Are Progressives on Tilt?

There's an fascinating debate going on in liberal circles about just how serious progressive Democratic congressmen are about voting down a health care bill that does not contain a public option. The threat to do so has been made frequently and forcefully, both by rank-and-file members and by the Majority Leader. But is it a credible one?

On the one hand, I'd have trouble being persuaded that progressives would actually prefer to maintain the status quo than to pass a bill without a public option. Now, I can certainly imagine a bill being so bad that it would be a net setback to progressives' goals -- say you had something without a public option, employer mandate, or a national exchange, but with a strict individual mandate and which only provided subsidies up to 200 percent of poverty -- and that this bill were funded through a fairly regressive means like a value added tax. That would be a pretty terrible piece of policy and progressives (and most everyone else not employed by an insurance company) would be right to oppose it. But if you took something more like the current House bill, stripped it of the public option (replacing it with co-ops, I guess) and maintained everything else, this bill would still accomplish several important progressive and pubic policy goals (and avoid a major near-term political disaster for the President). Progressives, rightly, would like such a bill less. But for them to prefer the status quo to such a solution doesn't seem credible. That's why a lot of people have trouble taking the progressives' threats at face value.

On the other hand, suppose that we reverse this argument: are there Blue Dogs who would prefer the status quo to a bill with a public option -- but would prefer a bill without a public option to the status quo? The qualifier is important. Three House committees have already approved bills containing public options. In each case, some Blue Dog votes were lost. But how many of these Blue Dogs would have voted to approve the bill if it didn't contain a public option? That is far less clear. Some of them might have, almost certainly. But progressives ought to be wary of Blue Dogs (and Republicans) who argue against a public option -- when they may simply be opposed to the entire concept of meaningful health care reform.

To recap:

A. If the only two choices were to pass an (otherwise decent) bill without a public option and to pass nothing at all, and everyone knew these were the only two choices, I believe the bill would almost certainly pass; progressives would cave.

B. On the other hand, if the only two choices were to pass a bill with a public option and nothing at all, and everyone knew these were the only two choices, I believe at least some Blue Dogs would cave and the bill would stand a decent shot at passing. This is far less clear, however; it is incumbent upon progressives to determine whether a bill with a public option really does stand a shot a passage. If not then their threat is idle at best, and self-destructive at worst.

The reason that I wrote earlier this week that a bill with a public option was "probably" dead is because I've long believed that leadership from the White House might make the difference between a bill with a public option just barely passing and it just barely failing to do so. When the White House appeared to backtrack on the public option over the weekend, it seemed either that they had already counted the votes and concluded that the public option could not pass, or that they thought the situation was too tenuous to warrant the gamble. But the situation could also be a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy: the public option might have passed, if only the White House had been willing to agitate for it -- but since they weren't willing to do so, it couldn't.

That notwithstanding, let's go back to the branch on the tree where both proposition (A) and proposition (B) are both true: a sufficient majority of the Congress prefers a bill without a public option to the status quo, but also a majority prefers a bill with a public option to the status quo. This is where things get interesting and where a lot of the game-theory stuff comes into play. And if this is the case, then I would not underestimate the progressives.

From progressives' point of view, they have been waiting many, many years for this moment -- for an ostensibly fairly liberal Democratic president, an ostensibly filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, an ostensibly lock-solid majority in the House, and a discredited opposition party. For a variety of reasons, the situation isn't as good for progressives as it appears on paper and never was. But that doesn't mean that expectations aren't very high. And yet they've seen little progress on climate change, on gay rights, on torture policy, on regulating the banks -- and now they're running into a stiff headwind on health care. It's 1994 all over again. To the progressive mind, it seems to be -- pardon my French -- the same old bullshit re-asserting itself. The moment is on the verge of being lost.

In poker, one of the situations when a player is most prone to go on tilt is when he had been on a winning streak and then begins to lose. It's one thing when you simply aren't getting cards all night and lose money slowly and steadily. When this happens, most poker players are pretty good at accepting that it just isn't their night and will continue to play reasonably well, if perhaps a little overcautiously. But if you had been winning -- if you had already "booked" the win in your mind -- and then you start losing, things can get really, really ugly. You'll make bold, rash, irrational gambles. Your big win will turn into a small win and, if you're not careful, into a big loss.

This is sort of the situation that progressives are in right now. They're not in a mood to compromise. They're in a mood to gamble. This may well be irrational. It may well prove to be self-destructive. But the one thing you never, never want to do with someone who is on tilt is to try to bluff them off their hand.

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State Legislative Partisan Gains Since the Republican Revolution

Continuing my series of posts about changing partisan control of state legislatures, I was curious to see how much progress on a state-by-state basis the two parties made in the 12 years since 1994's so-called "Republican Revolution" cycle. Among the top gainers for each party, there were some surprising results--at least for the Democrats.


The two figures show the top 10 states in terms of share of house/assembly seats for the Republicans and Democrats, respectively. Looking at the Republican figure, there are no real surprises here: The 10 states where the GOP made its largest strides during those dozen years include eight former Confederate states, plus the border South states of Oklahoma and Missouri. It's clear from this, as well as congressional and Electoral College patterns, that Georgia and Louisiana are running counter to the rest of the country more than any other pair of states in America.

The real surprises are the big Democratic shift states.

As the second of the two figures shows, the top 10 here are more of a mixed bag. Mountain and plains states predominate; Washington, Colorado, Nevada, Montana, North Dakota are all on the list. This is partly attributable to the reversal of significant gains the GOP made up through and including the 1994 election, but also important strides made by Democrats out West this decade.

Then there's New Hampshire, whose story is more recent, as the Granite State quickly shifted from having two Republican congressmen, a Republican governor, and Republican control of both chambers to a Democratic-controlled state from top to bottom. NH's overall Democratic growth over the 1994-2006 period is outpaced only by Washington state's stunning change.


But the most obvious outlier of the bunch is North Carolina, which has proved itself a regional outlier. And remember, these are results calculated prior to the Democrats' 2008 victories in the House, Senate and for Barack Obama. (FWIW, I chose 2006, not 2008, as the point of comparison because both years are midterm cycles.) It's clear to me--yes, selfsame author of Whistling Past Dixie--that the Tar Heel State is the new Virginia, and proceeding in the same direction as its northern neighbor at a rate faster than I recognized or expected.

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Do You Favor Same-Sex Marriage? Do You Know Any Gay People?

Jeff and Justin found, based on survey data from 1994-2008, that gay marriage is most popular among the under-30s and least popular among the over 65's, and it's a big gap: the difference in support for gay rights is about 35 percentage points more among the young than the old.

To explore these age patterns some more, Daniel Lee and I did some simple analyses of attitudes on gays from three questions on the 2004 Annenberg survey, which had a large enough sample size that we could pretty much plot the raw numbers by age.

First, do you favor a state law allowing same sex marriage? As expected from Jeff and Justin's analysis, the younger you are, the more likely you are to support same-sex marriage:



How do we understand this? Perhaps younger Americans are more likely to know someone gay, thus making them more tolerant of alternative lifestyles.

It's not so simple.

Let's look at the response to the question, Do you know any gay people. As of 2004, a bit over half the people under 55 reported knowing someone gay; from there on, it drops off a cliff. Only about 15% of 80-year-olds know any gay people. (The data are a little noisy at the very end, where sample sizes become smaller.)



This isn't what I was expecting. I thought that people under 30 would be much more likely to say they know a gay person. But the probability actually goes up slightly from ages 18 to 45. I guess this makes sense: during those years, you meet more people, some of whom might be gay.

I showed this graph to a student in our department, and she was surprised that the percentages were so low: less than 60% of any age group reports knowing a gay person. A quick calculation: suppose you know 100 people well enough to know their sexual orientation, and suppose 3% of people are openly gay; then on average, people will know 3 gay people. (I think we actually asked a "How many gay people do you know?" question on one of our surveys, so we could look this up.) Given that there's overdispersion--some people have more friends than others, and gay people are not randomly distributed in the population--it doesn't seem unreasonable for about half the respondents to not know any gays.

Finally, who supports a Federal Marriage Ammendment (this one is an anti-gay position)? As of 2004, most people opposed such a constitutional amendment:



Opposition was slightly stronger among the young, but not nearly as much as you might expect given the attitudes on state gay marriage laws (as shown in the top graph above). Of the 20-year-olds, 50% supported a state law making gay marriage legal, 35% supported a federal law making gay marriage illegal, with only 15% supporting the status quo. Among 80-year-olds, however, 15% supported a state gay marriage law, 40% favor the federal anti-gay-marriage amendment, and a whopping 45% are happy with the existing laws. (I'm assuming that nobody out there is supporting the anti-gay marriage amendment and also state gay marriage laws, but I guess we can check this.)

Finally, from the Annenberg 2000 survey, here's the percentage of people, by age, who supported employment nondiscrimination laws. This one shows the expected pattern of the under-30s being different from everybody else:



Exact question wording is here (scroll down to the end). Daniel mostly coded nonresponses as No's, which isn't quite how I'd do it (I'd usually exclude nonrespondents from the averages), but I doubt this makes much of a difference. We can check.

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For Democrats, a "Moment of Clarity" on Health Care?

After a couple of very tough weeks, Congressional Democrats seem to be wising up on health care reform.

-- First, there's the news that Democrats seem prepared to drop the pretense of collaborating with Republicans on a health care reform bill. This is long overdue: with the possible exceptions of Mainers Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins**, and perhaps one or two retiring Republicans who can vote their conscience, Republicans have absolutely no incentive to give the Democrats a victory on a health care package. Credit, I guess, goes to Chuck Grassley for basically admitting as much, but the Republicans -- who until recently had outmaneuvered Democrats at virtually every stage of the health care debate -- made a pretty significant tactical error by giving the Democrats such a good excuse to go it alone. They may also have erred in so aggressively attacking the proposed co-ops provision, which is far weaker than the public option and is a compromise that anyone working in good faith for a "bipartisan" (i.e. weaker) health care bill ought to giddily accept.

-- Secondly, there's this trial balloon, leaked to the Wall Street Journal, about splitting the health care bill into two pieces, with some parts to be passed by reconciliation (requiring only 50 votes plus the Vice President) and others to be passed through ordinary procedure (60 votes required to overcome a filibuster). I don't think this strategy is quite as genius as it looks: if you're a senator who objects to the parts of the bill that are supposed to be passed by reconciliation, couldn't you register that displeasure by filibustering the less controversial parts of the bill when you otherwise approve them? Still, it overcomes the other major problem with reconciliation, which is that nobody knows what would be left in the bill once the Senate Parliamentarian got done with it. It's probably a bluff, but it's a better, more credible bluff than the one that the Democrats were hoping to run before.

-- One of the other obstacles that Democrats faced in passing a health care package -- and one which nobody quite seemed comfortable talking about -- is that Ted Kennedy's vote probably could not be counted upon because of of his ailing health. If Kennedy were to pass away, indeed, Democrats would face roughly a six-month delay until Massachusetts held a special election, during which time Massachusetts would have only one senator. Kennedy, however, is now pressuring the Massachusetts legislature to revise its special elections law to permit an interim gubernatorial appointment until that election takes place (Massachusetts is one of just four states that does not permit an interim appointment -- a provision the legislature introduced when it looked like then-governor Mitt Romney might appoint a Republican replacement were John Kerry to become President). From a public policy standpoint, I can't say I like the idea of changing the rules in midstream. But, if the Massachusetts legislature changes its law (and with roughly 8-to-1 Democratic majorities in both chambers, it probably will), its voters will at least have a couple of opportunities to register their displeasure, either by voting for a Republican to replace Kennedy when the special election occurs, or by voting the legislators out of office.

The Democrats still face a whole host of obstacles in passing a health care bill, but the odds today look a little better than they did 48 hours ago.

** p.s. Speaking of Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, I'm up in Maine on what's supposed to be a vacation, so I apologize if posting has been somewhat light for the past few days -- it will continue to be so through the weekend.

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Who Are the Liberal Democrats and the Conservative Republicans?

Daniel Lee and I made these graphs showing the income distribution of voters self-classified by ideology (liberal, moderate, or conservative) and party identification (Democrat, Independent, or Republican). We found some surprising patterns:


(Click on image to see larger version.)

Each line shows the income distribution for the relevant category of respondents, normalized to the income distribution of all voters. Thus, a flat line would represent a group whose income distribution is identical to that of the voters at large. The height of the line represents the size of the group; thus, for example, there were very few liberal Republicans, especially by 2008.

The most striking patterns to me are:

1. The alignment of income with party identification is close to zero among liberals, moderate among moderates, and huge among conservatives. If you're conservative, then your income predicts your party identification very well.

2. First focus on Democrats. Liberal Democrats are spread among all income groups, but conservative Democrats are concentrated in the lower brackets.

3. Conservative Republicans--the opposite of liberal Democrats, if you will--are twice as concentrated among the rich than among the poor.

Putting factors 2 and 3 together, we find that ideological partisans (liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans) are not opposites in their income distributions. In particular, richer voters are more prevalent in these groups.

Which might be relevant for the debates over health care, taxes, and other political issues that have a redistributive dimension.

P.S. The 2000 and 2004 data are from the National Annenberg Election Survey; 2008 is from the Pew Research pre-election surveys. We show all three years to indicate the persistence of the general pattern. As a way of showing uncertainty and variation, this is much more effective than displaying standard errors, I think.

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Afghanistan: 2004 results and 2009 Polling

On the eve of presidential voting in Afghanistan, let us take a final look over what we know going into this election. The Taliban, a Pashtun faction, ruled Afghanistan until 2001, when they were forced out of power by a combined Northern Alliance (a group largely made up of the Tajik, Hazara and Uzbeks who populate the northern portion of the country) and US-NATO forces. In 2004, the first post-Taliban election was held, which saw Pashtun ally of the anti-Taliban movement Hamid Karzai prevail with 55.4% of the vote.

The 2004 election was contentious but without major protest afterwards. While Karzai had his base of support in the Pashtun regions, he ran strongly second in many Northern Alliance provinces, even winning a few. Irregularities were many, and allegations of undue influence by the US and allies were fairly common.

Fast forward to 2009, where a quite similar situation is playing out. Hamid Karzai is running fairly strong in polls taken this summer, and continues to have net positive approval ratings, though his star has fallen significantly since 2004, both with national allies and international forces, including the US.

As previously mentioned, softened support for Karzai with the Northern Alliance faction has been the main hurdle for his re-election. The candidate running second in most evaluations of the contest, Abdullah Abdullah, is the candidate of the Afghanistan National Front, which is largely composed of Northern Alliance members. How many votes can be swayed (or forcibly moved) from the north into each camp will likely be the deciding factor.

Two major US-based polling organizations have taken the temperature of public opinion Afghanistan since summer began, with all three polls funded almost entirely by the US government. The non-profit International Republican Instititute (IRI) conducted in person and telephone interviews across Afghanistan in May and late July, while Glevum and Associates, a consulting firm, did the same in mid July. IRI did a similar exercise ahead of the 2004 elections, and ended up overestimating Karzai's overall victory margin by about 20 points.

Assuming that we can trust these results at a rough level (both pollsters have experience in Afghanistan, have learned lessons since 2004, and have relatively sound methodologies given the terrain), a couple key issues stand out. The main difference between the July polls is the undecided category, something that gave us a lot of trouble when we looked at polling in Iran back in June, when over 27% of Iranians told the American pollsters that they were undecided.

Were IRI's interviewers better able to earn the trust of the population, given their longer history in the country? Or instead, did they do their questioning in a way that made undecided a less attractive option, and therefore got decided, but possibly untrue responses? One other unknown question is whether "Other" candidates in the Glevum study were indeed other names, or a convenient way to "decided", but actually uncommitted.

In particular, a refusal rate of 38% in the Northern region, and overall refusal rates of 33% by Pashtuns and 32% by Tajiks means that key constituencies are underrepresented in the Glevum study. In the study, Tajiks are split between Abdullah (34%) and Karzai (30%), whereas Pashtuns lean far toward Karzai (44%), with Abdullah receiving just 11% of the Pashtun vote.

Nevertheless, if both sets are correct, the minority candidates Bashardost and Ghani seemed to proportionally gain the most of undecided registered voters, while Karzai and Abdullah mainly kept the same proportion as they got previously.

Looking back to IRI's May poll is significant mainly in its illustration of a very wide field back in May, where more than a dozen candidates received 2 % support or more. Dr. Abdullah officially registered as a candidate on 6 May, after speculation that he might drop out, which could explain his weak support during that period, while Karzai made significant progress with many loose allies during this period. The May edition of the IRI report goes into detail with each candidate over 2%, which, rather than lumping them into one "other" category, is as it should be done.

The final results will likely raise more questions than the answer for numbers-oriented people, in large part because the tallies that come from the electoral commission in Afghanistan (IEC) do not have a great track record. Indeed, it is possible that these polls, flawed as they might be, could better approximate the Afghan public sentiment than the results will. International observers quoted by the BBC after the 2005 parliamentary elections as saying that the elections had "very significant fraud," something that remains a major concern. Along with basic security, the integrity of the voting system for this year has again been widely challenged.

Even so, given the requirement of a run-off in the case that there is majority share winner, we could see a two-man second round following tomorrow's voting. A run-off, which could be forced if Karzai loses just 6 points from his 2004 share, would indicate a small but serious rupture in his coalition. Whether this would be a positive development (Competitiveness! Democracy!) or a negative one (Weak, fragmented government; Corruption; Taliban influence), is up for interpretation.
---
Renard Sexton is FiveThirtyEight's international columnist and is based in Geneva, Switzerland. He can be contacted at sexton538@gmail.com

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Asymmetrical Policy Warfare and the Prophets of Deceit

Why is President Obama struggling to win the argument over national health care reform? The president and the White House almost certainly underestimated public resistance, and were slow to get their own Organizing for America-led efforts up and running. And let's face it: Health care is complex, and it's just hard to disentangle that which is pretty well tangled in the first place.

Piggybacking on Nate's post immediately below, allow me to suggest that what we are also witnessing here is an asymmetrical battle in which conservatives, Republicans, trade associations and other assorted opponents are adapting campaign strategies--and smear tactics in particular--to a policy debate. And, if you think about it, it's a pretty shrewd strategy to muddy the waters, provide disinformation, and in general try to scare people away from an idea--just as one might try to deter them from voting for a candidate in an election campaign.

Indeed, consider the following:

1. It is almost always more difficult to get somebody to support a candidate or policy proposal idea than oppose it, because supporting usually requires agreeing with all or nearly all of who/what they are, whereas the threshold for opposition is lower. In short, it's easier to disqualify than qualify. A corollary to this is that the larger and/or more complex a policy is, the greater the disqualify-qualify asymmetry tends to be.

2. Because it is not always clear which particular objection(s) will move any given voter toward disqualifying an idea, the best approach is a shotgun one: raise every possible objection imaginable in order to maximize the number of people who can find at least one argument as the key, dispositive reason for their opposition.

3. Because voters are (often rationally) low-information consumers of policy, the use of exaggeration, misrepresentation and outright fabrication is often met with little to no impunity. And so it makes sense to not only raise legitimate, provable objections but also false, misleading ones as well. Compounding this effect is the fact that when those trying to speak truthfully inevitably get frustrated by all the deception and misinformation, it creates the unfortunate impression that the defenders are being defensive for other reasons, as Matt Yglesias argues in response to Barney Frank's exchange with some woman complaining that Obama is a Nazi.

In short, the same sort of "throw as much mud against the wall and see what sticks" philosophy used with great success over the years against, say, Democratic presidential nominees, is basically being applied to policy battles. Is it really all that puzzling that we are hearing claims like, Health care reform will kill your grandma! Bureaucrats will decide what tests you can take! There won't be enough doctors! Illegal immigrants will get covered for free! Are we really all surprised that this strategy is not only happening, but is working?

Oh, and just to be clear: the opposition's strategy is working. Here is a partial write-up by MSNBC's Mark Murray of new NBC News poll numbers released last night:

Americans still skeptical about Obama’s plans
By Mark Murray, Deputy political director, NBC News
updated 6:30 p.m. ET, Tues., Aug 18, 2009

WASHINGTON - Two weeks since raucous congressional town-hall meetings on health care became a national story — and days after President Barack Obama began holding his own town halls — Americans remain skeptical about White House plans to overhaul the nation’s health system, according to a new NBC News poll...

Damaging misperceptions
One of the reasons why it has become tougher is due to misperceptions about the president’s plans for reform.

Majorities in the poll believe the plans would give health insurance coverage to illegal immigrants; would lead to a government takeover of the health system; and would use taxpayer dollars to pay for women to have abortions — all claims that nonpartisan fact-checkers say are untrue about the legislation that has emerged so far from Congress. (Emphasis added)

Forty-five percent think the reform proposals would allow the government to make decisions about when to stop providing medical care for the elderly.

That also is untrue: The provision in the House legislation that critics have seized on — raising the specter of “death panels” or euthanasia — would simply allow Medicare to pay doctors for end-of-life counseling, if the patient wishes.

That's asymmetrical warfare at work--and at its worst.

In a compelling essay published in Inside Higher Ed, Scott McLemee compares what we are witnessing now to behaviors described more than a half-century ago by Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman in Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator:

In analyzing speeches and writings by the Depression agitators, Lowenthal showed a particular interest in how they operated as rhetoric – how the imagery, figures of speech, and recurrent themes worked together, appealing to the half-articulated desires and frustrations of the demagogue’s followers...

The insights and blindspots of this large-scale effort to analyze “the authoritarian personality” generated controversy that continues all these decades later. But I wasn’t thinking of any of that when Prophets of Deceit came back to mind not long ago.

The catalyst, rather, was my first exposure to the cable talk-show host Glenn Beck. His program, on the de facto Republican party network Fox, has been a locus for much of the pseudopopulist craziness about how the Presidency has been taken over by a totalitarian illegal alien. You will find most of the themes of this form of political thinking cataloged by Lowenthal and associates...

But the striking thing about Beck’s program was not its ideological message but something else: its mode of performance, which was so close to that described in Prophets of Deceit that I had to track down a copy to make sure my memory was not playing tricks...

In case you have not seen him in action, Beck “weeps for his country.” Quite literally so: the display of waterworks is the most readily parodied aspect of his performance. He confesses to being terrified for the future, and quakes accordingly. He acts out aggressive scenarios, such as one in which he pretended to be Obama throwing gasoline on an Average American and threatening to set him on fire.

So there you have it: Glenn Beck, Master Agitator in the asymmetrical war over health care.

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The Essence of the Health Care Endgame

Probably stating the obvious here. But sometimes the obvious is worth stating. From the latest NBC/WSJ poll:

Also, while just 36 percent believe Obama’s efforts to reform the health system are a good idea, that number increases to 53 percent when respondents were read a paragraph describing Obama’s plans.

That's a 17-point gap in support for the Democrats' health care plans when the plan is simply referred to as "Barack Obama's health care plan" versus when a reasonably fair description of the plan is actually provided to the respondents. Whence the source of the discrepancy?

Majorities in the poll believe the plans would give health insurance coverage to illegal immigrants; would lead to a government takeover of the health system; and would use taxpayer dollars to pay for women to have abortions — all claims that nonpartisan fact-checkers say are untrue about the legislation that has emerged so far from Congress.

Forty-five percent think the reform proposals would allow the government to make decisions about when to stop providing medical care for the elderly.

I don't think that health care needs to reach approval as high as 53 percent in order for it to be a good idea for the Democrats to pass the initiative. It's possible that Obama's approval ratings will decline further even if health care reform is passed. But they'd likely decline by more if health care reform fails: like splitting 8's in blackjack, sometimes it's right to accept a small loss if the alternative is a bigger loss.

There's still a chance, though, for the Democrats to work their way out of this damned-if-they-do, damned-if-they-don't scenario. There is at least a possibility for health care reform to gain popularity down the homestretch as the President grabs the bully pulpit and explains, in clear and simple terms to the American public, what the reform bill will and won't do.

Combatting this type of misinformation is not easy -- not when health care reform's opponents have every reason to perpetuate the confusion, not when the President's messaging has frequently missed a beat, and not when the Democrats have yet to agree on a particular proposal and are fighting over a variety of substantive and non-substantive details. But the President has to make every effort to do so. The fate of health care reform probably depends upon it.

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Is Obama Spending his Political Capital, Wasting It ... or Wuz He Robbed?

No matter how you slice and dice them, Barack Obama's poll numbers are down. And it's clear that his health care reform advocacy is contributing to his sagging support. So, herewith, a question for the day: As summer draws to a close, what can we say about Obama's use of his political capital?



As I see it, there are (at least) four possible explanations we can kick around:

1. Obama came to Washington to spend capital, not hoard it--and that's exactly what he's doing. This argument is equivalent to saying Obama is the Democratic George W. Bush, in that he cares less about his numbers and being loved than he does about pushing through his agenda. (Bush famously said upon winning re-election that he had earned some capital in the first election, earned a little more during re-election, and intended to spend it.) Big change is costly, and not just in actual dollars from the Treasury, but in terms of how much of his capital reserves a president is willing to spend to get what he wants. Obama is not plugging for school uniforms, folks. He's re-regulating Wall Street, trying to stimulate the economy by pumping nearly $1 trillion into it, and attempting to tackle the policy problem too many of his predecessors never could: reforming our messy, complicated health care system. Accordingly, he's paying the price for even trying.

2. Obama is investing now with an eye toward medium- and long-range returns. Call this the "you've got to spend political capital to make political capital" theory, in which Obama knows that the first summer is a good time to make a big investment, with sufficient time to recover his losses and maybe even come out ahead by the 2010 midterms, or at least by the time his own 2012 re-election campaign rolls around. If you have to do health care at some point in the first term, it's now or never...and so, after taking an initial hit, his capital reserves will slowly rise back to pre-Summer '09 levels.

3. Obama miscalculated. Riding an initial wave of popularity, the president figured he would be able to push through health care reform at little or no cost to his approval ratings, but miscalculated miserably. That is, he presumed that the relatively blank check given to him for the stimulus and other agenda items was somehow transferable to health care. And now, like a man committed to the wrong investment portfolio, he is chasing bad money with good and doesn't have the sense to just bail.

4. Obama got mugged. Even smart investors and people with eyes in the back of their heads sometimes get rolled, and Obama is simply the victim of a coordinated series of attacks designed to snatch his political wallet. Americans for Prosperity, Glenn Beck and company knew what they were doing.

OK, let's do some accounting. Obviously, the first two are the more charitable explanations than the latter two, for even though there can be some blame-shifting for explanation #4, a president still ought to be prepared for attacks of every sort. Frankly, as I consider all four, I'm not sure any of them is alone sufficient to explain what's going on. There might be a little of each.

The president surely believes in health care reform, and is willing to risk some capital to get it. But of course, he also would risk capital by not doing anything; critics, especially within his own party and from his base, would say he talked the talked during last year's primary and then balked the balked once in office. The second view is simply too charitable, because it presumes confidence that some of the independents currently abandoning him are going to return; and without them, he could be in serious trouble. And yet, if forced to move on reform at some point, the period immediately after the first six months' emergency actions provides the longest recovery period.

There's surely been some miscalculation, however. Health care reform isn't the stimulus package. For one thing, the stimulus is a temporary booster, whereas reform will ramify for decades. Moreover, although the effects of the $787 billion will hardly affect every American the same way, there's no doubt the un- and under-insured stand to benefit more--and even the slightest whiff of redistribution makes a lot of Americans queasy. Finally, well yes, there has been something of a political mugging. Need I review everything that's transpired on television and in town halls since the Sen. DeMint fired the starter's gun with his "Waterloo" comment? Thought not.

Whatever combination of the above four, Obama now faces the toughest political challenge of his presidency thus far.

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Grand Unified Obama Critique

One of these people must be wrong! But is it Paul Krugman?

[T]here are some good reasons for the prominence of the public option in our debate. […] One is […] what the option debate says about Obama.

If progressives had real trust in Obama’s commitment to doing the right thing, the administration would have broad leeway to do deals. But the president doesn’t command that kind of trust.

Partly it’s a matter of style — as many people have noted, he has been weirdly reluctant to make the moral case for universal care, weirdly unable to show passion on the issue, weirdly diffident even about the blatant lies from the right. Partly it’s a spillover from his other policies: by appointing an economic team that’s Rubin redux, by taking such a kindly attitude to the banks, he has squandered a lot of progressive enthusiasm.

...or is it Jay Cost?

For whatever reason, the Obama administration has acted as if those hagiographical comparisons to FDR were apt. It let its liberal allies from the coasts drive the agenda and write the key bills, and it's played straw man semantic games to marginalize the opposition. For all the President's moaning in The Audacity of Hope about how the Bush administration was railroading the minority into accepting far right proposals - he was prepared to let his Northeastern and Pacific Western liberal allies do exactly the same thing: write bills that excite the left, infuriate the right, and scare the center; insist on speedy passage through the Congress; and use budget reconciliation to ram it through in case the expected super majority did not emerge.

This might have flown during FDR's 100 Days. But this is not 1933 and Barack Obama is no Franklin Roosevelt.

If liberals are convinced that the President is too conservative and conservatives are convinced that he's too liberal then either the President must be doing everything right or everything wrong. Lately, granted, it has seemed more like the latter.

But actually, these critiques are not so incompatible.

Cost suggests that Obama misunderstood how difficult it would be to get his agenda passed in a 60-vote Senate in which the swing vote was a conservative Democrat from a state that John McCain carried by 17 points. Therefore, he should have bowed to reality and pursued a more modest agenda.

There are a few of Obama's liberal critics who could stand to recognize this. The Senate, with its filibuster rule, small-state bias, and committee and seniority structure, is a slow-moving, change-resistant, lower-case "c" conservative institution. It's not obvious that if you put -- I don't know -- Dennis Kucinich in the Oval Office that he'd have been able to accomplish a whole heck of a lot more. And Obama's achievements are not insignificant: he signed an $800 billion stimulus package, expanded children's health care, seems to have rescued the economy from a complete meltdown (although not necessarily from an extended recession), and has generally gotten good reviews on his foreign policy. And it's a little early to write the obituary on health care, which is still more likely to pass than to fail.

The more intelligent liberal critique of Obama, however -- and the one that Krugman is echoing -- is that he's left too much up to the whims of Congress, and particularly the Senate. Yes, Obama let his "Northeastern and Pacific Western liberal allies" write the health care, climate and stimulus bills. But he also let Blue Dogs and Committee Chairs mark them up. As a result, the climate bill that passed the House was significantly watered-down, the stimulus package was less than what economists like Krugman was calling for, and the public option is in grave trouble in the Senate.

What I think people were hoping for is that Obama would, somehow or another, be able to overcome the institutional barriers to change, probably through a hands-on approach involving a lot of public persuasion. And by "institutional barriers", I mean the Senate, among other things. The public option is a good example of this. It's fairly popular and would probably lower the net cost of the bill to taxpayers, but it likely won't pass because 10-12 Senate Democrats who take a lot of money from the health care industry are against it. Yes, some of these people are folks like Blanche Lincoln and Mary Landrieu who hail from states where Obama was never popular. But of the Democrats who have yet to endorse the public option, about half are from states that Obama carried.

To some fairly large extent, this was probably a vain hope. I think Cost is right that people have tended to overstate how much the country had changed last November 4th. Some 46 percent of the nation voted against Barack Obama, and we're still mostly the same country that elected George W. Bush twice.

Nevertheless, although his numbers have slipped significantly now, Obama had approval ratings of 50 percent or higher in all but two states throughout the first half of the year. We can debate the semantics of what a "mandate" is -- the fact is, Obama had a lot of political capital to burn. Obama could have used that political capital in either of two ways. He might have used it to bludgeon the Blue Dogs and moderate Republicans, or alternatively, he could have used it to quell liberal impatience and play more for the long term, perhaps limiting his policy advocacy to popular issues like education after getting the stimulus passed.

It's not clear that Obama has done either. Although Obama has put a lot of cars on the policy train, he's also let the Congress drive it. This is arguably the worst of all worlds. A slowgoing, more passive approach might be fine -- there are good arguments that Obama should have chosen to preserve his political capital once unemployment shot up from the 7's to the 9's within the first few months of his administration. If so, then perhaps Cost is right that the train should never have been allowed to leave the station. Alternatively, if you conclude that the Democrats' policy window was narrow, then full-speed-ahead was the right approach. But then Obama needed to play conductor, when instead he's often seemed happy enough to be along for the ride.

Now, let me pause here and stipulate how easy it is to play Monday Morning Quarterback. Obama passed one of the largest spending bills in history, a lot of which was directed toward traditionally liberal priorities. He's gotten farther on universal health care than any President has in the last 50 years and may well still get across the finish line. If a public-option-less bill passes the Congress, then liberals have every right to critique it as a matter of policy. But as a matter of politics, it will have been an enormous accomplishment.

For my money, the problem has not been that Obama is insufficiently committed to the progressive cause (which, by the way, is not necessarily his job). Nor is it that he's tried to ram liberal policies down the country's throat. Almost all of of the reforms that the Democrats have been advancing -- the stimulus, health care, global warming regulation, etc. -- began as fairly popular programs (although they didn't necessarily end up they once the Congress got done with them). Rather, it's that in trying to split the difference between these two extremes, he's sometimes failed to make the tough choices that define successful Presidencies. Obama will probably get this figured out -- in fact, he'll almost certainly get it figured out by 2012 (take a look at where Reagan and Clinton were at this point in their first terms). But if Democrats want to survive 2010 and the health care debate largely intact, he will need to do so sooner rather than later.

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Democratic Gains in Midwest Slower Than Needed to become National Majority

The Midwest is the swing region of the country. That's true in presidential elections, for sure, especially in what I call the "Great Eight" states; in fact, every winning presidential candidate since 1920--an amazing 23 consecutive cycles--has carried at least four of the eight Midwest states that border the Great Lakes and/or Mississippi River (Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, and Wisconsin). Wisconsin was the closest overall state in the two Bush presidential victories (third closest overall in 2000, first in 2004), but Obama won there comfortably. He also posted solid wins in states, like Minnesota and Iowa, once thought to be trending toward the GOP. Midwestern congressional gains significantly contributed to the Democrats' recapture the U.S. House and Senate in 2006, and their expansion of those majorities last year. You may also have noticed that the current White House occupant hails from the region's largest city.

Continuing this series of posts on state legislative party control--the first post of which is here--we see yet again how pivotal the Midwest is. Looking at the data graciously provided by Tim Storey of the National Conference of State Legislatures at four cut points,* it's clear that the Midwest has been consistently one of the two most competitive regions since the early 1980s. This is true in both the lower houses (state assemblies) and upper chambers (state senates). The only region more competitive across the time period of study is the Far West where, remarkably, the two parties have hovered within a very narrow range of between 40 percent and 50 percent Democratic share of all seats for four decades now. (More about the Far West in a later post.)


Turning back to the Midwest, what's most interesting is how little overall progress Democrats have made relative to their improved performance of late in national elections--and yet, because many of these states were so knife's-edge competitive this decade, the Democrats have flipped more state chambers from Republican control in the Midwest than anywhere else.

And yet, while the Dems' Midwestern shares of the lower and upper chambers have of course improved since 1994--as is true for Democrats in every region of the country but the South--the levels aren't much better in the Midwest than they were a quarter century ago, at the dawn of the Reagan era. The major strides made by the Democrats in the Northeast parallel the party's gains at the congressional level; until the crazy political maneuvering in the New York Senate raised it two, the Republicans controlled just one of 24 chambers in the 12 Northeastern states (the Pennsylvania Senate).

By contrast, Democratic progress in the Midwest is steady, but slower. Overall, in the 11 bicameral, partisan Midwest states (Nebraska is unicameral, non-partisan), the Republicans control 10 of the 22 chambers. Granted, six of those 10 result from control of both houses of the state legislatures in Kansas and the two Dakotas--tough sledding states for Democrats. But there are Democratic opportunities in Indiana, Michigan and Missouri--all states Obama won and states that, perhaps with some strategic gerrymandering, could present a different playing field starting in 2012.


Again, there have been some notable legislative chambers flipped by Democrats in the Midwest in recent cycles. The regional story is more one of success than failure for the Democrats, to be sure. But to build a national majority, the party that happens to boast a president from America's most competitive region needs to push up further its numbers in that region. As for the GOP, Republicans have began to talk of late about recovering in the Northeast. But if there is a Republican recovery in the offing in 2010 and beyond, I'm betting it will come in the Midwest, where the GOP can most persuasively make a claim to a resurgence if it reverses the partisan trend there and thwarts the Democrats' bid to make that region look more like Northeast.

*Notes: I organized the states into four regions as follows: Northeast, 12 states running from Maine to West Virginia and Maryland; South, 11 former Confederate states plus Kentucky and Oklahoma; Midwest, the "Great Eight" listed above, plus the Dakotas and Kansas (Nebraska has a unicameral, non-partisan legislature and is not included in the analyses); Far West, the 8 so-called Interior West states, 3 Pacific Coast states, plus Alaska and Hawai'i. I chose the four cut points I did because 1970 was the earliest year for which data was available and it made sense to take counts following non-presidential cycles, when the majority of state legislators are selected; since 2006 was the last such year available, four cuts at 12-year increments from 1970 to 2006 worked out well--a choice that also has the fortuitous benefit of including results from the 1994 "Republican Revolution" cycle.

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Obama's Peril in Afghanistan?

When Barack Obama took office in January, he swiftly moved to make his policy mark on the handling of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, as well as the US's anti-terrorism campaign more generally. Declaring a full change in direction, he issued executive orders restricting interrogation techniques, closed Guantanamo Bay and other secrets prisons, and so forth. In another high profile move, the administration launched their revised Afghanistan policy in major Presidential address in March, which included a number of concrete steps for the war to be taken forward.

Afghanistan was by many measures the strongest pillar of the foreign policy plank of the Obama campaign in terms of solid commitments that differed from both the Bush administration and the McCain campaign. While the Obama team harshly criticized the Bush approach in Iraq, with U.S. allies, in the Americas and the entire "War on Terror" concept, Afghanistan is where Obama hung his hat when it came to contrast with McCain's proposed approach. McCain argued that Iraq, where the US's "surge" policy had brought some measure of stability, was the key, and that gains there could be lost by redirecting or spreading US military and diplomatic forces. Obama, however, put in very blunt terms that the US needed to "refocus" on Afghanistan, with a major infusion of new troops, political will, and diplomatic pressure on NATO, Pakistan and domestic Afghan partners.

It is certainly quite a political gamble, putting your foreign policy credibility on the line for a war that could be lost a hundred times before it is won. Even if a strategic improvement were to be secured, it is clear that American public is quite fatigued with the overseas excursions altogether, "successful" or not. In terms of strategy for the Obama administration then, the Afghanistan conflict must be handled quite carefully on the political end, even though signs are generally positive after the change in strategy.

Looking at US public opinion (as measured by CNN's polling on the subject), since 2006, the Afghanistan war has been split in terms of popularity. Zooming in on the past nine months, we can see the beginning of an Obama arc.


Beginning in December 2008, the Afghan war, along with all other things linked with Barack Obama, was flying high. Rebounding from poor scores in July, when the foreign policy contest between campaigns was at its height, favorability for the war swung from -6 to +6 in just five months. By the end of Obama's first month in office, however, popular support had ebbed away, following the expected, but lukewarmly popular decision to deploy 17,000 additional U.S. troops to the country. March's policy address provided another bounce, particularly to Democrats in general, and liberals in specific, who had found Obama's previous actions to be more focused on "escalation" than was expected.

Since that speech in March, however, public opinion has slowly eroded, particularly among the left, as the conflict has moved to the background, and begun to again look like an eternal operation. While dangerous in terms of optics, the strategy behind might be sounder than it seems at first glance.

Unlike the Bush Administration, Obama has been content to leave Afghanistan on the back burner of public relations. The former was intent on providing updates, benchmarks, photo ops and so forth at a quite regular, about monthly, rate. Meant to show that progress was being made, the habitual notifications instead began to muddy the waters with the US public. Particularly as the Iraq operation took a turn for the worse, it was not clear which updates meant progress and which meant backsliding. As well, when big breaks occurred, it was quite difficult to tease them away from the normal, regular events. As such, Bush began to look disingenuous about the war and the public became more skeptical.

If Obama can stomach the relatively low popularity of the war, driven mostly by disenchanted lefties and skeptical moderates (about 66% of Republicans still approve of the war), and hold back from trying to show success before there is any, he can perhaps take the high ground by the time 2012 comes around. For example, rather than over blowing the impact of this week's Presidential election -- for example, hailing it as proof of "democracy," "freedom," "success," etc. -- the administration should continue to managed expectations with words like "slow but steady progress," and "step in the right direction."

Obama's peril in Afghanistan is that the political calculations that brought him to emphasize Afghanistan in 2008 mean that the ownership for its success or failure are transferred from the Bush legacy (and previous) to the Obama administration more quickly than perhaps Iraq, Israel/Palestine or illegal immigration. Like health care and the anti-recession stimulus efforts, ownership and effort also mean responsibility.

One option on Friday morning for the Obama folks is for in-country actors or subordinates to take the lead on responding to the Afghan election, rather than the President himself. Other than a relatively generic praise of democracy and gentle prods for its imperfections, leaving the response to the "experts" could be a way to insulate him a bit. On the other, this adminstration has generally put the President himself to major use as chief cheerleader for all policies, bar none, and perhaps Afghanistan this time will be no different. Indeed, the administration response, in terms of personnel, likely more than content, will be indicative of their political strategy moving forward.


Update: The Washington Post goes into detail about the sacking of former Afghanistan theater commander David McKiernan as part of the Obama administration's new strategy, which requires a commander who is "able to nimbly run the troops on the ground as well as the traps in Washington."
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Renard Sexton is FiveThirtyEight's international columnist and is based in Geneva, Switzerland. He can be contacted at sexton538@gmail.com

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How Many Votes Does the Public Option Have? How Many Does it Need?

Earlier I suggested that the public option probably does not have the votes to pass the the U.S. Senate. Let's examine this in a bit more detail.

Open Left's Chris Bowers lists 43 senators who as of last Wednesday, he believes based on official communications would vote in favor of a public option. This appears to be the best and most contemporary whip count of its kind.

There are at least two names on Chris's list of yea votes that I'd regard as less than certain: one is Ted Kennedy, who obviously supports the public option but might not be healthy enough to vote on it, and the other is Diane Feinstein, who has indicated that she's open to either a public option or non-profit co-ops -- wherein lies the whole debate. But let's give the Democrats credit for these two votes and start counting upward. What's their easiest path to 50?

There are five more senators who have either given signals that they'd support the public option or, when push came to shove, would be more likely than not to do so:

44. Tim Johnson (SD). Appeared to commit to the plan over the weekend. Should be regarded as a highly likely 'yes' vote.
45. Robert Byrd (WV). Has yet to take a position publicly, probably because he's been ill. But Byrd is generally pretty liberal on economic issues, and his colleague (Jay Rockefeller) is a vociferous supporter of the public plan. The potential barrier here, as in Kennedy's case, is likely Byrd's health rather than any philosophical concerns he has about the plan.
46. Amy Klobuchar (MN). Howard Dean's website lists her as a supporter. She's been decidedly more ambiguous in e-mails to constitutents, and Minnesota has lots of skin in the health care game in various forms. Still -- although Klobuchar is not as liberal as you might expect from a Minnesota Democrat -- this seems to me like an eminently whippable yea vote.
47. Ron Wyden (OR). Wyden's indifference to the public option is a little odd -- he's ordinarily quite liberal -- and may reflect his desire to promote his own health care alternative. Once it came time to vote on the actual, non-Wyden bill, I'd expect him to vote yes on the public option.
48. Herb Kohl (WI). Ostensibly supports the public option but with a lot of caveats: that it be "bipartisan", etc. Realistically, any public option that the Senate is considering is likely to be fairly watered down, moving Kohl into the probable yea vote category. But the co-ops concept might also be alluring to him.

Now, here are the senators that Bowers lists as maybes but who I think would be relatively unlikely to vote for the public plan. Not included here are Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins, who he lists as definite no's.

Mary Landrieu (LA). Other sources have her as a 'no'. She may be hedging a bit in constituent e-mails, but given a straight up-or-down vote on the public option, her vote seems highly unlikely.
Johnny Isakson (GA). Republican who is moderate on health care issues. Open Left lists him as a "maybe" based on what I think is a very optimistic read of a statement he made in June. Also, Isakson (along with all other Republicans but Olympia Snowe) sent a letter to the President stipulating his opposition to the public plan. Very little chance he'd vote for a public option.
Kent Conrad (ND). Given that he's probably done more than any other senator to hurt the public option, I don't really see him coming up big for the plan in the clutch.
Ben Nelson (NE). Generally the most conservative Democrat in the Senate, Nelson came out against the public option early on but has since hedged a bit. I don't know that Nelson would vote to filibuster a health care bill on final passage if it happened to include a public option. But, given the opportunity to take a straight up-or-down vote on the provision without bearing the burden of potentially killing health care reform (e.g. if an amendment on the public option had been proposed), I don't think a 'yes' vote is likely.
Evan Bayh (IN). Similar story to Nelson. He's been voting very conservatively (even relative to normal) this year.
Tom Carper (DE). Fairly conservative, and very corporatist Democrat. He takes a lot of money from the insurance lobby and there are also a lot of insurance jobs in his state. Seems to want co-ops instead.
Mark Warner (VA). Takes a ton of money from the industry. Our regression model regarded him as a very unlikely 'yes' vote. Has been somewhat ducking making a commitment on the issue, but some constituent communications suggest he'd much prefer the co-ops plan.

That leaves seven senators who I suspect are the true swing votes in a 50-vote environment. The Democrats would need at least two of these, and possibly as many as 4-5 depending on the health of Byrd and Kennedy and whether someone like Feinstein or Kohl ended up voting against the public plan.

Blanche Lincoln (AR). She's been all over the board on the public option. I don't know if anyone can say with confidence how she'd vote until they take the roll call.
Mark Pryor (AR). Been receiving less scrutiny than Lincoln since he's not up for re-election, but his position has been just as ambiguous.
Mark Begich (AK). Here's a guy who I suspect has fairly liberal instincts and doesn't take a lot of PAC money but is obviously in a very conservative/libertarianish state. Probably among the more gettable of the swing votes.
Jon Tester (MT). Largely the same story as Begich, although he's a bit more of a populist.
Max Baucus (MT). Public statements suggest he supports the public option in principle but he obviously hasn't done very much to move it along in practice. Common sense would dictate that he'd be unlikely to vote for a public option if it wasn't in the bill that came out of the Finance Committee. On the other hand, it's not out of the question that he'd want to save face with some of his liberal critics.
Bill Nelson (FL). "Not even his hairdresser knows," according to the Huffington Post.
Olympia Snowe (ME). Would probably vote for a public option that had a 'trigger' and vote against it otherwise.

But wait -- I've pulled a little trick on you. What's to say that 50 is the magic number of votes for the public option? It's far from clear that this is the case.

Suppose that the bill as reported out of committee to the Senate floor contains a public option. Opponents of the public plan could then try to pass an amendment to strip that provision. Proponents of the public option could try to filibuster voting on that amendement. But as I suggested earlier, I suspect that would probably be a mistake as even if the filibuster succeeded, it might encourage Democrats who are wavering on the overall package to filibuster everything else. So I suspect the public option needs at least 50 votes worth of support overall (with Vice President Biden potentially casting the 51st, tiebreaking vote as needed).

Alternatively, suppose that the bill that hits the Senate floor does not contain a public option. In this case, proponents of the public option could propose an amendment that included it. This amendment, however, would almost certainly be subjected to a filibster, meaning that a public option would need 60 votes to pass. It almost definitely does not have that many (even if there were a senator here and there who who was willing to break a filibuster on the issue even if they did not support the public plan itself.)

So for the public option to pass, it probably needs to be included in the initial, unamended bill that hits the Senate floor. This means that it probably needs to be supported by a majority of the Senate Finance Committee. But this is a little bit of a problem, since the public option only appears to have seven solid yes votes in the Finance Commitee when it will need 12:

Likely Yes (7): Rockefeller, Bingaman, Kerry, Schumer, Stabenow, Cantwell, Menendez
Probable Yes (1): Wyden
Swing (4): Baucus, Lincoln, Bill Nelson, Snowe
Probable No (2): Carper, Conrad
Likely No (9): Grassley, Hatch, Kyl, Bunning, Crapo, Roberts, Ensign, Enzi, Cornyn

If you could get a majority of this group of 23 senators to support the public option, then it would have better-than-even odds of being included in the bill that made it to the President's desk. Getting a majority of this group, furthermore, would probably mean that folks like Blanche Lincoln and Bill Nelson had voted in favor, meaning that the bill had at least 50 votes worth of support in the Senate overall.

On the other hand, I don't think a public option is likely to be included in a conference report if it hadn't already been approved in the bill passed by the Senate. This is the sort of thing that would make some senators very angry -- wavering Democrats who were looking for an excuse to vote against health care would have one, and could blame the liberal conferees for ruining their hard-earned compromise. Maybe liberals get really lucky with the conference commitee appointments and the Preisdent's approval has ticked back upward to 57 or 58 percent because of some good economic news or something; it's possible that you could add a public option at the conference stage. But it's just not very likely; there's too much risk that the conservative Democrats in the Senate will feel as though they've been baited-and-switched.

So, again, in order for a public option to pass, it probably requires the support of:
1. A majority of the Senate Finance Committee;
2. A majority of the Senate overall.
...and these two things are highly correlated; it is likely that either both are true or neither are.

When Kent Conrad says the public option does not have the votes, I suspect this means that (i) he himself does not want to vote for it; (ii) Max Baucus, the committee chair, is no more than lukewarm on it; (iii) senators like Carper and Lincoln have told him they'd prefer to vote on a bill without a public plan. If Conrad knows this, then the White House probably does too. There's some utility to them in pulling back on the public option now as (i) it signals their willingness to broker a deal while a deal can probably still be had and (ii) it prepares the liberal blogopshere to be let down gently, and perhaps to have rebounded by the time the bill comes up for final passage in the fall and their phone calls and door-knocks could be essential.

If the White House now says that Kathleen Sebelius "misspoke" in her statements on CNN this morning, they still have a lot of explaining to do. Did Barack Obama, Robert Gibbs, Bill Clinton, and Dick Durbin also misspeak when they hinted that it was time to move past the public option? Did they not know that they'd generate headlines like this one on the Drudge Report, headines that would take a lot of wind out of the public option's sails?

The White House had to know these things. This has not been a subtle hint. If they're hedging a bit now, it's probably because they're hoping to temper the reaction some in the blogopshere. I don't blame them for wanting to do so. And I don't blame the blogosphere for being angry -- the White House did not provide much in the way of leadership on this issue. But that doesn't mean it isn't the right time for the White House to (at least mostly) cut bait. There's likely going to have to be some sort of "regrouping" moment in September for health care to pass -- some sense of momentum that the White House can sustain for two, three, four weeks. If you'd waited until then to table the public option, such a moment would be less likely. There also probably has to be some effort to sell the public on the virutes of the plan as is -- and if the Administration can't convince the liberal blogopshere of that over the next 2-4 weeks, they almost certainly can't hope to do so to the general public.

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Life After the Death of the Public Option

From the President on downward, the White House now seems resigned to losing the fight over the "public option", a government-run insurance plan that would complete against private plans. It's time to re-assess the playing field in light of this development.

Is the public option really dead? Probably.

Perhaps the better question is whether the public option was ever really 'alive', meaning that it ever had enough votes to pass both the House and the Senate. We estimated based on committee votes that a bill containing a fairly weak public option -- like the one approved by the House's Energy and Commerce Committee -- would be a favorite to pass the House but probably only by a slim margin, with between 220-225 votes for passage (a minimum of 218 are required). And arguably, the conditions have worsened somewhat for health care reform since the Commerce Committee's compromise passed on July 31st.

It's the Senate side, though, where the public option was encountering most of its difficulties. Only 37** Senators, according to the whip count at Howard Dean's website, were firmly on board with the public option, whereas at least a few Democrats (Mary Landrieu, Joe Lieberman, Kent Conrad) had stipulated their opposition to it. (** EDIT: The information at the Dean website appears to be somewhat out of date. More recent counts show something like 43-45 Dems in favor.) There were nevertheless a number of scenarios under which one can imagine a bill with a public option having passed -- Lieberman, Landrieu, et. al. might be nominally opposed to a public option, but is their opposition so firm that they would vote to filibuster any bill that contained one?

The White House has evidently concluded that this is a real threat. I don't see any real obvious reason to doubt their assessment. For those who have come to a different conclusion, I'm all ears -- give me a detailed, practical (not theoretical) scenario by which a bill containing a public option passes both chambers and gets the President's signature. But I don't see it.

Keep in mind that, even if a bill with a public option made it to the Senate floor, it would be subject to an amendment that could strip that provision. Considering that virtually all of the 40 Republicans would vote for such an amendment, it would only need perhaps 10-12 Democratic votes to pass, something which it could quite possibly achieve. Now, progressives could try to filibuster that amendment. But if they did so, senators like Landrieu and Ben Nelson could then filibuster the overall bill with a clear conscience (or at least a good excuse).

Why doesn't the public option have the votes for passage? You'd think that a provision that is both fairly popular and money-saving was a good bet for passage. But the insurance industry really, really does not like the public option. We'd previously estimated that its lobbying influence has cost the public option something like nine (9) votes in the Senate.

This is an unpleasant truth. But just because it's an unpleasant truth doesn't mean that it's not the truth.

Is a bill without a public option worth passing (if you're a Democrat)? From a near-term political standpoint, almost certainly yes. Bill Clinton suggested on Thursday that the President's approval rating would get a five-point boost the moment that health care legislation passed with his signature. I don't know if that's exactly right, but this is certainly a better scenario for Democrats than the world in which health care reform fails and they're getting blamed by pretty much everybody and have nothing much to run on in 2010.

From a long-term political standpoint, some of the less effective versions of the House and Senate bills could create problems for Democrats down the road. For example, I've argued that the compromise floated by Max Baucus's Senate Finance Committee could wind up making quite a few folks upset, since it contains rather ungenerous subsidies and an individual mandate but no public option and no true employer mandate. If your employer drops your health coverage a few years hence and you have to buy an expensive plan on your own without much help from the government, you're probably going to be fairly peeved about the country having spent $900 billion to put you in this predicament. Hopefully, if the Democrats are giving up on the public option, they're at least getting something for their willingness to compromise, such as a stronger employer mandate and more aggressive regulations on insurance premiums.

Forget politics for a moment -- what about from a policy standpoint? The fundamental accomplishments of a public option-less bill would be to (1) ensure that no American could be denied coverage because of a pre-existing condition or because they became sick; (2) subsidize health insurance coverage for millions of poor and middle-class Americans.

These are major, major accomplishments. Arguably, they are accomplished at too great a cost. But let's look at it like this. The CBO estimates that the public option would save about $150 billion over the next ten years -- that's roughly $1,100 for every taxpayer. I'm certainly not thrilled to have to pay an additional $1,100 in taxes because some Blue Dog Democrats want to placate their friends in the insurance industry. But I think the good in this health care bill -- the move toward universal-ish coverage, the cost-control provisions -- is worth a heck of a lot more than $1,100.

Can progressive Democrats in the House block a bill without a public option from passing? If they want to, they probably can. We estimated earlier that a bill with a weak public option would garner about 220-225 votes in the House, assuming no liberal objections. Perhaps a bill with no public option at all could do a bit better -- maybe 230 to 240 votes, gaining some ground among Blue Dogs and a maybe a very few moderate Republicans. That would mean that you'd only need between about 15-25 progressives voting against such a bill to block passage; FireDogLake reports that they've already found 12 who are willing to do so.

But I'm not sure where that would leave progressives. If you re-inserted a public option, you might lose as many Blue Dog votes as you gained back from progressives. Even if you managed to avoid that, the public option would probably get killed by the Senate. Maybe you could gamble on a bill with a public option passing the House, a bill without one passing the Senate, and then the House bill winning the floor fight on the conference report. But this is usually not what happens. Instead, the Senate tends to win floor fights over conference reports, since they can filibuster them.

But don't progressives need to draw a line in the sand somewhere? I'm sympathetic to this argument from a game-theory standpoint. But (1) lines in the sand won't mean anything if they're washed to sea by a wave-like 2010 election; and (2) I'm not persuaded that the lack of progressive willpower is responsible for compromises on bills like health care, climate, and the stimulus package. The stimulus package passed the House with only 26 more votes than were required for passage and had just one vote to spare in the Senate. The cap-and-trade bill passed with just one extra vote in the House and has yet to pass the Senate (and probably won't). A health care bill, even under somewhat best-case scenarios and even without a public option, is unlikely to gather more than about 230-240 votes in the House and perhaps 62-64 in the Senate.

It doesn't seem to me as though the Democratic leadership (including President Obama) is unnecessarily watering down bills for the sake of achieving a "bipartisan" outcome. It seems, rather, that they're calibrating things relatively well, and squeezing about the most juice they can out of these initiatives given the institutional imperatives of the Congress.

By all means, try to change those institutional imperatives. Organize primary challenges against Senators and Representatives who are too conservative relative to their districts; these can have somewhat dramatic -- if probably somewhat temporary -- effects on Congressional behavior. Try to build some momentum against the filibuster. Expose Senators and Representatives who are voting against the best interests of their district because of special-interest money. Push Democrats to end the seniority system in its selection of committee chairs and floor leaders. And work on shifting the Overton window where you can. But I don't think the problem is that progressives are disempowered. It's simply that they don't constitute a majority. Non-Blue Dog Democrats make up 47 percent of the House. They probably do make up a majority of the Senate (although this is arbitrary; the Blue Dogs aren't formally active in the upper chamber), but in the Senate, a mere majority isn't good enough -- you need a supermajority.

How much of this is Obama's fault? I've never been particularly sanguine about the prospects for the public option's inclusion in a health care reform bill. I thought it was going to require a major rhetorical commitment from Obama back in June to get it passed, and even then that it would take some luck on top of that. In practice, Obama sort of dipped his toes in the water on the public option but never really took the plunge. You can make the case that this was a mistake. And certainly, I've been underwhelmed with the President's messaging on health care, although it's been better of late. But the point is, there is a lot of path dependence here: given the decisions he made earlier, the failure of the public option was probably inevitable and to have continued to press for it might have harmed the chances for health care's passage overall. If you want to blame Obama for this, go right ahead -- one thing I worry about with this President is that he tends to hedge his decisions too much. I would say, though, that this is almost certainly a tactical, rather than a strategic, mistake.

Incrementalism seems to be a popular meme these days -- could the public option do better as a standalone provision? While bearing in mind that bargaining is the third stage of grief, this seems to me to be a somewhat realistic hope, especially if Barack Obama is elected to a second term. If a health care reform bill passes, then the government will paying for private insurance coverage for some low-to-middle income individuals. This will tend to give everyone a more direct interest in cost containment: if a low-income family's insurance coverage is costing more than it should because of the absence of competition from a public option, it will be the taxpayers making up the difference. Of course, there would be some people arguing to blow the whole thing up entirely for this reason. But if someone then proposed a public option -- a provision that would spare $150 billion from the public dole and which would give consumers more choices -- it would seem to have a fairly compelling case. Part of the problem the public option faces is that it's a somewhat popular, cost-reducing measure which is mired in a somewhat unpopular, thousand-page, $900 billion bill. When taken as a standalone measure, its cost savings would be more transparent and its opponents would have less ability to confuse the public about its costs and benefits.

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