Today is primary day and 3.5 million Flori

Showing posts with label health care reform. Show all posts
Showing posts with label health care reform. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 03, 2013

Feeling distracted? Might be time to get back to basics...

From "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Partisanship" by SydneyAnne Stone on HuffPo

It is time to start focusing on collective solutions for the greater good. Instead of being a nation divided, we need to come together to find answers or we risk losing a great deal more...

 Hear hear! - NH


Posted by at 0 comments
Labels: , ,

Monday, November 25, 2013

Voters Demand for Open Primaries Increases Nationally


NONPARTISANS/ OPEN PRIMARIES
INDEPENDENT VOTERS
Morning Consult Poll Results on Politics of Healthcare Reform Shows Shift in Independent Voters (Sac Bee/ The Morning Consult) The poll reveals a significant shift in Independent voters heading into a midterm election year. 58% of independent voters now trust Republicans more on handling healthcare. Among all registered voters, President Obama receives a lot of the blame from more than 50% of respondents for the insurance cancellations, and over 60% say the president deserves a lot of the blame for the insurance exchange challenges. 
Posted by at 0 comments
Labels: , , , , , , ,

Friday, June 22, 2012

Unpopular Mandate -- An American Crossroads


As our elected representatives become party representatives and the parties begin a slow decline in power -- membership, identification with voters, and effectiveness in terms of representing and negotiating on behalf of the American electorate, we as a nation are indeed considering alternatives.

The health insurance debate isn't about health insurance. Nor is it about health, nor is it a debate. It's a partisan game. The kind of game that independents don't like.

Below is a thoughtful article by Ezra Klein in The New Yorker which tries to address our conflicted political and cultural moment. It is interesting article at the crossroads between politics and psyschology and culture. At the end of the day the article is talking about (without ever using the words) the culture of politics in the US and how it stifles a more developmental political process. I think that it is potentially useful in the discussion about the Obama presidency, as the article begs the question how does the current status quo change. Answer...you empower independents bringing them as active players into the public dialogue.

h/t to Rich Sokolow


The Political Scene

Unpopular Mandate

Why do politicians reverse their positions?

by June 25, 2012

Republicans turned against the individual mandate after supporting it for two decades.
Republicans turned against the individual mandate after supporting it for two decades.

On March 23, 2010, the day that President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law, fourteen state attorneys general filed suit against the law’s requirement that most Americans purchase health insurance, on the ground that it was unconstitutional. It was hard to find a law professor in the country who took them seriously. “The argument about constitutionality is, if not frivolous, close to it,” Sanford Levinson, a University of Texas law-school professor, told the McClatchy newspapers. Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the law school at the University of California at Irvine, told the Times, “There is no case law, post 1937, that would support an individual’s right not to buy health care if the government wants to mandate it.” Orin Kerr, a George Washington University professor who had clerked for Justice Anthony Kennedy, said, “There is a less than one-per-cent chance that the courts will invalidate the individual mandate.” Today, as the Supreme Court prepares to hand down its decision on the law, Kerr puts the chance that it will overturn the mandate—almost certainly on a party-line vote—at closer to “fifty-fifty.” The Republicans have made the individual mandate the element most likely to undo the President’s health-care law. The irony is that the Democrats adopted it in the first place because they thought that it would help them secure conservative support. It had, after all, been at the heart of Republican health-care reforms for two decades.

The mandate made its political début in a 1989 Heritage Foundation brief titled “Assuring Affordable Health Care for All Americans,” as a counterpoint to the single-payer system and the employer mandate, which were favored in Democratic circles. In the brief, Stuart Butler, the foundation’s health-care expert, argued, “Many states now require passengers in automobiles to wear seat-belts for their own protection. Many others require anybody driving a car to have liability insurance. But neither the federal government nor any state requires all households to protect themselves from the potentially catastrophic costs of a serious accident or illness. Under the Heritage plan, there would be such a requirement.” The mandate made its first legislative appearance in 1993, in the Health Equity and Access Reform Today Act—the Republicans’ alternative to President Clinton’s health-reform bill—which was sponsored by John Chafee, of Rhode Island, and co-sponsored by eighteen Republicans, including Bob Dole, who was then the Senate Minority Leader.

After the Clinton bill, which called for an employer mandate, failed, Democrats came to recognize the opportunity that the Chafee bill had presented. In “The System,” David Broder and Haynes Johnson’s history of the health-care wars of the nineties, Bill Clinton concedes that it was the best chance he had of reaching a bipartisan compromise. “It should have been right then, or the day after they presented their bill, where I should have tried to have a direct understanding with Dole,” he said.

Ten years later, Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, began picking his way back through the history—he read “The System” four times—and he, too, came to focus on the Chafee bill. He began building a proposal around the individual mandate, and tested it out on both Democrats and Republicans. “Between 2004 and 2008, I saw over eighty members of the Senate, and there were very few who objected,” Wyden says. In December, 2006, he unveiled the Healthy Americans Act. In May, 2007, Bob Bennett, a Utah Republican, who had been a sponsor of the Chafee bill, joined him. Wyden-Bennett was eventually co-sponsored by eleven Republicans and nine Democrats, receiving more bipartisan support than any universal health-care proposal in the history of the Senate. It even caught the eye of the Republican Presidential aspirants. In a June, 2009, interview on “Meet the Press,” Mitt Romney, who, as governor of Massachusetts, had signed a universal health-care bill with an individual mandate, said that Wyden-Bennett was a plan “that a number of Republicans think is a very good health-care plan—one that we support.”

Wyden’s bill was part of a broader trend of Democrats endorsing the individual mandate in their own proposals. John Edwards and Hillary Clinton both built a mandate into their campaign health-care proposals. In 2008, Senator Ted Kennedy brought John McDonough, a liberal advocate of the Massachusetts plan, to Washington to help with health-care reform. That same year, Max Baucus, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, included an individual mandate in the first draft of his health-care bill. The main Democratic holdout was Senator Barack Obama. But by July, 2009, President Obama had changed his mind. “I was opposed to this idea because my general attitude was the reason people don’t have health insurance is not because they don’t want it. It’s because they can’t afford it,” he told CBS News. “I am now in favor of some sort of individual mandate.”

This process led, eventually, to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act—better known as Obamacare—which also included an individual mandate. But, as that bill came closer to passing, Republicans began coalescing around the mandate, which polling showed to be one of the legislation’s least popular elements. In December, 2009, in a vote on the bill, every Senate Republican voted to call the individual mandate “unconstitutional.”

This shift—Democrats lining up behind the Republican-crafted mandate, and Republicans declaring it not just inappropriate policy but contrary to the wishes of the Founders—shocked Wyden. “I would characterize the Washington, D.C., relationship with the individual mandate as truly schizophrenic,” he said.

It was not an isolated case. In 2007, both Newt Gingrich and John McCain wanted a cap-and-trade program in order to reduce carbon emissions. Today, neither they nor any other leading Republicans support cap-and-trade. In 2008, the Bush Administration proposed, pushed, and signed the Economic Stimulus Act, a deficit-financed tax cut designed to boost the flagging economy. Today, few Republicans admit that a deficit-financed stimulus can work. Indeed, with the exception of raising taxes on the rich, virtually every major policy currently associated with the Obama Administration was, within the past decade, a Republican idea in good standing.

Jonathan Haidt, a professor of psychology at New York University’s business school, argues in a new book, “The Righteous Mind,” that to understand human beings, and their politics, you need to understand that we are descended from ancestors who would not have survived if they hadn’t been very good at belonging to groups. He writes that “our minds contain a variety of mental mechanisms that make us adept at promoting our group’s interests, in competition with other groups. We are not saints, but we are sometimes good team players.”

One of those mechanisms is figuring out how to believe what the group believes. Haidt sees the role that reason plays as akin to the job of the White House press secretary. He writes, “No matter how bad the policy, the secretary will find some way to praise or defend it. Sometimes you’ll hear an awkward pause as the secretary searches for the right words, but what you’ll never hear is: ‘Hey, that’s a great point! Maybe we should rethink this policy.’ Press secretaries can’t say that because they have no power to make or revise policy. They’re told what the policy is, and their job is to find evidence and arguments that will justify the policy to the public.” For that reason, Haidt told me, “once group loyalties are engaged, you can’t change people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments. Thinking is mostly just rationalization, mostly just a search for supporting evidence.”

Psychologists have a term for this: “motivated reasoning,” which Dan Kahan, a professor of law and psychology at Yale, defines as “when a person is conforming their assessments of information to some interest or goal that is independent of accuracy”—an interest or goal such as remaining a well-regarded member of his political party, or winning the next election, or even just winning an argument. Geoffrey Cohen, a professor of psychology at Stanford, has shown how motivated reasoning can drive even the opinions of engaged partisans. In 2003, when he was an assistant professor at Yale, Cohen asked a group of undergraduates, who had previously described their political views as either very liberal or very conservative, to participate in a test to study, they were told, their “memory of everyday current events.”

The students were shown two articles: one was a generic news story; the other described a proposed welfare policy. The first article was a decoy; it was the students’ reactions to the second that interested Cohen. He was actually testing whether party identifications influence voters when they evaluate new policies. To find out, he produced multiple versions of the welfare article. Some students read about a program that was extremely generous—more generous, in fact, than any welfare policy that has ever existed in the United States—while others were presented with a very stingy proposal. But there was a twist: some versions of the article about the generous proposal portrayed it as being endorsed by Republican Party leaders; and some versions of the article about the meagre program described it as having Democratic support. The results showed that, “for both liberal and conservative participants, the effect of reference group information overrode that of policy content. If their party endorsed it, liberals supported even a harsh welfare program, and conservatives supported even a lavish one.”

In a subsequent study involving just self-described liberal students, Cohen gave half the group news stories that had accompanying Democratic endorsements and the other half news stories that did not. The students who didn’t get the endorsements preferred a more generous program. When they did get the endorsements, they went with their party, even if this meant embracing a meaner option.
This kind of thinking is, according to psychologists, unsurprising. Each of us can have firsthand knowledge of just a small number of topics—our jobs, our studies, our personal experiences. But as citizens—and as elected officials—we are routinely asked to make judgments on issues as diverse and as complex as the Iranian nuclear program, the environmental impact of an international oil pipeline, and the likely outcomes of branding China a “currency manipulator.”
According to the political-science literature, one of the key roles that political parties play is helping us navigate these decisions. In theory, we join parties because they share our values and our goals—values and goals that may have been passed on to us by the most important groups in our lives, such as our families and our communities—and so we trust that their policy judgments will match the ones we would come up with if we had unlimited time to study the issues. But parties, though based on a set of principles, aren’t disinterested teachers in search of truth. They’re organized groups looking to increase their power. Or, as the psychologists would put it, their reasoning may be motivated by something other than accuracy. And you can see the results among voters who pay the closest attention to the issues.

In a 2006 paper, “It Feels Like We’re Thinking,” the political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels looked at a National Election Study, a poll supported by the National Science Foundation, from 1996. One of the questions asked whether “the size of the yearly budget deficit increased, decreased, or stayed about the same during Clinton’s time as President.” The correct answer is that it decreased, dramatically. Achen and Bartels categorize the respondents according to how politically informed they were. Among the least-informed respondents, Democrats and Republicans picked the wrong answer in roughly equal numbers. But among better-informed voters the story was different. Republicans who were in the fiftieth percentile gave the right answer more often than those in the ninety-fifth percentile. Bartels found a similar effect in a previous survey, in which well-informed Democrats were asked whether inflation had gone down during Ronald Reagan’s Presidency. It had, but many of those Democrats said that it hadn’t. The more information people had, it seemed, the better they were at arranging it to fit what they wanted to believe. As Bartels told me, “If I’m a Republican and an enthusiastic supporter of lower tax rates, it is uncomfortable to recognize that President Obama has reduced most Americans’ taxes—and I can find plenty of conservative information sources that deny or ignore the fact that he has.”

Recently, Bartels noticed a similar polarization in attitudes toward the health-care law and the Supreme Court. Using YouGov polling data, he found that less-informed voters who supported the law and less-informed voters who opposed it were equally likely to say that “the Supreme Court should be able to throw out any law it finds unconstitutional.” But, among better-informed voters, those who opposed the law were thirty per cent more likely than those who supported it to cede that power to the Court. In other words, well-informed opponents realized that they needed an activist Supreme Court that was willing to aggressively overturn laws if they were to have any hope of invalidating the Affordable Care Act.

Orin Kerr says that, in the two years since he gave the individual mandate only a one-per-cent chance of being overturned, three key things have happened. First, congressional Republicans made the argument against the mandate a Republican position. Then it became a standard conservative-media position. “That legitimized the argument in a way we haven’t really seen before,” Kerr said. “We haven’t seen the media pick up a legal argument and make the argument mainstream by virtue of media coverage.” Finally, he says, “there were two conservative district judges who agreed with the argument, largely echoing the Republican position and the media coverage. And, once you had all that, it really became a ballgame.”

Jack Balkin, a Yale law professor, agrees. “Once Republican politicians say this is unconstitutional, it gets repeated endlessly in the partisan media that’s friendly to the Republican Party”—Fox News, conservative talk radio, and the like—“and, because this is now the Republican Party’s position, the mainstream media needs to repeatedly explain the claims to their readers. That further moves the arguments from off the wall to on the wall, because, if you’re reading articles in the Times describing the case against the mandate, you assume this is a live controversy.” Of course, Balkin says, “if the courts didn’t buy this, it wouldn’t get anywhere.”

But the courts are not as distant from the political process as some like to think. The first judge to rule against the individual mandate was Judge Henry Hudson, of Virginia’s Eastern District Court. Hudson was heavily invested in a Republican consulting firm called Campaign Solutions, Inc. The company had worked with the Presidential campaigns of John McCain and George W. Bush, the Republican National Committee, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and Ken Cuccinelli—the Virginia state attorney general who is one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuits against the Affordable Care Act.
The fact that a judge—even a partisan judge in a district court—had ruled that a central piece of a Democratic President’s signature legislative accomplishment was unconstitutional led the news across the country. Hudson’s ruling was followed by a similar, and even more sweeping, ruling, by Judge Roger Vinson, of the Northern District of Florida. Vinson declared the entire bill unconstitutional, setting off a new round of stories. The twin rulings gave conservatives who wanted to believe that the mandate was unconstitutional more reason to hold that belief. Voters who hadn’t thought much about it now heard that judges were ruling against the Administration. Vinson and Hudson were outnumbered by other district judges who either upheld the law or threw out lawsuits against it, but those rulings were mostly ignored.

At the Washington Monthly, Steve Benen kept track of the placement that the Times and the Washington Post (where I work) gave to stories about court rulings on the health-care law. When judges ruled against the law, they got long front-page stories. When they ruled for it, they got shorter stories, inside the paper. Indeed, none of the cases upholding the law got front-page coverage, but every rejection of it did, and usually in both papers. From an editorial perspective, that made sense: the Vinson and Hudson rulings called into question the law’s future; the other rulings signalled no change. But the effect was repeated news stories in which the Affordable Care Act was declared unconstitutional, and few news stories representing the legal profession’s consensus that it was not. The result can be seen in a March poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation, which found that fifty-one per cent of Americans think that the mandate is unconstitutional.

What is notable about the conservative response to the individual mandate is not only the speed with which a legal argument that was considered fringe in 2010 had become mainstream by 2012; it’s the implication that the Republicans spent two decades pushing legislation that was in clear violation of the nation’s founding document. Political parties do go through occasional, painful cleansings, in which they emerge with different leaders who hold different positions. This was true of Democrats in the nineteen-nineties, when Bill Clinton passed free trade, deficit reduction, and welfare reform, despite the furious objections of liberals. But in this case the mandate’s supporters simply became its opponents.

In February, 2012, Stuart Butler, the author of the Heritage Foundation brief that first proposed the mandate, wrote an op-ed for USA Today in which he recanted that support. “I’ve altered my views on many things,” he wrote. “The individual mandate in health care is one of them.” Senator Orrin Hatch, who had been a co-sponsor of the Chafee bill, emerged as one of the mandate’s most implacable opponents in 2010, writing in The Hill that to come to “any other conclusion” than that the mandate is unconstitutional “requires treating the Constitution as the servant, rather than the master, of Congress.” Mitt Romney, who had both passed an individual mandate as governor and supported Wyden-Bennett, now calls Obama’s law an “unconstitutional power grab from the states,” and has promised, if elected, to begin repealing the law “on Day One.”

Even Bob Bennett, who was among the most eloquent advocates of the mandate, voted, in 2009, to call it unconstitutional. “I’d group us”—Senate Republicans—“into three categories,” he says. “There were people like me, who bought onto the mandate because it made sense and would work, and we were reluctant to let go of it. Then, there were people who bought onto it slowly, for political advantage, and were immediately willing to abandon it as soon as the political advantage went the other way. And then there’s a third group that thought it made sense and then thought it through and changed their minds.” Explaining his decision to vote against the law, Bennett, who was facing a Tea Party challenger in a primary, says, “I didn’t focus on the particulars of the amendment as closely as I should have, and probably would have voted the other way if I had understood that the individual mandate was at its core. I just wanted to express my opposition to the Obama proposal at every opportunity.” He was defeated in the primary, anyway.

But, whatever the motives of individual politicians, the end result was the same: a policy that once enjoyed broad support within the Republican Party suddenly faced unified opposition—opposition that was echoed, refined, and popularized by other institutions affiliated with the Party. This is what Jason Grumet, the president of the Bipartisan Policy Center, a group that tried to encourage Republicans and Democrats to unite around policy solutions, calls the “think-tank industrial complex”—the network of ideologically oriented research centers that drive much of the policy debate in Washington. As Senator Olympia Snowe, of Maine, who has announced that she is leaving the Senate because of the noxious political climate, says, “You can find a think tank to buttress any view or position, and then you can give it the aura of legitimacy and credibility by referring to their report.” And, as we’re increasingly able to choose our information sources based on their tendency to back up whatever we already believe, we don’t even have to hear the arguments from the other side, much less give them serious consideration. Partisans who may not have strong opinions on the underlying issues thus get a clear signal on what their party wants them to think, along with reams of information on why they should think it.

All this suggests that the old model of compromise is going to have a very difficult time in today’s polarized political climate. Because it’s typically not in the minority party’s interest to compromise with the majority party on big bills—elections are a zero-sum game, where the majority wins if the public thinks it has been doing a good job—Washington’s motivated-reasoning machine is likely to kick into gear on most major issues. “Reasoning can take you wherever you want to go,” Haidt warns. “Can you see your way to an individual mandate, if it’s a way to fight single payer? Sure. And so, when it was strategically valuable Republicans could believe it was constitutional and good. Then Obama proposes the idea. And then the question becomes not ‘Can you believe in this?’ but ‘Must you believe it?’ ”

And that means that you can’t assume that policy-based compromises that made sense at the beginning will survive to the end, because by that time whichever group has an interest in not compromising will likely have convinced itself that the compromise position is an awful idea—even if, just a few years ago, that group thought it was a great one. “The basic way you wanted to put together a big deal five years ago is that the thoughtful minds in one party would basically go off and write a bill that had seventy per cent of their orthodoxy and thirty per cent of the other side’s orthodoxy and try to use that to peel off five or six senators from the other side,” Grumet says. “That process just doesn’t work anymore.” The remarkable and confusing trajectory of the individual-mandate debate, in other words, could simply be the new norm.

I asked Ron Wyden how, if politicians can so easily be argued out of their policy preferences, compromise was possible. “I don’t find it easy to answer that question, because I’m an elected official and not a psychiatrist,” he said. “If somebody says they sincerely changed their minds, then so be it.” But Wyden is, as always, optimistic about the next bipartisan deal, and, again, he thinks he knows just where to start. “To bring about bipartisanship, it’s going to be necessary to win on something people can see and understand. That’s why I think tax reform is a huge opportunity for the economy and the cause of building coalitions.” Perhaps he’s right. Or perhaps that’s just what he wants to believe.




Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/06/25/12062fa_fact_klein#ixzz1yUWEfIrW
Posted by at 0 comments
Labels: , , , ,

Tuesday, February 01, 2011

Charlie Cook: Independents Volitile But Not Creating New Rules...


According to Charlie Cook, after three straight "wave" elections where there has been a drastic change in legislative makeup, we might be poised for a "normal" election in 2012. "To be sure, independent voters propelled Democrats in 2006 and 2008 and reversed course and pushed Republicans through in 2010. Independent voters are still impatient and volatile, but these elections were exceptions, not new rules." History will tell, but we personally wouldn't bet on anything these days being "normal."
The 2012 election is the primary issue at hand for the No Labels organization, who are focusing on growing so that more politicians will take them seriously. The primary goal being a large turnout at the National Day of Action planned for next year over six states, all open primary states. With enough numbers and enough voices, they will be hard to ignore.

INDEPENDENT VOTERS
NO LABELS
  • No Labels focuses on growth, Congressional monitoring, eyeing 2012 primaries (Ken Bingenheimer, National Common Ground Examiner) In a weekly leaders' call Monday morning, founding leader Nancy Jacobson discussed the National Day of Action the group is planning for 2012. "We're going to be spending about 60 percent of our time monitoring what's going on in Congress. We're going to be vigilantly watching, and hopefully bringing this community along to let their voices be heard in Washington. The other thing we're going to be working toward is a National Day of Action, which will happen sometime a year from now in six states, three on the Republican side, three on the Democratic side, in open primary states.
HEALTH CARE
  • Health care could be high-court nail-biter (By: David Nather, Politico) Because the stakes are so high, “this is a very difficult case for the Supreme Court as an institution,” said Turley. “You have a slight majority of the states opposing it. You have a national law that’s affecting hundreds of billions of dollars of services. This is the type of case that justices do not relish.”
CALIFORNIA
NEW YORK
  • IDC Sides With Senate Republicans On Rules Reforms (By Laura Nahmias, City Hall News) A change in Senate rules stripping Lt. Gov. Robert Duffy of his power to cast a tie-breaking vote passed 36-24 in a marathon session, with all four members of the Independent Democratic Caucus voting with Republicans against the rest of the Senate Democrats.


Posted by at 1 comments
Labels: , , , ,

Friday, January 14, 2011

President Obama's Approval Rating Misleading?

Our first piece of news today surrounds Markos Moulitsas' comments concerning open primaries; he believes they should be eliminated entirely. He attempts to defend these comments by stating that open primaries allow for "political mischief" when in reality he is concerned with the fact that it could "spell death for the two-party system". Speaking of democrats, specifics from the new approval ratings for President Obama continue to come in, with various opinions of what he's done with health care and the economy being the primary issues of discussion. Moreover, although his approval rating seems to be on the rise, these numbers may be misleading, as non-partisan voters have seemed to turn on him as his approval rating with them has dropped 11% over the last two years.

OPEN PRIMARIES
  • Moulitsas: Another Anti-Democracy Democrat By: themalcontent, Firedoglake) as [Markos Moulitsas] and other establishment-supporting operatives know all too well – open primaries spell the death for the two-party system.
OBAMA
NEW JERSEY
NEW YORK
Posted by at 0 comments
Labels: , , , , ,

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Talk Talk with Fred Newman and Jackie Salit: God, Dodd and Reform

I decided to publish the entire weekly Talk Talk with public philosopher and independent strategist Fred Newman, and CUIP president and NYC Bloomberg Independence Party campaign manager Jackie Salit this week. You can also SUBSCRIBE  to the weekly post.... In any case, please read on:


GOD, DODD AND REFORM

Sunday, March 21, 2010

Every week CUIP's president Jacqueline Salit and strategist/philosopher Fred Newman watch the political talk shows and discuss them. Here are excerpts from their dialogues compiled on Sunday, March 21, 2010 after watching selections from “The Charlie Rose Show,” “PBS NewsHour” and “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”

Salit: Healthcare, insurance companies, Wall Street…

Newman: Do you know what I was thankful for?

Salit: What?

Newman: That God gave us only 26 letters in the alphabet.

Salit: There’s a lot of “wordage” out there, certainly, and it’s all about regulatory reform. But there’s no talk about why it is that we have so many things that need to be regulated.

Newman: There is a reason.

Salit: And it is?

Newman: The best thing I’ve ever read on this was by Robert Reich, the economist, who pointed out that we have an entirely legalistic lawyer-controlled political culture where no sooner do they pass a law to regulate something, than every company’s board of directors races out of the room, hires a team of lawyers, and comes up with a way to get around those regulations. It takes them about 10 minutes. That’s the world we’re living in. Where business gets reined in for some kind of unscrupulous practice, and in short order they have a counter to it.

Salit: We sure saw that in Senator Chris Dodd’s presentation this week about the Senate Banking Committee’s proposed financial regulatory reform. It’s so interesting. The whole push was that we have to have some kind of independent body that’s going to protect consumers from manipulative and usurious lending practices by the banks. But that falls by the wayside…

Newman: …in about a second…

Salit: …in a second, exactly.

Newman: Actually, here’s what happens. The reformers bring in their proposal. Then everyone in the room laughs hysterically. And they don’t even bother to take a vote. Let’s move on now.

Salit: Let’s move on to which branch of the government, which bureaucracy, which interest group is going to get control of this thing because it is all about who’s going to control the oversight. They want to make sure the “overseeing” doesn’t get out of hand.

Newman: And they have a clerk who keeps a list of who got the last oversight control.

Salit: So they know whose turn it is.

Newman: Exactly.

Salit: Michael Lewis, who wrote “The Big Short,” said in an interview with Charlie Rose ‘Wall Street provides a financial service. It’s supposed to allocate capital. It’s not supposed to destroy wealth or misallocate capital. But, in this situation, they destroyed wealth and they misallocated capital and they’re still being paid huge amounts of money.’

Newman: I agree with that only to this extent: I don’t know why the formulation is “and they’re still.” Why wouldn’t they be “still?” That’s exactly what they’re paid to do.

Salit: He was saying that what they should be paid to do is to allocate capital properly.

Newman: I got you. But properly and improperly are virtually indistinguishable. That’s the explanation of why they got huge bonuses even though they didn’t do their job, according to Lewis. It’s not as if they didn’t allocate capital. They did. It’s not like being a plumber, where if you don’t get the toilet to flush, you don’t get paid. The whole system as it exists is too big to regulate.

Salit: Never mind too big to fail.

Newman: Exactly. It’s too big to regulate. It’s just too big and too complex so that, no matter what happens, they get their bucks. And, the economy is still stumbling along.

Salit: Things are happening. Presumably the stimulus money is getting places and the banking system was stabilized and the job loss has been stemmed. It’s not clear though what the relationship would be between that happening and a new kind of regulatory framework. Everybody’s saying that we can’t set up regulations that prevent some kind of disaster from happening.

Newman: That’s the big lie.

Salit: Because?

Newman: In the most pragmatic sense of the word, they can set up such regulations. They have set them up. It’s what we’re doing now. This is the worst disaster since…

Salit: …the Great Depression…

Newman: …since the times of Cleopatra, or whatever era you might fill in there. And they are dealing with it. So what’s the problem? It might be boring. It might be tedious. It might be incomprehensible. It might be all kinds of things. But that’s how the system works. You have the same old people creating regulations which are, roughly speaking, if you look at the totality of them, equivalent to the regulations that existed last time.

Salit: Hence the Consumer Protection Agency is housed at the Federal Reserve.

Newman: Right, because now it’s their turn.

Salit: So nothing new is happening up there, so to speak.

Newman: That’s my view. It’s ironic, isn’t it? Because the left abstractions, the Marxist abstractions which amount to, It’s always the same under capitalism, and to which people always respond by saying, Oh, you cynics. It’s more complex than that, are actually accurate. It’s not more complex. It is the same old, same old…all the time. Apparently you just have to pay your dues and go through 10 cycles of this before you’re allowed to say that.

Salit: What follows from that?

Newman: Look, from our vantage point, no one’s going to go out and make a revolution in the traditional 19th century sense of that word. But if you have the circumstances, like in the last presidential election where an interesting, although probably unpredictable, conjuncture of things occurred – some highly unusual, explosive, upending things can happen. Some people saw that conjuncture and took advantage of that. That made it possible to elect an African American president. Forget what his views are. Just that he’s African American is something of a revolution. But once that revolution is done, he goes to Washington to produce relatively modest changes, and the Republican Party has a sufficiently strong base – like half the country – so that it can muck things up.

What’s the probability of some consecutive circumstances of the kind which allowed the masses of people to actually participate in something in a mildly radical way? Probability? Zero. What’s the probability of one such conjuncture being sufficiently radical to produce changes large enough to, in turn, produce other changes? Don’t know. That’s what you’re gambling on by investing in the independent political movement. That’s what we’re gambling on. Those are the odds of our bet. Well, I’m content with that. I’m still here. You’re content with it. You’re still here. Are we doing some good stuff along the way? Yes. And that’s good, too, because the likelihood is that’s what we’ll, in fact, accomplish. Does that contribute to these other, larger shifts? Impossible to tell. Is it worth doing in its own right? Yes.

What does this all add up to? I’d say postmodernism is right. This is what it looks like. This is the very stuff we’re trying to figure out a way to talk about because there is no obvious way to talk about it. What do you do with that? Some people turn to God. Some people become super nasty. But everything loses meaning. Then, what do you do with a meaningless world? I don’t know. I like what we’re doing in a meaningless world. We’re trying to do something worthwhile to help people who always get the short end of the stick. That seems like a worthwhile thing to do. And we’re doing it well.

Salit: Have you seen this guy Francis Collins before? He’s the well-known and respected scientist who Charlie Rose interviewed, the author of “The Language of God,” who writes about his belief in God. He says, basically, that science can’t answer the question: Why is there something instead of nothing?

Newman: What’s that supposed to mean?

Salit: It could mean that science hasn’t answered that yet, but that’s the argument for God.

Newman: And that’s supposed to be profound?

Salit: I don’t think it’s supposed to be profound. It’s supposed to be a trump card.

Newman: I don’t know about that. How about pointing out that there is something and there is nothing. There’s something when there’s something and there’s nothing when there’s nothing. So the question, by any standard as far as I’m concerned, is profoundly ill-formed. Where did he go to school, this guy?

Salit: Yale.

Newman: Is that right?

Salit: Yes.

Newman: Well, it’s a theological school.

Salit: Even if he didn’t go to the Divinity School.

Newman: I assure you they’re not asking that question at Stanford, nor at Harvard. The real question is: Why are we taking a question effectively constructed by the Yale Divinity School as the least bit serious?

Salit: I went to Sarah Lawrence so I can’t answer that question.

Newman: I would say that you dropped out of Sarah Lawrence, so you have to!

Salit: Exactly. That’s how I answered the question. I dropped out of Sarah Lawrence.

Newman: There you go. I think that’s a good answer to that!

Salit: Thanks, Fred.

You can reach Fred Newman or Jackie Salit at 212-609-2800 or via email at 
Posted by at 0 comments
Labels: , , ,

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

TODAY'S NEWS HEADLINES for INDEPENDENT VOTERS - More on the Health Care Reform Vote, CA Proposition 14

THIRD PARTIES
PROP 14
HEALTH CARE VOTE
COLORADO
  • Independent living: Curry enjoys life as a former Democrat (John Colson, Post Independent) Zimsky said last week that the judge is considering motions from both sides, and that he is hoping for a decision on the case in May, which could be in time to get both Riddle's and Curry's name on the ballot in November.
KENTUCKY
NEW YORK
  • Cuomo Leads Big (National Journal/Hotline) A majority of NYers want Cuomo to run for GOV rather than for re-election, the poll shows, including 58% of independent voters.
NYC CHARTER REVISION
LAST WORD
Posted by at 0 comments
Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Monday, March 22, 2010

TODAY'S NEWS HEADLINES for INDEPENDENT VOTERS - Health Care and Charter Revision

INDEPENDENT VOTERS


ARIZONA

  • Hayworth Closes in on McCain (PAUL CRAFT, Frum Forum) Among liberal and moderate Republicans, however, McCain has a wide lead. If the Arizona GOP primary is closed off from independent voters, as state party officials hope, the primary might be dominated by the anti-McCain conservative party base.

COLORADO


LOUISIANA

PENNSYLVANIA


NYC CHARTER REVISION COMMISSION
NY LABOR and the HEALTH CARE VOTE
LAST WORD
Posted by at 0 comments
Labels: , , ,

Sunday, March 21, 2010

The Hankster Live-Blogging Health Care Debate and Congressional Vote


10:45pm EDT - Congress did it -- they passed a bill for health care reform. 219 Dem votes, (34 Dems against) Repubs 178 against and somehow the "independent" is missing...  Quite a hub-bub in our nation's capital....

10:30pm EDT - Pelosi just finished speaking... continued motions and opinions and requests... [who knew there were so many rules to governing the nation?!...] this is a "15 minute vote" (?) not sure what that means.... Commentary by C-Span is trying to explain about passage and failure.... during the next hour or so. Votes needed: 236 for HR 3590 (I think).... Again you can follow live coverage here, and think more about it here, and then around 11pm (EDT) be sure to see Dr. Omar Ali, TMV's Joe Gandelman and Nicole Kurokawa with Don Lemon on CNN...

10:11pm EDT – Just spoke with Joe Gandelman after the CNN taping of independents on the issue of health care reform (Don Lemon) — tune in to CNN at 11pm EDT. Get the independent view point!
10:07pm EDT – Rep John Boehner (R-OH) grandstanding about the House of Representatives being a broken house; gavel “both sides of the house would do well to remember the dignity of the House”
8:12pm EDT — Congressman Dennis Kucinich  statement on healthcare and the American people and the meaning of supporting President Obama.


8:31pm EDT - quietness on the floor of the US House.  Now resume the partisan, more or less socialist-moderate-anti-socialist statements...

8:26pm EDT - HR 3590 HR 4872 - the right to have insurance, end abusive practices by insurance companies, the nightmare ends tonight...

8:24pm EDT - Jim McDermott (D-MO) speaking in favor... Dean Heller (R-NV) against. I'm going to pay attention to what the partisans are saying....

8:12pm EDT -- Congressman Dennis Kucinich statement on healthcare and the American people and the meaning of supporting President Obama.

8:03pm - Joe Gandelman will be a guest on CNN tonight as part of an independent panel hosted by Don Lemon. Just spoke with Dr. Omar Ali - next up on CNN Don Lemon at 7:30pm -- consideration of the expected approval of health care reform, which he called a "historic reform", how can President Obama now turn his attention to reform of the political system itself. Dr. Ali thinks that the American people are becoming more aware of the process itself and the impact of that process on our national policy. Tune in to CNN at 7:30pm EDT


7:50 EDT - John Lewis speak vigorously in support

7:47pm EDT -- Congressman Rangel (D-NY) speaking about his privilege to serve. Oh, that's right, let's have a look at Dennis Kucinich's

7:31pm EDT -- Looking for Don Lemon's CNN independent panel - here's the live CNN channel

6:46 EDT - getting serious now, Rep Steny Hoyer (D-MD) speaking about this bill... and how health care was cheaper and less partisan in the past... A bi-partisan objective- affordable health care for all...

6:29 EDT - seems the resolution has another 5 minutes to vote. don't really understand the rules of the house, but they seem to be making their way through this....

6:28 EDT - one minute left to discuss....

6:03pm - Just spoke with Dr. Omar Ali - next up on CNN Don Lemon at 7:30pm -- consideration of the expected approval of health care reform, which he called a "historic reform", how can President Obama now turn his attention to reform of the political system itself. Dr. Ali thinks that the American people are becoming more aware of the process itself and the impact of that process on our national policy. Tune in to CNN at 7:30pm EDT Don't miss panelist Joe Gandelman of The Moderate Voice


5:38: Louise Slaughter votes yes; voice vote no. Roll call vote on the rule proceeding, proposal to suspend the rules. etc... Again, please tune in to C-SPAN and read Jackie Salit/ Fred Newman's Talk Talk on the issue of healthcare and our partisan gridlock....

5:35pm -- Closing remarks by Rep David Dreier (R-CA) starting out with pro-individualist/ anti-democratic solution... "common-sense proposals"... urge to vote no


NOTE: "Our" congressmen/women seem to think that their party registration and possible history of carrying coffee for their superiors equates with democracy. Stay tuned...

ROLLCALL BREAK:  If you haven't yet read Jackie Salit and Fred Newman's Talk Talk "Healthcare: The Final Act" do so while the Dems and Repubs put out their pretty much partisan votes... and watch live C-SPAN coverage here...

5:01pm -- Repubs roll call, saying "ask unanimous support to revise my remarks in regard to this flawed health care bill...

4:57pm -- ongoing bipartisan hack-spout... support/oppose... uhhh would there be any other choice give the 2-party frozen storm?

4:47pm - Phil Gingrey (R-GA) sites vote in 1993

4:46pm -- Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D-CO) sites personal family health issues

4:40pm -- So is the deal between Obama and Stupak over abortion the deal-maker?

4:39pm -- Virginia Foxx (R-NC) talking about increased cost and complete take-over of health care system

4:32pm -- Alcee Hastings (D-FL) Count me in as a radical. We must do what we think is morally right.

4:09pm - Rep. Slaughter (D-NY) is now referencing the people who spit at Rep. Barney Frank. She is putting to rest the contention that conservatives have the upper hand... Does Louise Slaughter have a southern accent, or am I crazy? Louise is in favor! Yea!

4:06pm -- Point of order was approved so we will now hear from Congressman Stupak. I have to say I had no idea that Jesse Jackson, Jr. was the speaker of the House. Has been over-mediaed by the Speaker of the Senate...? Louise Slaughter, D-NY of the Rules Committee speaking, again interrupted by Speaker -- lots of "rowdiness" -- being asked to take their conversations outside to the cloakroom. Are we in primary school in the 1800's????

4:05pm -- Stupak about to speak.


3:50 - Politico says Stupak and WH have resolved abortion issue....

3:46pm - That's Jesse Jackson, Jr. at the gavel, now have cut to pro and con protests outside the US Capitol...


********************************************************************************
Against my better judgement (and perhaps the advice of Fred Newman in the recent Talk Talk "Healthcare: The Final Act" with Jackie Salit and Fred Newman) The Hankster will be following the vote today on President Obama's health care reform bill in Congress.

3:14pm - there's a really contentious fight on the floor of the House right now about procedures and the guy who's wielding the gavel is hitting the sound block is Very Busy! You can see live coverage from C-SPAN here. I'm gonna find out who he is, but he has his arms folded tightly across his body for good reason!
Posted by at 1 comments
Labels: , , , ,

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Obama, Health Care and the Media: Stop the Presses!

Every week CUIP's president Jacqueline Salit and strategist/philosopher Fred Newman watch the political talk shows and discuss them. Here are excerpts from their dialogues compiled on Sunday, March 14, 2010 after watching selections from “Hardball with Chris Matthews,” “The Charlie Rose Show,” “PBS NewsHour,” “On the Record With Greta Van Susteren” and “Meet the Press.” You can subscribe here

...Newman: It’s about whether the president, who seems to be something of a leftist, who controlled both the House and the Senate, could pass what is, by any reasonable account, a center-left bill.


Salit: Yes.

Newman: And that’s a big political issue. Because he should be able to. But it’s questionable whether he will be able to......


.....Salit: Well, my guess is that from this point on, the news coverage is going to resemble what happens at a sporting event. Play by play, and that sort of thing.


Newman: If I was a media person, I’d stop covering this. I’d protest and not cover it anymore, and just say, Decide something already, you’re the Congress. When you decide something, we’ll come back and cover you. Until then, no coverage. That would be principled, I think....

Read more of Talk Talk here
Posted by at 0 comments
Labels: , , , , ,

Obama's Health Care Problem: Which Side Are You On Boys?

SEIU prez Andrew Stern is threatening to "go independent" on local races to oppose Dems who oppose Prez Obama's healthcare reform bill. New York is a fusion voting state, which has empowered third parties like the New York Independence Party, Conservative Party and Working Families Party.  Meanwhile, former Dem La Plata County Colorado Commissioner Joelle Riddle didn't threaten -- she went independent for real.

HEALTH CARE, OBAMA AND LABOR
COLORADO
  • Caucuses picking delegates today (by Garrett Andrews, Durango Herald) And though the herd of Democrats running to replace Joelle Riddle as La Plata County's District 1 Commissioner won't be thinned today, the party might get a better idea of how the candidates will fare at the County Assembly, Walter said. Riddle - who cut ties with the Democratic Party in August 2009 and is suing to have her name listed as an Independent on the November ballot - is slated to appear as a write-in in November. She currently faces a field of four Democrats: Dryside water lawyer Bruce Baizel, south Durango resident Chris Dolphin, former Durango City Councilor Scott Graham and cattleman author Jeff Mannix.
NEW YORK
BLOGOSPHERE
Posted by at 0 comments
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Monday, October 12, 2009

Independent Voters: Health Care or Partisan Politics?

I have been an independent activist for many years, and I created what is now considered to be THE independent political blog, The Hankster, because I felt that independent voters were not being represented accurately -- or at all -- in the mainstream media.

There are lots and lots of polls out there mainly concerned about the critical independent vote in the upcoming mid-term elections. These polls are being interpreted by media outlets without comment and without input from "on-the-ground" independents. It's as if our national record of the Civil War ommited Matthew Brady's battlefield photos...

Personally, I think the story that Jackie outlines in this commentary below is a "sea-change" story that "big media" picked up on briefly in 2006 and again in 2008 (election fever) but is now somehow completely missing from today's analysis. More than 40% of the American electorate identify as independents. And that growth was produced in large part by the progressive wing of the independent movement. If you blink on this, you will miss the story.

Independents are vulnerable to being peeled away by the Republican right. The Pew Research Center reports that were the 2010 midterms to be held today, independents would lean towards Republicans by a 43 to 38 percent margin. But, the evolution of a 21st century independent movement is not that simple. First, the movement is very fluid and very new. Historical movements develop through twists and turns, not in a straight line. The far right has attempted to take over the independent movement before. In 1994, Newt Gingrich crafted the “Contract with America” to woo Perotistas back into the Republican tent. And in 2000, social conservative Pat Buchanan hijacked the Reform Party presidential nomination, though he was roundly repudiated by independents in the general election. [FULL PIECE BELOW]

Please feel free to use this article in any way you feel appropriate. And let me know what you think.

Thanks!
Nancy

SERIOUS AS A HEART ATTACK: THE INDEPENDENTS’ STORY
By: Jackie Salit
When we finally get far enough down the road on health care reform, it will become clear that a driving force in the intensity of the fight was a heart attack. Not the medical kind. The political kind.

Independents swung decisively to Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election. And it is this shift by independents – who repositioned themselves from center-right to center-left – that gave the Republican right the political equivalent of cardiac arrest.

In 1992, 19 million independents voted for Ross Perot. In 2008, 19 million independents voted for Barack Obama. Over the span of 15 years, the largely white, center-right independent movement re-aligned itself with Black America and progressive-minded voters.

This did not happen out of the blue. It did not happen by magic. It happened because the progressive wing of the independent movement did the painstaking and often controversial work of bringing the Perot movement and the Fulani movement together at the grassroots. The Fulani movement refers to the country’s leading African American independent, Dr. Lenora Fulani, who exposed the black community to independent politics and introduced the independent movement to an alliance with Black America.

No doubt the dramatics that the right wing brought to the Town Hall meetings this summer were intended for the television cameras. But the organizers, strategists and radio personalities who orchestrated the theatrics had a particular audience in mind: Independents. If they could tarnish Obama’s image with indies, they could damage the black and independent alliance and re-establish the Republican Party as an influential force amongst independents. Some of that could be accomplished, they felt, by claiming Obama’s health plan would drive up the national debt – a concern that animated the early Perot movement. Some Republican strategists felt that if they simply branded Obama a socialist, it would scare independents away – not from the health care plan (everyone recognizes a plan of some kind will get passed) but away from the center-left coalition that elected him.

If indies are feeling somewhat disillusioned with President Obama over the health care reform fight, it has more to do with fears that he is being overly influenced by the partisans in Congress. Since independents voted for him to be a more independent president, it’s easy to see how some felt disappointed by his handling of the Republican onslaught. Obama’s independent appeal was based on his challenge to the prevailing culture of Clintonian opportunism in the Democratic Party and partisanship inside the Beltway. Put another way, the independent vote for Obama was an effort to define a new kind of progressivism, one that was not synonymous with Democratic Party control.

After years of hard work and organizing, independents have become a sought-after partner in American politics. They elected President Obama and New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, arguably the country’s two most independent and pragmatically progressive elected officials. No wonder the Republican Party right wants a clawback.

Independents are vulnerable to being peeled away by the Republican right. The Pew Research Center reports that were the 2010 midterms to be held today, independents would lean towards Republicans by a 43 to 38 percent margin. But, the evolution of a 21st century independent movement is not that simple. First, the movement is very fluid and very new. Historical movements develop through twists and turns, not in a straight line. The far right has attempted to take over the independent movement before. In 1994, Newt Gingrich crafted the “Contract with America” to woo Perotistas back into the Republican tent. And in 2000, social conservative Pat Buchanan hijacked the Reform Party presidential nomination, though he was roundly repudiated by independents in the general election.

If Republicans are increasing their influence among independents, it’s also because the Democratic Party Left has not been a friend to the independent movement. Sure, Democrats were happy that indies broke for Obama. But they were disappointed that we didn’t become Democrats. They equate progressivism with being in the Democratic Party. But they’re wrong.

Neither the Republican Party nor the Democratic Party has been enthusiastic about the development of indies as a third force. For different reasons, surely. But they share a common goal: to maintain the primacy of two-value logic (where there is only one or the other, never neither) and make sure independents are passive companions. That’s one reason that the fight for open primaries – which allow independents to cast ballots in every round of voting – and the campaign to appoint independents to the Federal Election Commission are so important. Those fights are about our right to participate and our right to represent our interests in changing the political culture.

The independent movement went left in 2008, after many years of grassroots organizing to link it to progressive leadership. Now the right wants to peel it back. Obama, presumably, wants to hold on to the partnership, but must also privilege his own party, which turns independents off and makes them more susceptible to Republican attacks. Meanwhile, independents are working hard at the grassroots to hold our own.

Jackie Salit is the president of IndependentVoting.org and the campaign coordinator for Mike Bloomberg’s mayoral campaign on the Independence Party line.
Posted by at 0 comments
Labels: , , , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)