Analytics wrote: ↑Tue Jun 01, 2021 2:00 pm
This deserves a more detailed response.
It’s totally true that Obamacare was seriously flawed in many, many, ways. And its also true that members of the Republican thinking class had valid, constructive ideas for how it could be improved. However, the idea that the Obama administration “simply didn’t need their votes” and was unwilling to negotiate or offer concessions is a complete myth. Every congressman on the margins, regardless of political party, had immense influence in the negotiations. That is one of the reasons for the bill’s flaws—individual Democrats demanded, and received, crazy concessions, just as did the AMA and the AARP.
The fact of the matter is that Democrats
did spend months and months negotiating on the details of the ACA with every Republican that was willing to negotiate.
Yes, it's true: many concessions were made to Democrats who were in red states. Do you remember what concessions were made to Republicans?
Look, there were no substantive negotiations for a very obvious reason. And I mean substantive ones; not moderation of an extreme position. Do you remember what the first HR was? It was Medicare for All introduced by Conyers in January. That set the tone as the Democrats' starting point. I suppose that, yes, since Democrats backed off from the most extreme option (from the Republican point of view) you could interpret that as a concession, but I wouldn't see it that way. There were many amendments, including some introduced by Republicans that had to do with first-time home ownership for veterans of the US military. Most of them were things like that. The idea that there were substantive changes to win Republican votes is not serious. The whole folksy bi-partisan "every Republican that was willing to negotiate" was a complete kabuki theater for liberals who want to feel like they're, gosh darn it, just the good guys who want to do good. Republicans went along with it to a point. But the operative facts are stark here: Democrats controlled the House and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. The votes to be fought over were the blue-dog Democrats, not the Republicans.
The primary issue for Republicans, if you'll remember, was not any of the various levels of input in the dozens of House Resolutions on health care introduced throughout 2009 or the amendments at the margins done in committee but the CBO scoring, which was only preliminarily done a week or two before the final vote. It's hard to know whether they were sincere about that; Republicans will say yes, but I'm sure you will say they were not. In general, I think they were sincere in their desire not to expand government programs, perhaps because they are always unable to roll them back even when they have power, which means that temperamentally they would be opposed to the federal exchange program. Why do you think Democrats were opposed to block grants, though, as a compromise?
Anyway, this all came down to sheer will: Democrats were determined to pass health care legislation. Republicans could not filibuster this and knew there was no point, until after the Massachusetts election: that's when negotiations would have been meaningful. The minute Democrats lost their filibuster-proof majority, we had the test of whether they really were full of the bipartisan intent they claimed. And what happened then? The Democrats forced the issue by threatening reconciliation, which they carried out. I think Republicans were stunned by that, and it set the tone of the 2010s in politics.
My view of this, to summarize, is that Democrats were playing serious politics because—wouldn't you know it?—they're serious political operators and not Jimmy Stewart. I supported the bill and thought the Democrats played their hand pretty well, though I'm not sure the reconciliation move was so smart in hindsight. But I also don't buy the propaganda about it. Speaking of which:
President Obama wrote: Unsurprisingly, given the atmosphere, the group of three GOP senators who’d been invited to participate in bipartisan talks with Baucus was now down to two: Chuck Grassley and Olympia Snowe, the moderate from Maine. My team and I did everything we could to help Baucus win their support. I had Grassley and Snowe over to the White House repeatedly and called them every few weeks to take their temperature. We signed off on scores of changes they wanted made to Baucus’s draft bill. Nancy-Ann became a permanent fixture in their Senate offices and took Snowe out to dinner so often that we joked that her husband was getting jealous.
“Tell Olympia she can write the whole damn bill!” I said to Nancy-Ann as she was leaving for one such meeting. “We’ll call it the Snowe plan. Tell her if she votes for the bill, she can have the White House…Michelle and I will move to an apartment!”
And still we were getting nowhere. Snowe took pride in her centrist reputation, and she cared deeply about healthcare (she had been orphaned at the age of nine, losing her parents, in rapid succession, to cancer and heart disease). But the Republican Party’s sharp rightward tilt had left her increasingly isolated within her own caucus, making her even more cautious than usual, prone to wrapping her indecision in the guise of digging into policy minutiae.
Grassley was a different story. He talked a good game about wanting to help the family farmers back in Iowa who had trouble getting insurance they could count on, and when Hillary Clinton had pushed healthcare reform in the 1990s, he’d actually cosponsored an alternative that in many ways resembled the Massachusetts-style plan we were proposing, complete with an individual mandate. But unlike Snowe, Grassley rarely bucked his party leadership on tough issues. With his long, hangdog face and throaty midwestern drawl, he’d hem and haw about this or that problem he had with the bill without ever telling us what exactly it would take to get him to yes. Phil’s conclusion was that Grassley was just stringing Baucus along at McConnell’s behest, trying to stall the process and prevent us from moving on to the rest of our agenda. Even I, the resident White House optimist, finally got fed up and asked Baucus to come by for a visit….
[after months of negating] In a last-stab Oval Office meeting with the two of them in early September, I listened patiently as Grassley ticked off five new reasons why he still had problems with the latest version of the bill.
“Let me ask you a question, Chuck,” I said finally. “If Max took every one of your latest suggestions, could you support the bill?”
“Well…”
“Are there any changes—any at all—that would get us your vote?”
There was an awkward silence before Grassley looked up and met my gaze.
“I guess not, Mr. President.”
I guess not.
Well, if Obama says he would let Olympia Snowe rewrite the whole bill and that he would move out of the White House, I guess we should believe he was sincere. And have you got Olympia Snowe and Chuck Grassley's side of this, as well? This is reporting private conversations that, no surprise, makes Obama look the hero. It is the typical self-justification and self-praise that every political memoir contains. I'm not sure why you find it convincing evidence of anything other than Obama's view of himself. And by the way, the way this is presented is misleading: Snowe and Grassley were 2/10 Republicans on the Finance Committee at the time. It is not as if any Republican in Congress (or Democrat for that matter) could just waltz into the oval office to negotiate and of all 250 or whatever only these two showed up. That's a distortion of how this worked.
My view of Obama comes from Jonathan Alter's two books on him. Both of those are favorable to a fault, but one thing jumped out at me and seems confirmed by several other accounts, namely, that Obama had little patience for real negotiation. I once heard Dick Durban defending Obama
to Democrats in Congress who thought he wasn't paying enough attention to what they needed for projects that weren't of huge moment to him. Durban's explanation was along the lines of "Barack wants to spend time with his family in the evenings, not schmooze congress people." He humiliated even Democratic congresspeople, whom he viewed as mere grand-standers, perhaps forgetting that they also represented voters and had voters to answer to. That was a big part of Chuck Grassley's stated reasons for his opposition, if you'll remember, so I'm sorry I find this whole account less than believable. You can see this in how he frames the meeting: there is no mention of what any voters anywhere, just leadership, congressional personalities, and "the Republican Party" and its "rightward tilt." Snowe's seat was filled by Angus King, which tells you that Maine's voters weren't exactly tilting rightward.
But Obama was a great manager of meetings: he liked short and well-defined agendas and wanted decisions made by the end of the meeting. He hated the endless debates and discussions of the Clinton people. Once the right decision was in view, it should pursued, and once made, it should be followed. End of discussion. I think that made him an effective executive, particularly once the Democrats lost the House and especially after they lost the Senate. In another era, that would have been highly valued in a president. But in an era where congress is dependent on the presidency because of that office's cultural dominance, it was a serious deficiency. His self-portrait here is charming but is quite different from the perception of even many of his supporters. There is a strong case to be made that Obama broke the Democratic party.
You can find the nomenclature as offensive as you want, but that’s besides the point. Issenberg’s point here is same-sex couples and their political allies fought for legal recognition of same-sex marriage because the Mormon Church and others on the right fought against it. I didn’t raise this as an example of politically neutral language. I raised it as an example of how people take positions based on tribal forces.
I don't find the language offensive so much as tiresome in its manipulation. The idea that the churches began a crusade against gay marriage out of the blue and thus precipitated the activism in support of its legalization is an absurd one. As I recall, there were some same-sex couples who sued the state of Hawaii for the right to marry and the Church attempted to join the state's side in that lawsuit. They were denied standing, and to support their appeal, they crafted the Proclamation on whatever it was so that they could claim this was some deeply held belief. That is its own kind of absurdity, but I can't take a sociologist like Issenberg seriously in surmising that this would have fizzled out or not been an issue if it hadn't been for church's opposition, as if churches aren't representative of segments of society. And it denies that there was any interest in this among gay couples and activist groups, which is flat out wrong. Health insurance benefits for partners, for example, became an issue in the 1980s and 1990s during the AIDS epidemic, and the necessity of winning legal recognition to claim such benefits is when the notion of "civil union" came into being. Some Scandinavian countries had already introduced that in the late 1980s or early 1990s. To recall and more accurately rewrite the quote you provided, it was not the churches who denied gay couples marriage; it was the state. So no, I don't really see this as tribal. Don't you think it's possible that different people and different groups can have genuine points of disagreement from other people and groups?
Calling it tribal strikes me as the technocrat's rhetorical trick whereby they set themselves above ordinary concerns and ordinary people: "those people are tribal and irrational, but I have allegiance only to facts and data because I am rational."
Regarding sociology, I’m referring to the nature of the problem, not the competence of the members of this or that sociology department.
Yes, it is a social problem, if that's what you mean, but what I am saying is that sociology as a field is not competent to address it because it is so politicized. It's the academic field you go into if you want to a be a professional activist.
The problem with classical economics is that rational decision making doesn’t always lead to optimal results. Whether it does or not depends upon the specific situation. Game theory provides a framework for analyzing these other situations. The basic example of game theory is
the prisoner’s dilemma. In this situation, the
rational decision is for each suspect to rat on the other. However, this
rational decision leads to
suboptimal results.
Applied to politics or culture, who gets to decide what is rational and what is optimal? There are different kinds of rational decision-making, and the problem I have with the technocratic approach is that it denies any interest in crass political disputes or genuine metaphysical differences (e.g. abortion) while in fact stealthily re-introducing them under terms like "rationality" and "optimal" because someone has to decide what these mean.
Drutman argues that two-party systems are intrinsically instable, and suggests that before the mid 80’s, America really had a four party system—Conservative Republicans, Liberal Republicans, Conservative Democrats, and Liberal Democrats. It was only with the advent of cable news that the national parties got organized and formed strong national identities. When this happened identity politics became the main thing politicians argued about. RINOs and DINOs got pushed out of their respective parties, and we became a true two-party country.
Ok, so there was the Great Depression and World War II, and then Cable News. Nothing else happened? This is incidentally completely backwards. Parties today are much less powerful and less centrally organized than they were in the past. Conventions used to matter; primaries didn't. It is the reverse today, and that is one reason that someone like Trump can capture the nomination of a national party and probably will again.
I'm not sure, though, that we yet have genuine identity politics in this country, though perhaps we are witnessing its formation.
There are multiple problems with two-party systems, the most fundamental of which goes back to psychology. Human beings have a natural tendency to divide the world into “us” vs. “them.” Two political parties reinforces the us-v-them mentality and the simplistic thinking and intolerance that accompany tribalism. “Them” winning becomes an existential threat to our very way of life, which directly leads to things like insurrections at the capital and elected leaders refusing to certify election results.
If it is a natural tendency, then it will happen no matter what. This also happens in political cultures with multi-party parliamentary systems. I have suspicions about this for the reasons I mentioned: every technocratic proposal of a "rational" solution designed to circumvent this or that thing about human psychology is always politics by other means. I know we see this differently, but I would just summarize my comments here by saying that I don't think the political situation is sufficiently explained by looking at politics alone. These kinds of ostensibly wonk-ish discussions are the most insidious because they pretend to be the opposite of the thing their proponents despise but are in fact merely another instantiation of it. I guarantee you that if we banned cable news and had a constitutional amendment establishing four national parties, complete with a Drutman commission to ensure sufficient numbers of conservative democrats and republicans to match the liberal democrats and republicans, we would just end up with an informal system of liberals vs. conservatives (both of which are a species of liberal anyway). Most likely, the Drutman commission would manipulate things so that its favored side wins.