Commonwealth Commonsense

A Big Idea

Congressional Republicans achieved a goal during yesterday’s healthcare summit. They shed their “party of no” label. They had ideas.

But Obama saw them and raised them one. He framed them as the party of small ideas while Democrats have a big idea. As in, we’re planning to fix healthcare instead of, as Sen. Tom Harkin said of the GOP plan, throw 10 feet of rope to a man drowning 50 feet from the boat—with a promise that at some later point, we’ll throw him a 20 foot rope.

The GOP did their homework well. As is usual the case, they were, in large part, more articulate than many of the Democrats, the president included. They had fire in their bellies and a list of facts and ideological bon mots. Even when they threw hanging curve balls, the Dems took called strikes. When I commented on that in a contemporaneous post yesterday, a friend also in my line of work called incredulous himself. The response to that oft charge of letting the government makes decisions instead of “the American people and their doctors” is, “Oh, if it were only so. Now it’s the insurance exec making millions of dollars a year who now gets to make that decision.”

But the Dems warmed up a little by the late innings, both rhetorically and passionately. The best I heard all day was by Sen. Dick Durbin. After the two Republican doctors lorded their experience over the crowd, Durbin gave them the view from the street. He’s been a good old fashioned—and as the GOP would characterize, “ambulance chasing”—trial lawyer. He’s defended victims of medical malpractice and the doctors that perform it. And showing his summation skills, he spoke in smooth paragraphs.

As any good lawyer would, he eviscerated the “common knowledge.” Both the number and award amounts of medical malpractice have dropped precipitously over the years, not increased, he said. The number of paid malpractice claims decreased 50 percent in the last 20 years, and the amount of awards have dropped the same 50 percent in the last five years. Then, he played the jury’s heart strings by telling the story of a woman who went in to have a mole surgically removed only to have the oxygen ignite, scarring her face for life and submitting her to repeated operations.

“Her life will never be the same. And you are saying that this innocent woman is only entitled to $250,000 in pain and suffering. I don't think it's fair.”

Certainly, GOP Chairman Michael Steele could understand that, he who thinks one million dollars, after taxes, “is not a lot of money.” Two hundred fifty thousand isn’t even walking around money for the chairman.

CNN, probably taking a cue from, I believe it was, GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell that Republicans weren’t getting enough hot air time, tracked the minutes party representatives talked.

Democrats spoke for a total of 135 minutes while President Obama spoke for 122 minutes, for a total of 257 minutes. Republicans, meanwhile, spoke for just 111 minutes, about 30 percent of the total speaking time.

The president spent too many of his minutes hemming and hawing as he is wont to do in extemporaneous situations. He often starts off searching for words in bursts of disconnected phrases. But when he warms, he can cut you with a butter knife.

His summation, which started in that same hesitant fashion, got legs. He cut through the GOP apocalyptic rhetoric.

“I know that there's been a discussion about whether a government should intrude in the insurance market. But it turns out, on things like capping out-of-pocket expenses or making sure that people are able to purchase insurance even if they've got a preexisting condition, overwhelmingly, people say the insurance market should be regulated.

And so one thing that I'd ask from my Republican friends is to look at the list of insurance reforms and make sure that those that you have not included in your plans, right now, are ones, in fact, that you don't think the American people should get.”

He reminded our representatives that they should be willing to let the American people have the same insurance coverage they have. He deftly framed his solutions as market driven as Sam Walton. His comparison of a wide open insurance market left to the states with what happened in the credit card market was one people could easily understand. He cited new statistics demonstrating how Americans already have chosen the government as their main source of insurance because companies can’t offer it anymore. And he used a little humor to undercut GOP criticism of the bill’s length and make the point that small ideas won’t work.

“I did not propose and I don't think any of the Democrats proposed something complicated just for the sake of being complicated. We'd love to have a five-page bill. It would save an awful lot of work.

The reason we didn't do it is because it turns out that baby steps don't get you to the place where people need to go. They need help right now. And so a step-by-step approach sounds good in theory, but the problem is, for example, we can’t solve the preexisting problem if we don’t do something about coverage.”

By this time, Obama has found his voice. He’s talking smoothly and minimizing the “hums” and “uhs.”

He then made the observation that I would have put a little differently, though his way sufficed. The Republicans think compromise is first, Dems put their ideas out there. Then Republicans put theirs. And then we all accept the GOP plan—lock, stock and barrel. Voila, bi-partisanship!

Finally, in music to the ears of those who thought he has no soul or fight in him,

“We cannot have another year-long debate about this. So the question that I'm going to ask myself and I ask of all of you is, is there enough serious effort that in a month's time or a few weeks' time or six weeks' time we could actually resolve something?

And if we can't, then I think we've got to go ahead and some make decisions, and then that's what elections are for. We have honest disagreements about -- about the vision for the country and we'll go ahead and test those out over the next several months till November. All right?”

Yes, Mr. President, that’s all right.

Liberals “Lost Their Thunder”

From the Guardian

There is an astonishing lack of anger among liberals, progressives and radicals who have abandoned emotion to the right. Our role model continues to be not FDR, still less Malcolm X, but our "bipartisan" and apparently tone-deaf President Obama. In this second or third year of a devastating depression, not just recession, that has inflicted an epidemic of suffering on the lower half of the American nation, Obama is very busy being fluent and civil while being essentially untouched by the rage felt by so many of us. Our world, as we have known it, is being annihilated, and nobody in power shows signs of giving a damn.

Healthcare Summit: Who Controls Costs?

I haven’t heard the basic response to the Republicans’ argument that we don’t want the government making decisions instead of the patients and their doctors.  The response is simply:  People don’t have control; insurance executives do.  Why the Dems don’t say that is beyond me.  Even when Sen. Kyl made the charge again before the lunch break, Obama said “everybody’s angry at Washington,” instead of pointing out that insurance companies now decide.

911 Call Costs $300

Is this our future?  No, it’s the present.

“Tracy residents will now have to pay every time they call 911 for a medical emergency. But there are a couple of options. Residents can pay a $48 voluntary fee for the year, which allows them to call 911 as many times as necessary. Or there’s the option of not signing up for the annual fee. Instead they will be charged $300 if they make a call for help.”

Tom Friedman’s column is titled “The Fat Lady Has Sung.”  While he thinks Obama’s problems are not all about how he communicates, he has failed to offer a compelling narrative.  Of course, it not at all certain that he has an attentive audience.

I am under no illusion that this alone would solve all his problems and ours. It comes back to us: We have to demand the truth from our politicians and be ready to accept it ourselves. We simply do not have another presidency to waste. There are no more fat years to eat through. If Obama fails, we all fail.

It’s true all over.  A week ago, many in my neighborhood were complaining about the lack of plows to remove the snow.  But Saturday when my state delegate and senator—David Bulova and Chap Petersen—had a town hall meeting, my wife recognized no one there from  our neighborhood.  I hope she was wrong. (I’m out of town for the week.) 

Obama’s Budget

Here’s a pretty cool chart showing how Obama’s FY2011 budget compares to the current budget.  Some of the biggest cuts include:

Grants to states for Medicaid – 11%

Public health and social services – 80%

Education for the disadvantaged – 32%

Trade adjustment assistance, training – 60%

Veterans benefits – 13%

State & Local law enforcement assistance – 15%

Child & family support programs –25%

Disaster relief – 62%

Obama’s New Communication Strategy

The Post says the administration has a new communications strategy.

First, they said, is a return to the disciplined messaging that was a hallmark of the 2008 campaign…

Second, White House advisers promise a quicker, more aggressive response to GOP attacks on the president and his policies….

A third change is a return to the backdrops for Obama that aides considered so effective during the presidential bid….

Finally, aides said it was recognized inside the West Wing that Obama has strayed from his most successful message of the campaign: that he would be a change agent in Washington.

Which means the administration has abandoned its original strategy, which was to be slow, passive, boring and an agent of the status quo.  Gee, I’m sure glad the administration has re-thought that plan.

A Tepid, Insincere Speech

Can we give up the lie that Barack Obama is a great speaker? As I watched the SOTU speech last might, I think I see two reasons that Obama’s rhetoric, while enhanced by his beautiful baritone voice, doesn’t resonate as much as it could. One is visual and one is verbal.

Note that in most sentences, the last couple of syllables drop in pitch, almost to the point that he seems to swallow the last words. That’s not a critical flaw per se, but when it becomes the dominant trajectory of his sentences, it borders on boredom. Speakers should mix up their inflections to keep the speech lively and varied. It reminds me of a child who, when asked if he did something bad, drops the ends of his sentence as he loses confidence in his argument. Obama sounds as if he doesn’t quite believe what he’s saying or loses his assuredness. Hopeful speech should sound hopeful in its inflections, meaning the ends of sentences should soar, not sink.

Second, only once in the entire speech did he look at the audience at home. In fact, his body is mechanical in its back and forth between the two teleprompters. This reliance on the words in front of him instead of those in his heart is becoming the stuff of ridicule. But most important, he fails to connect with the home audience. In fact, his side to side head moves makes it obvious to everyone that he’s reading. He might as well read from the script on the lectern.

I give him credit for saying he’s opposed to extending the Bush tax cuts for people making more than $200,000 and for taking on the Supreme Court. (Although wouldn’t it have been more effective if he looked directly at them and said, “The decision is wrong and we will overturn it.”) The fighting tone some credit him with sounds to me like the empty words of the class intellectual, who will, at the first sign of a real fight, fold as Obama has so often in the first year.

Where is Obama’s Larger Message?

Newsweek’s Joe Klein reminds us how memories get muddled.  Ronald Reagan, the man conservatives love to love, in fact recognized that his early tax cuts were a mistake and that he actually raised taxes two years after being elected.

[S]ince deficits do matter — and since Reagan's so-called supply-side cuts blasted an enormous hole in the budget — the President had to come back in 1982 with the largest peacetime tax increase in American history: the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act, which raised $37.5 billion, or 1% of gross domestic product (GDP), per year. He also signed a $3.3 billion gasoline-tax increase. The next year, he signed another whopping tax hike, designed to save Social Security.

But still the Reagan deficits got out of hand and Presidents Bush I and Clinton raised taxes, and as Klein put it, “Somehow the economy not only survived, it prospered.”

I thought about this after reading Tom Friedman’s Friday column in the New York Times.  He argues that President Obama has lacked an overall theme to his change agenda.

He has not tied all his programs into a single narrative that shows the links between his health care, banking, economic, climate, energy, education and foreign policies. Such a narrative would enable each issue and each constituency to reinforce the other and evoke the kind of popular excitement that got him elected.

Without it, though, the president’s eloquence, his unique ability to inspire people to get out of their seats and work for him, has been muted or lost in a thicket of technocratic details. His daring but discrete policies are starting to feel like a work plan that we have to slog through, and endlessly compromise over, just to finish for finishing’s sake — not because they are all building blocks of a great national project.

What is that project? What is that narrative? Quite simply it is nation-building at home. It is nation-building in America.

“Nation building” is not a winning phrase for the president, in my opinion.  It makes us sound like a third-world country (even if we are becoming one). 

But he does need a larger message.  My guess is it’s not that he can’t outline one; he’s afraid to articulate it.  We have not raised federal taxes in this country since 1993.  That alone is not a reason to.  But since then we have skewed the tax system so badly that not only have income disparities grown, but we are losing ground – in healthcare, education, infrastructure.

As I grew up in the 50s and 60s, life was pretty good in this country.  Most folks felt a better life was around the corner.  Not anymore.  We are not necessarily the greatest land of opportunity.

Actually, some other advanced economies offer more opportunity than ours does. For example, recent research shows that in the Nordic countries and in the United Kingdom, children born into a lower-income family have a greater chance than those in the United States of forming a substantially higher-income family by the time they're adults.

If you are born into a middle-class family in the United States, you have a roughly even chance of moving up or down the ladder by the time you are an adult. But the story for low-income Americans is quite different; going from rags to riches in a generation is rare. Instead, if you are born poor, you are likely to stay that way. Only 35 percent of children in a family in the bottom fifth of the income scale will achieve middle-class status or better by the time they are adults; in contrast, 76 percent of children from the top fifth will be middle-class or higher as adults.

…As a result of economic growth, each generation can usually count on having a higher income, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than the previous one. For example, men born in the 1960s were earning more in the 1990s than their fathers' generation did at a similar age, and their families' incomes were higher as well. But that kind of steady progress appears to have stalled. Today, men in their 30s earn 12 percent less than the previous generation did at the same age.

The main reason today's families have modestly higher overall income than prior generations is simple: More members of the household are working. Women have joined the labor force in a big way, and their earnings have increased as well. But with so many families now having two earners, continued progress along this path will be difficult unless wages for both men and women rise more quickly.

My mother didn’t work when I was growing up,  Neither did most of the women in our middle class neighborhood.

We will never go back to those good ol’ days.  But Joe Klein argues, we needn’t go that far back to the future.

An antitax fetishism has overwhelmed both parties. Along the way, despite the melodramatic rhetoric, the actual rate of federal taxation has wobbled a bit, from a high of 20.9% of GDP in 2000 to a recession-driven low of 17.7% last year, but averages out to just under 19% from 1980 to today. If the not-so-onerous Clinton tax rates are restored when the economy recovers, the federal Treasury would be enriched by nearly $300 billion per year.

Why does this matter now? Because we are in the midst of a debate over how to fund a health-care-reform plan — and the idea of raising taxes, even just a little bit, to pay for it is causing heart failure among our legislators. They are looking for somewhere between $30 billion and $35 billion per year. If the bill isn't properly funded — if working-class families don't receive large enough tax credits to help pay for their newly mandated health insurance, if they're forced to pay thousands of dollars in new out-of-pocket expenses — Republicans will use "socialized" health care as a bludgeon against Democrats in 2010 and 2012.

…It is a national scandal that we're nowhere close to having a reasonable discussion about taxes. A Reagan-size increase probably would be unwise right now, given the shaky economy. But the conversation will become unavoidable next year, when the Bush tax cuts expire. A restoration of the Clinton rates would go a long way toward paying down the Bush deficits and the assorted Bush-Obama federal bailouts and creating some breathing space if health reform costs more than expected. One hopes that Democrats, and fiscally responsible Republicans, will locate the backbone between now and then to do the right thing.

No, Obama’s big theme isn’t I’m going to raise taxes.  But in defense of higher taxes he needs to make a red,white and blue argument for fairness, something we’ve lost in the past 30 years.  Ronald Reagan made it OK to be greedy.  It seems with the populist anger against the obscenely wealthy, now is a good time to make that larger argument for justice, a fair, living wage for a fair day’s work, and a level playing field that rewards work and frugality.  Once the recession eases, we need to raise taxes not only on the super rich, but the well-to-do also, many of whom will be considered middle class ($100,000 and up). I would gladly pay them if I thought we’d have true healthcare reform, better transportation systems and a vibrant middle class, which is what makes this country great.

It is the common good argument, one that Obama hesitates to make, being perhaps afraid of the rich white men on Fox News and on talk radio.  He’s begun to fight back against right-wing extremists.  Now he needs to make the case to the rest of us.

‘We Wanted a Do-Nothing President’

Here’s a letter from a Newsweek reader on the week’s previous Anna Quindlen column about Obama’s change challenge.

Anna Quindlen asserts that, to help move the president's liberal agenda along, Americans "should start acting more like the voters who elected him." I suspect it's a mistake to equate the reasons many independents voted for President Obama—his youth, his family, his freshness after eight years of GOP governance—with strong support for his policies.
Calvin l. White Ooltewah, Tenn.

Mr. White seems to be saying, “Yeah, we elected him but we didn’t really want him to do anything.”

A Fiasco of Olympic Proportions

Just wondering…Did Obama believe his own PR?  Did he really think his presence in Denmark would make the IOC swoon?  So much for the advance office.

The slap to Chicago was such that some IOC members were left squirming. The city's plans for Olympic competition along its stunning Lake Michigan waterfront had long made it a front-runner and earned support from the highest possible level — Obama himself. His wife, Michelle, flew in two days before the vote to butter up IOC members, an essential part of the selection process. And Obama himself flew in Friday morning.

IOC members had seemed wowed, posing for photos with Mrs. Obama and taking souvenir shots of the president with their mobile phones. But, in the vote, Chicago was shunned.

"Either it was tactical voting, or a lot of people decided not to vote for Chicago whatever happened," IOC member Gerhard Heiberg said. "Nobody knows, but everybody is in a state of shock. Nobody believes it. I'm very sorry about it."