Taunter Media

If North Korea is an example of how to negotiate properly – indeed, if just about everything beyond our shores that is not handled by the Pentagon is being handled as well as could be hoped – the domestic agenda is an example of quite the opposite.  It is an example of a President with uncertain allies and a curiously deaf ear to both the mood of the country and his own mandate.  To take only the most recent example, on Thursday the Times reported that:

White House officials on Wednesday assured drug makers that the administration stood by a behind-the-scenes deal to block any Congressional effort to extract cost savings from them beyond an agreed-upon $80 billion.

The folks in Congress didn’t like that, so David Axlerod went to the Hill and

told Democratic senators Thursday that the administration did not make a deal with the pharmaceutical lobby that would prevent Congress from using the government’s clout to negotiate for lower drug prices, according to three Democratic senators who were in the meeting.

Unfortunately that wasn’t true (would the pharma lobby really be so crazy as to make it up out of whole cloth), so then the White House tried to square the circle with:

Congress can vote to do those things — just not as part of the health-care overhaul legislation.

Did anyone really sit down and think this one through?  How come Obama is handling health care – his signature issue, one that he had eighteen months to think through and Rahm Emanuel has been planning for fifteen years – the way Bernanke and Paulson approached the financial crisis, just back on his heels, bobbing and weaving and praying for the bell?

First, the basic truth that I assume the team now knows but seems unwilling to accept: the Republicans don’t want to pass anything.  It doesn’t matter if it’s single-payer or public option, coop or full-blown NHS nationalization; they’re against whatever Obama is for.  If Obama advocated some plan that featured single payer for people over 65 coupled with a hybrid tax-subsidized employer-based insurance for working people employed by corporations and individually purchased insurance for small business employees and the unemployed – call it the no-payer system, or the everyone-else-payer system – the Republicans would probably oppose that too, at least for the three weeks until the one guy at the Heritage Foundation who can tie his shoes figured out what’s in it.

It’s not that the Republicans are bad people or dumb people, although many of them are.  It is simply not in their interest; if it passes and works, all credit goes to the Democrats, and if it passes and fails, they voted for it too.  They can figure this much.  Plus, there’s more money in defending the status quo.

No, Obama needs to expect complete opposition.  The only Republican support he will get will come from Republicans who intend to run against the national Republican party – potentially Collins or Snowe.

Obama has also staked a lot on this one.  So far, his strategy seems to be something like this:

• Don’t scare anyone.  Keep repeating that people can keep the plans they have.  Make sure no one is scared.
• Don’t dictate anything to Congress.  Let the power structure work things out.
• Refuse to admit that any sort of tax might be increased.
• Try to buy off the pharma industry and whoever else you can.

I can see how this could have worked.  But it isn’t.

The first flawed assumption – the critical one, and something Obama should have seen coming – is that this leaves the actual product in the hands of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, the heads and tails of the coin of well-intentioned buffoonery. 

Let’s linger on Harry Reid, who makes Edouard Daladier look like Winston Churchill.  When Joe Lieberman began angling for a role in the McCain campaign, did Harry do anything?  Nope; said he was biding his time.  When he spoke at the Republican convention?  Nope.  When he went on the road and went negative on Obama?  No.  Harry said that he would deal with it after the election.  And after the election, when it came time to settle scores and Reid said Lieberman had to drop the Homeland Security chairmanship, Lieberman replied that this was an unacceptable demand.  Rather than telling Lieberman to go get the best chairmanship Mitch McConnell could offer, Reid backed down.  He wanted the practice for Roland Burris’ purchase of a Senate seat, which was so dubious that Reid announce Burris would simply not be seated.  Roland currently sits in 387 Russell, a nice spot right between Delaware and Constitution.

This was the guy who was going to deliver the Senate?  This was the guy who was supposed to deliver the centerpiece of Obama’s domestic agenda?  Harry ain’t no Lyndon Johnson.

Much as I enjoy the balanced rhetoric of Obama’s policy speeches, it’s getting to be time to take it up a notch.  Here is how he can get back on offense:

Move the goalposts

Shelby Foote was right in the Civil War documentary; Americans love to compromise.  We particularly love to split the difference, even if that is an obscene incentive to stake out the largest maximum position.  But two can play that game:

Announce that if a bill is not delivered to you that makes you happy, on January 1, 2010, you will declare by executive order that Medicare is open to all purchasers of any age (individuals or corporations) who pay the per-person cost of the service (roughly $9,500/year, based on $420bn of spending to cover 44mm people).  I’m no constitutional lawyer, but you aren’t asking for more money, you’re just defining the eligibility criteria, and how is anyone going to stop you – defund Medicare?

Medicare would initially be more expensive than typical plans, and probably not terribly popular.  But once people get the hang of having portable insurance, no risk of rescission, and realize the government is making a killing on them (they are paying at the actual loss rate of old people and consuming at the rate of young people), they will insist that the government match commercial insurance rates.

The opposition will start to feel much less confident in their maximum position.

Define the terms

The insurance industry, in case no one noticed, is not taking this quietly.  They have decided to fund the nutjobs who show up and scream at Congressional meetings.  They are in this, and they are fighting with everything they’ve got.

Good.  Punch right back.  How many people do you think have had a good experience with their insurance carrier?  People don’t defend them because they like the insurance companies, they defend them because they are terrified of the unknown thousand page government monstrosity that will replace the insurer.  This has reason; different states have good and bad DMVs, but the post office is reliably terrible, and public works projects are defined by their corruption.  Amtrak, FEMA, the Defense Department…we struggle with large organizations.

Just about the only one that works, however, is Medicare.  So why not set this up as Medicare versus the insurance company?  See, all Obama wants is for you to get Medicare now, and the insurance company is fighting against it.  Stop calling it “the public option;” we’re Americans, we don’t like “public.”  We want the Medicare option.

Start piling up victories

If there is one nugget of logic in the pharma “deal” mess, it is the reminder that bills can be passed in components.  The important thing is to get in the habit of introducing and passing bills.  I hesitate to recommend anything that increases reliance on Nancy Pelosi, but I’d pitch this to her: let’s pass something every week.  For example, pass the Taunter Drug Plan: no drug may be sold in the US at a price greater than its lowest price in every other OECD country.  The Senate may tear it up, but who cares?  I get (a) good press coverage that health care is making progress; (b) the opportunity to sit down with the pharma lobby and say “I can lean on Nancy to drop this in conference, but you need to deliver your senators for the next bill”.

Stop worrying about 60 votes

No one cares how bills get passed.  How many votes were there for rural electrification, or Medicare, or tax cuts?  This is America; we needed to make this clip because so few people even understand the general mechanics of government.

The filibuster is a hollow threat if the other side is willing to make the filibustering party carry through with it.  Indeed, it might even be welcome to have footage of Senators up all night speaking.  I’d let them do it for a couple of weeks, just to get the comparisons going to Strom Thurmond, or at least just drive them crazy.

And then just jam it through reconciliation.   Who cares about the sunset provisions?  Between now and the sunset date, the entire health care landscape will be changed.  It cannot very well be changed back.

And with that, a wonderful article full of interesting marketing advice.

UPDATE

Rahm Emanuel has a problem with leftist Democrats:

Sources at the meeting tell me that Emanuel really teed off on the Dem-versus-Dem attacks, calling them “f–king stupid.” This was a direct attack on some of the attendees in the room, who are running ads against Dems right now.

Tellingly, Rahm raised the specter of a loss on health care, sources at the meeting say — which suggests that the White House may be less certain about victory than officials allow publicly.

Now, I am to the right of the center of the Democratic Party: I don’t like card check, favor fiscal discipline, and want to reduce illegal immigration.  I have been on Daily Kos enough to know the popularity of my opinions among the truly left.

But surely the situation where health care is “lost” will be the situation where the bill is too weak, or cannot be passed under any circumstance, not that it will be too strong.  It’s not as if we should be concerned that we might accidentally come out of this with the National Health Service, and need to be reasonable and follow a Continental European model.

The people who are running ads on the left wish we had single payer.  They aren’t even asking for what they want.  They are asking for a public option, which they conceive as a compromise between single payer and doing nothing, but which White House inaction has turned into one of the two poles with co-ops in the middle.

The Blue Dogs have quite pointedly rejected the stated wishes of the overall Democratic caucus leadership, to the point that the Blue Dogs have been negotiating with the leadership – hardly the sign of a unified front.  Because of the Blue Dogs, the removal of an unwanted fetus from a woman’s body will not be covered by any government plan (heaven forbid someone get between a patient and her doctor); I presume the removal of an unwanted appendix is still permitted, but that might need more negotiation.

A robust, active left wing is of tremendous help to Rahm and anyone else trying to operate in the middle.  It gives the centrists - us – cover to say to the right “either we work something out that makes us happy or it’s going to be decided by them“.  Without that pressure, the Blue Dogs, who would be happy to have nothing happen, will simply sit by.

Rahm is an asshole.  That’s who he is.  Fine.  But be a smart asshole.