From Palin to Ryan: a short history of demonizing IPAB

The battle between the parties over Medicare reform is a battle about how best to control costs.  Ryan and Romney rely exclusively on the Competition Fairy, -- the notion that if private insurers are induced to compete for Medicare policyholders, they will find ways to hold down costs.  If that fails, Ryan/Romney would most likely shift costs to seniors, with some ostensible protections for low-income beneficiaries.  The Obama administration, via the Affordable Care Act, seeks to use the government's market clout to change the rules of the payment game for providers, creating new incentives to reduce unnecessary care and new rewards and penalties focused on patient outcomes.

Hey, I caught a pattern in Oct. 2008

Via Dave Weigel, I came across this political science data relayed by Richard Johnston and Emily Thorson regarding Sarah Palin's apparent effect on John McCain's campaign:

John McCain’s August 29 announcement of Palin as his running mate surprised the Republican establishment, the media, and especially voters. She made a strong first impression: she enjoyed high approval ratings after her acceptance speech, and the percentage of voters saying that they intended to vote Republican skyrocketed. But within days of the speech, her ratings began a precipitous slide from which she—and the McCain campaign—never recovered. Throughout the rest of the campaign, vote intentions were closely tied to Palin’s approval ratings: each major Palin approval drop was followed, within a day or two, by a drop in McCain vote intention. No other factor moved McCain support with such precision. Comparison of the correlation between running mate approval ratings and vote intentions from 2000 and 2004 confirms Palin’s peculiar importance in 2008.

 I hold that truth to have been self-evident -- per xpostfactoid, Oct. 24, 2008:

GOP leaders: GOP is unfit to govern

Let's step back and let the obvious sink in. Think about this internecine GOP spat for a moment:

BRIAN KILMEADE: Now, Sen. McCain, I want you to hear a sound bite from one of the Sunday shows. Dick Cheney sits down, talks about your selection of vice presidential candidate Governor Palin. Listen.

DICK CHENEY: I like Governor Palin. I’ve met her. I know her. She – attractive candidate. But based on her background, she’d only been governor for, what, two years? I don’t think she passed that test…of being ready to take over. And I think that was a mistake.

BRIAN KILMEADE: You agree? Disagree?

SEN. JOHN McCAIN: Well, I’m always glad to get comments four years later. Look, I respect the vice president. He and I had strong disagreements as to whether we should torture people or not. I don’t think we should have. But the fact is I’m proud of Sarah Palin. I’m proud of the job she did. I’m proud of the job she continues to do. Everybody has their own views and I respect those views. But I’m proud of what we did.

Romney to pick an UnPalin for Veep

Asked in a Colorado town hall whether he would pick his running mate before the GOP convention, Romney responded:

I can’t give you the timeline for that..that is a decision that we’ll make down the road. Nor can I give you the individual. I can tell you that the person I choose you will look at and say, ‘Well, that’s a person who could be president, if that were necessary, and that, for me, is the most important single criteria.”

Hmm. I guess that rules out all the clowns he ran against for the nomination, with the possible exception of the first dropout, Tim Pawlenty. Sounds like an attempt, too, to undo the Palinization of the GOP.  Too bad he had to Palinize himself to get the nomination -- demonizing a clone of his own healthcare creation, embracing insane tax and spending cuts, criminalizing abortion -- and lying nonstop about his opponent.

Thanks, Sarah! Americans believe the ACA has death panels

The Kaiser Family Foundation  has a 10-question online quiz about the ACA. Here are the questions that a majority of respondents answered wrongly:

• Will the health reform law allow a government panel to make decisions about end-of-life care for people on Medicare?  - 45% correct
• Will the health reform law cut benefits that were previously provided to all people on Medicare? - 40% correct
• Will the health reform law require all businesses, even the smallest ones, to provide health insurance for their employees?- 25% correct
• Will the health reform law create a new government run insurance plan to be offered along with private plans? - 27% correct [added in update -- see note at bottom]
• Will the health reform law allow undocumented immigrants to receive financial help from the government to buy health insurance? - 42% correct [also added in update]

Of Cohn and Karma

Jonathan Cohn worries in the wake of Gingrich's South Carolina victory:

But I know one member of the liberal media who is not giddy: Me. There’s a reason Gingrich is rallying the conservative base right now: He’s espousing some very conservative ideas. For starters, Mr. Former Speaker, what is wrong with food stamps? Gingirch is also appealing to some less than enlightened instincts. Let's face it, his victory in South Carolina probably has less to do with attacks on Bain Capital than it does with an attack on Juan Williams.

Maybe the Gingrich schtick stops working outside of South Carolina and the Republican base – and maybe, if he somehow won the nomination, he’d be the gift to Democrats that everybody supposes. That's the safe bet. But in a year that’s already proven so unpredictable, how can anybody be sure?

I know how he feels; I've expressed similar thoughts about Palin (a first: I can't find the link!). Yes, an unstable demagogue should be a lot easier for Obama to beat than a candidate who'd make a plausible president -- e.g., judging by past work product, Romney. But in a two-party system, either party nominating an unstable demagogue is a danger to democracy, both because any incumbent can be beat if economic conditions are bad enough or if catastrophe strikes, and because the takeover of one major party by extremists, reactionaries and hatemongers means we are always on the knife's edge.  The counter-argument, often expressed by Sullivan, is that only by electing an extremist and getting its clock cleaned can a party submerged in its own ideology be dragged back to the center. That may have worked in the case of Goldwater. But Goldwater was a sober statesman compared to Gingrich, Perry, Palin.

"Tell the truth, now, Nicolle..."

I wish I could find it. Circa 1998, Saturday Night Live ran a mock-interview between Monica Lewinsky and I think Barbara Walters (a.k.a. WaWa), in which the question is posed: "Tell the truth, now, Monica, did you give the President a hummer?" Answer: "No, Barbara." Almost immediately after, Monica whips out and displays her new book, How to Give the President a Hummer.

That's what came to mind as I glanced at a Time interview (by Claire Suddath) with former Bush communications director and McCain campaign adviser Nicolle Wallace focused on her new novel, It's Classified. Main character: Vice Presidential candidate Tara. Premise, according to Wallace:

Run, Sarah, Run!

If Dick Cheney can try to lure Hillary Clinton into the presidential race, why can't we progressives have a go at Sarah?  Jonathan Bernstein:

Could Palin launch an independent bid for the presidency? Why not? What bridges would she be burning with Republicans that she hasn’t burned already? And if she did go that route, she certainly wouldn’t have problems raising a fair amount of money, and she would be able to mobilize enough volunteers to get her name on the ballot in quite a few states.

The real Ezekiel Emanuel, revisited

Thanks to Ezra Klein for bringing into the current debate about euthanasia and assisted suicide Ezekiel Emanuel's humane argument against legalizing those practices, expressed in a 1997 Atlantic article.  Emanuel's chief concern was that once assisted suicide and euthanasia become common and accepted, subtle (or not-so-subtle) pressure would be exerted on some very sick patients to end their lives to ease the burden on their caregivers and loved ones:

Broad legalization of physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia would have the paradoxical effect of making patients seem to be responsible for their own suffering. Rather than being seen primarily as the victims of pain and suffering caused by disease, patients would be seen as having the power to end their suffering by agreeing to an injection or taking some pills; refusing would mean that living through the pain was the patient's decision, the patient's responsibility. Placing the blame on the patient would reduce the motivation of caregivers to provide the extra care that might be required, and would ease guilt if the care fell short. Such an easy, thoughtless shift of responsibility is probably what makes most hospice workers so deeply opposed to physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia.

That pressure, Emanuel warned, could also be financial, particularly in the United States:

Charles M. Schulz, Palin prophet

Forgive me for repeating myself, dear reader, but compare:

a.) From the Anchorage Daily News, 2/19/11, reporting the leaked contents of a book manuscript by former Palin aide Frank Bailey:

The manuscript opens with an account of Palin sending Bailey a message saying "I hate this damn job" shortly before she resigned as Alaska's governor in July 2009, less than three years into her four-year term.

b) xpostfactoid, 7/4/09, Why she did it:

McCain hearts Palin as victim-in-chief

John McCain's purported graciousness is disingenuous.

In an op-ed in today's Washington Post, McCain praises Obama's speech in Tucson -- then twists it to second Sarah Palin's depraved implication that she is the nation's chief victim of overheated political rhetoric.

According to McCain, "The president appropriately disputed the injurious suggestion that some participants in our political debates were responsible for a depraved man's inhumanity."  That's true, insofar as Obama suggested that we don't know "what thoughts lurked in the dark recesses of a violent mind." It's also true that  Obama upheld the value of "debating what might be done to prevent such tragedies in the future" and recommended that we "challenge old assumptions in order to lessen the prospects of violence in the future," but McCain's pullout is accurate as far as it goes.

McCain moves on to inveigh against character assassination and affirm his own belief in the President's patriotism and fitness to govern. He admits that he has been part of the problem in the past (remember: "he'd rather lose a war than a campaign"?). Then comes the sleight of hand:

A wish fulfilled for Erica Jong

In Fear of Flying (1973), Erica Jong's all-but-autobiographical narrator recounts the rage she felt encountering the smooth surface of postwar German life in Heidelberg, 1966:

What infuriated me most, I think, was the way the Germans had changed their protective coloration, the way they talked peace and humanitarianism, the way they all claimed to have fought on the Russian Front. It was their hypocrisy I abhorred. At least if they’d come out openly and said: We loved Hitler, one might have weighed their humanity with their honesty and perhaps forgiven them.

She recounts her search for the shallow-buried Nazi past, culminating in a sleuthing foray at the local library:

I went to the Heidelberg main library and began looking through guidebooks. Most of them were routine, with glossy photos of the Schloss and old engravings of the pasty-faced Electors of the Palatinate. Finally I came across a library-bound one, English and German on facing pages, with cheap, yellowing paper, black and white photographs and old Gothic type. The publication date was 1937, and every ten pages or so a paragraph or a photo or a small block of type was covered over with a square of oak-tag. These little squares were firmly glued down so that you couldn’t lift the corners, but the minute I saw them I knew I wouldn’t rest until I had unglued them all and discovered what was underneath.

I checked out the book (along with four others so the librarian wouldn’t be suspicious) and raced home where I carefully steamed the offending pages over a tea-kettle spout.

Maybe Bernstein's wrong this time?

If I may indulge in a lazy blog post format, at bottom is my comment in response to Jonathan Bernstein's rather astonishing claim that the fight over the Islamic Center near Ground Zero. Bernstein, always trenchant in his  debunking of unsupported assertions about the way politicians' words and deeds affect electorates, rather gleefully insists that Park51 (f.k.a. Cordoba House) is

not going to affect elections, it's not substantively important, and to the extent it's symbolically important...well, let's just say it's not symbolically important as a stand-alone issue in any significant way (at best, it's what Kevin Drum says, one straw -- so shouldn't we pay more attention to all that other straw?).  I'm sorry to be a stick in the mud about it, but it just isn't actually a big story no matter how much it gets hyped.  Okay? 

My response, which I'll be the first to admit lacks supporting evidence and doubtless needs work:

Gee Jonathan, I know you're an expert in the dynamics of public opinion and all that, but to second CSH, you sure seem wrong to me here.

Per a Ben Smith story, I think the Republicans completely repudiating Bush's efforts to differentiate Islam from Islamism is significant. I think Palin's success in bringing another poisonous meme to the eruption point is significant. I think that waves of hysterical demagoguery that hit fever pitch are significant. And I think that, as with torture, when it comes to defense of civil liberties leaders have to be better than the rest of us, because majorities will sell those liberties without a twitch for a modicum of relief from rage or fear. When one of our two major parties goes all out demonizing an entire religion and works assiduously to interfere with a local government's approval of a religious institution to be built on private property, that's dangerous.

Palinguistics go viral

Quick, who's speaking?

   ...Are the tax cuts paid for?

Listen, what you're trying to do is get into this Washington game and their funny accounting over there.  You cannot get the economy going again by raising taxes on those people who we expect to create jobs in America and to get the economy going again. If we want to solve the budget problem, we've got to have a healthy economy and we have to get our arms around the runaway spending that's going on in Washington, D.C.

Sarah Palin, right? No -- John Boehner, refusing to admit that making the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest permanent will increase the deficit.  David Gregory asked him five times to acknowledge that the tax cuts are "not paid for." He wouldn't do it.

Tina Fey advanced her career by imitating Palin.  Why not the Republican leadership? 

Sarah Milhous tills the midterms

As observers struggle to divine Sarah Palin's effect on various races for Congress and governor, it's worth looking back at the all-time master of collecting mid-term election chits, Richard Nixon. Here's Rick Perlstein on Nixon's campaigning strategy, 1966:

Geographically, the itinerary felt random. Politically, it was anything but. He received over a thousand speaking invitations a month. The ones he chose were triangulated with scientific precision. The New York Times's John Herbers reviewed the crazy-quilt itinerary and concluded Nixon was campaigning "in districts where races are close." The failure of discernment was profound. It was the opposite: he was campaigning in traditionally Republican districts where a Democratic congressman had won in 1964 on Lyndon Johnson's coattails, but was likely to be swept out in the conservative backlash...

Come November, Richard Nixon could remind the New York Times that what these districts had in common was that Richard Nixon had campaigned there. He could reap credit for making water flow downhill ( Nixonland, p. 142).

Yes, Weigel, Palin really needs to learn something

Dave Weigel's cynicism about the media's engagement with politicians and the electorate's engagement with media is so extreme that it converts to an odd sort of credulity. Imagining "the media that's actually going to cover the 2012 elections," Weigel predicts:

This media is not going to care about her policies. If policies come up during debates, and she gives the same answers she gives on Fox now, and Mitt Romney pounces on her, the story will not be that the GOP's frontrunner gave a pallid answer. The story will be that Mitt Romney pounced. What does this do to his image? What does Mike Huckabee have to say about it?


And so on. It's hard to imagine Palin competing at the policy level the press claims she needs to get to, but easy to imagine her competing at the level they actually play on. Quick, cast your mind back to the countless 2007/2008 Democratic debates. Do you remember Hillary's mastery of policy? No. You remember her fumbling an answer on drivers' licenses for illegal immigrants, you remember Obama telling her she was "likable enough," and perhaps you remember Dennis Kucinich talking about aliens.

Okay: perhaps people's chief takeaways from the 50-odd Presidential debates of the 2008 campaign were not smart policy pronouncements -- such as Obama's assertion in his first debate with McCain, regarding the war in Iraq, "We have weakened our capacity to project power around the world because we have viewed everything through this single lens."  But that doesn't mean that viewers assess the candidates merely as celebrities. What do people remember about Palin's performance on policy questions in her national media appearances in 2008?  Incoherent babble about seeing Russia from Alaska and what happens when Putin rears his head and flies in American airspace.  Her obvious cluelessness when Charles Gibson asked for her thoughts about the Bush Doctrine. Her faux-Reagan, target-free "there you go again, Joe" in her debate with Biden.

Look, ma no lies: Palin smears with hypotheticals

Is there a method to Palin's loopy syntax? She inspired a fresh round of indignation and glee by suggesting on Fox on Monday that Obama has been soft on BP because he's received oil industry campaign contributions, and for seeming to suggest that he attracted more oil money than a Republican President would.

In fact, while Palin's Fox riff was a smear (impugning Obama's motives with no factual basis) it did not include an actual lie -- she didn't say that Obama got more money from the oil industry than any given Republican. In elusive, allusive convoluted fashion, she piled hypothetical on hypothetical.  After asking why the media doesn't ask "if there's any connection with the contributions made to President Obama and his administration and the support by the oil companies to the administration" (literally, a connection between the oil industry's support for Obama and the oil industry's support for Obama, but you know what she meant), she goes from speculation about what is (or could be) to counterfactuals about what might have been or could yet be:

now, if this was President Bush or if this were a Republican in office who hadn't received as much support even as President Obama has from B.P. and other oil companies, you know the mainstream media would be all over his case in terms of asking questions why the administration didn't get in there, didn't get in there and make sure that the regulatory agencies were doing what they were doing with the oversight to make sure that things like this don't happen.

Palin seems to be dreaming up a hypothetical Republican who hasn't been massively supported by the oil industry. We are literally in fantasyland, where it's natural to body forth the possibility that Obama has been influenced by oil money and then conjure a Republican president who's received "even less" than Obama but whom the media will assume (as it would have with Bush, who received proportionately more of the industry's dollars, but never mind...) is more influenced than Obama is (was).  And just as the slip about "support by the oil companies to the administration" suggests the opposite of what she purportedly means, so the "even" in "even as much," taken literally, would seem to suggest that Obama hasn't received much from the oil industry.  Palin gets lost in her own funhouse.

Don't get her wrong

Rahm Emanuel should be flattered that Sarah Palin thinks he should resign. She probably also thinks that he should publish a ghost-written book, get a TV show and run for President.

To coin a PostPalinism....

Sully adds the italics to a tidbit from Andrea Stone's account of Alaskans' current thoughts about their onetime half-term governor:

Moments earlier, another woman, who called herself a conservative Republican, spoke incredulously about the "cynicism" of national Republicans in choosing someone clearly unqualified for the vice presidency. "How in the world could they?" she asked. "The phenomenon of Sarah Palin exists because people are uninformed politically." (Like several people interviewed, she refused to be identified for fear of "retribution" from Palin and her allies.)

In Wasilla, do they call it retribWootion?  RetribWooten?  

Owens' win in NY 23: bad for Democrats, good for the country?

After basking a bit in the tea partiers' election-night shock when their insurgent darling Doug Hoffman went down in NY District 23, Frank Rich cautions:

The Democrats’ celebration was also premature: Hoffman’s defeat is potentially more harmful to them than to the Republicans....it increases the odds that the Republicans will not do Democrats the great favor of committing suicide between now and the next Election Day.

Quite so. But what may be bad for Democrats in the short term is good for the country.

The country needs the Republican party to step back from the brink. Other mature democracies have fringe parties that play primarily to voters' fears and fantasies, but those parties exist within multiparty systems. In times of stress their vote may approach or crack 20% of the total, and everyone draws a breath and notes the electorate's anger.

We have only two national parties. If one of them shrinks to attract the affiliation of less than 30% of the electorate and retreats entirely into fringe party thinking and tactics, that's dangerous. The tea partiers' lies and paranoid fantasies; their demonization of a reform effort as incremental, cautious, and indeed historically Republican in its genesis as the pending health care bills; their glorification of the willful ignorance of Palin and Bachmann and their rapt attention to transparent demagogues like Beck and Limbaugh, is all fringe party behavior. Those who equate health insurance mandates or voluntary end of life counseling with fascism are themselves potential fascists -- demonizers of opposition, rabid advocates of torture, paranoid fantasists.

If that fringe entirely captures one of our two parties, the next big shock -- a world market collapse like that predicted by Roubini, a major terrorist attack -- could push such people into power. If, meanwhile, new Republican governors in purple states go to work with even a modicum of pragmatism -as Christie at least will have to do -- that could have a powerful demonstration effect for Republican decision-makers.