Romney's Blunder (With Update)

I think Mitt Romney blew a big opportunity. He should have kept his public comments minimal during the health care reform debate, then -- when the bill passed -- he should have come out and said, "Although there are parts of the bill I do not like, I find the overall package to be quite good and I support what the Congress and President Obama have done."

Sure, he would have been mercilessly attacked by the Tea-Baggers and all the Republicans who are afraid of the Tea-Baggers (which is all of them), but Romney isn't in Congress and isn't running for anything in 2010. The 2012 primaries are still a long ways off and anything can happen between now and then. Hell, just two short months ago, the popular thinking in this country was that Health Care Reform was dead and Obama's presidency was crippled as a result. Who knows what the political landscape will be like a year from now.

Instead, Romney currently finds himself in an impossible position -- he now has to distance himself from legislation that he himself came up with (i.e., RomneyCare in Massachusetts), and you know that his opponents for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination are going to repeatedly point out that ObamaCare is really just RomneyCare. In fact, such attacks have already begun. My point is that Romney was going to be attacked for his Massachusetts plan anyway, so why should he distance himself from it by opposing ObamaCare and in the process look like the Mother of All Flip-Floppers? By expressing support for ObamaCare, Romney could have defended himself from a position of strength and maybe even counter-attacked.

Every other GOP candidate for 2012 is going to be attacking Health Care Reform. Romney could have separated himself from the pack on this issue, and I think it was a big mistake for him not to do that. The GOP plan was to defeat the reform, and by doing so, break Obama's presidency. That strategy failed; but given that every Republican supported the strategy, it was a failure for every Republican. It didn't have to be that way.

By the way, will this be the new GOP anti-reform talking point?

UPDATE: John Cornyn's strategy on how to deal with ObamaCare? Praise it by faintly damning it:

NRSC Chairman John Cornyn plans to send a memo to Republican candidates Tuesday urging them to be proactive in shaping the campaign debate on health care and not let Democrats "distort our record and our ideas." "On the trail, it's critical that we remind people of the fact that it was Republicans who fought to force insurance companies to compete with one another over state lines for Americans' business. It was Republicans who fought to reform the junk lawsuits that raise medical costs and lower quality by forcing doctors to practice 'defensive medicine,'" Cornyn writes, emphasizing the GOP's record beyond its opposition to the Obama-backed health care bill. "It was Republicans who fought for policies that protected Americans with preexisting conditions and it was Republicans who proposed health care reforms that didn't cut Medicare by $500 billion and raise Americans' taxes by $400 million. It's Republicans who continue to believe that we should focus on reforms which actually lower health care costs for Americans, first and foremost." If the GOP thinks health care is going to work to their advantage this year, that doesn't mean they expect that to happen passively.

RepubliCare (With Update)

There is a lot of stuff coming out on how much of the recently-passed health care reform bill was really just a long list of ideas that Republicans had previously embraced. It's been fairly clear to me for quite some time that the HCR bill was mostly populated with Republican ideas, but neither the left or the right seemed to want to talk about this issue.

And for good reason: The GOP was simply out to "break" Obama no matter how many Republican ideas he embraced, and the Democrats certainly didn't want to point out that the reform package was pretty much based on ideas originally proposed by conservatives (their base wouldn't have liked that at all).

But now that health care reform is the law of the land, this story is starting to gather steam. Yesterday, we learned that Bush speechwriter David Frum, who was recently fired by the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute (AEI), made the following comment to fellow conservative Bruce Bartlett:

Since, [Frum] is no longer affiliated with AEI, I feel free to say publicly something he told me in private a few months ago. He asked if I had noticed any comments by AEI "scholars" on the subject of health care reform. I said no and he said that was because they had been ordered not to speak to the media because they agreed with too much of what Obama was trying to do.

Imagine that – a conservative “think” tank muzzled because too many of its members agreed with the President on how to solve one of the critical problems of our time. And the other side calls us Stalinists?

I’ll give the GOP credit, though – they had so much anti-Obama solidarity on this health care reform issue that the Republicans were even able to shut down their own intellectuals. [I was about to finish that thought with “Only in America,” but that’s about as un-American as you can get].

There's more. Check out this video. If you can't get video at your workplace, what it shows is an excerpt from an interview today wherein Campbell Brown at CNN asked GOP senator Orrin Hatch why he's against health care reform now even though he actually supported an individual mandate back in 1993. Hatch's response:

"In 1993, we were trying to kill HillaryCare, and I didn't pay any attention to [the individual mandate], because that was a part of a bill I just hadn't centered on, but since then, of course, 17 years later, when it comes up and I know it's possible it's going to pass, I looked at it, and constitutionally, I came to the conclusion, and everyone came to the conclusion, that this would be the first time in history that the federal government requires you to buy something you don't want."

I'm not even going to try to parse Hatch's bullshit response, because the point is that the media is finally starting to realize that "ObamaCare" is actually "RepubliCare" (or maybe we should just call it RomneyCare).

In any event, the Republicans really blew it on this issue, because all they had to do was embrace their own ideas! They could have easily claimed credit for a majority of the bill, and Obama most likely would have let them do it. Had the GOP done that, there would have been overwhelming bipartisan support for the reforms, and the signing ceremony that happened earlier in the week would have been a great day for all Americans as opposed to what it turned out to be, namely, a huge, momentum-building victory for Obama and the Democrats, and a call to violence for the radical right.

But my question is: What now? I expect that the media will come out with more reporting over the following weeks pointing out just how much health care reform is based on GOP ideas. If this happens, what will be the GOP response? Will Republicans just continue to deny the obvious, or will they be forced to pivot on this issue and embrace the reform? How can the Republicans embrace reform now after spending all that effort enraging their lunatic base?

As I mentioned on Wednesday, GOP Senator Chuck Grassley has already taken credit for some of the HCR law, and I expect we'll see more of this over the next few weeks. But the bottom line here is that the Republicans really backed themselves into a corner on this issue.

UPDATE: Here is what Obama said this morning on Today:

"[W]hen you actually look at the bill itself, it incorporates all sorts of Republican ideas. I mean a lot of commentators have said, you know, this is sort of similar to the bill that Mitt Romney, the Republican Governor and now presidential candidate, passed in Massachusetts."

More on this here.

Lukewarm Condemnation From NRCC

In fact, caliing it "lukewarm" would be generous:

Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA) is one of the Democratic lawmakers who has been targeted after the health care vote -- and one Republican group suggests he has only himself to blame for the situation.

National Republican Congressional Committee spokesman Andy Sere said that while his organization doesn't condone the actions of the person or people who cut a gas line at Perriello's brother's house (apparently under the impression that the home was the congressman's), Perriello is not the victim.

"Central and Southside Virginians are the ones who are going to have the bear the burden of increased taxes," Sere told The Roanoke Times. "What you're seeing is a frustration among his constituents who believe he's not listening to them." * * *

Sere later tried to claim he was he was only referring to marches, demonstrations and letters -- and not physical threats -- but that's total horseshit, of course.

Clearly, GOP leaders don't want to seriously condemn any of the folks who are issuing threats against Democrats because these people form the base of the Republican Party. Check out these results from a recent Harris poll:

* 57 percent of Republicans (32 percent overall) believe that Obama is a Muslim

* 45 percent of Republicans (25 percent overall) agree with the Birthers in their belief that Obama was "not born in the United States and so is not eligible to be president"

* 38 percent of Republicans (20 percent overall) say that Obama is "doing many of the things that Hitler did"

* Scariest of all, 24 percent of Republicans (14 percent overall) say that Obama "may be the Antichrist."

This poll goes a long way to explain why the Republicans have chosen to oppose everything Obama supports, even if the idea was originally a Republican one. I mean, how could a senator or congressman support anything Obama does in the face of these numbers? Such a person would have to go home and explain to half of his constituents why he is cooperating with that illegal-alien-Muslim-terrorizer in the White House.

Two-fifths of Republicans think that Obama is doing many things that Hitler did, and one quarter of them think Obama is the Anti-Christ. How could a Republican ever support Obama on any issue without pissing off these lunatics?

Senator Chris Dodd thinks that things might be loosening up a bit on this front:

"I think, frankly, there are a number of Republicans who went along with the strategy of 'just say no' who were never really happy with it, but if it worked they would go along," Dodd said. "They saw it fail. And now they've had enough of it. and they really want to be involved in crafting things."

I was thinking a similar thing the other day. The most essential part of the GOP's "Just Say 'No' To Obama" strategy was defeating Obama on health care reform; and now that such a goal cannot be reached, my thinking was that a lot of Republicans in Congress might decide that the time has come to do their jobs. But the aforementioned results from the Harris poll have caused me to do some rethinking on that.

By the way, I really like this.

Interesting Interview Of David Axelrod (With Update)

From HuffPo:

One of the president's closest advisers said on Tuesday that Republican opponents of health care reform let down their guard following Sen. Scott Brown's election in Massachusetts, in the process allowing Democrats and the administration to make a final, successful push for the bill.

In an interview with the Huffington Post hours after the president signed health care reform into law, senior adviser David Axelrod pointed to that special election in late January as a pivotal point in the long path to passing legislation.

"Some of the steam went out of the opposition after that," Axelrod said. "I think that people felt like they had made a statement. Perhaps they felt like they had killed health care reform... They thought the fight was over. And that [the president] couldn't now succeed. I do believe that. And it is almost as if they had made the statement that they thought they had stopped the thing. And so it created a breathing space for us to regroup." * * *

I think Axelrod makes a good point, but he and the rest of the Obama Administration need to beware of falling into the same trap. If the Dems for one minute think that momentum is on their side on this and that they can sit on their hands with regard to Health Care Reform, they should think again. The GOP has promised to come after them with everything they've got, and I expect that will happen.

I know that the most recent Gallup poll showed 49 percent approval and 40 percent disapproval of the health care reform law, but all the polls before that showed that most people opposed the reform. The polls basically reversed themselves overnight, and that can easily happen again.

What the Democrats need to do now is launch a spoiling attack against the GOP. Obama should travel all over the country and speak on this issue (I heard he was in fact going to do that). The Democrats and their surrogates should launch blistering attack ads on all the Republicans who opposed this bill (which is ALL of them).

One ad should attack Republicans individually. It should simply lay out the reforms, and then close with "Call Representative So-and-So and ask him why he and the rest of the Republicans opposed a bill that actually reduced the deficit and extended Medicare solvency by at least nine years and provided health coverage to 32 million Americans who didn't have it before."

I have a feeling that a lot of Democrats think this new law will basically sell itself, but that won't happen if they let the GOP frame the debate during the run-up to the Mid-Terms.

UPDATE: This new Health Care Reform law is so full of GOP ideas that I have no doubt Republicans will soon be coming out and taking credit for most of it. Of course, this won't happen right away, because the current Republican plan is to oppose All Things Obama (even if it was a Republican idea to begin with -- e.g., the Deficit Reduction Panel) and, as everyone knows, the GOP is masterful at keeping its people in line and there is no way in hell that . . . .

Wait! ... What's this? Could it be true . . . ?

GOP Senator Chuck Grassley takes credit for health care reform! That didn't take long.

Any bets on who will be the next Republican domino to fall? I pick Rep. Peter King of New York.

Victory!

Danimal just called me to concede that I did in fact win my $10 bet with him -- although his call might have been premature given that the GOP can still pull all sorts of delaying tactics to prevent the final vote from happening before midnight --but it is clear now that Health Care Reform will pass the House.

This is a huge accomplishment, historically and politically. If the bill hadn't passed, Obama's presidency would have been crippled and the Democrats would have been absolutely screwed in the upcoming Mid-Term Elections. Now they can campaign from a position of strength. In fact, with regard to the Health Care Reform issue, the Democrats need to do three things to the GOP during the run-up to the Mid-Terms: (1) attack, (2) attack, and (3) attack more.

Even though these reforms really aren't all that different from the stuff that the Republicans were supporting during the Clinton-era health care debate, the GOP nonetheless decided that the best thing for them to do politically was to sit on the sidelines and instead do anything and everything they could to turn this Health Care debate into Obama's Waterloo. They need to pay for that decision, and the Democrats can make them pay if they do the following things:

** The Dems need to constantly point out that the reforms passed today are very moderate. In fact, the whole thing was a huge compromise. The so-called "public option" was actually a compromise on the single-payer deal, which is hilarious because the public option wasn't part of the bill that was just passed. When Obama signs this bill into law, it should be a very somber moment -- he should simply point out that these basic reforms needed to be passed decades ago, and he should say that he signs on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens who died because the American people did not have the political will to get this done sooner.

** The Dems need to constantly point out that the GOP didn't do squat on Health Care Reform when they were in control all those years, and as a result 45,000 Americans died each year who wouldn't have died had they had health coverage. The GOP loves to protect unborn fetuses, but they don't give two shits about folks after they are born and Obama and company need to point out this hypocrisy at every opportunity.

** The Democrats need to constantly ask the Republicans this question: Why in the hell did your party uniformly oppose a bill that actually reduced the deficit and extended Medicare solvency by at least nine years and provided health coverage to 32 million Americans who didn't have it before!? One of the GOP's talking points on this issue is that these reforms will increase the deficit, and Republicans continue to make this argument even though these reforms actually reduce the deficit by $130 billion in the first decade, and $1.2 trillion in the second. The GOP will continue to bring up this fake issue; and every time Republicans do it, the Democrats should simply call them out as liars.

On that last point, Obama and the Dems need to rid themselves of their fear of calling Republicans "liars" on this (or any) issue. I hate it when Democrats use phrases like "well, that's not exactly true" or "Mr. So-and-So has his facts wrong." Lies such as "death panels" or "government takeover of health care" were able to gain traction because the Democrats' response to all that bullshittery was weak at best. That needs to change.

All you hear about these days is how badly the Democrats are going to lose this November. But that doesn't have to happen, especially if our economy starts creating jobs again over the next few months. But it will happen if the Democrats continue to act like a bunch of political weaklings.

Bad News For The GOP (With Updates)

The Congressional Budget Office just released its final numbers on the health care reform bill, and it is good news for the Democrats. Steve Benen sums it up:

[T]he final package costs $940 billion over 10 years. It reduces the deficit by $130 billion in the first decade, and $1.2 trillion in the second. The bill will bring coverage to 32 million Americans, while extending Medicare solvency by at least 9 years.

Democrats have begun calling the package the "biggest deficit reduction measure in 25 years," which happens to be true. It's also arguably the biggest cost control bill ever.

Also note, the final Democratic proposal lowers the deficit more than the previous versions. The Senate bill was projected to reduce the deficit by $118 billion in the first decade, and this one does even better. * * *

I have a $10 bet with Danimal that the House will pass the bill before the end of the day on Sunday, so this report gives me some hope that I might win that bet. Having a very active Dennis Kucinich on board doesn't hurt the Democrats' chances either:

A few hours after Rep. Dennis Kucinich switched his support to become a critical vote for the health care bill, he took to the House floor to ask wavering colleagues to join him. Astonished colleagues pointed to Kucinich (D-OH) darting from member to member on the House floor yesterday, saying privately they'd never seen him get so involved in whipping a vote.

It's not just progressives he's targeting to keep in the fold, it's everyone, a top Democratic aide told me. Members know that Kucinich - a staunch antiwar liberal long in favor of a single-payer system and often going out on a limb with his own agenda - is setting aside deep ideology to help get something passed. "It's a totally new dynamic. People are realizing he's doing it for history," the aide said. * * *

Even if this weekend's anticipated vote doesn't go the Democrats' way, the CBO report does give them a little cover. They can point out during the run-up to the 2010 mid-terms that the Republicans opposed a bill that actually reduced the deficit and extended Medicare solvency by at least nine years while providing health coverage to 32 million Americans who didn't have it before.

Of course, the Dems can more effectively use these arguments against the GOP if the bill passes. My hope here is that the House Democrats who are still on the fence will figure out that they are going to be attacked on health care reform no matter what happens with this bill, and that it would be better to defend themselves from a position of strength (i.e., defending a law that they passed without any GOP support) than from a position of weakness (i.e., defending a failed bill that they couldn't pass even though they controlled both branches of Congress and the White House).

UPDATE: How do we know the CBO numbers are bad for the GOP? Because the Republicans are attacking them.

UPDATE II: From First Read:

We’re told that the White House and House Dem leaders are fewer than five votes away from 216, after Dennis Kucinich’s no-to-yes switch yesterday and pro-life Dem Dale Kildee saying that he’s ok with the Senate bill’s abortion language. * * *

Quote Of The Week

"See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands; your walls are ever before me."

Isaiah 49:16 (i.e., the Bible passage that Sarah Palin quotes to justify her use of notes scribbled on the palm of her hand).

The Bible doesn't refer to teleprompters, so I guess that's why Palin has no problem attacking Obama for using them.

This Is Idiotic

I can't believe this one:

President Obama's advisers are nearing a recommendation that Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, be prosecuted in a military tribunal, administration officials said, a step that would reverse Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.'s plan to try him in civilian court in New York City.

The president's advisers feel increasingly hemmed in by bipartisan opposition to a federal trial in New York and demands, mainly from Republicans, that Mohammed and his accused co-conspirators remain under military jurisdiction, officials said. While Obama has favored trying some terrorism suspects in civilian courts as a symbol of U.S. commitment to the rule of law, critics have said military tribunals are the appropriate venue for those accused of attacking the United States. * * *

The politics of this are pretty simple: the GOP is going to attack Obama on this issue anyway (even though they had no problem with Bush prosecuting terrorists in Federal Court), so if Obama backs down the other side can attack him (1) for initially proposing that Khalid Sheik Mohammed be tried in Federal Court, and (2) for being indecisive on the whole War On Terror deal by changing his mind on Federal prosecutions.

Show some backbone, Barack.

What Is It With These People?

From TPM:

It's no good for a family values Republican to get picked up on a DUI. But substantially worse to get picked up for a DUI after leaving a gay nightclub with an unidentified man in a state vehicle.

That's the sorry state that befell California state Senator Roy Ashburn (R-Bakersfield) early Wednesday.

In better days Ashburn, a fierce opponent of gay rights, was fighting marriage equality and organizing anti-gay marriage rallies as part of his "Traditional Family Values" campaign.

But he hit a bump in the road -- figuratively, not literally -- Wednesday at around 2 AM when CHP officers observed him weaving and driving erratically in downtown Sacramento. After a field sobriety test, officers determined that Ashburn, who reeked of alcohol and had bloodshot, watery eyes, was under he influence of alcohol and placed him under arrest. He was released from jail just before 4 AM.

Initial reports only noted the DWI arrest and Ashburn issued a contrite apology on Wednesday. But late this evening, the CBS affiliate in Sacramento reported that "sources" confirmed that Ashburn had left Faces, a gay nightclub in downtown Sacramento, just prior to his arrest. * * *

That Sound You Hear Is George Orwell Rolling Over In His Grave As His Head Explodes

Sarah Palin said this on Leno last night:

I studied journalism, my college degree there in communications. And now I am back there wanting to build some trust back in our media. I think the mainstream media is quite broken and I think there needs to be the fairness, the balance in there — that’s why I joined Fox. Fair and balanced, yes. You know because, Jay, those years a go that I studied journalism it was all about the who, what, when, where, and why, it was not so much the opinion interjected in hard news stories. … As long as there is not the opinion under the guise of hard news stories — I think there needs to be clear differentiation.

Quote Of The Week

Look, it would be okay for reporters and pundits to be obsessed with what legislative method is employed to pass health care reform if they boned up on the issue. Alternatively, it would be okay for them not to understand it at all if they deemed it an irrelevant issue. (Which, in my opinion, it is.) But obsessed and ignorant makes for a bad combination.

-- Jonathan Chait at The New Republic.

Chait is referring to how reporters and pundits are buying into the GOP bullshittery that health care reform is going to be passed via reconciliation. As Kevin Drum explained:

[T]he Democratic plan is not to pass health care reform via reconciliation. It never has been. The plan is to pass it via regular order (i.e., have the House approve the bill already passed by the Senate) and then amend it with a few modest modifications that are passed via reconciliation and therefore can't be filibustered in the Senate.

Once again, you gotta hand it to the GOP. Republicans in the Senate are currently on pace to break their own filibuster record:

In the 110th Congress of 2007-2008, with Republicans in the minority, there were a record 112 cloture votes. In the current session of Congress -- the 111th -- for all of 2009 and the first two months of 2010 the number already exceeds 40. The most the filibuster has been used when Democrats were in the minority was 58 times in the 106th Congress of 1999-2000.

That should be the big political story, yet the GOP somehow got reporters and pundits to run with a story that has no basis in reality.

I said it before and I'll say it again: Republicans have horrible ideas, but they have political maneuvering down to a fine art.