February 26, 2009

2/26: Getting Ready To Rumble

Liberal bloggers are pleased that Pres. Obama is proposing a $634B reserve fund for health care, which they see as evidence that Obama is "serious about pursuing health care reform." Although lefty bloggers were quick to note that $634B "isn't quite enough to pay for the subsidies that are an essential part of a universal-care system," they nevertheless see this proposal as "a good first step." While a few conservative bloggers are expressing concerns about the cost of this proposal, the rest have been relatively quiet. It appears that the real blogosphere fight over health care probably won't come until Congress starts debating health care reform in earnest.

What else is happening in the blogosphere?

• Conservative bloggers (Bluey, Rubin, Yousefzadeh) continue to blame the stock market's poor performance on Obama's policies and rhetoric, while liberal bloggers continue to push back against this argument.
• Liberal bloggers (Singer, Krugman, Benen, Black) continue to criticize Gov. Bobby Jindal's (R-LA) response to Obama's speech -- especially his attack on federal funding of volcano monitoring.

HEALTH CARE: $634 Billion? Dude Ain't Messin' Around...

Liberal bloggers are pleased that Obama is proposing a $634B reserve fund for health care, which they see as a sign that the President is serious about health care reform:

• The New Republic's Jonathan Cohn: "How big an investment is that? It's pretty big -- more, I believe, than any president has proposed setting aside for coverage expansions to the non-elderly since [Bill] Clinton tried for universal health insurance in the 1990s. And it confirms that Obama is serious about pursuing health care reform, beyond small incremental steps."
• Obsidian Wings' publius: "The good news is that it's pretty much official -- health care reform is ON this year. Obama is carving out a big chunk of money for it -- and we wouldn't be reading these stories if they weren't serious about it."
• AMERICAblog's Joe Sudbay: "Obama said he was serious about health care. His budget is serious about health care. [...] I'm impressed by the strategy -- and the number."
• Open Left's Chris Bowers: "I like this approach. $634 billion over ten years is not as much as we need to successfully overhaul the health care system, but it is a good first step that will make any further requests for more money in future months and years easier. It appears to be, quite literally, a down payment for health care reform."
• The New York Times' Paul Krugman: "The supposed commitment of $634 billion to health care reform isn't quite enough to pay for the subsidies that are an essential part of a universal-care system, but it's not ridiculously short, either. It's beginning to look as if Obama's really going to go through with this -- and if he gets us to universality, his legacy will be secure."

Meanwhile, Ezra Klein and Stirling Newberry analyzed the proposal in greater depth.

HEALTH CARE II: Mo' Money, Mo' Problems

Several conservative bloggers are expressing concerns about the size of Obama's proposed $634B health care reserve fund:

• Hot Air's Allahpundit: "The health-care money would be provided over 10 years, so, you know, no worries. Granted, they don't have an actual plan on how to spend it yet -- but then they don't have an economic plan yet either. [...] It's a down payment, with the balance to be paid by the permanent tax increases on the middle class that are coming, as the NYT reminds us in a moment of amazing candor today. How much will that balance be, allowing for the inevitable cost overruns? Only The One, in his supreme wisdom, knows."
• RedState's Dan Spencer: "According to the Post, Obama's health care overhaul will cost as much as $1 trillion over the next decade. [...] A trillion here a trillion there pretty soon..."

Power Line's John Hinderaker notes that Obama plans to help pay for this fund by reducing tax deductions for people in the top income bracket, which Hinderaker considers a mistake: "[Obama's proposals] will be achieved in part by reducing the deductions that are available to the 'wealthy,' i.e., those earning $200,000 (if single) or $250,000 (if married) per year. [...] Michael Barone has written that Obama was elected in November on the strength of a 'top and bottom coalition.' He carried high-income and low-income voters, while John McCain won a majority of middle-income voters. As the inevitable effects of Obama's policies become visible -- higher taxes, inflation, prolonged weakness in the economy, depressed stock market -- the 'top' part of his coalition will begin to erode. That process likely began today."

OBAMA: He May Be Popular With The Public, But Not With Traders

Conservative bloggers continue to blame the stock market's poor performance on Obama's policies and rhetoric:

• RedState's Robert Bluey: "The best thing President Barack Obama can do for the economy is keep quiet. A day after delivering an address that won widespread praise from the chattering class, Obama's big-government policies were rejected by traders on Wall Street. Wall Street's negative reaction to Obama is nothing new. Ever since Election Day, Obama's words have failed to inspire investors."
• Commentary's Jennifer Rubin: "The slides in markets and consumer-confidence ratings, to some extent, reflect the collective 'thumbs down' on the administration's course of action. The potential that the recovery will be stalled by a regime of more government spending, regulation, and taxation has not been lost on those who must invest, hire, and plan their expenditures. Will that flashing red light then be recognized as a dire warning in Washington and serve to upset the administration's plans for even more anti-free market policies? Perhaps."
• RedState's Pejman Yousefzadeh: "[H]ow many more days of this is the market supposed to take? Once again, cast your minds back to 2000-2001, when Democratic leaders were accusing George W. Bush of 'talking down the economy.' Isn't that what the Obama Administration is plainly doing?"

Liberal blogger Jane Hamsher disputes the notion that Obama is "talking down the economy": "I understand that every time the market takes a big drop trillions of dollars evaporate from the face of the planet and people already worried about their economic future become even more concerned, and politicians should certainly not speak recklessly. But there is a logic flaw embedded in the idea that [the economy's] overall health is a function of the direction in which the Dow is heading, and that nobody should be saying or doing anything to drive it down. [...] Having the courage to take action to restore the integrity of the market means doing things that will depress in the short term. If it doesn't go down when it has to swallow the bitter pills of regulation or bank nationalization, you're doing something wrong. Letting the market decide what is and what is not sound policy is like disciplining your kids based on how well they like it."

JINDAL: Clearly, He's Never Had To Run From Hot Molten Lava

Liberal bloggers are still hammering Jindal's response to Obama's speech -- particularly his attack on federal funding of volcano monitoring:

• The Washington Monthly's Steve Benen: "[T]here is some irony here. Jindal, the chief executive of a state ravaged by natural disasters, is mocking research funds that monitor natural disasters."
• MyDD's Jonathan Singer: "I grew up in Portland, Oregon, about 50 miles from Mount Hood, an 11,249-foot volcano that has been active in the past few hundred years, and only about 75 miles from Mount St. Helens, the eruption of which led to dozens of fatalities not even 30 years ago. Most of my family still lives in Portland, and I am in the city on a fairly regular basis. In the event that Hood, St. Helens, or any other volcano in the region were to blow, I would most certainly want the federal government to have done all it could on the detection front so that my family had ample warning to get to safety. Do Bobby Jindal and the Republican Party begrudge me that?"
• Krugman: "[B]oth [conservatives and liberals], I thought, agreed that the government should provide public goods -- goods that are nonrival (they benefit everyone) and nonexcludable (there's no way to restrict the benefits to people who pay.) The classic examples are things like lighthouses and national defense, but there are many others. For example, knowing when a volcano is likely to erupt can save many lives; but there's no private incentive to spend money on monitoring, since even people who didn't contribute to maintaining the monitoring system can still benefit from the warning. So that's the sort of activity that should be undertaken by government. So what did Bobby Jindal choose to ridicule in this response to Obama last night? Volcano monitoring, of course."

Several bloggers are arguing that Jindal's swipe at volcano funding is indicative of the extent to which the GOP has become an echo chamber:

• Atrios: "I've written before that I think part of the problem that conservatives/Republicans face is that their mythology has become a bit too complex for mere mortals (people who don't listen to [Rush] Limbaugh and read The Corner obsessively) to comprehend. They reference rogues' gallery of enemies and various 'bad things' that most people have never heard of. Simply trying to navigate through the various wingnutty minefields while throwing out the appropriate red meat has become difficult to do, and the result is incomprehensible to most of the country. Volcano monitoring! High speed rail!"
• The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan: "The GOP emphasis on marsh mice and volcanoes and federal cars is a function of talk-radio conservatism -- and nothing like an adult approach to actual government."
• digby: "Jindal and the rest are going to have a problem: They are now officially a sub-culture and it's hard to get a majority when you literally speak a different language than most people."
• Balloon Juice's John Cole: "I believe that one of the big reasons Obama consistently did better in polls than on pundits' scorecards in the debates is that not many Americans had any idea what John McCain was talking about most of the time. [...] When he said 'bear DNA' over and over, I'm sure most Americans just thought he was having a senior moment. But [Mark] Halperin et al. thought it was brilliant. Field mice and volcano monitoring are just never going to work as well as 'welfare queens' and 'young bucks buying T-bones' did. They're too complicated."

THOUGHT OF THE DAY: The Joe-the-Plumberization Of The GOP

The Next Right's Patrick Ruffini:

"If you want to get a sense of how unserious and ungrounded most Americans think the Republican Party is, look no further than how conservatives elevate Joe the Plumber as a spokesman. The movement has become so gimmick-driven that Wurzelbacher will be a conservative hero long after people have forgotten what his legitimate policy beef with Obama was.

A movement self-confident in its place in American society would not have made Joe the Plumber a bigger story than he actually was. Since its very beginnings as a movement, conservatism has bought into liberalism's dominant place in the American political process. They controlled all the major institutions: the media, academia, Hollywood, the Democratic Party, large segments of the Republican Party, and consequently, the government. Liberalism's image of conservatives in the '50s and '60s as paranoid Birchers gave birth to a conservative movement self-conscious of its minority status. As in any tribe that is small in number and can't fully trust its most natural allies (i.e. the business community or the Republican Party), the meta-debate of who is inside and outside the tribe is magnified exponentially.

The legacy of that early movement -- alive and well at CPAC and in the conservative institutions that still exist today -- is one driven inordinately by this question of identity. We have paeans to [Ronald] Reagan (as if we needed to be reminded again of just how much things suck in comparison today), memorabilia honoring 18th century philosophers that we wouldn't actually wear in the outside world, and code-word laden speeches that focus on a few hot button issues that leave us ill-equipped to actually govern conservatively on 80% of issues when we actually do get elected."

LEST WE FORGET: Thanks, Now I'm Even More Confused

From Overheard in New York:

Friend #1: My friend told me that in Wisconsin they deep-fry cheese curds.
Friend #2: What's "cheese curds"?
Friend #3: Kurds are a perennially oppressed ethnic minority group found in parts of Iran, Iraq, and Turkey.

Posted by Ian Faerstein at February 26, 2009 12:33 PM