Jamison Foser

There is no "reset" button

There has been a lot of talk -- coming from both reporters and professional Democrats -- since Scott Brown's win in Massachusetts of President Obama and the Democrats pressing the "reset button."

There is no "reset" button.

Pressing the reset button suggests starting over.  Democrats cannot start over; they must continue from where they are.  They must figure out not what they should have been doing all along, but rather what they must do from here.

For example: Let's say you think they shouldn't have pursued health care last year.  Ok, fine.  But they did.  They can't simply push a "reset" button now; they did what they did, and must proceed from here.  That does not mean that they have to continue on the same course, or that they have to pass comprehensive health care reform (though I think they do.)  What it means is that they have to keep in mind how their actions going forward will work given what they have already done, not in some fantasy world in which they are starting over via a reset button.

Politics isn't Super Mario Brothers.  You can change course, but you don't get to hit a button and get a clean slate.

Politico's (wrong) lessons of Clinton's comeback

Politico's John Harris has a piece explaining various "lessons" of Bill Clinton's post-1994 political comeback that President Obama should learn from.  Like countless reporters who have attempted to summarize Clinton's comeback over the years, Harris places a great deal of weight on things like "Triangulation" and small-bore initiatives like school uniforms -- "Understand that small things can be big," as Harris puts it.

But Harris -- like many before him -- bizarrely omits two of the most important elements of Clinton's comeback.

First, the economy was stronger -- and the perception of the economy was much stronger -- in '95/'96 than in '93/'94. For example: The unemployment rate ranged from 6.5 percent to 7.3 percent for all of Clinton's first year in office.  It was in steady decline throughout 1994, but didn't fall below 6 percent until just before the November elections.  By the 1996 election, the unemployment rate had been in the mid 5s for two full years.

Harris writes that a key lesson of Clinton's comeback is to "Find a way to talk about the economy."  Strangely, he makes no mention of a more important lesson: Find a way to fix the economy.  Indeed, he ignores the concept that actual economic conditions have something to do with electoral results.

And Harris gives no indication that he understands that an incumbent can better get away with running on small-scale initiatives like school uniforms when the economy is good than when unemployment is hovering around 10 percent.

Second, Harris seems to have forgotten that a key feature of Clinton's comeback was an aggressive and successful campaign to highlight the opposition party's deeply unpopular agenda.  The GOP shut down the government, tried to slash Medicare, attempted to roll back environmental protections that had enjoyed decades of bipartisan support, and more. 

Revisionist histories of the Clinton Comeback tend to focus on, as Harris does, "Triangulation," as though that meant that the Clinton team didn't hammer the GOP relentlessly:

Clinton became famous for what his political consultant Dick Morris called “triangulation,” positioning himself between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans.
...
Under the Clinton formula, Obama would never surrender an aura of bipartisanship — no matter how bitterly partisan Washington becomes.

The reality is that Clinton and the Democrats spent 1995 and 1996 beating Republicans over the head for their draconian policy initiatives, ethical lapses, and willingness to stand in the same room as Newt Gingrich. 

Take a look at this 1996 ad, titled "Wrong in the Past":

Does that look like an attempt to blur lines, appear bipartisan, and run on uncontroversial small-bore initiatives?

Harris's "lessons" of Clinton's comeback have a couple of problems: They are far from a full picture of  what really happened, and they ignore the massive economic differences between 1995/96 and 2010. Other than that, though: Great advice.

The politics of health care reform

David Plouffe has some good advice for Democrats:

Pass a meaningful health insurance reform package without delay. Americans' health and our nation's long-term fiscal health depend on it. I know that the short-term politics are bad. It's a good plan that's become a demonized caricature. But politically speaking, if we do not pass it, the GOP will continue attacking the plan as if we did anyway, and voters will have no ability to measure its upside. If we do pass it, dozens of protections and benefits take effect this year. ... Only if the plan becomes law will the American people see that all the scary things Sarah Palin and others have predicted -- such as the so-called death panels -- were baseless. We own the bill and the health-care votes. We need to get some of the upside. (P.S.: Health care is a jobs creator.)

Plouffe’s broad points are both exactly right and, unfortunately, infrequently understood by professional Democrats -- and not just in terms of the current health care discussions. (They’re also a pretty good reminder that comprehensive health care reform should have been passed quickly last year.)

But Plouffe’s stipulation that the “short-term politics are bad” concedes too much to skittish Democrats and media naysayers.  That stipulation was nothing more than a throw-away in Plouffe’s piece, but it’s a common assumption, so it’s worth considering whether it’s true.

I don’t think it is.

Let’s say Democrats were to pass a robust health care reform package next week.  What, exactly, is the downside?  As Plouffe notes, the downsides are already in place, and they aren’t going away.  Are they really likely to get much worse?  That seems unlikely -- particularly considering the (comparatively, at least) favorable coverage they’d get for accomplishing a legislative goal they’ve sought for decades.

But that’s only half of the equation. When you say “the short-term politics are bad,” you have to consider: Compared to what?

In this case, that’s compared to not passing health care reform.  And that, I think, would be politically devastating for Democrats.  Remember: the downsides are locked in place.  Republicans aren’t going to stop hitting Democrats for supporting health care reform; the GOP base isn’t going to become demoralized by Democrats walking away from reform; etc.  And by walking away from health care reform they’ve been working on for a year and talking about for decades, Democrats will also look like they aren’t capable of governing and don’t stand by their core values.  They’ll face weeks of news reports -- not to mention Republicans -- portraying them as weak and craven on top of the negatives they already face.

Compared to not passing health care reform, passing health care reform is a political winner, not a loser -- in both the short and the long term.

(My current column for Media Matters is about a related topic: the shallowness of the media's political analysis, one example of which is a tendency to assess the political merits of a situation without considering the political merits of the alternatives.)

UPDATE: Mike Lux explains what passing "a meaningful health insurance reform package" means:

The path, which has been suggested by many other people as well as me, is to simply pass the full Senate bill, and then immediately pass a clean-up bill through the reconciliation process, which requires only 51 votes in the Senate. The clean-up bill could include the provisions that progressives in the House and Senate, as well as wide majorities of the American people, have been demanding: the compromise on the benefits tax issue, more affordability for low and moderate income folks, ending insurers' exemption from anti-trust laws, a national insurance exchange instead of the weaker fragmented state run exchanges, and yes, some form of that public option that voters and activists keep saying we want. Doing this kind of double bill approach would allow all the good insurance regulations and other provisions in both the Senate and House versions of the bill that can't be passed through the reconciliation process because of Senate rules to still get done, while making the bill far more politically popular with voters and healing the rifts caused with the base because of all the bad compromises forced by Lieberman and other Democratic conservatives in the Senate.