As God gave him to see the right

I am nearing the climax of Ronald C. White's excellent Lincoln's Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural (2006).  It is leading me to reflect once again why a speech that casts a war that slaughtered 600,000 men as a divine judgment and collective punishment continues to move me.  There is something unique about the tired notion of divine judgment as transmuted by Lincoln's mind and bottomless suffering.

White casts the speech as a species of Jeremiad, a dominant form in Puritan preaching, rooted in the inevitable perpetual sense that the New Israel (like the old one) was forever backsliding. White demonstrates that Lincoln was intimately familiar with the genre, which he describes as follows:

The thrust was that the people had sinned by straying from the original vision of their forefathers and thus deserved punishment. Their sin was linked with the judgment of God. Judgment should give rise to repentance. If there was repentance, the preacher offered the possibility of forgiveness. Forgiveness portended hope. Hope should lead to reform (Kindle location 2102-04).

For the United States the "original vision," as Lincoln increasingly cast it in the war's later days (White notes), is the Declaration's credo: all men are created equal..endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. Punishment for corruption of that vision, in Lincoln's provisional judgment, is an eye-for-an-eye affair:

How long have we known the truth about the Cuban missile crisis?

I "agree" with the reader cited below by James Fallows in his continuing series on threat inflation and ensuing U.S. military engagements:

I said that nearly all the major official "threats" of the modern era proved in retrospect to have been hyped. Missile gap, Tonkin Gulf, WMD, etc. Reader JA immediately replied, "You left out terrorism." And reader AS wrote:

It's true that we came close to nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis. But according to a well documented article in the Atlantic [plus others],  the missiles themselves were an inflated threat, i.e., according to US generals at the time did not materially hurt US security and could easily be traded, as they eventually secretly were, for US missiles in Turkey. 

Did the two-year budget war just end with a GOP victory?

[Update 2]: I usually try to avoid the blog-first-ask-questions-later temptation but may have succumbed to it in this case. Important qualification of news on which this post is based from Brian Beutler. The question is whether Obama has announced intention to sign a continuing resolution by March 27 that funds the government through Sept. 30 at levels incorporating the sequestration:

7:01 AM - Mar 2, 2013

Brian Beutler ‏@brianbeutler@xpostfactoid1 it's hard to write about this. My understanding is that he will not sign CR that makes the sequester caps the new top line...

Brian Beutler ‏@brianbeutler@xpostfactoid1however he will sign one that preserves the existing top line, even if sequestration makes him cut beneath it.

Brian Beutler ‏@brianbeutler@xpostfactoid1 Technical but important difference.

xpostfactoid ‏@xpostfactoid1 @brianbeutler yes indeed! Can there really be a "here's the budget but you have to cut below it" provision?

@brianbeutler @xpostfactoid1 that's what we have today under sequestration. The new CR would simply carry the current budget forward, soup to nuts.

 More qualifications in updates at bottom.  So perhaps the answer to the question in the post title is 'not yet,' though I still think that Obama has maneuvered himself into a bad position. Here's the original post.
*     *     *     *
Every time the next budget showdown looms, Dem-side writers always eagerly game out what will happen when Obama refuses to yield and Republicans are forced to propose x, or defend y.

It never happens. Obama always punts, or caves.

The next showdown was to be March 27, when the continuing resolutions funding the government run out, and new funding bills will have to be passed, either at sequestration levels -- or not.  Here, for example, is Brian Beutler on February 26:

The most important factor in this fight is probably the reality that Obama doesn’t have to face voters again and thus is willing to veto sequestration replacement bills if they’re composed of spending cuts alone. Congressional Democrats are fully aware of this, too, and that creates a powerful incentive for them to hold the line.

So sequestration will begin. Obama won’t cave. And then the tension sequestration was intended to create — and in fact has created — between defense hawks and the rest of the GOP will intensify and actually splinter the party. If that doesn’t happen quickly enough, then the sequestration fight will become tangled up in the need to renew funding for the federal government at the end of March. If Republicans don’t cave before then, they’ll precipitate a 1995-style government shutdown, public opinion will actually begin to control the outcome, and it’ll be game over.

But what did Obama do on the eve of sequestration? The Times' Michael Shear and Jonathan Weisman report:

The tax-cutters' eternal advantage

David Atkins does not like Obama's proposed Medicare and Social Security benefit cuts and complains about moral um, unequivalence in D.C.:

The idea that spending cuts are morally and politically superior to revenue increases is so ingrained the Village political press that to even put the shoe on the other foot creates an unthinkable scenario. This is one of Ronald Reagan's most baleful legacies: a Washington establishment that can't stop believing it's the 1980s or early 1990s.

Is there a displaced rational basis for blaming Obama?

Lots of smart political observers have been working hard in recent days to explain the odd phenomenon of centrist beltway types (Fournier, Ignatius, WaPo editorial staff) blaming Obama for not being able to induce Republicans to accept the kind of compromise or "balanced approach" to replacing the sequester that Obama has articulated ad infinitum and that the pundits in question themselves seek. That approach seeks a roughly equal mix of revenue increases (via tax loophole reduction) and spending cuts to replace the $1.2 trillion in automatic, across-the-board cuts in discretionary spending mandated by the sequester. Should such a balance be struck, spending cuts would still outnumber revenue hikes by about 2-to-1 in the sum of deficit reduction measures taken since 2011, not counting interest savings.

James Fallows calls the both-sides-are-to-blame schtick false equivalence.  Brendan Nyhan decries Green Lantern theory, the apparently ineradicable belief that the president can bend Congress to his will by force of rhetoric or personality or some more nebulous magical power.  Brian Beutler detects an Obama derangement syndrome -- a profound disappointment in Obama stemming from his apparent lack of power to stop the train wreck. Beutler does an excellent job demonstrating that David Ignatius in particular lambastes Obama for not making precisely the public argument in favor of a mix of tax hikes and spending cuts -- including cuts to Medicare and Social Security -- that Obama has been making nonstop for two years.

Fallows and others attribute this phenomenon to a rooted belief among establishment Beltway types that if compromise fails, both sides must be at fault. Beutler and Nyhan allude to misplaced faith -- disproved by political science research -- that the president can win a political fight by force of argument. Also, more generally, that presidential power should be able to overcome, because the president is...Father of us all?

I suspect that at least some of those who call on Obama to compromise more, or articulate better, or propose larger, "braver" entitlement cuts may be displacing anger over a disappointment in Obama that is more grounded in reality. Or perhaps I'm just speaking for myself here. Because I am angry at Obama.

Yes, Team of Rivals was Tony Kushner's "principal source" for Lincoln

I came to  Michael Vorenberg's Final Freedom: The Civil War, The Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment (2001) via Timothy Noah, who suggested in a New Republic  "best books" listicle  that this book was likely the unacknowledged main source of the movie Lincoln,  In a Jan. 10 followup, Noah notes that "Lincoln isn't adapted in any meaningful way from its nominal source, Doris Kearns Goodwin's book, Team of Rivals, which despite its many virtues dedicates only a few pages to the film's central narrative--the passage of the 13th amendment to the Constitution" and that Final Freedom is "a book rich in narrative detail that [screenplay author Tony] Kushner surely feasted on."

I finished Final Freedom yesterday, after a slow read, noting points of convergence and divergence with the movie along the way. A week or two ago, I reread Goodwin's four pages on the House's passage of the thirteenth amendment in January 1865. And what struck me right away -- and now again as I read those pages again -- is that the film's narrative shape and thematic focus bear a much closer resemblance to Goodwin's short hero's narrative than to Vorenberg's richly detailed, polyphonic tic-toc.

Preparing to write that thought up, I went to TNR to pull Noah's article and discovered that he has gone on something of a quest to get Tony Kushner to acknowledge a debt to Vorenberg. In a followup,  Noah spoke to both Kushner and Vorenberg.  Kushner acknowledges having read Final Freedom, and praises it warmly, but denies that it was a primary source. Reading his response was for me a case of reading more or less what I was about to write. So..me first! -- it's my blog. Then, Kushner and Vorenberg.

About that conservative soft spot for means-testing

[reposted from 2/22]

Jonathan Cohn had some fun this afternoon with this tweet and article:

‏@CitizenCohn Huge scoop: White House endorses means-testing for Medicare. http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112506/david-brooks-obama-and-medicare …

--  the joke being that Obama's 2013 budget, released a year ago, proposed modest increases in the already-higher premiums that wealthy seniors pay for Medicare Parts B and D.  Legions apparently retweeted Cohn without pausing to note that the "scoop" was a year old and based on information that the White House publicized.

Cohn's post was prompted by David Brooks lambasting Obama for not offering serious entitlement cuts, such as means-testing, in current negotiations to replace the sequester (see Cohn's post for links).  Which highlights a rather odd fact: means-testing Medicare and Social Security has been a Republican talking point throughout the budget wars. They use it either, I imagine, for cover -- see, we're not just about cutting benefits for the poor -- or as a stalking horse for cutting benefits for everyone else. More on that later.

The funny thing about means-testing is that it's functionally equivalent (if arguably less efficient in some cases) to raising taxes on the wealthy, which is anathema to the GOP.  Another funny thing: people don't realize the extent to which benefits for the elderly are already means-tested -- or, if I'm using that term imprecisely, more expensive for the wealthy (and in one case, available only to the poor).  A few facts, then, about our core elderly benefits:

Woodward is peddling a nonsense conclusion. Why?

For who knows what reason, Bob Woodward is blowing smoke on the sequester deal.

In an article published yesterday, he makes an allegation about the sequester and the grand bargain it was supposed to stimulate that is so absurd no one even noticed what he now says he meant:

In fact, the final deal reached between Vice President Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in 2011 included an agreement that there would be no tax increases in the sequester in exchange for what the president was insisting on: an agreement that the nation’s debt ceiling would be increased for 18 months, so Obama would not have to go through another such negotiation in 2012, when he was running for reelection.

So when the president asks that a substitute for the sequester include not just spending cuts but also new revenue, he is moving the goal posts. His call for a balanced approach is reasonable, and he makes a strong case that those in the top income brackets could and should pay more. But that was not the deal he made.

There is a major sleight-of-hand embedded here. Woodward is saying, first, that the sequester includes no revenue -- which is plain fact -- but also that it was therefore understood initially that the replacement for the sequester would also include no revenue.

That is palpable nonsense, as I demonstrated yesterday: before the deal was signed, Obama said that the supercommittee would be charged with striking a deal that would include revenue.  The White House elaborated the point that most parties expected the supercommittee to consider a mix of tax hikes and spending cuts from the start.

Now Woodward is back with an email to Politico's Mike Allen spelling out his initial  point, which no one noticed because it was so absurd:

No, Bob Woodward, the White House did not move the goalposts on the supercommittee's charge

Bob Woodward claims to have proof, in the form of statements by the principals, that the idea of using sequestration as an enforcement mechanism in the Budget Control Act of 2011 originated with the White House. That may be.*

Woodward also asserts that "the final deal reached between Vice President Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in 2011 included an agreement that there would be no tax increases in the sequester." He provides no quotes in this article to back that statement up. If there was any such agreement, it was never put in writing and it is not reflected in the legislative language or in official descriptions of the deal immediately following its announcement.

A CBO statement put out on August 1, 2011, described the supercommittee's task as follows:

Create a Congressional Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction to propose further deficit reductions, with a stated goal of achieving at least $1.5 trillion in budgetary savings over 10 years

The BCA itself describes the supercommittee task as follows:

GOAL.—The goal of the joint committee  shall be to reduce the deficit by at least $1,500,000,000,000 over the period of fiscal years (Sect 401b, p. 52).

"Reduce the deficit" does not mean "by spending cuts only."

Publicly, from the moment the deal was announced, Republicans insisted that the supercommittee was tasked with considering cuts only, and Democrats insisted that new revenues would be part of the mix.  Announcing the deal on July 31, 2011, Obama said this of the supercommittee (my emphasis):

Breaking: U.S. senior benefits means-tested

Jonathan Cohn had some fun this afternoon with this tweet and article:

‏@CitizenCohn Huge scoop: White House endorses means-testing for Medicare. http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112506/david-brooks-obama-and-medicare …

--  the joke being that Obama's 2013 budget, released a year ago, proposed modest increases in the already-higher premiums that wealthy seniors pay for Medicare Parts B and D.  Legions apparently retweeted Cohn without pausing to note that the "scoop" was a year old and based on information that the White House publicized.

Cohn's post was prompted by David Brooks lambasting Obama for not offering serious entitlement cuts, such as means-testing, in current negotiations to replace the sequester (see Cohn's post for links).  Which highlights a rather odd fact: means-testing Medicare and Social Security has been a Republican talking point throughout the budget wars. They use it either, I imagine, for cover -- see, we're not just about cutting benefits for the poor -- or as a stalking horse for cutting benefits for everyone else. More on that later.

The funny thing about means-testing is that it's functionally equivalent (if arguably less efficient in some cases) to raising taxes on the wealthy, which is anathema to the GOP.  Another funny thing: people don't realize the extent to which benefits for the elderly are already means-tested -- or, if I'm using that term imprecisely, more expensive for the wealthy (and in one case, available only to the poor).  A few facts, then, about our core elderly benefits:

Worse than a crime, etc.

In trying to pin the sequester on Obama, Republicans never really say exactly what they're blaming him for. Is it for actually wanting the savage cuts -- a suggestion that doesn't pass the laugh test? Or for being weak or foolish enough to let them inflict it on him and on the country? That must be it -- notwithstanding it doesn't reflect very well on them.  They're the ones insisting that the meat ax is better than a) simply calling the thing off, since no one intended to enact it, or b) replacing it with a mix of more targeted cuts and modest tax hikes.

Ruth Marcus speaks my thought exactly (and I suppose I've more or less reiterated hers):

The Obama administration is guilty of bad negotiating in pursuit of sensible policy. Congressional Republicans are guilty of exploiting the president’s bad negotiating in pursuit of terrible policy.

And yes, Obama, never willing to carry a fight to the finish, gave up his point of maximum leverage:

What would Simpson-Bowles 2.0 do to Medicare?

Liberals are up in arms about the new Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction framework because, in brief, it calls for about $1.4 trillion less in revenue over ten years than Simpson-Bowles 1.0  (let's call it SB 1) along with roughly another $1.8 trillion in spending cuts, counting interest savings. That's more cuts than those mandated by the looming sequester, but more back-loaded, and with $600 billion coming from Medicare and Medicaid, which the sequester doesn't touch.

The shock comes from the reduction in proposed new revenue compared to the original plan, a change that simply reflects Obama's more limited revenue goals ($1.2 trillion over ten years at last ask, compared to $2.6 in SB 1). Spending cuts remain approximately the same, making the whole package proportionately more cut-heavy.

I want to look for a moment at the $600 billion in savings SB 2 proposes for "health care reforms" -- $200 billion more than SB 1 laid out, but  no more than Obama put forward in his last "grand bargain" offer to Boehner.  Simpson and Bowles envision bending the health care curve in ways that overlap with those envisioned by Obama -- though BS 1 cuts benefits in ways that Obama would not approve, and BS 2 would presumably cut benefits still more. Their rather sketchy new framework takes an "all of the above' approach to reducing healthcare costs -- hitting providers, beneficiaries, and drug companies:

Reduce Medicare and Medicaid spending by improving provider and beneficiary incentives throughout the health care system, reducing provider payments, reforming cost-sharing, increasing premiums for higher earners, adjusting benefits to account for population aging, reducing drug costs, and getting better value for our health care dollars (Feb-Dec 2013)

The paradox of power, immigration reform edition

It's pretty amusing that Republicans are lambasting Obama for daring to stick his oar into the immigration reform process:

...Republicans quickly condemned the reports of a new administration plan, calling it “dead on arrival” and “very counterproductive”...

On Sunday, Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, another Republican calling for immigration changes, said on “This Week” that the president’s efforts to develop his own legislation would undermine efforts on Capitol Hill and were taking “things in the wrong direction.” 

No one is more aware than Obama that he, as president "remains a polarizing figure," as the Times' Michael Shear and Julia Preston put it.  The last time Congress was huffing and puffing in the early stages of a Grand Bargain, almost exactly two years ago (2/15/11), over deficit reduction,  Obama explained why he had not unveiled a detailed plan:

In which Obama induces false memory in Fallows, and I name that tune

In a headnote to his annual line-by-line annotation of Obama's SOTU (noting the political imperatives driving almost every line), James Fallows elaborates on a point he's made before about Obama: "You can barely remember a word of what he says. Obama's eloquence exists almost exclusively on the macro scale..."  In a sense, Fallows suggests, he remembers less than no lines, since the one line he thought he remembered -- ""not red states, nor blue states, but the United States of America," from Obama's 2004 DNC keynote, was a  "play it again, Sam" -- never quite said.

This evening, Fallows recounts the long back story to that speech and the missing line (as told by David Bernstein in Chicago Magazine), and then segues to some thoughts I sent him, e.g.:

Re that strange absence of memorable phrases: it's not just balanced by one strength, it's book-ended between two: conceptual complexity/coherence on the macro side, and cadence on the sub-micro. At least in 2007/2008, less so now, Obama's speeches were musical, hinging on repeat phrases (yes we can) and on the simplest of rhetorical devices, various forms of parallel structure, e.g. anaphora, the repetition of beginning words (also a lot of parallel phrasings in series -- "A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin" etc.).  It was no accident that Will.i.am was able to set one of his speeches to music to some effect.

That's a distillation of a post I put up in response to Obama's victory speech on election night, 2008, which illustrates the point. That was one incantatory speech.

David Goldhill, consider our dental dystopia

David Goldhill, long an advocate of shunting all but catastrophic health care costs onto consumers (pairing super-catastrophic insurance with mandatory HSAs) offers, I must admit, a compellingly negative view of what's likely to become of cost controls embedded in the ACA or favored by the health care experts I like to read. It's a kind of mirror image of Atul Gawande's thousand flowers vision:

Through private insurance, Medicare and Medicaid, our health system relies on centralized cost control and clever adjustments to payment formulas to try to tame the beast. Traditional health experts may repackage their ideas, but they are never discouraged by past failure. So the new Accountable Care Organizations are a reinvention of H.M.O.’s. The Independent Payment Advisory Board is the new Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, or MedPAC. Bundled payments are the new Prospective Payment System.

We often see some early benefit from the introduction of new ideas, but over time such initiatives are always subjugated by our system’s nefarious economic incentives. Implement cost control reforms and watch providers circumvent new rules and guidelines. Reduce reimbursement rates for procedures, and witness providers expand the definition of required services. Convert fee-for-service reimbursements into bundled payments, and soon more severe diagnoses are given. Attempt to use government buying power, and see providers turn to lobbyists to keep prices up. We are approaching a half-century of fighting this losing battle.

It's true that power industries and interest groups are very successful at gaming new regulations. It's also true that today's reforms bear some resemblance to prior efforts.

Morning in, ah, Medicare?

Well, it's a sunny pre-holiday Friday morning, and I am cheered by Ezekiel Emanuel in today's Times heralding the bending of the healthcare cost curve, as it now seems over the past ten years. On the cost control front, perhaps the ACA will look in retrospect something like the surge in Iraq, giving a jolt of indeterminate magnitude to a st of processes already in motion.

In any case, perhaps superficially, I am riffling through my mind the hopeful signs that have emerged on the healthcare front in recent weeks. If I want to go head over heels in caffeinated optimism, I might imagine that Atul Gawande's vision of a kind of venture capital process of reform stimulated by the ACA -- dozens of simultaneous experiments, a handful of which will yield dramatic results -- may actually occur over the next ten-odd years.

Hopeful signs include the fact that, for all the GOP's caterwauling about "bureaucrat-controlled" and "government-controlled" healthcare, beneath the radar some Republicans are looking at cost control measures that are indeed government-imposed, and likely to be effective.  For example, as I noted recently, two long-term "doc fix" bills are currently circulating in Congress, one bipartisan (but mainly Democrat), one Republican. While the GOP bill accords far more input to healthcare providers, both purport to either end or radically curtail fee-for-service payments.

A second sign of some nonideological thinking on the Republican side emanates from a bipartisan initiative, the Partnership for the Future of Medicare, co-chaired by former CBO head Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Ken Thorpe, a professor at Emory. The pair this week distilled a  PFM report in a post on the Health Affairs blog. I think of Holtz-Eakin, former economic adviser to the McCain campaign, as an intensely partisan critic of Obamanomics and the ACA, an impression gleaned mainly from quotes in news articles.  I was therefore somewhat surprised to learn that he is preaching the futility of simple cuts to benefit formulas, and calling for more systemic reform that does not simply rely on the Competition Fairy:

Obama's passionate pragmatism

Obama has always presented himself as both pragmatist and idealist, projecting faith that if we "uphold our ideals through the hard, often frustrating, but absolutely necessary work of self-government" we will make incremental progress toward audacious goals: a new age of broadly shared prosperity, plentiful sustainable energy, affordable health care, nuclear weapons reduction (and ultimately eradication), an end to global poverty, arrested global warming.  In tonight's SOTU, he wedded the pragmatism and the idealism powerfully, reasoning with understated passion, shouting less than in his inaugural but building to a powerful climax of moral exhortation as he invoked Newtown, recapturing also the balanced cadences and grammatical parallelism that marked his speeches in 2008.

Obama's repeated plea to the nation tonight was to face reality: his tone was relentless reasonability. He spoke with a distilled fluency of a man who has been articulating the same values and proposing essentially the same policies (excepting gun control)* for six years on the national stage and now speaks with the knowledge that through several permutations and waves of oppositional hysteria he has still has (or has regained) a majority with him on the big stuff.  And so he argued, not only as if he were himself convinced but convinced that we are convinced: Deficit reduction has to be balanced. Undocumented immigrants have to be offered a path to citizenship as part of comprehensive immigration reform. The nation has to invest in the pillars of shared prosperity: alternative energy, education, infrastructure. Climate change is real and wreaking havoc.  The level of gun violence we live with is insane. Everyone has a right to vote without standing in line for five, six, seven hours. As he said with respect to immigration reform: "we know what needs to be done."

Here are a few of the reality checks -- arguments delivered with a "who can dispute it?" mien:

Really?

Phil Bronstein debriefed the Navy SEAL who shot bin Laden at length. Part of the anonymous shooter's narrative:

The group discussed what would happen if they were surrounded by Pakistani troops. We would surrender. The original plan was to have Vice-President Biden fly to Islamabad and negotiate our release with Pakistan's president.

This is hearsay, but I understand Obama said, Hell no. My guys are not surrendering. What do we need to rain hell on the Pakistani military? That was the one time in my life I was thinking, I am fucking voting for this guy. I had a picture of him lying in bed at night, thinking, You're not fucking with my guys. Like, he's thinking about us.

We got word that we'd be scrambling jets on the border to back us up.

Well yes, hearsay. But was Obama really ready to start lethal firefight with Pakistan after invading its airspace and landing a combat team unannounced, thereby, at a minimum, completely destroying the chance of even a minimal level of cooperation with regard to Afghanistan or terrorist and Taliban safe havens in Pakistan's tribal regions?

Some thoughts about drone strikes and detention

It is high time I sorted out my thinking (and feeling) about U.S. drone killings and other targeted killings of those deemed to be terrorists. It's a duty to myself if no one else. The charge that liberals who were up in arms about Bush's torture and detention policies are unjustifiably silent about Obama's secret and unaccountable killings has some merit in my case, though I have on occasion expressed unease or disapproval of various aspects of Obama's conduct of the ongoing covert war. This will be an essay in the original sense, in that I am figuring out what I think (and recalling what I have thought at various stages) as I go along. The questions: what policies are effective (or likely to cause blowback), what policies are legal (or pose a lasting danger to our civil liberties), what policies are ethical (or likely to save more lives than they take).

The white paper defines "imminent" correctly. Now what?

It's been widely noted that the Justice Dept. white paper purporting to set forth a legal framework "for considering when the US government could use lethal force in a foreign country" to kill a U.S. citizen vastly expands the killing zone in space and time. "The battlefield" is potentially everywhere, and the "imminence" of the threat of violent attack to be legitimately defended against is continuous.

Regarding physical space, the paper pretty much gives the government carte blanche to target anyone deemed a "senior operational leader of al-Qa'ida" in any country in the world, since an attack is deemed "consistent with international legal principles if it were conducted, for example, with the consent of the host nation's government or after a determination that the host nation is unable or unwilling to suppress the threat posted by the individual targeted" (p.5). For example indeed. That "example" covers every imaginable circumstance. I'm no expert in international law, but I doubt it sanctions governments to kill perceived enemies as defined herein wherever they find them.

The white paper has been most widely excoriated for its definition, or alleged defining away, of "imminent." One of three conditions that must be fulfilled for a lethal attack on a U.S. citizen to be justified is "the condition that an operational leader present an "imminent" threat of violent attack against the United States" -- which, according to the paper, "does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future" (p.7).

Another cliff, another cave?

Greg Sargent exhorts the Democrats not to fall for the GOP's sequester bluff:

Democrats are going to have to do a better job of spelling out precisely what the consequences of the sequester would be, so the public understands precisely what Republicans are willing to allow happen in to force the spending cuts they want.

The White House is starting to do that today, circulating a fact sheet that lays out in specific terms exactly what the sequester would do. A few examples: 2,100 fewer food inspections could occur. Seventy thousand kids kicked off Head Start. Ten thousand teacher jobs put at risk. Hundreds of thousands of seriously mentally ill adults could go untreated. Over $500 million in cuts to small business loan guarantees. Cuts to unemployment benefits — further harming the economy — and child nutrition. Etc.

I must confess, this fans an anger that's been brewing in me -- and I take that anger as evidence of a weakness in the Dem position. Obama and the Dems co-negotiated the sequester. Say if you like that they never intended for it to go into effect -- but they put themselves in a position to let it happen. Put another way, Obama and Biden, through the deal they cut at year's end in a last-minute override of Harry Reid, have let the leverage they had on Dec. 31 be reversed. More broadly, Obama has put us in this position through his serial unwillingness to force a confrontation -- in December 2010, in August 2011, and in Dec/Jan 2011-12. 

Will the 'doc fix' revolutionize U.S. healthcare?

I'm new to this, and so lack important context, but it looks to me as if a pending 'doc fix' -- a long-term replacement for the failed Medicare reimbursement formula (part of the Balanced Budget Act of 1997) that Congress patches up every year --could transform our healthcare delivery system at least as sweepingly as the Affordable Care Act.

Modern Healthcare's Rich Daly reports that two rival bills have been introduced. A bipartisan bill all but phases out fee-for-service, while a GOP bill preserves but modifies it. The first,  introduced by Rep Allyson Schwartz (D-Pa) and co-sponsored by Rep. Joe Heck (R-Nev.), an osteopath, is summarized by Daly as follows:

Schwartz's bill (PDF) would mostly unravel the fee-for-service system by requiring physicians to adopt one of several replacement models that the CMS would test and approve over five years. Physicians who did not do so would face successive payment cuts, although a small number of physicians could remain in a modified fee-for-service system if they met certain quality benchmarks or were near retirement.

The xpostfactoid service employee mandate

I confess to be swayed back and forth a bit by an online debate. I more or less assented to Timothy Noah's brief against Pret-a-Manger, a counter food chain that takes training its employees to be friendly and engaging to perhaps new extremes:

Pret keeps its sales clerks in a state of enforced rapture through policies vaguely reminiscent of the old East German Stasi. A "mystery shopper" visits every Pret outlet once a week. If the employee who rings up the sale is appropriately ebullient, then everyone in the shop gets a bonus. If not, nobody does. This system turns peers into enthusiasm cops, further constricting any space for a reserved and private self. And these cops require literal stroking. In other workplaces, touching a co-worker may get you fired, but at Pret you have to worry about not touching co-workers enough. "The first thing I look at," Chief Executive Clive Schlee told The Telegraph last March, "is whether staff are touching each other . . . I can almost predict sales on body language alone...

Obama and further deficit reduction

In response to Obama's reiteration during a pre-Super Bowl interview that he's seeking new revenue by curbing tax deductions for the wealthy, Andrew Sullivan reverts to favorite (though somewhat modified) mantras:

I’d love those loopholes to be closed. But that’s not real, serious revenue-raising tax reform. It’s old-school class demagoguery, not 2008 Obama honesty. If we are to control future debt, and to do so in part through ending tax deductions, we simply have to include the mortgage deduction, the state tax deduction, and the charity deduction – or find a way to cap those deductions past a certain income level. Nothing else comes close to making a difference. And yes, that means the middle class will get hurt a little. That’s what “additional revenue” in the amount required entails.

So less about the Cayman Islands and more about the sacrifices we need to make, please. I really hope the ACA reduces healthcare costs, but I don’t think it’s fiscally responsible to rely on experiments that may well yet fail. Baiting the super-rich is easy. Reducing the deficit responsibly is extremely hard – unless this president is prepared to be blunter and clearer than he was in this interview. And this, recall, is at the beginning of his second term, with maximal leverage at his disposal.

In the two years since Obama's 2011 SOTU, when Andrew called on Obama to make a crusade of deficit reduction, he has come a long way toward a liberal perspective on the budget -- acknowledging that the Tory austerity program in the UK has been a failure and at least partially recognizing, as here, that controlling healthcare costs is basically the whole of the U.S.'s long-term budget challenge.  But Sullivan still can't quite shake the notion that long-term budget planning calls for "sacrifice,", as if deficit reduction were some kind of war effort rather than a component of seeking the greatest prosperity for the greatest number.  And he misreads Obama more than one way here.

a second microblog post

So, based on the economic fundamentals in 2011-12 as we now know them, if Romney and Obama had been sock puppets the election results would have been about the same. But see also the first micropost.

Last year's contraceptive compromise completed: Federal government will pick up tab for contraceptive coverage at religious nonprofits with self-funded insurance plans

Today, HHS answers a question that arose last February when the administration announced its compromise regarding insurance coverage for contraception at faith-based nonprofits that objected to the coverage on moral grounds (places of worship do not have to provide contraceptive coverage at all). Here is the question as I framed it last February: 

Under the  compromise,

• Religious organizations will not be required to subsidize the cost of contraception.

• Contraception coverage will be offered to women by their employers’ insurance companies directly [and free of charge], with no role for religious employers who oppose contraception.

Question: more than half of Americans who get their health coverage from their employers are in self-funded plans -- that is, plans in which the employer sets aside funds to cover the cost of health care, usually hiring a third party administrator (TPA) to handle the claims process, as well as a stop-loss insurer to cover costs above a certain level.  So: who will "provide contraception coverage" in self-funded plans?   If it's the self-funded entity, then the employer is paying for it. Would the TPA somehow absorb the cost -- or a stop-loss insurer under some special rider? If so, surely either would find a way to pass the cost back? 

And lo, here is the answer, published today by HHS:

A microblog post

Obama won reelection because he managed to restrain GOP economic sabotage just enough to keep growth sputtering along

Syncophants, shills and charlatans at work

Forget for a moment how Chuck Hagel performed at his confirmation hearing today. Consider how the U.S. Senate (as represented by its Armed Services Committee) performed:

Oh, screw it.

What I'd planned here, having listened to selected snatches of the nine-hour malignant clown show, was to extract every craven, grandstanding, litmus test-setting question demanding affirmations of unconditional support for Israel, willingness to supply limitless aid to Israel, retractions of any and all past criticism of Israel. But I can't find a transcript, and the relevant quotes are proving elusive in news stories.  Trust me, the demands of Levin, Gillibrand and Blumenthal, not to say Cruz and Graham, boiled down to this: "Mr. Hagel, if confirmed, how thoroughly and wholeheartedly will you subordinate U.S. interests to Israel's perceived interests?"

In any case, while searching for the questions in questions, I stumbled across a post by Mondoweiss expressing pretty much exactly what I wanted to say:

You say you want an evolution

Our understanding of how politicians "evolve" is, I think, evolving.

As Obama moved through his slow dance toward embracing gay marriage, the word became obvious code for "I'm picking my moment to change my position" -- i.e., "reveal my true attitude," which had been on record since 1996. He first set the clock running in October 2010 (all Obama quotes below are taken from this ABC 5/912 timeline):

“I have been to this point unwilling to sign on to same-sex marriage primarily because of my understandings of the traditional definitions of marriage,” President Obama said during an interview with liberal bloggers. “But I also think you’re right that attitudes evolve, including mine. And I think that it is an issue that I wrestle with and think about because I have a whole host of friends who are in gay partnerships.”

By the time he went the last yard more than a year and a half later, his "evolution"  had become a punchline. The process was at once disingenuous, since the conclusion was foregone, and candid, in that he did describe a mental process that in some sense and at some time probably did take place:

Fever breaking?

In meetings with donors and editorial boards during the 2012 campaign, Obama suggested that his reelection would "break the fever" of fanatic GOP opposition to everything he proposed. The fiscal cliff brinksmanship at the turn of the year did nothing to suggest any such "break"-through, as Obama acknowledged in a New Republic interview conducted in mid-January and published just yesterday:

Chris Hughes: You spoke last summer about your election potentially breaking the fever of the Republicans. The hope being that, once you were reelected, they would seek to do more than just block your presidency. Do you feel that you've made headway on that?

Not yet, obviously.

CH: How do you imagine it happening?

I never expected that it would happen overnight. I think it will be a process. And the Republican Party is undergoing a still-early effort at reexamining what their agenda is and what they care about. I think there is still shock on the part of some in the party that I won reelection. There's been a little bit of self-examination among some in the party, but that hasn't gone to the party as a whole yet.

Now, just a day after that interview appeared, the doctor may be looking up and offering some cautious optimism.  For a day at least, the stonewall seems to be cracking at three points:

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....

Yes, Reagan did change the trajectory

Jonathan Bernstein would have us believe that the notion that Ronald Reagan, in Obama's words, "changed the trajectory of American politics" is a mirage -- and Obama would do well to stop chasing it.

It's one more salvo in the continuing campaign of political scientists who engage with the broader public to convince us (with pesky evidence) that almost nothing that we think matters in politics really matters, or matters much, or matters in the way we think it does. Here's the core of Bernstein's 'untransformational Reagan' argument:

Take a look at the Reagan myth. Did Reagan “ideologically shift the nation in his direction?” If we’re talking about voters, the answer is pretty clearly no. As Northeastern political scientist Bill Mayer showed in The Changing American Mind, if anything, public opinion on many issues became more liberal, not more conservative, during Reagan’s presidency (see also a nice post from George Washington University political scientist John Sides).

Obama, child of 2008, father to man of 2013

Harold Meyerson has helped me recognize that in noting the continuities between Obama's second inaugural and his past speeches (2008 and 2009-12), I under-emphasized what's new. Meyerson helps me see more fully the extent to which the speech represents a restoration of ideas Obama expressed in the 2008 campaign. Or rather, an attempt to reboot his implementation of those ideas -- seizing the "gift for reinvention" that he affirmed as an American quality.

It all boils down to what is meant, if anything, by "we are the ones we've been waiting for" (2008) and "my fellow citizens -- you were the change" (2012) and "You and I, as citizens, have the power to set this country’s course" (2013).  Here's Meyerson:

Meet the new Obama -- same (mostly) as the Old Obama

Yesterday, I sought to demonstrate that Obama was simply reverting to form in his second inaugural address by equating liberal priorities with the nation's founding principles and historical development. He did so day in and day out in 2008; the notion that liberal policy prescriptions would enable the country to continue forming "a more perfect union" was the basis of his campaign. I professed myself astonished that anyone would be surprised by his using this framework -- grounding his policies in the Declaration of Independence -- in his Second Inaugural.

Lest anyone conclude that Obama the defender of liberal priorities went into remission for four years, let's extend the 'rhetoric retrospective' back from the most recent past. Take, for example, Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention last September -- a widely panned speech that to my ear was more forceful, more caustic, and more conceptually resonant than yesterday's inaugural.  At the DNC, Obama grounded his defense of government action to expand opportunity and strengthen the safety net and stimulate enterprise in -- you guessed it -- the Declaration of Independence:

As Americans, we believe we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights – rights that no man or government can take away. We insist on personal responsibility and we celebrate individual initiative. We’re not entitled to success. We have to earn it. We honor the strivers, the dreamers, the risk-takers who have always been the driving force behind our free enterprise system – the greatest engine of growth and prosperity the world has ever known.

But we also believe in something called citizenship – a word at the very heart of our founding, at the very essence of our democracy; the idea that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another, and to future generations....

Our liberal history: Obama's oldest trope

In my response to Obama's second inaugural speech, I took it as a given that it's a well-worn Obama trope to equate liberal priorities with the nation's founding principles and historical development -- so much so that Obama rather abbreviated the argument this time around.

I am therefore a bit gob-smacked to note that many of those whom I like to read best seem to be assuming that the equation of active government and collective action with the credo expressed in the Declaration of Independence and with the course of American history is some kind new departure for Obama. See  Greg Sargent, Ezra Klein and James Fallows, That Obama today expanded his circle of concern to include immigrants and gays and (implicitly) safety from gun violence in new ways, I recognize. Ditto that he's dropped the pretense (or rather, belief) that acknowledging some "good ideas" from the other side will get him where he wants to go (as I noted after his convention speech).  But the core concept of government that he articulated today, and the historical support he mustered for it, were utterly familiar..

Back in June 2008, I examined Obama's deployment of our shared past in a post called "We've been here before": How Obama frames our history. Not to bore you with peripherals in that post, I've culled a few examples of such deployments from it and other 2008 Obama speeches.

Janesville, WI, Feb. 13, 2008:

when opportunity is uneven or unequal - it is our responsibility to restore balance, and fairness, and keep that promise alive for the next generation. That is the responsibility we face right now, and that is the responsibility I intend to meet as President of the United States....

In the end, this economic agenda won't just require new money. It will require a new spirit of cooperation and innovation on behalf of the American people. We will have to learn more, and study more, and work harder. We'll be called upon to take part in shared sacrifice and shared prosperity. And we'll have to remind ourselves that we rise and fall as one nation; that a country in which only a few prosper is antithetical to our ideals and our democracy; and that those of us who have benefited greatly from the blessings of this country have a solemn obligation to open the doors of opportunity, not just for our children, but to all of America's children...

It’s a promise that’s been passed down through the ages; one that each generation of Americans is called to keep – that we can raise our children in a land of boundless opportunity, broad prosperity, and unyielding possibility.

New York, New York, March 27, 2008:

But if we unite this country around a common purpose, if we act on the responsibilities that we have to each other and to our country, then we can launch a new era of opportunity and prosperity. I know we can do this because Americans have done this before. Time and again, we've recognized that common stake that we have in each other's success. That's how people as different as Hamilton and Jefferson came together to launch the world's greatest experiment in democracy. That's why our economy hasn't just been the world's greatest wealth creator – it's bound America together, it's created jobs, and it's made the dream of opportunity a reality for generations of Americans.

Obama strips his credo to essentials while widening his net

From the beginning of his national career, Obama's core message has been that what our current political configuration defines as liberal priorities fulfill the promise of America's founding documents. That is, government's function is to ensure an equal shot at life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness -- and to pool collective resources to create conditions in which opportunity is optimized for all. Today, at his second inaugural, Obama delivered that credo in short form:

we have always understood that when times change, so must we; that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges; that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action

Obama cast a wide net in defining what's entailed by pursuing equality of opportunity in this country and seeking to foster it abroad. It entails not only preserving entitlements for the elderly but fighting income inequality, not only fostering alternative energy industries for economic purposes but fighting climate change that is already upon us, not only reducing unequal opportunity for citizens but expanding opportunity for immigrants, not only securing equal pay for women but complete equal rights for "our gay brothers and sisters."

Obama did not provide a lot of policy detail as he laid out the tasks required to fulfill the nation's charter.  But I was heartened by a few hand signals, e.g.:

A lawyerly second inaugural, or a piece of the president's heart? Or both?

I am generally chary of literary analysis that finds meaning in sound -- variations of rhythm and meter, assonance and alliteration, etc. But purely by accident, while reading Ronald C. White's little ode to Lincoln's Second Inaugural in today's Times (this by a man who I see in the bio line has written a whole book about the speech), I was struck by the beauty and, as it were, aural authority of the speech's final phrasing as White quoted it:

By contrast, Lincoln disappeared in his second inaugural. The speech contains the word “I” only once. Lincoln was pointing beyond himself to the future of the American democratic experiment, “to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves; and with all nations.”

Following the qualified, conditional assertion that the nation has endured God's wrath, and the injunction to "bind up the nation's wounds," this final phrasing does, it seems to me, deliver a kind of aural balm.  It chimes internally in multiple ways: in the alliteration of "achieve and cherish," the assonance of "achieve" and "peace," the double nail-down of just and lasting, lightly punctuating the soft susseration of "cherish...peace...ourselves, nations."

Three professors of false equivalence look at the Obama-Boehner faceoff

The Times' James B. Stewart today interviews three management gurus who think that "getting to yes" in a deficit reduction deal ought to be easy. These men presumably know a good deal about corporate negotiations. But their apparent ignorance of politics -- political dynamics generally, and the battles of the last two years in particular -- is breathtaking.

The three cited experts, William Ury of Harvard, Seth Freeman of Columbia's Stern School, and Daylian Cain of Yale,  collectively assert the following: both sides are taking and have taken maximalist, uncompromising positions; neither allows the other any face-saving outs; and they are not that far apart substantively. Prof. Cain suggests that spending time together socially could make a substantive difference.   All of these assumptions are wrong.

Why the euphoria?

At the risk of displaying my ignorance of How Things Work: I do not quite get Dem-side triumphalism in response to the Republican cave on the debt ceiling.

Yes, it's a relief that the GOP will not blow up the world economy late next month.  But what about the sequester, st to take effect in six weeks?

Chris Cillizza quotes a "senior House Republican aide" declaring, "“in the sequestration fight, we have greater leverage because current law is on our side.”   Is everyone in the liberal commentariat sanguine that because half the cuts fall on defense spending, the GOP will never pull the trigger?

Most surprising to me is Paul Krugman's readiness to declare victory on Obama's behalf:

But it appears that [Obama's fiscal cliff] strategy has worked, and it’s the Republicans giving up. I’m happy to concede that the president and team called this one right.

And it’s a big deal. Yes, the GOP could come back on the debt ceiling, but that seems unlikely. It could try to make a big deal of the sequester, but that’s a lot more like the fiscal cliff than it is like the debt ceiling: not good, but not potentially catastrophic, and therefore poor terrain for the “we’re crazier than you are” strategy. And while Republicans could shut down the government, my guess is that Democrats would actually be gleeful at that prospect: the PR would be overwhelmingly favorable for Obama, and again, not much risk of blowing up the world.

I would think that Krugman would regard implementation of the sequester's across-the-board cuts -- $100 billion in the coming year, $1.2 trillion over ten,  executed with "a meat ax not a scalpel," to paraphrase Obama -- as catastrophic indeed.  He's expressed a great deal of angst over far lesser cuts in the last two years. Those cuts would be a serious immediate blow to the recovery and a long-term threat to a host of vital government functions.

On August 2, 2011, the day after the debt ceiling deal was finalized, James Fallows wrote, in an email to me, "Knowing something about how defense budgeting works, I have zero confidence that the triggered cuts in Pentagon spending will ever happen. FWIW."  Is that the general assumption now?

Perhaps the salient point about sequester is that it's more curb than cliff.  According to National Review's Andrew Stiles, "A senior GOP aide notes that sequestration “doesn't have the cliff-like finality” of default and could be more easily dealt with retroactively through legislation to restore defense spending."  IF Republicans want to roll back those defense cuts, though, they'd presumably have to cough up some of the additional revenue Obama is demanding -- unless he hates the defense cuts as much as they do.

Best case, I would think, the two sides agree to postpone the sequester for say nine months and to try once again to reform the tax code and agree on lesser, more targeted spending cuts. That would open up some possibility of Obama winning new revenue under cover of tax reform -- perhaps by capping any given deduction's value at 28%, as Obama has proposed.

Also possible, perhaps: stalemate, whereby the sequester is postponed, the GOP allows no new revenue, and appropriations are sweated out bill by bill, with relatively moderate spending cuts.

Finally, Obama might cut a deal in the next two months, with far less revenue and rather more cuts, including, possibly, an entitlement trim such as chained-CPI,  than his side can easily stomach -- though if the past is any guide, there may be less to those cuts than meets the eye, and a few low-profile stimulus goodies thrown into the mix.

Geithner sees no evil in the bubble

Two moments in Tim Geithner's exit interview with the Wall Street Journal's David Wessel struck me as noteworthy. First, this:

MR. WESSEL: Is there a risk that a combination of the backlash to the bailouts and the changes to the authorities of the Treasury and the Fed has been your successors, if confronted with something like 2008, will be unable to respond as effectively?

MR. GEITHNER: [One risk is that] they're not willing to respond . If you look at the history of crises, what most distinguishes how countries fare is whether people who are willing to do those tough things really do them or whether they sit there and wait—hope it burns itself out, decide to try to teach people a lesson, worry about moral hazard, not protecting the innocent. So one risk is that people are going to be more tentative about that because they just looked at the backlash in this crisis, and they decide to try to wait a little bit, and hope they don't have to do the hard thing.

Geithner appears here to set up an either/or: either the regulator "worries about moral hazard" or he or she "protects the innocent."  The "worry" about moral hazard, of course, is that it may precipitate the next crisis by shielding those who triggered the last one from the consequences of their recklesssness.

To be fair, Geithner says at a different point, "if you’re in policy or you’re in markets, you should always worry about moral hazard"-- so it would appear that his point above is limited -- that in the crisis hour moral hazard should not be the primary concern.  But it's fair to wonder whether moral hazard is ever a primary concern of Geithner's, given that he doesn't see much moral transgression in our banking system. Which brings us to the next  moment:

Passive aggression against Netanyahu

Surprise surprise, according to Jeff Goldberg Obama believes Israel "doesn't know what its own best interests are." As Israel threatens to cut the West Bank in half and so cut off the possibility of a two-state solution, that sentiment is about as surprising as an Obama conclusion that Republican budget math doesn't add up.

While allowing for the possibility of effective U.S. action behind the scenes to block the E-1 development, I am, shall we say, conditionally infuriated by Obama's reported passive aggression vis-a-vis Israel, if Goldberg's reporting is reliable:

When informed about the Israeli decision, Obama, who has a famously contentious relationship with the prime minister, didn’t even bother getting angry. He told several people that this sort of behavior on Netanyahu’s part is what he has come to expect, and he suggested that he has become inured to what he sees as self-defeating policies of his Israeli counterpart.

Progressive consensus and debt ceiling scenarios

Jared Bernstein has a post that crystallizes an emerging consensus on the left regarding our current budget battles:

• Medium-term deficit reduction (10-year horizon, per Simpson-Bowles etc.) is 2/3 done
  
• The last third requires hard bargaining but isn't brain surgery. Cf. Obama in Monday's presser:
  

  The consensus is we need about $4 trillion to stabilize our debt and our deficit, which means we need about $1.5 trillion more. The package that I offered to Speaker Boehner before we -- before the new year would achieve that. We were actually fairly close in terms of arriving at that number.

  
  So -- so if the goal is to make sure that we are being responsible about our debt and our deficit, if that’s the conversation we’re having, I’m happy to have that conversation. And by closing some additional loopholes through tax reform -- which Speaker Boehner has acknowledged can raise money in a sensible way -- and by doing some additional cuts, including making sure that we are reducing our health care spending, which is the main driver of our deficits, we can arrive at a package to get this thing done.

•  The key to our fiscal future is healthcare cost control. The best course on that front is watchful waiting to see how ACA reforms shake out (coupled, I would add on the basis of Obama's 2013 budget and December negotiations with Boehner, with moderate, incremental trims to provider payments and benefits to the wealthy).

Here's Bernstein's sum-up:

Apologies, commenters

It seems that for several weeks, many comments have been going into my spam filter. I just picked out the real ones (most are spam) and published a bunch of comments. So sorry if yours was among those that sat for days or weeks.  I will now be vigilant on the Blogger 'comment moderation' page to make sure it doesn't happen again. And thanks to Andrew Long for pointing the problem out to me.

"Not this time": Obama revises himself

The headline takeaway from Obama's press conference yesterday is that he's talking tough about the debt ceiling. And indeed, he elaborated his case against holding the faith and credit of the nation hostage in new and forceful ways. What also struck me, though, is the extent to which Obama implicitly admitted that the obstacles he is now facing are partly of his own making. In fact, since late in his reelection campaign he has been casting is second term as an edited version of the first.

On the economic front, Obama reiterated three core messages yesterday:1) The debt ceiling is no frame within which to negotiate deficit reduction; 2) deficit reduction is not our chief problem; and 3) Republicans' chief goal is to weaken core government functions and commitments, radically altering the social contract. Each was to some degree a revision of a past stance.

Regarding the debt ceiling, as Ezra Klein pointed out yesterday, Obama has been unequivocal since the election: it is not a negotiating chip in budget battles.  Yesterday he stated this simply, forcefully and repeatedly.  Here is the first iteration, in his opening remarks:

Julianna Goldman questioned Obama's debt ceiling cred to his face. His response...

I noted in a prior post that as the debt ceiling approaches, I'm getting foreboding flashbacks from this familiar process: 1) Obama articulates his position forcefully and with precision; 2) progressives note with glee that he's boxing Republicans in; 3) stalemate sets in as a deadline looms; 4) a flurry of reported Obama concessions augurs a deal; 5) the deal is announced, headlined with those concessions if backloaded with some Obama priorities.

Today's press conference may augur a similar pattern.  At greater length than ever, and with top-of-his-game precision, Obama laid out his case for a clean debt ceiling hike and "balanced" deficit reduction.  When asked why we should believe that this time he would not blink at the brink, however, he was less convincing.

Two lengthy exchanges tell the tale. In the first, challenged on the consistency of his debt ceiling position and the irresponsibility he alleged in Republican conduct, he was precise and masterful, catching Republicans in a rhetorical pincer: Threatening default is extremist and unprecedented. And doing deficit reduction by spending cuts alone is extremist and unprecedented. One threatens to blow up the economy and destroy the nation's privileged position as the world's default currency. The other threatens to sell the nation's public benefits and seed corn to preserve tax breaks for the wealthy. As the TV hosts say, let's listen:

The next debt showdown...I see it!

This snippet from this evening's Plum Line roundup gave me deja vu:

* Steve Kornacki on why Republicans may cave in the end:

Much attention is paid to the way-out-there true-believers who have gained to power to define what conservatism means in the Obama-era. But there are still many Republicans in Congress – and in influential positions outside of Congress – who recognize the catastrophe that would be unleashed by a default. And in the wake of the November election, they may be more assertive in reining in the crazies now than they were during the debt ceiling showdown in 2011.

The flavor of this deja vu might be classed as optimistic preview.  The sentiment: Obama has the leverage: when he stares the GOP down, they'll be forced to... [add consummation to be wished].  As, for example, when Reid and McConnell were negotiating on December 28, three days before the fiscal cliff's edge, and Sargent eagerly anticipated the failure of those talks:

The real budget battle: voucherize Medicare, or IPABize it?

Noting that the emerging Republican budget strategy seems to be stalemate -- refuse to approve any new taxes, consequently give up on entitlement reform, and blame Obama, Jonathan Chait notes that this strategy makes a kind of sense. That is, it locates the long-term budget battle where it belongs, on the means of controlling healthcare costs:

This may sound like a cynical strategy. And it is. But it’s not a purely cynical strategy. It reflects an important intellectual development on the right. Capretta is advocating not just the classic no-taxes-ever approach that has defined the party for years, but also its newer (or newly fervent) belief in privatizing health-care services.

The main driver here is Paul Ryan, whom Capretta advises. (Yuval Levin, another Ryan favorite, makes a similar, though less openly cynical, no-deal argument for the Weekly Standard.) Ryan has accepted the argument, traditionally pushed by Democrats, that the main driver of long-term budget deficits is not the aging population but skyrocketing health-care costs. Ryan has decided that the only possible answer to the problem is to turn Medicare into a system of subsidized private insurance, and that the wonders of competition between insurance firms will dramatically suppress cost inflation (“the way it always works when the consumer is in charge,” he says).

What's truly cynical is not Ryan's ideological faith in the competition fairy, but his demonization, in the illustrious McCaughey-Bachmann-Palin tradition that is now general GOP dogma, of other more proven means of controlling healthcare costs. Chait continues:

Boehner's whining is finding an audience

John Boehner, with an assist from Bob Woodward, is doing a nice job spinning the interpersonal side of his failed negotiations with Obama. While it's natural for right-wing media to take up his narrative, his spin is trickling into the mainstream, too.

On the right, the new image of Obama the Negotiator is oddly flattering, at least to the ears of a liberal accustomed to fretting about the president's accommodating style.. The personalized corollary of the right's current view of Obama as a legislative juggernaut is Obama as an imperious, arrogant, my-way-or-the-highway stonewaller. Here's Peggy Noonan:

He didn't deepen any relationships or begin any potential alliances with Republicans, who still, actually, hold the House. The old animosity was aggravated. Some Republicans were mildly hopeful a second term might moderate those presidential attitudes that didn't quite work the first time, such as holding himself aloof from the position and predicaments of those who oppose him, while betraying an air of disdain for their arguments. He is not quick to assume good faith. Some thought his election victory might liberate him, make his approach more expansive. That didn't happen.

Who's more scared of the sequester?

Since the limited fiscal cliff deal was struck, there's naturally been a ton of speculation whether the Republicans will indulge in a fresh round of debt ceiling terrorism when the treasury reaches the end of its rope in a couple of months, and whether Obama will blink if they do.

In a Wall Street Journal interview, John Boehner indicated that the debt ceiling may play more of a support role, and that the sequestered spending cuts postponed for just two months by the Jan. 1 agreement are the GOP's main source of leverage. Here's how he sketched out his alleged negotiating strategy, as recounted by the WSJ's Stephen Moore:

The real showdown will be on the debt ceiling and the spending sequester in March. I ask Mr. Boehner if he will take the debt-ceiling talks to the brink—risking a government shutdown and debt downgrade from the credit agencies—given that it didn't work in 2011 and President Obama has said he won't bargain on the matter.

The debt bill is "one point of leverage," Mr. Boehner says, but he also hedges, noting that it is "not the ultimate leverage." He says that Republicans won't back down from the so-called Boehner rule: that every dollar of raising the debt ceiling will require one dollar of spending cuts over the next 10 years. Rather than forcing a deal, the insistence may result in a series of monthly debt-ceiling increases.

The Republicans' stronger card, Mr. Boehner believes, will be the automatic spending sequester trigger that trims all discretionary programs—defense and domestic. It now appears that the president made a severe political miscalculation when he came up with the sequester idea in 2011.

McConnell clears the way for more revenue hikes

Annoying as it is to hear Mitch McConnell declare that Republicans will not agree to any further revenue increases, I am pleased to note him intoning this party line regarding the fiscal cliff deal:

Look, this was not a tax increase,

That's true, insofar as at the time the deal was enacted, the Bush tax cuts had expired, and the deal reinstated about 85% of the cuts. If restoring a portion of the foregone revenue was not a tax increase, then neither is restoring more of it. If you accept all negotiations this year as an adjustment within the frame of the Bush tax cut expiration (which, okay, McConnell and co. don't), that gives Obama and the Democrats another two trillion-plus over ten years in running room for future negotiations.

Obama the centrist

It's been a while since I checked in on Obama's weekly address. This week, the headliner is another call on Congress not to play chicken with the debt ceiling -- though based on recent polling, he's going to have to do better to explain to the public that raising the debt ceiling does not authorize new spending (not withstanding that poll's limitations).  A few other tidbits caught my eye, though:

1) While Obama paired job growth and deficit reduction, his emphasis again was on deficit reduction. That's partly a function of his focus on looming budget battles, but he still positions himself as a centrist who cuts spending while investing in the future (infrastructure, education, energy). He also invoked the confidence fairy.

2) When talking about cutting spending while preserving essential investments, Obama does not emphasize preserving Medicare and Social Security.  It's no secret to anyone not in the grip of right-wing paranoia that Obama is open to entitlement reform (though his preferred means of Medicare savings would work by squeezing providers and reducing unnecessary care by ending away from fee-for-service payments). He not only aims to transfer wealth from the wealthy to the poor and middle classes, but also, to some degree,  from the (nonpoor) elderly to children, parents of children, and broadly, "the future", via infrastructure and R&D.

The liberal Reagan of the Wall Street Journal's imagining

Democrats worried that Obama will get rolled in the looming debt ceiling/sequester fight might turn to the right wing commentariat for comfort.  To his enemies, he now bestrides Capitol Hill like a colossus while the GOP leadership walks under his huge legs and peeps about to find themselves dishonorable graves.

I don't think they're right. But I find it refreshing.  Bracing. You might almost say exhilarating. Start with Charles Krauthammer:

The rout was complete, the retreat disorderly. President Obama got his tax hikes — naked of spending cuts — passed by the ostensibly Republican House of Representatives... now that he’s past the post, he’s free to be himself — a committed big-government social democrat...

Uggh, my money is on McConnell

Yesterday, I wondered where Obama thinks he's going to get the leverage to insist that any future spending cuts be paired with further tax hikes. As reflected in today's Politico reporting, Obama and the GOP leadership are living in alternate universes. Obama thinks he's broken a psychological threshold along with the Republican no-new-taxes-taboo and that he can wield public opinion to make his all-spending-cuts-to-be-balanced-with-more revenue rule stick. McConnell & co. think they have Obama over a barrel with the debt ceiling and sequester cuts looming.

My money is on McConnell. Reid might have been a match for him. Obama and Biden weren't.  Agreeing to only a two-month postponement of the sequester cuts, McConnell's main demand, looks like a disaster -- unless Obama is ready to finally go over a cliff. The only precedent for that: he did let the sequester become law in the first place in late 2011, rather than intervene and strike another all-cuts-no-revenue bargain. That's a thin reed of hope.

What I can't see is Republicans agreeing to further tax hikes, e.g., through Obama's proposed 28% deduction cap for wealthy taxpayers.  They acceded to a very limited tax increase only under extreme duress -- when the only alternative was larger tax hikes. Their "principles" are therefore intact. The notion that a taboo was broken is nonsense.

What I don't get

I was a little shocked by the two-month sequester postponement in last night's fiscal cliff deal. That sounds to me like debt ceiling squared.  Where does Obama think he's going to get the leverage to demand that spending cuts be paired with further tax hikes?  Yesterday he was talking like a man with platinum coins in his pocket. Is there something we don't know, or is he just blowing Choon smoke?

P.S. tweets like this set me thinking/remembering a little:

@AlecMacGillis House R demands for cuts now MIGHT suggest a smidgen of awareness that debt-ceiling hijack won't fly as well the 2nd time.

Last time around, in summer 2011, perhaps even the GOP House would have backed off the brink if Obama had not embraced the debt ceiling deadline as a "unique opportunity to do something big."  Perhaps this time, simply insisting that he won't treat it as a deadline will be enough.  But I can also imagine stories leaking out as the deadline approaches that he's offered this and that in exchange for that and this...making it impossible to step back and insist, "no, I want a clean raise."