If Not ObamaCare, What?

One way or another — either by decree of an activist Supreme Court or by winning in November and repealing the Affordable Care Act — Republicans are aiming for a post-ObamaCare world. What would they do then?

Despite the rhetoric against it, ObamaCare has never been just an extension of federal power for its own sake. It is an attempt to solve a serious problem: When President Obama took office, something like 50 million Americans did not have health insurance. Millions more had hollow health insurance: Their most likely health problems were labeled “pre-existing conditions” and not covered. Also, yearly or lifetime caps on what the insurance company had to spend meant that people were only covered if they didn’t get too sick. In short, millions of Americans with some kind of insurance still faced bankruptcy if they had major health problems.

The ACA is not a perfect solution. Some people will still fall through its cracks, but ObamaCare imposes federal standards that do away with hollow insurance, and (when it fully takes effect in 2014) it will considerably shrink the pool of uninsured Americans.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether this was the best we could do, or whether the same or better results might have been achieved more efficiently with either more or less government intervention. But reasonable people can’t argue with this: If ObamaCare gets repealed, we’ll then face the same serious health-care problem that President Obama faced when he took office.

What would President Romney do about it?

The Romney campaign web site has a page about that. At first glance, it looks like a serious plan: It has 15 bullet points, each of which looks like a link to some detailed position paper. However, they aren’t links; they’re just bullet points formatted in blue.

That’s all you get.

Blanks, not bullets. A few of the 15 are standard conservative talking points that sound good but are basically empty, like capping malpractice awards. (I’ve explained before why I think this will accomplish very little. Short version: Malpractice awards themselves are a trivial part of the overall healthcare budget, and claims about “defensive medicine” don’t hold up when put to the test. States that cap malpractice awards don’t suddenly see their healthcare costs drop.)

Another empty bullet: “Prevent discrimination against individuals with pre-existing conditions who maintain continuous coverage.” Good as that sounds, it just restates what the HIPA Act established in 1996. People who spend their 20s in some Starbucks-barista type job could still be out in the cold when they finally do try to get insurance later on.

And yes, it would be nice to have “IT interoperability”, “non-litigation alternatives to dispute resolution”, and “Consumer Reports-type ratings of alternative insurance plans”, but none of that is going to help you much if you get cancer. And actually guaranteeing such stuff would be too much government intervention anyway, so Romney just pledges to “encourage” and “facilitate” these changes.

States and individuals lose power to corporations. Romney’s website highlights this quote:

I believe the better course is to empower the states to determine their own health care futures.

And yes, the substantive parts of the Romney plan do appear to move responsibility and decision-making from the federal government to states and individuals. However, when you assemble the bigger picture the bullet-points paint, the real story is that power moves to the insurance companies.

Here’s how: The federal government gets out of the standards-making business, apparently returning that power to the states. However, the bullet “Allow consumers to purchase insurance across state lines” undoes all that state power. If consumers can purchase insurance in any state, then states can’t regulate the health insurance sold to their citizens. If Vermont has high consumer-protection standards and New Hampshire low ones, then health insurance companies will only offer Vermonters policies written in New Hampshire.

You could argue that the market will provide whatever consumers demand, but we’ve seen this scenario play out before, when interstate banking was deregulated in 1999. If you have a Citicorp credit card, you send your payments to South Dakota. Bank of America payments go to Texas. That’s because those states have low consumer-protection standards. Would you like to have a Visa protected by the more consumer-friendly laws of, say, Massachusetts? Good luck with that; you won’t find one.

The same thing happened 100 years ago with corporate charters. Half of all U.S. corporations are chartered in Delaware, because Delaware won the race to the bottom.

So we know pretty well what will happen to health insurance if there are no federal standards and insurance companies can sell across state lines: States will race to the bottom until a few states say that health-insurance companies can do whatever they want. Then all policies will be written in those states. There won’t be anything you can do about it, because nobody you can vote for will have any control.

Block grants. Romney’s first bullet reads “Block grant Medicaid and other payments to states”. The cost of Medicaid is currently shared between the states and the federal government. (This article says the feds pay 60% in Texas.) For its contribution, the federal government gets to establish standards.

A block-grant approach would have the federal government say, “Here’s some money for Medicaid; spend it however you want.” By writing that check, the federal government would completely discharge its responsibility for providing health care to poor people.

The assumption behind this approach is that federal standards are inefficient. Left to its own devices, a state might get more out of the money than it does with the feds looking its shoulder. That may or may not be true, and it can work in either a conservative or a liberal direction. (Vermont is hoping for some kind of no-strings arrangement as it moves towards a single-payer system.)

But something else happens when you move the federal government out of the picture: You break the link between poor people’s health care and the Federal Reserve.

As we have seen since 2007, the federal government can borrow money in large quantities even during a financial crisis. And since dollars are created by the Federal Reserve, it is literally impossible for the federal government to go bankrupt as long as it owes dollars.

But states can go bankrupt, and the threat of bankruptcy can force them to do otherwise unthinkable things. Since 2007, states have been canceling projects and laying people off in droves — not because they wanted to destroy jobs and not because they suddenly discovered they didn’t really need teachers or firefighters or highways. But tax receipts were down, needs were up, and something had to give.

If there were no federal standards and federal money involved, Medicaid would be the obvious place to cut during a  crisis. (Texas keeps looking at abandoning the Medicaid system anyway,  even if it means losing the federal money.) Sure, some people would die, but they’re poor and don’t have press agents, so who would notice? (When did you last see a headline like “Sick homeless man dies in alley”? Do you think it never happens?) And if the poor decided to move to a more compassionate state, so much the better. Win/win.

In short, a state Medicaid program can’t provide the same security as the current system. States can promise whatever they want, but in a crisis those benefits would vanish.

And even in good times, states would feel pressure to race to the bottom. Be hard on poor people and maybe they’ll go somewhere else.

Responsibility. Everybody looks with horror at the upward-sloping trend in healthcare spending. But there are two ways to deal that trend: Figure out how to deliver care to everyone more efficiently, as most European countries do. Or push the responsibility off on somebody else, with the ultimate result that federal government won’t be held responsible when there’s no money to take care of people.

Romney wants to go in the second direction. Under President Romney, we could expect more and more people to have hollow insurance policies (written in whichever state allows the hollowest insurance). More and more people will either go bankrupt when they get sick, or will depend on state programs that go unfunded in hard times.

Stacked up against that future, ObamaCare looks pretty good.

June 18, 2012 – 12:36 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (3)

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What Senate Candidates Deserve Your Support?

Last week a Sift-reading friend told me she had set aside some money to contribute to Senate candidates, and wondered where I thought it would be best spent.

We agreed that this is a good time to contribute. In general, early money is more valuable than late money, but (if you’re like me) you’d usually rather see your money spent in the general election than during the primary. So one of best times to contribute is right after the primaries bring the race down to a Democrat vs a Republican.

There are 33 Senate races this year, but a few simple criteria will narrow down the candidates worth contributing to or volunteering for.

I’ve never claimed to be non-partisan. (I try hard to keep the Sift honest, but I’m not trying to be neutral. I write what I believe, not just what I want you to believe.) So it shouldn’t surprise anybody that my first criterion is that I’m only considering candidates who will caucus with the Democrats. (That would include independents like Bernie Sanders of Vermont and probably Angus King of Maine.) Anybody committed to vote for Mitch McConnell as majority leader is off my list.

Second, the race should be close. I love Bernie Sanders, but I expect him to win with or without me. Real Clear Politics currently rates 8 races as toss-ups: Florida, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, North Dakota, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Whether that’s your serious-support list or not depends on how optimistic/pessimistic you are about what will happen between now and November. If you expect a big Democratic surge that isn’t showing up in the polls yet, then you might want to reach for one of RCP’s “leans Republican” seats, like Arizona, where Richard Carmona currently trails by about 11%. If you expect the opposite, you might want to defend one of the “leans Democratic” candidates, like Sherrod Brown in Ohio, ahead by 8%.

I don’t really have a hunch about the trend, so I’ll stick with the toss-ups. Next, I want strong progressive voices in the Senate. I want somebody who’s going to make me proud, not just be slightly better than a Republican. That takes Bill Nelson of Florida (not to be confused with Ben Nelson of Nebraska, who is worse) off my list. He has a history of joining Republicans on issues like eliminating the estate tax, and he’s generally one of the last Democrats to get on board for things like raising the debt ceiling. So, Bill, I’ll be rooting for you on election night, but I can think of people more deserving of my time and money.

Elizabeth Warren

Two candidates that jump right out at me are Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts and Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin. Both of them will face an avalanche of out-of-state money, Warren from the financial industry and Baldwin from the religious right.

Elizabeth Warren. Warren you’ve probably heard of, even if you’re not from Massachusetts. I first noticed her when she was chair of the Senate’s TARP Oversight Committee. She did several very plain-spoken, hard-hitting interviews on Rachel Maddow’s show where she laid out exactly how opaque the program was and how few of the underlying problems were being fixed.

The best argument for putting Warren in the Senate was the Jamie Dimon testimony to the Senate Banking Committee. (More about that in the Nuggets.) Warren is exactly the person who should have been in that room.

She’s a Harvard law professor, so her opponent Sen. Scott Brown is trying to tar her with the Harvard elitist label. But she wasn’t born into the Harvard strata of society, she started in the working class and climbed the ladder. She understands ordinary people and wants to be in a position to watch their backs.

Current polls are about as close as polls can be: Brown 43.8%, Warren 43.5%. I expect Warren to win a close race for three reasons: Undecideds have a tendency to break against the incumbent, Massachusetts is a blue state, and Warren’s supporters are genuinely enthusiastic about her. But Wall Street really hates Warren, so Brown will have a lot of money to spend.

Tammy Baldwin. Unless you live in Wisconsin, you may not know much about Tammy Baldwin. She’s been in Congress for 14 years, and is the only openly lesbian congresswoman. (She was already out of the closet when she ran in 1998. Up until that time, the only gay representatives had come out while in office.) In 2010, National Journal’s ratings had her tied for being the most liberal member of the House.

Now, my first thought on hearing those facts would be: She’s going to get crushed. But so far that’s not happening. The Republican primary isn’t until August, and the RCP average has her trailing former Governor Tommy Thompson by 8.7%. But that average is skewed by a Rasmussen poll with a huge Republican bias (Thompson ahead 52%-36%).  The other two polls have her behind Thompson by manageable numbers: 4% and 6%, which could just be name recognition. Marquette University’s poll has her ahead of the other two likely Republican candidates.

There’s also no guarantee Thompson wins the primary, or gets through unscathed with the Club for Growth gunning for him. Chuck Todd sums up the race and interviews Baldwin:

Other toss-up Democrats. Claire McCaskill isn’t exactly an inspiring progressive voice. (National Journal rates her exactly in the middle as the 50th most liberal senator.) But this is Missouri we’re talking about; what did you expect? I think she’s doing as much as the voters will allow, and that holding this seat is key to holding the Senate. Polls: Rasmussen has her behind by double digits, but PPP says the race is tied.

Jon Tester in Montana is another incumbent Democrat in a Republican state. Don’t expect his support on, say, gun control. But his heart is in the right place when it comes to keeping Wall Street in check. PPP and Rasmussen disagree about who is ahead.

Immigration is likely to be a huge issue in the Nevada race. Shelley Berkley is challenging the incumbent Dean Heller, who was appointed when John Ensign resigned in disgrace. Nevada is a swing state that’s been trending blue as the Hispanic vote increases, but Republicans keep offering far-right candidates. Heller is a typical senate Republican, rated the 73rd most liberal senator. Berkley supports the DREAM Act; Heller wants to build a bigger border fence. The non-Rasmussen polls have this as a neck-and-neck race.

In Virginia, Tim Kaine vs. George Allen is a marquee match-up. Kaine has been governor and Allen senator. (Allen famously lost to Jim Webb in 2006 after the Macaca gaffe.) So far, I haven’t found anything thrilling on Kaine’s web site, and he seems to be running a vague I-was-a-good-governor campaign. But he’s narrowly ahead in the swingiest of swing states.

I confess I had never heard of North Dakota candidate Heidi Heitkamp until this morning. She’s running in a red state as a former state attorney general who fights for the people. Her web site is focused on local North Dakota issues, and I really have no idea how progressive she’d be. (She favors the Keystone Pipeline that environmentalists oppose.) Polls have her neck-and-neck with Rep. Rick Berg.

June 18, 2012 – 10:53 am Categories: Articles | Comments (3)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

OK, it’s Monday. I’m awake. The week’s articles should start appearing in 2 or 3 hours.

What was everybody was talking about this week? Greece, the Senate Banking Committee’s love-fest with bankster Jamie Dimon, the reporter who heckled the president in the Rose Garden, and the female representative who got punished for assaulting the virgin ears of the Michigan legislature by saying “vagina”. But I bookmarked a lot of other interesting stuff for this week’s Nuggets and I still haven’t decided how much of it I have space for.

In addition to the Nuggets, this week’s Sift will have two longer articles:

  • If not ObamaCare, what? Even if the Affordable Care Act survives its upcoming death match with the Supreme Court, Mitt Romney has pledged to repeal it. But his plans for replacing it are surprisingly thin. The vague principles he does endorse sound great — especially if you’re an insurance company.
  • What Senate candidates should you support? This comes from a Sift-reader’s question: Everybody’s talking about Obama vs. Romney, but the Senate is also up for grabs in November. If you have money to contribute or time to volunteer (and you don’t just want to focus on your local race), where should it go? I answer this question with two other questions: Did you know that the most liberal member of the House is running to become the first openly lesbian senator? And that her race is rated a toss-up?

And by the way: No Sift next Monday, because this week I’ll be at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in Phoenix. They tell me that our plans for protesting the Arizona anti-immigrant law do not include getting arrested, but I haven’t seen Sheriff Arpaio’s plans. And while I understand that some great writing has been done in jail, I’ll bet the wifi signal is terrible, so I’m not going to stress over getting a blog out. The Sift will return July 1.

June 18, 2012 – 7:37 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Ch-ch-changes

They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.

–  Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1977)

Changes in the Weekly Sift. It’s been almost a year since I re-formatted the Weekly Sift and moved it to weeklysift.com. I think it’s time for some changes again.

In August and September, three posts went viral, totaling over 100K of the 162K views the Sift has had all year. I think it spoiled me. Since then I’ve been searching a little too hard for the next viral post, and I think I need to shift back towards the Sift’s original mission: offering my readers a trustworthy condensation of the public debate, and saving them time by sifting through the info-stream and fetching out the occasional nugget.

The changes will be subtle. I’m still going to write my own articles when I can’t find anything that makes exactly the right point, but I’m going to refocus my efforts on serving my regular readers rather than seeking the attention of 10,000 strangers.

The obvious changes are that Short Notes has been renamed Nuggets of the Week, re-organized, and moved to the top of the blog. I’ve also added a Monday Morning Teaser to preview the day’s articles for those who come early. And when I don’t have changes to explain, the weekly summary will be shorter than it used to be.

In this week’s sift:

  • Nuggets of the Week. Everybody was talking about the Wisconsin recall, Ray Bradbury, and the transit of Venus, but other stuff was also worth your attention: what an oil pipeline break looks like, an anti-rape video from Scotland, the commencement speech you should have heard, how crazy Americans look to Germans, articles based on Chris Hayes’ and Joseph Stiglitz’s new books, the Netroots Nation videos, a fabulous photo from Milky Way Scientists, and more.
  • What Happened in Wisconsin? After all that, Scott Walker stays in office. How bad were the results? Should Obama be worried about carrying Wisconsin? Should we all be worried about the unprecedented money Walker raised and spent? And can you really buy an election with that much money? How?
  • Demonizing the Girl Scouts. It looks like the Catholic Church is joining right-wing Protestants in villainizing the Girl Scouts. Partly it’s the whole female-empowerment thing. But it’s also part of a larger pattern. Increasingly the Religious Right sees the American melting pot as a caldron of contamination.
June 11, 2012 – 1:37 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Post a comment

Nuggets of the Week

Everybody was talking about …

The Wisconsin recall election, of course, but I’ve already written about that today.

Remembering Ray Bradbury. In 2012, we take for granted that you can find really good writing in genre fiction. Salman Rushdie writes childrens’ books, SciFi has Neal Stephenson, fantasy China Mieville, and so on.

Thank Ray Bradbury for that. Most pre-Bradbury scifi writers didn’t mess with sissy techniques like metaphor, while “serious” authors stayed far away from time travel or outer space. Ray started breaking down that wall, and the rest is history.

Obits were everywhere. The NYT’s was as good as anybody’s.

The transit of Venus. Venus passed between the Earth and the Sun Tuesday, making a black dot on the Sun if you had the right eyewear. Don’t worry if you missed it; you can catch it again in 2117.

Time-lapse photo of actual transit

A transit-of-Venus pizza

… but a lot of other stuff was also worth your attention:

Here’s what it looks like when an oil pipeline breaks. This one is in Alberta and was discovered Thursday night.

A popular right-wing meme is “How can we expect the government to do X when it can’t even run the Post Office?” AlterNet explains why the Post Office would be doing fine if not for “phantom accounting”.

Nate Silver presented his state-by-state prediction model for the presidential election. Current prediction: Obama wins 291.8 electoral votes to Romney’s 246.2. (Decimals appear because Nate weights his averages by the confidence of his prediction. So his 63.4% confidence that Obama wins Virginia’s 13 electoral votes adds 8.2 EVs to Obama’s column and 4.8 to Romney’s.) He followed up with a summary of how different organizations’ electoral forecasts disagree.

This anti-rape video from Scotland is both clever and effective.

Secret space plane? How cool is that? Next they’re going to tell us that Hal Jordan has test-flown it.

If you didn’t like the commencement speech at your graduation, why not overwrite that memory with a better one? Here’s the speech Atul Gawande gave at Williams. Atlantic links you to video of speeches by Neil Gaiman, Jane Lynch, President Obama, Steve Carell, Aaron Sorkin, and Fareed Zakaria.

After the LinkedIn password disaster, you may be looking to create new passwords that are easy to remember and hard to crack. Salon’s Farhad Manjoo explains a good technique, though he is misinformed about how recent it is.

Two articles that capture how different things look in Germany: Der Spiegel explains how crazy our American fear of national health care looks to Germans. Yes! magazine describes Germany’s plan to invest $270 billion in replacing all of its nuclear power with renewable energy.

To see how Germany views labor unions and public property, check out Thomas Geoghagan’s Were You Born on the Wrong Continent, which I reviewed in September, 2010.

Looking for transit-of-Venus photos led me to the Facebook page of Milky Way Scientists, who have a great photo collection.

The Nation gives Chris Hayes space to preview the argument of his new book The Twilight of the Elites. I think I’m going to have to read this.

Summary: A genuine meritocracy would have a lot of inequality (as talented people move to the top), but also a lot of mobility (as talented children rise from the lower classes). But what would happen after the elites gained enough power to keep inequality while shutting down mobility?

Such a ruling class would have all the competitive ferocity inculcated by the ceaseless jockeying within the institutions that produce meritocratic elites, but face no actual sanctions for failing at their duties or succumbing to the temptations of corruption. It would reflexively protect its worst members; it would operate with a wide gulf between performance and reward; and it would be shot through with corruption, rule-breaking and self-dealing, as those on top pursued the outsized rewards promised for superstars.

Sound familiar?

Nobel-Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz is also thinking about the elite in his Vanity Fair article, also based on a recent book:

Put sentiment aside. There are good reasons why plutocrats should care about inequality anyway—even if they’re thinking only about themselves. The rich do not exist in a vacuum. They need a functioning society around them to sustain their position.

Like me, you probably didn’t make to Providence for the Netroots Nation conference. Wasn’t it good of them to put so many of the videos online?

Steve Almond raised an interesting question in the NYT’s Sunday magazine: What if liberals doggedly pursued our own agenda, and stopped letting clowns like Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin distract us?

This is something I wrestle with in the Sift: When do you need to know what the other side is saying, and when does a story just titillate your rage to no constructive purpose? (Comments welcome. Feel free to take today’s Girls Scouts article as an example.)

June 11, 2012 – 12:37 pm Categories: Short Notes | Comments (3)

What Happened in Wisconsin?

Short version: The long anticipated recall of Governor Scott Walker fizzled. Walker won the rematch against Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett by almost exactly the same margin (53%-46%) as their 2010 race.

Longer version: Split decision. The Democrats appear to have won one of the four state senate recall elections. The Republican hasn’t conceded and a recount seems likely, but if the 779-vote margin holds up, Democrats will control the Wisconsin senate.

So the upshot is that the union-busting Walker has already done will stand for another two years, as will his education cuts and the voter suppression law (if it ultimately survives its court challenge). But Walker won’t get any new shenanigans through the legislature until at least 2013, if then. That’s a big improvement on the way things were when the demonstrations started in February, 2011. Then Walker had solid majorities in both houses and could do pretty much whatever he wanted.

What it means. Everybody has been working hard to spin the result. Republicans want it to be a vindication of Walker’s policies and a sign that Romney can win Wisconsin in the fall. Democrats want to read it either as a rejection of the recall process itself, with little meaning for President Obama or even for Walker’s re-election in 2014, or as a sign of the Citizens United apocalypse, in which massive contributions from the very wealthy can buy a result.

Exit polls. The big reason to doubt Obama is in trouble in Wisconsin is Tuesday’s exit poll: Obama over Romney 51%-44%.

Republicans spin this by claiming the poll had a Democratic bias:

Considering the exit polls the media relied on showed a razor-thin difference between Walker and his Democratic opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, the logic behind some huge lead for Obama, produced by the same exit polls, melts away. Walker defeated Barrett by a 7-point margin.

Apply that same analysis to Obama’s 7-point lead in the same exit polls and the race in Wisconsin is actually closer to being dead even.

This point is bogus. The early exit poll, reflecting only people who voted in the morning, showed a neck-and-neck race between Walker and Barrett. But Obama’s 7-point lead comes from the final exit poll, which shows Walker winning by about the right margin. (Atlantic’s Molly Ball describes how exit polls work.)

Doubting the process. Walker got 53% of the vote. But according to the exit poll, 70% of the voters were dubious about whether a recall was appropriate at all. Of the 10% who said a recall was “never” appropriate, 94% voted for Walker. 60% believe in recalls “only for official misconduct”; Walker got 68% of their votes.

I think the wording of the choices skewed this result a little. The only other option — that a recall is appropriate “for any reason” — is too loose.  The actual justification for the recall — that compared to Walker’s radical policies, his vaguely conservative 2010 campaign amounted to fraud — might have gotten more than 27% agreement.

Still, it does seem that many voters set Walker a lower bar than he’d face in a regular election. For them, the question wasn’t whether Walker or Barrett would be a better governor, but whether Walker had done anything so egregious that the 2010 election should be overturned.

A good comparison here was the Clinton impeachment. Many people who disliked Clinton’s policies and thought his sexual escapades were shameful nonetheless believed that impeachment was unwarranted.

Not like Ohio. Another instructive comparison is Ohio, where Governor Kasich’s similarly vague cut-spending/create-jobs 2010 campaign led to a similarly radical ALEC agenda after the election. As in Wisconsin, Kasich’s attack on workers’ rights led to a popular backlash.

But Ohio’s constitution allows the voters to go after laws directly. So last November Ohio repealed Kasich’s anti-union S.B. 5 in a referendum by a 61%-39% margin.

In Wisconsin, the voters’ only recourse was to recall the people it had just elected, and the recall couldn’t begin until the officials had served a year in office. As a result, Tuesday’s recall was the culmination of more than a year of political turmoil: Democratic senators escaping to Illinois to deny Walker a quorum, the April 2011 Supreme Court election, and the state senate recall elections of last summer.

So it’s not surprising that some fed-up voters would be angry the recall itself. As one questioner at Netroots Nation’s Wisconsin post-mortem panel commented Friday: “If Wisconsin had had the same mechanism as Ohio, if we’d been able to go directly after the law, we would have gotten the same result.” (I watched the session’s livestream and haven’t re-watched the tape, so my quotations are only approximate. The fuzzily-sourced quotes below are due to my sketchy notes.)

Madison was the first Occupation

The message disconnect. The massive demonstrations in Madison in 2011 were the prototype for Occupy Wall Street. The Wisconsin protests had the same grass-roots, horizontally organized structure and the same independence from parties and candidates. As Harry Waisbren put it at Netroots Nation:

This movement is not about electing Democrats, it’s about ending the corporate subversion of our democracy.

But that led to a problem: The Occupy-style grass-roots movement was great at collecting one million signatures for the recall-Walker petition. But as soon as that petition was filed, the focus of the process necessarily shifted to electing Democrats — precisely what the movement is not about. Election campaigns continue to be top-down political-consultant-driven operations.

Things got worse after the primary, which was won by the centrist Barrett rather than the activists’ favorite candidate, Kathleen Falk. So rather than a referendum to restore workers’ rights, public education, and environmental protections, the campaign became a generic do-over of the 2010 Walker/Barrett race. As one Netroots Nation panelist put it:

Barrett never really focused on the messages that were coming up from the grass roots.

Now, maybe Barrett looked at his polling and decided those issues were losers. Who knows? But as a result, the logic of the recall slipped away. “The narrative was lost,” Waisbren commented. That led directly to the sense of the recall’s illegitimacy that was expressed in the exit poll.

Walker’s money advantage. This was the most expensive campaign in Wisconsin history, and Walker had an overwhelming money advantage. Mother Jones provides this chart:

In addition to these millions, millions more were spent by outside groups like the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity on “issue ads” that couldn’t directly say “Vote for Walker”, but left little doubt who you should support. All told, the Center for Public Integrity estimates that $63.5 million was spent. Walker’s ads started appearing back in November. As one Netroots Nation panelist said:

No one who lives in Wisconsin could doubt that Walker owned the airwaves.

What money can do. A lot of people are skeptical that it’s possible to buy an election. History is full of well-financed candidates who went nowhere, like Rudy Giuliani in 2008 or Phil Gramm in 1996. As Giulani now says:

Campaign spending doesn’t mean anything because you can spend it incorrectly.

Similarly, Rudy could say that being seven feet tall doesn’t mean anything in basketball, because you might be clumsy. But what if you’re not? What can you do with a cash advantage like Walker’s if you spend it correctly?

Obviously, nobody’s going to vote for Walker just because they’ve heard “Vote for Walker” 100 times and “Vote for Barrett” only 10-15 times. Where Walker-level money comes into play isn’t just in repetition, it’s in re-defining reality.

The jobs issue was a key example. The slogan of Walker’s controversial 2011 budget was “Wisconsin is Open for Business“. His agenda’s whole point was that industry would create jobs if the state cut corporate taxes, broke unions, and stopped protecting workers and the environment.

It hasn’t worked. The Wisconsin Budget Project looked at statistics from the Federal Reserve and concluded:

If we use December 2010 as our baseline for analysis, the newly released data indicate that only one other state (Alaska) has experienced slower growth than Wisconsin.

And Bloomberg News — hardly a left-wing outfit — reported:

Wisconsin was ranked last among states and the District of Columbia in economic health in 2011, the first year of Walker’s tenure, according to the Bloomberg Economic Evaluation of States.

Walker didn’t like those numbers, so he made up his own. The Bureau of Labor Statistics said Wisconsin had lost 33,900 jobs. But Walker’s re-analysis said that Wisconsin had gained 23,321 jobs. And then he blanketed the airwaves with this ad:

As Netroots Nation panelist Emily Mills pointed out, any state could adjust its numbers in the same way:

Whatever metric you use on jobs, if you apply the same metric to every state, Wisconsin is still dead last.

But nobody had millions of dollars to spread that message across the state, so Walker’s message stood.

That’s Wisconsin’s lesson for the post-Citizens-United era: The best use of money in politics is to define reality. Don’t just tell citizens to vote for you, create a virtual world in which voting for you makes sense.

What it means for November. Mitt Romney has a lot of disadvantages: He’s not very likeable. He’s a bad campaigner who has a habit of saying things like “I like to be able to fire people” and “I’m not concerned about the very poor.” He’s a wooden debater who has yet to appear outside the conservative bubble. He has taken a lot of radical right-wing positions that he’ll have a hard time running away from. And he’s the poster boy for income inequality and financiers run amok.

But you have to give Romney this: He knows how to raise vast amounts of money and bury his opponents with it. And he has no scruples about redefining reality.

Limitless amounts of money are going to be spent in the fall. And while Obama is no slouch as a fund-raiser, he’s going to be outspent by a wide margin, especially if you count the corporate-funded outside groups like the Chamber of Commerce and Karl Rove’s Crossroads, whose ads I’ve already seen repeatedly during the NBA playoffs.

The bulk of that money isn’t going to be spent saying “Vote for Romney”. It’s going to be used to redefine reality. Millions already believe (falsely) that Obama raised their taxes, that he cut defense, that he isn’t really an American citizen, that he’s secretly Muslim, that the stimulus didn’t create jobs, and on and on and on. By November, millions more will believe other false things that make it logical to support Romney over Obama.

In Wisconsin, Obama currently benefits a little from Walker’s redefinition of reality: If the Wisconsin economy is getting better, maybe Obama isn’t so bad.

But now that Walker is safe until 2014, the up-is-down campaign will reverse itself. Wisconsinites can expect to start hearing that they’re in a depression, that things were never this bad under President Bush, and so on. It will make a difference.

A 7% difference? Too soon to tell.

June 11, 2012 – 11:56 am Categories: Articles | Comments (4)

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Demonizing the Girl Scouts

An outrageous part of the culture war that isn’t getting enough press is the Religious Right’s demonization the Girl Scouts. The gist of the attack (found here) is typical guilt-by-association stuff: If there’s some reason to name the Girl Scouts in the same sentence as Person X or Organization Y, then the Scouts are responsible for anything X or Y can be accused of doing.

Last month, Catholic bishops joined in by starting an investigation. Like Americans in general, about 1/4 of Girl Scouts are Catholic, and many Scout troops are associated with Catholic parishes. What are the bishops worried about? The WaPo explains:

Critics of the Girl Scouts contend their materials shouldn’t have any links to groups like the Sierra Club, Doctors Without Borders and Oxfam, or other groups that support family planning and contraception. Other critics are unhappy that the American Girl Scouting organization is a member of an international scouting association that supports contraception access.

Some parents have reported that when their daughters go out to sell Girl Scout cookies, they have had doors slammed in their faces by people refusing to buy their treats because they think the profits go to support abortion and birth control.

Why would people think that? Because the Right has been linking the Girl Scouts to that demon of demons, Planned Parenthood. (Indiana Congressman Bob Morris called the Scouts “a tactical arm of Planned Parenthood”, and his regional Girl Scout organization responded.) How can anyone argue with logic like this from the Washington Times?

The best evidence that the Girl Scouts have not actually severed ties with Planned Parenthood is that Planned Parenthood has not tried to destroy them.

(Weirdly, the guilt-by-association thing doesn’t apply to the Washington Times itself, which was founded by the Moonies in 1982 and has been owned and operated by them ever since. The Religious Right is fine with the WT being America’s flagship conservative newspaper.)

A good overview of the actual Girl Scouts and why they enrage the Right was published last September on Slate.  From the beginning, Amanda Marcotte argues, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts were set on different paths.

While scouting for boys was about preserving the tradition of rugged, outdoorsy masculinity, scouting girls looked to the future, shucking off Victorian models of women as delicate flowers and replacing them with physically capable and adventurous women. …

These origins set the two organizations on strikingly different paths, despite their common emphasis on physical activity and volunteerism. The Boy Scouts still employ a nostalgic worldview, while the Girl Scouts focus more on keeping with the times.  …

It’s telling that Christian right critics avoid dealing directly with the group’s “go girl!” brand of empowerment, choosing instead to promote lurid tall tales. Maybe their tactic amounts to a tacit acknowledgement of just how mainstream the Girl Scouts’ feminism is, and just how far from the mainstream the anti-feminist views of the Scouts’ Christian right critics have become. The Girl Scouts focus on building self-esteem, teaching girls to care for their health, and promoting educational opportunities that help the girls’ economic futures. Its Christian right critics cling to a tradition where women exist primarily to serve.

This is part of a larger pattern: Increasingly, the Christian Right is rejecting the traditional American model of a melting pot and embracing a kosher-kitchen view of society, in which everything must be in its proper cabinet, safe from contamination.

Any organization founded on the view that we can put aside doctrinal differences to pursue common goals — Girl Scouts, public schools, public universities, umbrella charities like the United Way, and so on — is targeted either for takeover, destruction, or replacement by a group that has been cleansed and purged. (The most absurd replacement is Conservapedia, which is necessary because Wikipedia is unclean.) The attack is always the same: These groups mix us. They expose us to the views of others. They stir our time, money, and effort into the same pot with the time, money, and effort of people who might disagree with us on other issues.

For example, the Right’s problem with the Susan Komen Foundation wasn’t that Komen funded abortions. (It’s an anti-cancer organization that has nothing to do with abortion.) But by mixing with the anti-cancer activities of Planned Parenthood, Komen became unclean. It has to be purified, destroyed, or pushed beyond the pale before it in turn contaminates the righteous women who want to cure breast cancer.

Girl Scouts is a melting-pot organization. Girls who might have different beliefs or goals or heroines mix together around the common goal of maturity, empowerment, and making the world a better place. But as they color their visions of a better world, girls might discover outside-the-lines groups like the Sierra Club or Doctors Without Borders.

Contamination! Unclean! Unclean!

June 11, 2012 – 10:26 am Categories: Short Notes | Comments (3)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

I’ve noticed that traffic on the Weekly Sift home page increases on Monday mornings, as people wonder when the week’s articles will come out. Some weeks take me longer than others, and I can never guess when some last-minute detail or glitch will hang me up for an hour or so. So I’ve decided to add a new feature for the early arrivers: “The Monday Morning Teaser”, which will go up first thing in the morning and tell you what articles to expect later in the day. (I intend for the Teaser to be brief. This Teaser is unusually long because I’m explaining what it is.)

This week’s Sift will have some other changes, which I’ll explain in the summary post: The usual Short Notes post is renamed “This Week’s Nuggets” and will come out last rather than first, so that when the day’s postings are complete it will sit right under the summary, rather than coming out first and sitting at the opposite end from the summary.

Rather than beginning with its own lead article, I plan for each week’s Nuggets to start with a “What Everybody Was Talking About” segment that will quickly link to the best articles I’ve found about stories you’ve undoubtedly already seen a headline about. (If the story was over-hyped, the best article about it might be a satire or a cartoon.) What was everybody talking about this week? Wisconsin, the death of Ray Bradbury, and the transit of Venus.

In addition to the Nuggets, this week’s Sift will have two longer articles:

  • What Happened in Wisconsin? will examine the various spins people are putting on Scott Walker’s victory in Tuesday’s recall election. What does this result say about the strengths and weaknesses of the liberal grass-roots movement that was the prototype for Occupy? What does it mean for the Obama/Romney race in November?
  • Demonizing the Girl Scouts. I want to throw a little light on a corner of the culture wars that doesn’t get nearly enough attention: In May the Catholic bishops started an investigation of the Girl Scouts, for the purpose of determining whether Catholic parishes should continue to sponsor troops or otherwise cooperate. The bishops may be joining Protestant right-wingers, who for years have been demonizing the Girl Scouts as a radical-feminist, anti-traditional-values organization.

I still haven’t named the weekly summary or chosen a quote for it.

June 11, 2012 – 7:45 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

The Authority of Women

The authority of women’s speech does not come, finally, from political roles or
ecclesial position, but from the truth of words spoken, the authenticity of the
speaker, and the relationship of trust and genuine concern that allows one to speak
not only words of encouragement, but also words of challenge.

– Mary Katherine Hilkert,
Speaking with Authority (2001)

In this week’s sift:

  • Challenging the Inquisition. The Inquisition never died, it just changed its name to the Congregation for the Defense of the Faith. Today the CDF is attacking the Leadership Council of Women Religious, which represents most American nuns. But rather than meekly submitting, the nuns are demanding a meeting with the Grand Inquisitor, as if he were the one with something to fear. As American Catholics rally around the sisters, maybe he is.
  • Who Can Obama Kill? If you want to kill American citizens, at the absolute minimum you should have to convince somebody who doesn’t work for you.
  • Carolina Rules the Waves and other short notes. North Carolina considers ordering planners to ignore rising seas. Adopt a uterus. Indiana charges a suicide-survivor with murdering her fetus. Everything is about race now. Who’s worth talking to about women’s health? Men. The spending increase that never happened. And more.
  • Book recommendation of the week. Evolving in Monkey Town by Rachel Held Evans. Evans grew up in Dayton, Tennessee, site of the Scopes Monkey Trial. She went to William Jennings Bryan College and learned how to defend a “Biblical worldview”. Then she had an unexpected attack of compassion for the people who are going to Hell, and everything started to change.
  • Last week’s most popular post. Food-eaters are not a special interest group got 166 views. The most-clicked link was to the blog Food Politics.
  • What you can do. It’s get-out-the-vote time in Wisconsin. The Scott Walker recall election is tomorrow and it’s close. You can still help phone bank.
June 4, 2012 – 1:53 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (2)

Challenging the Inquisition

In April I linked to a Religious News Service article about the Vatican’s attempt to rein in American nuns. Boiled down, Rome’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (or, as it was called in its glory days, the Inquisition) complained that the nuns were thinking for themselves rather than letting the bishops think for them, and letting human suffering distract them from fighting the culture wars.

Rome’s solution was to put a man in charge of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious*, which represents 45,000 American nuns. Seattle Archbishop Peter Sartain, will (in his own words) “review, guide and approve, where necessary, the work of the L.C.W.R.”

Picking up the gauntlet. Apparently, LCWR will not take this meekly. After a three-day meeting, LCWR’s board released a statement saying (more or less) that the Inquisitors don’t know what the Hell they’re talking about:

[LCWR] board members raised concerns about both the content of the doctrinal assessment and the process by which it was prepared. Board members concluded that the assessment was based on unsubstantiated accusations and the result of a flawed process that lacked transparency. Moreover, the sanctions imposed were disproportionate to the concerns raised and could compromise their ability to fulfill their mission. The report has furthermore caused scandal and pain throughout the church community, and created greater polarization.

Unsubstantiated accusations, lack of transparency, and a flawed process, leading to disproportionate sanctions that cause scandal and pain … who would expect this from the Inquisition, given its sterling historical reputation?

LCWR’s president and executive director plan to go to Rome on June 12 to “raise and discuss the board’s concerns” with Sartain and his boss, Prefect (or, as the office used to be called, Grand Inquisitor) Cardinal William Levada.

Even after meeting the Grand Inquisitor face-to-face, the LCWR does not promise to obey, but only to “gather its members both in regional meetings and in its August assembly to determine its response”.

Conscience vs. obedience. So far, the Inquisition show no signs of being worried about the nuns’ response. Sartain’s recent article in the Catholic weekly America reads like the kind of flattery you shower on subordinates you expect to have no trouble with. (“That’s a good girl. Daddy’s proud of you.”**) He refers only obliquely and abstractly to his new role and mission, while effusively praising the obedient nuns of the past.

But in spite of having all the institutional power on its side, perhaps the Inquisition should be worried. A responding America article from Fordham University ethics professor Christine Firer Hines (not a nun) paints a more challenging picture:

Catholics sometimes compare the church to a corporation or a military organization, with clergy, religious, and laity answerable to bishops and pope as their top executives and CEO. From this (ecclesiologically dubious) vantagepoint, “wayward” behavior of L.C.W.R. members or their affiliates endangers the church’s discipline, and requires firm correction …

As Vatican II affirms, the episcopal office uniquely serves the revealed truth of the gospel. But that truth resides in and with the whole church. Beholden to military or business organizational models, pundits who deride L.C.W.R. sisters for posturing falsely as a “magisterium of nuns” disrespect the authentic authority not only of religious communities, but of the laity in their various charisms and vocations. Because the official magisterium does not have a monopoly on gospel truth, office-holders must constantly listen for that truth in the whole church …

From this point of view, the Vatican intervention, intended to “assist the L.C.W.R. in implementing necessary reforms” to bring it more fully in line with “an ecclesiology of communion,” cannot be properly understood as a one-way street. The very meaning of “communion” forbids this. … If bridges toward communion are to be strengthened in this process, what John Paul II calls the “dialogue that leads to repentance” must work in both directions.

In addition to implying that Rome’s treatment of women might have left it with something to repent, Hines’ implicit framing (“the magisterium” vs. “the whole church”) invites lay Catholics to interpret the hierarchy’s disrespect for the nuns as disrespect for them as well: Only the conscience of a bishop is valid; all others must simply get in line.

On the blog Catholic Moral Theology, St. John’s University theology professor Christopher Vogt uses similar framing:

It seems to me that one of the questions at the heart of this controversy is whether acting in conscience is primarily about being obedient to authority or about conscientious discernment.

He quotes the Inquisition’s assessment of LCWR:

Some speakers claim that dissent from the doctrine of the Church is justified as an exercise of the prophetic office.  But this is based upon a mistaken understanding of the dynamic of prophecy in the Church: it justifies dissent by positing the possibility of divergence between the Church’s magisterium and a ‘legitimate’ theological intuition of some of the faithful.

The assessment denies that possibility, leading Vogt to comment:

According to this framework, there is no possibility for the bishops ever to learn anything from the laity.  The bishops are never wrong; they don’t need any help.  Such a view collapses the tension we find in the [Second Vatican] Council documents which try to balance an affirmation of the importance and legitimacy of magisterial authority with the recognition that sometimes the Holy Spirit speaks authentically to the faithful in a manner that doesn’t pass through Rome – in the depths of their hearts.

It’s not just lay Catholic intellectuals who have taken up the nuns cause. The NYT reports:

Catholics in more than 50 cities held vigils and more than 52,000 have signed a petition in support of the sisters, organized by the Nun Justice Project, a coalition of liberal Catholic groups. The project is telling Catholics to withhold their donations to Peter’s Pence, a special collection sent to the Vatican, and give the money instead to local nuns’ groups.

Whose religious freedom? This argument comes at a time when the hierarchy is invoking “religious freedom” against the contraception provisions of Obamacare. But they defend an odd kind of religious freedom that America’s Founders would barely recognize: the freedom of religious institutions, a right virtually unrelated to (and sometimes at odds with) the consciences of individuals who are not bishops.

Meanwhile, Sister Carol Keehan, head of the Catholic Health Association — a consortium of organizations more directly affected by the contraception mandate — was happy with the compromise the Obama administration offered:

We are pleased and grateful that the religious liberty and conscience protection needs of so many ministries that serve our country were appreciated enough that an early resolution of this issue was accomplished.

Commonweal, a left-leaning Catholic political journal, described the bishops’ argument as “hyperbolic” and warned:

If defending religious freedom becomes a partisan issue or, worse, an electoral ploy, it will engender enormous cynicism in an electorate in which a significant majority of voters already think religion is too politicized. … In their simplistic rhetoric, the bishops sound more like politicians than pastors.

Catholic Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne commented: “Many bishops seem to want this fight.” And on the NYT Opinionator blog, Notre Dame philosophy professor Gary Gutting first dissects the bishops’ arguments, then says:

their often demagogic reaction suggests political rather than religious concerns. There is, first, the internal politics of the Church, where the bishops find themselves, especially on matters of sexuality, increasingly isolated from most Church members; they seem desperate to rally at least a fervid core of supporters around their fading authority. But the timing of their outbursts also suggests a grasp for secular political power.

The wider issue. The Commonweal editorial quotes research from sociologists David Campbell and Robert Putnam showing that the politicization of churches is causing young adults to disengage from organized religion, a message similar to the one David Kinnaman (president of the evangelical Protestant research organization the Barna Group) put forward in the 2007 book unChristian. 

A similar message based on personal experience was in the blog post “How to win a culture war and lose a generation” I linked to two weeks ago, in which Rachel Held Evans described her 20-something generation as “ready to stop waging war and start washing feet”.

This is an issue that crosses denominational lines. In one sense, it is Christianity’s perennial doctrinal purity vs. good works conflict. But it seems to be striking this generation with particular force. More and more young adults want to know not which religion is winning or even which religion is right, but whether any religion does any good.

Through their lives of service, the nuns are showing one way to answer that question. The bishops seem deaf to it.***

* Translation from the Catholic: religious in this context comes from the Latin religata, meaning bound. In other words, these are not just women who have “got religion”, but women bound by their vows to the Church; i.e., nuns.

** Not a direct quote.

*** Probably you’ve already run into the story of Cardinal Dolan’s threat that Catholic organizations will halt their charitable work rather than comply with the contraception mandate. I’m not linking to that claim because I still haven’t found an unedited tape or transcript of enough of Dolan’s remarks to convince me he wasn’t taken out of context.

June 4, 2012 – 1:40 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (1)

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