Nancy Pelosi, Psephologist?

There are several reasons why Massachusetts elected the Republican on Tuesday, a topic I hope to cover if I have the time. However, one reason certainly isn't this bullshit explanation offered by Nancy Pelosi:

“There’s some fundamentals in there [the Senate HCR bill] that make it problematic for our members,” Ms. Pelosi said. “Some members say, and I respect this, some of the concerns that were expressed in Massachusetts were about certain provisions of the Senate bill. We want, obviously, to hear and heed what was said there and what is said across the country.”

Some of the concerns that were expressed in Massachusetts? If I interpret this correctly, she is, in effect, implying / suggesting that some people voted for Scott Brown because, after studying the details of the two bills, found the Senate version inferior to the House version and in opposition to their liberal proclivities, hence elected the Republican candidate to the Senate?

This reminds me of a line in the first season of The West Wing, the box set of which I have been plowing through the past week or so: "We don't need an opposition party; we're our own best opposition party".

UPDATE: Holy crap, a marginal percentage of voters for Brown did, in fact, follow the logic that Pelosi outlined above [see comments for details]. Astonishing, and Mea culpa. I still believe that, in this instance, the Dems should pass the Senate version, flawed as it is. Of course, Congress and the Administration are backpedalling from even that. In the bigger picture, the Administration should be more aggressive, a post I was working on this morning before lecturing . . .

. . . and this is consistent with a protest vote thesis, for which special elections are prime electoral contexts. I do wonder just how salient the preference for the public option was in these Brown voters however.

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Unteachable Moment

So I spent an entire quarter in the fall of 1999 tryin' to learn something to future UFC behemoth Brock Lesnar, and this is how he repays the effort:

Ultimate Fighting Championship heavyweight champion and former WWE superstar Brock Lesnar has slammed the Canadian health care system, referring to it as being like a Third World country, in a press conference announcing his return from diverticulitis Wednesday.

Lesnar had felt unwell for some time when he was struck down in a hunting lodge in a location he refused to disclose, only to state it was three hours from the nearest medical facility.

That unnamed medical centre, which is said to have been in Gimli, Man. (population 5797), wasn't up to the fighter's standards.

"I love Canada," said Lesnar. "Some of the best people and best hunting in the world, but I wasn't in the right facility."

"They couldn't do nothing for me," he added. "It was like I was in a Third World country, I just looked at my wife and she saved my life and I had to get out of there."

. . . "The only reason I'm mentioning this, I'm mentioning it to the United States of America because President Obama is looking for health care reform and I don't want it ... I'm speaking on behalf of Americans, I'm speaking on behalf of our doctors in the United States that don't want this to happen and neither do I."

What's hilarious about this -- aside from the known link between steroid use and perforation in diverticular disease, which I note for no special reason but rather in the way someone might randomly mention odd facts gleaned from Harper's Index -- is Lesnar's apparent belief that socialized Canadian medicine interferes with the efforts of the private sector to construct Mayo-sized facilities three hours west of places like Gimli, MB.

If Brock Lesnar's diverticulitis supplies an argument against Candadian health care, Brock Lesnar's attendance at the University of Minnesota supplies an argument against the Morrill Act of 1862.

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Things I Don't Understand

Although I'm hardly a rational choice purist, I tend to think that political actors operate according to logics that are essentially intelligible, and that they more or less respond to obvious costs and benefits. I'm not, by and large, compelled by arguments that treat an entire subset of political actors as morons; if politicians are doing something that appears to me to be stupid, I'm very often inclined to think that I don't sufficiently understand the situation, and the costs and benefits involved.

And so now, here are two things that I don't understand. I don't understand how House Democrats think that a better outcome will result from scrapping the Senate bill and starting over. While much can be accomplished in reconciliation, passing the Senate bill doesn't preclude that strategy, and in any case reconciliation has procedural and substantive drawbacks as a method of passing legislation. I certainly don't understand the idea of "calling the Senate's bluff" by pushing reform through piecemeal; the Republicans aren't bluffing, and they have both the capacity and the will to prevent action. I do get the anger. The House bill itself already represented a substantial compromise from what progressives wanted and believed was possible, and after all there's only so much shit you're prepared to eat. Still, I don't see that it's going to get any better, especially since Senate Democrats have proceeded to go wobbly, and might not even manage 51 for the key parts of the bill.

And here's the other thing that I don't understand; I don't get how anyone in the White House thinks that something useful can be achieved through bipartisanship. This makes far less sense than what the House Democrats appear to believe. It's simply insane, at this point, to treat the Republican Party as an institution that's interested in policy. Even if you do manage to make sufficient concessions to flip one or two Senate Republicans, you're not going to get any movement from the House Republican caucus. Moreover, if the White House doesn't think that it can keep progressive House Democrats in line for the current Senate bill, then how in Jeebus' name can it possibly believe that progressives will go along with the much, much worse legislation that is likely to result from a bipartisan compromise?

And so I don't get it. I've always been pretty dismissive of the idea that the Democrats can lose my vote; for me, the difference between the lesser and greater evils is always relevant, and so I'll tend to support whichever candidate is more progressive, even if I find the substantive views repellent. But if the Democrats manage to fuck this up, I'm not sure I'm on the bus anymore. I'll have to stop paying attention to politics and (shudder) do some actual work.

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Move over, Feith...

Wow. I mean, Schilling has reprehensible political taste, but the guy helped thwart two terrorist plots against the homeland Yankee World Series runs during the last decade. The next time Martha Coakley experiences brain patterns that even remotely orbit the world of baseball, she really ought to consider staring at a fixed point on the floor as a substitute for speech.

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ChiComs Under the Bed!

Al Kamen, via Jason Sigger:

This month marks the 10th anniversary of the Clinton administration's cavalier handover of the Panama Canal -- leaving an alleged front for the Chinese Red Army in control of the strategic passage -- despite the strong misgivings of some top foreign policy experts.

"If we do nothing, I can guarantee you that within a decade, a communist Chinese regime that hates democracy and sees America as its primary enemy will dominate the tiny country of Panama, and thus dominate the Panama Canal, one of the world's most important strategic points," Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) told a House subcommittee on Dec. 7, 1999, as it debated the handover.

Retired Adm. Thomas Moorer warned that China could sneak missiles into Panama and use it as a launchpad for attacking the United States. And former defense secretary Caspar W. Weinberger wrote that fall that Panama's contract with Hong Kong-based Hutchison Whampoa to control ports at both ends of the passage was "the biggest threat to the canal."

Is that a money back guarantee, Dana?

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