pressure the GOP into a clean raise. Second, as I noted yesterday, in making the case in 2008 that Reagan "changed the trajectory," Obama emphasized that Reagan "tapped into what people were already feeling," not that he educated them or changed their minds by force of argument.

The distinction between seeking to channel public opinion, or perhaps even focus it when it's latent, and trying to change it, is crucial, and my impression has been that Obama recognizes this. But an interview with The New Republic's Chris Hughes and Franklin Foer sends up some warning signals.

What exactly is the danger for Obama in chasing the "liberal Reagan" mantle?

Yesterday, I offered a partial dissent from Jonathan Bernstein's contention that it's a myth that Ronald Reagan "defined an era" or, to borrow Obama's 2008 phrase, "changed the trajectory of America."  Reagan, I argued, did set the ideological mold that subsequently hardened into GOP dogma, not least by at least appearing to demonstrate that tax cuts can unleash economic growth.

I'd like now to probe a little deeper into exactly what Jon was warning Obama against. I'm not certain, but I suspect that the warning may pertain to a perceived flaw in Obama's current political strategy fingered by Ezra Klein and others. Eliding out the meat of Bernstein's debunking of the "transformative Reagan" myth, here's his advice for Obama:

Here’s the problem. Ronald Reagan wasn’t really the Reagan of everyone’s imagination. So aspiring to be a “liberal Reagan” is chasing a fantasy. Worse than that—it’s a fantasy that can easily distract a president from the real things that he should be doing....

In which I jump to a conclusion

Jonathan Bernstein jumped in early yesterday with a characteristic caution regarding Susan Rice's withdrawal of herself from consideration for Secretary of State:

I’d caution everyone to wait a bit before drawing any firm conclusions about what happened here. We don’t know she was Barack Obama’s first choice. We don’t know, if she was the top choice, why she didn’t wind up the pick. If outside objections mattered — say, from John McCain — we don’t know which ones mattered, and it’s not necessarily the loudest ones.

It's certainly true that we don't know everything Bernstein says we don't know. Nonetheless, when I saw the news, my own mind jumped to a conclusion simultaneous with processing it: shit, Obama caved. I consider that a significant data point, not because I'm particularly knowledgeable about this process or about Rice, but because I'm not. I think anyone who followed the course of this prospective nomination even casually would have leaped to the same conclusion. And those optics suggest a major White House failure, whatever the merits of Rice as Secretary of State.

Obama can't quite keep it simple

[11/15: several updates at bottom]

In response to the first 'fiscal cliff' question in his press conference today, Obama seemed to shut the door on any alternative to letting the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% expire -- that is, to raising the top marginal income tax rate. But there was a little sliver of light along the doorjamb, and when Chuck Todd pushed on it, Obama swung the door open.

First, this seemed all but definitive:

QUESTION: You’ve said that the wealthiest must pay more. Would closing loopholes instead of raising rates for them satisfy you?

OBAMA: I think that there are loopholes that can be closed, and we should look at how we can make the process of deductions, the filing process easier, simpler. But when it comes to the top 2 percent, what I’m not going to do is to extend further a tax cut for folks who don’t need it, which would cost close to a trillion dollars.

Poll-vaulting to debate glory

First we all watched the first debate and stood gaping as Obama's lead vanished in the aftermath. Then we learned that Obama's poll slide had in fact started about a week prior.

Next, we watched Obama win the second debate and held our breath for a bounce in the polls. Now, Jonathan Bernstein avers casually that the race is  "slightly trending towards Obama, perhaps beginning after the second debate or perhaps a bit before that."

A bit before...a new theory presents itself unbidden!  Whichever candidate is starting to rise in the polls outperforms in the debate.

The candidates personally are as much in the grip of campaign "fundamentals" as political scientists tell us the race itself is. The workings of their minds and bodies are pulled by electoral tides as surely as we are all subject to gravity. Or poll--arity.

Okay, maybe not. Sounds compelling, though, doesn't? I mean compolling.

Romney Rules, cont.: blame Obama for effects of policies I advocate

I want to add a footnote to Jonathan Bernstein's challenge to the media to spotlight the substance of Obama and Romney's opposing stances regarding public sector layoffs, which Romney publicly advocated  on Friday, claiming the US doesn't need more firemen, police or teachers. Bernstein:

The real problem with Obama's June 8 press conference

I am not going to opine on whether Obama's "the private sector is doing fine" gaffe will hurt him in the long run.  Sullivan assumed yes, and when I read his lament I jumped immediately for comfort to Jonathan Bernstein, who, right on cue, assured that ultimately it will matter not a whit. 

I am distressed, though, by a more conscious word choice of Obama's in that June 8 press conference below, though -- on that recalls the political summer from hell, 2011.  Wanna guess what I'm thinking?  I will refrain from putting the (repeated) keyword in italics:

Last September, I sent Congress a detailed jobs plan full of the kind of bipartisan ideas that would have put more Americans back to work.  It had broad support from the American people.    It was fully paid for.  If Congress had passed it in full, we’d be on track to have a million more Americans working this year.  The unemployment rate would be lower.  Our economy would be stronger.

Attention, David Brooks: "Romney grits" are not the issue

Nice diversion, David.

David Brooks would have us believe with regard to Romney that "the wealth issue is a sideshow," because Romney is not a "spoiled, cossetted character," but rather a fanatic hard worker shaped by his family's persecution and pioneering grit. True enough, and point taken.

But the trust fund stereotype is a straw man.  Romney's wealth is an issue -- and a potent one at this point in American history -- not because his privileged (and demanding) upbringing spoiled him, but because, as a member of the 1% (or the point-one percent), he proposes to further cut taxes on the wealthy and shred the social safety net.  As Ezra Klein recently pointed out, Romney's budget proposals are far to the right of candidate George W. Bush's. As Jonathan Cohn adds, his cap on Federal spending at 18% of GDP puts him to the right of Paul Ryan, whose budget ends Medicare as we know it and radically reduces Social Security.

Romney's wealth is also at issue because the way he earned it encapsulates both the strength and the weakness of American capitalism in the Reagan and post-Reagan era. Bain may well have revitalized many companies that could not have survived without restructuring via the kind of strategic management the company pioneered and fostered. Bain also loaded down its purchases with debt and effectively looted some of them: the leveraged structure effectively siphoned wealth from employees to investors.  Bain, in short,  contributed both to growth and growing inequality.

A not-so-plain blog (post) about politics

Hmm. In a fit of absent-mindedness, Jonathan Bernstein may have just amended his theory of what makes democracy work, or what makes an elected democratic official a "good" one in a sense that goes beyond managing to stay in office a long time. Or perhaps he's just clarified a point that I don't believe was clarified before. Or just opened up a can of worms.

Let's start with the theory-qualifying snippet:

Where politicians and parties go wrong is when they adjust the policies they favor in order to be able to use the words that test well, and then mistakenly believe that the underlying policies are actually popular.

Most of us would not have any problem with that statement. But under Bernstein's theory of representation, it's not entirely clear that it matters whether "underlying policies" are popular, if the "words that test well" get the speaker elected or reelected. So, for a second time, let me pick a bone with the joyous cynicism animating Bernstein's celebration of a purely contractual relationship between elected official and voters.