Bruce Bartlett articulates something that I’ve been wanting to write about for a while about the “read the bill” nonsense, and since he did a better job of it than I would have, I’ll just direct you to him:

The 1,990-page length of the health reform bill is once again bringing forth demands that members of Congress be required to read the legislation before voting on it. While a seemingly reasonable demand, it is, in fact, a waste of time.

The reason becomes obvious the moment one actually reads legislative language.

[...]

For these reasons, reading an actual bill is a completely useless exercise for the vast majority of members of Congress and staff. They rely heavily on committee reports that are supposed to accompany all bills coming up for a floor vote. These reports are written by committee staff and are required to faithfully reflect the bill’s intent. They may contain important details, clarifications, data, citations to hearings, and supporting materials, such as a section-by-section analysis, that allow the legislation to be intelligible to non-lawyers and other non-experts.

In addition, both Republicans and Democrats in Congress have organizations that review all bills coming up for a vote, summarize them and offer political perspectives. Here, for example, is the House Republican Conference report on the health bill. If one’s party holds the White House, a member may find the Statement of Administration Policy to be important in understanding a bill and how to vote on it. Here is the SAP on the health bill. The Congressional Budget Office’s analysis may also be important. Here is its report on the health bill.

Read the whole thing, which is quite illuminating. The bottom line is that the language of a bill is generally technical and may have impacts on various pieces of existing law. If you’re a member of Congress who is not on the appropriate committee or not involved in drafting the legislation, it’s not necessary to read it. The legal language is there to ensure that particular policies get enacted. The important thing is that the members understand the policy, not the technical legal language.

The loss of a Republican seat in NY-23 under highly unusual circumstances notwithstanding, yesterday was a good day for Republicans. After crushing defeats in successive elections, they won back the Virginia governor’s office in a blowout and knocked off a billionaire incumbent governor in New Jersey despite having their vote split between two candidates.

I would, however, resist the temptation to see these contests as a referendum on Barack Obama’s presidency and the Democratic Party, much less a harbinger for 2010 and beyond.

Glenn Reynolds has an op-e in the NY Post titled “The Obama Magic has Faded.”

All politics is local, they say, and Tuesday’s off-off-year elections certainly had their local angles. Jon Corzine has been a terrible governor even by the undemanding standards of terribly governed New Jersey. Creigh Deeds, though he looked good to Democratic Party recruiters not long ago, turned out to be an undistinguished campaigner, more driven by the concerns of Washington Post editorialists than of Virginia voters. And NY-23 Republican nomineee Dede Scozzafava was a bizarre choice, bizarre enough to inspire a seemingly quixotic third-party run by Doug Hoffman.

But these local angles weren’t enough to keep the Obama administration out of the races. President Obama barnstormed Virginia and New Jersey — and pumped money and Joe Biden into NY-23 in support of Democratic candidate Bill Owens. (One suspects Owens would have preferred more money and less Biden.)

And — until it started looking as if they might lose — the Obama people were suggesting that these races would seal their mandate and encourage congressional wafflers to toe the line on health-care reform. Not so much, as it turns out.

Now, this is right, so far as it goes.  Exit poll analyses by both ABC and CBS show Obama remains personally popular but that people are extremely worried about the economy and the direction of the country.  The reality has set in that Obama’s a politician, not a messiah.  While many retain high hopes, most of the irrational exuberance has faded.  And, clearly, he doesn’t have coattails when he’s not on the ballot.  Then again, neither did Ronald Reagan.   Recall that Republicans lost 27 House seats in 1982.

A stronger case is made by Dan Balz in an “analysis” piece at WaPo titled “Contests serve as warning to Democrats: It’s not 2008 anymore.”

Neither gubernatorial election amounted to a referendum on the president, but the changing shape of the electorates in both states and the shifts among key constituencies revealed cracks in the Obama 2008 coalition and demonstrated that, at this point, Republicans have the more energized constituency heading into next year’s midterm elections.

The most significant change came among independent voters, who solidly backed Democrats in 2006 and 2008 but moved decisively to the Republicans on Tuesday, according to exit polls. In Virginia, independents strongly supported Republican Robert F. McDonnell in his victory over Democrat R. Creigh Deeds, while in New Jersey, they supported Republican Chris Christie in his win over Democratic Gov. Jon S. Corzine.

For months, polls have shown that independents were increasingly disaffected with some of Obama’s domestic policies. They have expressed reservations about the president’s health-care efforts and have shown concerns about the growth in government spending and the federal deficit under his leadership.

Tuesday’s elections provided the first tangible evidence that Republicans can win their support with the right kind of candidates and the right messages. That is an ominous development for Democrats if it continues unabated into next year. But Republicans could squander that opportunity if they demand candidates who are too conservative to appeal to the middle.

This is exactly right.  Independents, by their very nature, are fickle.  When thing are going well, they’ll stick with the party in power and when they’re not, they’ll vote for change.

So, if unemployment is still high and we’re still mired in a mess in Afghanistan a year from now, the Republicans will have an opening to make major gains in the House and Senate.  But they’ll need candidates who won’t alienate independents.

I followed the Virginia race with some interest given that I live in the Commonwealth.  It wasn’t a race about Obama or national issues at all.  Deeds was the surprise winner of the Democratic primary, with the well-financed and well-known Terry McAuliffe and Brian Moran killing each other off and leaving Deeds standing.   He was a moderate Democrat with appeal to rural Virginians who had narrowly lost to McConnell four years earlier when the latter got 323 more votes for attorney general.  But when the Washington Post went on attack against McDonnell for an old master’s thesis and some rather unprogressive statements about women and homosexuals, Deeds decided to run a nasty campaign hammering at those points.  It backfired, as McConnell turned the other cheek and came across as a decent, reasonable man.  (As an aside, I should note that Republicans easily won the lieutenant governor and attorney general races in landslides, too. )

In New Jersey, Corzine is personally unpopular and his state is in bad shape.  I posited on last night’s OTB Radio that it was all downhill after the motorcade incident, which was the first time I realized what a jackass Corzine was, but I don’t follow Garden State politics closely enough to know for sure.   At any rate, Chris Christie was perceived as a reasonable alternative even in a Democrat-leaning state.  Corzine’s genius advisers decided their best course was to double down on the jerk factor, campaigning on the theme that Christie was too fat to be governor.  Oddly, it didn’t do the trick.

Regardless, these races demonstrate that Republicans can win — even with all the damage to the brand suffered in recent years — given both an opening and a solid candidate.

Economist David Zetland explains the political economy of lobbying by auctioning a dollar bill for $3.75.

As he explains:

This set of incentives (”on the margin”) makes it rational to keep raising the stakes given that you have bid because winning always has a higher payoff than losing. The “right strategy” is, of course to not bid at all. (As Joshua, the computer, says in Wargames: “Strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”)

Fifth, all-pay auctions reproduce the dynamics of political lobbying in which the politician is auctioning the wording to some law, and lobbyists from both (many?) sides are contributing money, perks and attention to get their version of the law. All of the lobbyists pay, but only the politician wins.

Now, Zetland is surely right about how sunk costs can make otherwise irrational behavior perfectly rational.   But his view of lobbying is too cynical.

Yes, organized groups can and frequently do manage to get language into bills and even enact major public policies that would never come to pass if every citizen’s opinion was taken into account.  But that’s a function of “who cares more” rather than bidding.   Indeed, contra the “Wargames” quote, the reason the majority often loses is because they’re not playing the game.

With rare, criminal, exceptions, American politicians aren’t auctioning their positions or the language of bills to the highest bidder.  Rather, the highest bidders are scrambling to get politicians who largely agree with them elected and to get those they deem persuadable to see their position.

via Alex Tabarrok

As widely expected, the Powers That Be have declared the recession  over, while cautioning that the economy still has a long way to go.  And, of course, the Obama administration is crediting its stimulus packages for the good news.

It might not feel like it to most voters, but the U.S. economy is growing again after a more than a year of contraction.  The nation’s gross domestic product grew at a seasonally adjusted rate of 3.5 percent for July through September – the first growth since the spring of 2008, the Commerce Department said Thursday. That marks a sort of unofficial end to the recession that has bedeviled President Barack Obama since he took office. Economists credited the growth to consumer spending – up 3.4 percent – fueled in part by government stimulus, such as the popular Cash-for-Clunkers car-buying program.

But Obama economic adviser Christina Romer stopped well short of declaring victory. “The U.S. economy is moving in the right direction. However, this welcome milestone is just another step, and we still have a long road to travel until the economy is fully recovered,” Romer said in a statement.

That’s because more than 15 million Americans remain out of work, and a jobs report is due next week that’s likely to show the nation’s unemployment rate continues to creep upward toward 10 percent. That means the White House and politicians on the Hill will be very careful about declaring the recession over, even if the economy has finally started growing again.

The Obama administration said its analysis found that the $787 billion stimulus program contributed between 3 and 4 percent points to the GDP growth – meaning the nation’s output would have risen little, if at all, in the past quarter without it.

Now, taking credit for good things that happened on their watch is simply what presidents do.  Bush took credit for his recovery, Clinton for his, and Reagan for his.  Naturally, few presidents take the blame for bad times, which they attribute variously to the business cycle, their predecessors, the Congress, or a national malaise.

But it’s rather clear that neither the $787 billion stimulus nor the Cash for Clunkers programs had much to do with the recovery, such as it is.   Aside from the disputed AP report claiming that the administration’s report used some fuzzy math and bizarre calculations, the fact of the matter is that the recession was global and so, too, is the recovery.  Things happening all over the world, generally, are not explainable by small gestures made in a single country — even a hyperpower.

Cash for Clunkers, most agree, simply moved up sales that would have happened later in the year.  That’s not such a bad thing so far as it goes, except that many dealers are still waiting to get paid.  It’s hard, then, to credit money that hasn’t been distributed for stimulating the economy.  But, yes, condensing several months’ sales into a single month does boost the books for that quarter.

Ditto the “stimulus” package, almost all of which has all along been targeted for out years.  Again, very little of that money has been spent and therefore it’s impossible for it to have done much stimulating, aside from whatever psychological impact the government’s “doing something” may have had.  Most of the “stimulus” will presumably be spent well into the recovery, making it more akin to ordinary “pork.”

Again, this isn’t a partisan attack on Obama.  He inherited an economic crisis and is doing what politicians do under the circumstances.  And, yes, I similarly rejected George W. Bush’s claims that his modest tax rebate ended the recession he inherited from Bill Clinton.  For that matter, I didn’t blame Bill Clinton for said recession nor overly credit him for the economic boom that took place over much of his tenure.  He had the good fortune of being in office during the Internet boom and post-Cold War booms and the good sense not to screw it up.   Presidents have some impact on the economy but not nearly as much as we attribute to them.

As to the recovery itself, the administration is right to downplay expectations.  NPR’s Kevin Whitelaw:

“We’re no longer simply on the roller coaster to hell,” says Donald Luskin, the chief investment officer for Trend Macrolytics LLC, an economics consulting firm. “But the idea of returning back to normal growth levels? That will be well into next year.”

[...]

“In a normal recession, the leaves fall off the trees because it’s autumn,” Luskin says. “In this recession, the leaves fell off the trees because there was an enormous forest fire. It’s a little bit of uncharted territory to know how long it will take to come out of that.”

This time, the damage was so severe that companies and consumers alike appear more reticent to return to their old habits. With Americans still adjusting to the tough new economic realities, consumer spending might not recover for quite some time.

“We have seen a permanent change in consumer behavior after seeing their retirement savings and home values go down,” says Gus Faucher, the director of macroeconomics at Moody’s Economy.com. “People are going to be more cautious coming out of this recession than they have in previous recessions because of the depth of the downturn.”

“Permanent” is the wrong word here.  Consumer confidence always rebounds.  We’ve had numerous booms and busts since the Great Depression, after all.  But not only was this recession deeper than any in quite some time it was this first major economic crisis in today’s 24/7/365 media climate and therefore the most hyped in history.  It’ll naturally take longer to recover.

And some significant percentage of the 10 percent unemployed — a figure that’s all the more staggering after decades of record employment — will never get their old jobs back.  Most will eventually land somewhere but this is a serious shakeup of the composition of our jobs base, not the standard business cycle.

Photo credit: For Granted

IOZ (whose identity is apparently a mystery) sums up a recent debate that’s been brewing on several of the blogs I frequent:

When Kerry Howley made the irrefutable and yet quixotic point that any proper concern with liberty, whether practical or, ahem, merely philosophical, must grapple with the strictures of cultural mores and social conventions, for they affect the lives and freedom of those individuals with whose liberty libertarianism supposedly concerns itself equally to and sometimes more than the official acts and proscriptions and promulgations of the government-même, I made no comment, because honestly, this again? I like and respect Kerry. She is probably smarter than I am. I am sure she looks better in heels. Her efforts along these lines are perhaps noble, but nonetheless doomed.

It is not so much that they lack merit–on the merits, she is correct–as that they make a sort of category error. The problem is not that many libertarians are unwilling to consider the broader implications of their philosophy, but rather, that libertarianism is not a philosophy, not even a “political ideology,” as the more careful bet-hedgers might have it.

It is instead a lame, purely American third-party movement that sometimes appropriates the trappings of ideology in order to justify self-perpetuation in the face of a plurality-takes-all electoral system wholely inimical to minor parties. In reality, it is no more an ideology, let alone a philosophy, than is “Democrat” or “Republican.” It is moderately more consistent than either major American political party because it has no constituency. In the absence of a coalition, coherence. This is nothing to brag about.

That about covers it.

Olympia Snowe and other wayward Republicans will be subject to strong persuasion but no punishment from the caucus, Senate Republican leaders tell Politico.

Mitch McConnell and his deputies in the Senate Republican leadership are responding very cautiously to Olympia Snowe's decision to become the first GOP vote for a Democratic health care reform bill. Photo: AP

Mitch McConnell and his deputies in the Senate Republican leadership are responding very cautiously to Olympia Snowe’s decision to become the first GOP vote for a Democratic health care reform bill.

That’s about all they can do.

“My job as whip is not to twist her arm but to bring all the information that we can bring to bear on the issue and hope that people vote the way we would like to see them vote,” said McConnell’s No. 2, Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.). Kyl said a heavy-handed approach “doesn’t work.”

And indeed, it could backfire — not just with Snowe but with other Republicans who’ve indicated that they could cross over to help Democrats pass some of President Barack Obama’s top domestic policy initiatives.

In an op-ed in The New York Times over the weekend, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) suggested that he’s open to supporting a Democratic climate change bill. And in an interview published this week in POLITICO, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) said he was willing to try to find common ground with Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) on rewriting the rules for Wall Street.

Republican leaders know that if they crack down hard on Snowe, they risk pushing her and other wavering Republicans into the arms of the Democrats. So, instead, they’ll lobby their own intensely in order to keep the GOP united and force the Democrats to find 60 votes by themselves.

Shelby has assured Republicans that he won’t cross over on his own. He told POLITICO on Wednesday that he would “never support something as the lone Republican.”

But the same can’t be said of Snowe or Graham. Snowe was the only Republican on the Senate Finance Committee to vote for the Democrats’ health care bill Tuesday. And over the summer, Graham was the only Republican on the Judiciary Committee to vote in favor of Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court.

Shelby was twice elected to the Senate as a Democrat, switching parties when the GOP won the majority in 1994.  Still, he and Graham aren’t going anywhere unless pushed very, very hard.  But Northeastern Republicans like Snowe and Susan Collins would likely improve their positions by becoming Democrats, so treading lightly is McConnell’s only sane choice.

Lamar Alexander, who is in charge of the Senate GOP’s message, said that “our conference does not dictate policy to individual senators” and that opinion among Republican senators is “rarely unanimous.”

On Wednesday, Snowe said she’s not worried about being on the receiving end of any backlash within her caucus. And she dismissed reports that supporting a Democratic health care reform bill could cost her a chance at moving up to the top GOP slot on the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. “I have no reason to believe that,” she said.

Back when Arlen Specter was a nominal Republican instead of the nominal Democrat he recently became, I opposed having him chair the Judiciary Committee.   That wasn’t as punishment –I ‘d have given him another powerful chairmanship — but rather because confirming judges is one of a small handful of issues where party unity truly matters.   Surely, Science, Transportation, and Commerce shouldn’t be divided along party lines on most issues.

We’re a continental country with extraordinary diversity.  Senators from Maine are not going to see eye-to-eye on most issues with their counterparts in Kentucky.  Insisting otherwise is a surefire recipe for minority status.

The magnitude of the win of Angela Merkel’s coalition, coming on the heels of a center-right romp in the recent European Parliament elections and the ouster of several conservative governments in recent months, has spawned much hand-wringing about the decline of Europe’s Left.

I round up and analyze some of this commentary in my New Atlanticist essay, “Whither Europe’s Left?”

Ultimately, I view this as a cyclical rather than an ideological phenomenon.

Even the most moribund opposition parties will eventually find a charismatic leader to capitalize on the public’s fatigue with the governing party.  Republicans have dominated the presidency during my lifetime, winning 7 of 11 elections going back to Nixon’s landslide in 1968.  But, every time it looks like the Democrats are a permanent minority party, they either come up with a particularly dynamic leader (see Clinton, Bill and Obama, Barack) or they capitalize on Republican hubris (see, Carter, Jimmy and Obama, Barack).

[...]

Just when the American Democratic Party seemed to be too left-leaning and out-of-touch on the issues, Clinton and company rebranded them as “New Democrats.”  Margaret Thatcher and John Major and the British Tories held the reins of power for 18 years before Tony Blair and “New Labour” won a landslide victory; they’ve now held power a dozen years and are running aground.

It’s a virtual certainty that Europe’s center-left parties and America’s Republicans will, in the not-too-distant future, win back control of their respective governments.  And it’s an absolute certainty that, when they do, they’ll do so on decidedly different platforms than the last time they did so.

What do you think?

Steve Benen puts together a chart based on DailyKos’ weekly State of the Nation poll and notices that the GOP has virtually no support outside the South:

In case anyone’s having trouble reading the visual, the Republican Party’s favorability is very weak in Northeast (7% to 87%), and only marginally better in the Midwest (13% to 78%) and West (14% to 75%). In the South, however, 50% have a favorable opinion of the GOP, and only 37% have an unfavorable view.

Time will tell how the electorate responds to changing economic circumstances, the debate over health care reform, etc., and I can very easily imagine Democrats taking a drubbing in the midterms. But it seems the Republican Party would be in a much more competitive position — in the short and long term — if its base wasn’t centered in just one region.

As a long-time Southerner living in the DC suburbs of Northern Virginia (the South ends about 40 miles from here as far as I’m concerned) I agree so far as it goes.  Mostly, though, the survey results (and, yes, this poll is reputable despite who’s paying for it) simply point to the low state the GOP is in at the moment

Yes, the hard core base is in the South and Southwest.  Has been for years.  But the Democratic Party is a bicoastal party at its core.  Recall the famous 2000 and 2004 Election County-by-County maps.  Or even the less controversial state-by-state map from 2004:

In fairness, that’s a representation of a winner-take-all system and not quite comparable to the favorability survey.   But, remember, the Democrats were in much better shape in both 2000 and 2004 than the GOP is in 2009.   But relatively small swings in approval lead to drastic changes in voting outcomes.

There’s a reason the Democrats have been around since Jefferson’s/Jackson’s day (depending on who you ask) and the Republicans since Lincoln:  They’re adept at adapting to changing times.  (Also, they’ve rigged the rules in their favor.)  Whether it happens in time for the 2010 or 2012 election cycles, the Republican Party will naturally evolve to meet the realities of the country’s demographic and cultural shifts.  The Democrats did so in the late 1980s and early 1990s, becoming decidedly more moderate in the aggregate on law and order, defense, and other issues where they were getting hammered by the GOP.  And the Republicans have gradually become more embracing of popular social programs over the years ( if not yet the means to pay for them).

To survive at the state and local level, Republicans will have to find candidates who can appeal to non-Cuban Hispanics and a more socially liberal population.  From that group will come the next crop of gubernatorial, senatorial, and presidential candidates.   And, remember, no party has won more than three straight presidential contests since FDR and Truman made it five straight during the Depression and WWII.  Indeed, only Reagan-Bush made it three straight — forcing the Democrats to quit nominating Mondales and Dukakises and reinvent themselves with Clinton.  Who then nearly made it three in a row for the Dems.

Andrew Sullivan seems to argue that the losing side in an election thereby loses the right to protest:

It’s perfectly proper – even admirable – to demonstrate and argue against the new administration’s ideas, but it’s also worth recalling that this plan in its essentials was an integral part of the president’s campaign platform and his party’s effective manifesto. It was debated ad nauseam last year, and Obama won by a hefty margin. The tone of these protests suggests that this is some wild power-grab. It isn’t. It’s a centrist and not-too-ambitious plan to fulfill a clear campaign pledge as responsibly as possible within a sensible fiscal framework.

The protestors keep saying that they want their country back. Sorry, my fellow small-governmenters, but this country is a democracy, and you didn’t lose your country, you just lost an election. You had your chance for eight years. You blew it, and you lost. What Obama is doing is what he was elected to do. The principled response is not a massive, extremist-riddled hissy fit a few months in, but a constructive set of proposals to build on universal care for a more market-friendly and cost-conscious system in the future. You have to win some political credibility for that; and then you have to beat the man you lost so badly to last year. That’s the civil and civilized way forward for the right. It also seems, alas, to be the one they are currently refusing to take.

This is wrong on so many levels.

First, Obama won for a whole variety of reasons.  Candidates say all manner of things on the campaign trail but winning does not necessarily confer a mandate for all of those programs.  A goodly number of the centrists, independents, and even conservatives who voted for Obama did so because they found him personally appealing, found John McCain less than inspiring, wanted to accelerate our withdrawal from Iraq, wanted a clean break from eight years of George W. Bush, or any of a hundred other things.  This does not translate into “this election was about universal health coverage,” any more than Bush’s victory of John Kerry in 2004 was about privatizing Social Security.

Second, even if one were to believe that the healthcare debate was somehow central to the 2008 election, it doesn’t mean that the debate must therefore be forever closed.  Certainly, the war in Iraq and the general fight against terrorism were much, much more central to the 2004 election.  That didn’t end the discussion.  Nor should it have.

Third, one can generally be in favor of something and yet oppose the manner in which it is implemented. Obama’s campaign message on healthcare was rather vague and none of the plans circulating through Congress much match up to it.  Even many Democrats are unhappy with the current plans.

Fourth, this is the United States of America. The right to protest one’s government for whatever reason one wishes is enshrined right there in our Constitution. It’s the first thing mentioned in the Bill of Rights.

In his Daily Beast debut, Alex Massie rises in defense of Joe Wilson’s outburst. No, not so much whether Obama was lying in this particular instance but rather the very notion that it’s “inappropriate” to heckle the president.  The whole piece is worth a read but here’s a taste:

Trivial though it may seem, this brouhaha highlights a great flaw in the American system: You elect a monarch. In olden days and on the old continent, criticizing the monarch might limit your life chances. So too, alas, in the American capital today, as the arbiters of acceptable Washington indecency—that is, the Davids Broder and Gergen—decry your shortage of civility and surfeit of vulgarity.

The convention that Thou Shalt Not Speak Ill of the President in His Presence elides the great difference known to every Briton—that between insulting the head of state and insulting the mere head of the executive branch of government.

Insulting Queen Elizabeth is one thing; insulting Gordon Brown is practically an obligation. Disrespecting the former is an act of treason; disrespecting the latter and his office, a necessity: Every Wednesday, Brown must endure Prime Minister’s Questions, during which his enemies in Parliament grill him. Prime Minister’s Questions may not be the be all and end all, but it affords an opportunity for “telling truth to power” that does not exist in the regal American system.

America’s problem is that it has combined the head of state and the head of the executive branch into a single office, and it can no longer distinguish between the two roles. Obama’s health-care address was not given in his role as head of state. It was, rather, a political speech made by—pinch yourselves—a mere politician seeking to advance his own political agenda.

He makes a very good point here, extending the argument Alex Knapp makes in Bring Heckling to the Colonies! And, as a matter of principle, I agree.  Of course Wilson has a right to call Barack Obama a liar.  But there’s a time,  place, and manner for everything and an address to a joint session of Congress is not the appropriate venue.

The more I think about it, though, the idea of the president calling Congress together to give them their marching orders on health care is inappropriate.  I’m not calling out Obama here; he’s merely following recent precedent.  But, aside from the annual State of the Union address (which, frankly, I’d be happy to see return to its written message to Congress format) and genuine national emergencies such as the aftermath of Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 attacks, the very format is a bad idea.  It’s yet another way that we reinforce the mistaken notion that the president is “the boss” and that Congress has an obligation to carry out his agenda.

Presidents have the bully pulpit by the nature of their office and can easily get their message to the people whenever they want.  But let’s do away with him calling the elected representatives of the people together and lambasting them for not doing what he wants.

Thomas Friedman’s latest column, in which he argues Communist China’s system is preferable to ours because it “can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century,” has quite naturally generated a heated response in the blogosphere, with everyone from Reason editor Matt Welch to National Review’s Jonah Goldberg to American University lawprof Kenneth Anderson to Nick Denton’s Gawker ridiculing Friedman’s thinking and/or questioning his patriotism.

In my New Atlanticist post, “Chinese Autocracy vs. American Democracy,” I cut the old boy a bit of slack.

To be sure, Friedman elides some of the minor advantages America’s system has over China’s, such as freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly, access to the Internet and others too numerous to mention.  But Friedman, who’s been to China and talked with its cab drivers to gain fascinating insights about how the world works, knows this.

Frustrations and pique aside, Friedman doesn’t really prefer China’s system to America’s at all.   Rather, he prefers to a particular set of policy outcomes that China’s “enlightened” government can impose on its people without consequence, that our own more-or-less accountable representatives can not.   But that’s rather like preferring Fascism for the timeliness of its trains.

Especially if you make your living as an opinion writer.

Virginia GOP Gubernatorial candidate Robert McDonnell is taking quite a bit of flak for a thesis he wrote in college in 1989.

The media spotlight is on gubernatorial hopeful Robert McDonnell who is currently launching his 2009 campaign for governor of Virginia. McDonnell finds himself in hot water for his 1989 thesis, which outlines a position hostile to women’s interests and feminism.

Frankly, I think this kind of thing misses the mark. Politicians who have been in office for awhile have had ample opportunity to build a record that can be judged. More importantly, that record can show how a politician’s thinking has evolved over the years. People change their minds. They vote different ways. Moreover, as Will notes, this type of examination can have a chilling effect on academia:

Moreover, I’m wary of the chilling effect academic witch-hunts have on the interaction between experts and politicians. Presumably, we want our political leaders to get advice from academics, who are disinterested and frequently more knowledgeable on a particular subject. Academic documents are also fundamentally different from political ones – they’re less vetted, more exploratory, and ultimately less subject to artificial political constraints. I think this is a good thing, and I’d like to see more practical interaction between the academy and policy-makers precisely because academics have more freedom to come up with good ideas.

I completely agree. Judge McDonnell on his record in office; not his college thesis.

Gene Lyons has written a column headlined “You won’t win the healthcare debate by calling people stupid racists.”

The piece isn’t worth reading, I’m afraid, after the headline — which Lyons probably didn’t write. But the title is right on. It’s a truism of public debate that you will never persuade those who disagree with you by dismissing them as stupid or venal. Yet that’s become the standard first move on both sides of the aisle.

It’s likely true that, as Barney Frank’s ethnic heritage compelled him to point out, that arguing with some of the specific people who show up to rant and scream at the town hall debates is like arguing with a dining room table.  Some people are simply beyond reasoning with.

But — and this is the point Lyons is getting at — they represent the honest fears of a lot of decent folk who are amenable to persuasion.  And President Obama himself is taking the right tack in treating them as such.  The Democratic leadership in Congress and many liberal commentators, though, are lumping them in with the Birthers and LaRouchites.

When Republicans controlled the presidency and had strong majorities in the House and Senate, I often read calls from bloggers on my side of the aisle for purging the RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) from the ranks.  After all, the likes of Arlen Specter and  Lincoln Chaffee were a giant pain in the butt and always seemed to be in cohoots with the Democrats to craft a “compromise” bill that we weren’t going to like.   Why not get rid of these clowns and just work with the True Believers?

Well, by and by, it happened.  Most of the Republicans in the Northeast lost.  A couple of them became Democrats.

And now the Democrats control the presidency and have strong majorities in the House and Senate.  And, lo and behold, bloggers on their side of the aisle are saying the same thing.   Digby, responding to Charlie Cook’s claim that the Dems could lose 20 seats in the House in 2010, mostly among the so-called Blue Dogs:

I would love to hear anyone tell me why I shouldn’t be cheering for that outcome.

Cook said it would “reflect on” the president, but from my perspective it would reflect well on him. And if it happens because he rammed through meaningful health care reform instead of some watered down bucket of warm spit and the administration managed to get unemployment down, I think he will very likely have Morning in America in 2012.

To hell with Rahm and his appease the Blue Dogs at all costs strategy. What good is it if the president fails in 2012? If Cook is right and the Dems maintain their majority while losing a bunch of these reactionary wingnuts, I couldn’t be happier. And the Democrat should be happy too because it means they can pass successful legislation for a change.

Now, I encourage the Democrats to pursue this strategy.  I really do.  But instead of “winning by losing” they would simply be “losing by losing.”

Blue Dog Democrats are mostly Southern Democrats.  They’re moderate on the social issues and moderately hawkish on fiscal issues, making them liberals back home, conservatives in the Democratic Caucus, and “wingnuts” to the Netroots.  If they lose, they’ll be replaced by Southern Republicans who will naturally be to their right.

The Blue Dogs disagree with Obama on some issues but they wish him well and will vote with him when they can.  Almost all of them will campaign for him back home in places like North Carolina and Virginia and Florida, where he won narrowly last time even though Republicans have generally carried them.   Their replacements would disagree with Obama on more issues and hope he fails politically so that their party can take back the White House in 2012.

The only way that addition by subtraction works for a party is in the leadership.  A key committee chairman who opposes the party’s agenda can be more trouble than he’s worth.  For example, I opposed having Arlen Specter chair the judiciary committee, given how important the courts are to both party’s agenda.  (I would have given him a chairmanship of similar prestige where his views were more in line with the GOP’s mainstream.)  But taking away occasional supporters and replacing them with dedicated opponents is not a winning strategy.

While I share Michael Tomasky’s disdain for people carrying signs about “the blood of tyrants” while protesting democratically elected leaders, he goes too far here:

There was an election. One guy one, another guy lost. It wasn’t disputed. It wasn’t decided by an ideologically divided Supreme Court, which gave the win to the guy who won fewer votes. This election wasn’t even particularly close. It means that the side that won is entitled to try to pass its agenda. But the protesters don’t respect the result of the election.

To be sure, there are people, like the Birther conspiracists, who don’t in fact respect the result of the election.  But so what?  So long as they don’t actually engage in criminal conduct to express that disrespect, they’re entitled to be sore losers.

But winning an election doesn’t mean you get to do whatever you want for the term of your office.  Not in America’s system with it’s complicated checks and balances and divided government.  No, winning merely means you have better leverage on the wheels of power, not complete control.

George W. Bush was re-elected in 2004 by a comfortable margin and his party had control of both Houses of Congress.  Rather quickly, with the Katrina debacle and the emergence of a full-blown insurgency in Iraq, his administration got stuck in the mire.  His vaunted “political capital” was gone and he was unable to enact such things as the massive Social Security reforms on which he campaigned.

Beyond the practicalities of enacting public policy, the very idea of a “mandate” is rather silly.  Yes, Barack Obama won and yes, he was and is quite popular.  Yes, he campaigned on fixing health care and yes, fixing health care is popular.  But those who voted for Obama did so for a wide variety of reasons.  Similarly, those who like Obama and who want to “fix” health care may nonetheless disagree, vehemently even, with the particular set of fixes that are being bandied about.  Surely, they’re entitled to let that be known?

Just as surely, those who lost the last election are entitled to try to rally the troops and persuade independents to give them another chance.  That’s the essence of free speech.