U.S. Politics: Alabama Jones and the Template of Doom

[S John]

3 hours ago, Darth Richard II said:

I always assume he threw a dart at a list of names.

I think McCain and the Republicans wanted to counter the historic nature of Obama’s run for the presidency.  Like, OK the Dems got a black guy up there, let’s put a woman on the ticket so that if we win it’s also a national milestone.  I think Palin was someone who was ascendant at the right time in name recognition but not yet we’ll enough known for everyone to know she is a nut.

[DMC]

8 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

I think it's fair to argue that the ACA hurt Democrats in 2010 and was one of the main factors for the Republicans' wave election.

Pretty sure we've been over this before, but the ACA inarguably hurt Dems in 2010.  First, there's the parallel trends that clearly suggests a correlation...

Quote

Critically, the GOP’s surges in the generic ballot occurred when healthcare was front and center, but also when the economy appeared to be improving—a factor that presumably would work in the ruling Democrats’ favor. President Obama’s approval ratings also appear to have moved in sync with the relative prominence of the healthcare debate...Obama and the Democrats were at their low points in public opinion when the healthcare debate was highly visible. [8-9]

...Second, there as the asymmetric intensity favoring those that were opposed...

Quote

Amongst all voters, 49% opposed health care reform, while 43% supported it. For independents, 51% were opposed, and 39% were in favor. When intensity was factored in, the gap was much wider. 44% of all voters strongly opposed the Democrats’ health care reform, while only 24% strongly favored it. Among independents, 43% were strongly opposed, compared to 18% in strong support. There was also a stark intensity divide amongst partisans. 87% of Republicans strongly opposed the Affordable Care Act, while only 49% of Democrats strongly supported it. [9]

...Third, this did have a measurable and significant effect on MCs that voted for the ACA:

Quote

Masket and Greene (2010) found that Democratic House members who voted for the Affordable Care Act performed 5.2% worse in the election than those who voted against it. McGhee and Sides (2010), meanwhile, found a 4.5% loss of support for those Democratic incumbents supporting healthcare reform. [10]

Why this happened has also been well-researched, and the findings clearly point to Obama's shepherding of the ACA racialized attitudes on health care.  Obama passing the most significant health care legislation in nearly half a century all of a sudden made a lot of voters with racial resentment not only opposed to universal health care, but adamantly opposed.  This galvanized them to the polls at extremely high rights, especially for a midterm.

Now, there's some endogeneity questions there, in terms of direction of causality - weren't those with racial resentment always going to be galvanized to the polls and the ACA simply served as a fig leaf?  This may well be true (and almost certainly is at least somewhat true) but it doesn't explain the first reason mentioned above - if this was so, why did the ACA seem to activate their racial resentment?

Moving on to Dodd-Frank, the notion it had any type of impact on the 2010 elections at the mass level is absurd on its face.  In fact, this paper shows some fun descriptive cross-tabs that elucidate the ridiculousness of the notion.  Table 3 (13) gives the percentage of support for various pieces of legislation in the 111th Congress based on which party the respondent "blames" for our national problems.  Among those that blamed the Democrats, a full third actually supported Dodd-Frank, compared to only 6 percent of the blame Dem crown supporting the ACA.  Further, a full 41 percent of Tea Party supporters favored Dodd-Frank (10 percent supported the ACA)

Among those that blamed both parties, Dodd-Frank enjoyed widespread support at 72.5 percent (49.3 for ACA).  It was more supported among this group than SCHIP!  Still, however, 60 percent of "both sides" respondents supported a GOP House candidate, and this was the decisive factor in the Dems' "shellacking:"

Quote

How would the national vote share have changed if those who ‘‘blamed both’’ had split evenly at the ballot box, rather than breaking for Republicans? Whether we do this calculation with a simple redistribution of a bivariate table28 or by re-estimating the predicted vote share assuming that the coefficient for the ‘‘blame both’’ variable was zero, rather than negative and large in magnitude, we find that the Democrats improve their aggregate vote share in races for the U.S. House by about 5 points—creating near parity with the Republicans.29 This suggests that the ways in which voters assigned blame and responsibility for the nation’s problems had a profound impact on the election results. [19-20]

This speaks to larger arguments within the field about responsibility/blame attribution, economic voting models, and the importance of national factors on midterms, but it also makes it abundantly clear that Dodd-Frank was not a salient factor in the 2010 contests.

On 12/17/2017 at 11:44 PM, Altherion said:

As I said, most people didn't know or care what it did -- but they knew and cared about what it didn't do.

Um...what?  I'm not even entirely sure what this means, nor if this statement is even conceptually falsifiable, but it's certainly non-falsifiable with existing data.  The only possible way Dodd-Frank had an impact on 2010 is because "what it did" deeply angered a donor class that seized on the opportunities provided in Citizens United to bankroll Tea Party and other groups in order to ensure Republican MCs that would only serve to exacerbate income inequality were swept into Congress. 

In that vein, sure, I suppose Dodd-Frank was in part used as a springboard to secure a Republican Congress that would do everything it could to prolong and extend the runaway wealth of the 1% (or .1%, or .01%).  The tonnage of cognitive dissonance you have to demonstrate to blame this on the Dems or even "both sides" is quite the sight to see. 

[DMC]

4 hours ago, Altherion said:

Furthermore, the more locked in you are in voting for the lesser evil, the freer said lesser evil feels to move towards the greater one.

This is even more mind-numbingly stupid than the Dodd-Frank chestnut, demonstrating a clear misunderstanding on the fundamentals of voting, and, well, politics.  The entire idea of voting for the "lesser evil" is that in the aggregate, they share more of your preferences than the "greater evil."  This is the basics of proximity models since Downs (1957).  The more support the "lesser evil" candidate garners, the further that candidate and her party can pull the status quo towards their preferences - and by definition yours if you consider them the "lesser evil."  Voting for the greater evil is wholly irrational, even in Rabinowitz & Macdonald's (1989) directional model (still the most prevalent response to spatial/proximity models).

Your Clinton example is a demonstration of this:  he was forced to move right on welfare reform and the GLBA because of a Republican Congress (Clinton ran on passing NAFTA and the mainstream of both parties supported it at the time - with opposition from the "extremes" of both parties).  If there was enough support for his policy preferences, the Democratic party would have maintained congressional majorities, and he wouldn't have had to move to the center.

[Seli]

9 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Didn't help that you had Palin out there telling everyone that Obama was going to kill everyone....

Speaking of Palin, decades from now, when historians cover this period in time, will they point to Palin as the turning point when American conservatives went absolutely insane? 

Other choices are Bush I, when conservatives closed the door to one budget balancing tool completely. And Bush II where they were happy to openly throw out the democratic process to get their candidate into the presidency.

 

[OldGimletEye]

On 12/19/2017 at 0:03 AM, Altherion said:

I wouldn't call it a little homework -- the thing is over 800 pages of legalese and financial jargon. I'm sure it is interesting to people who work with such documents and it will probably prevent a crisis identical to the Great Recession, but in the grand scheme of things, it really, really doesn't matter. Anything that long is almost guaranteed to have loopholes simply by virtue of its complexity, but in this case the guarantee is ironclad because the people who are interested in loopholes had input into the document. It's only a matter of time until they find another way to gamble.

This entire paragraph is one big word salad, a whole bunch of handwaving, and then it manages to contradict itself.

It kind of reminds of back in the day, when I was but a young lad, and I had an exam, but rather than studying for it, I chose to go out and get drunker than fuck, believing I could just write reams of bullshit that would fool the professor. Not surprisingly, that usually didn’t work out too well.

You write “it will probably prevent a crisis identical to the Great Recession”. You know this is not a small thing. The Great Recession was enormously damaging to working class people. Many of them will likely never recover financially from it. Preventing crises like the Great Recession is a big deal.

Then you write,”but in the grand scheme of things, it really, really doesn't matter”. Why doesn’t it matter? Either you recognize it’s 1) important to prevent crises like the Great Recession or 2) it isn’t. If you believe 2) then you are basically denying every lesson that we have learned and what we know. You’ve already it admitted, it would seem, that Dodd-Frank will probably prevent crises identical to the Great Recession, so it would seem your conclusion doesn’t follow from your premises.

Finally, it seems to me that your argument here is basically, well it’s too hard, so lets don’t even try. But I think that is a load of crap. I’m quite sure at some point we’ll have another financial crises in our future. When that happens, I have no idea. But, that doesn’t make trying to prevent them an exercise in futility. Just slowing down their frequency of occurrence is a big deal.

On 12/19/2017 at 0:03 AM, Altherion said:

Until the economic policies I'd like come around, the "isms" will never be gone and in fact I expect them to grow stronger as inequality increases.

Well first you don’t even know what economic policies you even want. You general mode of argument is to 1) complain about “identity politics”, 2) dismiss evidence that rebut your points, and 3) conveniently conclude “it’s both sides”.

But, to the extent someone wants a more liberal economic agenda, I think its delusional to believe that will be achieved without combating racism, sexism, and so forth. And without getting into any high powered statistical or econometric studies, it seems to me, that if you have just a general, but a pretty good understanding of American political history, you would come to the conclusion that racial resentment has often been deployed by conservatives, even if on a very subtle level, to promote the plutocrat economic policies they favor.

We know that racial resentment was a very strong predictor for the Trump vote. And at this time, Trump’s policies make Reagan look like FDR.

And of course @dmc515 has presented evidence that racial attitudes had an impact on how people felt about the ACA.

Bottom line, it’s delusional to think you can solve these economic issues, without addressing racism, sexism, and so forth.

On 12/19/2017 at 0:03 AM, Altherion said:

It has these angles, but they are about the distribution or resources within the 99% whereas by far the most serious problem is the runaway wealth of the 1% (and actually the 0.1% and 0.01%). It doesn't matter what race or gender the latter are -- as long as they continue becoming richer faster than everyone else, we're going to have problems including (but not limited to) fighting between various groups.

While, I’m also concerned about the 1%, I think it’s important to address the distribution of resources among the 99%. Why should somebody get a smaller piece of the pie because they happen to be born nonwhite or female? I think your dismissive attitude towards these groups stinks, and it goes a long way to explain your sorry ass support for Trump. And it’s your attitude that ultimately allows people like Trump to rob the country on behalf of plutocrats.

[Rippounet]

9 hours ago, Altherion said:

You are assuming that voting for the left-most candidate actually makes a difference... but remember that a candidate is free to move to the center once he or she is elected. Furthermore, the more locked in you are in voting for the lesser evil, the freer said lesser evil feels to move towards the greater one. Consider, for example, Bill Clinton, who signed quite a few major pieces of legislation (e.g. on trade, welfare and finance) which we now can be quite certain were neither leftist nor in the interests of quite a few people who voted for him.

As a matter of fact, I recently did some reading on Clinton and his move to the center-right was quite popular at the time. Clinton emerged as a politician at a time when moderate Democrats had already moved to the center and were quite willing to support smaller government and less welfare, among other things. This is why Clinton did what he did and not only got reelected in 1996, but remained quite popular for a while afterward, until monicagate obscured everything else.
So it doesn't matter that Clinton signed laws that hurt the interests of his voters if most of these voters weren't aware of it. Take the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999 that is now widely seen as a terrible idea: it's hard to say that this became a major issue for the 2000 election. And yet, experts like Stiglitz say it played its role in the 2007 subprime crisis, which cost millions of Americans dearly.
My point is, again, that you can't demand that politicians take care of your interests for you. Your vote reflects your priorities and your choices, and as bad as it may be in the US, it's still far from being North Korea. So you can't both vote for Trump and blame the Democrats for ignoring your economic interests ; if you want the Democrats to care about your economic interests, you need to vote for them based on said interests, and when enough people do that the political center will shift to the left. That's why organizing and grassroots activism still matter: it explains to people how to weaponize their vote. However, if you're too focused on other issues (such as immigration) then you are part of the problem and verything you say is just making excuses for not matching your deeds with your words.

If you were genuinely concerned about economic interests first and foremost you would have been a passionate Sanders supporter first before becoming a reluctant Clinton supporter. You would have never considered voting for Trump, and we would not be having this exchange. What you are doing now is making excuses and obfuscating because it's hard for you to admit that you don't have that much of a problem with neo-liberalism. It's globalism you hate. Neo-liberalism you can live with, as long as it's nationalist neo-liberalism.

9 hours ago, Altherion said:

Oh, there's no doubt that they were better at organizing. Don't get me wrong, what they have managed to achieve is quite impressive. However, there is reason to believe that white people will catch up sooner rather than later.  A majority of the white population already feels that white people are discriminated against and organization should follow shortly (people like Bannon are arguably in the vanguard).

Which makes him part of the "divide and conquer" crowd. Thanks to Bannon poor whites will focus on minorities and immigrants instead of directing their anger at the 1%.

9 hours ago, Altherion said:

No, not of miracles and saviors... but not of grassroots activism and intellectual foundations either. The first two do not exist and the last two will not help you when you are playing against people with orders of magnitude more resources than you have. It's gone way, way past the point where the 1% can be outplayed that way.

We'll agree to disagree on this one.
More importantly, I think this shows your true colors. People who genuinely hate neo-liberalism don't go voting for its nationalist version because "the 1% cannot be outplayed" the old-fashioned way. They fight. You are just looking for excuses.

[OldGimletEye]

23 hours ago, Rippounet said:

As a matter of fact, I recently did some reading on Clinton and his move to the center-right was quite popular at the time. Clinton emerged as a politician at a time when moderate Democrats had already moved to the center and were quite willing to support smaller government and less welfare, among other things. This is why Clinton did what he did and not only got reelected in 1996, but remained quite popular for a while afterward, until monicagate obscured everything else.

I just wanted to add, that is another reason, I think conservatives had such a profound intellectual crises right after Dubya’s presidency.

Before Dubya, if you were a conservative, things were looking up. The Democratic Party had been pushed to the right. And during the 1990s Republicans had managed to take control of congress.

I think going into Dubya’s presidency, the momentum looked like it was on conservatives side. I think they had high hopes for Dubya’s presidency, but then it came all crashing down on them, with Dubya’s numerous fuck ups and plus the financial crises showed the free market couldn’t be left to it’s own devices.

[Rippounet]

Oooh, that's sneaky. So apparently the EU is worried about the new tax reform because it imposes a 20% tax on in-company importations for American subsidiaries of foreign companies ; a foreign company may choose not to pay this extra tax but in this case will be taxed on its benefits instead (meaning it would be taxed on its benefits both in the EU and the US). Conversely, it seems subsidiaries of American companies abroad get preferential treatment, meaning they could start buying European companies more easily.

Apparently the EU is considering a response. I doubt it will be strong enough for the time being.

[Rippounet]

When robots are better than humans:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NePlddZpNKs

Read the comments for lulz.

 

[OldGimletEye]

On conservative global warming stupidity.

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/12/18/16791106/white-house-climate-change-national-security-strategy-threat-military

Quote

The Trump administration is backing away from calling climate change a national security threat, a move that contradicts nearly three decades of military planning.

 

Quote

The military has long considered climate change a “threat multiplier,” with assessments dating back to 1990. In 2014, the US Department of Defense published a climate change adaptation road map, oblivious to the political wrangling on the issue and writing that “[r]ising global temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, climbing sea levels, and more extreme weather events will intensify the challenges of global instability, hunger, poverty, and conflict.”

Well, I guess so long as the children of rich Republicans won’t have to partake in any of the fightin’ what's the big deal?

..................................................................

It turns out the Republican tax bill wasn’t conservative enough. So it had to be re-written to hand out even more cash to the wealthy.
 

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/12/18/16791174/republican-tax-bill-congress-conference-tax-policy-center

Quote

By 2027, more than half of all Americans — 53 percent — would pay more in taxes under the tax bill agreed to by House and Senate Republicans, a new analysis by the Tax Policy Center finds. That year, 82.8 percent of the bill’s benefit would go to the top 1 percent, up from 62.1 under the Senate bill.

..........................................................................................

Uh, maybe the Republican Tax bill won’t keep jobs at home.

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/12/the-republican-tax-bill-will-send-more-jobs-overseas/

Quote

Remember Donald Trump’s promise to keep American jobs in America? Of course you do. No longer will we tolerate American companies sending jobs offshore thanks to stupid tax laws and unfair competition. Not on Trump’s watch, anyway.

Funny thing about that. According to the Washington Post, the Republican tax bill is likely to increase the movement of jobs and profit overseas:

..............................................................

When conservative asset mispricing concern trolling ends badly.

https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-advantage-of-central-bank-not-being.html

Quote

The Riksbank started raising interest rates from its then lower bound of 0.25% towards the end of 2010, because they were worried about a potential housing bubble. Rates continued to rise to 2%, but inflation began to fall, and did not stop until it hit zero at the end of 2012. There was no growth in GDP in 2012. The eminent macroeconomist Lars Svensson resigned from the Riksbank in protest at this departure from inflation targeting.

 

[Paladin of Ice]

7 hours ago, S John said:

I think McCain and the Republicans wanted to counter the historic nature of Obama’s run for the presidency.  Like, OK the Dems got a black guy up there, let’s put a woman on the ticket so that if we win it’s also a national milestone.  I think Palin was someone who was ascendant at the right time in name recognition but not yet we’ll enough known for everyone to know she is a nut.

It was a combination of this and trying to endear McCain with the Evangelicals and Fundamentalists, who McCain viewed with distaste at best and who loathed him in return. That in itself was a result of McCain being somewhat apathetic towards religion, prior feuds, and especially the 2000 primaries where McCain felt that Evangelicals in favor of Bush II were behind pushing some slanderous narratives about him, and McCain responded by calling out Falwell and Robertson specifically as nutcases and "agents of intolerance".

So he got himself a young, female, fundamentalist Christian to try to simultaneously shore up the base, pull in a few women voters, and neuter Obama's historicness. 

[Maithanet]

9 minutes ago, Paladin of Ice said:

It was a combination of this and trying to endear McCain with the Evangelicals and Fundamentalists, who McCain viewed with distaste at best and who loathed him in return. That in itself was a result of McCain being somewhat apathetic towards religion, prior feuds, and especially the 2000 primaries where McCain felt that Evangelicals in favor of Bush II were behind pushing some slanderous narratives about him, and McCain responded by calling out Falwell and Robertson specifically as nutcases and "agents of intolerance".

So he got himself a young, female, fundamentalist Christian to try to simultaneously shore up the base, pull in a few women voters, and shore up the religious conservative base. 

In addition, according to Game/Change (which admittedly has some questionable things in it, but they had a lot of access), McCain was planning for a long time on picking his buddy Joe Lieberman.  Picking Al Gore's former VP pick would help McCain establish himself as a Centerist Republican, which is the campaign he wanted to run.  It would allow him to distance himself from the disaster of the Bush presidency, and portray Obama is an extreme lefty. 

The problem was that Republicans wouldn't allow it, and threatened a boycott or revolt at the convention if Lieberman was chosen.  So he had to scramble, and wasn't really prepared with a well vetted list of VP choices.  Palin ticked the boxes - young, interesting, woman, evangelical, camera friendly.  The problem was that she was obviously not ready for prime time, so much so that people wondered how the hell she got elected Governor. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

15 hours ago, OldGimletEye said:

Well I really don't disagree. It seems once she started up, is when you had other crazy critters, like Glenn Beck, and Alex Jones come out of the woodwork. Now it's possible those two clowns were popular before her, but I don't recall it or remember it.

It seems she showed you could make a lot of money by being a professional conservative (clown).

They had a presence before her rise, but their popularity didn’t explode until after the 08 election. Beck in particular. Jones’ rise has been more recent.

[Fez]

Odds are looking up that we'll have a shutdown on Friday.

The House is planning to pass another CR with just Republican votes; this time it would be short-term for all domestic agencies but fund the Pentagon at higher levels for the full year. Since this would eliminate a lot of Democratic leverage for full year domestic spending, they obviously aren't going to support it. And since any funding bill in the senate needs 8 (soon to be 9) Democratic votes, this isn't passing. House Republicans are currently talking a big game about not voting for whatever the Senate sends back, or maybe even leaving town for Christmas after they pass the tax bill and this CR.

So, yeah. McConnell just announced that the senate will vote on the tax bill this evening, instead of tomorrow as originally planned, presumably to give more time to figure out how to avoid a shutdown. But the issue was never the Senate, it's House Republicans.

Meanwhile, I'm very curious to know what the House whip count currently is on the tax bill. I assume it's fine, they only lost 13 votes the first time around. But House leadership has shown they are very bad at keeping accurate counts, and there were a few members who'd said they voted yes only to advance the process (since it was known that the senate had a different bill). The big difference is that the first House bill didn't have the individual mandate repeal. And while all House Republicans want to repeal the mandate, back during the health care debate some of them were pretty adamant about finding a replacement for it, which this bill doesn't have. Of course, that hasn't stopped Collins or Murkowski.

 

In other news, 

It was Scott and Rounds that sided with the Democrats to block Garrett. He wasn't qualified, but many Trump nominees aren't; I'm not sure what caused them to flip this time.

[OldGimletEye]

23 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

They had a presence before her rise, but their popularity didn’t explode until after the 08 election. Beck in particular. Jones’ rise has been more recent.

Yeah people like Limbaugh, Hannity, and Bill OReally, were always clowns. And I thought they were scrapping the bottom of the barrel and you couldn't get dumber or crazier. Until, I became aware of people like Jones and Beck around 2009-2010. I hadn't really even heard of them until about that time.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

6 hours ago, dmc515 said:

Pretty sure we've been over this before, but the ACA inarguably hurt Dems in 2010.  First, there's the parallel trends that clearly suggests a correlation...

I appreciate the thorough break down, but I think you read too much into an offhand comment. I knew the answer already. One of the major aspects of my honors thesis was that President Obama misread the results of his election, incorrectly assuming that he had a policy mandate to act on healthcare reform. Only a small percentage of eligible voters listed healthcare reform as their top priority, so it was inevitable that there would be significant backlash after Obama used all of his political capital on the issue.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

6 hours ago, Seli said:

Other choices are Bush I, when conservatives closed the door to one budget balancing tool completely. And Bush II where they were happy to openly throw out the democratic process to get their candidate into the presidency.

 

Reagan, Bush 1, Gingrich, Bush the Lesser, Limbaugh etc. were all just laying the tracks IMO. Palin was the freight train.

[Guest]

Am I missing something, or has there not been a CBO score on the conference report? There seems to have been quite a bit of new spending added, but not as many pay-fors as far as I can tell.

The Byrd Rule still does apply to conference report votes, does it not?

 

[OldGimletEye]

Jim “Waterloo” Demint not conservative enough for the Heritage Clown Foundation?

LOL.

Anyway.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/5/4/15517710/heritage-foundation-jim-demint-chair

Quote

In the latest seismic shake-up of a major conservative institution during the age of Trump, the Heritage Foundation announced on May 2 that it had ousted Jim DeMint, the former senator who has led the right-wing think tank since 2013. Ed Feulner, who had served as Heritage’s president for most of the foundation’s existence until retiring in 2013, will step in as president again until a permanent successor is named.

 

Quote

While it may be tempting to ascribe DeMint’s downfall to ideological tensions or Trump-related controversies, the true explanation here seems to lie in office politics.

 

Quote

The strange thing about this conflict is that both DeMint and Needham have reputations for being ideological bomb throwers who want to shake up Washington and aren’t afraid to go after the Republican Party establishment in order to do so — that is, they seem to agree on a whole lot.

 

Quote

Founded back in 1973 after conservative Capitol Hill aides and wealthy donors concluded that existing Washington think tanks were either too liberal or too ineffective at influencing legislation, the Heritage Foundation exists to advance conservative ideas — which it has generally defined as a hawkish foreign policy, cuts to taxes and government, defenses of traditional and Christian religious values, and in recent years opposition to immigration reform — into law and government policy.

Now, I think this is important. I’m pretty sure the Cato Institute, along with other conservative "think tanks", were founded in the early 1970s as well. I’d argue that it was at this time when conservatives started to put together their intellectual infrastructure so to speak.

Quote

The Times story went on to quote Heritage’s executive vice president Phillip Truluck as saying, ''We don't sit around smoking pipes and thinking deep thoughts about what the economy will look like five years from now.”

Well, I'm shocked the clowns at the Heritage Foundation didn't think deep thoughts.

Quote

That strategy paid off for the foundation after Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980. Heritage helped supply the new conservative administration with both staff and policy proposals 

I'd say yes it did.

[DMC]

24 minutes ago, Fez said:

But the issue was never the Senate, it's House Republicans.

What I'm curious about is if McConnell is going to make good on his word and include either Alexander-Murray and/or Collins-Nelson in the Senate's CR.  That could really throw a wrench in things:

Quote

The Senate may also try to attach a pair of bipartisan ObamaCare fixes to the CR that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) promised Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) in exchange for her vote on tax reform. House conservatives have flatly rejected that idea. 

 

13 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

I appreciate the thorough break down, but I think you read too much into an offhand comment.

Nah, my response was simply the result of insomnia induced boredom.  Just quoted your statement to use as a jumping off point.

15 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Only a small percentage of eligible voters listed healthcare reform as their top priority

Healthcare policy is almost always low salience with voters (at least in how we measure salience as the top, or top two, issues that concern respondents).  It only rises when at least one of the parties makes it a big issue.  And even then, not always.  I don't think Obama necessarily misread the election results, he was just willing to leverage his political capital and short-term institutional advantages into getting the ACA passed.  Plenty of MCs knew their vote for the ACA would lose them their seat and did anyway.