Whoever shall replace Axelrod and Emanuel?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The Obama White House will look a lot different in 2011 than it does today -- hopefully for the better. Larry Summers, director of the National Economic Council, is taking his smug arrogance and conflicted Wall Street ties back to Harvard. Obama Senior Advisor David Axelrod, will be doing some "hippie punching" out on the campaign trail, and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, expected to be the next major player out the door, will likely be heading back home to Chicago, where it is expected he'll run for mayor.

So who will the new faces be? Who knows? (Who cares?) Howard Kurtz tweeted that, according to CBS, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs could replace Axelrod. But, honestly, does it matter?

Given what we've come to expect from Obama so far in his presidency, which is disappointment after maddening disappointment, I wouldn't be surprised if he re-populated his inner circle with a bunch of pro-DADT, pro-Bush-Cheney national security state, pro-Wall Street neocon-lite Republicrat Blue Dogs just to stick it to his liberal-progressive base and ensure that his policy agenda is solidly moderate Republican and uncompromisingly untransformative.

Pardon my mood, but that whole "change we can believe in" rhetoric now seems like a steaming pile of horse manure.

More on Gibbs' (and now Dowd's) lefty smear

By Creature

Steven D:

So my question to Maureen Dowd and Robert Gibbs is why is a "single payer" health care system a dirty word (for that is how Gibbs intended to use it in his attacks on the administration's critics from the left)? Because "lefties" want it? Ask any Canadian if they would prefer changing their system to one like ours. Whether they consider themselves left, right or middle politically, I'd bet the vast majority would say No! emphatically.[...]

But for a high Democratic administration official to criticize a progressive policy idea as somehow being "dirty" or "ridiculous" is absurd. And for Gibbs and Dowd to both agree with the negative connotations given to that term ("Canadian health care" or "single payer" -- take your pick) shows how far our political discourse has fallen, how detached from even suggesting government can be a primary force to solve critical human problems such as public health and how insane we must appear as a country to every other western developed nation who provides better health care to their citizens.

It's amazing how often words like "how far our political discourse has fallen" can be used in so many different contexts today.

Gibbs blasts "professional" left

By Creature

“They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality.” -- Press Secretary Robert Gibbs.

To the White House the left is as much as an annoyance as the right (which is silly--if not a bit disrespectful). I get the whole pragmatism thing. I get that the Senate is a mess. I'm thrilled that they have gotten things done in the face of a dishonest opposition (really, I am). But do they need to be so dismissive? Do they need to express their frustration out loud?

In the end, I assume this is just hippie-punching politics. Robert Gibbs still holds out hope that the serious people in Washington won't call Obama a socialist-leftist blah, blah, blah, but that ship sailed long ago. Robert Gibbs is punching air at this point and it's unnecessary.

Update: Gibbs walks back, a bit.

Where are the votes on health-care reform?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

According to CNN, "opponents of reform [are] just 11 votes shy of the 216 needed to prevent President Obama from scoring a major victory on his top domestic priority."

Not good, not good at all.

But wasn't it no less an authority than White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs who said, just the other day, that reform would be "the law of the land" within a week, that the votes would be there?

What the hell's going on?

Well, the votes may very well be there -- or may soon be there. Perhaps to highten the drama, perhaps to indicate its ideological leanings, CNN may highlight the opposition to the Senate bill in the House, but that doesn't mean that the White House and the House Democratic leadership aren't building support, and gaining ground, on the other side. Indeed, as House Democratic Caucus Chairman John Larson indicates, "the votes are there" to pass reform.

Over at Firedoglake yesterday, David Dayen had the horse race -- isn't that what the media think it is? -- at 205-209 against, including "leaners." A later post by Chris Bowers at Open Left noted an addition to the Yes side, making it 206-209, and suggested three uncommitted who should vote Yes, making it, effectively, a tie. If Chris is right, it now comes down to a group of 13 Democrats, a group that is overwhelmingly conservative (they "vote more like Republicans than like Democrats") and pro-Stupak. That's the bad news. The possible good news is that eight of them are relatively new to Congress, elected in 2004 or after, meaning they relied for their election on the support of the current Democratic establishment, and that eight of them voted for the House's own reform bill back in November.

As Chris explains:

This is a pretty right-wing group, but securing a majority of them it possible. The key is probably for groups that supported them in 2008, including the White House, to throw the hammer down and make this vote a pre-condition for support in 2010. They vote more like Republicans than like Democrats, but only have the benefit of being in Congress due to support from Democratic and progressive groups.

Well, the hammer has been thrown down. Britain's Telegraph is reporting that Obama "will refuse to make fund-raising visits during November elections to any district whose representative has not backed the bill," and TPM is reporting that "Health Care for America Now is targeting 11 House Democrats in a series of new ads. The move, according to Politico, is part of the team effort with SEIU, AFSCME and other groups to target 17 House Dems, spending a total of $1.7 million."

In other words, it ain't over yet, even with the media more or less taking the Republican side (on the horse race but even more so on both the content of reform and the process by which it is moving through Congress, both of which expose the media's abject ignorance and unwillingness to overcome it). Gibbs may very well be right, the votes may very well be there, and this admirable if admittedly flawed reform package, to be improved through "patches" passed through reconcilation in the Senate, will soon be the law of the land.

But I'm still deeply worried. This could easily fail. And failure would mean not just no historic reform, reform that would directly benefit millions and millions of Americans as well as the entire country in terms of making health care more fair, more just, and less costly, but Democratic self-destruction. I wonder if the Democrats really understand this, and I wonder if those still on the fence have any idea what this is really all about.

**********

Here, via TPM, an ad targeting Rep. Jason Altmire of Pennsylvania (who's not one of the 13):

Law of the Land

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Surely this optimism isn't misplaced:

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said the healthcare bill will pass by next weekend.

"We'll have the votes when the House votes, I think, within the next week," Gibbs said on "Fox News Sunday."

Gibbs added that those on next week's Sunday talk shows "will be talking about healthcare not as a presidential proposal but I think as the law of the land."

Surely Gibbs knows what he's talking about. It would, after all, be a great embarrassment to the White House were the votes, in the end, not to be there.

President Barack Obama will look to campaign on the new healthcare law in midterm elections, Gibbs said.

"We believe healthcare reform is going to pass, and once it passes we're happy to have the 2010 elections be about the achievement of healthcare reform," Gibbs said.

But Republicans on Fox said there's no guarantee the bill passes and that Democrats will benefit from it.

"If they pass this thing, I think they lose the House of Representatives this fall," said former Bush White House adviser Karl Rove.

If Democrats do pass it, "then the American people will be the losers," said House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.).

Well, of course they're saying that. They know that the polls are narrowing (with support for reform gaining), and that much of the opposition to Obama's plan comes from the left, which wants reform to go further, and that, once people understand the specifics, reform is extremely popular. Indeed, once this reform bill -- with patches -- has been passed, it will likely be a major vote-winner for Democrats.

Republicans claim that reform will ultimately be the Democrats' undoing, but then why are they advising them not to pass it? If they're looking out for their own interests -- and, of course, they are -- shouldn't their advice rather be for Democrats to pass it and then face the wrath of the voters at the polls? (For more on the utterly insincere advice for Democrats, see Jon Chait, who has been making these points for some time.)

But they know that that wrath may not be coming, that, instead, passage could rally the Democratic base, pull in independents, and otherwise put Republicans on the wrong side of history. This is why they don't want the bill to pass, and why their real "advice" is for reform to fail.

All the more reason for Democrats to get it done -- and not to take Republicans at their word, which is, as usual, blatantly dishonest.

How Obama's strategy on health-care reform makes perfect sense even as the lack of White House leadership continues to be a significant obstacle

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I'm not sure I agree with Glenn Greenwald that the absence of the public option in the White House's new health-care reform compromise is proof of Obama's opposition to the public option:

It now seems obvious that White House's claim of support for the public option was a pretense used to placate the progressive base (in fact, it seems committed to excluding the public option very likely because it would provide real competition to the health insurance industry and is thus vehemently opposed by the industry and its lobbyists).

Let me stress that I'm not sure what Obama supports and what he doesn't -- who is sure, outside of Obama and his inner circle? -- though I tend to take him at his word that he would prefer reform with a public option. But I simply do not accept that his various public utterances in support of the public option have all been part of some grandiose "pretense," a Machiavellian plot to delude progressives.

What we know about Obama is that he is a ruthless realist. Whatever his ideals, whatever his principles, he is fully aware of what is possible, or of what seems to be possible, and he generally operates/governs within the parameters of that realism. That's how he was as a candidate and it's how he is as president.

Now, where I am deeply critical of Obama is in the area of leadership. As Ezra Klein writes:

This has been a complete and utter failure of White House leadership. They need to give this effort their support, or they need to kill it by publicly stating their opposition. But they can't simply wait for someone else to make the decision for them, which has been their strategy until now.

That failure continues. Press Secretary Robert Gibbs may very well be right that the votes just aren't there for the public option, but the problem is that the White House -- President Obama himself -- never pushed for it in any meaningful way. What was said behind closed doors I don't know, and he may well have pushed for it privately, but he never came out publicly and demanded a public option or else, using his bully pulpit to move public opinion, providing the sort of determined leadership Democrats needed.

That alone wouldn't have guaranteed success, of course, but at least the public option would have had a good shot. Now? Not.

Ezra explains:

For supporters of the strategy [to use reconciliation for the public option], that's not going to be very satisfying: Maybe there would be more supporters if the president took up the cause! It will also intensify the efforts of activists who want to prove that there is sufficient support, which means individual senators will be under even more pressure to sign the letter, which means this isn't likely to go away quietly. The White House is using the Senate as a sort of human shield here.

For opponents of the strategy, Gibbs's comments will be taken as evidence that the White House opposes the effort. I think that's actually the right interpretation, particularly given that Gibbs later emphasized Obama's intention to discuss "consensus ideas" Thursday, but it would be nice if the White House would just say what it means rather than leaving people to guess.

In other words, Obama opposes the "effort" to pass the public option through reconciliation but, if I may add to Ezra's analysis, not necessarily the public option itself (insofar as that matters at this point).

We may be critical of Obama's conservative approach to reform, of his stultifying realism, of the utter lack of leadership on the president's part, but I suspect that the White House is driven by the desire for success, and by the view that passing the compromise (and admittedly flawed) Senate bill (with appropriate modifications to appease the House) stands the best chance of success given the current political situation.

And why is that? Because the votes really might not be there. Or maybe they are, or at least could be with enough prodding, but maybe securing them, in both the House and Senate, would take too much time, and require too much prodding, too much additional compromise, too much playing off of competing Democratic interests, not least in a challenging mid-term election year.

And maybe the White House thinks that pushing through a more robust reform bill, one with a public option, by way of reconciliation would undermine the president's ability to sell reform as something other than a solo partisan effort. We all know what the public thinks of partisanship. We also know what it thinks of reform -- unpopular within the context of legislative sausage-making, much more popular when the specifics are known. And we know that the media are spinning reconciliation as a dirty word. So how would passing a reform bill, even one with a popular public option, through what is perceived to be partisan trickery benefit Obama, not least given how Republicans would undoubtedly propagandize against both the process and the substance? And how would it benefit Democrats running for re-election in November?

I certainly think that, in the long run, Democrats would benefit politically/electorally from health-care reform. Ultimately, the success and popularity of reform would win out.

But, for now, at this moment, given the current political reality, Obama's clear preference that the Senate bill be passed, with modifications addressed through reconciliation, is completely understandable. It is not what I would have preferred, and a big part of me does wish Democrats would bring back the public option, with or without Obama's support, but, at the same time, I just don't think that this reality can be denied. As Jon Chait writes:

Health care reform is still hanging on for dear life in the House. The dynamic is that the Democrats are going to lose some votes from pro-life members who insist on Bart Stupak's language. They need to make up the votes by persuading Blue Dog and other centrist Democrats who voted no for the original bill to vote yes this time. Many of those centrists said at the time of their original vote that they preferred the Senate bill and opposed the public option. Restoring the public option, aside form sucking up a lot of time by introducing another big fight, would greatly complicate this already-complicated task.

That's why Jay Rockefeller opposes adding the public option to the bill at this point. Rockefeller is the author of the public option. So it seems like the fear that reopening this debate will sink the whole bill really is the reason for the administration's reluctance. Or maybe Rockefeller's in on the pretense, too.

This seems to me to be the correct interpretation. Steve Benen adds:

I realize that Gibbs's response today seems unexpected, but it doesn't strike me as all that surprising -- if the White House thought the votes were there for a public option, the administration would have included the idea in the proposal unveiled yesterday. The fact that the president's version of reform didn't include the idea should have made it pretty clear that the White House thinks, correctly or not, that public option support remains insufficient.

I should note, though, that Gibbs's comments need not be the end of the public option. The White House is under the impression that the votes just aren't there to pass this specific measure, but if proponents on and off the Hill want to prove otherwise, there's still time to do just that. Gibbs didn't say the president opposes the public option -- Obama has said repeatedly he supports the idea, and would like to see it in the final bill -- he just said he thinks the public option lacks the support it needs in Congress.

If public option advocates want to prove Gibbs wrong, now's their chance.

To repeat, there is the distinct risk that such a move could meet with serious popular disapproval. But that's not to say Democrats shouldn't try. If the votes are really there, they should go for it -- and communicate to the public just why they're doing what they're doing. But if not, or if it would be overly costly or challenging, they should do what Obama proposes, which would at least give them a historic accomplishment to run on, major legislation to call their own, and which would benefit the American people with meaningful change to a health-care system that is unfair, unjust, and economically destructive.

Let's just be realistic about what can be done.

Quote of the Day: Robert Gibbs on Obama, Stewart, and Colbert

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Gibbs, quoted by Time's Michael Scherer:

I think the President would love to [do The Daily Show], just maybe not Colbert... I have yet to see a politician best Stephen Colbert in an interview on his show. I mean, he's really, really good.

Of course, they're very different, and Stewart is more than capable of doing a tough interview. With Colbert, it's not just about dealing with tough questions, it's about dealing with Colbert's brilliant act, and that's why no one has ever bested him.

Personally, I'd love to see Obama do both shows -- and regularly. In the meantime, at least Assistant Sports Psychologist Colbert has Shani Davis.

Worst Democrat of the Day: Robert Gibbs

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Firedoglake's Cynthia Kouril explains it well:

White House press spokesman Robert Gibbs just said [yesterday on CNN] that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) would likely be executed after trial and conviction. WTF?!?

Am I the only person left who still remembers a legal concept called presumption of innocence? Am I the only one who remembers that the whole point of a trial is that the outcome is not certain?

Listen Gibbs, do NOT insult the prosecutors who are about to work their asses off trying to put together a winning criminal case. Do NOT insult the hardworking defense counsel who are going to put thousands of hours into making sure that KSM gets due process. Do NOT insult the excellent federal judges of SDNY by suggesting that any one of them would preside over a kangaroo court. Do NOT insult our entire criminal justice system.

In a real trial, the outcome is not known before the trial occurs. Further, much of the information in the hands of the government which will be used at trial against KSM should currently be Grand Jury Material, subject to secrecy under Rule 6e. Which means that you, Robert Gibbs, cannot legally know exactly what that evidence might be.  So, how could you possibly know if KSM is going to be convicted? How do you know that?

You don't. So stop shooting you mouth off and calling our system of justice and the dedicated professionals of both bench and bar in the Southern District of New York into disrepute.

Yes. What she said.

(So shut up, Robert Gibbs. You're the president's press secretary. You should know better. Show some respect for the American legal system. And for justice.)

Obama is for a public option, but...

By Michael J.W. Stickings

And it's a big BUT.

Stephanopoulos: "[Press Secretary Robert] Gibbs says the President will make the case for a public option in his speech to Congress on Wednesday but he won't issue a veto threat if it isn't in the final package."

Okay, fine. So he'll make the case for it but could end up agreeing to a bill without it.

But will his public support for the public option resonate with Democrats either on the fence or with Republicans? Will he say enough to bring them back? Will he be able to unify his party?

Also, what will he say in private, behind closed doors? Will he push for a public option? Will he lobby in support of it, seeking to rally support for his supposedly desired outcome?

Does he really want a public option? How much is he willing to compromise, to give in?

Questions, questions, questions...

I'm still on Obama's side here. I do think he wants meaningful reform with a robust public option. I just think he's being realistic -- and that, up to now, his strategy has been to talk up bipartisanship and let Republicans play their (extremist, obstructionist) hand, eroding whatever credibility they had.

But now, with Republicans decidedly against reform, and with Democrats left to work for reform on their own, it is imperative that he take the lead in making it happen.

It's just that nagging doubt again: How much is he willing to give up to get it done?

Understatement of the Day: Robert Gibbs on Dick Cheney

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Responding today to Cheney's self-aggrandizing (pro-torture) attacks on Obama on Fox News yesterday, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said this:

I'm not entirely sure that Dick Cheney's predictions on foreign policy have borne a whole lot of fruit over the last eight years in a way that have been either positive or, to the best of my recollection, very correct.

Not entirely sure? Haven't borne a whole lot of fruit? Way to be diplomatic, Mr. Press Secretary. Shall we read between the lines? (At least you noted, if not with nearly enough conviction, that Cheney had the facts "wrong.")

Cheney has been anything but positive, and certainly not correct, the fruit has been poisonous. And, yes, I'm entirely sure of that.

The Public Option is not dead -- maybe

By Capt. Fogg

President Obama is being excoriated right and left -- well, mostly left -- for having abandoned the public health care option in health care reform. Are we buying into the propaganda once again? It's not true, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said on Face the Nation yesterday. The president is still committed to the idea.

Although Heath and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told us on the same day that it's "not essential," leading to the speculation that the idea had been dropped, now we're being told she "misspoke." Was she being used as a stalking horse to try out the idea? I don't know, but if the admittedly unscientific CNN poll showing that 57% of us think it is indeed essential has merit, the huge and boisterous tumult trying to tie it to every vestige of evil that can be pressed into service is mostly sound and fury and a tale told by Republican opponents. Presumably, the number who think it's merely a good idea is even larger.

We're not going to have reform without it, says DNC Chairman Howard Dean:

[A]public option is essentially what veterans and people over 65 have — it's Medicare.

A sentiment which reflects what many of us supporters have been saying all along in the face of dire warnings about death panels and summary executions and worse.

The amplitude of the argument, which still seems to be growing louder has made us forget that health care reform is a very popular goal and with some insurers talking about very substantial hikes in premiums I don't think public support has waned very much at all.

Congressional support is another matter, of course, with Kent Conrad (D-SD) proclaiming on Fox News yesterday: "The fact of the matter is there are not the votes in the United States Senate for a public option. There never have been." There is some justification, to put it mildly, for public disillusionment with Congress.

I wonder how many letters, calls, hookers, and e-mails it takes to equal the power of corporate contributions, junkets, and three-martini lunches.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)