Obama's Gay Problem

Andrew Sullivan blasts President Obama over his party's substantive failure on gay rights:

In some ways, Obama's fealty to the big gay lobby rather than to the real gay community is testimony to why Democratic party politics remain repulsive to me. HRC has achieved nothing substantive for gay equality on a federal level in the twenty years I've been observing them. But they sure know how to milk donors at swanky black tie affairs. They are the Rotary Club for affluent gays, and their prime job is to explain to the gay community why it is never in the Democratic party's interest to do anything for gay people that might actually resemble equality. Oh, yes, we'll get a lovely Obama speech. Like that costs him anything or proves anything. There is nothing Obama can say at this self-satisfied, well-heeled Rotary Club dinner that he hasn't said before.

. . .

If Obama wants to support gay equality, he knows what to do. If Pelosi and Reid want to support gay equality, they know what to do. If HRC believes in gay equality, they also know what to do. So spare us the schmoozing and the sweet-talking and do it. Until then, Mr president, why don't you have a nice steaming cup of shut-the-fuck-up?

Ouch.

The Supreme Court, States, and Gun Rights

TIME magazine has a good roundup of the "Five Supreme Court Cases to Watch This Term."

I'm most interested in McDonald v. Chicago. Hopefully, the Court will finally incorporate the Second Amendment against the states. As I've said before, I am a strong proponent of total incorporation.

Unsurprisingly, the libertarian Cato Institute has filed an amicus brief in this case, arguing in favor of incorporation. It's worth a read, if you're interested.

The Morality of Grayson

I've never been a big fan of Matt Yglesias -- and I've never understood why Andrew Sullivan apparently finds him so fair-minded that he named an award after him.

Anyway, I'm glad that Sullivan finally called out Yglesias for his strained justification of Alan Grayson's vicious ad hominem against Republicans on the floor of Congress.

Yglesias's defense amounts to: "'So what?' Republicans engage in this kind of abusive rhetoric all the time. That's the real issue."

This seems to be the same moral logic that I used in grade school, when I tried to convince my mother she should overlook my cookie-stealing habit because what I had done was relatively less offensive than some of the things my friends had done.

They were the real problem children, after all . . . .

Update: There is another aspect of this controversy that's been bothering me. In an interview with Wolf Blitzer on Wednesday, Grayson called congressional Republicans "knuckle-dragging Neanderthals."

Grayson said:

What I mean is they [Republicans] have got no plan. It's been 24 hours since I said that. Where is the Republican plan? We're all waiting to see something that will take care of the pre-existing conditions, to take care of the 40 million Americans who have no coverage at all.

I've been hearing a lot lately that health care reform has been stalled by Republican "obstructionists." But are Democrats really waiting for the Republican plan, or is Grayson just posturing?

Right now, there are three bills floating around in committee: the House tri-committee bill, the Senate Finance Committee bill, and the Senate HELP Committee bill.

One major sticking point here is the public option, but there are many other points of contention (Ezra Klein offers a good summary of the main disagreements here). In the Senate, the Finance Committee bill (the "Baucus Plan") does not include a public option, while the HELP Committee bill does.

It's true that the virtually all Republicans (with the possible exception of Olympia Snowe) have refused to support either of the bills in the Senate, but the House Blue Dog Coalition is also largely opposed to a public option. More importantly, Blue Dogs seem to strongly favor the deficit-neutral Baucus Plan. The Democratic leadership, on the other hand, seems to be leaning toward the HELP Committee bill.

If the Democrats could unite on a single plan -- and perhaps convince Snowe to come on board -- they could easily pass health care reform. The problem is that they can't.

It's not Republican "obstructionists" who are holding up health care reform at this point. Most Democrats have already abandoned all hope for a bipartisan compromise.

The central conflict is now within the Democratic party.

The Two Faces of the Public Option

Clive Crook writes:

My view on the public option has always been that I'll know whether I like the idea when I see it explained. The problem is that the idea has been pitched as all things to all men. Centrist voters are told it won't make much difference. Progressive voters are told it will make so much difference that the entire project is a waste of time without it.

. . .

The public option cannot be both an ordinary competitor, leaving your circumstances unchanged if you choose not to take it up, and a force that can balance the budget by squeezing hundreds of billions out of public health-care costs. It can be one of these or the other, but not both.

Democrats have been debating whether a "strong" public option should pay Medicare reimbursement rates, something an ordinary competitor could not do. If it did, this would drive down costs and have many other (not necessarily intended) consequences. It would be a big step towards Medicare for all. As I have argued before, there are worse things than Medicare for all, including in my view the present system. But this outcome is one of the things that the administration is saying it does not want.

If you want Medicare for all, do what some Democrats do and make the case. If you don't, stop proposing a public option that would push the system towards it.

I couldn't agree more.

Update: According to Gallup, the majority of Americans (61%) believe that it is not the responsibility of the federal government to guarantee health insurance to all its citizens. (The sampling error is +/- 4%.)

The Resilient Public Option . . .

Is the public option really dead yet? At the point, it's anyone's guess.

I obviously spoke too soon last time . . .

But I'm still betting that the public option will be excluded from the final version of the bill.

Any takers?

Ouch.

Greg Mankiw tears into President Obama for his health care hypocrisy.

I suppose that while the president is apologizing to John McCain for attacking McCain's proposal to tax employer-provided health insurance, he should also apologize to Hillary Clinton for criticizing Clinton's proposal to mandate health coverage . . . .

Health Care Racism

Ryan Sager offers this assessment of the correlation between racial resentment and opposition to health care reform:

Whites in the South are the most anti-black group in America; a lot more whites in the South are now Republicans than were at the beginning of the 1990s.

What this all adds up to is that both of these statements can be true at the same time:

1) Many of Obama’s opponents harbor a significant amount of racial resentment against black people.

2) To quote Bill Clinton: “100% of those who are opposing him now would be against him if he were a white Democrat.”

Opposition to Obama is tied up with race because party identification in America is tied up with race. Are there some racist idiots at many of the GOP rallies? Yes. Would there be sexist idiots if Hillary Clinton were president? Also yes. Would any Democratic president be able to reform the entire health-care system — or undertake any major government-growing reform — without significant opposition from roughly the same group of people who are out protesting today? Absolutely not.

I think he's is right. But Sager also believes that a "very large chunk of the people predisposed to oppose Obama’s policies are also racists." As evidence he links to this WaPo "study," which I find extremely unconvincing:

As evidence of the link between health care and racial attitudes, we analyzed survey data gathered in late 2008. The survey asked people whether they favored a government run health insurance plan, a system like we have now, or something in between. It also asked four questions about how people feel about blacks.

Taken together the four items form a measure of what scholars call racial resentment. We find an extraordinarily strong correlation between racial resentment of blacks and opposition to health care reform.

Among whites with above average racial resentment, only 19 percent favored fundamental health care reforms and 57 percent favored the present system. Among those who have below average racial resentment, more than twice as many (45 percent) favored government run health care and less than half as many (25 percent) favored the status quo.

What survey data did they use? How large was the sample? How many respondents identified themselves as Republican? What was the survey's margin of error? What were the four questions that were used as a proxy for "racial resentment"? Were these questions designed to "coax" people into revealing their true racial sentiments? Were the questions open-ended? Were they ranked on an ordinal scale? How was the data coded? How strong was the correlation?

The authors don't reveal the answers to any of these questions.

Could their numbers be accurate? Maybe. But how can we assess the validity of this study if they have failed to provide even the most basic level of transparency?

Equal Bodies

My friend recalls an old conversation in which I argued for a more gender-balanced view of sexual objectification. She writes:

. . . men and women aren't treated equally, aren't seen as equals, aren't valued in the same ways in the same spaces. And yes, men shouldn't be reduced to muscular arms and flat, tan stomachs and shouldn't begin to enter the world of debasement women have been living in for such a long time, that reaching equality at the lowest common denominator is no way to reach equality. [But] men - white men, I should specify - are still generally seen first and foremost as people. Therefore, being reduced to an object is still a terrible thing, but its cultural impact is not the same if the same image is with a woman. Because, as much as I wish all things were equal, women are still primarily seen as bodies first. [my emphasis]

I'm not sure how to even begin unpacking this last sentence.

By whom are women "primarily seen as bodies" rather than people? Men? Society? The dominant culture? I think my friend may be lumping these three together.

Is it really so easy to pin down the dominant strands of contemporary American thought amidst such vast ideological diversity? Can we really paint with such broad strokes? Is power really so highly concentrated in today's pluralistic society?

As a policy person, I may approach these questions from a slightly different perspective. To me, power is the ability to place things onto the political decision agenda or to keep them off of that agenda. In both respects, women's organizations have been immensely powerful over the past several decades. And I think this may be part of the reason why I am unwilling to accept such a generalized conception of how women are "seen" in America.

This model of society -- a culture that is so fundamentally repressive toward women -- fails to incorporate the past 40 years of social progress, and the incredible political clout that women's organizations now wield.

It's no coincidence that the first bill President Obama signed into law was the Fair Pay Act. Nor was it surprising that one of the president's first public acts was to rescind the Mexico City Policy. Over the past several decades, feminist groups have deeply transformed the political landscape in America -- and, with it, many aspects of our culture. These changes should not be portrayed as exogenous. Indeed, they have played an important role in our cultural evolution, and they should be considered an internal part of our social model.

Unfortunately, I think that many contemporary feminists -- like other kinds of activists -- have a "tendency to minimize victories and exaggerate threats." In some ways this makes sense. Activism necessitates a certain kind of hyperbole. But these exaggerations distort the complex reality.

After multiple waves of feminism, a series of profound policy changes, and decades of intense social criticism, it's not so easy to make blanket statements about how women are really perceived by society.

At the very least, we should acknowledge that the issue of social perceptions is complex and requires quite a bit more qualification today than it did in the past . . . .

Thank you for calling Air Health Care . . .

This is kind of an interesting perspective, though obviously health care is very different from air travel. Still, it's something to think about.

In fact, this little spoof seems to really get to the heart of David Goldhill's point (here is his brilliant cover piece for the Atlantic Monthly) . . .

The biggest problem with the American health care system is the backward incentives.

Why do we as consumers accept such poor quality? Because we don't see ourselves a customers operating within a market structure. Why don't we see ourselves as customers? Because most of us aren't paying anything like the real cost of our health care.

For Glenn Beck's Purposes

What an idiot . . . .