Organizing for America, the post-campaign version of the Obama for America campaign's juggernaut website/mailing list/organizing tool that compiled and rallied more than 3 million supporters during Obama's 2008 presidential run, is asking its supporters to help rally their home-state senators on the health care reform package with calls to Washington. Obviously, many of these emails or phone calls are unnecessary or wasteful because some senators will be on board no matter what, others not; so it's really about wavering senators (that means you, Ben.)
A version of the script found here has gone out by direct email, and those who go to the OFA site are immediately greeted by an appeal to take action. That script reads in part:
If we don't pass health reform, millions of Americans will be trapped in a broken status quo, unable to pay their bills or see a doctor when they need one.
More and more employers will drop coverage for employees. And Medicare and Medicaid will blow a hole through our budget.
There's too much at stake not to get this done. That's why, as of this morning, OFA supporters have made 849,856 calls to Congress in support of health reform since August.
And that's why today, with the Senate locked in last-minute negotiations, our goal is to hit one million calls.
Of course, many of the names on the OFA mailing lists are supporters who were hoping that the health care bill would include some of the provisions now negotiated away--public option, Medicare buy-in and the prescription drug importation I wrote about earlier today.
So I'm just wondering aloud whether and to what degree there will be pushback from OFA members about getting these emails, if at all? OFA says it's approaching a million calls, which is impressive. Might it lose some disgruntled supporters along the way? I doubt Mitch Stewart would say so, and the list is propriety so we will likely never know....
Center on budget and Policy Priorities
There's been a lot of complaining about the president this week, myself included. But one thing he does not deserve blame for are the projected structural deficits over the next decade.
According to a new report issued by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, and based on figures from the Congressional Budget Office, the Bush43 tax cuts and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are responsible for a much bigger share of the annual deficit projections than TARP, the stimulus package and even effects of the economic downturn (i.e., lost treasury revenues) combined.
Yes, Tea Party Nation, you read that correctly: All of this big government socialism that has so frightened you is dwarfed by the deficit contributions of those tax cuts for the most wealthly Americans. But please, run out in the streets with your Obama/Joker signs defending those in Jay-Z's tax bracket. Now, more than ever, they need your help.
Sniping aside, look: You can hold Obama accountable for TARP, since he supported it, and of course the stimulus. Though he hasn't withdrawn fully from Iraq and is ramping up in Afghanistan, you can only proliferate or scale back something somebody else started, so even that is at best a push for GWBush. You could even argue that as we move forward the treasury losses of the downturn gradually become Obama's responsibility.
But the tax cuts? That's all on you, George. (Well, W, his fellow Republicans, and the Dems who voted with them.)
The report--the title of which actually says it all: President Obama Largely Inherited Today’s Huge Deficits: Economic Downturn, Financial Rescues, and Bush-Era Policies Drive the Numbers--summarizes its findings as follows:
The events and policies that have pushed deficits to astronomical levels in the near term, however, were largely outside the new Administration’s control. If not for the tax cuts enacted during the Presidency of George W. Bush that Congress did not pay for, the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that began during that period, and the effects of the worst economic slump since the Great Depression (including the cost of steps necessary to combat it), we would not be facing these huge deficits in the near term.
While President Obama inherited a bad fiscal legacy, that does not diminish his responsibility to propose policies to address our fiscal imbalance and put the weight of his office behind them. Although policymakers should not tighten fiscal policy in the near term while the economy remains fragile, they and the nation at large must come to grips with the nation’s deficit problem. But we should all recognize how we got where we are today.
So the Dorgan-McCain amendment in the health care reform legislation that presumably would have lowered prices per-dose or per-pill prices for prescription drug by allowing the importation of prescription meds form Canada and Western Europe was defeated 51-48 on Tuesday. As the Los Angeles Times reports:
The defeat of the drug importation proposal from a bipartisan group of lawmakers, which would have made it easier to import cheaper prescription drugs from Canada and Western Europe, was a crucial victory for Obama and the pharmaceutical industry.
The politically charged amendment had held up the Senate for a week and threatened to derail the whole healthcare bill.
The vote on the amendment -- cosponsored by Sens. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) -- was 51 to 48, nine short of the 60 needed to pass.
Even if some get mad at me for saying so, I find this more dispiriting and irksome than the failure of the public option. (He said, ducking beneath his desk as rotten fruit soars overhead.) Seriously, and not to diminish the potential benefits of the public option, or for that matter the Medicare buy-in, this concession just smacks of naked surrender to one and only one industry: Big PHarma. At least with the public option and Medicare buy-in one can point to a variety of trade associations and other groups raising various and sometimes legitimate objections or caution flags. Here it's just about maintaining ologoplistic market control for domestic drug sales. And I don't want to hear about drug safety--this is Canada and Western Europe as exporters we're talking about.
Doubly irksome is the fact this was sponsored by Dorgan--one of Obama's biggest early supporters back in Iowa in late 2007 and early 2008--and McCain, who was Obama's general election opponent. In other words, you can't even dismiss this as some purportedly looney left provision, or something Sen. Bernie Birkenstocks tried to sneak past an unwitting Senate, for Dorgan and McCain are straight out of centrist casting. (Confession: I've been licking my chops all afternoon about dropping in that last turn of a phrase.) I mean, if you can't get 60 votes for something supported by two senators of good faith who are viewed as decent brokers for centrists in their respective parties--and who supposedly hold sway on such things--well, then that just testifies to the powers allayed against that provision.
Triply irksome is that one of the key powers allayed against it, in the end, was Obama himself. He reversed field once the pharmas threatened to withdraw support for the overall package. I know, I know: realpolitik means cutting the deals to get the overall package thru, and "everybody can't get everything they want," as the refrain this week goes. But c'mon: this is a perfect example of the "special interest politics" for which "hope and change" was very expressly and quite repeated promised as--can't help myself again--the antidote.
Quadruply irksome, but not at all surprising? This release from MAPlight.org, showing that senators who opposed allowing imports received on average 66 percent more in campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical industry than those who voted for the amending to allow imports; among Democrats only, the figure is even a big higher (70 percent).
I've got a headache. Can somebody mail me an cheap bottle of aspirin from Toronto?
I realize this is merely peripheral to the debate over health care reform, health policy generally, and Americans' health status. But as those larger issues are discussed, the fact that--surprise, surprise--some of nation's children are getting sick at school, and not from wiping their noses on their sleeves and sneezing all over each other, is disconcerting and at least timely.
The USA Today reports on new CDC findings showing that school cafeterias remain subpar (if a little better than recent history) in terms of food safety and food quality:
No food-borne illness has sickened more schoolkids in the past decade than norovirus, and none is linked as consistently to improper food handling in cafeterias, a USA TODAY investigation found.
Data kept by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that norovirus caused at least one-third of the 23,000 food-borne illness cases reported in schools from 1998 through 2007. The toll: about 7,500 sick children, USA TODAY found. Those figures represent just a fraction of all cases. Investigators suspected but couldn't confirm norovirus in nearly 2,000 additional illnesses in schools during that period, and the CDC says many more cases go unreported.
The purpose of the inspection requirement is to ensure that the facilities and workers comply with safety and sanitary requirements — from checking food temperatures to wearing gloves.
But the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the school lunch program, acknowledges that the rule is almost impossible to enforce...
Federal data show that more than half the schools in eight states — including California and New York— failed to meet the requirement for two inspections during the 2007-08 school year. In Maine, the state where the fewest schools conformed to the law, fewer than 1% of schools met the requirement that year.
Although such outbreaks often begin in the cafeteria, more than 8,500 schools failed to have their kitchens inspected at all last year, and another 18,000 fell short of a requirement in the Child Nutrition Act that calls for cafeteria inspections at least twice a year, USA TODAY found. The mandate is part of the National School Lunch Program, which provides food for 31 million schoolchildren across the nation. Almost every school in the United States receives food as part of the program.
Well, that last part about receiving food from the National School Lunch Program is, in fact, part of the problem, if memory serves. Reading Eric Schlosser's book Fast Food Nation, the one part that is indelibly seared into my brain is the "shit is in the meat" line he writes after explaining how recalled beef shipments that didn't pass inspection for sale in supermarkets are often bought by the USDA and then distributed to the schools. Hopefully, that no longer happens at the rates it did before FFN went to print. But still...
Anyway, USA Today provides a 50-state ranking so you can check out how your state fared in terms of inspections here. On the east coast, it's almost 1 p.m.--enjoy your lunch!
WASHINGTON -- For about the next 10 hours, the Senate will be doing nothing but listening.
Republicans have deployed a particularly irritating delaying tactic to keep healthcare legislation from moving forward, insisting that the clerk read the entire text of an amendment by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., before debate on the amendment can begin. (The amendment would open Medicare to all Americans, setting up a government-run single-payer healthcare system, and is virtually guaranteed not to pass.) GOP leaders unleashed the plan, with some rhetoric about making sure lawmakers knew what they were voting on, earlier Wednesday.
Reading the entire text could take 10 to 12 hours. Usually, the Senate avoids such delays by getting unanimous consent to consider bills read after the clerk gets a few words in. But Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., objected twice to a request from Sanders to skip the reading, leaving Sanders shaking his head in disgust.
The stunt was intended to make life difficult for Democrats, by wasting hours of time that could be used to debate the bill so a vote can be held before Christmas as planned. But Democratic leadership aides point out it could also make life difficult for the military.
The current spending bill for the Department of Defense expires at midnight Saturday night, so Congress needs to pass next year's bill before then. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had planned to file cloture on the Defense bill Wednesday, which would allow for the Senate to vote Saturday. Now the reading may mean that vote on the military spending legislation gets pushed back to Sunday.
Technically, that could mean the military has no funds for several hours Saturday night. The actual impact would probably be negligible, but look for Democrats to start asking why the GOP is jeopardizing the troops in order to delay progress on healthcare.
I didn't realize it until I saw this morning his post from yesterday, but apparently I was channeling John Aravosis yesterday. Or he me. Or whatever--it was some sort of weird mind meld.
Generally frustrated about health care reform's fate the past few days, but specifically writing about climate change, I asked why it seems that the public majorities necessary to pass progressive agenda items always seem to be, ex ante, higher than those required to pass conservative agenda items? "More than anything else--the bias of the media, think tanks or other institutions, which is a related and relevant element--the political reality that less support is needed, say, to pass a tax cut for rich people or start a war than is needed to expand health care coverage or raise the minimum wage, testifies to the fact that the political system is generally skewed against progressive reforms," I wrote.
AmericaBlog's Aravosis was looking more specifically at health care and more specifically at Senate partisan majorities than public polling figures when he raised a similar question: Why were GWBush and his smaller Republican Senate majorities seemingly able to get more done than Obama and his larger Senate majority at present? But the essential, underlying question we are both asking is the same one. Only our answers differ.
Aravosis' answer revolves around an intangible, namely, political resolve:
What the GOP lacked in numbers, they made up for in backbone, cunning and leadership. Say what you will about George Bush, he wasn't afraid of a fight. If anything, the Bush administration, and the Republicans in Congress, seemed to relish taking on Democrats, and seeing just how far they could get Democratic members of Congress to cave on their promises and their principles. Hell, even Senator Barack Obama, who once famously promised to lead a filibuster against the FISA domestic eavesdropping bill, suddenly changed his mind and actually voted for the legislation. Such is the power of a president and a congressional leadership with balls and smarts.
I don't disagree with John. But as I said yesterday, I think there is something more systematic, specifically in the way that the conservative agenda is buffered by the power system in Washington in many ways and to a greater degree than is the progressive agenda. There are exceptions to this rule, but overall, I think there's an obvious and semi-permanent asymmetry at work here.
Part of this is not ideological, mind you, other than in the literal fact that conservatives tend to want to do less or change less rapidly or less dramatically than progressives do. And because the status quo "wins" whenever nothing is done, or at least generally survives when only little or incremental changes are made to it--this is a staple assumption of game theory and social choice theories, btw--well, that means there is a built-in advantage for (most) conservative policies and for conservatism as a philosophical approach to governance. This may not be fair, you say. But it is the ineluctable state of political nature, so to speak.
That said, let's dovetail John's observations with my own. If what I've said above means the political playing field will always have a slightly downhill tilt for conservatives/status quo-defenders/Republicans (or however you want to label one side), that means it is accordingly tilted uphill for their opponents: progressives/change agents/Demcrats. The tilt may be slight or steep; and on occasion, such as when the political stars are perfectly aligned (1933? 1964?), the tilt may even go in the opposite, progressive-favoring way for some period of time. But in general, the asymmetry exists and it is real.
That said, the political demand for "balls and smarts," to borrow Jon's typically direct and apt language, is unavoidably bigger for progressives, the burden of political skill and courage greater. Again, that may not seem fair, but it's the reality. It's one of the reason that the Left/progressives are often depicted, correctly at that, as tougher on their own Democrats than are the Right/conservatives are on Republicans--but it's also a warrant for being tougher on Democrats and having bigger expectations in the first place. After all, something needs to be added to the calculus to compensate for the handicap that the political system imposes, to varying degrees of severity, but more or less perpetually upon progressive change or reform.
And I think this recognition is what has disheartened many progressives as the one-year anniversary of Obama's administration, in combination with those nearly 60 percent Democratic majorities on Capitol Hill, approaches. We were told this is the biggest crisis since the Great Depression. We were promised bold action. In effect, we believed the playing field's tilt was at least even--and maybe tilted slightly in a downhill direction for some brief window of opportunity. On top of that, Obama's got mad political skillz, at least rhetorically and in terms of iconography. And in his campaign, wow, what guts and poise he demonstrated all at once. And as far as Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, the former may seem a bit wanting (though as I discussed yesterday, he holds the weakest cards), but the latter surely is formidable. In short, it seemed like the political planets were all in line.
And so disappointment is not unreasonable. This is not Bill Clinton in 1995, or even in 1993. It's damn sure not Jimmy Carter in 1979. This is Barack and Nancy and Harry in 2009. Nobody was expecting them to deliver the sun and the moon--but many of us were expecting a lot of stars to shine, and to shine brightly.
War Room is written and edited by Alex Koppelman, with contributions from Salon reporters around the country.
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