Friday opinion. Bad week for Republicans.
Joe Klein:
The latest--an update from Michael Scherer's smart post below--is that Rand Paul is now saying that he regrets the appearance with Rachel Maddow, not the ridiculous statements he made in favor of a private business's ability to discriminate according to race. I suspect that this will be the first of many such disasters for the Tea Party libertarians. They are about to find themselves faced with actual political rivals who will be more than happy to expose the utopian foolishness of their ideology. This will be a rare moment of public education for an electorate that doesn't pay sufficient attention to even the most important aspects of democracy.
If Democrats play their cards right, by November most Americans will know that Medicare is government health care, that social security is a government pension service, that all the bank bailout money either has been paid back or will be covered by a modest tax on too-big-to-fail banks, that the Obama stimulus package mostly consisted of tax cuts for them and support for necessary local government functions like schools and cops--and that the jobs-creating aspects of the stimulus package have been remarkably free of corruption.
Bob Shrum:
Farther up the Appalachian Trail, in a special election for Congress in western Pennsylvania that had Republicans salivating, the Democrat decisively triumphed in a district that had rejected Obama in 2008. The surprised GOP rationalized that the result didn’t really count; the winner was "pro-choice and pro-life." So are a lot of Democrats in Pennsylvania, including Sen. Bob Casey—and so are a lot of the Democrats in Congress who, after this special, we know can be re-elected in the fall. The outcome was a signal that the new Associated Press survey, which shows Obama’s party with a 5 point lead nationally, may actually be right. All politics is economics; as the economy improves, so will Democratic prospects for the midterms.
But the President can’t simply wait for history. He has to nudge perceptions and interpret events. This is Obama’s party—and the Campaigner-in-Chief has to carry an affirmative message that will define Democrats between now and November.
Charles Lane:
The constitutional aberration, in fact, was Southern legislation that required segregation in various business establishments. To cite just one of many examples, a 1928 Alabama state law mandated racially separate toilet facilities in hotels and restaurants. Segregation was never really a matter of individuals exercising their free speech or property rights, as Paul implied. It was a tight web of mutually reinforcing public and private rules.
I'm afraid that the Ron/Rand Paul world view founders on these sorts of contradictions all the time. It's amazing that there's room for it in today's Republican Party, or anywhere on the political spectrum, for that matter.
Lane has never been mistaken for a progressive.
Matt Bai:
What all this probably means is that we are living in the era of the upstart. Thirty years ago, when you needed a party infrastructure to make a serious run for higher office, taking it to the establishment was a quixotic venture undertaken on the national level, where a Jesse Jackson or a Pat Buchanan could at least make a powerful statement along the road to obliteration. (Recall Jimmy Carter’s indictment of Jerry Brown in 1976: "Don’t send them a message, send them a president.")
Those days are gone. The intraparty rebellions now will be increasingly local, sufficiently financed and built around credible candidates — the kind of campaigns that made Barack Obama president and that may yet give us Senator Paul or Senator Sestak. My gosh, these people in Washington are in for it now.
Jonathan Cohn, start of a 5 part series:
In the immediate aftermath of his legislative triumph, Barack Obama has barely received credit. Polls show the public doesn’t particularly like the new law. Conservatives are livid over the expansion of government. Liberals are ambivalent, disappointed as much with their leaders as with the legislation. There are, in short, widespread questions about whether the ordeal was worth it--and whether the president and Democratic leaders could have charted a better, alternative course.
These are questions I asked myself constantly over the last two years, as reform legislation first took shape and, then, as it moved through Congress. I believed that legislation was worth passing--that its champions were, by and large, making the best of difficult circumstances--even if I didn’t like all the compromises. But those are complicated judgments to make in real time, based on only the reporting snippets that come through eclectic sources.
What follows is an effort to revisit those judgments, with the benefit of hindsight and fuller information.
The Hill:
Physician groups deluged Capitol Hill Thursday with statements of support for a short-term freeze on Medicare rate cuts.
The increased activity came one day after congressional staffers warned them that a 21.3 percent cut in Medicare rates was a real possibility come June 1 unless the groups raised the pressure on recalcitrant lawmakers.
For more on this, see What's The Matter With Doctors? from April.
Paul Krugman:
Despite a chorus of voices claiming otherwise, we aren’t Greece. We are, however, looking more and more like Japan.