Fred Clark argues that on health care reform, Democrats are playing Jeopardy while Republicans are playing Family Feud:
At the recent health care reform “summit,” Republican leaders made it clear that they’re not interested in playing Jeopardy. That would be a losing proposition against President Ken Jennings. Obama was eager to show that he really does have the right answers — cost containment, near-universal coverage, lower premiums, better quality care, deficit reduction. All of that is well covered in the plan he’s pushing and any attempt to challenge him on the facts would be doomed.
So the GOP has decided to play a different game — to switch from Jeopardy to Family Feud. That way it’s not about the facts, or about what works, or about the actual effect of actual policies on actual people. In the subjective guessing-game of Family Feud, none of that matters. Family Feud is all about perceptions — about what those hundred people surveyed think or guess or dimly remember having heard something about.
This is perhaps my favorite blog post I’ve read this year and a gold medal winner in the Metaphor Olympics.
James Surowiecki ably describes the gulf between Democrats and Republicans on expanding access to health care. Democrats see the fact that 50 million Americans don’t have health insurance as a problem that the federal government should solve in the near term, and Republicans don’t. Democrats also see the fact that for certain groups of people, it’s impossible to get affordable health insurance at all as an individual as a problem, and the Republicans don’t. Or at least they don’t see either of those problems as being worth doing what it takes to solve them.
But there’s another side of the issue that he completely ignores — the fact that health care costs are rising rapidly and that both Medicare and employer-funded health insurance are headed for disaster. Most retiree health plans are already in deep trouble, and the second order effects are severe. One of the reasons General Motors has been uncompetitive is that a substantial portion of the revenue they earn from each car they make goes to pay for health insurance for retired autoworkers. Republicans do not seem to want to engage on this issue, even if America’s system were perfect today, the rising costs insure that it’s going to have big problems down the road.
And this, to me, is the bigger problem. Republicans and Democrats can debate until the end of the world whether the government should make sure everyone has health insurance. I am strongly in favor of universal health care, personally. But regardless of where people stand on that issue, our government is going to have to engage with the issue of rising health care costs and growing Medicare enrollment sometime soon. The fact that Republicans are unwilling to treat the problem as the impending crisis that it is disqualifies them from being taken seriously as far as I’m concerned.
Turns out the same skills that make a person a keen observer of movies or theater are also useful for observing the real world. Here’s Roger Ebert in The gathering storm:
Sometimes in the noise of the news there will be a single item that pops out with clarity. That happened when I heard about Tracy, California, which is charging $300 every time the fire department answers an emergency call that doesn’t involve a fire.
The essay also explains why it’s so expensive to park in Chicago. I wondered about that last time I was there.
To go back to the beginning, some of my favorite writers were at one time theater or movie critics. New York Times columnist Frank Rich was a theater critic, as was technology journalist and entrepreneur Scott Rosenberg.
The metaphor of the bike shed discussion has served me well over the years. Here’s a theory of how it applies to politics:
In the book “Stealth Democracy” (which I previously blogged on here), John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse argue that voters have very weak policy preferences. Indeed, you can get a lot of people to change their mind on policy by asking them whether, thinking through the potential consequences of that policy, they’d like to change their mind. You can get even more of them to change their mind if you pay them a compliment first.
Which makes sense. People don’t know very much about policy. The twist in Hibbing and Theiss-Morse’s argument, however, is that people do know quite a bit about process, or feel they do, and in contrast to their weak policy preferences, they have very strong process preferences. The strongest among them is the belief that the people sent to do the people’s work shouldn’t be working on behalf of special interests, which explains the fury over the Nelson deal. Similarly strong is the aversion to partisan conflict, as most people think that these problems have common-sense solutions, and too much conflict suggests the two parties are deviating from that middle path.
People may not know the details of the health care reform bill, but the know that the legislative process that produced it stinks.
Since it was posted yesterday, I have been both horrified and fascinated by the results of this DailyKos/Research 2000 poll of Republicans. It’s impossible to cherry pick the results from the list to make my point because so many of them are so very distressing. Andrew Sullivan posted a great explanation of what this is about:
It has a parallel in the way in which non-violent Islamists have doubled down on medievalism as they feel an overwhelming sense of their own failure to succeed in modernity. There is a profound insecurity and dysfunction in these subcultures which cannot make the transition to modern life and thereby surrender more totally to the ancient past and to hatred of those who succeed. The hatred of Obama – a clearly decent and obviously Christian man – is not about him. It’s about them. It’s about their resentment of a man who has integrated his own identity and made a place for himself in a pluralist world. They cannot do that – so, like Palin, they invent a world of ancient virtues and moral absolutes that they routinely fail to live up to in reality. I mean: look at Palin’s family and Obama’s. Whose is the more traditional? And yet Palin is allegedly the avatar of family values – and Obama is a commie subversive.
I just don’t know what you do with a person who believes that ACORN stole the 2008 election on behalf of a foreign-born socialist who hates white people and should be impeached. These same people are ready to ban openly gay teachers from public schools unless they agree to teach the book of Genesis in science class. I don’t think education is the answer.
I beat up on the Republicans a lot, but I want to point out the alternative budget proposal put forth by Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan. His proposal eliminates the deficit and takes care of the entitlement crisis. It does so by eliminating Medicare and giving seniors vouchers they can use to buy health insurance. If health insurance premiums go up at a higher rate than the voucher amount, it will fall to seniors to make up the difference. His proposal is not something I’d support, but it is an honest attempt to engage with the budget problems the country faces long term, which is more than you can say for most of what Republicans put forth. He argues in favor of his proposal in this interview with Ezra Klein.
Every day we see a lot of boneheaded proposals from Republicans at every level of government, arguing that taxes are too high and that government spending is basically a big waste. Most Republicans seem to be content to argue that we should cut taxes and eliminate the deficit, and also that military spending should be held at the same level or raised, and, more recently, that Medicare cuts are off limits. There doesn’t seem to be any concern over whether this philosophy is in any way coherent.
Colorado Springs is helpfully providing a working example of Republican governance at work, which the rest of us can learn from. The Denver Post has the details:
More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops — dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled. The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter.
Neighbors are encouraged to bring their own lawn mowers to local green spaces, because parks workers will mow them only once every two weeks. If that.
Water cutbacks mean most parks will be dead, brown turf by July; the flower and fertilizer budget is zero.
City recreation centers, indoor and outdoor pools, and a handful of museums will close for good March 31 unless they find private funding to stay open. Buses no longer run on evenings and weekends. The city won’t pay for any street paving, relying instead on a regional authority that can meet only about 10 percent of the need.
The list goes on in the article.
Colorado Springs has the same problem as government at every level. The recession has driven tax receipts way down and employee benefits continue to get more expensive. It seems to me that liberals and conservatives seem to share largely the same expectations of what services shout government provide, but Republicans believe that the amount of taxes the government collects are not relevant to that level of service.
Whats truly depressing, however, is that as a country we seem to have completely lost the will and the capacity to collectively confront these challenges. Our union has been torn asunder by a clash of ideologies and special interests and brigades of power-hungry partisans that has resulted in a paralyzing political stalemate. In response, our citizens have become angry, cynical, distrustful and dispirited.
From Washington Post business columnist Steve Pearlstein’s The State of the Union speech Obama would give in a more honest world.
The response to people worried about the Supreme Court’s cataclysmic decision to lift any limits on political spending by corporations has been that we can be saved by transparency. That’s what the majority argued in their decision, and that argument has been taken up by conservatives who think that more corporate influence on the work of government is a good thing. But transparency involves only corporations documenting how much they spend, and money that goes unspent is really the crux of the matter.
Corporations have powerful levers to pull without spending a dime, given that they have the opportunity to spend as much as they like. First of all, they can threaten to withhold contributions they might otherwise make unless a legislator does their bidding. Secondly, they can threaten to spend on behalf of a politician’s opponent unless they get their way. Neither of those threats must be reported in any way. And, in many cases, the threats do not even need to be made. Politicians know what corporations want, and they now know that they can spend whatever they like to get it. Does a lobbyist for a coal company really need to call a legislator and tell them not to vote to ban mountaintop removal mining?
So we are now in a situation where the influence of corporations has been magnified to an incredible degree even before the first dollar is spent. And no amount of transparency is going to fix that.
As a California budget-watcher pointed out to me, when you get Arnold Schwarzenegger in a room with the leadership of the Senate and Assembly, Schwarzenegger has the most budget and legislative experience in the room. A guy who was starring in Terminator films as recently as 2003 is now the most seasoned elected official during one of the worst crises California has ever had.
Ezra Klein in The folly of term limits.
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