Wrong For 2008, Premature For 2016

There is no blog more identified with progressivism than Daily Kos.  Its readership is enormous, and it has extraordinary writers.

There must be extraordinary bloggers at Daily Kos- because its success couldn't possibly be because of its founder and proprietor, the already legendary Markos Moulitsas Huizenga. Today he writes

With Quinnipiac the latest to show Hillary Clinton romping toward the White House, it's becoming increasingly clear that she would face an easier path to the White House than anyone since Eisenhower, and maybe even since Thomas Jefferson.

As I note in greater detail below the fold, there is little room for an insurgent primary candidate (and the rest of the shaping field lacks any heft), while her general election numbers are downright gaudy. The big question is less about whether she can win, and more about whether she wants to pull the trigger and make history.

If she does, Dems are virtually guaranteed the White House for another eight years, and with that, at least one Supreme Court seat (Scalia would be 88 by the end of her second term). How could she refuse that? So meet me below the fold to see how she gets there.

It's silly enough to declare victory for a presidential candidate more than three years ahead of the next election, perhaps even more so when her party occupies the White House.  Reaction of the electorate to the policies President Obama pursues the next 3-4 years, as well as its perception in fall 2016 of the state of the country (much of which is beyond a president's control) will have a far greater impact on the 2016 presidential election than will polls which currently show Clinton routing the field.

Kos give a nodding reference to his full-throated criticism of the New York Senator in 2008, stating merely "Clinton's post-primary actions have defused much of the hostility she had engendered (including from me)."

Let's revisit a little of that hostility, shall we?  In March, 2008, Moulitsas argued that Clinton could capture the nomination only by staging torching the party:

Yet a coup by super delegate would sunder the party in civil war.

Clinton knows this, it's her only path to victory, and she doesn't care. She is willing -- nay,eager to split the party apart in her mad pursuit of power.

If the situations were reversed, and Obama was lagging in the delegates, popular vote, states won, money raised, and every other reasonable measure, then I'd feel the same way about Obama. (I pulled the plug early on Dean in 2004.) But that's not the case.

It is Clinton, with no reasonable chance of victory, who is fomenting civil war in order to overturn the will of the Democratic electorate. As such, as far as I'm concerned, she doesn't deserve "fairness" on this site. All sexist attacks will be dealt with -- those will never be acceptable. But otherwise, Clinton has set an inevitably divisive course and must be dealt with appropriately.

To reiterate, she cannot win without overturning the will of the national Democratic electorate and fomenting civil war, and she doesn't care.

Now, the individual who was "so divisive, she is actually working to split her own party" and who was "planning for more drastic, destructive and debilitating civil war" has "about as easy a path to the White House as anyone can ever have. It's now up to Clinton to decide whether she's really finished with public life, or whether she'll cap her storied career with one more dramatic bang."

Moulitsas really hasn't changed, merely transferring his devotion and blind allegiance from one person to another, from 2008's flavor of the month to 2013's flavor of the month.    He concedes that there is "one glaring black mark on Clinton's resume—her continued support for the surveillance state."  But he adds "Her positions on civil liberties appear to line up with those of Obama," to which there is little organized opposition.

President Obama apparently realized there would be little blowback from policies extending the national security state which, if exercised by a Republican (or even another Democratic) President, would have provoked outrage. But the President- or, rather, Democrats running for elective office in the future- may not be so lucky when he ramps up his thrust for the Grand Bargain.  Reuters reported last week

President Barack Obama, unable to persuade Republicans to accept higher taxes, is attempting to cobble together what he calls a "common-sense caucus" among lawmakers to help resolve U.S. budget woes and push his legislative agenda.

On Monday and in recent days, Obama has made individual phone calls to a number of senators in a search for common ground on $85 billion in budget cuts that went into effect last week, as well as his top priorities like deficit reduction, gun control and an overhaul of U.S. immigration laws.

Gene Sperling, the White House senior economic official, said on the CNN program "State of the Union" on Sunday that Obama was contacting to lawmakers to talk about compromises that could include reforms to both the tax code and entitlement programs, which include Social Security retirement benefits and Medicare healthcare for the elderly and disabled.

Five years ago, Moulitsas supported Obama, who had narcissistically promised "we are the ones we've been waiting for,"  over Hillary Clinton.  The seer who called Sarah Palin "a genius pick" by John McCain now has decided to throw his bad judgement behind Hillary Clinton.   "Women, who dominate the Democratic Party electorate," he writes, "are rightfully ready for their turn with history."

That's the problem with falling in love with politicians; it may be done for all the wrong reasons.   Barack Obama was going to "make history"- and he still might, unless Republicans are too stubborn to accept the President's effort to weaken Social Security and Medicare, the signature initiatives of the Democratic Party.  These days, Markos Moulitsas has a thing for Hillary Clinton because, for some, the right policy pales in significance to the right genetics.


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A Little Patience, Please

You can't say Markos Moulitsas Zuniga isn't open-minded.

The founder and publisher of Daily Kos, with hundreds of thousands of registered users and millions of unique viewers each month, ran on Monday a post entitled "2016 dan be Hillary's." Citing polls indicating Mrs. Clinton is favorably viewed, and would defeat potential GOP nominees in a presidential race in Texas and Kentucky, Moulitsas argues

if she's making states like those two competitive, what prayer would Republicans have in the traditional battlegrounds?

As I noted last week, Republicans are already in a world of hurt—if 2012 looked demographically the way 2016 will look, President Barack Obama's 3.9-point victory would've been a 5.2-point victory. But Clinton would make the GOP's daunting task downright impossible, particularly in the wake of their hamfisted efforts to attack Obama by trying to gin up a rivalry between the president and his former primary opponent.

So when Dick Cheney said, "I have the sense that she’s one of the more competent members of the current administration, and it would be interesting to speculate about how she might perform were she to be president," he wasn't trying to be nice to Clinton, he was trying to attack Obama. But oops. Four years of blowing kisses at Hillary can't be erased by a single manufactured freakout over Benghazi. The reality is that Hillary remains the nation's most popular politician and the most admired woman in the last 64 years, per Gallup.

Barely six hours later, a post authored by "Troubadour" on the same site asks rhetorically

And yet here we are again, with no less than Markos putting up a Front Page piece on what a stirling (sic) candidate Hillary would be in 2016.

The thing is, he and so many others simply forgot to ask the most basic question: Why in the hell would you want Hillary Clinton to be President in the first place?

Troubadour maintains (emphasis his) "The objective reality of Hillary Clinton's career and personality is far, far below any sane standard of Presidential leadership: Every step of the way has been characterized by the Washington version of "social promotion..."  He notes that assessing her performance as Secretary of State is difficult to determine without knowledge of the inner workings of the Department, and believes her efforts in the U.S. Senate were driven by political calculation.

Troubadour's scathing criticism is overly harsh.  The political career which began as First Lady, he states, "became hers simply because she had married a man decades earlier who would later become President." Whatever the merits of that assessment, it is ironic given that Barack Obama, newly re-elected as President, lost a race for the U.S. House of Representatives, became State Senator only after his opponent was forced out of the race, and became a U.S. Senator after the GOP nominee quit the race amid a sex scandal. Obama then faced far-right Republican Alan Keyes, who had flown in from Maryland for the occasion, and who would have been beaten by a block of wood.

Paul Waldman knows that Obama's primary (pun intended) challenger in 2008 would be confronted with some of the same gender-based contempt she had faced until dropping out and endorsing Senator Obama that spring.  He explains

It's also tempting to forget, when looking at her today, just how much ugly sexist vitriol was aimed at her during her time as First Lady and, to a slightly lesser but still significant degree, in her 2008 campaign. If she runs again, and especially if she becomes the Democratic nominee, it will come back in greater force than ever. Ann Friedman laments Clinton's Catch-22:

Herein lies one of the most useful, but also saddest, lessons of Hillary Clinton's career: The best defense against being labeled a raging bitch is to convince people you're an underdog. The ability to eat shit, to suck it up and earn the affection of skeptical voters or older male colleagues or your cheating husband, again and again, is an essential skill for successful women of Hillary's generation. A skill that is becoming less essential, sure, but one that few women would declare irrelevant.

To say that Clinton was the victim of sexism is too simple, true though it is. There was what can only be described as a tornado of male sexual panic directed at her. It sometimes seemed that decades of resentment and insecurity over the attacks on patriarchal privilege was poured into a cauldron, simmered down to a thick sauce, and then poured on Clinton's head. It came in the form of angry screeds, and it came in the form of jokes, all far more revealing about the sender than the target. Much of the humor, like the Spy magazine cover with which I illustrated this post, was premised on the hilarious idea that Clinton was not a woman at all but a man, because after all, how could she be FIrst Lady, work on policy, and still be a woman? (This continued into 2008;here's Amy Poehler as Clinton in a Saturday Night Live skit, saying "I invite the media to grow a pair. And if you can't, I will lend you mine.")

When she wasn't portrayed as male, Clinton was described as a castrating harpy; to take just one example, Tucker Carlson said multiple times during the 2008 campaign that whenever he saw Clinton on television, "I involuntarily cross my legs." I suppose Carlson was being refreshingly frank about his own sexual insecurity; his manhood apparently hangs by such a thin thread that just seeing a powerful woman on television was enough for him to fear that she would come through the screen and steal his testicles. But he was hardly the only one who saw in Clinton such a threat to their masculinity. The examples are too numerous to go through, but I'd just mention one of my favorites, when U.S. News complimented Clinton for a speech she gave, saying, "Her presentation was devoid of hard edges, contrary to her longtime image among critics as a harridan and a polarizer." That's right, a "harridan." That was written not in 1907, but in 2007.

As I said, I have no idea whether Clinton is going to run for president again. But if she does, all that stuff is going to come roaring back. There are many more women in politics today than there were 20 years ago when Hillary Clinton first became a national figure, and I'm sure that before long one of them will run for president and be faced with only a fraction of the kind of sexist venom that Clinton has been the target of (particularly if she's a Republican). But Clinton herself will never be able to escape it.

While Waldman is empathetic, Troubadour slams Mrs. Clinton's "presence, personality, image, and style."  But he does recognize "Comparing a recent Secretary of State with positive name recognition and negatives only from years in the past to GOP politicos who have been actively engaged in partisan politics up to the present time."  He also remarks "We have better, more talented, more courageous people than this available to lead, so there is no excuse for Hillary Clinton being the Democratic nominee in 2016, and even less excuse for we in the base to act like it's reasonable to favor her just because the cogs of the machine are once again turning around to her position."

There may, instead, prove to be no one better, more talented, and more courageous to lead. But less than one month into the second presidential term of the incumbent is too early for Markos Moulitsas or anyone else to assume otherwise.

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Hold The Applause, Please


Last night, the Canadian-born former Michigan governor and current Current (yes, current Current) TV host Jennifer Granholm offered a commentary entitled "Obama, Thank You for Keeping the Golden Door Open."    She exhibited impressive shortsightedness when arguing that the decision addressing the opportunities of children of illegal immigrants the President announced (transcript, here) yesterday "addresses our nation's biggest dilemma, which is economic growth."

By contrast, on Tuesday, Robert Reich, rarely if ever right (wing) but invariably correct, had noted

Can I say this any more simply? The earnings of the great American middle class fueled the great American expansion for three decades after World War II. Their relative lack of earnings in more recent years set us up for the great American bust.

Starting around 1980, globalization and automation began exerting downward pressure on median wages. Employers began busting unions in order to make more profits. And increasingly deregulated financial markets began taking over the real economy.

You won't get any of this from the  leading liberal/progressive blogs or journalists today.     Not from Reich.   Nor Glenn Greenwald.    Nor Charles P. Pierce.   Nor Daily Kos, which even offers a petition to sign supporting the Administration's decision.   Nor, especially, the Center for American Progress, the de facto media arm of Organizing for America.

Today, they will not be writing about globalization or automation- or offshoring, outsourcing, privatization, or withering criticism of government employees.    They will not point out that (as did Robert Oaks a few months ago) there officially are 3.39 unemployed individuals seeking work for every job available, with a ratio of 6.07 to 1 if we use a broader definition of unemployment.     While they pause to praise the President's decision, they will, for the time being, also stop writing about Republican class warfare while the GOP continues its (largely successful) effort to pit the poor against the working and middle classes.

Nor will they remind us of the 2010 Survey Of Consumer Finances released this past week by the Federal Reserve Board, which "provides insights into changes in family income and net worth since the 2007 survey."   It found (as the chart below, from the Federal Reserve Board via the economicpoplist.org, indicates)

the median value of real (inflation-adjusted) family income before taxes fell 7.7 percent; median income had also fallen slightly in the preceding three year period (figure 1).    The decline in median income was widespread across demographic groups, with only a few groups experiencing stable or rising incomes.   Most noticeably, median incomes moved higher for retirees and other nonworking families.

Median net worth (chart from the Federal Reserve Board via economicpopulist.org) fell dramatically despite rising for retirees and other nonworking families- the Americans who derive their income from outside the employment sector.
    

  


Continuing a 30-35 year trend (interrupted periodically), median family income declined despite rising for retirees and other nonworking families- the Americans who derive their income from outside the employment sector.        For individuals competing for jobs, the trend is clear, and downward, as reflected in the decline of middle-income private sector jobs as a share of total employment, graphically depicted by the decline of the empire.com:

Admittedly, those factors- including "free" trade, automation, privatization, off-shoring, outsourcing,  privatization, a stagnant minimum wage, and union busting- usually celebrated by conservatives play a greater role in the destruction of the job market, downward pressure on wages, and subsequent decline of the middle class than does immigration, legal or illegal. And, today (June, 2012) as Granholm assumes, our biggest "dilemma" might in fact be economic growth.

Still, at some point the economic slump will be in our rear view mirror with politicians, pundits, and media all cheering a roaring economy.    All factors, including illegal immigration, will continue to take their toll on jobs and wages, with most ignored by the right, and illegal immigration by the left.  




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Early, At Best


Don't jump to conclusions.    Kick back and relax.   Take a cold shower.

A couple of weeks ago, in wake of the withdrawal from the GOP presidential race of Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney was crowned by the media his party's presidential nominee.     With the inevitable bounce or bump- which are not the same, but probably both played a role- Romney was found to be running neck and neck with President Obama.

Now that a little of the media's Republican euphoria and Democratic fear has subsided, a different narrative is being developed, for this week.      Jed Lewison of Daily Kos, for instance, cites two recent polls of sentiment in Arizona, one by the Merrill/Morrison Institute and the other by Behavior Research Centers/Rocky Mountain Poll, both showing Obama at 42% and Romney at 40%.

Presidential polls are like women (or men); there always is another one coming along.     Or like the weather in Chicago- wait a minute, it'll change.   Or like.... well, enough with the cliches.   We hear, accurately, that polls are mere snapshots, after which other "experts" cite the latest one to back up their perspective.

It is early- very early.    At this stage four years ago, few people had heard of Sarah Palin, and even fewer cared about her.     Then four and a half months later, after everyone had seen and heard Palin and presumably formed an opinion about her, she was identified as the dramatic pick that would send Barack Obama back to Chicago.   Or Hawaii.    Or Kenya.

Alas, things changed dramatically even after early and mid September of 2008, a mere two months before the election and five months later in the process than we now stand.      A poll- even an accurate one taken by a reputable organization- is at best now virtually meaningless (more on at best in a later post).      And the final tally in Arizona, unless extraordinary circumstances ensue, will not change the outcome of the election.

Aside from (obviously) the usual suspects- the economy, world affairs, cultural issues, personalities, the debates (barely), and others- this incumbent's re-election prospects are imperiled by GOP voter suppression efforts in various states and the shift in electoral votes granted states as a result of population changes reflected in the 2010 census.    (If Obama were to carry exactly the same states he did in 2008, his total would be 12 short of that in 2008.) Still, Barack Obama in 2008 garnered 365 electoral votes, 192 more than his opponent and 95 more than needed for election.       He did so by carrying the popular vote in every state won by Al Gore- who fell a mere four(4) electors shy of victory- plus Colorado, Florida, Indiana (!), Ohio, Nevada, North Carolina, and Virginia.        Meanwhile, Senator Obama- who won the popular vote by 7.2%- was crushed in Arizona by 8.8%.

Admittedly, Arizona was the home state of the 2008 GOP presidential nominee.    But arguably the main reason Arizona rejected Barack Obama was because it is a conservative Republican state.   Notwithstanding whatever impact the immigration/illegal immigration issue (thus far seriously fumbled by the Gas and Oil Party) may have on November's outcome in Arizona, Barack Obama will not carry the state.

Or, less likely, he will.     But if he does, one thing surely will have transpired- a blowout election, a laugher which did not turn on the vote in Arizona.         It is inconceivable that Obama would lose a majority of the electoral votes in the states which flipped from (R) to (D) from 2000 to 2008 and still carry Arizona.    (If the incumbent lost all those seven states and won Arizona, he would lose due to the aforementioned transfer of delegates among the state).

So grab an "adult" or sensible beverage of your choice, set a spell and take your shoes off.      Then amuse yourself at the attention given to spring polls of presidential preference.     Just don't take them seriously.



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Health Care Polling

Jed, please; you're killing me!

A good blogger, Jed Lewison, at Daily Kos comments about a poll taken for CNN by Opinion Research Corporation earlier this month:

As you may know, a bill that makes major changes to the country's health care system became law earlier this year. Based on what you have read or heard about that legislation, do you generally favor or generally oppose it?
Favor: 43%
Oppose: 54%

(IF OPPOSE) Do you oppose that legislation because you think its approach toward health care is too liberal, or because you think it is not liberal enough?

Favor (from previous question): 43%
Oppose, too liberal: 37%
Oppose, not liberal enough: 13%


It takes about three seconds to look at these numbers and realize that the failure to secure a public option was President Obama's single biggest political mistake of the health care reform fight. Given the power of the health insurance lobby, getting a robust public option was probably never a serious possibility, but something like Medicare buy-in for people 55 and up was doable, and if Obama had been able to shepherd it through Congress, it almost certainly would have won over much of the liberal opposition to reform.

An important thing to keep in mind here is that most liberal opponents of health care reform aren't Democrats whose votes can be taken for granted. Most of them are actually independents. According to the poll, 17 percent of independents oppose reform because it is not liberal enough. That compares with 9 percent of Democrats.

In all, one-quarter of opposition to health care reform comes from people who believe it's not liberal enough, including about twice as many independents as Democrats who wish it were more liberal. If you happen to be one of those who believes that independents decide elections, that's a number you can't ignore.



Lewison's theme is right: a lot of people support single-payer (or a variant thereof) and should not be ignored. But Lewison undermined this point with his interpretation of the ORC numbers.

Question 2 was asked only of those who, unaware of the follow-up question, responded to Question 1 by saying they are opposed to the health care legislation enacted earlier this year. However, there are people who offered their support but, if aware they would be given the opportunity to explain their opposition because reform did not go far enough, would have answered "oppose" to the first question. These are people, the very wisest among us, who had grave misgivings about "Obamacare" but are loathe to put themselves in the camp of the opponents.

You remember those critics: the Democratic bill will increase the deficit by forcing millions of people to lose their coverage in the best health care system in the world and replace it with government takeover of health care which will destroy the private insurance industry and in which government bureaucrats will come between you and your doctor, determine what plan you have to accept, impose death panels, increase wait times for care, and generally turn us into Canada. Some of us would rather stand with President Obama and the Democratic Party than with the radicals whose opposition was more often hysterical than reasoned.

If the first two questions of the survey had been combined, such that respondents were asked whether they support the legislation, oppose it because it was too liberal, or oppose it because it was not liberal enough, more than 13% would have gone with the last option. Oh, maybe not 20% or 25%- but wherein a few respondents are proxies for millions of Americans, the percentage increase would have represented a lot of us who strongly believed the health care legislation far too tepid, reform excessively cautious. Those would have included independents, but more Democrats.

Unfortunately, as Lewison appears to understand- and as now is obvious- President Obama was little concerned about those "liberal critics" or, as he would put it, "sanctimonious purists."

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Limbaugh Applauds Economic Obstructionism

Rush Limbaugh ranted on Tuesday, July 14

The regime today says that they have "saved or created" three million jobs. Think about how deranged or delusional that is. We know for a fact that just last month alone 652,000 people gave up looking for work, and they want to try to tell us they've "created or saved" three million jobs? So liberalism, leftists, they know how to destroy. They know how to tear down. But they have no clue how to build back. They can't even manage their own disasters. They made their debt, let them lie in it.

A few minutes later Rush would claim "Democrats are in a screaming panic" about losing the House in November and contend

It woulda been worse if we hadn't done the stimulus, it would have been worse. That's all they got, that and bashing Bush. It could have been worse. They have to lie. That they created three million jobs, or saved 'em, or what have you.

That manipulative genius, Rush Limbaugh. He said Democrats claim "it could have been worse" and implies that it is absurd. Not so absurd, according to the Congressional Budget Office in May, as reported by that socialist communist Obama house organ, The Washington Times:

The stimulus law was responsible for funding between 1.2 million and 2.8 million jobs in the first quarter of this year and kept the unemployment rate lower than it would otherwise have been, the Congressional Budget Office said in a new analysis Tuesday.

The analysis said the gross domestic product, the measure of the country's economy, was between 1.7 and 4.2 percent higher than it would otherwise have been without the $862 billion program, which passed Congress in February 2009 almost exclusively on the strength of Democratic votes.

As for unemployment, even though the rate hovered around 10 percent during the quarter, CBO said that could have been as high as 11.5 percent without the stimulus.

In a prime example of circular logic, Rush maintains of Democrats (who else?) "They made their debt, let them lie in it."

Admittedly, if it is their debt, they are responsible for it. Unavoidably true- but completely irrelevant, except as manipulation. The implication (not statement) is that Barack Obama- or the Democratic Party- is responsible. (Limbaugh doesn't make it clear to whom or what he is referring. Specification, even mere clarification, is uncomfortable for conservatives, who usually prefer feeling to thinking.) But the Democrats/Obama/Pelosi etc. are neither responsible for most of the current deficit nor for what is expected in the future. Last year, The New York Times explained

Mr. Obama’s main contribution to the deficit is his extension of several Bush policies, like the Iraq war and tax cuts for households making less than $250,000. Such policies — together with the Wall Street bailout, which was signed by Mr. Bush and supported by Mr. Obama — account for 20 percent of the swing.

About 7 percent comes from the stimulus bill that Mr. Obama signed in February. And only 3 percent comes from Mr. Obama’s agenda on health care, education, energy and other areas.

If the analysis is extended further into the future, well beyond 2012, the Obama agenda accounts for only a slightly higher share of the projected deficits.

According to The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, the Bush-era tax cuts account for over $700 billion — or nearly 55 percent — of the deficit projected for 2019 under current policies. According to the Congressional Budget Office (graph, below, via CBPP), Bush-era tax cuts will account for a greater share of the projected 2019 deficit than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the recession, the stimulus, and TARP, Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac- combined.

Rush, then, could have altered his monologue a bit and made it accurate: The Obama administration has saved or created at least two million jobs. Still, there were 652,000 people who gave up looking for a job last month; many of them need an extension of unemployment benefits, which my party has been blocking. Conservatives know how to oppose; heck, we oppose anything President Obama favors, or which we can accuse him of favoring. We can help the president pull this nation out of the recession facilitated by the last president, end the latter's tax cuts for the wealthy, and then claim credit with the public for helping get the deficit under control.

Either this is good electoral strategy- or this Daily Kos blogger has a point.

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Not Reid

Two interesting posts graced the pages of Daily Kos yesterday. BarbinMd includes a portion of the conversation between Newsweek's Howard Fineman and host Chris Matthews regarding Senator Joseph Lieberman's opposition to any form of public option in health care and comes to a conclusion:

MATTHEWS: Uh, let's talk about this thing with Harry Reid and Lieberman. I call him "Joe the bummer" as in "Joe the plumber," because he's brilliantly timing this thing. 'I'm not for this, I'm not for the public option, now I'm not for the buy-in on Medicare,' the H-55. He's just killing these guys.

FINEMAN: Well, I talked to his spokesman today, I said, look, I'm going on Hardball, give me your side of the story. Okay, their side of the story is, it's a principled thing, there's many parts of the bill he believes in, the Medicare buy-in is an add-on because there's already subsidies. And the guy gave me a lot of plausible stuff. Okay. And I half believe it. I'm sorry ...

MATTHEWS: What's the other half of your beliefs?

FINEMAN: The other half is it's personal with Joe, not with Obama, 'cause don't forget that Obama, the President, supported Lieberman in the fight in the party in Connecticut. It's the grassroots left of the Democratic Party ...

MATTHEWS: That enjoyed his torture.

FINEMAN: That enjoyed his torture and this is payback to them. Obama, excuse me, the President's caught in the middle here. That's my take on it.

MATTHEWS: So he wants Markos Moulitsas to take a hit.

FINEMAN: He wants Moulitsas, he wants Firedoglake, he wants all those people who rode around on the bus of the challenger, who defeated him in the Democratic primary.

So there.

And this is the thumb-sucking baby that Harry Reid is caving to.

Mcjoan posted "Reid Caves: Medicare Buy-in, Public Option Pulled from Senate Bill," ninety minutes later quoted The New Republic's health care expert Jonathan Cohn, who in turn had quoted Politico's Carrie Budoff Brown, who had reported

The White House is encouraging Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to cut a deal with Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), which would mean eliminating the proposed Medicare expansion in the health reform bill, according to an official close to the negotiations. ...

The White House disputed this account, saying any notion that officials there are trying to push Reid into cutting a deal with Lieberman is inaccurate. White House officials say they are on the same page with Reid, working with him to find the best way to move forward with reform – not pushing him to do something he doesn’t want to do.

“The report is inaccurate,” said Dan Pfeiffer, White House communications director. “The White House is not pushing Senator Reid in any direction. We are working hand-in-hand with the Senate leadership to work through the various issues and pass health reform as soon as possible.”

But the source reaffirmed the account, saying that the White House recommended that Reid cut a deal with Lieberman that would allow the health reform bill to pass by Christmas, and that Reid wanted more time before making a final decision.

Cohn adds

But one of TNR's Capitol Hill sources is saying the same thing that Politico's is. According to the source, the message came directly from Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel: Lose the Medicare buy-in, reach an accommodation with Lieberman, and pass legislation as soon as possible.

Ryan Grim of The Huffington Post, as mcjoan notes, wrote

Rahm Emanuel visited Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in his Capitol office on Sunday evening and personally urged him to cut a deal with recalcitrant Sen. Joe Lieberman, two Democratic sources familiar with the situation told the Huffington Post.

Trying hard not to to confirm what he was confirming, Barack Obama Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois admitted “The White House is encouraging us to find 60 votes and to preserve some of the most important parts of the bill. I don’t want to go into the specifics – we want Sen. Lieberman’s support."

Harry Reid is caving? It wasn't the Nevada Senator whom Joe Lieberman was unfavorably comparing to John McCain when the Connecticut Senator in August 2008 framed the presidential election as

between one candidate, John McCain, who has always put the country first, worked across party lines to get things done, and one candidate who has not....

In my opinion, the choice could not be more clear: between one candidate, John McCain, who’s had experience, been tested in war and tried in peace, another candidate who has not. Between one candidate, John McCain, who has always put the country first, worked across party lines to get things done, and one candidate who has not. Between one candidate who’s a talker, and the other candidate who’s the leader America needs as our next president.

In case anyone didn't understand which candidate he thought was patriotic, at the Republican National Convention a few weeks later Lieberman condemnedpoked another finger in the eye of Senator Obama, whom he said

is a gifted and eloquent young man who can do great things for our country in the years ahead. But eloquence is no substitute for a record — not in these tough times.

In the Senate he has not reached across party lines to get anything significant done, nor has he been willing to take on powerful interest groups in the Democratic Party.

When others wanted to retreat in defeat from the field of battle, when Barack Obama was voting to cut off funding for our troops on the ground, John McCain had the courage....

And the problem is.... Harry Reid?

Rahm Emanuel works for President Barack Obama. Whatever the reason(s) for Joe Lieberman to be acting like Joe Lieberman, one thing is clear: the White House wants a bill. Any bill. Anything it can point to and call "health care reform." Whatever the contents. Excusing Barack Obama for his failures may get us closer to a law weak enough to get 60 votes in the United States Senate, but it stands in the way of getting reform that improves, rather than harms, the nation's health care system.

Obama's Choice

Senator Claire McCaskill (D.-Mo.) was a very early supporter of, and constant surrogate for, Barack Obama, and fittingly, backed the bid of the Independent Senator from Connecticut, Joe Lieberman, to remain chairman of the Senate's Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. In an article in Salon, Mike Madden quotes the Missouri Senator as saying:

He has sent a very clear signal since his election -- one of humility and one of reconciliation and healing, and it's very clear to all of us that he doesn't want to play the old political games. Old politics would have been revenge and retribution. New politics would be, let's get to work.

In an ironic way, McCaskill is half right. Unlike the comments of some such as Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas ("what happened, happened in the Senate- not in the White House, in the Senate"), McCaskill seems to understand that the primary reason Lieberman (who lost his position as chairman of a subcommittee) was given an ineffectual slap on the wrist was Barack Obama. It was the President-elect's spokesperson, Stephanie Cutter, who, in an e-mail of November 11, wrote Greg Sargent of Talking Points Memo

We aren't going to referee decisions about who should or should not be a committee chair. President-elect Obama looks forward to working with anyone to move the country forward. We'd be happy to have Sen. Lieberman caucus with the Democrats. We don't hold any grudges.

If the leader of your party, recently elected in a near-landslide and currently enjoying great popularity, says (through a representative) a)"we'd be happy to have Sen. Lieberman caucus with the Democrats" (though evicting Lieberman from the caucus never was on the table); and b)"we don't hold any grudges" toward a politician who has said that you are "a talker" who hasn't always "put country first," the message is clear: I want that guy to remain in a position of influence. And another message: cross me, and I will reward you.

At some point during what he hopes will be an eight-year run, President Obama will be faltering in the polls with little support among the American people. And he will need the vote of a wavering member of Congress, who will then remember the message Barack Obama sent in his advocacy of another member of Congress who actively, and virulently, attacked him throughout the campaign. And that member will know that bucking President Obama carries no retribution and no consequence, except possibly reward.

Fear: Thy Name Is McCain

Reuters reported on March 14, 2008 of a curious comment by Senator John McCain:

Republican presidential candidate John McCain said on Friday he fears that al Qaeda or another extremist group might attempt spectacular attacks in Iraq to try to tilt the U.S. election against him.

McCain, at a town hall meeting in this Philadelphia suburb, was asked if he had concerns that anti-American militants in Iraq might ratchet up their activities in Iraq to try to increase casualties in September or October and tip the November election against him.

"Yes, I worry about it," McCain said. "And I know they pay attention because of the intercepts we have of their communications ... The hardest thing in warfare is to counter someone or a group of individuals who are willing to take their own lives in order to take others."

DHinMI on 3/14/08 at dailykos had an interesting take on this:

McCain isn't president, so why would he think the voters would punish him for failing to prevent another Al Qaeda attack on the United States?
Oh, that's right, because McCain is really running to complete George W. Bush's third term as President, and in that moment of candor, he let slip his greatest fear, that the voters will figure out that by embracing George W. Bush, McCain embraces all of Bush's failures.
(And speaking of embracing Bush's failures, McCain today was in Iraq with Dick Cheney- MSL.)
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Yes, I know that Senator McCain is raising the specter of another terrorist attack so as to plant the idea that Al Qaeda is afraid of him. But McCain may be right. We both worry that Al Qaeda will attack the United States shortly before the presidential election, which would likely inure to the benefit of the more hawkish candidate, the war veteran, John McCain. That could be smart strategy on their part; after all, what could be better for recruitment of Islamic terrorists than election of a President willing to keep American- i.e., western- troops on Muslim land for the next 100 years?