Obama's war in Afghanistan

My column for today's FT argues that Obama needs to rethink his policy on Afghanistan.

Polling and the public option

Opinion polls asking whether Americans want healthcare reform to include a "public option"--a government-run scheme to compete alongside private insurers--are all over the place. One shows support as low as 35%. Most seem to put it at 50% or higher. One says 83% are either strongly or somewhat in favour.

Majority support for the public option seems difficult to reconcile with what seems to be somewhat weaker support for the health bills in Congress that include the option. Are there really that many Democrats who would prefer no change at all to a reform stripped of the public plan? Well, maybe there are.

Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com has two good posts on the subject. One points out that most people don't know what the public option is. The other blames the variation in responses in part to subtle differences in the way the questions are put. Questions that clearly say "option"--underlining that people who like their existing arrangements can keep them--elicit stronger support. Putting the question that way gets a more accurate answer, he says. One poll, Quinnipiac, follows all his advice on framing the question and measures support at 62 percent:

Do you support or oppose giving people the option of being covered by a government health insurance plan that would compete with private plans?

I wonder. If you are offered a choice between (a) X, and (b) your choice of X or Y, what's not to like about (b)? One possibility, of course, is that you would worry about having to pay for Y (through taxes) even if you didn't choose it. Aside from that, if Y was even eligible for consideration, you would only prefer (a) if you believed that (b) was not really what it claimed to be, that Y might impair X in some way.

If every respondent was mindful of the effect the public option might have on their taxes and on their existing insurance, either positive or negative, that 62% support would be real. The question is, are they? How many of that 62% are thinking, "Well, if you are telling me I can keep my present policy on the present terms, fine", when it may turn out that this premise is false. In other words, is "option" really a cleaner term for this purpose than "plan to compete alongside"? If at the outset you are an individual buyer on the regulated exchange, yes: you would have the choice. If you have employer-provided insurance that your employer subsequently decides to drop, you would feel differently. For good or ill, the public option would affect private insurance--that is the whole idea, after all. I'm not sure the Quinnipiac question states the alternatives as plainly as it seems to.

A foreigner reflects on Ted Kennedy

I hesitate to say anything about his passing--least of all, anything addressed to American readers. I didn't grow up with the history, as Americans of my age did. I'm an outsider, so reverence for the dynasty and the deeper sense of loss that goes with it are things I cannot feel. I'll just point to a few of the articles I've read today that seemed to shed some light.

The Boston Globe has the fullest coverage, as you might expect, and it is very well done.

I thought this essay by Sean Wilentz for The New Republic was outstanding.

His political longevity testified to the love of his constituents, through thick and thin, but also to his persistence, his ability to learn and to grow, and then to surpass himself. The sadness, the squandering, the might-have-beens of his life would have crushed others, but Kennedy endured, his principles intact.

You ought to read the whole article, but that capsule sums the man up pretty well, I think. I'd have added charm and energy--he was phenomenal in both respects--to the summary list of assets, and I don't think "the sadness, the squandering, the might-have-beens" does justice to his lowest point, but still.

Speaking of that, how to deal with Chappaquiddick has been a problem for many commentators and obituarists. Many decided, I think, that decency requires a veil to be drawn and euphemisms deployed, such as Wilentz's in that snippet. I disagree. I think you have to look at it unflinchingly, because you cannot understand the miracle of Kennedy's redemption otherwise. What he did was terrible. He survived as a politician only because of his name--a disgusting thing. But it changed him, and see what he then did with his life. He was emphatically not, as Paul Krugman writes, always a great man. He was once much less than a great man. What is astonishing is that he nonetheless made himself a great man.

I admired EJ Dionne's column for several reasons, including for the way it captured unique, or at any rate very unusual, aspects of Kennedy's political personality. He was neither cynic nor soggy centrist. He was passionate, a liberal's liberal. Yet he was pragmatic, and was capable of liking and respecting people who disagreed with him. Firm principles married to a friendly tolerance of other views: on both sides of modern American politics, that is so rare.

And there was this Kennedy paradox: Precisely because he knew so clearly what he wanted and where he wished the country to move, he could strike deals with Republicans far outside his philosophical comfort zone...

[K]ennedy's liberalism was experimental, not rigid. Principles didn't change, but tactics and formulations were always subject to review. He gave annual speeches that amounted to a report on the state of American liberalism. He always sought to give heart to its partisans in dark times -- "Let's be who we are and not pretend to be something else," Kennedy said in early 1995, shortly after his party's devastating midterm defeat -- but he did not shrink from pointing to liberal shortcomings.

In that speech, he insisted that "outcomes," not intentions, should determine whether government programs live or die. In 2005, he criticized liberals for failing to harness their creed to the country's core values.

I think that last point is crucial. On the left of the Democratic party, it is not hard to find disdain and even contempt for "the country's core values", insofar as those values depart from the ones espoused by a progressive liberal.

As for the willingness to cut deals in the name of progress, one wonders of course what role Kennedy might have played in fashioning a compromise on healthcare. He strongly favored the public option, but I find it hard to believe he would have preferred no reform at all to a Massachusetts-style system, or that he would have committed himself to vote against any measure that did not contain a public plan--the position that many Democrats now seem to be adopting. In more ways than one, he will be missed.

Don't blame Obama?

People keep referring me to Ross Douthat's column, "Don't Blame Obama", which you should read if you haven't already.

In reality, the health care wrestling match is less a test of Mr. Obama's political genius than it is a test of the Democratic Party's ability to govern...

If the Congressional Democrats can't get a health care package through, it won't prove that President Obama is a sellout or an incompetent. It will prove that Congress's liberal leaders are lousy tacticians, and that its centrist deal-makers are deal-makers first, poll watchers second and loyal Democrats a distant third. And it will prove that the Democratic Party is institutionally incapable of delivering on its most significant promises.

It's a good piece and as usual Ross says a lot I agree with, but a couple of things. That is a rather jaundiced assessment of the Blue Dogs, is it not? I can't see that their objections to the bills are unprincipled. Their positions make sense to me. It is not wrong, either, for politicians to care about public opinion. We should  want them to do that. Are they failing in some way, as Ross implies, if they are "loyal Democrats a distant third"? I want parties to be institutionally capable of governing, but I don't give politicians many points for tribal loyalty come what may. Coalitions are what make parties capable of governing. Leaders have to shape those coalitions.

Which leads me to my second point: why must one conclude that the health reform mess is Obama's fault or else the party's fault--choose one--when it is plainly both? The Democrats' ability to govern has everything to do with the effectiveness of their leader and principal spokesman, especially on a sensitive issue, health care, where success requires a complicated policy to be put persuasively before the public. We know Obama has the necessary skills. We saw that last year. He chose not to deploy them, and put Democrats in Congress in charge. That was a big mistake.

It's true that Democrats in Congress are split. So is the public at large. All the more reason why Obama needed to lead. In the campaign, he extended popular support for the party into the middle of the electorate. He needed to maintain or even build on that to advance his policy goals. So far, he hasn't. He has managed to disappoint both the centre and the left, as Ross says. But the left is always disappointed. That is its perpetual state of mind. The left will be disappointed if in the end Obama gets universal health care with generous subsidies for the less well-off, but no public option. There is nothing one can say to this. But disappointing the centre as well was an unforced error. The Obama of the campaign could have kept the middle on board, but he decided--until it was too late to change his mind?--that he would not even try. Yes, he gets the blame for that.

Prospects in Afghanistan

An interesting discussion about Afghanistan at the Brookings Institution today (I think this page will have transcript and/or video in due course): Bruce Riedel, Michael O'Hanlon, Kimberly Kagan and Anthony Cordesman, moderated by Martin Indyk. To only slightly varying degrees, all the speakers were pretty grim. Despite the recent commitment of extra forces, they see the situation as either bad and getting no better, or actually deteriorating. They think far more troops and other resources are needed, and worry that the administration is putting pressure on General McChrystal and other military commanders to curb their request for more manpower even before they have put their case. Ominous echoes of Rumsfeld, I thought.

None of the speakers volunteered a rationale for being there in the first place. It took a question on that from the audience to elicit what I thought was a perfunctory reply from just one of the panelists. Riedel, if I understood him correctly, made two points.

First, he said that if we weren't there, we would be unable even to harry al-Qaeda with drones: they could train and organize unmolested. That puzzled me. The US does not need anything like its present commitment, let alone the additional resources the army seems to want, merely to launch unmanned aircraft against al-Qaeda targets. Second, he said that if the West lost to the insurgency, the blow to its credibility in the Muslim world would be too devastating to countenance. This also seemed none too convincing: an all-encompassing rationale which has been offered before for fighting wars that the US then went on to lose at  greater cost than not fighting them in the first place. I want to believe that the West's fight in Afghanistan is both necessary and likely to succeed, but those arguments do not persuade me.

The discussion started, as these discussions tend to, from a barely examined notion of "success"--a viable, self-supporting and friendly Afghan state--and then inferred from this the resources that will be needed to achieve it. Fine in theory, but Iraq is just the latest reminder that the politics works the other way round. The fight in Afghanistan is already far from popular, and support seems more likely to fall with time than rise. If no compelling rationale can be put before the public,  it may make better sense to accept that the constraint on resources will tighten, and ask how much can be achieved with what little will be available.

This was Gilles Dorronsoro's argument in a recent FT op-ed. (Though see this letter to the editor in response.) Match goals to means, he argued. Politics rules out the converse. I would like somebody to change my mind, but I find this view depressingly persuasive. Here and here are fuller statements of Dorronsoro's thinking. He posts other commentary on his Carnegie Endowment page.

Bernanke's second term

This seems like a wise decision, though perhaps not what Obama had in mind last winter. Proposing Larry Summers, the obvious alternative, eminently qualified though he may be, would have antagonized a lot of Democrats even more than reappointing a moderate Republican. Also, since the Fed has faithfully executed so much of the administration's response to the crisis, ditching Bernanke would have looked as though Obama was repudiating his own policies. On the whole I think the Fed chairman has done well in terrible circumstances, and deserves a lot of credit. He cannot be accused of timid passivity, at any rate. Whether he will enjoy presiding over the difficult task of unwinding the Fed's unprecedented interventions, we will find out.

An interesting choice of words in Obama's announcement:

Almost none of the decisions he or any of us made have been easy. The actions we have taken to stabilize our financial system, repair our credit markets, restructure our auto industry, and pass a recovery package have all been steps of necessity, not choice.

"Necessity, not choice." Of course this is his favorite phrase in defending America's engagement in Afghanistan, contrasting that action with the war in Iraq. Robert Kagan had what I thought was a persuasive column on this over the weekend, arguing that what is necessary is rarely clear-cut. The same goes for the management of economic crises. Right or wrong, Obama's economic policies are no more popular than his policy on Afghanistan; but rather than defending them on their merits, he says, "We had no choice." It's not very convincing. Nearly always, there are choices.

Obama's health reform nightmare

My column for the FT this week is on healthcare reform--again. I think Obama needs to drop the public option, despite the dismay this will cause among progressive Democrats, and he needs to be honest about the need to raise taxes to pay for universal coverage. Politically, one can see why he has preferred to do neither, but the calculation has gone wrong. His strategy has done a very improbable thing: it has alienated centrists and progressives alike. He cannot repair his standing with both of those groups, and must now choose whose support he needs more. In any event he must start being clear, consistent, and honest.

The selling of healthcare reform has been marked from the start by indecision, both on substance and on tactics, and by an extraordinary lack of clarity. The country still does not know what Mr Obama is advocating. Much of the time, apparently, neither does he.

Since the congressional recess began this month, Mr Obama has been on the road to sell a plan that does not yet actually exist. Rival bills are in the works and the final result will quite likely resemble none of them. Meanwhile, the president states and restates fundamentally incompatible goals - universal coverage, higher quality, lower costs - as if mere commitment to those aims should be enough to satisfy sceptics. He says he wants a bipartisan solution, then defaults to left-liberal talking-points about the scheming of Republicans, the tyranny of special interests and the wickedness of insurance companies. It is a complete shambles.

You can read the rest of the article here.

The Lockerbie bomber

Reaction in the US to this--both to the fact of the early release, and now to the scenes in Tripoli--is a mixture of astonishment, incomprehension, and disgust. Nobody seems able to accept what has happened at face value. It must be some sordid deal about oil between the US, Scottish and UK governments, surely. Or do they know he's really innocent, as some of the victims' relatives believe? Is that what's going on? Nobody can accept or even understand the "compassionate release" rationale as laid out by Kenny MacAskill. A convicted mass murderer, found guilty of this most appalling atrocity, is set free as an act of mercy? Have these people gone quite mad? It seems to me a very fair question.

MacAskill, interviewed on US television, radiated the most repellent sanctimony I have ever seen in a politician--and that is saying something. His manner suggested that the whole thing is more about his own implacable self-righteousness than the demands of justice. He was followed on air by victims of the relatives. They were restrained and dignified, but plainly dismayed and distraught, and feeling horribly betrayed. Does the exercise of compassion not also take into account compassion for the victims and their families, one wondered? No, he seemed to argue, for that would be to choose vengeance not justice. False. There is such a thing as just punishment. How could it be unjust for a man guilty of a crime like this to die in prison? I would advise MacAskill not to visit the US for the foreseeable future. Indeed, calculations of justice aside, I wonder if the Scottish government has the smallest inkling of the harm it has done to its standing in the US--not to mention the prospects of future co-operation on security--with this bizarre act.

Incidentally, Obama comes out of it none too well, either. Why didn't he do something to stop this lunacy, people are asking? And his tepid reaction--"'deeply regrets the decision"; once Megrahi is back in Libya, "he should be kept under house arrest"--has bewildered many Americans almost as much as the original decision.

Update:

This isn't something you see every day.

How not to sell healthcare reform

This struck me as a non-story if I ever saw one.

Given hardening Republican opposition to Congressional health care proposals, Democrats now say they see little chance of the minority's co-operation in approving any overhaul, and are increasingly focused on drawing support for a final plan from within their own ranks.

Oh please. It isn't Republican support they lack, it's public support. And this is not the way to go about getting it. Democrats are technically right that they can get a bill through the senate even with one or two defections on their own side, using a special procedure to prevent a Republican filibuster. But with public opinion, previously well-disposed to reform, now leaning against the Democrats' proposals--a result of the White House's dismal failure of leadership on the issue--it would be political recklessness of a high order to pass reform by means of a ruse. Not least because the purpose would be to disempower dissenting Democratic senators, not just Republicans. What would centrist voters make of that? The go-it-alone threat surfaces every few weeks. Though complaints about Republican obstructionism are justified, the idea looks less credible now than before.

The NYT piece leads with supporting quotes from Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff. What a surprise. Mr Emanuel's purpose in floating this story was presumably to distract attention from the administration's continuing embarrassment over the public option. Is this negotiable or not? Is this necessary, in Mr Obama's view, or not? The answer appears to be that it is still necessary, like before--but negotiable. Something not quite right there.

This week's careful administration maneuvering on whether a public insurance option was an essential element of any final bill was seemingly part of the new White House effort to find consensus among Democrats, since the public plan has been resisted by moderate and conservative Democrats who could be crucial to winning the votes for passage if no Republicans are on board.

For the second time in two days, Mr. Obama did not mention health care on Tuesday, a marked departure from the aggressive public relations campaign he mounted in July and early August. The White House is striving to stay out of the fray, aides said, until the president can get away on vacation this weekend.

Careful maneuvering? If that shambles was careful maneuvering, heaven help us if this administration ever gets muddled. A vacation sounds like a good idea.

The administration should drop the public option. Politically, the disappointment of the Democrats' hard-liners would be a plus for the administration, not a minus: their protests would reassure moderate opinion. Substantively, it would subtract little or nothing from the considerable virtues of the other aspects of the reform proposals, around which a broad popular consensus can still be built. This FT editorial on the subject gets it right. My congratulations to whoever wrote it.

Bombs, Baghdad and Hollywood

The worst attacks in Baghdad for months put my visit to the movies last night into a sobering context: I went to see The Hurt Locker, which is about a US bomb disposal unit working in Iraq. The film was almost universally praised. I thought it was gripping, disturbing, and brilliantly executed.

A couple of scenes did strike me as implausible. (The shoot-out in the desert, which had the bomb-disposal guys fighting alongside a group of Brits who seemed to have a lot of trouble aiming their sniper rifle; the crazy freelance venture towards the end, which  got one of the team shot.) But the visuals were completely convincing, the casting (with lesser known actors in the leading roles) was perfect, and the tension was relentlessly maintained.

So I agreed, for instance, with David Denby, Dana Stevens, and Joe Morgenstern, who all gave it raves. I did wonder how David Denby could write of the main character that "you might say he's drawn to danger and needs it." You might say that? How could it be plainer that he's fatally addicted to danger, thus doomed physically, and already emotionally dead. In an unbearably sad moment at the end he tells his infant son that with age you come to love fewer things; he now loves only one, he says. Cut to an image of him walking down the street towards an unexploded bomb. I think the movie's epigraph, a quotation from a war correspondent that says "war is a drug" may also be intended as a clue.

I was pleased that director Kathryn Bigelow has such a critical hit on her hands, because I have always had a slightly guilty admiration for "Point Break", a surfer-dude crime caper with the reliably preposterous Keanu Reeves playing an FBI undercover officer. If I described the plot then told you how much I enjoy this movie, you would lose what little respect for me you already have. So I won't do that.

Do go and see The Hurt Locker. It's superb cinema. But you might also take a moment to browse the comments thread attached to Metacritic's review page. Ordinary movie-goers mostly loved it. But the film has a lot of very low ratings from people who say they have served in Iraq, and who complain bitterly that, despite all its apparent realism, the film is not at all truthful. For instance:

I am still deployed and this is truly the worst war movie I have ever watched. Without even acknowledging how far from the truth the tactics are and lack of security in every scene, EOD [bomb disposal] is falsely portrayed as some sort of special forces unit. I have sat on many IED's and regardless of the fact that units are not allowed to travel outside of a 3 vehicle or 4 vehicle security concept, EOD is not comprised of 3 enlisted men defusing bombs. The robot is always extensively used and more importantly EOD personnel are never foolish enough to handle ready to go large ordnance to defuse it. Every time we found an IED from 155 shells to mortar rounds, they were always blown in place. The few times an IED was taken was when it was fully dismembered by a disrupting detonation. I watched a little over half of this movie before turning it off as it was too painful and ridiculous to watch.

Another said:

It was a movie by civilians for civilians, which I guess is why so many critics love it so much.

Hmm. That rings true, doesn't it?

Readings on healthcare reform

The NYT had two excellent pieces on this subject yesterday. Richard Thaler's article is the best piece I have read on the public option. And he gives Republicans and Democrats alike some very good advice:

To the Republicans, I say this: If you can get real assurances that the public option has to break even, and that it will get no special deals from suppliers, let the Democrats have it but ask for concessions on tort reform in return. (That could actually save some money.) The resulting public plan will be too small to notice.

To the Democrats, I say this: If you want competition in health care, you won't get it if the public option can make deals its competitors can't. So either give the Republicans hard assurances that the public option would have to break even and not get special treatment, or, better yet, just give it up to ensure that some useful health care reform is passed. A public option is neither necessary nor sufficient for achieving the real goals of reform, and those goals are too important to risk losing the war.

And Sarah Lyall has a fine, balanced piece on what an American living in Britain makes of the NHS. Everything she says rings true to me, a Brit living in the United States.

The N.H.S. is great at emergency care, and great at pediatric care. My children have enjoyed thorough treatment for routine matters -- vaccines, eye tests and the like. A friend who had cancer received the same drugs and the same treatment, I was assured, as she would have in the United States. When, heartbreakingly, she died, her family was not left with tens of thousands of dollars of outstanding bills, or with the prospect of long, bitter fights with hardened insurance companies.
 
But there are limits. Without an endless budget, the N.H.S. does have to ration care, by deciding, for instance, whether drugs that might add a few months to the life of a terminal cancer patient are worth the money. Its hospitals are not always clean. It is bureaucratic. Its doctors and nurses are overworked. Patients sometimes are treated as if they were supplicants rather than consumers. Women in labor are advised to bring their own infant's diapers and their own cleaning products to the hospital. Sick people routinely have to wait for tests or for treatment.

Obama's wrong turn on health care

My column for the FT today argues that Obama is the author of his own problems on healthcare reform.

Mr Obama's health proposals are not in trouble because conservative Republicans oppose them. Conservative Republicans were always going to oppose them. They are in trouble because moderate Republicans oppose them, and even more because many moderate Democrats also have doubts.

Mr Obama has to persuade centrists - the voters who elected him president - to support health reform. It is as simple as that. If he brings moderates and independents on board, reform will succeed. If he fails, the effort will either be abandoned or, more likely, the plans will be watered down.

The town hall protesters, with their "death panel" hysterics and posters depicting Mr Obama with a Hitler mustache, may help push centrists back to the Obama camp. If not, they should. So far, though, Mr Obama's lamentable salesmanship has pushed harder the other way. Hindered no doubt by the fact that there is still no finished plan to sell, he has failed to come up with a plausible line to put to the country.

Read the rest of it here.

Procedures mandated enplanement

Here's a good one.

The [Transportation] department has sent Continental Airlines a letter asking for details on Continental Express Flight 2816, which left Houston at 9:23 p.m. Friday but didn't arrive at its destination in Minneapolis until after 11 a.m. Saturday.

In between, the small airliner spent nearly seven hours sitting on the tarmac in Rochester, where it had been diverted because of thunderstorms, before passengers were allowed to go inside an airport terminal. Two and a half hours after disembarking, passengers reboarded the same plane and were flown to Minneapolis.

The airline is claiming that the passengers had to stay "enplaned" because TSA officials had left for the night, meaning that nobody would be available to screen the passengers again before reboarding. They were finally allowed to get off next morning when the TSA officers arrived for work. Absurd? Of course. Another case of following procedures over a cliff. But never fear. The department is working on new procedures.

Welcome to America--and file under Death of Common Sense.

Obama's town hall meeting

A civil exchange, at least. But not a very effective performance. He treated it as an election campaign event. The opening was thoroughly partisan: his first substantive remarks were an attack on the venality of the insurance companies, a theme to which he returned repeatedly. He banged the populist drum in other ways too. If this effort fails, he said, it will be because of the resistance of special interests. (Actually, it won't.) They have blocked reform before, he said, and must not be allowed to do it again. To me, this is foolishly condescending to the voters who disagree with the proposed reforms on their merits: it says they are dupes.

Still, he successfully reset the message, as trailed earlier. He played down cost control, except when pressed by questioners to discuss the future of Medicare. (We will spend a lot less, he said, and get better results at the same time.) Moving the focus elsewhere is wise, since the bills have rather little to say on cost control, and this point is now well understood.

Instead, his main themes were the need to widen coverage and, especially, the benefits of reform for people who already have insurance--principally, that there will be new limits on out of pocket expenses (getting sick should not make you bankrupt) and that your coverage will not be denied in future because of pre-existing conditions. As I've mentioned before, this last point should have been front and center from the start, but better late than never.

Unfortunately he's still trying to argue that if you are happy with what you've got, nothing will change. This is neither true nor even plausible. For instance, services under Medicare would be affected by the new reimbursement regime. The public option would destabilize some private plans--and is intended to. People won't just migrate at their own initiative to new plans because they find them preferable. Many will be migrated by their employers, whether they like it or not. This claim that nothing will change if you're content has to go.

He was unusually clumsy now and then. What was he thinking, giving his second question to a child? And what was he thinking when he answered that question with a discussion of end-of-life counseling and an intended joke (I think) about switching off granny's life support? I didn't see many people in this overwhelmingly friendly audience laughing.

When he was asked about his earlier support in principle for single-payer, he said that the transitional difficulties would be too great. That seemed a tepid endorsement of the mostly private system that is actually being proposed. But of course the main problem is that he still cannot say with any precision what the plan is. He can assure the country of this and that, plausibly or otherwise, but there is still no finished plan to sell. Many of the questions were appeals for information. People are asking, what is going to happen? The president doesn't know. He just knows he's for it.

More noise than debate

Democratic members of Congress are taking the case for health reform to a series of "town-hall meetings". In many cases these have turned into brawls--and so far as most reporting is concerned, rage rather than the substance of the issues is now the story. Many protesters are hoping not to debate but to shut the meetings down. They carry posters of politicians with devils' horns, or of Obama with a Hitler mustache. They claim the administration wants to bring in euthanasia, among other things. It is all very ugly.

There are valid and invalid criticisms of the protesters. A bogus criticism is the Democrats' complaint that the protests are "orchestrated". No doubt they often are. But what is wrong with that? Democrats have been known to orchestrate a thing or two. Progressive groups turn up for regular strategy consultations in the White House. What is that about, if not "orchestration"? Also, directed or not, the passion of the protesters is not synthetic. They are against these bills, and they are entitled to say so.

I'd go a little further in defending them. These town halls are not really an exercise in consultation. The politicians are not asking their constituents, "What should we do about healthcare reform?" They are saying. "This is what we plan to do and why. Any questions?" The Democrats, after all, had hoped to get the whole thing done by now, no consultation required. This recess is an inconvenience not an opportunity. In that sense, the town halls are mainly for show. The politicians are not there to learn anything. I can understand the view that shouting at them is the only way to get their attention. I think a degree of frustration among the audience is justified.

Of course, the notion that the administration plans euthanasia for sick retirees is literally insane--can anybody seriously believe this? And there are many other instances of outlandish misinformation. But this does not mean that the proposed reforms give no grounds whatever for concern, as many liberals seem to believe.

In particular, the fear that standards of care for the elderly might fall has some justification. If stricter tests of cost effectiveness in health care are to be brought to bear--as they should be, in my view--spending unlimited sums on one or two low-quality end-of-life years will likely fail them. And the stricter rationing of treatments for the elderly is not a malicious fantasy of the conservative right. In systems like Britain's NHS, it is standard operating procedure.

These are difficult issues. They have to be faced. What a pity this cannot be done in a civil way, with tolerance and mutual  respect. In the US today, this is asking the impossible. The two sides don't just disagree. They loathe each other. They would literally wish to see each other destroyed. It is hard to see how you get from here to any kind of consensus.

Why Obama must break his word on taxes

My Monday column for the Financial Times argues that Obama is going to have to raise taxes on the middle class, whether he likes it or not.

"Read my lips. No new taxes." George Bush senior made that fatally memorable promise during his campaign for the White House. Later he saw that for the sake of the economy he would have to break it. When he did the right thing and went back on his word, he was vilified. It was a turning point in his presidency - his one-term presidency.

Not that Barack Obama needs reminding. He finds himself in exactly the same position. During his own run for the White House, he promised that taxes would not rise for families making less than $250,000 a year. If you are middle class, he said in his stump speech, "you will not see your taxes increased by a single dime. Not your income tax. Not your payroll tax. Not your capital gains tax. No tax". Mr Obama knows the risk if he, too, breaks his word.

But he also knows he will have to. Higher taxes on the broad middle class would be needed even without Mr Obama's long-term plans for healthcare reform, infrastructure spending and the rest. Factor those plans in, and the need is plain even on the administration's own flattering arithmetic: its budget leaves an enormous long-term deficit even after the economy has returned to full employment. Make less rosy assumptions, and the hole is bigger still.

You can read the rest of it here.

Good news on unemployment?

Friday's figures showed an unexpected fall in the unemployment rate. Is the recession over? Possibly, explains James Hamilton, but it would be wise to reserve judgment for a while yet.

Perhaps the loudest cheering over the BLS report was because the unemployment rate improved from 9.5% in June to 9.4% in July. But let's look at how the net flows behind that calculation break down. The BLS only counts you as "unemployed" if you both (1) don't have a job and (2) have taken active steps within the last 4 weeks to try to find a job. According to the household survey from which the unemployment rate is constructed, there were 155,000 Americans on net who quit or lost their jobs in July but didn't immediately look for a new job, so those people newly without jobs don't contribute positively to a higher unemployment rate. And 267,000 Americans who reported themselves to be unemployed in June still weren't working in July but had also stopped actively looking for a job, so they're no longer counted as unemployed. That last development is the reason the unemployment rate went down. But given the current environment, it's hardly appropriate to interpret the fact that many people have simply stopped looking for jobs as reflecting an improving economy. Unless we get much better employment reports in September and October than we did in August, the unemployment rate is sure to climb back up.

...but the goods are odd

Don't take my word for it. My friends will confirm that I'm married to a startlingly beautiful woman. I say this with all due modesty and not without regret. I recall a piece by Michael Lewis some years back about the drawbacks of being married to a model. (My wife is not a model but she could be if she weren't so intelligent.) Poor lad, one thought, let me be the first to sympathize. But in fact he had a point. Now and then men who meet us take me aside to demand an explanation. "What the hell is going on here?" or words to that effect. Their astonishment, frankly, can give offence.

Anyway, doubtless seeing some merit in the consensus that she would be better off elsewhere, she is currently dodging rocket fire in the more congenial surroundings of Kabul. The job brings her into frequent, er, contact with muscular security officers and assorted high-testosterone adventurers, who see precious few women of ordinary looks, let alone knockouts like my wife. So as you can imagine I often ask for a word of reassurance. She is very sweet and patient about it.

On the occasion of my most recent tantrum, she said the competition is not as formidable as I might think. As one of her women friends, reviewing the local talent, put it: "The odds are good, but the goods are odd."

Have you heard that before? I had not. What a brilliant apercu. It might be Australian, which would stand to reason. A no-nonsense people. I have been in situations where it fits the case perfectly. Perhaps it is common parlance, but if not it deserves to be.

Foreign law and Sotomayor

Warmest congratulations to the new Supreme Court justice. An inspiring, remarkable, and distinctively American story, and undoubtedly a well-deserved appointment. Soon we'll find out what kind of a justice she'll be--and what her promises (made in their time by all the other ideologically committed justices of left and right) about strict political neutrality, and applying the law rather than making it, blah, blah, blah, will mean in practice.

As always Stuart Taylor of National Journal has something interesting and important to say on the subject. I was among the many who noted (with approval) Sotomayor's statement that "American law does not permit the use of foreign law or international law to interpret the constitution". Stuart's new column points out that there may be much less to this than meets the eye.

It's clear from Sotomayor's post-testimony written answers, as well as from her April 2009 speech to the ACLU of Puerto Rico, that she would consider foreign court decisions -- precedents, that is -- "as a source of ideas... informing our understanding of our own constitutional rights."

At the outset of her ACLU speech, Sotomayor said: "I always find it strange when people ask me, 'How do American courts use foreign and international law in making their decisions.' And I pause and say, 'We don't use foreign or international law; we consider the ideas that are suggested by international, foreign law."

She added that "to the extent that we have freedom of ideas, international law and foreign law will be very important in the discussion of how to think about the unsettled issues in our own legal system" and endorsed the idea of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg "that, unless American courts are more open to discussing the ideas raised by foreign cases, by international cases, that we are going to lose influence in the world."

This could be an extremely important issue, and it looks as though Sotomayor will be on the wrong side of it. The Ginsburg view that she endorses seems indefensible, if not downright bizarre, to me. The US increases its influence in the world by making its law conform more closely to foreign laws? Eh? (This reminds me of the idea that Britain would have more influence in the world once it submerged itself more thoroughly in Europe.) More important, what concern is it of the Supreme Court whether and to what extent the US influences other countries in the first place?

North Korea tests the limits

Has ever a story suffered from so gross a surfeit of pointless analysis as Bill Clinton's trip to North Korea? Tired megalomaniac dictator trades ego-stroking photo op with former US president for two US hostages. From the American point of view: why not? Cheap at the price. But what more is there to say? Precisely nothing. Watching cable news and especially CNN give this topic blanket coverage and color commentary from all hands, for lack of anything else to report in a slow week, was sometimes almost harrowing. My favorite moment was when they broadcast the transmission test image from North Korean TV. What do they mean by those vertical bands? Gripping.

And still it goes on. Here's Fox on the Clintons-psychodrama angle. And this morning's NYT opines:

We do not know the details of Mr. Clinton's meetings, but we hope they lead to future talks. That poses a challenge for Mr. Obama: while he must pursue this opening, he must not be so desperate for a deal that he lets North Korea set all the terms. He struck the right note when he told MSNBC on Wednesday that Mr. Clinton's mission had not eased the need for North Korea to alter its behavior if it wants a "path to better relations."

A pivotal moment, all right.

Prospects for healthcare reform

Brookings' Darrell West takes an optimistic view.

Obama already has demonstrated much greater political effectiveness than Clinton. The new president is more popular than Clinton was at the six-month point. In mid-July, 1993, for example, Clinton had a 41 percent approval rating in the Gallup poll, much lower than Obama's most recent rating of 56 percent.

Four of the five relevant congressional committees actually have passed health care reform, which is not something Clinton was able to achieve. Obama's leadership style of delegating specific policy decisions to Congress has led to committee approvals and given himself maximum room for bargaining and negotiation at the end of the legislative process.

When you look at public opinion polls, there is little evidence that opposition scare tactics are working. Sixty-six percent of Americans in a recent CBS News/New York Times survey favored a "government administered" public health insurance option. This is despite private insurance industry anguish over a public option. And 55 percent believe the federal government should guarantee health insurance for all Americans. Critics who claim America should not expand the role of the government are losing that argument with the general public.

Even more striking are poll numbers revealing that voters have much greater confidence in Obama on health care than congressional Republicans. For example, 55 percent of Americans say Obama has better ideas about reforming health care, compared to only 26 percent who think that of congressional Republicans.

All good points.

Where I'm less sure is here:

If Democrats lose health care reform, the biggest victims will be Blue Dog Democrats. Since many of them represent conservative areas, they will be the ones swept out of office if liberals are disillusioned by failure and stay home in the 2010 elections. Moderate members who oppose health care reform because they worry about specific provisions should understand they have more to fear from failure than success in passing comprehensive reform.

I'm guessing that the Blue Dogs have a highly developed sense of where their electoral interests lie. I'd trust their judgment on that, if on nothing else. On the other hand, there's no denying that the outright failure to pass a measure would be a disaster for the president and his party. It's very hard to believe that a deal cannot be scrabbled together to avoid that outcome.

Obama's promise on taxes

Richard Posner wonders how tightly Obama is bound by his campaign promise not to raise taxes "by one cent" for people earning less than $250,000.

The President is a lawyer. Lawyers are masters of equivocation. Perhaps what has been taken off the table is just increases in income tax rates until the economy recovers from the current depression. Perhaps the door has been left ajar for other forms of tax increase, such as a federal value-added tax; cutting deductions (which do not affect the nominal tax rate); and increasing federal income tax rates in a year or two, when (one hopes) the Gross Domestic Product will have returned to its trend line.

Obama cast the commitment more widely than income taxes.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama said over and over that the middle class -- which he defined as anyone making less than $250,000 -- would not face any tax increase.

"If you make under $250,000, you will not see your taxes increased by a single dime. Not your income tax. Not your payroll tax. Not your capital gains tax. No tax," he said at a campaign event in 2008.

Perhaps, as Posner mentions, there is more scope for evasion on the timing, though so far as I know Obama never limited his promise to the duration of the recession.

Certainly middle-class taxes need to rise. That much is beyond dispute. And in fact Obama is already chipping away at the commitment. Taxes would rise at firms that did not provide health insurance under reform proposals he has endorsed. True, that would be a rise in the employer's tax rather than the employee's, but that is of no real significance: take-home pay would fall just the same. The individual penalty for failing to comply with a health insurance mandate is also a kind of tax. So is the rise in energy prices under cap and trade, another policy he has endorsed.

In the end, he is going to have to break his promise explicitly and the sooner he comes clean about that the better. My advice (see here and here, for instance) would be, wrap it up in comprehensive tax reform. Put the whole broken tax code on the table. My biggest fear for the US economy is that he will spend too long, ultimately in vain, trying to keep his word. That way lies fiscal ruin.

The Republicans' failure on healthcare reform

My FT column this week takes the Republicans to task for failing to play a more constructive role--or indeed any role to speak of--in the healthcare debate.

One striking aspect of the story is the role played by the Republican party - namely, no role at all.

In Congress, effective opposition to the administration has come from moderate and conservative Democrats, members of the so-called Blue Dog coalition. The independent Congressional Budget Office has also harmed the legislation's prospects by undermining the administration's claims about costs. The Democratic plans, says the CBO in its tiresomely honest way, would "bend the curve" in the wrong direction. That verdict has sunk in with the public.

But what do the Republicans think about this pivotal issue? Hard to say. How peculiar that is. The Democrats' disarray on health reform was an opportunity for the party to recover from its drubbing in the 2008 elections. Political strategy aside, it was also in the public interest that the Republicans should do their job as a functioning opposition - by offering an intelligent critique of what the Democrats were proposing and a workable policy of their own.

With Democrats all over the place on the issue, the Republicans either needed to argue that the system was not broken and did not need fixing, or else come up with a plan of their own. They have so far done neither.

Can China and the US be allies on climate change?

As I say below, an interesting possibility. The more I think about it, the more plausible it seems. This column for National Journal (the link expires in a month) is about last week's US-China talks. It mainly discusses other aspects of economic diplomacy, and only touches on climate change at the end. I'll have to come back to it.

Americans are a proud people who do not care to be bossed around. So are the Chinese. Hence [so far as most points of contention are concerned], the greater the diplomatic pressure, the less the progress. Restraint and respect will likely be more conducive to good policy than attempts to muscle the other side -- and this runs both ways.

The important exception to this is climate change. In the cases I just discussed, the mutuality of interests is exaggerated. The key to sensible policy is for the national interest to guide it. Climate change is different. There, forgive the expression, we really do sink or swim together. Whatever Al Gore may say, U.S. action on carbon emissions is going to bring little benefit to the United States unless India and China act too. Cooperation on this between the two countries is going to be vital -- the difference between success and failure.

The good news is that the prospects for this necessary cooperation are better than you might suppose. In fact, the United States might find that in China it has an ally. China has been reluctant to commit itself to internationally agreed-upon targets for carbon reductions -- but so has the United States. And the reasoning on each side is not that different. Skepticism about the mechanics of agreements like the failed Kyoto accord is exacerbated by an elevated sensitivity to infringements of sovereignty. It seems to me, as a European, that China and the United States understand each other pretty well on that topic.

Together, the United States and China could conceivably push for an international emissions-control system that is more flexible than Kyoto, putting greater emphasis on investments in new clean technologies and less on punitive sanctions against existing industries. If they chose to get together on this, the game would be up for other approaches. It is, at least, an interesting possibility.