Needlenose

We may have invented the solar cell, but China has taken the lead in manufacturing solar panels – and wind turbines as well, to add a little salt into the wound.

President Obama, in his State of the Union speech last week, sounded an alarm that the United States was falling behind other countries, especially China, on energy. “I do not accept a future where the jobs and industries of tomorrow take root beyond our borders — and I know you don’t either,” he told Congress.

That’s just rhetoric, Mr. President, Congress wants whatever their corporate masters tell them to want.  And in spite of what Justice Alito  may have been muttering during your speech, that’s regardless of where those corporate masters may live.  Multinationals just follow the money.

(Images via Witty Comics.)

Just assume a kayak and 2,756 miles' worth of stamina, and you're there!

Speaking of Fubar (as Green Boy was just below), about a month ago he passed along an off-site remark about Google Maps providing “driving directions” from San Francisco to Hawaii — including the awkwardly roundabout need to kayak from Washington state across the Pacific.  My reply, based on that week’s progressive disappointment in the White House, was that  President Obama must have used similar software in figuring out his escalate-in-order-to-withdraw strategy in Afghanistan.

Little did I know that despite my terminal procrastination in posting about that topic, the same half-hearted snark would be appropriate with regard to the state of healthcare reform… and even that requires a large quantity of optimism.

As you undoubtedly know by now (um, unless you’ve been depending on this blog to keep you informed of breaking news developments), separate reform proposals have passed in the House of Representatives and the Senate — with the latter bill’s benefits so thoroughly diminished that whether it’s any improvement at all over the present system is a matter of fierce debate in the progressive blogiverse.  In fact, Obama himself is under intense criticism for having exerted so little visible effort to avoid the legislative emasculation that occurred in the Senate.

In Obama’s defense, though, this is a situation that he apparently planned for early on in the year, as Brian Beutler reported for TPM back in August:

Dick Durbin (D-IL), the number two Democrat in the Senate, says President Obama wants to move forward with some form of health care bill quickly, and then fight the fight over particulars in negotiations with the House of Representatives. . . .

“… we are trying to walk this tightrope to get this bill through. The House [of Representatives] is likely to include it [a public option]. The Senate may not. Then we go into conference committee and President Obama has to roll up his sleeves and see if he can bring us all together. And when I’ve spoken to him about this a couple times, all he’s said is: ‘Get me to a conference committee. Let me bring these folks into a room, and let me work and get it done.‘”

Okay, so the Democrats in Congress have gotten healthcare reform to a conference committee, as Obama claims to have wanted.  Indeed, in his own comments on the subject, the president echoed Durbin’s language:

“… we hope to have a whole bunch of folks over here in the West Wing, and I’ll be rolling up my sleeves and spending some time before the full Congress even gets into session…. I intend to work as hard as I have to work, especially after coming this far over the course of the year, to make sure that we finally close the deal.”

The question is, rolling up his sleeves to do what?   Conventional wisdom has already hardened that whatever comes out of the House-Senate negotiations will be essentially identical to what passed the Senate (even if that bill is at least slightly improved over its worst incarnation) — lest it fall prey again to the unpredictable whims of Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman as they threaten to join a Republican filibuster.

It seems like daydreaming at this point to imagine that Obama could move the bill in a more robust (and progressive) direction, then finally mount the bully pulpit, using the inherent popularity of a “public option” and similar features to pressure the centrist corporatist Dems into allowing a simple majority vote.  And yet, Obama’s speech to Congress in September showed that he could move the needle of popular opinion on healthcare reform, if only he cared enough to try.

Another possibility is the strategy that Nate Silver outlined a couple of weeks ago:

… the idea is to “surprise” the Senate by unexpectedly introducing additional provisions under reconciliation once you’ve already got the main portion of the bill passed. Does this sound attractive to you? Well then, the best thing to do would be topass the bill as is now, since that is the first step in the strategy. To repeat: the most promising application of the split-bill/reconciliation strategy involves passing what you can now — not killing it.

Silver sees this as also being unlikely, but it was also proposed by wonk-blogger Mark Schmitt back in July…

Use the 60-vote Senate to pass whatever they can pass now — we liberals will grumble but live with it — and then use reconciliation next year to fix it. With the exchange structure and subsidies established, it wouldn’t be hard to add an employer mandate, which would save money. With the rudiments of even a weak public plan in place, it wouldn’t be complicated to expand it and modify its eligibility rules, in ways that might save or cost money but in either event, involve budget changes to an existing program rather than creating something new. Aggregating small changes over the next few years (on the model of the steady expansion of Medicaid engineered by Henry Waxman and others over the 1980s and 1990s) could non-controversially build the kind of robust and equitable system we dream of.

… and Sen. Tom Harkin, a public option supporter, hinted at it two weeks ago (“We have to get this bill passed, and then we’ll come back and revisit the public option at some point.”)

Assuming the House and Senate finish making their legislative sausage by Obama’s “State of the Union” address to Congress, wouldn’t it be something of a political masterstroke for the president to announce a plan to strengthen and complete the watered-down bill by passing an expansion of Medicare using budget reconciliation rules?  That would be a classic example of doing the hard, unpleasant work during the off year, and delivering the most popular aspect of reform right before the 2010 elections.

If Obama lacks the chutzpah to even try that, instead settling for the cautious, least-resistance path of accepting whatever meager reforms the Congress will pass on its own, then he deserves whatever he gets — in terms of public opinion and a demotivated base going into the 2010 elections — for his failure to lead.  Just standing by and watching as others do all the rowing isn’t enough; at some point, the president has to grab an oar, too, or we’ll never get anywhere.

“We’ve traced the posts to this location… does anyone here go by the nickname of ‘Green Boy’?”

(Via Reuters.)

Some encouraging news via the Washington Post today:

President Obama is likely to endorse using a portion of the government’s $700 billion financial bailout for a new jobs creation program during a speech about the economy next week, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters Friday morning.

“The president thinks we should and must do everything in our power to create an environment for job growth and job creation,” Gibbs said. When asked whether Obama will talk about the use of TARP funds on Tuesday, Gibbs said, “I think that’s likely.”

About $139 billion of the Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP, remains unallocated and available to the administration. Banks have paid another $10 billion in interest and dividends to the Treasury and returned about $71 billion in aid, the Treasury reported in November. This week, Bank of America announced it would repay its $45 billion package.

As recently as this week, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner has said he wants to dedicate much of the unspent TARP money to reduce the national debt. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal.) and other top Democrats have been crafting a jobs bill that would tap the bailout program. The size of the repayments from once shaky banks may make it possible to accomplish both goals.

. . . Gibbs said the president is likely to talk about multiple ideas for job creation, some of which would require congressional approval. The Tuesday speech at the Brookings Institution follows a day-long jobs summit Thursday and a trip to Allentown, Pennsylvania on Friday to highlight the plight of workers.

This weeklong focus on creating jobs is a refreshing sign that Obama and his top advisers did not, in fact, forget all of their political skills shortly after taking office.

Matt Yglesias adds that the President may be remembering a thing or two about basic messaging as well:

… once Obama’s Allentown event got into the Q&A section it got really good. What was interesting about it was that everything Obama said was so banal. It was elementary, back-to-basics, “I’m a Democrat” kind of stuff… He wasn’t even really all that feisty. But he got out and talked basic politics—who’s on your side, who’s fighting for change, and who’s responsible for protecting the status quo.

In other words, Obama is rediscovering the importance of the fundamental things that got him elected.

There’s a massive element of political calculation involved here, obviously — not just a president taking action to stop the downward drift of his poll numbers, but the Democrats in general needing to provide a positive political message going into 2010.

Even if the stimulative impact of whatever “jobs bill” gets passed is relatively small, much of the money from last spring’s economic-recovery package is still due to be spent this coming year.  Giving voters a fresh reminder that Democrats took action will be important for them in taking credit for whatever improvement occurs in the job market, regardless of the cause.

But at least this is the good kind of political calculation… the kind that comes from elected officials realizing they’re accountable for producing positive results for the people who put them in power.  Frankly, we could do with a bit more of it.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

President Obama and Iraqi president Nouri al-Maliki at the White House yesterday (via the Associated Press).

It’s becoming obvious now that the protracted drama of the Senate Finance Committee, long feared to be the beginning of the end for meaningful healthcare reform, really was just the end of the beginning.  Now that a version of the bill has been pried loose from Sen. “Max Tax” Baucus and his committee, the real negotiations — and posturing — have started.

That’s why Joe Lieberman and Evan Bayh are making noises about not ruling out a filibuster — but hey, they can be bribed persuaded not to join one, too!– and why Jay Rockefeller and Chuck Schumer (and Nancy Pelosi, on the House side) are applying pressure in the media for a robust public option.  Everyone’s jockeying for position.

Jon Walker’s post at FDL Action today sums up the state of play nicely with a quote from Tom Harkin:

There are 52 solid Democrats for a public option and only about five Democrats really kind of opposed to it…. One has to ask if the 52 should give into the five or if the five should come on board with the vast majority.

And you know what?  That’s how everyone knew (or should have known) this was going to wind up back in January — with a handful of faux-centrist Senators threatening to sabotage a Democratic president for at least the third straight time, and everyone else wondering how to get around that obstacle.

But this also means that of all people, Barack Obama should have a plan for how to deal with this situation.  I’ve been more naive optimistic than many progressive bloggers, holding out hope that Obama really does want a public option in the final healthcare bill — not out of his innate progressive nature or the goodness of his heart (always a bad bet when it comes to politicians), but due to his own stated recognition that whatever passes needs to work, or he’s going to pay the political price for the resulting fiasco just as surely as if the bill had been defeated.

That’s why I’m not surprised to read that Harry Reid is reportedly working behind the scenes “for the best possible public option coming out of conference” (though those last four words are worth noting, and perhaps being alarmed over), or to see Nancy Pelosi’s forthright defense of a public option yesterday just before appearing with President Obama at two events in San Francisco (where his praise of her would seem odd if she’d just thrown his alleged secret desire to kill the public option under the bus).

But now’s the time for Obama to stop forcing us to imagine what his real intentions are. We all know how solicitous he’s been of Max Baucus’s endless delays and whatever whim Olympia Snowe chooses to express on any given day, and not openly pressuring Democratic senators who have spoken against a public option.  I’ve tried to give Obama the benefit of the doubt, figuring that he’s worked directly with these bozos colleagues in the Senate and knows what preening, obnoxious assholes they are how sensitive they are to being pressured.

At the end of the day, though, he’s got to persuade them to do the right thing.  And the end of the day is rapidly approaching.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

“I’m more likely to win the Nobel Peace Prize than you are to make this shot!”

(President Obama challenging a jump shot by aide Reggie Love, via Twitter and whitehouse.gov.)

Alec MacGillis of the Washington Post attended the AFL-CIO convention in Pittsburgh yesterday, and wrote this about President Obama’s speech there:

In a fiery speech to the nation’s largest labor federation, Obama urged members to get behind his proposal to overhaul the health-care system, which he vowed would pass in the next few months. To his audience’s satisfaction, he reiterated his support for including a government-run insurance plan, or public option, among the choices for consumers — a top priority for AFL-CIO leaders. And he dropped some of the language he used in last week’s health-care address to Congress in which he seemed to play down the importance of the public option.

But Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times was also there, apparently in the same convention hall but a different world:

A week after he asked Democrats in Congress to support the outlines of his health care plan, Mr. Obama made a similar but broader case to union audiences here and earlier Tuesday in Ohio. . . .

Yet despite the thunderous applause he received, his mentioning the term “public option” only once during a 35-minute speech at the convention did not go unnoticed. Many delegates carried signs and wore T-shirts declaring that a government-run insurance program was a nonnegotiable piece of health care legislation.

I suppose this is better than MacGillis and Zeleny getting together and deciding among themselves what the approved spin should be.  But still…

As you may know, there’s a psychiatric condition known as Münchausen syndrome by proxy, one of the manifestations of which can be loosely defined as putting someone or something else in jeopardy so that you can be a hero by “saving” it.

For obvious reasons, this came to mind as I watched a surprisingly reinvigorated Barack Obama give his speech to Congress on Wednesday night.  As columnist E.J. Dionne wrote for the Washington Post, “After a listless summer during which his opponents dominated the health-care debate… it seemed as if a politician who had been channeling the detached and cerebral Adlai Stevenson had discovered a new role model in the fighting Harry Truman.”

Then again (though I know I might be inviting sneering about “multi-dimensional chess” and the like), there may have been a method to the seeming madness of Obama’s lackadaisical summer attitude toward healthcare reform.  A New York Times story a few days ago navel-gazed about how Obama has attempted to learn lessons from the failure of Bill Clinton’s healthcare proposals in 1994:

That 15-year-old lesson underscores how much the Clinton debacle has defined Mr. Obama’s drive for his domestic priority from the beginning, providing a tip sheet for what not to do. Even Mr. Obama’s decision to address a joint session of Congress on Wednesday night to jumpstart his health initiative left some aides wary, given the inevitable parallels with Mr. Clinton’s September address 16 years ago to introduce his ill-fated plan.

I can point out a key difference just from the numbers in the quote above — Clinton’s speech was in September 1993; his reform bill died nearly a year later.

Obama quite likely concluded that the momentum from a single speech (particularly given the ever-shortening modern news cycle and attention spans) couldn’t possibly last an entire year.  It could, however, trigger a short legislative sprint of two months or so.

Thus the now-obsolete insistence earlier this year on a health bill by August wasn’t really intended to get a bill by August; rather, it was intended to provoke enough movement that a bill by Thanksgiving would be in striking distance.  (The declaration in the spring of an October 15 target date for invoking reconciliation is further evidence of this.)

All this, of course, leaves open the question — which, you might have noticed, is being pressed rather forcefully in many parts of the liberal blogiverse — of what kind of bill Obama hopes to pass with this last-minute rescue effort.  To go out really far on an optimistic limb, think about the president’s especially Munchausen-like treatment of the public option, which has been not merely thrown under the bus but tied to railroad tracks, hung over the edge of cliffs, and subjected to every other imaginable sort of peril in news reports.  And yet Obama continues to include it, at least nominally, in his proposed legislation.

Everyone who understands how important a public option is to successful healthcare reform feels terribly jerked around by now.  But then, the corporate-owned “centrist” types who have balked at a robust public option are probably feeling the same way about Obama’s refusal to officially kill it.  Like the old story of the carrot and the stick tied to the donkey’s back, the public option’s demise seems eternally just a few inches away, but never arrives.

Perhaps Obama is just waiting for the very last second to throw it away as a bargaining chip.  But if I were one of those hacks centrists, I’d be very nervous about the resilient popular support for a public option tempting Obama to champion it in fall rallies, daring them to vote against it.  As many other folks have observed, the momentum would be almost impossible for any politician, no matter how thoroughly bought off by the insurance companies, to resist.

Of course, that same possibility will make it all the more shameful if Obama really does surrender on the public option.  But I’ve waited 15 years just to have hope again, so I’ll cling to it for a few weeks longer.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)