The best description of modern American politics yet written

"As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself." This is quoted by Steve Benen this morning. He also adds:

There is one great overwhelming dilemma that dominates American politics in this early part of the 21st century. It is not the extent to which President Obama has failed to meet the expectations of the progressive base, though this matters. It is not the lazy, negligent, and incompetent establishment media, though this matters, too. The issue that should dominate the landscape is the radicalization of the modern Republican Party and the effects of having one of two major political parties descend into madness.

What brought Steve to write this? It is an article entitled "Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult" by long-time Republican Congressional staffer Mike Lofgren. Lofgreen recently retired after 28 years of working with Republicans on the Hill. Here are some excerpts:

Both parties are rotten - how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to corporate loot. The main reason the Democrats' health care bill will be a budget buster once it fully phases in is the Democrats' rank capitulation to corporate interests - no single-payer system, in order to mollify the insurers; and no negotiation of drug prices, a craven surrender to Big Pharma.

But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.

To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.

[...]

A couple of months ago, I retired; but I could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the US and global economies as hostages.

[...]

Everyone knows that in a hostage situation, the reckless and amoral actor has the negotiating upper hand over the cautious and responsible actor because the latter is actually concerned about the life of the hostage, while the former does not care. This fact, which ought to be obvious, has nevertheless caused confusion among the professional pundit class, which is mostly still stuck in the Bob Dole era in terms of its orientation.

[...]

It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant.

In his "Manual of Parliamentary Practice," Thomas Jefferson wrote that it is less important that every rule and custom of a legislature be absolutely justifiable in a theoretical sense, than that they should be generally acknowledged and honored by all parties. These include unwritten rules, customs and courtesies that lubricate the legislative machinery and keep governance a relatively civilized procedure. The US Senate has more complex procedural rules than any other legislative body in the world; many of these rules are contradictory, and on any given day, the Senate parliamentarian may issue a ruling that contradicts earlier rulings on analogous cases.

The only thing that can keep the Senate functioning is collegiality and good faith. During periods of political consensus, for instance, the World War II and early post-war eras, the Senate was a "high functioning" institution: filibusters were rare and the body was legislatively productive. Now, one can no more picture the current Senate producing the original Medicare Act than the old Supreme Soviet having legislated the Bill of Rights.

Far from being a rarity, virtually every bill, every nominee for Senate confirmation and every routine procedural motion is now subject to a Republican filibuster. Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself.

John P. Judis sums up the modern GOP this way:

"Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority. It is the party of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but also of the government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment trial of 1999. If there is an earlier American precedent for today's Republican Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to and who later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery."

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters' confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that "they are all crooks," and that "government is no good," further leading them to think, "a plague on both your houses" and "the parties are like two kids in a school yard." This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn ("Government is the problem," declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).

The media are also complicit in this phenomenon. Ever since the bifurcation of electronic media into a more or less respectable "hard news" segment and a rabidly ideological talk radio and cable TV political propaganda arm, the "respectable" media have been terrified of any criticism for perceived bias. Hence, they hew to the practice of false evenhandedness. Paul Krugman has skewered this tactic as being the "centrist cop-out." "I joked long ago," he says, "that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read 'Views Differ on Shape of Planet.'"

[...]

This constant drizzle of "there the two parties go again!" stories out of the news bureaus, combined with the hazy confusion of low-information voters, means that the long-term Republican strategy of undermining confidence in our democratic institutions has reaped electoral dividends. The United States has nearly the lowest voter participation among Western democracies; this, again, is a consequence of the decline of trust in government institutions - if government is a racket and both parties are the same, why vote? And if the uninvolved middle declines to vote, it increases the electoral clout of a minority that is constantly being whipped into a lather by three hours daily of Rush Limbaugh or Fox News. There were only 44 million Republican voters in the 2010 mid-term elections, but they effectively canceled the political results of the election of President Obama by 69 million voters.

[...]

This tactic of inducing public distrust of government is not only cynical, it is schizophrenic. For people who profess to revere the Constitution, it is strange that they so caustically denigrate the very federal government that is the material expression of the principles embodied in that document. This is not to say that there is not some theoretical limit to the size or intrusiveness of government; I would be the first to say there are such limits, both fiscal and Constitutional. But most Republican officeholders seem strangely uninterested in the effective repeal of Fourth Amendment protections by the Patriot Act, the weakening of habeas corpus and self-incrimination protections in the public hysteria following 9/11 or the unpalatable fact that the United States has the largest incarcerated population of any country on earth. If anything, they would probably opt for more incarcerated persons, as imprisonment is a profit center for the prison privatization industry, which is itself a growth center for political contributions to these same politicians.[1] Instead, they prefer to rail against those government programs that actually help people. And when a program is too popular to attack directly, like Medicare or Social Security, they prefer to undermine it by feigning an agonized concern about the deficit. That concern, as we shall see, is largely fictitious.

[...]

I have joked in the past that the main administration policy that Republicans object to is Obama's policy of being black.[2] Among the GOP base, there is constant harping about somebody else, some "other," who is deliberately, assiduously and with malice aforethought subverting the Good, the True and the Beautiful: Subversives. Commies. Socialists. Ragheads. Secular humanists. Blacks. Fags. Feminazis. The list may change with the political needs of the moment, but they always seem to need a scapegoat to hate and fear.

It is not clear to me how many GOP officeholders believe this reactionary and paranoid claptrap. I would bet that most do not. But they cynically feed the worst instincts of their fearful and angry low-information political base with a nod and a wink.

[...]

I do not mean to place too much emphasis on racial animus in the GOP. While it surely exists, it is also a fact that Republicans think that no Democratic president could conceivably be legitimate.

Then he lets loose on the failures of the political Democrats. And he is dead right!

The reader may think that I am attributing Svengali-like powers to GOP operatives able to manipulate a zombie base to do their bidding. It is more complicated than that. Historical circumstances produced the raw material: the deindustrialization and financialization of America since about 1970 has spawned an increasingly downscale white middle class - without job security (or even without jobs), with pensions and health benefits evaporating and with their principal asset deflating in the collapse of the housing bubble. Their fears are not imaginary; their standard of living is shrinking.

What do the Democrats offer these people? Essentially nothing. Democratic Leadership Council-style "centrist" Democrats were among the biggest promoters of disastrous trade deals in the 1990s that outsourced jobs abroad: NAFTA, World Trade Organization, permanent most-favored-nation status for China. At the same time, the identity politics/lifestyle wing of the Democratic Party was seen as a too illegal immigrant-friendly by downscaled and outsourced whites.[3]

While Democrats temporized, or even dismissed the fears of the white working class as racist or nativist, Republicans went to work. To be sure, the business wing of the Republican Party consists of the most energetic outsourcers, wage cutters and hirers of sub-minimum wage immigrant labor to be found anywhere on the globe. But the faux-populist wing of the party, knowing the mental compartmentalization that occurs in most low-information voters, played on the fears of that same white working class to focus their anger on scapegoats that do no damage to corporations' bottom lines: instead of raising the minimum wage, let's build a wall on the Southern border (then hire a defense contractor to incompetently manage it). Instead of predatory bankers, it's evil Muslims. Or evil gays. Or evil abortionists.

How do they manage to do this? Because Democrats ceded the field. Above all, they do not understand language. Their initiatives are posed in impenetrable policy-speak: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The what? - can anyone even remember it? No wonder the pejorative "Obamacare" won out. Contrast that with the Republicans' Patriot Act. You're a patriot, aren't you? Does anyone at the GED level have a clue what a Stimulus Bill is supposed to be? Why didn't the White House call it the Jobs Bill and keep pounding on that theme?

You know that Social Security and Medicare are in jeopardy when even Democrats refer to them as entitlements. "Entitlement" has a negative sound in colloquial English: somebody who is "entitled" selfishly claims something he doesn't really deserve. Why not call them "earned benefits," which is what they are because we all contribute payroll taxes to fund them? That would never occur to the Democrats. Republicans don't make that mistake; they are relentlessly on message: it is never the "estate tax," it is the "death tax." Heaven forbid that the Walton family should give up one penny of its $86-billion fortune. All of that lucre is necessary to ensure that unions be kept out of Wal-Mart, that women employees not be promoted and that politicians be kept on a short leash.

It was not always thus. It would have been hard to find an uneducated farmer during the depression of the 1890s who did not have a very accurate idea about exactly which economic interests were shafting him. An unemployed worker in a breadline in 1932 would have felt little gratitude to the Rockefellers or the Mellons. But that is not the case in the present economic crisis. After a riot of unbridled greed such as the world has not seen since the conquistadors' looting expeditions and after an unprecedented broad and rapid transfer of wealth upward by Wall Street and its corporate satellites, where is the popular anger directed, at least as depicted in the media? At "Washington spending" - which has increased primarily to provide unemployment compensation, food stamps and Medicaid to those economically damaged by the previous decade's corporate saturnalia. Or the popular rage is harmlessly diverted against pseudo-issues: death panels, birtherism, gay marriage, abortion, and so on, none of which stands to dent the corporate bottom line in the slightest.

He then explains what really matters to the Republican Party of 2011. I list here only his three categories.

1. The GOP cares solely and exclusively about its rich contributors.The party has built a whole catechism on the protection and further enrichment of America's plutocracy. Their caterwauling about deficit and debt is so much eyewash to con the public.
2. They worship at the altar of Mars.While the me-too Democrats have set a horrible example of keeping up with the Joneses with respect to waging wars, they can never match GOP stalwarts such as John McCain or Lindsey Graham in their sheer, libidinous enthusiasm for invading other countries.
3. Give me that old time religion.>Pandering to fundamentalism is a full-time vocation in the GOP.

There is a lot more in this great article. And it is written by a man who has been on the inside with the Republican leadership for nearly thirty years.

Remember "a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself." This article explains how it is happening to America right now. It is a process of the Republicans attacking to destroy American democracy and the hapless Democrats simply failing to defend democracy when it is under attack.

2012 is going to be a pivotal election for America, probably one as important as the election in 1860.

Does the economy now need government stimulus or austerity?

Is the current economic set of problems the result of Democratic policies as implemented by Obama, or is the economy sputtering because the Republicans who control the House of Representatives refuse are doing their free market fundamentalist austerity policies? David Shorr writes on that issue:

The heart of the Republican argument is the claim that government spending and taxation is "job-destroying" and otherwise harmful to the economy. Well, this view among Republicans (and sympathetic deficit-hawk Dems) put limits on the 2009 stimulus package and ruled out the possibility of a subsequent injection of stimulus. So if the economic disaster brought about by Bush policies wasn't proof enough, we are tragically getting another demonstration of what happens when free market fundamentalist policies win out over J.M. Keynes' time-tested, Great Depression-taming approach.

The real problem with Republican obstructionism isn't its rigid refusal to compromise or cynicism in wishing for the president's failure. What we have here is a grand experiment for our grand debate over government expenditure, regulation and the provision of public goods, i.e. whether they are necessities or threats for the economy. We should take the GOP at Grover Norquist and Ayn Rand's word; cuts in budgets and the public sector is the job- and prosperity-creating tonic for what ails our economy. Republicans have succeeded in sidelining the government and preventing it from propping up weak demand. It's not a stretch, therefore, to say this is the Republicans' economy -- not because of George Bush, but because of Paul Ryan, Michele Bachman, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul, Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, the Koch Brothers, Richard Viguerie...

The scorekeeper on this experiment can be considered to be the bond market. When the policies begin to work then businesses will begin to expand and they will need funds. Investors will invest in the companies and in the stock market rather than in the bond market. Demand for safe government bonds will drop, requiring bond issuers to offer higher interest rates.

In other words, low bond interest rates means that the economy is still doing poorly, higher bond interest rates will indicate that the economy is improving.

The Republican led charge into cutting government spending has resulted in the lowest bond interest rates since the 1950's. The markets are speaking very loudly. Why aren't the Republicans in the Congress listening? Or do they have other purposes rather than improving the American economy?

The endgame on the debt ceiling games.

This is the best description of what the idiots in Washington have really accomplished - nothing.

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Fineman and O'Donnell agree that it is going to come down to August 1 and we'll get an increase in the debt ceiling on a clean vote.

I really suspect that is too optimistic. I think it'll be a stalemate even at the end, with both sides blaming the other and the economy going to hell as they are paralyzed.

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Bill Maher is less optimistic. I agree with him.

In the meantime no one is doing a damned thing to increase jobs. That's the accomplishment of the Republicans with Obama's help. As Bill Maher says, in Nov ember 2012 the economy will have gone to crap (even worse than now) and the voters will have forgotten the lost Summer of 2011. Instead they are going to say "We elected a Democrat as President and we got a disaster."

I'd rather not be right on this.

Why does the media refuse to acknowlege the Republicans want to destroy Medicare?

From Steve Benen today discussing yesterday's Meet the Press Roundtable offered the question that progressives and liberals have to really focus on:

The question isn’t why Dems are on the offensive; the question is why the Beltway media finds it offensive [that the Democrats are attacking the destructive policy offered by the Republicans.]

The media takes the Republican narrative of destroying Medicare as serious policy, but the mere presentation of the facts by Democrats that what is presented is the destruction of Medicare is blown off as mere demagoguery or Mediscare. Why is the media so damned blind?

The answer to that question according to George Lakoff's book The Political Mind: Why you can't understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain is that the conservatives have framed the allowable possible narratives to exclude the idea that the government can possibly do anything at all without becoming a tyranny. If something does not fit into the narrative society prescribes for a given role then the individual will most often refuse to recognize the exceptions. That's because these narratives, as provided by society, are hard-coded into our brains. Those narratives are how we determine what things "mean."

People choose the roles they play from an accepted set of roles offered by society, and within each role only certain narratives are permitted. Let me emphasize - anything not fitting into that role is generally ignored unless it becomes extremely pressing. "Designing a successful government program to solve a social problem" is not an allowable narrative if your role is successful Washington reporter.

For conservatives generally the only acceptable way to get medical care is from private wealth or from current employment. That's their narrative. But it pointedly excludes the idea that the government might use reasonable insurance planning to organize the financing of health care services in advance of need and then let the private market bid to offer those services.

The answer to the question is that conservatives like the Koch brothers have worked reporters very hard to set the acceptable narratives that successful reporters are allowed to consider. There is no equivalent liberal or progressive effort being planned or conducted.

Also as Lakoff points out, merely providing the facts does not overcome the hardwired narratives built into the brain. The fantasy that such facts might change the narratives is the 18th-Century brain theory he is demonstrating is false. Frames and narratives are what matters, not facts. Those frames and narratives are hardwired into the structure of the brain. Facts that do not match the narrative will find it difficult to find a "landing place" in memory.

What has happened to the Democratic Party as a national organization?

Should the Democrats be nationalizing the Democratic political message the way the Republicans have or should the Democrats continue to run primarily a district-by-district set of campaigns with each candidate crafting the message to match what he or she thinks his voters want to hear from him?

The following was posted yesterday by at MyDD.

...in November, I was angry. The Democrats had just backed away from the only winable fight on the Bush Tax Cuts, and seemed hell bent on heading into the election with nothing much to get voters, at home either content or disenfranchised, out to the polls to fight back. Part of that was the policy they were defending, and part of it was the lack of any unified, consistent message. You can't campaign on principle your policy doesn't back up, and the principle the policy does portrays -- Eh, we sorta tried? -- isn't a winning slogan. Ta-da! GOP "mandate."

Jason is right. It appeared to me that the national Democratic Party did not want to put out a national Democratic message because it would have damaged too many already threatened blue dogs. So the Democrats ran district by district while the Republicans nationalized their message. Then, of course, the Citizens United decision allowed the national Republicans to throw tons of money into the election, and FOX News is one massive propaganda organization. They all demonized the Democrats.

Remember 2008 right after Obama was elected when the talk was that Bush/Cheney had made the Republican Party so toxic they wouldn't be able to win elections for decades and might even have to change the name of their party?

It didn't help a bit that the Republicans in Congress ran a two year program to stop the Democrats from doing anything to alleviate the problems caused by the Great Recession, especially unemployment. That worked for them also. The Republicans caused the Great Recession and the Wall Street collapse, so they lost in 2008. Obama came in and in two years was unable to break the lock the Republicans have had on the Senate so Obama and the Democrats were in office and got blamed for the problems the Republicans caused either through greed or through political calculation.

Well, with the Republicans in charge of the House a lot of the political terrain has changed. Now the Democrats can sit on the sidelines and expose the less than photogenic behavior of the conservatives. Take a look at what Steve Benen wrote today:

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) defended proposed Republican budget cuts to popular domestic programs Sunday as necessary to maintaining fiscal health.

"No matter how popular sounding these programs are, they jeopardize our children's future," the House Budget Committee chairman said on "Fox News Sunday."

So, let me get this straight. In order to help protect the interests of our children, we have to cut Head Start, student loans, Title I grants (which help schools with kids who live in poverty), and nutritional aid for pregnant women and women with young children.

By making these cuts, Paul Ryan believes he's helping make children's futures brighter. Presumably, the House Budget Committee chairman also intends to teach kids about fire safety by handing them matches and lighter fluid, and encouraging them to play.

Indeed, as far as Ryan is concerned, we just can't afford Head Start, student loans, Title I grants, and nutritional aid for pregnant women and women with young children, but we can afford tax breaks for people who don't need them, costing far more money.

But it gets better. Steve also pointed out:

The DCCC targeted 19 GOP House incumbents, nearly all of whom represent districts won by President Obama in 2008, blasting their support for a spending-cut plan that would "cut education" and "cut science and technology research," which would in turn cost jobs. Soon after, some of the Republicans facing the heat felt a little defensive.

In other words, the ads had the intended effect. GOP lawmakers in competitive districts wanted to be seen as cutting spending, but started getting nervous when Dems told their constituents about the breadth of the possible cuts.

This is a step toward nationalizing the 2012 campaign, something that Obama is going to have to do anyway if he is going to win reelection. But will Obama then shut down the Democratic national messaging machine again after 2012 and force the individual Democratic candidates to run mostly on whatever message each of them can craft?

Consider what Jack Balkin wrote on this subject:

What we are facing today is likely to be importantly different from previous periods of divided government before the George W. Bush Administration. The reason is that at the national level, contemporary American politics suffers from a pathological and debilitating condition: the emergence of parliamentary parties in a presidential system.

Democracy in the United States is based on a presidential system, in which different parties can control the presidency and the houses of Congress. In a parliamentary system, by contrast, the prime minister is head of government and also a member of either the majority party or a party in the majority coalition. Presidential systems have regular elections; there is no possibility of bringing down a government with a vote of no confidence (other than the possibility of impeachment and removal). In parliamentary systems, the head of government can call for new elections at different times, and the legislature can dismiss the head of government by a vote of no confidence.

The American system has long presumed that in periods of divided government, the President will be able to create coalitions with members of both parties in order to pass legislation. This is possible in part because, at least since the Civil War, and until very recently, American political parties have been agglomerations of heterogenous interests, and relatively ideologically diverse. (During the New Deal, for example, northern liberals, Catholics, and blacks coexisted in the same Democratic party as Southern whites). The heterogeneity of American parties is due partly to historical contingencies, and partly to the fact that candidates run to represent particular geographical constituencies in different regions of the country (rather than having seats assigned to them based--in whole or in part--on a party list). Parliamentary parties in most countries, by contrast, tend to be more ideologically coherent and centrally controlled. (Unlike the United States, with its first-past-the-post system, many parliamentary democracies also have some seats awarded by proportional representation, which also tends to concentrate power in the central party apparatus.)

In the past several decades, however, American political parties have come to resemble European-style parliamentary parties, as the old party system inherited from the New Deal has broken down. Each party is increasingly ideologically cohesive, and strongly differentiated from members of the other political party.

The way this point is usually expressed is that the parties are increasingly polarized. But a more appropriate way of saying this is that representatives of the two parties in Congress are behaving more like parliamentary parties. Perhaps ironically, given their anti-European rhetoric, the Republicans behave more like a European-style parliamentary party than the Democrats, who still retain more moderates in the House and Senate.

There are many overlapping reasons for this polarization. One is the primary system, which tends to produce less moderate, more ideological candidates. A second is the system of campaign finance. The national parties have more control over individual members because of the amount of money they can bring to bear (or withhold) to promote (or punish) candidates in the primary and general elections.

Parliamentary-style parties may work well in parliamentary systems, but their emergence in a presidential system is a particularly worrisome development.

I think we will see more nationalized politics from the Democrats because they have to match what the Republicans are already doing. This is going to be one more major strain on our political system, something which will cost the United States in both international power and in economic power. I'm not sure how long it will take the denizens inside the Washington beltway (what Paul Rosenberg called Versailles) to realize that the old rules really aren't working properly and the Republicans are actively screwing everything up for the rest of us. America is off in unknown territory without a guide.

It's hard to take the Republicans in Congress seriously

President Obama was in full professor-mode last night, and the Republicans were simply angry destructive children playing at being adults and trying to get people to pay attention to them. No one showed that more than Eric Cantor who was the serious child playing dress up and trying to act adult but having no comprehension of what was actually happening around him. As if that were not enough childishness for one night, Cantor was followed by the Congressional Republican court jester, Michelle Bachmann. CNN decide the crazy children were so cute that they had to display her like a doting grandparent who shows off his grandchild acting silly and gushes "Oh, how sweet."

The best response from the grownups that I have seen this morning comes from Steven Pearlstein at the Washington Post. This is how he characterizes the best the Republicans had to offer last night:

Republicans, it turns out, have no public investment strategy, just as they have no health-care strategy and no agreed-upon blueprint for reducing federal spending. What they have are poll-tested talking points, economic delusions and an overwhelming partisan instinct to say "no" to anything Barack Obama proposes. In their response to the president's State of the Union message, they remind us once again that they are not serious about economic policy and not ready to govern.

In framing his retooled economic and political strategy, the president emphasized using public money to leverage private investment and innovation, once a popular Republican theme.

In the short term, administration officials expect the bigger boost to the economy is likely to come not from jobs directly funded but from additional private investments spurred by increased confidence and a renewed sense of national purpose - "our Sputnik moment," as Obama called it.

The Republicans owned the Federal Government from 2001 until their idiocy got so clear that Democrats were brought back in the Run Congress in 2006 and Obama was brought in to replace the failed George Bush in 2008.

Face it. What did the Republicans do for America? Two unnecessary wars, the destruction of the financial underpinning of the federal government after Clinton had set it on the way to fiscal surpluses, the destruction of the great city of New Orleans through mismanagement of the rescue and rebuild process after Katrina hit it and the greatest economic disaster since 1929 which was completely avoidable if the adults had been in charge in Washington and on Wall Street.

With the two wars still bleeding American taxpayers and killing American troops and the unemployment at close to 10% (a number that is carefully held down by conservative definitions) all the Republicans can offer as rebuttal to Obama's State of the Union speech last night was the sedate unrealistic ignorance expressed by Eric Cantor and the loud primal scream of frustration that Michelle Bachmann awkwardly displayed.

Why are the Republicans acting so idiotic in public when America is suffering so from the first decade of Republican mismanagement during the Bush administration? People with money (e.g. The Koch brothers, Howard Ahmanson, Jr. and Houston's Bob Perry. Then there is the Wall Street money, the insurance lobby money, the Military Industrial Complex money protecting its contracts, and many more.) are stirring up the American crazies and the Republican politicians need those crazies if they are to continue to hold their elected offices. Without those well-financed special interest groups, America could have a marginally sane opposition party. as it is we get Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Eric Cantor and Michelle Bachmann.

So last night as the serious adults tried to work out how America will deal with the most challenging period it has undergone since the Great Depression and WW II, the Republican Party responded by offering the rantings of self-centered ignorant children playing dress-up and keeping the adults from doing serious work.

The Republicans are not ready to govern, and they are doing everything they can do to stop the Democrats from governing, just as America needs its best minds working to determine how to deal with the disasters Republican government have left us with. Last night put it all on display.

Oh, and the media did not show that it has a serious purpose, either, as it catered to the crazy children running the Republican Party and released an advance copy of the SOTU speech early.

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Addendum 1:25 PM
This, from Steve Benen comparing Michelle Bachmann's idiocy to the speech by the more polished Eric Cantor, is interesting. They spouted the same nonsense.

But here's the funny part: substantively, Bachmann's nonsense was roughly identical to the foolishness repeated by Paul Ryan in the official Republican SOTU response. Note Media Matters' fact-check of Ryan's speech and then check Media Matters' fact-check of Bachmann's speech. The similarities are striking -- with a few exceptions, they had the exact same message.

So who is handing them their talking points? This message is obviously centrally controlled.

Really. Who is it that controls this idiocy? I have hinted at a few of the culprits above. With the Citizen's United decision from the corporate-owned U.S. Supreme Court, though, tracking that information down soon enough to make a difference politically is going to be almost impossible.

111th Congress: Democrats paid a high price, but they chose wisely

Steve Benen, evaluating the recent two years of the 111th Congress, quoted the following from Rachel Maddow:

"Democrats had a choice when they became the governing party. When they won those last two elections and they took control of the two branches of government that are subject to partisan control in our country, they could have governed in a way that was about accumulating political capital with the primary goal of winning the next election. They could have governed in constant campaign mode. Or they could have governed in a way that was about using their political capital, not accumulating more of it, about spending the political capital they had to get a legislative agenda done, to tackle big, complex, longstanding problems that had languished."

The Democrats have really gotten a lot of stuff done that has languished for a long time. The Affordable Care Act is only one element, and it was a really big one. And the process has really exposed the warts of the American political system. (I strongly suggest that the U.S. Senate be simply abolished.)

But America is going to look back at what the Democrats did in the most recent Congress with pride. Republicans are going to whine, cry and lie.

Visual Presidential votes for the last 88 years

This is a visual representation of the red/blue map of America for the last 88 years by David Sparks. David Sparks is a PhD. candidate in political science at Duke University.

From David Sparks' blog:

"This animated interpretation accentuates certain phenomena: the breadth and duration of support for Roosevelt, the shift from a Democratic to a Republican South, the move from an ostensibly east-west division to the contemporary coasts-versus-heartland division, and the stability of the latter."

[h/t to David Kurtzl at Talking Points Memo.

Tuesday's election will not be pretty

This statement by Mike Lux gets at the heart of what has gone wrong with the Obama Presidency.

The biggest problem with the Third Way argument, though, connects to the fascinating back and forth between Obama and progressive interviewers in recent weeks: the palpable frustration expressed by, say, Jon Stewart in his interview is far less about having to make compromises to get things done, and far more with the insider-y ways deals were cut and decisions were made re what to compromise on. This is what Third Way and other pundits who argue for moderation never seem to understand: their version of centrism and the rest of the country's are very different.>

Exactly right. The Washington Insiders have consistently gotten things badly wrong, even when there have been people who told them they were not getting the nature of the problems right and not solving them. That has been especially true with economics, where Krugman was right that the stimulus was too small to work adequately but Obama was neither willing to fight for a larger one nor was he willing to explain to the voters what he was actually doing and enlist their help to get Congress to act!

This is Obama's leadership failure. He has been a backroom deal maker and a manager, but he has utterly failed to lead the country. He makes his deals, then he submits his view to the tender mercies of the Congress and he accepts the results they chew up and spit out. But he has never submitted his judgment directly to the public to convince the public what direction America should take.

The result is that America is getting the inadequate and lobbyist-mangled beltway wisdom out of Washington along with being chastised for not supporting the "superior" wisdom of the Washington insiders.

Obama may have had to go the backroom inside the beltway route to get health care passed. I personally think he did. But even there had he engaged better with the public, the result would have been better. That is what happened with the financial overhaul bill.

Now, a week before the election, Obama is on the hustings trying to get out the base vote so that he can get a Congress back that he can still work with. But the Conservatives and the multimillionaire oligarchs and the foreign-owned fascist FOX TV has gotten to the public before Obama did. Obama is playing defensive politics from a deep hole, and whether much can be done this late date is really questionable. Had Obama offered leadership to America for the last two years it still wouldn't be very good, but since he has not done that it will be worse.

Now America has thrown the structure of Congress in Washington to the tender mercies of a badly misinformed public. It is a dangerous experiment to see whether democracy can be abused and misinformed and still show wisdom on election day.

This is what leadership looks like

Bill Clinton is going out and telling the country why they should keep the Democrats in office.

Bill's right!

The Repubs are weak so the angry anarchists - populists are going after them.

Wonder why the teabaggers are going after the Republicans and not the Democrats right now? It's simple. The Repubs are a discredited party coming off a massive series of losses since 2006. The election of 2008 so completely flummoxed them that they could not agree on an acceptable candidate for President so their nomination devolved to McCain, who was and is hated by the Christian right which provides half their votes. After the debacle of 2008 they had so little to run on in 2010 that they famously put up a website asking for suggestions.

But the economy has changed the political calculus this year. Wall Street and the Republicans in partnership gave us the Great Recession, and the low-balled unemployment statistics sit at 9.5%. Foreclosures remain at record levels. So two years ago the voters voted for Hope and elected Barack Obama as President. And what's happened?

Nothing. Nada. Jackshit. the Democrats have Congress and the Presidency and they haven't done anything significant. In fact, the largest trend in the White House is to continue to Bush policies. Have they quit torture and rendition, or have they just quit announcing them?

So look at the Teabaggers. Essentially they are anarchists who refuse to assign a leadership. Their economics is largely the discredited Austrian school Libertarianism. Remembering the failure of the Ross Perot third Party movement, they looked at the two major parties and saw the Democrats in control of the two political branches and they saw the hapless Republicans who could not even decide on what platform to run on this year. So they are going after the Republicans in the primaries with a surprising level of success. So where will they go after this November's election?

The Democrats are not immune to the disaffection the teabaggers display. But they are also not a discredited minority party coming off of a Presidential election in which they were totally discredited as a party the way the Republicans currently are, either. The Republican Party leadership want to keep their jobs, so they are absolutely desperate to find issues they can compete for power on. Without the teabaggers and conservative big business domination of the media this would not be much of an election.

The Dems, however, gained national power in 2008 and so the leadership feels they are in the catbird seat. But I for one think they are as out of touch as the Republicans are. Right now the Dems are not weak enough to attack so that the teabaggers are focusing on the Republicans which is the party in disarray.

The Dems have way too many "leaders" like Rham Emmanuel who know that they are god's gift to the party and to the nation and refuse to accept questioning. They know how elections and politics really work and the Progressives are just fringe piss-ants who need to go away. They know best. Obama fits in the crowd, I think.

This is just the election where the Republicans are so weak they are facing the populists. The turn for the Dems is coming.

At last - the Truth about the Republicans is told.

Have you wondered where this ad was for the last ten years? This is the Truth!

Yes we can; No you can't. Boehner is wrong.

This was too good not to blog.



h/t to Talking Points Memo.

Health care summit has clear outcome

Yesterday's health care summit laid out the basic philosophical difference between the Democrats and the Republicans. Steve Benen has written his conclusions this morning, and I agree.

The Republicans do not recognize any major problems in the American health care system, and even if they did they do not believe that government could fix them. The top priority of the Republican Party is that it not regulate business or anyone and that taxes be kept very low. Every government action has to meet those two criteria before anything else. Government action is generally wrong and should not occur.

The Democrats believe that America has a broadly dysfunctional health care system that leaves out too many people and that offers suboptimal outcomes for many others. Too many Americans get sicker than they should and many die unnecessarily. In addition the system itself costs too much and the cost is increasing too rapidly. Looking at other wealthy industrial nations around the world these are problems which can be controlled, but it requires government action.

Yesterday' health care summit laid out those two positions along with the proposals the Democrats have developed over the recent year. The Democrats then asked the Republicans to join them in developing an appropriate set of activities to deal with America's health care problems. The Republicans replied "Not just no but Hell no!" and demanded that the Democrats abandon the effort to fix the system.

Since the Democrats are the majority party, they are now left to pass health care reform on their own. They have to. They were elected on the promise that they would.

That's where we are this morning, the day after the health care summit. The next step has to be for the Democrats to by-pass the filibuster in the Senate.

Health care, the Republican Party and the non-functional Senate

We are seeing groundbreaking Legislation finally drag through the Senate. Because of the nature of the Senate, it's far from an ideal bill, but considering how dysfunctional the Senate is, this is the best we'll get.

Lindsay Graham complained to NPR about how Nebraska was getting the federal government to cover the state portion of Medicaid while South Carolina was not. Somehow that seems unfair to Sen. Graham, but he could have worked his own deal by agreeing to vote for the bill and replace Sen. Nelson. Really, all Graham and the Republicans want to do is complain. The irrational aspects of the Senate bill are the responsibility of the Republicans.

That's because the Republicans have created the dysfunctional Senate using its small state bias (which magnifies the numbers of Republicans elected), its arcane rules, and the tradition of the filibuster.

The Republicans lost control of the Senate because they can't govern. Now they are making the Senate itself unworkable because they believe that short-sighted voters and the conservative media will blame the Democrats for the results of the Republican scorched earth policies and refusal to deal with the deep problems America currently faced. The Republican effort to Filibuster the defense appropriations bill in hopes they can delay passage of health care is unacceptable and irresponsible.

Consider what the Republicans have done to the Senate. They are demanding a 60 vote super majority in order to pass any significant legislation, and they are refusing to even present legislative actions to work with. The Republican Senators have abdicated their duty to the American nation in favor of somehow damaging the Democrats. The result it that the Senate now can only function by unanimous vote of all 60 Democrats. That's the reason for all the political deals to pass health care. With the requirement of a unanimous vote each Democratic Senator can block all Senate legislation unless he or she is effectively bought off.

The Republicans could stop this overnight. They just need a few Republican Senators to vote for the health care bill and replace the Democratic Senators who are holding up the Democratic Party. But the Republicans refuse to do anything for the American nation because they want to political advantage.

If the Democrats do not hang this action around the necks of the Republicans running for election in 2010 then they deserve to be voted out of office. Only the American people do not deserve the return of the Republican Party to Senate power.

In the meantime we get maybe half the health care bill that we could have if the Republicans had the interests of the American public in mind instead of the hope for return to power.

Health care reform: Maybe it'll look better in hindsight

I am very dissatisfied with the compromise piece of garbage the Senate has created and tried to call health care reform. I am also highly dissatisfied with the behavior of the White House and President Obama during the last six months. Howard Dean's recent announcement that the bill has gotten so bad that we should just kill it and come back for another try frankly resonates strongly with me.

Only, I recall the effort in 1993, and now 2009 is the next try. Sixteen years delay. That's a lot of insurance company unearned profits and quite a few Americans dead, sicker than they should be for much longer than they should be and many, many unnecessary bankruptcies.

I've got a list of some of the flaws in the Senate HCR bill as it was last night which I won't even bother to post. But the big one that I hear is the problem of the mandates demanding that people pay up to 17% of their annual income to private insurers for health insurance that will still stick them with annual and lifetime caps and shift a lot of the expense from the insurance to the sick people. But of the 47 million estimated uninsured, this bill still insured 31 million more.

It's a step. A big one. And while is has a lot of flaws, it moves the correct direction in a large jump and in a reasonable (if slow) period of time. This needs to be done regardless of how bad the bill is. Get this done now, and then fix what doesn't work, because this is still fixing a whole lot of what does not work today. Except for the piece of crap that was Part D of Medicare (the unfinanced drug bill with the doughnut hole to save money) there has been no major positive improvement in the health care system since the Medicare bill in 1965.

So for anyone who thinks that Howard Dean's call to kill the bill and start over, take a look at the history of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation as presented by TPM Reader PT.

This health care reform bill is massively significant for the nation. It can be moved towards right now, or it can be killed now, to someday in the far future be again resurrected - at massive cost to the nation. The really big flaws in the current bill and feeding the massive egos of Senators Nelson and Lieberman notwithstanding, it is still time to pass the damned bill they allow us. It will be fixed afterwards. It will have to be. But that will be much easier than this initial restructuring of the system.

A murkey view of the coming 12 months in politics

When Obama was elected in November 2008 I was thinking that we had been saved from the Bush/Cheney administration. And we had. Just not as dramatically as I had hoped. But now Obama is facing the perennial political question "What have you done for me lately?" 2010 is not going to be a pretty year politically.

It's a year after the 2008 Presidential election. Even Al Franken has finally been sworn in as Senator. Yet we aren't out of Iraq and Afghanistan (unrealistic dream, but not close to being true yet.) Don't Ask Don't Tell is still law in the military. The military budget has gone up, not down. And health care reform which was promised to be on Obama's desk by August is still bouncing around through the Senate and being cut down to something only the conservatives can love.

Recently the London Review of Books published Obama's Delusion by David Bromwich in which David takes Obama to task for having misled the voters in order to get elected, but now has gone back on everything he promised in the campaign. For a number of critics on the left, Obama is already a failed President and those who defend him are as irrational as the defenders of George Bush as he pushed his incompetence onto the American people. Glenn Greenwald provides a somewhat nuanced description of how critics of Obama from the left should be basing their criticism on his failures to enact left wing policies, not on his defenders who simply assume that his personality is so outstanding that nothing he can do is going to be wrong. Glenn is right that the hard left Obama defenders are no better than the Republicans who attack everything Obama does simply because he isn't their man. But for all his nuance, Glenn does not get down to the core of what liberals and progressives need to do to prepare for the 2010 election.

Josh Marshall this morning addressed the threat that 2010 is going to be another 1994 in which the Republicans take back the House and begin another ascent back to power. It's a good article, well worth reading, but in essence it says that 1994 was a direct result of the slow loss of the Solid South to the Republicans beginning with Nixon's Southern Strategy, and delayed only because the incumbent Democrats in the South were able to play off the 12 years of Republican Presidency after 1980 to hold onto their offices, but with the accession of a Democratic President in 1992 they lost that lever. Mostly the incumbent Southern Democrats retired or were defeated in 1994, but the problem was a structural one. It was not a fact that somehow Clinton lost the House to the Republicans in 1994. Those structural weaknesses do not exist in 2010. But Josh does point out that if his theory is correct "2010 is fundamentally different. The key problem for Dems isn't unpopularity. It's a highly apathetic Democratic electorate facing an extremely energized Tea Party GOP" Also, he says "Two factors -- whether Health Care passes and whether there's significant improvement in the economy by next summer -- will decide things, not any amount of strategery and messaging."

I think that is the core of the problem presented by the 2010 election. The core problem that I see is the Democratic apathy. So Steve Benen, riffing off a discussion by Matt Yglesias of the problems of institutional responsibilities faced by Obama explains why the Democrats are currently so apathetic.

Post-election governing tends to feature a familiar pattern. Presidents take office with high hopes, governing proves difficult, the policymaking process gets bogged down, and supporters get discouraged and start to walk away. It can be pretty disheartening.

Invariably, the new president gets blamed for failing to deliver. Matt Yglesias offers a helpful reminder about the nature of institutional responsibilities.

Matt adds to that Democrats thought that when Bush was replaced by Obama, then the Democratic agenda would be pushed through Congress. But all that happened was that the previous roadblock to getting progressive election - the Bush veto - was removed. It was replaced by the new roadblocks of a unified 40 member Republican Party of the Senate able to use the veto to block legislation. This has made the new roadblocks Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman.

...need to correctly identify the obstacles to change. If members of Congress are replaced by less-liberal members in the midterms, then the prospects for changing the status quo will be diminished. By contrast, if members are replaced by more-liberal members (either via primaries or general elections) the prospects for changing the status will be improved. Back before the 2008 election, it would frequently happen that good bills passed Congress and got vetoed by the president. Since Obama got elected, that doesn't happen anymore. Now instead Obama proposes things that get watered down or killed in Congress. That means focus needs to shift.

It seems to me that the apathy that is currently afflicting the Democratic electorate will be somewhat alleviated by passing health care. Something will have to pass. The future of the Democratic Party rides on it, and the two real threats (Nelson and Lieberman) will not want to be blamed for the total failure of the bill. They cannot now escape blame if it fails. But they are both demanding a very high price for whatever they finally permit. I am concerned that the banker-oriented Obama Treasury Department will do too much to fight the deficit before the 2010 election, though, resulting in a second dip in the economy. The resulting job loss is the real electoral threat. If the administration can actually do something about jobs, that will remove that threat from the election. Naturally, that means that the Republicans will fight hard against every possible job bill.

In any case, though, I do not expect the Republicans to take back the House in 2010. This next 12 months will continue to be very politically interesting.

---

Addendum 7:55 pm
Well, well. Steve Benen Reports that this morning Larry Summers said that the White House is shifting its goals from deficit reduction to job creation and economic growth. No surprise, actually. They are bright people and see the same things I do. The difference is that they see more than I do and that they don't have to tell the media what they are planning. So the surprise that this morning's announcement contains is that they decided to let the media in on their planning.

Last Night the House passed Health Care Reform

Now that the House Democrats have passed a health care reform bill, it is going to resonate with the majority of Americans who want both health care reform and the public option. Even if the Senate were to successfully kill the bill now, the majority of American voters have a clear idea of what health care reform can look like, and who is for and against the reform.

This will carry over to the 2010 election, either as proof that the Democrats are taking action against America's problems or that the Republican's refuse to act against America's problems.

The other 2010 election problem for the Democrats is the economy. They have nearly a year now to position themselves as being in support of the American people and to further paint the Republican Party as the Party of No.

I'd say that last night Nancy Pelosi pulled out a really big win for both America and for the Democratic Party. All the Republicans have left is bluster and some ability to tie up the Senate. Neither of those are going to go over too well in an economy that isn't doing well, as is almost certainly going to be the case in November 2010.

Lieberman is also in a weaker position now. How would you like to be a Democratic Senator how could be blamed for killing the HCR bill now? And if Joe were to block a vote and kill the Senate bill, do you think the real Democratic Senators would look on his actions kindly?

The rest of the Senators in the Democratic Caucus would gain a lot of street cred by getting rid of Joe. And at that point, his only choice would be to become a Republican when the Republicans are a powerless minority. And how much seniority are the Republican Senators going to give up to donate to a traitor Democrat? Would he even become a ranking member on some committee?

Yesterday's House vote has a lot of resonance. This is going to be even more interesting from here on out, and I'd say that health care reform is in a good position to be passed. We watched history being made last night.

The Democrats need a single healthcare reform narrative now

What we learned in August is something we've long known but keep forgetting: The most important difference between America's Democratic left and Republican right is that the left has ideas and the right has discipline. Obama and progressive supporters of health care were outmaneuvered in August -- not because the right had any better idea for solving the health care mess but because the rights' attack on the Democrats' idea was far more disciplined than was the Democrats' ability to sell it.

[...]

Whatever discipline Obama had mustered during the campaign somehow disappeared. This is just the latest chapter of a long saga. Over the last twenty years, as progressives have gushed new ideas, the right has became ever more organized and mobilized in resistance -- capable of executing increasingly consistent and focused attacks, moving in ever more perfect lockstep, imposing an exact discipline often extending even to the phrases and words used repeatedly by Hate Radio, Fox News, and the oped pages of The Wall Street Journal ("death tax," "weapons of mass destruction," "government takeover of health care.") I saw it in 1993 and 1994 as the Clinton healthcare plan -- as creatively and wildly convuluted as any policy proposal before or since -- was defeated both by a Democratic majority in congress incapable of coming together around any single bill and a Republican right dedicated to Clinton's destruction. Newt Gingrich's subsequent "contract with America" recaptured Congress for the Republicans not because it contained a single new idea but because Republicans unflinchingly rallied around it while Democrats flailed.

You want to know why the left has ideas and the right has discipline? Because people who like ideas and dislike authority tend to identify with the Democratic left, while people who feel threatened by new ideas and more comfortable in a disciplined and ordered world tend to identify with the Republican right.

Robert Reich explains what we should learn from the experience of August. Go read the rest.

what will it take to reach out to the Republicans on health care reform?

What kinds of proposals can Democrats accept that will allow the Republicans to compromise and work seriously on a reform of the American health care mess? Digby thinks history has the answer:

Adam Green notes Mark Warner's tiresome comments over the week-end about the need for bipartisanship and reminds us that this isn't the first time the Democratic Charlie Brown's have fallen for this:

Newt Gingrich on the House floor during the health care debate -- March 16, 1994:

Mr. GINGRICH.

I agree with my friend, the gentleman from Missouri [Mr. Gephardt]. I want to reach out in a bipartisan way to pass the bill. I praise the gentleman from Florida [Mr. Bilirakis] and the gentleman from Georgia [Mr. Rowland] for a bipartisan bill. I praise the gentleman from Iowa [Mr. Grandy] and the gentleman from Tennessee [Mr. Cooper] for a bipartisan bill. They are starting in the right direction to reach out.

How did that work out?

[Digby responds with another quote] I can answer that:

Then minority whip Newt Gingrich (R-GA) led a politically opportunistic and stubborn conservative charge against health care reform. He argued internally that any successful bill would set back Republican electoral prospects in November 1994. At a March 1994 strategy retreat, Gingrich warned GOP senators that “any Republican concessions will be met with more Democratic demands,” and that the GOP should concede nothing.

[Again from Digby}I doubt the game plan has changed.

I agree with Digby. I doubt that the Republican game plan has changed.

The Republicans simply don't believe that the American people should be provided with universal health care or anything like it from the government. Period. They also are certain that they are right, and that the majority of Americans who disagree with them are wrong. Besides not believing in government benefits for anyone except the rich, they don't especially believe in democracy either.

They strongly believe these thins. But if they admitted it in public, they also know the media would pillory them with the admissions and they would lose the next election. So they act on their core beliefs, but do not publicly admit to them. [I suspect that this knowledge of how the media would expose their true beliefs to the public is the reason why they also strongly believe that the major media is liberal and opposed to them.]

That's a rather schizophrenic form of thinking, of course. The have their personal goals [personal power and personal wealth], and they have their strong personal beliefs. But to achieve those goals, they have to show a very different mask, one that does not display those beliefs, to the media for exposure to the public. They will do so as long as it remains rewarding. But it must be difficult.

There will be no bipartisan health care bill, no matter how badly America desperately needs massive reform in the health care lack-of-system. The Republicans will continue to talk a seemingly somewhat conciliatory game until the very end. But at the end, they will pull out all the stops to kill health care reform.

If the Democrats are fooled by this "Lucy's Football" again and do not succeed in passing the health care legislation in spite of the Republican obstructionism, then the next election is going to be a bad one for the Democrats.

If that's the case then the Blue Dogs who ultimately defeat the bill should be taken out in the primaries. Only the Democrats can make government work again, and if the Blue Dogs obstruct that, then they go or the Democratic Party itself goes.

To answer the question this essay started with, nothing will reach the Republicans. They cannot and will not act in a bipartisan manner on health care. It's that simple.And the Democratic Party will once again severely regret it if it ignores this truth