More Thoughts on Health Care Reform

-It's more than a little understatement to say that it's great to see legislation that is actually designed to help people. In many ways, the fact that, even after all the amendments and tinkering, this was a progressive bill, just reinforces one of the broader divisions in politics, between those who are always seeking to improve the United States and are labeled progressive, in no small part because they are in favor of "progress"; and those who see the United States as already perfect and who believe tinkering or trying to improve will only lead to a fall from American perfection (which much better describes their view of the United States than "American exceptionalism" does). It's a sad-but-true fact that conservatives wish to preserve a status quo that leaves a lot of room for improvement.

-In all of this, the importance and greatness of Nancy Pelosi should not be overlooked or ever forgotten.

-To echo what Erik said, there has been no small amount of absurd hyperbole, and it hasn't even been limited to politicians. Acquaintances on facebook have made comments such as "we might as well take the Constitution out back and burn it right now," somebody being grateful John Boehner was their representative, and somebody even saying "Forgive them Lord, for they know not what they do," which was also apparently uttered by some guy named Jesus on a cross. Because, after all, the Jesus being crucified and wingnuts angry that a bill designed to help rein in insurance costs and aid families are totally the same thing.

In dealing with all this, I think Barney Frank hit it dead on, pointing out that the battle over health care became "the proxy for a lot of other sentiments. A lot of which are perfectly reasonable but some of which are kind of ugly. ... People out here today on the whole were, many of them, were hateful and abusive."

I couldn't agree more, and Republican efforts to disavow the hate-speech this past Sunday are as hollow as their objections to reform. When their supporters get ugly, Republicans are quick to try to disavow those supporters, but they've been encouraging this kind of language and these attitudes since the 2008 electoral campaign (remember all those crowds at McCain rallies calling Obama a Muslim and other names?). Republican representatives can't just hide from this language when it makes them look bad - it's as much a part of their movement as Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, appeals to the Reagan years, and hawkish rhetoric. It's all part of the package, whether they like it or not.

-On that note, for those both inside and outside of Congress who claim to oppose the bill on Christian principles, I might recommend they go back and read that part about some guy named Christ. I believe he who recommended helping those in need, rather than continuing to deny them care and side with wealthy interests. If you aren't in favor of helping people, you can't really make any pretense to standing for a religion whose main figure preached helping people.

Obama and the Democratic Congress

I pretty much disagree with Matt Bai's article about Obama not being able to control a Democratic Congress. He writes:

If recent history is any guide, however, Obama would need more than raw numbers in his favor. Congressional majorities are, in fact, a lot like corporate profits; they exist on paper, but that doesn’t mean they’re actually there when you need them. Carter, a reformer who won in an equally anti-Republican year, inherited a 23-seat majority in the Senate and a 149-seat advantage in the House — and accomplished little. Working with a narrower majority, Clinton barely passed a budget and then failed to win approval for his health care plan before losing Congress altogether. George W. Bush saw his one-seat Senate majority disappear almost immediately when a member of his own party, Jim Jeffords, defected.

The problem for all three presidents was, in a sense, more cultural than ideological. Carter, Clinton and Bush were all former governors who had not spent enough time in Washington to take the subway without a map; they were of the same parties as their Congressional allies but not of the same club. Each arrived in Washington assuming he’d earned the right to dictate the governing agenda to his party’s leaders, and each soon learned that entrenched Congressional chairmen aren’t especially impressed by inaugural balls. Such outsider presidents tend to display a remarkable indifference to the electoral needs and insecurities that can lead legislators to abandon a president of their own party. In retrospect, for instance, it’s hard to imagine why Clinton pursued a vote on his anti-crime bill, which included new restrictions on handguns, in August 1994, just three months before a lot of Southern and Western Democrats had to face the voters in their districts. A lot of them lost at least partly as a result, and the lesson that Congressional Democrats took away was that Clinton’s vaunted political instincts didn’t extend to helping them.

The problem with this analysis is that it is a facile look at the past. There is a huge difference between Carter and Clinton on the one hand and Obama on the other. Carter and Clinton had Democratic majorities, but those majorities had significant numbers of old-style southern Democrats in them. The realignment of 1980-1994 essentially eliminated those seats. Today, almost all Democrats agree with the central agenda of the party. Bai is someone aware of this but says that the tide of Democrats is likely to bring in more conservative members. To some extent, this may be true. I'm sure that there will be a couple more Heath Shuler types in the House. But who in the Senate fits this description? Democrats are going to win at least 7 Senate seats and I can't think of one of these people who is a conservative. Kay Hagan? Maybe. That's it.

That's not to say that Obama won't have problems setting the agenda. But I think the structural problem that Bai bases his history on has largely disappeared.

The connection between reason, information, and political ideology

The Washington Post has a story about a recent experiment conducted by two political scientists:

Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler provided two groups of volunteers with the Bush administration's prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. One group was given a refutation -- the comprehensive 2004 Duelfer report that concluded that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction before the United States invaded in 2003. Thirty-four percent of conservatives told only about the Bush administration's claims thought Iraq had hidden or destroyed its weapons before the U.S. invasion, but 64 percent of conservatives who heard both claim and refutation thought that Iraq really did have the weapons. The refutation, in other words, made the misinformation worse.

A similar "backfire effect" also influenced conservatives told about Bush administration assertions that tax cuts increase federal revenue. One group was offered a refutation by prominent economists that included current and former Bush administration officials. About 35 percent of conservatives told about the Bush claim believed it; 67 percent of those provided with both assertion and refutation believed that tax cuts increase revenue.

(You can read some more commentary about this article at Mother Jones, and find a link to the study)

This study adds to another recent finding in Larry Bartels' new book, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (Princeton University Press, 2008). Among the many interesting findings in Bartels' new book, he found using survey data that perceptions of growing economic inequality in the United States over the last twenty years were far different among liberals and conservatives. Not particularly surprising on the face of it, but he also found that political information had a substantially different effect among liberals and conservatives. The income gap between the rich and the poor in the U.S. has increased over the last twenty years, this isn't a debatable fact. But, Bartels found that among liberals, they were increasingly likely to recognize increasing economic inequality as they became more politically informed. Among the least informed liberals involved in the survey, about 70% recognized that inequality had increased, compared to 80% of the least informed conservatives. Among the most informed liberals, about 95% recognized that income inequality had increased, compared to about 60% of the most informed conservatives.

Am I really surprised by these findings? Not particularly. But it is still pretty disheartening that the likelihood of rational debate and reasonable compromise between liberals and conservatives, especially at the elite level, is pretty unlikely given that factual evidence has no impact on the most die-hard conservatives. If you combine these findings with other research that demonstrates ideological polarization between liberals and conservatives (or Democrats and Republicans) has also increased since the 1980s, especially at the elite level, the implications for the quality of public debate and public policy in this country are downright depressing.