some things just have to be said

Obama did a Q&A of sorts with Republicans at their meeting.

It went, depending on your political persuasion, pretty well. The one Republican there who came off looking like he knew what he was talking about, without references to simple pre-conceived talking points, was Paul Ryan (the deficit and budget hawk. Incidentally, I am now extremely jealous of Wisconsin residents. Between Feingold and Ryan, they seem to have picked some experts up there in policy, one's a civil libertarian galore and the other's a virulent anti-pork, anti-spending budget watchdog, good times. They have their flaws, but their virtues are worth some vices).

This went over much better still than the SotU address as far as addressing partisanship issues. I've noticed for example some GOP/tea-partish types who went for the drill, baby, drill part of the speech...but seemed unaware that it's been in the Senate version of Waxman-Markey for months now with a bill that ultimately very much resembles what he outlined in his speech the other night. And that hasn't gone anywhere because of: tada, their heroes in the GOP (and a couple moderate Democrats who were awaiting Ben Nelson style treatment for their state). The ideas have been incorporated. Bipartisanship, of the sort invisioning actual government accomplishments, historically revolves around a sort of give-take relationship. Somethings from this side are put in, some things from that, and then a bill is born. It's messy. It is sometimes politically risky and unpopular, and it often results in messy bills that aren't as effective as they should be, but things are done in this way because it's impossible, not to mention dangerous, to govern a country with just one ideological mandate on how to govern.

What also does not work is something more like this
"I want this in the bill"
"Okay, so if that's in there, will you vote for it"
"I cannot vote for it and I won't"
"Then why should I put it in?"

Which is basically what we've had. Obviously you are going to end up with a partisan-looking bill if
1) you paint everything as a partisan bill
2) you vote on a straight partisan basis and support nothing, regardless of whether it supports your ideas or not (or, ideally, the ideas your constituents supported you to enact or remove).
3) the majority opposition learns 1 and 2 to be the case and since you have declined honest partisanship, you will be ignored.

That's just how it works. That's basically what Obama has tried with this last week or two to point out. I give him some credit for that. I wish he had more of my political outlooks, but I honestly don't think somebody from my side of the fence could get elected in a national election in the first place. This is why I am certain that he's hardly the next coming of Lenin or Marx (such a person could not get elected anymore than I could because they are way too far out of line with the national political spectrum. Take a look at where the Socialist party polls in this country, there's your Lenin and Marx and it's less popular than people like me). For all the leftist comparisons made to Bush as the next Hitler, the same criteria applies. There are aspects of the statism of both Bush or Obama that compare favorably to fascism (corporatism). But these are not new aspects to American culture and politics, and they're not really sufficient reasons to envoke Godwin's Law as the first step to getting people to pay attention to these things as reasonable problems. Or at least, getting serious people capable of effecting changes in the structure of society and governance. There's a very long road to serfdom and totalitarianism and the things that have gone on are somewhere around step 5 or 6 on a 20 step process. Step one would be something like: form a government, provide it with powers and the use of force to enforce those powers. I'm pretty sure most Americans are comfortable with that step even I am somewhat warily so. I am likewise pretty sure many Americans are actually far more comfortable than I am about steps 5 and 6 (things like a military industrial complex for the purposes of national pride and pointless wars and things like spending money with the appearances of providing jobs and income to people), regardless of how much they appear to whine about such things. Obama pointed that out with the fact that they (GOP representatives) were still showing up at the ribbon ceremonies to build some of these wasteful pet projects.

Much of the problem with a decentralized philosophy is that it often has very little to do in a modern political environment. It's very easy to say: this program is stupid, we should kill it. It's another thing to get the votes arranged so that it dies. It's one thing to say, we should deregulate more of our economy. It's still another to look at things like structural rules and regulations and come up with a way to change how the game is played so that it benefits consumers and businesses alike by having fewer, or even no, overarching central controls (airline deregulation is the most famous example here but the deregulation of energy in California is a famous example against such things). People have a hard time looking at the health care sector and imagining what could be on the other side of that if we really reformed it. That's why talking about all this as a "reform" has been pretty silly to someone like me. Free market advocates are swooning over Singapore all the time because they have a pretty good idea how to implement that here, at least some of it (parts of it may be more cultural artifacts that will be difficult to copy and parts may be technocratic advantages to one-party rule that is more plausible in a city-state environment than a nation-state with dozens of major special interests and regional variations). Most voters do not because the "how" involves a pretty radical shift in how we make health care decisions and pay for them. It's just not possible to explain Economics 101 to everyone in a way that they will patiently examine and then go out and weight the costs and benefits of a potential reform and make decisions to support or oppose them. It's far easier to go out and explain this to people who can affect changes in a marginal way around the edges and nudge the direction of health care back toward a market environment. This is why there were some things in the Senate version of the bill that I liked. There was a lot I did not, but because it was broad enough it contained little bits and pieces of seeds to allow things to go in a number of directions, somethings would go toward markets (such as beginning to nip at the employer tax benefit exclusions) and somethings would go toward centralization. In a sense it was an admission that we cannot do a gigantic change like this in a sweeping way from a centralized position but we have to do some little changes in a bunch of different directions to see which ones might work and which won't. It's actually a very favorable admission for a government to make (the issue with it is largely that it has historically been incredibly hard to kill programs that don't actually work to benefit anybody alongside those that do).

That's sort of the price of politics in a realistic world. You accept what is possible in order to get where you ultimately want to go. If it was a legitimately terrible bill, I would have said so and more openly opposed it. I think it's a bad bill, and an incomplete solution to a very big problem that could be resolved very easily by some sweeping reforms (Wyden-Bennett or single payer in other words). It contains some bad seeds like the Stupak amendments regarding abortion funding which I believe are unnecessary (because of the pre-existing Hyde amendments), or the money to bribe Nelson into voting, and what I regard as some hollow cost controls rather than realistic ones (because the cost controls are subject to political moves rather than technocratic rules of cost-benefit analysis, as we saw with the breast cancer screening recommendations that got nixed earlier this year). But it still contains some seeds that are promising. For Republicans to go out and proclaim a new era of Socialism is disingenuous as a result. For starters, things on this front haven't changed that much from 2008 or from 2004 or from 1994 or from 1980. In fact the only major reform toward socialism that has been actually passed by the government regarding health care in decades was passed by many of these same Republicans (medicare part D, probably a political sop to buy off old people because of the attempts to reform social security in addition to this, which seems to have worked. At least, old people don't seem to know that medicare is from the government and don't seem to mind backing Republicans as a result of new benefits that appear to have been installed by them if they are aware of that). For another, they could have introduced more things that would have mixed more market capitalism in and they never seemed all that interested in doing so. Tort reform is necessary, but it's basically a small stick in a very big stick castle that needed to be re-built. It's hardly the lynch-pin of serious reform.

So for them to have to sit there and take it while they get read the Riot Act by Obama was a pretty good start. For them to do so while trying to engage him in serious questioning was also a good start (because it made them look even worse). There are some quibbles around some of the facts used by both parties involved, and certainly some about the implications of some policy choices that can be made (particularly the stimulus bill's effectiveness). But some of the key facts the public seems to care about are the ones like "this is socialism" or "this was Obama's deficit" and "he's not listening to us, this is a partisan bill", and he pushed back hard against these. I think they can do this sort of messaging effectively against Pelosi because she strikes me as hyper-partisan (and a very effective one at that, far more so than Reid or Obama). I don't think they can do it against Obama, because he strikes me as more pragmatic than partisan. He's still to the right of me on a lot of civil liberties, and his positions on the current wars, and somewhere to the left of me on a lot of economic positions. But that doesn't make him the next Mao or Hitler or Duce either.