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LANGUAGE WARNING: Today's story is uncharacteristically blunt, and from this moment forward we will be using lots of inappropriate language in making our points.
Gentle Reader, you have been officially...warned.
With that in mind, if you take offense when confronted with language strong enough to knock a fuckin' buzzard off a shitwagon, please stop reading now.
It is by now fairly well known that Rahm Emanuel, President Obama's White House Chief of Staff, had a bit of a blow-up with liberals who were ready to start running ads against "blue dog" Democrats who were working very hard to shut down the health care reform effort.
Now we're not gonna get in the middle of that argument today; instead, since we're finally getting a chance to talk, I figured me and Rahm could get a few other things out of the way that have been on everyone's mind for the past year or so.
The Profile in Courage Award belongs to the Manchester Democrats that elected to do what is right in this week's aldermanic meeting. Jim Roy, Barbara Shaw, Garth Corriveau and Betsi DeVries stood their ground against Mayor Gatsas in his never-ending desire to end the contract with MCTV.- Unfortunately the remaining democrats did not.
It has become public knowledge that Lopez has sold out. He made promises in past elections with the republicans to make sure that no republican would run against him. Now it is time to pay for those promises and MCTV is part of that sell-out. What happened to Patrick Arnold, Joyce Craig, Ron Ludwig? - Very disappointing to see the new democrats tainted already by Lopez. It is still politics as usual in Manchester. What is up with Dan O'Neil?
What will the School Board do? Will they sell themselves out too because Gatsas loaned them money to pay for books? They should remember The Trojan Horse!
When will the democrats wake up and stop helping Gatsas and the republicans take over Education and Government TV in Manchester? This issue is not about the money. The issue is to control the message in Manchester and to end the transparency in government that only MCTV provides in Manchester.
Something better change fast or forget about the next election cycle with Will Infantine running all the community channels!
What the broad view of health care reform truly reflects is illustrative when determining in which direction this legislation will head, if it does go forward. Our neo-liberal economy that favors capital and products/services over labor/people has been reinforced with public policy for decades. Greenspan testified with pride to Congress that employment volatility insured that wages were being held in check - resulting in a workforce that was growing increasingly dependent on employers. This signal to industry created greater profits and earnings and stagnated wages and job growth for another generation.
Can someone please explain to me why we haven't passed health care reform yet? We've got the votes.
Forget the moral obligation you have, Democrats. Just think about your own hides for a minute. What part of a depressed Democratic base have you not noticed in poll after poll? Do the math. If you don't act, no amount of door-knocking and GOTV and blog vapors are going to counter the impression you will make on the American people that "politicians are all the same."
Ignore the Republicans on health care reform. Why? Because Republicans ignored health care reform for eight years, after killing efforts at reform before then. They have no credibility on this issue. A TeeVee debate will score points. Votes? Not so much.
And no, passing this is not nearly enough either. Until the White House starts thinking about the economy more through the eyes of an Elizabeth Warren than a Timmy Geithner, they can expect they will not have the votes to pass anything in 2011 and beyond.
Where is the cramdown on mortgage modifications? The current program doesn't adjust the principal, and so it's still better for the average family to take a hit and walk away. Where are the low interest loans to spur home energy retrofits? Tax credits after the fact don't make retrofits affordable for the average family. Retrofits that will mean jobs for small businesses. Where's the student loan bill? And on and on.
Yes, it's unfair that President Obama has to clean up after President Bush's mess. Life is unfair, and opportunities are few.
1) In pretty much all the matchups, it's clear that the Democratic base is depressed. If nothing else happened other than that the D percentages matched the R ones (and there's lots of other positive things that can happen with undecideds and undeclareds besides), this poll would have an entirely different narrative. So, good thing there's lots of time between now and November, though that time will only matter if President Obama and Congressional Democrats understand their base problem now. With the seemingly daily Tom and Jerry theatre between Republicans and the White House, however, I'm not sure they do get it.
2) Just by way of an example (though others would suffice too), I spent some time poking around the CSP-Guinta macthup. UNH polled 155 registered voters for that one. Is 155 people even a poll?
Greetings from the DNC's Winter Meeting! Well, actually it starts tomorrow, but to make sure I make the credentials committee meeting and also squeeze in some museum time I arrived today, and will catching up with Raymond as well as a couple of other NH-ites later.
President Obama will be speaking to the general session Saturday.
As I walked around the city this afternoon, I smiled thinking of how happy it was here a little over a year ago. Governing is harder than winning, but I have great faith in the President.
As Jim Splaine is quick to remind us, political support, like many things, swings on its own pendulum. Clearly, after two strong elections in a row, and staring at a mid-term in which the minority party typically makes gains, all signs point to a challenging election year.
It would be foolish and counterproductive to ignore that tendency. But on the other hand, it is equally unwise simply to assume New Hampshire is forever in a state of competitive swing between the parties. The larger trend, one that played out in the Nineties as well as the Naughts, is a shift away from a reliably red state, to a true swing zone, to one, perhaps based on long-term demographic changes, leaning to the left.
Gallup released its 2009 state-by-state party ID polling today. Predictably, it showed some ground being lost from the year previous (though, interestingly, one point less ground lost than all the states bordering us). Here are the years I was able to track down from Gallup:
This will be a tough year in which to hold on to seats. Democrats in office, thanks to the jobless recession, may pay the price for the disastrous economic policies put into place from Reagan onward and in full flower under W.
But that said, there is every reason to fight, and fight hard, for every vote. As our demographics change, we are slowly becoming, imho, more and more like Vermont and Maine in our politics. And at the moment, our party ID still gives us a significant edge.
In Nascar lingo, the "Silly Season" is the period near the end of the season when the also-ran drivers try to get new rides with the also-ran teams. This traditionally began in September, around the time of the race here in New Hampshire. In recent years, the Silly Season has been happening earlier and earlier.
The NH Republican Party is starting its silly season very early this year. The new legislative session is three weeks old and Daytona is almost a month away. The NH GOP released two very bizarre press releases this week, both triggered by a meeting between Revenue Administration chief Kevin Clougherty and various leading State House Democrats, including Speaker Terie Norelli. Understandably, the Republicans felt excluded, but did they simply choose to invite Clougherty to meet with members of their caucus? No, not really...
Some of the things I have read today out of the mouths of Democratic Senators and Congressman have left me really ashamed of my party.
Any regular reader here knows I have not exactly been kind about what the US Senate did to a pretty decent health care reform bill. And I certainly wasn't with Josh Marshall and Andrew Sullivan and others who told us to sit down and take it when Joe Lieberman ruined everything.
But Coakley's loss has really lifted the veil. In less than twenty-four hours, a remarkable transformation has taken place. The dirty hippie bloggers (me included) as well as more established figures in lefty punditocracy are quite literally begging the House to pass the Senate bill. Not only are the politics disastrous if they don't, but it literally means the difference between lives saved and lost, family fortunes ruined by medical bills or not. It is the least worst option, and the one that serves the public the best.
But instead of a sense of urgency, I'm seeing grand statements that thinly disguise self-serving re-election agendas, fear, not-my-problem-ism, and blame game.
Shameful.
The aforementioned purveyors of such talk, buffeted as they are by the media vapors over Massachusetts, think things are bad for them now. But do they possess imagination enough to comprehend what it will be like in November if they turn their back on health care legislation?
Adding: This letter from an anonymous Senate staffer is a must read. Addinger: "Dear Nervous and Frustrated House Democrat"
This poll question and answer is spreading like wildfire in blogworld. As it should!
It's being called an "enthusiasm gap." But I'm going with a causal, rather than a consequential term.
Under the best of circumstances, capturing drop-off voters for mid-term elections is a great challenge.
(I mean, look how W. campaigned his heart out for congressional Republicans, and timed a vote for an uneccessary war right before the '02 mids. What's a few hundred thousand premature deaths in the face of gaining some seats?)
But what I'm seeing here is a citizenry mired in a jobless recovery, who, because of 50-state mini-Hooverism and other factors, has not seen the effects of the stimulus in their lives. A people who doesn't follow politics closely, but closely enough to notice the snail-like, tepid progress on health care reform on the one hand, and on the other a 503c-worked up pile of vapors the media loves to put their cameras in front of instead of covering policy.
Please don't take this as another "Obama hasn't solved my personal problem yet, and therefore I'm going Nader!" scribble. It's not. In general I am most proud of how the President has managed to slow the freight train that W. sent speeding toward a cliff.
But, in my view, if those numbers up top point to anything, it's to a leadership gap within the entire party, from the man in the White House all the way down to you and me. The weakest deficiency is in the US Senate, but bad report cards go out to all, imo.
Just because we are a big tent doesn't mean we can't have effective talking points, effective framing, effective message discipline, and effective legislative discipline.
Even with their party leaderless and in disarray, the GOP still does a better job of crafting a consistent, easily understood message that shows strength and purpose.
We strive to be, if anything, a participatory space around here, and I've had a question come to my inbox that is very much deserving of our attention.
To make a long story short, our questioner wants to know why, on the one hand, despite the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA, also known as the "stimulus"), unemployment in the construction industry continues to increase, and, on the other hand, why there is such a giant disparity, on a state-by-state basis, in the cost of saving a job?
They're great questions, and, having done a bit of research, I think I have some cogent answers.
It was a long hot August for those who would like to see health care reform, as rabid "Town Hall" protesters proffered visions of public options that would lead to death panels and socialism and government tax collectors with special alien mind control powers that would use sex education and child indoctrination and black helicopters as the means for gay people to impose their dangerous agenda on the innocent, God-fearing citizens of someplace in Mississippi that I'm not likely to ever visit.
Part of the reason that opposition was so rabid was because health care interests were spending millions upon millions of dollars doing...well, doing whatever the opposite of giving a distemper shot to the angry mob might be, anyway.
So wouldn't it be great if all the CEOs of all those health care interests were to gather at one time and place so you could, shall we say, gently express your own thoughts regarding the issues of reform and public options?
By an amazing coincidence, that's exactly what's going to happen Thursday in Washington, DC, as the Patient Centered Primary Care Cooperative (PCPCC) holds its Annual Summit.
Follow along, and I'll tell you everything you need to know.
So it's the day of the big speech, Mr. President, and we got trouble with a capital "T" right here in Health Care City.
What are you gonna do? Do we follow the traditional Democratic Party legislative process of passing...something...at any cost, assuming the entire time that the Left and the Netroots will "go along with the program", or is there a risk that the calculus doesn't work as well today as it did in 1994 and 1996?
Well, lucky for you, I'm a fake consultant, and I know a few things about your "target market", so before you answer that question...we need to talk.
Is it any wonder Democrats are losing ground with independents, while at the same time the enthusiasm of our own base weakens?
The traditional media, preferring politics and process over policy, have done a terrible job explaining what health insurance reform is. Few outside of the land of political junkies actually know what a public option is; fewer still know it's less expensive than not having one.
Harry Reid's senate discipline and leadership have been pitiful. And while I favor the President's idea to have this be a thing born from the legislative branch, there have been too many signals from the White House recently that they are willing to label passable weak tea "reform" and call it a day.
Do they not see that if they pass something that is not meaningful, it will not have a meaningful impact on the lives of ordinary Americans?
And if that happens, Americans will retreat into "All Politicians Are the Same" mode. Independents will be for the GOP's taking, and the Democratic base will feel, rightly, that they've been played.
The health insurance system in this country is an unqualified disaster.
Barack Obama and Democrats explicitly ran on fixing it.
Voters like leaders and strength and conviction and results.
Republicans understand this almost intuitively. Why Democrats have a harder time getting it is, in all sincerity, a very great mystery to me.
If at the end of the day, after all the theatre and vote engineering and face saving, a law emerges that Americans are required to purchase insurance from the same old murder-by-spreadsheet oligarchy, it will actually be a worse outcome than the status quo.
I, and the millions of other people that worked to propel Democrats into a supermajority in government, don't make money doing what we do. Our time is valuable, and, at least in my case, I would much rather spent it among the worlds of nature and letters than in keeping an eye on the Villagers.
If sixty Senate Democrats, a huge House majority, and the President of the United States cannot pass meaningful health insurance reform, Rahm, no amount of checking off legislative achievements is going to help your boss and those down ticket of him in November 2010.
That this even needs to be spelled out amazes me, and yes, shames me.
A comprehensive Gallup poll of American political opinion finds New Hampshire is one of 30 states "solidly Democrat." The survey also found half of Granite State voters are self-professed independents, the highest in the county tied with Rhode Island.
...The most Democratic state in the country was Massachusetts where there is a 34 point gap between parties. Vermont had a 28 point gap. Maine, like New Hampshire, had an 18 point gap.
An 18 point gap???
(Also, don't miss Dante Scala's voter breakdowns from 2002 to 2008. Required reading, imo.)
It's great news that Dante Scala has started posting again on GraniteProf.
Greater still to read his breakdown of the registered Democrats from 2002 to 2008. Every one of these three posts is required reading, but since fair use prevents me from quoting all of it:
Rockingham's 17 percent growth in GOP registration, for instance, pales in comparison to the 65 percent growth in registered Democrats in that county from 2002-08.
But Rockingham's increase doubled the rate of GOP growth in Merrimack County, where registered Republican voters only increased 9 percent in the last six years (Democrats grew by 74 percent). Merrimack was one of four counties with only single-digit growth in GOP registration during the last six years:
* Carroll County, 6 percent increase in GOP voters (Democrats' increase: 49 percent)
* Cheshire County, 5 percent (D increase: 70 percent)
* Grafton County, 2 percent (D increase: 92 percent)
In two New Hampshire counties, the GOP actually lost registered voters from 2002-08:
* Sullivan County, -1 percent decrease in GOP voters (D increase: 55 percent)
* Coos County, - 1 percent (D increase: 41 percent)
There are three things that really jump out at me when reading those, frankly, stunning numbers.
1) It really just completely blows the "liberals moving up from Massachussetts" myth to smithereens. Those counties are northern or western, and rural. These are not Boston commuters. And in fact, the largest growth of new GOP voters, tiny as it was, comes from - surprise! - Rockingham county.
2) As Dante himself mentions, and as I once did a while back, the Upper Valley area really appears to be the best possible launching pad for progressive Dems. And consequently, with such growth in Grafton and Sullivan counties, this gives ample room to have a CD2 primary where genuine progressive values and ideas can win.
3) For a Democrat looking to win CD2 in the general election, Paul's north of Nashua approach is not at all a bad way to go about it.
Todays's columns by Fahey and Dorgan have a hodge-podge of information about the budget, candidates and wanna-be candidates, the usual New Hampshire mash-up. I'm noticing even when it's quiet , it's not quiet in New Hampshire politics. Although the rumblings in Alaska and the bumblings in South Carolina give us a run for our money.
That's good news for those of us who just love this kind of thing...
The budget before the State Reps is not what NH needs. There is time to craft a better budget. We don't have to be afraid of the Republican bogey man. And since when, do Democrats act out of fear? This budget hurts the very people Democrats are supposed to represent, the elderly, the lower income folks and the workers. Yeah, you remember the workers, the union folks that show up every time Democrats need to get re-elected.
We can't afford to lose 750 to 1000 State jobs and still expect the State to run efficiently or at all for that matter. At the bargaining table, the SEA has offered over $58,000,000 in cost savings to the State. To date, they have yet to take it seriously. I ask you, who knows better where the savings are than the people who do the jobs?
Having lived through two breaks in State service, one under Steve Merrill's budget cuts, and having seen what happened under Terry Morton's reign of terror at DHHS a few years back, things are not so sweet for this State Employee/taxpayer.
So if you're like me, you have been wondering just exactly what all this "tea party" stuff is about. There's going to be some sort of protest, that we know; but beyond that the whole thing seems a little...vague.
Alternatively, it's possible that you were unaware that "tea party" has recently become a word reborn in conservative political circles.
Well, whether you knew it or not, April 15th was indeed a day of protest, with citizens gathering for what were reported to be a series of grassroots events across the nation that was intended to invoke the spirit of the Boston Tea Party.
In an effort to find out exactly what is motivating these folks, and to find out what they are trying to accomplish, I took my handy recorder and captured a conversation with a "tea bag" protester.
We will review that conversation, and we will follow it up with a few thoughts about how this group of voters might impact electoral politics going forward.
I have asserted, both here and there, that the political press holds Democrats to a higher standard than Republicans.
It would take 10 years and a team of academics to prove this, so let's just abandon any idea about that. If I could, I would ... not. Bigger fish to fry -- and that is one of my issues, people write about the press too much. I try to avoid it here, but I can't avoid it entirely because of who I am and what I do. I read Media Nation and Mediabistro, and that's pretty much all I need. Maybe we should count Atrios too.
The other day, David Broder asserted that Judd Gregg is "one of the smart ones." (I think David Broder has made mistakes, but in general is given an unfair shake by the blogscape. We hold him to a higher standard because he is known as "the dean of Washington politics.")
Now let's "unpack" (more on unpacking another day) that statement.
Judd Gregg is one of the smart ...
a. Senators
b. Republican senators
c. Republicans
d. Republicans who have agreed to join the Obama Cabinet
e. Guys willing to talk to David Broder
Does it really matter what the answer is? Broder is not comparing Gregg to the Harvard Law Review staff, he's comparing him to a small circle of people. It may be ever-churning, but it remains small, and people who linger in it -- remember the words of Noah Cross in Chinatown -- get respectable with age.
I have no doubt that the town is full of smart Republicans, but how exactly does Judd Gregg stand out from this group? It is not any of the following:
a. Leadership on an issue
b. Thought leadership on the legislative process (this one may be true, but if so the evidence is scant)
c. Political independence (Gregg balked at one or two Bush things, invoking the ire of some in his party, but in general his record is predictable)
So why does David Broder consider Gregg one of the smart ones? There are only a few possibilities left, and the most likely one is: Gregg talks to Broder, either off the record or on background.
A Democrat who is friendly to the press -- Charles Schumer, say -- is a camera hound. A Republican who is friendly to the press is one of the smart ones.
We need higher standards. Or maybe one standard. Again, I like Broder better than most blogger types do, but, as he praises Democrats for reaching out to Republicans (keeping both sets of his sources happy), does he ever regret not slamming Republicans for not reaching out to Democrats when they were in charge?
