US Elections

"Something more fundamental is going on here: Obama seems not to respect his fellow citizens — the uninformed rubes who crashed the health-care town halls — nor care what they think. All his energy now is devoted to disregarding their strong aversion to his idea of health-care reform and forcing through a vote on something the public doesn’t want. It’s hard to bond with the American people ... when your agenda conveys disdain for their concerns."

Republicans have lots of long-term problems of their own, but at the moment they are blessed by having the best of enemies.

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That new timetable could see the House pass the Senate's version of health care reform as early as next week, according to the Times. The vote would be held on Thursday or Friday if the Congressional Budget Office issues its report on the legislation, and if the legislative text of the package of changes the Senate is to adopt under the reconciliation process can be written in time. 

While I must extend my utmost sympathy to Michelle, Malia, and Sasha Obama for having to miss out on this trip, and I commiserate with my fellow Australians, who I´m sure are eager to have the President over for tea and biscuits, I am glad Obama is to stay in the States. While Russell is right to say his visit to Indonesia is too important to America's foreign policy interests to cancel, Obama does not need to be visiting Australia without delay. I have little doubt that seeing health care reform through these final votes, providing 30 million Americans with insurance, and helping to control costs of a dangerously metastasising sector of the U.S. economy is a better use of Obama's time over those three days than anything he may do in Australia. And that includes crumpets with Kev.

I'm sure many Australians will be disappointed by the delay. But if it will help bring America even this small amount closer to the kind of affordable and accessable health care we enjoy Down Under, then we should gladly accept Obama's apologies. 

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According to The Australian’s Brad Norington, it looks like the President may wind up delaying his long-anticipated trip down under.

It seems the President's press secretary, Robert Gibbs, was coy when asked about the Obamas coming trip to Guam, Indonesia and Australia, saying only "I don't have any updates for you right now on the trip, except to say the President is going on that trip" - while refusing to speculate on potential delays. The President has indicated that he wanted a vote before taking off.

Norington also notes that, unlike Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono who received the honour last week, Prime Mister Kevin Rudd would not be presenting Obama with an Order of Australia gong.

Unlike the Nobel Peace Prize, apparently one has to actually achieve something to earn an OAM.

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There's been a number of pieces this week about Emanuel, and whether he's good or bad for the Obama administration, whether he is an effective enforcer or a sell-out who has achieves nothing legislatively.  But what I learnt during my internship, more than anything, was the difference between advocacy and governing, and about the time for each, and when it's appropriate for someone who holds an elected office to do either. Emanuel's job is to get stuff done, not push for the most liberal option regardless of outcome. And the Democrats would do well to remember, at this point, that there is a time and place for both advocacy and pragmatic governing.

I think one of the big problems in the way the US Congress works is the conflation of the two. Certainly, in the Republicans' case, it makes political sense to be obstructionist. If the Democrats pass health care reform, in the long run it will be a good thing for the Dems, and it may even stop the 2010 election from being TOTAL bloodshed.  

But left wing Dems, who are voting against health care because it's not progressive enough, make no sense. There is a time for advocating a certain policy position. That is not now. Because the votes aren't there for a public option, and killing a good bill because it's not a great bill achieves nothing. And doing it to make a point achieves nothing.

And that's the thing. Government needs people in different roles in order to function. It needs advocates and lobbyists to push certain points of view. It needs people to brief and to inform and to pressure. But it also needs people to govern. It needs people to make a decision that is both in the interest of their constituents and politically feasible. Sure, what is politically feasible changes with the briefing and the informing and the pressure. But at a certain point, it becomes necessary to face reality.

So liberals need to give up on the Public Option. It's not going to happen right now. It might happen in the future, but it's not going to happen right now. And they need to remember that August, during the break, was when the educating and the convincing needed to happen. It's too late now. Effective government is about knowing when is the time to try to convince, and when is the time to examine the situation and act according to the reality of the electorate.

Governing can only be partially ideological. Pragmatism must have a place. The Democrats need every vote they can get on Health Care reform, and ideologues like Dennis Kucinich are showing a remarkable lack of responsibility by acting as though voting no is a way to change minds. The time for advocacy is over - it's now time to govern.

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We've had the Washington Post arguing, on its front page no less, that the White House is in dire straits because it doesn't listen to Rahm Emanuel enough. This was in response to suggestions the White House could pull itself out of dire straits if it listened to Rahm Emanuel less. Then there was Sunday's New York Times, which concluded the White House was in dire straits because it listens to David Axelrod too much. 

You don't even need to disdain Mark Knopfler as much as I do to tire of all this talk about dire straits and the White House, particularly when under examination, things don't look too bad for the Obama administration. True, this is not a great time for Democrats: Americans have too little patience with incumbents at the moment, probably because too many Americans are out of work. The economy is still a little too sluggish in its recovery, the deficit is a little too large for anyone's liking, and Charles Rangel's dealings appear to be a little too shady. The party can expect a tough run in the mid term elections.

But if you look a little farther afield than the Times' condemnation of Axelrod, you'll see within its pages a perfectly cogent summation of Obama's political fortunes:

Polls suggest that the public is already on the president’s side. In a New York Times/CBS News survey early last month, respondents were twice as likely to say that President Obama was trying to work with Republicans as they were to say that Republicans were trying to work with President Obama (62 percent versus 29 percent). And by overwhelming margins, they said they wanted both sides to compromise some positions “in order to get things done.”

[...]

In the New York Times/CBS poll last month, 51 percent said they view the Democrats unfavorably, the highest since November 1994, when the Republicans swept into office. But 57 percent said they view the Republicans the same way, near the all-time high of 60 percent.

The paper quotes a Democratic pollster, Stanley Greenberg:

Greenberg ... noted that the energy behind Democrats in 2006 had been building for a year, beginning with anger over President George W. Bush’s handling of Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq war. “The other side got demoralized as they watched our energy,” Mr. Greenberg said. This time, “our side is demoralized by the lack of progress. It’s almost independent of the energy on the other side.”

The Democrats have to do two things, he said. They have to show that they can govern successfully — passing some version of health care reform would be his preference — and then they have to frame the election as a choice for Democrats

Greenberg may be partisan, but his reading is accurate. This is not yet a Presidency on the ropes. For a start, as Matt Yglesias points out, Obama can lay claim to quite a few accomplishments from his first year in office. The President's approval rating, hovering around 51 per cent, is not nearly as high as it was during the heady months after he first took office, but it remains respectably positive. And most importantly, though commentators seem all too eager to elide this detail, health care, Obama's signature reform, is not dead yet. Rather than proving themselves unable to govern, Democrats are nearing the end of a long process of reform that nobody should have expected would be easy.

As my colleague Erin pointed out in an essay written for the USSC last year [PDF],  the Obama administration's approach "was not married to any particular version of health reform policy. Rather, it crafted an approach to the manner in which the policy would be shaped and political forces managed." In so doing, Erin argues, Obama has advanced this current attempt at reform closer to realisation than ever before.

Now that the Democrats have gotten over their Scott Brown-inspired shakes and realised that 41 Senate seats does not make a majority, this bill has every chance of making it as far as the President's desk. And while I would have preferred to see Obama campaigning six months ago for this legislation as hard as he is now, and while plenty of people around Washington pinpoint the length of time Max Baucus was permitted to seek the support of Senate Republicans (apparently Obama's fault), Obama has so far been reasonably successful in promoting a difficult and historic piece of legislative reform. Examining his administration's supposed failure is like complaining that, a hundred metres short of the finish line, a marathon runner has taken too long to complete the race. 

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