I thought it would be deficit scare-mongering, but it’s actually teh bipartisanship. Gergen (via Digby):
In my judgment it’s a tragedy for the country to have a bill this important, a historic piece of legislation, pass with only one party voting for it.
Broder tomorrow (no link from me):
But even those Republicans who were initially inclined to do that — and there were at least a handful of them — were turned away by the White House and the Senate Democratic leaders, who never lifted their sights much beyond the Democratic ranks.
[…]It would help a lot if he reached out personally to those few Republicans who might still want to improve the bill rather than sink it. And it would help even more if he shamed the Democrats into rescinding some of the crasser bargains they made to buy votes along the way.
The country would welcome even a few signs that this legislation has bipartisan support.
It makes sense when you think about it: deficit scare-mongering requires a little bit of number crunching or at least a few google searches.
But you can whine about bipartianship and all the Republicans that would have supported the bill if only Obama had sweet-talked them without even mentioning the name of a single Republican Senator. It’s just easier.
mr. whipple
That damn Obama. Never reaches out to the GOP.
arguingwithsignposts
Sweet baby Jeebus. Can we just punch Broder in the neck already?
Danton
David Broder, as a friend puts it, is the thinking man’s idiot.
donovong
I agree. I also believe it is a tragedy for one party to act like such peevish assholes that they won’t vote for it. But that’s just me.
I wonder what Grover Norquist would say?
Dannie22
You have a serious HCR addiction there John.
mcd410x
@Danton: @arguingwithsignposts: Don’t shoot him in the dick. That’s just wrong.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
Yeah, nothing will be so important to me on the day when my job disappears, and I find out I can still get affordable insurance that can’t turn me down for having temerity to get sick a few years back …. as knowing that a few stupidass Republicans got conned into voting for the bill that made it all possible.
That’s right. That’s going to be the frosting on my cake. That will be the thing that makes it all worthwhile.
Bipartisanshipiness. Jesus wept.
anonymoose
Don’t lick the Broder
He’s just pissed off that Obama didn’t invite him to the soiree over at George Wills’ house.
FlipYrWhig
Hey, here’s an idea. What if a key Senate committee established a group of 3 Democrats and 3 Republicans to do nothing but hammer out a compromise over a painstaking course of several months? That’s bound to work!
Midnight Marauder
Who knew Obama was a necromancer?
asiangrrlMN
Next pundit who says anything about fucking bipartisanship gets a serious Roto-Rootin’ with my trusty rusty pitchfork. Please let it be Douthat.
General Winfield Stuck
Oh the irony of it all. And now from our friends on the left we get the flip side that Obama is playing footsie with the wingnuts that makes him look weak, and oh noes a Corporatist Bipartisan sellout.
And the evil wizard behind the scenes is Rahm Emmanuel. You can’t make this shit up.
Or maybe you can
mogden
Crappy bill deserves to go down in flames.
arguingwithsignposts
@asiangrrlMN:
I’m betting Kristol.
@mcd410x:
Dude(ette?) he’s like 87. that wouldn’t matter.
eemom
k, that does it. I’m gonna go to the old folks’ home myself and leave the door open so that Broder can wander off into the Beltway traffic.
Might even leave a little saucer of milk on the front porch to lure him out.
AhabTRuler
One week left, DougJ.
asiangrrlMN
@arguingwithsignposts: Oh, crap, that was Broder and not Brooks. Sheesh. And, Kristol? I’ll double-fist that asshat (rusty pitchfork AND Garden Weasel!).
@General Winfield Stuck: Stuck and Fuck show back on again?
@eemom: Snort. You iz teh funny. I will help.
Mako
…requires a little bit of number crunching or at least a few google searches.
Fuck that, Who is hotter, Walter Payson, Emmit Smith or Barry Sanders? Come on, you know you have an opinion. Who looks dreamier in those tight nylon trousers?
Ailuridae
@asiangrrlMN:
You don’t happen to look like a Chubby Reese Witherspoon by any chance?
General Winfield Stuck
@asiangrrlMN:
LOL, nah, It’s Christmas. And he has made some new opponents.
arguingwithsignposts
@asiangrrlMN:
Interested in your newsletter. Subscribe, etc. etc.
BTW, Hamsher/Norquist. WTF? Yet again. I have to go back to amazon, which is my god.
asiangrrlMN
@Ailuridae: Not even in my wildest dreams–except for the chubby part.
@Mako: Troy Polamalu! Yeah, yeah, whatever, not a running back.
@General Winfield Stuck: Aw, a softie at heart!
Dan Robinson
Who gives a fuck what Broder thinks? Broder is a douchebag’s douchebag.
arguingwithsignposts
Kitteh of mass destruction, btw. with the paper ball.
Quaker in a Basement
I think Broder must actually be a software program, not a human. And I think he was written in the late 80s.
El Cid
You hippie libruls just can’t admit that he’s right. Obama should have invited a bipartisan commission so that Republicans could make sure that no Stalinist Kenyan death panels would abrogate the 10th amendment to the Constitution by paying illegal immigrants to abort babies of black women who skipped out on the mortgages that Jimmy Carter forced the banks to give them.
ds
It’s just the sign of new political realities. The parties have realigned. How about that.
They were never going to get any Republicans other than the Lobster Caucus to vote for the fucking thing. Oh, and maybe Arlen Specter. Oh, wait…
They’re just anachronistic holdouts from a previous era, sort of like Parker Griffith. After they retire/get voted out, does anyone think the Republicans will nominate moderates to run for their seats?
And we didn’t lose them because Obama didn’t try. He was on the phone with Snowe for hours up until the last day.
burnspbesq
Which Senators are those, Mr. Broder?
Name just one.
asiangrrlMN
@arguingwithsignposts: Guaranteed to make me smile. Love that little girl. By the way, how did you find the JESUS KEY link?
@El Cid: Guaranteed to make me smile. Love that incisive snark.
valdivia
@arguingwithsignposts:
she is Teh Cuteness.
jenniebee
“Who might still want to improve the bill rather than sink it?” What, is he nuts? The bill has had millions of people “improved” out of it already. It’s been “improved” to the point that it is one more compromise away from losing the support of its most dedicated advocates. So called “fiscal conservatives” have “improved” this bill by eliminating all its most effective cost containment measures and sticking in a tax on insurance plans that raises little revenue but gives a big Fuck You to the unions.
This bill is already bi-partisan. It’s a carefully negotiated compromise between Blue Dogs and the Democratic wing of the Democratic party, and those are the only two parties that count.
You know, if Republicans were interested in coalition building they could put their forty together with the Blue Dogs and actually have a serious voice in national policy. But they’re not, so they don’t.
ds
The really bizarre thing is that Broder actually has a pretty decent book about the failure of the 1994 health reform effort. He’s not an idiot about these things. He understood the Gingrich/Dole strategy of killing Clinton’s initiatives, whether they agreed with them or not, in order to boost their election chances.
Why does he not get that Republicans played the exact same game with Obama?
Mako
@donovong:
I wonder what Grover Norquist would say?
Grover and I went to school together back in ’75. He is credited with the “Shrink government to drown it in a bathtub” quote. Interesting story how that came about. Alcohol was involved. We discussed how we might like to have tiny real-life Barbie dolls climb about on our penises.
I sometimes still think fondly on the idea, he made it a career.
asiangrrlMN
@jenniebee: This times ten. And, it’s the reason I get so sick of the bipartisan bullshit. There was nothing the Democrats could have given the Republicans in order to garner their support for the bill because their bottom line is to kill healthcare reform. Period. Full stop. The sooner the media stops pretending this isn’t true, the better (yeah, yeah, I know).
@burnspbesq: Exactly. And, if Broder could find that mythical creature, a bipartisan Republican, I would then want Broder to ask said beast what it would take, bottom line for her/him to support healthcare reform. Stop with all the irrelevant bullshit already.
Mako
penis puts one in moderation?
interesting.
arguingwithsignposts
@asiangrrlMN: It was someone a few threads back, I can’t recall whom. I can only take it in small pieces, because teh funny is so awesome. I can’t afford that many keyboards.
Anya
@arguingwithsignposts: Do you think Kos would ban Hamsher’s minions (slinkerwink ) since this most idiotic move?
@Dan Robinson: The sad part is, an intern can look up, how many times did Obama meet with Snow and discover that he probably met with her more than he met with any other Dem Senator, including Harry Reed. I still don’t understand her motivations.
Mako
vulva
Mako
uterus
Jason Bylinowski
I am convinced that a national polity based on good faith is no longer feasible in this country. I mean to say: it’s dead. Unfortunately, this means that we should probably all be backing the village, as they continue to spout the CW of the day, supporting them somewhat like the audience listening listening to the string quartet playing on the titanic as it sank into the northern Atlantic. I don’t see how it gets better from here, unless the internet evaporates or is blown to hell by some furrin terrist. This nation of thousands of tiny subcultures is simply too striated at this point. Admit it, my fair & liberal friends: 99 percent of you here don’t read RedState or New Majority, even though YOU SHOULD READ IT and you damn well know it. Sure, you might give David Frum a chance when he’s taking down his own party, but that’s it. Now, take that selection bias and multiply it ten times, and that’s the kind of intentional segregation you find on the right. I can tell you from my thousands of hours of experience “behind enemy lines” as a southern US resident that they don’t even give your philosophy the time of day. They wouldn’t even take the trouble to piss on you to put your fire out, as they would say.
It’s an odd dichotomy, this country, because I still think that, although it’s far too late to put the genie back into the bottle (meaning, to go back to a time before the internet and on-demand cable), that doesn’t that I’m totally convinced that the nation is doomed, although I do think that on the whole, a thousand years from now, historians will be looking at the post-Vietnam era as the time when things started to slowly fall apart for the American Experiment (but that is a long-road scenario – I’m not some idiot conservative who honestly thinks that America will last forever, though I don’t think it has to end ignominiously, either.) Clearly there is still a dominant cultural influence that, at the moment, still works very much in our favor. The liberals OWN Hollywood, and probably always will. Turn on any show besides COPS or any thing on FoxNews, and you will find at least a lukewarm liberal worldview behind it. So that to me is a little cheering, although what would be even more cheering is to know that there is a place on the internet that EVERYONE could feel comfortable going to in order to discuss, to discover, and to have a break from the normal insular experience of the internet. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: going to Balloon Juice is a fucking blast, I love John Cole like a long-lost brother and wish I still lived in Morgantown so I could buy him a beer sometime, and all of that is great, but we’ve got to get out from behind this leftist shield and the right needs to do the same. If we want to preserve the Republic (and I do) we have no choice but to break bread together.
Alright, so bring me some arguments. PS: I know the Repub right is an unserious party right now. The question is, how do we engage them such that discourse becomes possible again? I thought they were due for some “time in the wilderness”, but they apparently took this to mean a fifteen minute play-period outside the schoolyard before going right back to stealing our lunch money.
Thoughts?
+3, Marilyn Monroe style
Mako
vagina
El Cid
@ds: I think Broder ‘understood’ the Gingrich/Dole strategy mostly because they told it to him.
Corner Stone
@El Cid: This is pretty close. You just need to throw a little dash of Clinton in here somewhere, either one, and it will be perfect.
Mako
Okay, I see, can’t use the peenis word.
Sexists.
DougJ
Admit it, my fair & liberal friends: 99 percent of you here don’t read RedState or New Majority, even though YOU SHOULD READ IT and you damn well know it.
I actually do read them for fun, but I don’t see any particular point in reading them (RedState is nuts, New Majority is smart but completely impotent).
arguingwithsignposts
@Jason Bylinowski:
Only if my eyes were gouged out and fed to me on AsiangrrlMN’s rusty pitchfork. Buzzkill.
El Cid
It should have been pretty clear in 2003 (if not a decade earlier) that the national Republican Party was in no way a normal, functional political party but a dangerous anti-Constitutional gang of criminal thugs and anyone who didn’t understand that was a completely useless and nation-harming fuck-stain who thinks the best way to deal with the mafia is to cut deals with them.
Mako
@Jason Bylinowski:
Alright, so bring me some arguments.
Edit for brevity.
DougJ
The question is, how do we engage them such that discourse becomes possible again?
The same way the Romans engaged the Carthaginians. I wish there were another way but there’s not.
We’ve had one president in the history of the United States who knew how to deal with the south. I think you know what his name was.
Studly Pantload
In breaking news, I have officially gone full-on Midwest ghetto, having just snacked on salsa con queso from a jar spread on white bread. The Kitten (aka Mrs. Pantload, *not* to be confused with RedKitten) is, of course, mortified, but as I never belch or that-other-thing in her presence, I figger she can cut me some slack.
ds
Lincoln?
LBJ comes second, I guess.
asiangrrlMN
@arguingwithsignposts: Eggs-actly. I don’t see why I SHOULD read it. I get the shorter here, and I don’t need to be inundated with racist, sexist, every-other-ist hateful batshitcrazy crap when I can get that in the real world, thankyewverymuch.
arguingwithsignposts
@DougJ:
There you go, bringing up the Carthaginians again.
El Cid
@asiangrrlMN: The feeling I get from making you smile is better than 2 dozen Wonkette posts in a row about young Republican leaders found in double wetsuits in sexually compromising positions. And I mean that.
Corner Stone
@Studly Pantload: Good God.
El Cid
@ds: FDR did pretty good — he bought ’em out.
Alex S.
Blabla-fucking-bla. As if the White House had exerted more pressure than the republican leadership…
asiangrrlMN
@El Cid: Oooh, you sweet-talker you. Rrowr. And, you actually made me chuckle that time.
arguingwithsignposts
@El Cid:
That is definitely TMI!
ETA:
Midnight Marauder
@DougJ:
James K. Polk?
+5
Keith G
@ds:
Dude, the guy is 80 years old. I am sorry but very few people get to 80 with all the wits they had at 50, 60, 70 et.al.
He may not be an idiot, but he also may not be fully sentient any longer. It happens. I totally did not like the output of Robert Novack, but I respected his twisted little self serving mind. He had the good fortune of dying off rather quickly before making a total mockery of his early works.
Broder is becoming a victim of his own long life.
Dave
@Jason Bylinowski:
Suppositories? What the hell? TMI, dude.
Mako
@DougJ:
The south will rise again!
tavella
Don’t lose your job in the next four years. If you are counting on that provision, it only applies to children. Everyone else they plan to cover by getting states that don’t have high risk pools to institute them. And going by California, those plans are exactly as crappy and expensive as you would expect given that they are pools consisting entirely of sick or likely to get sick people.
Four years down the line, it kicks in for adults (assuming the Dems retain control of Congress, or they don’t decide that high risk pools are just as wonderful as Republicans say they are.) Yes, that also makes the rescission provision utterly useless for the next four years, since it allows recission for fraud, which is already the excuse that insurance firms use.
mr. whipple
??? 3 drinks and a bottle of sleeping pills?
Alex S.
@DougJ:
James Buchanan?
Studly Pantload
What’s sad to me is that if that famous “Senate Comity” (ask for it by name!) were the type that existed before the Gingrich Revulsion, sans Republicans and Blue Dogs with itchy filibuster fingers, we wouldn’t have had to give two toots about Lieberman’s and Nelson’s dainty little feelers, and could have had a Senate bill more closely in-line with the House bill. And the Beltway blowhards are tsk-tsking that Obama didn’t reach around, er, out?
Give me a frakking break.
El Cid
@Mako: …soon as we get the car in the front yard fixed and this washer off the porch…
Mako
@Alex S.:
James Buchanan only has his job because of my man Franklin Pierce. Dude wanted to make Cuba a state. Imagine how much better things would be today…
Studly Pantload
In more breaking news, Sarah Palin just tweeted herself again. Second night in a row.
A cry for help?
Bob In Pacifica
I wish Obama reached out to some Republicans… and strangled them.
asiangrrlMN
@Bob In Pacifica: Or punched them in the neck a la John Cole.
Studly Pantload
Both self-tweets were from her Crackberry. Maybe she’s just butt-tweeting?
Jason Bylinowski
@DougJ: It totally sucks that the first name I thought of was Nixon.
@Mako: While that would be nice, I only have one writing style, and it is ridiculous.
Ana Gama
@FlipYrWhig:
And those 3 Dems were ConservaDems, to boot. That would have to work, wouldn’t it?
Mako
@El Cid:
Bigot.
I have no problem with you hiring Guatemalans to hand manicure your lawn and HOA forbidding clothes lines and picking up your toy poodle poop in a plastic bag, just stay out of my neighborhood.
Your Home Depot garden troll is shit yard-art next to my ’73 F150.
Something Fabulous
@asiangrrlMN: Ooooh, I am SO glad you have turned this into a verb. Roto-rootin’. R-r’n for short? May I to use plz?
Jason Bylinowski
@Dave: “Suppositories? What the hell? TMI, dude.”
OK, so apparently there is more than one style of inebriation associated with Marilyn Monroe. The more you know, I guess. No, I mean the rather more sophisticated style of having a glass of wine while spontaneously sucking down a couple of valiums. Or in my case, a couple of .5mg alprazolam that tend to knock me the hell out. Yes, it has been prescribed to me, though I venture to guess that the wine was not. In my realm of peers, we just call that extra credit.
El Cid
@Mako: Me? I hope to hell you realize I can say that shit ’cause I grew up on well water right up against a tobacco farm. Don’t you go giving me that ‘Oh my god I’m ‘on whoop some ass ’cause somebuddy said sumpin ’bout the South shit’ ’cause I done been there and back, buddy.
Yutsano
You know, maybe Snowe no longer counts as a Republican because of her stimulus vote. In fact, I half-expected her to switch over during the cloture votes just to prove a point. But sad to say she fell into lockstep. Wonder what McConnell threatened her with.
Xanthippas
God, what an idiot. You have to be a real, non-observant moron to think that Republicans were “turned away” by the Democrats on health care. What the fuck does he do all day, when his fucking job is to pay attention to what goes on in the very town that is the home of the godamn paper he writes for. Christ!
Oh, Merry Christmas!
ds
The conserva-love for “high risk pools” is the most bizarre thing I’ve seen from the Republican side in years.
Basic reasoning says that an insurance pool consisting only of sick people won’t work unless it’s essentially a welfare program, or the amount of coverage is capped at such a low level it’s essentially worthless.
The few states that have somewhat functional high risk pools have to come up with huge taxpayer subsidies to fund them, and even then there are big restrictions on who can enter them, because otherwise people wouldn’t bother to buy insurance when they’re healthy.
Why do conservatives support what basically amounts to a highly inadequate welfare program, that probably creates perverse incentives not to buy insurance before becoming sick.
asiangrrlMN
@Something Fabulous: Sure! It’s yours! Anything I say here, I give to the Open Source that is the BJ community.
@Yutsano: Hi, hon. One thing the Republicans know how to do is keep their people in line.
Studly Pantload
Palin’s latest tweet:
c tomrrw’s Healthcare Takeover vote=the sleeping giant will awaken&action will b takn by”average”Americans as lite shines on big govt growth
OK, definitely drunk-tweeting. Somebody got herself into the moose juice. All that’s missing is the “+eleventy” at the end.
Mako
@El Cid:
Oh la-dee-da aren’t you the rural one.
When i was a kid we dreamed of living near a tobacco farm, the fucking stockyard didn’t smell nearly so good. Well water? Oh my aren’t you the fancy pants, we had to squeeze moths.
Studly Pantload
@ds:
“Why do conservatives support what basically amounts to a highly inadequate welfare program?”
Because it’s untenable.
Martin
@Midnight Marauder:
El Cid
@Mako: Moths? Luxury. We had to squeeze sweat out of ‘own bodies to drink, and then we had to give’t back.
asiangrrlMN
@Studly Pantload: Please. I’m begging you. Put a warning before you quote La Palina in the future. My brain desperately scrambles to make some sense out of what she’s written, and it physically hurts when it fails to do so.
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: Ain’t that da troof. Picking Emmitt Smith out of the list provided, which in no way should be taken as an insult against Troy. I’m not sure I wanna think about this tonight after dealing with an absolute idiot client.
Platonicspoof
@Jason Bylinowski:
Not possible even if there were serial attacks from outer space carnivores.
Studly Pantload
@asiangrrlMN:
I live to disturb.
Ash
What’s this asshole been smoking? 77% of the country doesn’t give two shits about what Republicans want or think or feel.
asiangrrlMN
@El Cid: Four Yorkshiremen?
@Studly Pantload: And disturb you do, Mr. Ghetto Midwesterner.
Midnight Marauder
@Martin:
I rest my case, Your Honor.
Studly Pantload
@Platonicspoof:
No shit. If the Dems lose their supermajority in ’10, the Senate will be so gridlocked they’ll be nothing for Obama to do except cutting ribbons at new shopping malls.
Morbo
@Jason Bylinowski: That was the first name that came to mind for me as well.
@arguingwithsignposts: She is clearly doing a fennet fox impersonation.
FlipYrWhig
@Platonicspoof: The Democrat plan for dealing with these serial attacks by outer space carnivores is just more Big Government. Republicans have a common sense conservative solution. Tax cuts. And small business. Also.
Studly Pantload
@asiangrrlMN:
I’m actually one of those Seattle DFHers. But my little snack did feel like it was missing a nearby embroidered rendition of dogs playing poker.
Edit: Moderation purgatory? Really? What ever was my sin?
Yutsano
@Studly Pantload: Great. Now I’m torn. I really want Reid to lose his job but only if there’s a Dem seat to replace him. I hope Bennett gets his act together in Colorado. Either that or the SDCC gets off their ass and gets some support behind winnable races.
ds
“The Democrat plan for dealing with these serial attacks by outer space carnivores is just more Big Government. Republicans have a common sense conservative solution. Tax cuts. And small business. Also, too.”
fixed
jcricket
I saw Monseiur Gergen on CNN last night and whoever the excreble host was basically gave him the huge set up of “Is this bill a failure already because Obama wasn’t able to get any Republicans on board?” Talk about your loaded question.
Where the fuck are the media personalities saying, “Is the GOP going to be shut out of government because of its refusal to participate in governing?” or “Does the complete lack of GOP participation in the stimulus, HCR, climate change, etc. mean that the party has moved too far to the right?” or “where have the moderate Republicans willing to cross the aisle and cross their party leadership gone?”
And with a few exceptions, none of the Democratic surrogates on TV bother to make this point. It’s all over the blogs. We all know there are no more moderate Republicans. The teabaggers are taking over. Criticize Limbaugh and you have to walk it back a day later. Have a sensible idea and Palin turns it into death panels and you have to disavow your participation in that idea.
If the media was doing its job this would have electoral consequences. If Democrats were doing their jobs, this would have electoral consequences. Hell, if Democrats in the Senate were doing their job this would have legislative consequences (blow up the filibuster dumbfucks). But instead it’s basically consequence free obstinance. In fact, it’s becoming the Democrats failure to reach out to the reactionary nutballs that are today’s GOP. And it’s the Democrats failure for not getting 60+ votes in the Senate on everything (despite that never being the requirement until about 2 years ago).
God I hate this country sometimes.
Mnemosyne
@Jason Bylinowski:
If you haven’t read Nixonland yet, I recommend it. Basically, you’re seeing the results of 40 years of Republicans playing different factions of Americans against one another. That will be enormously difficult to change since we now have second- and third-generation politicians who fed off that division.
Yutsano
@ds: Can someone point me to the last policy that Republicans enacted under the Bush interregnum that was specifically designed to assist small businesses? Or is this just Alger type bullshit they sell to exploit their base?
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: Ding ding ding on the latter! Hi, hubby. How you doing?
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: Old legal trick: Never ask a question you don’t know the answer to.
Other than dealing with useless clients who won’t listen to me? I’m peachy as a Georgia pie.
Ana Gama
Stolen from Rumproast
Grover Norquist Random Progressive Quote Generator
“I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drown it in the Firedoglake.”
Yutsano
@Ana Gama: Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! Wingnut mad-libs! Me likey!
danimal
Remember back a few months when the GOP claimed that all of Washington agreed on 80 percent of the health care bill and if the Dems just dropped the controversial stuff like the public option, they could get a bipartisan bill? I do, so why the hell do nationally known columnists forget?
Teh google works. Also.
TaosJohn
Mostly what I feel now is an overwhelming sadness. The richest country in the world, supposedly, and we can’t have what everybody else does. I’ll never accept that, and I wish to God my president hadn’t.
freelancer (itouch)
@DougJ:
COTY-bait
asiangrrlMN
@danimal: Because sometimes, you just have to walk on by.
@Yutsano: Mmmm, pie.
freelancer (itouch)
@Studly Pantload:
Palin is the political equivalent of George “Biff Loman” Costanza.
Happy Festivus
freelancer +3
Platonicspoof
@Studly Pantload:
I happened to catch this Charles Gibson interview, and on HCR Obama said
But it was the matter of fact way he said it, without pausing to think, that was the important part.
And it was two weeks ago. There’s no constructive reason for pundits to hammer bipartisanship on HCR.
ds
@TaosJohn:
The reason we don’t have what every other country has is that every time health care reform has come up it’s either been killed by conservatives who just hate social insurance, or by liberals who think it won’t go far enough.
Obama didn’t sell you out. Congress just hates the idea of Medicare for all, or even a strong public option. It would pass neither the House nor the Senate. If Obama had stood for high principle and demanded single payer, there would be no health care reform at all.
Switzerland has a mandate + regulate model of insurance, because it was one of the last industrialized countries to adopt universal coverage.
As the very last, we have to make even uglier compromises. In Switzerland, insurance is private, but insurance companies are required to offer a base level plan at no profit. We’re not requiring that.
But over time we need to turn the screws in on insurance companies and have them operate as basically public utilities. That’s our best shot at a European-style system. That is how the German system operates.
Yutsano
@Platonicspoof:
If they can sell anything as Obama is teh fail, they’ll do it. It doesn’t matter if Obama has moved way beyond any consideration like that.
Darryl
“If you haven’t read Nixonland yet, I recommend it. Basically, you’re seeing the results of 40 years of Republicans playing different factions of Americans against one another. That will be enormously difficult to change since we now have second- and third-generation politicians who fed off that division.”
Mnemosyne, I don’t consider anybody who doesn’t understand what you just said, to know the first thing about American politics.
seabe
Well, it’s in my opinion that the administration could have gotten a triggered public option and marginalized Lieberman instead of Snowe.
Then maybe we could have satisfied the Village and their bipartisanship fetish, we’d have a triggered PO, and kick Lieberman in the throat in one fell swoop.
freelancer (itouch)
@Yutsano:
But the media is teh librul! Laura Ingraham sez so. They all bow down before tranny maobama!
Ana Gama
And that day is coming, because even with this bill, Medicare goes broke soon. I think this bill adds 9 years to solvency. Not much more time to delay. Our current insurance model is just not sustainable, and certainly will not survive the retirement of the baby-boomer generation. Anybody who thinks so is blowing smoke.
That’s why this bill has to be the first step. And really, that’s all that it is.
mk3872
The American press and American people favor bipartisanship (polls consistently show that).
I think it is a brillian tactic by the Repubs to 100% oppose all things Dems do to FORCE them into working toward the Republican stance on tough issues.
When they don’t agree at all, just pack it in and fire away at the other side.
As the HCR debate has shown, there will be NO price to pay from the minority party. The press will not hold the Repubs accountable for their lack of sincerety toward working in a bipartisan manner.
FlipYrWhig
@seabe:
Of course, there were a series of minor freakouts across the blogs every time Obama made overtures to Snowe. I remember a bunch on Atrios. Hey, interestingly, that was right around the time I stopped reading him!
My impression is that the WH wanted to pull in Snowe and Collins, but Reid wanted to pull in Lieberman and Nelson. Either way it was going to require concessions and be subject to a wave of denunciation from the purists.
Sly
Pomposity in the defense of criminal stupidity (and stupid criminals) has been his M.O. for decades. Broder is as Border does. Just stop reading him.
@Studly Pantload:
She certainly is a master of fitting boatloads of nonsense into Twitter’s 140 character limit. Not hard to see why.
I like that she wrapped “average” in quotes, however. It’s very “ironic” of her.
Studly Pantload
@seabe:
The thing is, Lieberman has the Dems over a barrel because he votes with the Dem caucus pretty darn regularly, hcr and foreign policy notwithstanding. Snowe does not. Piss off Droopy Dawg and he can single-handedly stall the rest of Obama’s agenda, and you *know* he’s enough of an a-hole to do that. And Snowe won’t be riding in to salvage that. Yeah, it sucks, but thems the cards we’ve been dealt.
Plus, triggered *anything* is giving up the bird in the hand for the magical unicorn in the sky.
Mnemosyne
@Darryl:
True, but Perlstein really shows how the left rose to the bait that the Republicans put out and damaged themselves politically for years. It’s definitely given me an interesting perspective on the current HCR freakout on the left. We may not realize that the Republicans are triggering us the same way they’ve done for 40 years, but they sure as hell are.
cleek
because the thing that’s holding back Snowe and Collins is the fact that Obama hasn’t sent them enough muffin baskets… ?
The Moar You Know
What an utter and total load of horseshit. Not one Republican (save for Cao on the House’s health legislation, and he’s probably going independent soon anyway) has ever had any intention whatsoever of voting for any bill proposed by the Dems this year, or for that matter, any Dem bill brought up during Obama’s term. Not one.
Fuck, we could float a bill mandating that
CaligulaReagan’s face be put on every piece of currency and every public building in this country and every goddamn Republican would still vote against it.I’ll give ’em this; they know the meaning of party unity.
Anne Laurie
@ds:
Because Broder admired the Gingrich/Dole cabal, who were (in his feeble Media Village Idiot mind) “paying back” that arriviste Clinton. But Obama successfully resisting the latest Rethug generation’s furious yet feeble attempts to do the same thing? Shameful! For shame!
Anne Laurie
@asiangrrlMN:
I think of Douthat’s smugmug(tm), and wonder “How will she know which end in which to insert her favorite tool of correction?” And then I realize — “Doesn’t matter!”
@Mako:
The spambots are not trolling WP to offer me the chance to GROW THE VAGINA YOU HAVE ALWAYS WANTED, is why.
(The male-gender version is an actual spam-mail subject. When I first saw it, I thought, “What — in a jar, in my basement?”)
Jason Bylinowski
@The Moar You Know: “party unity”
Let’s just call it PUNITY and be done with it.
And you’re right, they do have it in spades. Now, if the Democrats just play their fucking cards right, just this once, just this one single time (please GOD!) and actually try and do a good job of the rollout and promotion of HCR, we’ll find out that Snowe would have been better off just switching parties after all, because one of the really really satisfying disadvantages of the GOP strategy is that if they’re wrong, they lay all their chips down on obstruction and party purification and HCR does in fact play well to the public (which is as much a function of effective spin-doctoring as effective governance), well, they are ALL going to have a rough decade or so.
This next three years is going to be an awful, nerve-wracking, and completely bad-ass exciting period to be witness to. The economy first, HCR second, and those two random silly wars: that is order of things to watch in my opinion. I hope it goes well for my team and all, but really if the HCR isn’t a complete joke in the long-term and as long as we can bring down unemployment back to a smidgen under 9 percent by 2011, we’ll be looking at an easy second term for Obama and possibly some gains in Congress as well, since the GOP is going to continue to run all their nutjob candidates in order to proceed with their utterly nonsensical plan to oust all their moderates. Basically, there’s a huge gamble going on on both sides, and I just can’t call it from here. I think Democrats have the advantage from this side of time, but our party leadership SUCKS (Reid, Pelosi and the so-far useless Tim Kaine), with the exception of Obama, who at this point still has only a lot of unproven potential.
ds
No. Actually in the book (it’s called The System) you get saddened lamenting Broder. It’s a very fair account of the collapse of the 1994 reform effort.
Obviously he trashes Clinton for turning the effort over to Hillary and Ira Magaziner, and for his incompetent attempts at gamesmanship, but he’s actually right about that. But he correctly calls out Republicans for creating gridlock and promoting a dysfunctional government as a ploy to win votes.
I really don’t understand why Broder’s column is so horrible, when he genuinely does seem to understand the basic realities of modern American politics, or at least used to.
Chuck Butcher
There is this to consider, the supposed 60 seats in the Senate left the Rs a reason to not deal, period. Anything would be D failures, and I do mean anything. The bad part for Ds is then you have to get the pricks on board. While the 60 seat thing remains, expect everything to be filibustered by the Rs. Frankly, I’m damned amazed the stimulus made it.
Since the Ds can’t manage their 60 the Rs win – either way. Nothing passed is Ds’ fault, something passed is owned by them and it will suck because the Ds have Lieberman – and a couple others.
I do actually think that more rotten shit comes from having to get all 60 than the Rs could extort if they had 42 or so. Not to mention that if Lieberman made 58 his Chair would be gone in a flat heart beat. I suppose one could propose total paralysis at 58-42, were that the case it might actually have some consequences.
The intellectual mites that propose that the Rs were going to do something different … well … bridges for sale and all that.
Chuck Butcher
@Jason Bylinowski:
Jason, you could write the R campaign literature for the next two election cycles in your goddam sleep about HCR alone and I’ll bet you can not manage to sell it to one sceptic – left or center or rightish. And you have a huge problem because scepticism is the norm on this one.
You better hope that in ’10 there are no insurance policies for the 35M uninsured to look at and see what they’ll be getting for their money and my bet is the Rs will make sure there is something to look at. If the Ds don’t make sure that the few benefits of this don’t hit before the bills do,’12 could be a blood bath.
Fuck all the PUMA bullshit, you fuckers that are for this thing had better get over yourselves and figure out how to deal with the politics of it real damn fast. This lame shit here ain’t gonna do it. The Republicans have handed you a live grenade and you better figure out what to do with it and putting the pin back in isn’t an option – now.
You aren’t winning over people who should be on your own side, right here, voters are gonna be real tough. This advice has nothing to do with my opposition to the thing. It has everything to do with those who will go out and do the door knocking and LTEs and etc. and especially the ones who will be talking to reporters of any stripe.
pablo
Now we should all pray that someone doesn’t show up for Broder’s next deadline!
Truly, that is the benchmark Broder column. My head exploded!
Tomlinson
Yup. There is no going back now. There is, however, some astoundingly bad policy that could provide the dems an out.
They could strip the mandate, leave the insurance company regs, stop taxing cadillac plans and instead go with a high-income tax (probably a pretty nasty high income tax.) This is the populist approach. The medicaid expansion stays.
You probably garnish that with as much of John McCain’s healthcare policy as you can, so you can hang this around the republican’s neck.
As policy, it’s an utter fail. The net effect is to toss sick people onto the rolls of the insured without incenting the well to get insured. It kills the insurance companies, is an obvious vote grab, doesn’t bend the cost curve in any way, and leaves us with a health care system accelerated towards collapse.
If you are smart, you probably want to leave the country if you can, if that is what gets enacted. Save you a lot of angst.
What you cannot do is ram through good policy using reconciliation. You don’t need to be a hyper-genius to write the republican copy on that, it’s right at the top of this page. Going to be tough enough selling a 60-vote bill.
Tomlinson
I don’t agree with this, BTW. It should be a remarkably easy sell (30MM more people insured, got rid of nasty insurance company policies, exchanges increase competition, community rating, etc.) The mandate is a non-issue (it only impacts 5% of the population, etc.)
The real problem the dems face is accelerating the plan so that everyone sees benefits ASAP.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
@Chuck Butcher:
Quite honestly Chuck, I don’t post here to change any minds nor would I ever want to try. I am incapable trying to do so until I meet you, shake your hand and look you in the eye. Until I do that you are just a collection of letters that spell something we all call a name. No offense meant, I just don’t go trying to convince someone of anything unless I can look them in the eye while doing it.
Regarding any PUMA/ratfucking that is alleged/talked about, it is what it is or is not. What I mean by that is if it interests me I will talk about it, if not then I don’t. Right now I am fascinated by this ‘schism’ that is ‘developing’ on the left. Never in my life did I ever think I would see progressives who consider themselves the left of the left actually defending Hamsher and her organization joining forces with the likes of Dick Armey, Phyllis Schlafly and Grover Norquist. It is mind boggling to see these people line up behind Hamsher and her paid activists going after progressives like Bernie Sanders, Vicki Kennedy, John Lewis and Al Franken. I never would have guessed that the far left would go so far around the bend that they end up on the other side.
Sorry, while you are free to ignore these developments I prefer to watch and talk about this with others. We can jawjack all we want about the HCR bill but other than donating to a cause and contacting our representatives, there is little else that we can do to influence it. My lowly posts on some obscure spot on the internet are not going to be noticed or have any effect.
But I sure like talking about stuff anyway. I’m just not here to sell someone on my positions. The HCR bill is going to be whatever it is (or not) and right now all we can do is hurry up and wait. Sucks for those who are impatient but our government was not designed to turn on a dime. I paid attention in high school and learned this fact from a very cynical, but very good, American Government teacher. Watching our government in action is akin to watching 90 year-old men playing football, it seems like it takes forever for them to move the ball one yard. Because it does…lol
Hope you are doing well. Peace.
The Raven
Besides, this way, you don’t have admit you can’t count to one.
Croak!
Comrade Jake
From the looks of the GOS this morning, Hamsher may have gone a bit too far going after Sanders. Good to see the pushback.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
@Comrade Jake:
I agree. I am reading the comments and they are running strongly against Hamsher. Her buddies are trying to keep up the act but nobody is buying it. Good. The diary by Joe Beese (about Hamsher and Norquist going after Rahm) died an ugly death. Other than the Hamsher supporters there, nobody else was tipping it but they were recommending it so it would get on the wreck list and everyone could see that they weren’t buying Jane and newfound buddy Grover.
I don’t know what it is about Obama that makes his enemies lose all perspective in attacking him. He doesn’t have to do a damned thing and the glorious flameouts keep happening everywhere.
bob h
Is Broder showing signs of senility? These are sheer fantasies he is expressing.
grumpy realist
Broder has *always* been a babbling fool about bipartisanship. If he ever had to write about the shape of the Earth he would be chastising those mean round-earthers for not listening nicely enough to the flat-earthers.
I’d love to get a bumper-sticker that says: Nature Doesn’t Care About “Politically Feasible”
JK
Olympia Snowe is a worthless fucking piece of shit who is every bit as big of a motherfucking asshole as Jim Demint and James Inhofe.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@El Cid:
This.
Rick Taylor
__
I’m a little stunned. Yeah, but to see through deficit scare mongering requires a bit of knowledge. To see through bipartisanship hysteria only requires common sense. I never thought these people knew a thing about policy, but I supposed they knew something about how Washington works. The administration wasted months on trying to craft a bill some Republicans would support, and recently he’s been spending hours with Snowe trying to get her support. What more could they have done? Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised villagers could be so obtuse, but I am.
Notorious P.A.T.
Maybe I should stop defending you, DougJ.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@ds:
Kinda of like, hmmm, what am I thinking of? kinda like a.., like a..,
like a railroad
Elkins Act, 1903. [established uniformity in pricing. Did not cut costs]
Hepburn Act, 1906. [regulated and cut costs]
If you keeping chanting it over and over and make little puffing choo-choo noises it starts to make sense:
Elkins Act, Hepburn Act
Elkins Act, Hepburn Act
Elkins Act, Hepburn Act
Elkins Act, Hepburn Act
[BTW, who again was the powerful industrial interest that had a stranglehold on the Senate from 1903-1906, and was sucking the oxygen out of the rest of the economy?]
Chugga-chugga choo-choo!
Cain
@arguingwithsignposts:
Fuck me, I read that as”Cardasians” or rather “Kardashians”. I wish Rome would have annihilated the Kardashians too.. ;)
cain
edit: edit buttons are back!
AngusTheGodOfMeat
Americans generally have the government they voted for.
They tell pollsters whatever, in response to various forms of questions, but most Americans probably could not define bipartisanship or describe a period in which they saw it working effectively, nor name the bipartisans who supposedly made it happen.
The polls that count are the ones taken on election day. Even the real pollsters know that.
Americans favor division, if elections are to be taken at face value. That’s because they themselves are divided. The political machines divided them, on purpose, to achieve their ends. It’s a little disingenuous of the machines to come along and claim that they want bipartisanship after doing that, isn’t it?
Take John McCain for example. He picked the most divisive campaign strategy possible, and a running mate to match, in 2008, and then after the election, made a show of posing with Obama to pimp bipartisanship. Since then, he has been the most divisive partisan of any failed presidential candidate in memory.
Who wants bipartisanship? Yo momma, that’s who.
CalD
__
Not for nothin’ but isn’t this essentially the same argument Booman was making last week to justify big-P progressives behaving badly?
Aunt Moe
The health care bill passed with 60 democrats and no republicans. That is because the American people elected 60 democrats to do the nation’s business.
60-39? A hell of a majority.
Merry Christmas.
Don
You have reproduced above the exact quote that pushed me over the hump onto my decision to cancel my WaPo print subscription on the first of the year.
That’s just so blatantly baloney I can’t take it anymore. I can marginally tolerate the modern news methodology where you simply report anything said by anyone, regardless of whether it’s false on its face. Ezra linked to Weigel’s writeup about the media and how they deal with Palin and summarizes the larger problem:
But to toss on top of that a consistent pattern of printing op-eds that are just filled with blatantly false or misleading information? No. If you insist on separating out analysis and news so completely then it’s just unacceptable to publish analysis that deliberately misstates the facts.
I’ll miss the physical paper over lunch but I’m not going to support this death spiral and pay the new raised prices.