Health Care And The Hillary Counterfactual

A lot of people are wondering how health care reform would've gone differently if Hillary Clinton had been president. It's a question that interests people because Democratic primary voters had a choice between her and Obama, and we want to know if we did the right thing.

But there's a slightly different question that's actually more relevant to our choice. How would health care reform have gone if we had nominated Hillary Clinton? And here I think the answer is: significantly worse.

The big question I have about a world where we nominate Hillary is: Does Al Franken still win the Minnesota Senate race? After a long recount, dragged out by Republican legal challenges aimed at keeping Democrats down a Senate seat, Franken prevailed by 312 votes out of nearly 3 million cast. With a margin so thin, the question of who's at the top of the ticket could very well have made the difference.

There's some reason to think that Obama was more appealing to Minnesota voters than Hillary was. (I think Nick made this argument at some point but I can't find it.) Looking back at the primary, Hillary's strength was concentrated in the Appalachians. Obama did better in areas with either a high black population or a large number of college-educated voters, and Minnesota falls squarely into the latter category. If who does better in the primary is a good proxy for who's going to get a bit of extra base turnout, and thus who gives Franken better coattails, it looks like Obama might've put Franken over the top. And then when it came time to get 60 in the Senate, Franken put health care reform over the top.

I don't think there's any similarly close Senate race we lost where Hillary would've tipped the balance in the other direction. In general, coattail effects probably aren't very large. It's just that this race was incredibly tight, so a bunch of small things made the difference. And that's what eventually allowed us to break the filibuster and pass health care reform.

The Cheese Standard

Problem 1: The World Bank head promotes an international currency system based on gold.

Problem 2: The USDA promotes overconsumption of cheese, in tension with its anti-obesity drive.

Both of these are bad ideas from authorities who should know better. But with minor modifications, we can unite both of these foolish proposals into a superior one. Namely: a new international monetary order based around the Cheese Standard.

In an economic environment characterized by high unemployment and low to negative inflation, gold is inferior to cheese as a medium of exchange. Since cheese can't be stored indefinitely, it must be spent quickly, stimulating the economy and boosting employment. Gold has exactly the opposite properties. And as a medium of exchange whose supply is relatively fixed and beyond any government's immediate control, gold leaves expansionary monetary policy unable to help anyone.

And that's how I answer Robert Zoellick's demands for a Gold Standard. He may press upon the brow of labor a crown of cheese. But he shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.

Leadership Races

It looks like Nancy Pelosi will continue as leader of the Democratic caucus. And that is good.

The interesting question concerns the Minority Whip election, where it appears to be James Clyburn versus Steny Hoyer. Pelosi and Hoyer have an odd relationship as rivals who fight against each other during each major leadership race, but then work together perfectly well when the fighting is done. The most well-known recent case is when Pelosi supported Murtha's run against Hoyer for the majority leadership back in 2006. My take on that is just that Murtha had done a favor for Pelosi (leading the charge against the Iraq War) so Pelosi felt obligated to pay him back. But you wouldn't know it from what happened over the next few years, they worked together more or less seamlessly on major issues. Now Clyburn appears to be running with tacit Pelosi support against Hoyer.

Despite being the pro-business candidate, Hoyer has some progressive support. Leadership elections involve a whole lot of favor-trading and the question of who helped out more with funding your campaign is an important one. Also, I've heard that Hoyer's network will sometimes face off against Pelosi's network on the question of which particular progressive member or conservative member gets a particular leadership post that was going to that ideological bloc anyway. So it's no surprise that you have people with all different alignments in each network, even though the question of who actually leads the caucus is ideologically very significant.

I don't have a very clear view of how this sort of thing turns out. I assume that Pelosi is supporting the people she supports as part of some kind of Byzantine internal dealmaking that's mostly about returning past favors. I'd also guess that Hoyer retains his leadership position. But with lots of the more pro-Hoyer Blue Dogs gone from the House (after biting themselves in the foot by pushing for a small stimulus) it's conceivable that Clyburn will win. In any case, it'll make interesting TV.

Consequences Of The Senate Calendar

Assuming that Barack Obama wins a second term, he's still unlikely to ever have a Senate majority like he did for the last two years. 2006 and 2008 were good Democratic years in the Senate, and as a result we're mostly playing defense in 2012 and 2014.

Take-home message 1 (and the message of the linked post): Obama's ability to pass major legislation depends on filibuster reform.

Take-home message 2: 2016 is the new 2008.

Russ Feingold, Good And Bad

The big reason I'll miss Russ Feingold is the same as it is for most other Democrats. He was a fairly reliable vote in favor of good stuff and against bad stuff. His votes against the Patriot Act and the Iraq War are the shining examples that set him apart from a lot of his colleagues.

It's sad to see him lose to a rich right-winger. Not knowing anything about our bench in Wisconsin, I'm interested in seeing whether he wants to run for Herb Kohl's seat in 2012 in the event that the then-77-years-old Kohl decides to call it quits, just because he's won statewide in Wisconsin before and maybe he'd have a good shot at winning again.

There's a downside to this, though. One vote is only one vote. If I'm going to lose a vote and bad stuff is going to pass or good stuff won't, it doesn't matter that much whether I lose 99-1 or 100-0. What I want is somebody who'll be successful in using influence to bring other Senators along to the good side. I'd even take somebody who'd go over and vote for the bad stuff in exchange for a concession that'd make it significantly less bad. (This wouldn't have been possible in the Patriot Act case, as far as I can tell. It's more plausible in the Iraq War case, because of the chance to pass the Levin amendment or get Biden-Lugar rather than the eventual disastrous Lieberman Iraq War Resolution.) And this is where there isn't a whole lot to say for Feingold -- I try to get as much detail as I can on who's doing what behind the scenes, and I can't recall ever reading something and thinking, "whoa, there's Russ Feingold doing something useful."

At the worst end of the spectrum, I remember when Feingold introduced a resolution to censure President Bush for warrantless wiretapping a few years ago. Feingold immediately went on cable TV (Fox News no less) calling out not only Bush, but the weak and ineffectual Democrats who wouldn't get behind his resolution. The whole affair caught Harry Reid entirely by surprise -- Feingold hadn't even given his caucus any advance notice that the resolution was coming. If you didn't dig into the behind-the-scenes details, you might've been overjoyed with him, and a lot of the Democratic Party faithful were. But stunts like this aren't actually the way you pass legislation through the Senate, or block opposing legislation, or get your colleagues to see things your way, or actually accomplish anything useful.

More recently, he's done plenty of things that should have earned him more scorn from progressive activists. He joined the GOP in filibustering financial reform because he thought it should've been tougher on banks. What eventually happened? Well, Democrats needed an additional vote to break the filibuster, so they got Scott Brown to turn against the filibuster in exchange for an $18 billion giveaway to banks, mostly in his state. The net effect of Feingold's filibuster was giving $18 billion to banks. This is the sort of thing that anybody with more tactical sense than a popsicle would recognize and then go along with the bill.

He does plain weird stuff sometimes. Back when they were trying to impeach Bill Clinton, he was the only Democrat who voted against the motion to just dismiss the impeachment proceedings. If he was casting a cowardly vote to drive up his own poll numbers before re-election, well, that's a good reason! I'd rather have him do that than give Republicans any edge over him. But if he can do that, I'd also like him to apply that sort of calculating attitude to the things he does in the Senate.

My big complaint about him recently is that he seems to be on the wrong side of filibuster reform. Feingold is on the list of Democrats who are leaning against the measure. By making it harder to change laws, the filibuster entrenches old prejudices and sticks us with primitive social welfare programs instead of the well-funded ones you see in European countries. If you're really going to be a progressive Democrat, vote to change the processes in ways that allow progressives to succeed.

So I can't really get on board with all the Feingold love I'm seeing from other people. He was unusually good in some respects, but unusually bad in others. All in all he was an okay Democratic Senator, and it's a real shame that he lost his race to a rich plastic products manufacturer who loves Atlas Shrugged.