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From the Dagbloggers
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Bipartisanship as Theater
by Doctor Cleveland 2/26/2010 - 2:09 pm
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So President Obama's health care summit didn't go anywhere it wasn't expected to go. The Democrats made noises about bipartisan compromise and asked for Republican input. The Republicans demanded the whole bill (or more accurately both the bills) be scrapped entirely. The Democrats got no concessions. No reasonable person would have expected anything else at this point. And Barack Obama, who is a fairly reasonable person, must have expected to play out much the way it did.
This was meant as pure theatrical politics. Obama was making a gesture of generosity and open-mindedness, for which he got nothing. That may sound all too familiar, but this time he made a magnanimous gesture and got rebuffed on national TV. Basically, it was a full work day of Republicans complaining that they weren't being listened to while the leader of the free world sat there patiently listening to them.
And that is what the health care summit was all about. It was designed to make Obama look conciliatory and the Republicans look churlish. The GOP didn't do as badly as they might have, but still badly enough that Obama is probably satisfied with his day's work.
The question isn't whether health care reform will be passed with "bipartisan" support or not. That ship sailed long ago. The question is whether the Republicans will be able to spin their own partisan intractability as the Democrats' refusal to compromise. That's clearly been Plan A, Plan B and Plan C for the Congressional GOP: stonewall the bill at every turn and complain that they're not being allowed any say. The televised summit was designed to undermine that plan by making the Republicans own their obstructionism and take the consequences.
It's not 11-dimensional chess. It's a pretty legible political tactic. And it was probably worth a day out of Barack Obama's life.
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In the News
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SPIN METER: Rivals airbrush anti-Romney words
By Nancy Benac, Associated Press, May 16, 2012
After the nastiness of the Republican primary race, former candidates have collective amnesia about Romney disses
Note to self: you think you're so smart about this kinda stuff, but you yourself fell for it once again.....so much for all the prognostication about one of our political parties disintegrating from all the primary campaign animosity.
Read the article at http://www.salon.com/2012/05/16/spin_meter_rivals_airbrush_anti_romney_words/ -
Assessing the Representativeness of Public Opinion Surveys
Pew Resarch Center for the People and the Press, May 15, 2012
For decades survey research has provided trusted data about political attitudes and voting behavior, the economy, health, education, demography and many other topics. But political and media surveys are facing significant challenges as a consequence of societal and technological changes.
It has become increasingly difficult to contact potential respondents and to persuade them to participate. The percentage of households in a sample that are successfully interviewed – the response rate – has fallen dramatically. At Pew Research, the response rate of a typical telephone survey was 36% in 1997 and is just 9% today. The general decline in response rates is evident across nearly all types of surveys, in the United States and abroad. At the same time, greater effort and expense are required to achieve even the diminished response rates of today. These challenges have led many to question whether surveys are still providing accurate and unbiased information [....]
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Ride of Silence
On May 16, 2012 at 7:00 PM, the Ride of Silence will begin in North America and roll across the globe. Cyclists will take to the roads in a silent procession to honor cyclists who have been killed or injured while cycling on public roadways. Although cyclists have a legal right to share the road with motorists, the motoring public often isn't aware of these rights, and sometimes not aware of the cyclists themselves.
...
The Ride of Silence is a free ride that asks its cyclists to ride no faster than 12 mph, wear helmets, follow the rules of the road and remain silent during the ride. There are no sponsors and no registration fees. The ride, which is held during National Bike Month, aims to raise the awareness of motorists, police and city officials that cyclists have a legal right to the public roadways. The ride is also a chance to show respect for and honor the lives of those who have been killed or injured.
Read the article at http://www.rideofsilence.org/main.php -
Sugar makes you stupid: Study shows high-fructose diet...
A new UCLA rat study is the first to show how a diet steadily high in fructose slows the brain, hampering memory and learning — and how omega-3 fatty acids can counteract the disruption. The peer-reviewed Journal of Physiology publishes the findings in its May 15 edition.
"Our findings illustrate that what you eat affects how you think," said Fernando Gomez-Pinilla, a professor of neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and a professor of integrative biology and physiology in the UCLA College of Letters and Science. "Eating a high-fructose diet over the long term alters your brain's ability to learn and remember information. But adding omega-3 fatty acids to your meals can help minimize the damage."
While earlier research has revealed how fructose harms the body through its role in diabetes, obesity and fatty liver, this study is the first to uncover how the sweetener influences the brain.
The UCLA team zeroed in on high-fructose corn syrup, an inexpensive liquid six times sweeter than cane sugar, that is commonly added to processed foods, including soft drinks, condiments, applesauce and baby food. The average American consumes more than 40 pounds of high-fructose corn syrup per year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
"We're not talking about naturally occurring fructose in fruits, which also contain important antioxidants," explained Gomez-Pinilla, who is also a member of UCLA's Brain Research Institute and Brain Injury Research Center. "We're concerned about high-fructose corn syrup that is added to manufactured food products as a sweetener and preservative."[Better write this down]
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Insider tells why Anonymous ‘might well be the most...
Christopher Doyon, a.k.a. Commander X, sits atop a hillside in an undisclosed location in Canada, watching a reporter and photographer make their way along a narrow path to join him, away from the prying eyes of law enforcement.
It’s been a few weeks of encrypted emails back and forth, working out the security protocol to follow for interviewing Doyon, one of the brains behind Anonymous, now a fugitive from the FBI.
Doyon, who readily admits taking part in some of the highest-profile hacktivist attacks on websites last year — from Tunisia to Orlando, Sony to PayPal — was arrested in September for a comparatively minor assault on the county website of Santa Cruz, Calif., where he was living, in retaliation for the town forcibly removing a homeless encampment on the courthouse steps.
The “virtual sit-in” lasted half an hour. For that, Doyon is facing 15 years in jail.
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I think the premise you've outlined here is pretty reasonable, Dr. C. The thing that I wonder about it is this: Why wait a year to make such a move? Did Obama just recently figure out that he wasn't going to get any blood from this rock? If not, why waste a year on the rest of the sturm and drang? Baucus, Grassley, et al? An ice cold bully pulpit in the midst of deliriously high polling numbers? That's the part that seems amateurish to me.
Excellent point. You know, even way back in the Democratic primary, Obama had a tendency to be politically reactive. Whenever he plays aggressive politics, he plays it well, but he always seems to hold his fire until his opponent is about to shoot him in the head. There is some sense to this approach--he doesn't overreact, and he does seem to get what he wants in the end while maintaining that reputation for coolness under fire. But I worry that one of these days, he's going to wait too long and get shot. And even he pulls this bill off, I think everybody would have been a lot happier without the yearlong circus--much as we would have been happier without the last four months of the primary.
Speaking of the primary, I think that's the metaphor that got a certain Senator from New York in a bit of trouble.
Er.. wait. Maybe she was just openly speculating about the probability of him actually being shot.
Yes, I hesitated before employing the metaphor and then recklessly charged ahead. So shoot me.
Obviously, I agree that HCR hasn't been handled ideally. I suspect Obama realizes this now, too. Either he'll learn from those mistakes (and every new president has to learn on the job in some crucial ways) or he won't.
In a more local way, the timing is easy to understand. Obama is through with the nonsense, and going to make HCR happen no matter what. The prelude to using reconciliation and winning on a party-line vote is this public gesture of bipartisanship. He's holding out an olive branch, which he knows will be refused, because he has the invasion landing prepared.
Why did he wait so long? It's a good question, which I expect people in the West Wing have obsessed about. I don't actually believe that he didn't perceive the obstructionism of the GOP at large. He clearly set out to pick off just a few Republican votes in the Senate. (Recently some anonymous Blue Dog senator was carping about this during a blind-source attack on Rahm Emanuel; the complaint was that the White House had only tried to pick up a few moderates from the other side, when what was "supposed" to happen was an attempt to pick up 20 or 30 Republicans. That complaint actually made me think much better of Rahm.)
What Obama didn't count on was, first, the GOP's unprecedented party discipline. The stumbling block has been not being able to peel off those two or four Republicans, and to be fair, in the past peeling off moderates for a centrist bill has worked. In the past, picking off Snowe/Collins/Voinovich/etc. would have worked. The Republicans are genuinely playing the game differently, and Obama didn't see that coming.
The second thing Obama seems not to have expected in the deep appeal of irrationality. It's pretty clear that he didn't think the Town Hall and Tea Party lunacy would actually manage to move political situation at all, and I'll confess that I didn't either. I figured that the craziness would be counter-productive. Obama doesn't seem like a person who has much use for intemperate nuttiness himself, and I doubt he can really imagine why anyone would give those people ear. He figured that the general public would back the plan that polls all said they backed.