Whose Dream?

Peter Beinart's reaction to Bayh's resignation is...odd:

Obama’s general-election win in Indiana, along with his victories in North Carolina and Virginia, were central to his claim that he was transcending the red-blue divide, creating a new, less-polarized political map, an enduring Democratic majority of the kind that had been lost when Robert Kennedy was gunned down.

It’s this dream that, for the foreseeable future, Evan Bayh’s retirement likely forecloses. Republicans will probably take the seat, giving them both of the Hoosier State’s seats in the Senate, along with its gubernatorial mansion. Obama’s climate-change agenda is unpopular in Indiana and his health-care reform effort is not faring much better. If a conservative Democrat like Bayh fears he can’t win reelection in the state, it’s hard to imagine how Obama himself can win it again, absent a major shift in economic conditions.

Three points:

• By all accounts, Bayh's resignation wasn't driven by a fear that he would lose, and he had a commanding lead in the polls.
• I'm not sure who, exactly, dreamed that Obama's narrow victory in Indiana was anything but an anomaly. Anyone remotely knowledgeable about politics would have made the GOP overwhelming favorites there in 2012, and putting together a viable Democratic coalition hardly requires that party carry one of the most consistently Republican states in the country. I'm also not sure what RFK's ability to assemble a winning coalition in a Democratic primary has to do with anything.
• One suspects that the real "dream" here is the same one that causes people who actually get paid to write about politics for a living to indulge in ludicrous fantasies about Evan Bayh mounting a credible primary challenge to an incumbent president from the right. That is, the dream seems to be a political landscape in which one party appeals to the median voter of Indiana while the other appeals to the median voter of Alabama. Those of us who regard this as a nightmare are less likely to be broken up about Bayh picking up his ball and crying all the way home about President Obama not letting conservative Democrats and Republicans completely control Congress.
  

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Joementum 2: Electric Boogaloo

Obviously, the idea that Evan Bayh has any chance of winning a national Democratic primary is funny stuff (or pathetic, when the person making the argument is actually paid to write about politics; it's funnier coming from hapless amateurs.) But I especially enjoyed this from Lane's tribute to Bayh:

For months now, Bayh has been screaming at the top of his voice that the party needs to reorient toward a more popular, centrist agenda -- one that emphasizes jobs and fiscal responsibility over health care and cap and trade. Neither the White House nor the Senate leadership has given him the response he wanted.

Leaving aside the feigned shock about the fact that the Democratic leadership was unenthusiastic about adopting the agenda of the second-most conservative Democratic senator, you have to enjoy the idea that the "popular" strategy for the Democrats would apparently be a "jobs" program...of the "fiscally disciplined" kind adopted by Herbert Hoover and Martin Van Buren. If Congress actually adopted Bayh's ideas, his choice to run or not would be moot, given that his chances of winning would be roughly zero given the state of the economy...

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The Dean Has A Crush!

There has already been a lot of good commentary about the latest from Fred Hiatt's crayon scribbler emeritus. I think this the key part:

Her lengthy Saturday night keynote address to the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville and her debut on the Sunday morning talk show circuit with Fox News' Chris Wallace showed off a public figure at the top of her game -- a politician who knows who she is and how to sell herself, even with notes on her palm.

Yep, 2012 is going to be 2000 all over again, with a not-very-bright reactionary governor portrayed as "authentic" against elitist Democratic phonies. Kill me now.

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Etiquette Lessons

I'm still going to stick with my contention that the key variables in claiming that Obama's banal criticism of a Supreme Court opinion was somehow an "unprecedented" outrage are 1)President Obama, and 2)a Supreme Court decision the outraged parties strongly support on the merits.

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Broder-In-Training

It's actually kind of impressive how many obvious errors of analysis Charles Lane packs into a few paragraphs here:

I can't remember a more breathtaking 48 hours in politics since Barack Obama's election in November 2008. Byron Dorgan is out; Chris Dodd is out; Bill Ritter is out. Who would have thought that just one year into Obama's promising presidency, the Democrats who had pinned their hopes on him would be dangerously close to political meltdown?

[...]

Dick Morris sees a "New Two-Party System" in which centrist Democrats are getting squeezed out of a liberal party that has no real place for them any more.

That's about half right. It's more like we have four political parties stuffed into two. Roughly speaking, the Democrats consist of a liberal wing (epitomized by, say, Howard Dean) and a centrist wing (think of Arkansas's Blanche Lincoln). The Republicans include a conservative wing (e.g., Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio) and an ultra-conservative wing (Sarah Palin). These are not recent developments. Both parties have been ideological and regional coalitions for decades.

[...]

Now, however, under the Internet-intensified pressure of recession, terrorism and global uncertainty, the four parties are breaking out of the two-party mold that had previously contained them. On the Democratic side, President Obama finds himself torn between progressives demanding an ideologically pure health-care program, among other agenda items, and a pragmatic wing desperately attempting to hold together 60 Senate votes by whatever means necessary.

[...]

The past is not prologue, but party instability of this magnitude could be the harbinger of even bigger changes. The U.S. political system actually fractured into four major parties in 1860 -- and we all know what happened next.

I suppose one could just note that he quotes Dick Morris as a serious political analyst and then go home, but for the record:

• The idea that there's "no room" for centrists in the Democratic Party couldn't be more absurd. There remain plenty in the Democratic caucus, and as we've seen all too vividly they wield an enormous amount of leverage.
• What Dorgan's decision not to run again has to do with a split between progressives and "centrists" is, to put it mildly, unclear. As far as I can tell, no significant progressive blogger sees Dorgan's resignation as a good thing, he wasn't facing a primary threat, etc. etc.
• Chris Dodd was, as Senators go, progressive. And far from being part of a "political meltdown," his decision not to run makes it nearly certain that the Dems will hold a formerly vulnerable seat.
• The idea that progressives are unwilling to compromise on health care, in contrast to a "pragmatic wing" of centrists, is a near-perfect inversion of the truth. Progressives have, in fact, been willing to accept any number of odious compromises in order to get a health care bill passed. It's the Liebermans and Stupaks who are the nihilists willing to kill health care reform in order to (in the latter case) restrict abortion rights or (in the former case) indulge in unprincipled narcissism.
  
• The fact that teabaggers sometimes want the Republican Party to run more conservative candidates hardly means that they aren't willing to work within the party.
  
• All of the large, "brokerage" parties that characterize two-party systems contain tensions. But, of course, American parties are in fact far more disciplined and ideologically coherent than has been the case historically. The idea that there's an unusual degree of partly instability is utterly wrong. As for Lane's suggestion that we could be on the verge of an 1860-like party crackup -- care to make it interesting?

An impressive piece of work.

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Today In Yoosta-Bee Concern Trolling

Shorter William Daley: The Democratic coalition needs to be big enough to encompass legislators who oppose every significant item on a moderately progressive agenda, or the party is doomed.

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The Process Projection

I obviously agree with Ed Kilgore's point that voting for cloture should be the minimal acceptable standard for being a Democratic caucus member in good standing, but I think this is an especially important point:

Since 60 votes are required to “invoke cloture” and proceed to a vote, the White House strategy on health reform has oscillated between efforts to pull a few Senate Republicans across the line (shoring up “centrist” Democrats as a byproduct) to get to 60, and schemes to use budget reconciliation procedures, which prohibit filibusters.

This latter possibility has aroused dire threats of Armageddon from conservatives, most notably from New York Times columnist David Brooks, who said use of reconciliation for health reform would be “suicidal,” and would “permanently alienate independents.” Brooks cleverly conflated public misgivings about health reform with support for a filibuster, and equated a simple majority vote with an effort to “ram health care through” Congress. There is zero evidence at this point that voters are versed in the intricacies of Senate procedure, or cherish the right of 41 senators to dictate national policy.

The idea that because David Broder considers it important to adhere to whatever ad hoc procedural obstruction the Republicans have come up with means that the public cares about this stuff is absurd.

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Huh?

Via Krugman (who does a good job of explaining why a reform bill should contain a public option), perhaps someone can make heads or tails of this Joe Klein argument, because I sure can't:

I would be opposed to a system where every doctor and nurse was employed by the government. I do favor a single-payer system where the government uses tax credits to give people the money to buy health insurance.

I don't understand the first argument, but as Krugman says the most plausible explanation is that he's claiming that there's no difference between a model where the government provides insurance but providers remain private and an NHS style system. If so, this is quite mistaken, and it would also be deeply crazy to think there's any slippery slope to an American NHS. And then there's the second point -- does he think that government subsidies of private insurance would constitute a "single payer" system? I'd prefer to think he's not that unfamiliar with basic terminology at this late date, but I can't see how it makes sense any other way...

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