Health care, health care, health care, but the pundits have not caught up to events.
Nate Silver/Five Thirty Eight:
The Comey Letter Probably Cost Clinton The Election
So why won’t the media admit as much?
Hillary Clinton would probably be president if FBI Director James Comey had not sent a letter to Congress on Oct. 28. The letter, which said the FBI had “learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation” into the private email server that Clinton used as secretary of state, upended the news cycle and soon halved Clinton’s lead in the polls, imperiling her position in the Electoral College.
The letter isn’t the only reason that Clinton lost. It does not excuse every decision the Clinton campaign made. Other factors may have played a larger role in her defeat, and it’s up to Democrats to examine those as they choose their strategy for 2018 and 2020.
But the effect of those factors — say, Clinton’s decision to give paid speeches to investment banks, or her messaging on pocket-book issues, or the role that her gender played in the campaign — is hard to measure. The impact of Comey’s letter is comparatively easy to quantify, by contrast….
And yet, from almost the moment that Trump won the White House, many mainstream journalists have been in denial about the impact of Comey’s letter.
The denial was palpable on social media yesterday. The combo of the HRC interview with Christiane Amanpour and Comey testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee was irresistible. and, naturally, everyone brought their priors.
That also set off some obnoxious tweets from NYT reporters, willing to disrespect Clinton but not willing to look at their own involvement.
So it goes.
This isn’t hard. She and her campaign made errors of judgement and omission and still would have won without Comey. But blaming solely Clinton w/o acknowledging the role of the press, Comey and Wikileaks (including press coverage) is absurd. Nor is she blaming “everyone but self”. But easier to blame her then press coverage if you are a NYT reporter.
More from Nate:
The motivation for this seems fairly clear: If Comey’s letter altered the outcome of the election, the media may have some responsibility for the result. The story dominated news coverage for the better part of a week, drowning out other headlines, whether they were negative for Clinton (such as the news about impending Obamacare premium hikes) or problematic for Trump (such as his alleged ties to Russia). And yet, the story didn’t have a punchline: Two days before the election, Comey disclosed that the emails hadn’t turned up anything new.
One can believe that the Comey letter cost Clinton the election without thinking that the media cost her the election — it was an urgent story that any newsroom had to cover. But if the Comey letter had a decisive effect and the story was mishandled by the press — given a disproportionate amount of attention relative to its substantive importance, often with coverage that jumped to conclusions before the facts of the case were clear — the media needs to grapple with how it approached the story. More sober coverage of the story might have yielded a milder voter reaction.
Amy Walter/Cook Political Report:
Think of the GOP as a body and Trump like a donated organ. Trump is not organic to the GOP, but the body has accepted it as its own.
However, solid and continued support for Trump isn’t the whole story. The question is whether this support for Trump is going to translate into turn-out and support for the GOP in 2018. You don’t have to go too far back in history to find an example of a president who came to office with backing from a new, enthusiastic group of voters, only to find that those voters failed to consistently show up for the party. The so-called Obama coalition never soured on Obama, but they also didn’t show up to vote for his party in 2010, 2014 or 2016 - i.e., the years he wasn’t on the ballot.
Jonathan Chait/New York:
The GOP Health-Care Bill Is an Abdication of Responsibility and a Moral Disgrace
Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare without a replacement failed. But they are attempting the next closest thing: a bill the party leadership will try to rush into law without the barest elements of due diligence. There have been no hearings, no studies, no Congressional Budget Office analysis; not even the text of a bill circulated the day before Thursday’s vote.
Sarah Kliff/Vox:
The absurdity of voting on the AHCA without a CBO score
As leadership scrambles to whip the votes for the American Health Care Act, it's worth stepping back to ask: What the heck is the rush?
The best explanation I've found comes from my colleague Andrew Prokop. When Republicans started this year, they had a strategy to move two big policy packages, one on health care and another on tax reform. There would only be two chances to use the budget reconciliation process that allows a bill to pass with only 51 Senate votes (for complex procedural reasons explained here), so each would get one shot.
Health reform would go first, they thought, because it would be simpler. It was a legislative strategy built when the Republican health care plan looked markedly different:
They thought it would be legislatively easier to write an Obamacare repeal bill than tax reform, because they intended to put off the hard work of creating an actual replacement for Obamacare until later. This was the “repeal and delay” strategy — pass a quick repeal, set it to go into effect in a few years, and write the replacement in the meantime.
But then GOP leaders encountered a problem. Their members, in both the House and the Senate, turned out to really hate the “repeal and delay” strategy, because it meant getting rid of Obamacare and its benefits without the “replacement” the party had long promised they’d offer being ready.
Republicans want to move quickly on health care so they can fit in tax reform too, another immense and complex policy lift.
Francis Wilkinson/Bloomberg:
Trade Is the Scapegoat for Political Failure
The notion that “lousy trade deals” are responsible for the erosion of working-class prosperity is a common denominator in the rhetoric of Trump and Bernie Sanders. For them, “trade” is a flexible villain, sufficiently elastic to encompass blows to labor power that originate in broader trends of global competition or de-unionization or the specific effects of automation.
At a panel discussion last week at the City University of New York, a handful of prominent economists grappled with “Trade, Jobs and Inequality.” None echoed the views of Sanders or Trump.
“No, lousy trade deals are not a primary cause” of working-class despair, said panel member David Autor of MIT in a follow-up email to me. “It is the case that China’s accession to the WTO in 2001 was a big shock to U.S. manufacturing. This was not really a trade deal, however. This was China becoming a member of an existing trade agreement. And this was an inevitable long-term result of China’s spectacular development.”
Another participant, economist Bradford DeLong of the University of California at Berkeley, pointed out that technological evolution steadily drove down manufacturing’s share of U.S. labor for half a century before the China shock.
The demonization of trade deals, DeLong wrote to me in an email, is off target. “NAFTA was supposed to kill the U.S. auto industry,” he wrote. “It didn't -- the auto industry loved it.”
It might not matter whether trade, automation, globalization or some combination is at fault. But it matters greatly that American politics has proved incapable of mitigating the damage, helping to open the path to power for Trump.
Message matters and broad concepts » policy.
Stephen Walt/FP:
This Isn’t Realpolitik. This Is Amateur Hour.
The Trump administration’s Asia policy is the worst of all possible worlds.
It gets worse: Instead of seeing China as a peer competitor whose rising power needs to be checked, Trump has been kissing up to Beijing in the hope of securing its help on North Korea and a number of issues. There’s nothing inherently wrong with collaborating with Beijing when our national interests (as opposed to Trump’s business interests) align, but such an approach inevitably raises doubts in the minds of China’s neighbors. It also reinforces the perception that Beijing is calling the shots in Asia. If that were in fact the case, why would anyone there want to remain closely tied to the United States?
Even Trump’s impulsive outreach to Duterte shows that it is still amateur hour at the White House. One can make a pragmatic case for trying to smooth a strained relationship with a key ally; the problem is that Trump did not consult anyone about it and didn’t know if Duterte was likely to accept when he extended the invitation. Here’s a pro tip: An invitation to visit the White House is a serious matter that needs to be vetted beforehand and agreed to by both parties before it is made public. As it happens, Duterte responded by saying he might be too busy to pay a visit, thereby making Trump look foolish and desperate.
KFF.org on Medicaid and rural America:
Where is Rural America and Who Lives There?
The nearly 20% of the nonelderly population, or 52 million people, who live in the most rural counties of America are spread across almost 2,500 counties that are heavily concentrated in the South and Midwest (Click here for a county level map). In contrast, the 20% of the nonelderly population (or 55 million people) who live in the most urban counties of America are spread across fewer than 70 counties that are heavily concentrated in the Northeast. Rurality varies widely by state (Figure 1 and Appendix Table 1). By the definition used in this brief, states such as Montana, North Dakota, and Wyoming are entirely rural, whereas states such as Connecticut, New York, and the District of Columbia have little to no rural area. In 11 states, more than half of the nonelderly population resides in a rural area (Montana, North Dakota, Wyoming, South Dakota, Vermont, New Mexico, Mississippi, Alaska, Iowa, Idaho, and Arkansas).
What role does Medicaid play in rural America?
Medicaid plays a central role helping to fill gaps in private coverage in rural areas. Private insurance accounts for the largest share of health coverage among individuals in rural areas. However, nonelderly individuals in rural areas have a lower rate of private coverage compared to those in urban and other areas, reflecting greater employment in jobs that do not offer employer-sponsored health insurance4 and the lower labor force participation rate in rural areas (Figure 5). Medicaid helps fill this gap in private coverage, covering nearly one in four (24%) nonelderly individuals in rural areas, compared to 22% in urban areas and 21% in other areas. However, Medicaid coverage does not fully offset the gap in private coverage. As such, rural areas have a slightly higher nonelderly uninsured rate (12%) compared to urban (11%) and other areas (10%).
Danbury News-Times:
NEWTOWN - For the first time in five years, the 26 bicyclists who pedal 400 miles to honor the Sandy Hook massacre victims will be riding with their backs to Washington, D.C.
If it sounds like the activists are sending a message to Congress, they are.
“We have been riding for four years into Washington, D.C., and during that period of time, Congress has failed to pass a single piece of legislation that would reduce gun violence,” said Monte Frank, an attorney who founded the four-day ride after the massacre of 26 first-graders and educators at Sandy Hook School in 2012.
“This year we decided we are going to start in Washington and ride away from Congress and toward the states and cities and communities that are working hard to protect their citizens from gun violence.”
The twist on the Team 26 ride means Frank and his colleagues will begin their fifth annual message tour from the Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Thursday morning, and make their way through Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York, before arriving home Sunday night to a reception in Newtown.
Jonathan Capehart/WaPo:
Why so many people don’t hear or won’t accept what Hillary Clinton actually says
This whole episode further confirms my conjecture that when we look at either of the Clintons, we see them as if looking at figures in a fun-house mirror. Their distorted image invariably conforming to the preconceived notions of the viewer. I’ll admit that my fun-house-mirror view of them is on the favorable end of things. But I’m not blind to their foibles and failures, their shortcomings and sins. The problem is that too many people are blinded BY them.