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Froma Harrop
Providence Journal
October 17, 2007
Whether Graeme Frost has an affluent father or lives in a $400,000 house with granite counters is of no consequence to me. But such details have led a right-wing attack on the Democrats’ poster family for expanding the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, which President Bush vetoed.
These charges happen to be untrue. The Frost family income is $45,000. Their Baltimore house, bought 17 years ago for $55,000, is now worth about $250,000, and the kitchen counters are concrete.
But even if the counters were gold, I wouldn’t care. America needs a universal health care plan that puts the rich and poor, young and old, sick and well into one big insurance pool.
And whether the Frosts could sell their house and use the money to obtain health coverage is irrelevant. They tried to buy a policy, but insurers wouldn’t sell them one because of pre-existing medical conditions. Graeme and his sister suffer brain injuries from a car crash.
The right does these issues on automatic pilot – and the left knows how to hit back – but the center feels conflicted. Megan McArdle, a blogger for the Atlantic magazine’s Web site, worries about forcing families to sell assets to qualify for public health care benefits. “On the other hand,” she writes, “many people, including me, don’t want to pay for the health care of someone so that they can stay in their Park Avenue mansion.”
Honey, you already do.
The taxpayers are footing the medical bills of many a Park Avenue swell over 65. There’s little means testing in Medicare, yet Bush pushed a drug benefit on top of the program’s already generous coverage. It will cost many times the price of SCHIP, even were it to cover the likes of Graeme Frost.
So let’s discuss what the panic is really about. Republicans know that once government health coverage seeps up into the middle class, there’s no stopping it.
Note how Bush does this big “compassionate conservative” thing about very much wanting SCHIP for poor people. Programs for the poor are fine, because you can always cut the living daylights out of them. Politicians who mess with middle class benefits find their heads in the return mail.
The happiest campers in American health care today are the people in Medicare, a government-run program that sets prices. Middle-class families who taste similar fruits will not say: “Please, oh, please. Send my health coverage back into the exciting free market.” And their neighbors will ask, “Where can I get some?”
As last stands go, issuing cries of injustice that an insured family making $40,000 might be asked to subsidize the health care of an uninsured family making $60,000 is neither heroic nor smart.
The more rational response would be to let the folks making $40,000 also join the program – and require employers to raise their paychecks by the amount previously taken out for health coverage. Both the family and the bosses would come out ahead.
Really, how did American workers become the last people in any industrialized democracy to be subject to such anxiety about paying for medical care? They already fund the health care of retirees, the poor, the disabled, convicts and government employees, including members of Congress. Their taxes pay for everyone’s health care except their own.
Republicans can’t possibly believe that today’s expensive and chaotic mess of a health care “system” is a “conservative” approach. They see their former business allies running into the arms of Democrats for deliverance from the unpredictable costs of insuring workers.
Right-wingers, give it up! You’re fighting a battle you shouldn’t want to win. A country without universal coverage isn’t conservative. It’s primitive.
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Steven Thomma
McClatchy
October 17, 2007
DES MOINES, Iowa – Ready for some presidential politics in the middle of Christmas? Some campaign volunteers elbowing carolers off the front porch? How about some really nasty brochures in the mailbox alongside the Christmas cards?
That’s the prospect facing voters in Iowa now that the Iowa Republican Party moved Tuesday to accelerate the date of its presidential precinct caucuses to Jan. 3, the earliest by far in history.
It’s also a challenge facing presidential candidates, who do their most aggressive campaigning in the week leading up to Iowa’s influential caucuses, which traditionally lead off voting for the two major party nominations.
For front-runners, that week’s the key time to solidify their lead. For challengers looking to move up or who face elimination, that’s the time to grab voters’ attention and overtake candidates ahead of them. Hotly worded charges fly, the airwaves are filled with attacks, and mailboxes bulge with campaign literature.
But this time, it’s also Christmas week.
“We have to be careful,” said Gentry Collins, the Iowa campaign director for Republican Mitt Romney. “The average family doesn’t want campaigns calling or knocking on the door during the holidays. It’s probably a time when they don’t want to hear a lot from the campaigns.”
Then there’s the question of how to compete on TV with all the holiday ads. An ad about the threat of a terrorist attack might not feel right before one with smiling children opening gift-wrapped toys. There also might not be much TV time available for political ads.
And it’s far from certain that the campaigns can get their volunteers out to knock on doors and make phone calls during the holidays. Many are college kids who’ll be on break.
“It certainly complicates things for the campaigns,” said Peverill Squire, a political scientist at the University of Iowa. “They want to build up to the caucuses. But they’re going to find that difficult to do with Christmas and New Year’s. … We don’t know how far the candidates will be willing to go to impose themselves.”
Why did the Iowa GOP do this? Because Iowa wants to keep its influential role as the first state to vote.
The two major parties decided to honor tradition, setting Iowa to hold the first precinct caucuses and New Hampshire to hold the first primary eight days later.
But other states are refusing to go along.
First, Florida moved up its primary. Then Michigan did, too. Now Iowa Republicans have followed suit. Iowa Democrats haven’t yet decided what to do.
Next, New Hampshire’s secretary of state will set the date for his state’s primary. Iowa Republicans think that could be Jan. 8, but admit it also could be set for early December.
Which would push the hyper-phase of the campaign into Thanksgiving.
Reconciliation May Be Hard Sell to Angry Party
By Alec MacGillis
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 17, 2007; A01
WASHINGTON, Iowa — A hush fell over the crowd as Sen. Barack Obama crossed the field, his white shirt glowing in the sun, waves of cornstalks rustling behind him. Once inside the open barn on the county fairgrounds here, he offered a message as uplifting as the backdrop, promising a new era of consensus instead of partisan divide.
“We’re going to win an election, but more importantly, we’re going to change the country,” the Illinois Democrat said. Nothing will get done in Washington “unless we not only change political parties in the White House, but also change our politics.”
The audience of Iowa Democrats seemed receptive. But when it came time for questions, it was clear that at least some members of the crowd had not escaped the partisan mind-set that Obama said he wanted to overcome. What did he think about President Bush’s veto of a children’s health insurance bill? What, another person asked, did he make of the Bush administration’s alleged denigration of science? What would he do to prevent Republicans from taking advantage of election flaws like the one in Florida in 2000, in which the questioner said “it’s not over till your brother counts the votes”?
As Obama positions himself for the stretch run for the Democratic presidential nomination, his call for a “new kind of politics” faces a broad test in his own party, and not just of whether it makes any criticism of his chief rival, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), seem hypocritical. As the pointed questions he received here suggest, it may be that his summons to “turn the page” past the country’s red-blue polarization is not what many Democrats want to hear after seven years of mounting anger at Bush and the Republican-dominated government.
Obama faults a broken system in Washington for failures that many Democratic voters attribute simply to having the other side in power. By contrast, Clinton more directly exploits Democrats’ feelings of resentment. She argues that the troubles of the past seven years — the Iraq war, Hurricane Katrina, the widening income gap — are the result not of broken politics in Washington but of poor Republican governance, and she says that she would offer competent leadership to fix what has gone awry since her husband left the White House.
Obama accentuated the basic differences yesterday in Iowa. Reminded by a shop owner in Vinton that Clinton is proposing a universal health-care plan just as he is, Obama countered that electing Clinton president would not be enough to get health-care reform passed. “It can’t be the same kind of partisan battling we had in the ’90s,” he said, according to the Associated Press. “I think I can do better than Hillary Clinton, and that’s why I’m running.”
Nationally, Clinton’s more straightforward appeal for a Democratic restoration seems to be working. Polls show her well ahead of Obama and the rest of the Democratic field, and for the first time she is beating him on the fundraising front — prompting him to acknowledge his underdog status yesterday on his Web site.
But the Obama campaign hopes that in New Hampshire his post-partisan message will play well among independent voters, who can vote in the primary. And in Iowa, where polls indicate Obama is running better than in New Hampshire, voters in the past have been receptive to more conciliatory appeals.
“I’m looking for someone in the middle who can bring people together and tackle things head on,” Ryan Flannery, a family doctor in Washington County, said after the fairgrounds event during Obama’s Iowa tour in the first week of this month. Added Susan Barnett, an Iowa City secretary who saw the senator speak in Coralville: “We can’t survive the divisiveness that’s been going on. We need to build bridges.”
But Gary Frost, a library conservator at the University of Iowa who was also in Coralville, noted the challenge Obama faces in running on a platform of national reconciliation at a time when Democrats are so angry. “It’s a big reach, and I give him credit for that because it’s risky,” Frost said.
The risks are on particular display now that Obama is putting more emphasis on his early opposition to the Iraq war and seeking to draw a contrast with Clinton’s support for the resolution authorizing it. Because Obama has mostly resisted attacking her by name, his critique extends to the entire Democratic establishment for not opposing the war.
In effect, this seems to lift some of the blame for the war from the Bush administration and place it on the backs of Democrats, an unlikely tack in a Democratic primary. “There are those who offer up easy answers. They will assert that Iraq is George Bush’s war, it’s all his fault. Or that Iraq was botched by the arrogance and incompetence of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney,” Obama said in Coralville. “The hard truth is that the war in Iraq is not about a catalogue of many mistakes — it is about one big mistake. The war in Iraq should never have been fought.”
Obama offered a similar argument two days later at a Boys and Girls Club in Waterloo, saying that the country was “failed by a president who didn’t tell the whole truth” but that it was “also failed” by the rest of the D.C. establishment. But the crowd broke into such loud applause after his charge against Bush that his broader criticism of the Washington system sounded like an afterthought. Similarly, those moments on the trail when he allows himself to take clear shots at Bush — on issues such as torture, military contractors and education funding — tend to win him his loudest cheers.
David Axelrod, Obama’s chief campaign strategist, argues that there is no mismatch between the senator’s bipartisan appeal and Democratic anger at Bush, saying in an interview that Obama’s call for reconciliation is itself implicitly an “anti-Bush message.” “One of the reasons Democrats have been so angered by Bush is that he’s been so fundamentally divisive and intractable and unable to hear other points of view,” he said.
Obama’s unifying message was the strategy of choice, Axelrod said, because it has been the main theme of his career. If Obama does not criticize Bush and Republicans more, he said, it is because he has “never been an aficionado of the cheap applause line.” As for the idea that Obama should instead frame his message around the fact that he has none of Clinton’s baggage and would therefore be a better candidate in November, Axelrod said he doubts that approach would work.
“Senator Clinton has enormous negatives, were she to go into a general [election], and the fact that Barack is a good unifier is a good harbinger for the general,” he said. But, he added, “voters get sold short. They’re smart and sophisticated. They realize that it’s important to replace a Republican with a Democrat, but that it won’t do enough” if “all we do is change parties without challenging our politics.”
On the trail, Obama emphasizes the practical benefits of his ability to bring people together, but less in terms of his chances of beating the GOP nominee next fall than in terms of what he could accomplish as president. (The closest he comes to playing up his electability is to joke about Republicans he says whisper to him at events, “Barack, I’m a Republican and I support you!”) More often, he points to his success working with Republicans in the Illinois legislature and says that a desire to bring the same approach to the White House is what motivates his campaign.
“We’ve become so accustomed to just assuming that 45 percent of the country is red and 45 percent is blue. . . . Even if we [eke out a victory], we can’t govern. There’s gridlock,” he told a crowd at the University of Iowa. “My belief was that I could change the political map and end gridlock.” He added: “If we could gain a 60 percent majority on any of these issues, we could actually get something done. My goal . . . is finding that 60 percent majority.”
This applies most to reforming health care, he tells voters. He plays down differences between his proposal and those of Clinton and former senator John Edwards (N.C.), telling the state university audience that all three are going to “set up . . . plans you can buy into it if you’re poor, if you can’t afford it we’re going to subsidize it, we’re going to emphasize prevention, blah blah blah.”
The real difference, he said, lies in who would win support across the aisle. As he put it a day later in Independence: To pass universal health care, “we need to build a movement for change. It’ s not going to happen just because you elect a Democrat.”
After the University of Iowa event, Kelly Gallagher, a real estate lawyer, said she saw Obama’s point. If Clinton is elected, she said, “things will become much more divisive.” She added: “That’s part of the problem with Hillary. I think she won’t be able to get a lot done. There’s a much greater probability of Obama being able to achieve his goals.”
Irene Rosenbaum, a retired social worker, was less convinced. She agreed with Obama that “not all Republicans are bad and not all Democrats are good.” But she was not sure he would be able to rise above partisan divides any more than Clinton. “The Republicans would be against other Democratic candidates, too,” she said.
