Where I spinelessly see virtue in both sides to left disputes about Obama

There’s been a lot of disappointment expressed on the left in recent days over Obama and the Democratic Congress, which crested when Joe Lieberman scotched a Medicare buy-in. Other sources of discontent are accusations of Big Finance influence in the Obama administration, Obama’s escalation of the war in Afghanistan, Obama’s lack of action on various LGBT issues, and his continuation of indefinite detention without trial for some of the Guantanamo detainees.

Some Obama fans have gotten defensive at some of these complaints. To some extent, I’m sympathetic with Obama’s defenders. Ever since Ralph Nader’s 2000 presidential candidacy, without which Bush likely would not have been elected, I get an allergic reaction to anything that smacks of a Naderesque declaration that there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between Democratic and Republican presidents.

Moreover, Grand Narrative critiques of Obama neglect a universe of substantive progressive accomplishment that underscore what a vast improvement his presidency is over his predecessor, such as:

Economy: Pushing the stimulus package, reviving vigorous antitrust enforcement, extending unemployment benefits and cutting taxes for lower-income taxpayers, extending S-Chip, helping pay for children's health insurance;

Environment/climate change: Reversing Bush on California's regulation of tailpipe emissions, reconsidering a bar on considering climate change impact on new coal plant applications, voiding drilling leases on public lands in Utah, moving toward an end to corn subsidies, seeking to reduce antibiotics in livestock, and a bunch of other good stuff;

Foreign policy/defense: really getting out of Iraq, opening up diplomacy with Syria, pressuring Israel to freeze the settlements, losing missile defense bases in Eastern Europe, cutting wasteful weapons systems like the F-22, and stopping conditioning foreign aid on nonparticipation in the International Criminal Court;

Labor: Appointing NLRB members who actually want to enforce laws against unfair labor practices, reviving meritorious discrimination claims by signing the Lily Ledbetter Act, reversing anti-labor Bush-era executive orders;

Civil liberties: Banning torture, leading to the CIA closing "secret" prisons, returning rendition policies to pre-Bush standards, overturning Bush's ban on federally-funded stem cell research, giving up on raids of medical marijuana providers.

Not to mention Sonia Sotomayor on the Supreme Court. A commitment to a nuclear-free world, which has important diplomatic benefits regarding nuclear non-proliferation. A sane response to the election protests in Iran.

And not to mention that our dysfunctional legislative institutions notwithstanding, Obama would actually sign bills that set up a public option for health insurance, impose a cap on greenhouse gases, establish a consumer protection agency for financial products, and let unions organize with card check. In my view, blaming him for congressional failures on this score overestimates his influence and comes down to a tactical disagreement more than a substantive problem.

As much as I think it's possible to exaggerate the extent of Obama's selloutdom, I’m glad that Greenwald and Taibbi and Kos and various other parties have been writing the things that they have. Obama and Congress need pressure from their left flank. Health care and financial regulation bills will likely be substantively better if these folks call Obama and Congress for their shortcomings. I just feel a need to remind everyone about the forest out there.

Health bill still worth passing

Now that Lieberman has blown up any whisper of a public option, lots of people on my side of the aisle (Markos Moulitsas, Howard Dean) are angrily demanding a rejection of the whole bill.

While I find arguments that the bill is worth saving to be persuasive, I haven't seen one lately that addresses the most potent left argument against it head-on: that an individual mandate to buy health insurance without a public option will just force people into the same crappy insurance policies that plague all of us now.

The point of the individual mandate is to make sure that people don't game a system in which insurance companies can't reject anyone with a pre-existing condition by refraining from payment of premiums until medical expenses arise. It's also to make sure that healthy people pay into the system to subsidize sick people, part of the point of insurance.

As best that I can tell (the contents of the Senate compromise are hazy to me), the bill wouldn't force people into bad deals as Kos and Dean fear, given that the bill forces the insurance industry to adopt a "community rating" system that effectively regulates how much insurance companies can charge. Moreover, the penalty for not buying health insurance would only be $750.00 per person, with some hardship exceptions. That's a low enough penalty that it might operate as a de facto catastrophic plan -- and it wouldn't apply to the lowest-income Americans, who are eligible for Medicaid, at eligibility levels that this bill increases. Not to mention that this bill has $900 billion in subsidies to help people buy health insurance.

Finally, the public option under consideration at this stage of the game was open to such a small number of people and was so restricted in its ability to negotiate good deals that it probably wouldn't have made the difference that its advocates hoped for -- not enough to torpedo the bill at this point.

Marriage equality disappointment in NY

Governor Paterson supports marriage equality, the Assembly passed marriage equality by a lopsided majority, but the State Senate killed it today.

For the 99% of people not attuned to the idiosyncrasies of New York State politics, the State Senate has historically been gerrymandered to maximize Republican representation, by diluting New York City's representation at the expense of upstate, Long Island, and Westchester. As even those areas have turned blue, however, Democrats last year managed to scrape a one-vote majority control of the Senate (albeit control that has proven vulnerable to renegade Democrats).

Be that as it may, eight Democratic Senators -- a quarter of the Democratic caucus -- voted against marriage equality today. While a less-gerrymandered Senate would have given marriage equality proponents some slack in this regard (just look at the results in the Assembly), this is still appalling. One of them, Ruben Diaz, who represents part of the South Bronx, has long proven himself to be a irrational, extremist bigot. Joseph Addabbo, a newly-elected Senator and scion of a Queens political family, is of particular disappointment to me. I actually worked last Election Day for this jerk under these auspices (when he evaded taking a stand on the issue). I want my Election-Day activism back.

Hiram Monserrate also voted against marriage equality, which is particularly weird given that he represents Jackson Heights, Queens, which hosts one of the largest gay communities in New York City, yet another reason to get rid of him right after his recent conviction on misdemeanor assault charges against his girlfriend.

I don't know about the rest of the opponents of marriage equality, and I think that our side will eventually prevail, but this is a bitter setback.

No good options in Afghanistan

I've expressed before my ambivalence about Afghanistan, which is shared by national security writers whom I respect.

It's not hard to make the case that pulling out of Afghanistan will have negative consequences. Insightful Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid points out that the Pakistani military has been hedging its bets between support for the (Afghan) Taliban and the U.S., such that a U.S. pullout would incent the Pakistani military to back the return of the Taliban to power, portending a spread of Taliban/Al Qaeda ideology and influence in the region (including the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia). A U.S. pullout won't necessarily even lead to peace for the beleaguered Afghans, as Steve Coll argues here, compounding the conditions a resurgent Taliban would subject Afghans to.

On the other hand, there's the question of whether the 30,000 additional troops Obama will send, along with any change in strategy, would have any hope of stopping these bad things from happening. According to the David Petraeus' own counterinsurgency manual, you'd need 400,000 troops (one for every twenty Afghans) to wage an effective counterinsurgency. Obama didn't address this in the speech tonight.

There's also what you might call the South Vietnam problem. The corruption, incompetence, and fecklessness of the South Vietnamese government in the early '60s in the face of a determined nationalist insurgency with lots of grass-roots support were a part of the reason that the U.S. government felt it had to fight South Vietnam's battles for it, an obvious recipe for disaster. Comparable levels of dysfunction plague Hamid Karzai's government. Obama's speech tonight distinguished Vietnam from Afghanistan in some respects that I agree with, and referred to problems with the Karzai government, but just didn't have the facts on his side to convincingly deal with this problem.

So I'm still conflicted.

And it doesn't solve the problem we've got, but please let's not forget how badly the Bush administration botched Afghanistan.

Causation Correlation

While the economy seems to be growing, at least, the unemployment rate still stinks. Conservatives have naturally seized upon this in a way that almost makes me nostalgic for the days when Democrats used to be accused of rooting for bad times.

The weakest argument I've seen so far is that the anemic employment figures somehow indict the stimulus package. I haven't seen any unpacking of this challenge to established macroeconomics so much as post hoc, ergo propter hoc logic. The rise in unemployment happened after the stimulus; therefore it must have caused it, right?

It's important to bear this in mind when non-hack economic forecasters and academics conclude that the stimulus package has actually made the economy better off -- if anything, it was too small. Hopefully, the signs that the Obama administration is taking facile politicized crocodile tears about the deficit seriously won't trump good economics.

The case for abolition of the Senate, part 3,743

So the big victory for health care reform is that the Senate voted 60-39 to cut off debate over whether to debate the issue.

The U.S. Senate is an embarrassing anachronism of an institution.

The real propaganda victory

A lot of people remember Bobby Sands, the provisional IRA member who led a hunger strike in a British prison in 1981, was elected to Parliament while he wasted away, and died a martyr to the IRA cause. What most people don't remember is that the specific issue that precipitated Sands' fast was that he didn't want incarcerated IRA members to be treated as ordinary criminals along with convicted thieves, rapists, and murderers; he wanted to be treated as something more akin to a prisoner of war.

So it strikes me as strange that conservatives think that it's some kind of propaganda "victory" for Al Qaeda that Eric Holder is seeking to try 9/11 conspirator Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in civilian criminal court rather than by some kind of military commission (David Brooks gave an example of this argument on Friday's Newshour.) It seems to me that treating Al Qaeda members as warriors unnecessarily elevates them, and trying them as common criminals diminishes their message. Moreover, it's not like the rules of evidence allow Mr. Mohammed to just stand up and declaim the Al Qaeda manifesto during the trial. If he's convicted, he'll get a chance to say anything he wants before sentencing, but I don't see why this is such a big propaganda victory. When Zacharias Moussoui did that in his trial, it only compounded his performance as an embarrassing lunatic.

If you really want to see a propaganda victory for Al Qaeda, check out the opposite of a civilian trial, torture and indefinite detention, which has been uncontroversially reported as a galvanizing factor for Taliban and Al Qaeda recruiting.