Clarity

QOTD, Krugman: 

The key point is that ever since the Reagan years, the Republican Party has been dominated by radicals — ideologues and/or apparatchiks who, at a fundamental level, do not accept anyone else’s right to govern.

Benen: 'THE TASTE THAT LINGERS'....

NBC's "Meet the Press," not surprisingly, touched on the 2016 Olympics decision, and the politics surrounding this week's events. Rachel Maddow's analysis struck me as entirely right.

"The unseemly cheering on the right for America losing its Olympic bid I think is going to be the taste that lingers a long time after this failure," Rachel said. "Certainly the president tried to get something and he didn't get it, and people who hate the president feel like that's a cause for celebration. But to see, for example, the Weekly Standard post 'Chicago loses, Chicago loses, cheers erupt at Weekly Standard headquarters' I think says a lot more about the Weekly Standard, it says a lot more about the right right now than it does about this loss."
Noting the larger context, Rachel added, "In 2012, London got the Olympics after Blair tried for them; in 2014, Russian got them -- Russia got them after Putin tried for them; and in 2016 all four finalists had their head of government or head of state to make the argument. Obama did nothing unreasonable. And it would've been a shock if Chicago won. For them to be cheering America's loss here on the right I think is sort of disgusting."
David Brooks largely agreed, at least to the extent that the president's efforts were entirely reasonable. "He took a risk for his country," Brooks said. "He put the country ahead of his own personal prestige. He lost one. I actually don't mind it. I think, I think he was all right on this."
E.J. Dionne added, "John McCain's slogan was 'country first,' and in this case it was 'Obama hatred first' on the right, not the country."
It's probably too much to ask for some kind of significant backlash, but I suspect if a pollster were to ask Americans which bothered them more, the president trying to bring the Olympics to the U.S. or the president's detractors cheering the Olympics not coming to the U.S., conservatives wouldn't fare especially well.

Krugman (NYT): The Politics of Spite

There was what President Obama likes to call a teachable moment last week, when the International Olympic Committee rejected Chicago’s bid to be host of the 2016 Summer Games.
“Cheers erupted” at the headquarters of the conservative Weekly Standard, according to a blog post by a member of the magazine’s staff, with the headline “Obama loses! Obama loses!” Rush Limbaugh declared himself “gleeful.” “World Rejects Obama,” gloated the Drudge Report. And so on.
So what did we learn from this moment? For one thing, we learned that the modern conservative movement, which dominates the modern Republican Party, has the emotional maturity of a bratty 13-year-old.
But more important, the episode illustrated an essential truth about the state of American politics: at this point, the guiding principle of one of our nation’s two great political parties is spite pure and simple. If Republicans think something might be good for the president, they’re against it — whether or not it’s good for America.
To be sure, while celebrating America’s rebuff by the Olympic Committee was puerile, it didn’t do any real harm. But the same principle of spite has determined Republican positions on more serious matters, with potentially serious consequences — in particular, in the debate over health care reform.
Now, it’s understandable that many Republicans oppose Democratic plans to extend insurance coverage — just as most Democrats opposed President Bush’s attempt to convert Social Security into a sort of giant 401(k). The two parties do, after all, have different philosophies about the appropriate role of government.
But the tactics of the two parties have been different. In 2005, when Democrats campaigned against Social Security privatization, their arguments were consistent with their underlying ideology: they argued that replacing guaranteed benefits with private accounts would expose retirees to too much risk.
The Republican campaign against health care reform, by contrast, has shown no such consistency. For the main G.O.P. line of attack is the claim — based mainly on lies about death panels and so on — that reform will undermine Medicare. And this line of attack is utterly at odds both with the party’s traditions and with what conservatives claim to believe.
Think about just how bizarre it is for Republicans to position themselves as the defenders of unrestricted Medicare spending. First of all, the modern G.O.P. considers itself the party of Ronald Reagan — and Reagan was a fierce opponent of Medicare’s creation, warning that it would destroy American freedom. (Honest.) In the 1990s, Newt Gingrich tried to force drastic cuts in Medicare financing. And in recent years, Republicans have repeatedly decried the growth in entitlement spending — growth that is largely driven by rising health care costs.
But the Obama administration’s plan to expand coverage relies in part on savings from Medicare. And since the G.O.P. opposes anything that might be good for Mr. Obama, it has become the passionate defender of ineffective medical procedures and overpayments to insurance companies.
How did one of our great political parties become so ruthless, so willing to embrace scorched-earth tactics even if so doing undermines the ability of any future administration to govern?
The key point is that ever since the Reagan years, the Republican Party has been dominated by radicals — ideologues and/or apparatchiks who, at a fundamental level, do not accept anyone else’s right to govern.
Anyone surprised by the venomous, over-the-top opposition to Mr. Obama must have forgotten the Clinton years. Remember when Rush Limbaugh suggested that Hillary Clinton was a party to murder? When Newt Gingrich shut down the federal government in an attempt to bully Bill Clinton into accepting those Medicare cuts? And let’s not even talk about the impeachment saga.
The only difference now is that the G.O.P. is in a weaker position, having lost control not just of Congress but, to a large extent, of the terms of debate. The public no longer buys conservative ideology the way it used to; the old attacks on Big Government and paeans to the magic of the marketplace have lost their resonance. Yet conservatives retain their belief that they, and only they, should govern.
The result has been a cynical, ends-justify-the-means approach. Hastening the day when the rightful governing party returns to power is all that matters, so the G.O.P. will seize any club at hand with which to beat the current administration.
It’s an ugly picture. But it’s the truth. And it’s a truth anyone trying to find solutions to America’s real problems has to understand.

Roger Cohen (NYT): The Public Imperative 

NEW YORK — Back from another trip to Europe, this time Germany, where the same dismay as in France prevails over the U.S. health care debate. Europeans don’t get why Americans don’t agree that universal health coverage is a fundamental contract to which the citizens of any developed society have a right.
I don’t get it either. Or rather I do, but I don’t think the debate is about health. There can be no doubt that U.S. health care is expensive and wasteful. Tens of millions of people are uninsured by a system that devours a far bigger slice of national output — and that’s the sum of all Americans’ collective energies — than in any other wealthy society.
People die of worry, too. Emergency rooms were not created to be primary care providers.
Whatever may be right, something is rotten in American medicine. It should be fixed. But fixing it requires the acknowledgment that, when it comes to health, we’re all in this together. Pooling the risk between everybody is the most efficient way to forge a healthier society.
Europeans have no problem with this moral commitment. But Americans hear “pooled risk” and think, “Hey, somebody’s freeloading on my hard work.”
A reader, John Dowd, sent me this comment: “In Europe generally the populace in the various countries feels enough sense of social connectedness to enforce a social contract that benefits all, albeit at a fairly high cost. In America it is not like that. There is endless worry that one’s neighbor may be getting more than his or her “fair” share.”
Post-heroic European societies, having paid in blood for violent political movements born of inequality and class struggle, see greater risk in unfettered individualism than in social solidarity. Americans, born in revolt against Europe and so ever defining themselves against the old Continent’s models, mythologize their rugged (always rugged) individualism as the bulwark against initiative-sapping entitlements. We’re not talking about health here. We’re talking about national narratives and mythologies — as well as money. These are things not much susceptible to logic. But in matters of life and death, mythology must cede to reality, profit to wellbeing.
I can see the conservative argument that welfare undermines the work ethic and dampens moral fiber. Provide sufficient unemployment benefits and people will opt to chill rather than labor. But it’s preposterous to extend this argument to health care. Guaranteeing health coverage doesn’t incentivize anybody to get meningitis.
Yet that’s what Republicans’ cry of “socialized medicine” — American politics at its most debased — is all about. It implies that government-provided health care somehow saps Americans’ freedom-loving initiative. Some Democrats — prodded by drug and insurance companies with the cash to win favors — buy that argument, too.
I’m grateful to the wise Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic for pointing out that Friedrich Hayek, whose suspicion of the state was visceral, had this to say in “The Road to Serfdom:”
“Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance — where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks — the case for the state’s helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong.”
That’s why, when it comes to health, every developed society but the United States has such a “comprehensive system,” almost always with state involvement. However, pooled risk does not necessarily imply a public option. It can be achieved through mandated private-insurer coverage coupled with subsidies. That, for example, is the Swiss way — and where Congress seems headed.
But it’s nonprofit insurers who provide the coverage in Switzerland because health insurance is viewed as social insurance — as it is throughout Europe — rather than a means to make money. One fundamental reason a public option — yes, “option,” not single-payer monopoly — is needed in the United States is to jump-start the idea that basic health care is a moral obligation rather than a financial opportunity.
Another is to provide competition to private insurers and so force waste, excess and cozy arrangements out of the American system. Behind all the socialized medicine babble lurks a hard-headed calculation about money — all the profits skimmed from that waste and the big doctors’ salaries that go with it.
It’s not over yet for the public option. President Barack Obama should still push it with a clear moral stand.
He’s been too deferential. The best bit of his speech to Congress on health care was the last — and even there he left the most powerful words to the late Edward Kennedy: “What we face is above all a moral issue; at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country.”
Obama then said he’d been pondering American character “quite a bit” and did some “self-reliance” versus government intervention musing.
He should have been clearer and punchier. A public commitment to universal coverage is not character-sapping but character-affirming. Medicare did not make America less American. Individualism is more “rugged” when housed in a healthy body.