Dems need to seize outrage over Medicare cuts

Earlier today, during his weekly press conference, Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), the Democratic Whip, indicated that his caucus may be willing to compromise on cuts to Medicare in exchange for concessions on the debt ceiling. Any public support for cutting Medicare, even a little, is particularly tone deaf right now. Indeed, the Democrats – especially those in the House – need to shift public attention to Medicare by better and more succinctly expressing their outrage at the plans by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) to eliminate Medicare. Above all, they need to emphasize that they will do all in their power to prevent it. This is a seize-able moment, much like health care reform two years ago was for the GOP, because of the intensity of public opposition to the GOP budget.

Why any Congressional Democrat is not fitting some variation of “the Republicans’ Medicare-destroying budget” into their daily talking points is beyond me. Instead, as usual, the Democrats appear to be showing up to this knife fight over the budget with a stack of library books. They are getting lost in nuance and, to be fair, facts. No, if the Ryan budget were passed it would not actually end Medicare. But the Affordable Care Act was never going to institute death panels, either. Yet, the town halls of the summer 2009 were reverberating with screams about death panels. Similarly, with some media savvy and message discipline, the town halls of summer 2011 can be about angry seniors showing up en masse to rail against the Republican Plan to End Medicare. To do the opposite, and be publicly open to compromising on Medicare is blatantly ignorant of both the present reality and the massive political opportunity that the Ryan budge t presents – particularly in states like Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio: crucial in 2012 and full of Medicare eligible seniors.

Kathleen Hochul knows this. She is the Democrat running in the special election in New York’s 26^th Congressional district. A Democrat running in a normally Republican district, Hochul has seized on the opposition to Paul Ryan and John Boehner’s plans to destroy Medicare – and will likely win tonight as a result.

PPP released a series of polls this morning clearly demonstrating that for four Democratic Senators whose seats are necessary to maintain control next year – Brown (OH), McCaskill (MO), Tester (MT), and Klobuchar (MN), any support for cutting Medicare makes voters in their states overwhelmingly less likely to vote for them. It is in their best interests and that of their Democratic colleagues if party leaders take a hint if Hochul wins tonight – that opposition to any cuts to Medicare should be the key selling point of the Democrats right now.

It will take some astroturfing that’s never been our strongest ability, but reminding the voters that we want to save Medicare while they want to end it, while encouraging public outrage, should be the Dems’ mission for this summer.

Laying a New Foundation

PHILADELPHIA – President Obama’s televised address to Congress next week is a big deal, and it is my fervent hope that The White House rises to the occasion. These sorts of appearances before a joint session are rare, underscoring the importance of what President Obama will have to say on Wednesday. And this particular address comes not only at a critical point for our country, but at a pivotal moment for the Democratic Party. After a resounding, once-in-a-generation rout of the Republican Party last November, the Democratic Party, true to its form, has managed to mangle its message and give the Republicans a clear, albeit illogical, path from the wilderness back to relevance. The GOP is steering the national debate, and in the process, again preventing health care from reaching millions of Americans.


Additionally, however, is the toll the internal divisions of the Democratic Party are hurting both the president and the Democrats. If health care fails, we can surely blame it on the Republicans, but there truly is nobody to blame except for moderate Democrats – people like Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, Mary Landrieu and Max Baucus.


But the divisions within the party that have long existed but went on seeming hiatus for the Obama presidential honeymoon, are back in forms beyond the moderate Dems in the Senate. A big reason that the President’s poll numbers have recently plummeted is a significant drop in job approval from liberal voters and young voters, alike. Liberals and young people (often coterminous) are frustrated with the Administration’s eagerness to compromise on health care, irritated by the apparent desire to achieve bipartisanship over progress and tiring of the failure to withdraw more troops from Iraq or pass bills such as a repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”


The President should take a cue from the late Speaker Tip O’Neill and remember to “dance with the one that brung ya.” He needs to articulate a plan for health insurance reform – and later for the rest of the “Change” we were promised – and unite the Democratic supermajority in the Senate and the Democratic House behind it. If he can get certain Republicans like Olympia Snowe on board for some it, great. But if not, so be it; He needs to accomplish something, with or without the Republican Party. And his Democratic base will be much more satisfied and eager to go work for candidates in 2010 if he does it without.


Obama is inclined towards compromise and bipartisanship and breaking down the divisions that have torn us apart in the past. That was central to his campaign in 2008, but it’s simply not realistic and it’s important for him to govern in the world in which we live, not an ideal world. This Republican Party and these Republican voters are not looking to compromise or unite; they are looking to destroy and divide. And they are utterly effective at both of those.


Meanwhile, the Democrats are terrible at marketing. The Republican Party managed to sell effectively sell a horrendous war by making it seem necessary for our survival. They might have, again, destroyed hope of health insurance reform by making it seem like a sure roadblock to our survival. They get everyone on the same page, using understandable (if wrong) concepts such as “death panels.” The Democrats, on the other hand, are barely in the same book and using concepts such as “access and affordability for every American while not restricting the choice and free market growth of any person or company.” It’s time for a winning sales pitch.


President Obama needs to make an unprecedented sales pitch on Wednesday. He needs to sell both the men and women sitting in front of him and the millions watching on television. (And Twittering it, for that matter.) By the time the speech concludes on Wednesday, it needs to be readily apparent that the situation is different than it is today. He needs to give the sort of address that historians look back on as a turning point. Fortunately, that is precisely what President Obama is best at.


This turning point is for not only the health care debate, but as I said earlier, the political atmosphere and the country itself. The President needs to lay a “New Foundation.” For the first several months of his administration, he has used this phrase with some regularity and it has not yet caught on as his trademark, as his “New Deal” or “Great Society.” Decades later, people fondly point to both of those sets of programs even if they cannot name a single element of either the “New Deal” or “Great Society.” They were bold, beneficial and transformative.


We need not simply such a program in the United States at this moment, but such a feeling. The sense that we are truly beginning anew. That the President has watched the bitterness brewing over the past decades displayed at town hall meetings and on cable television over this past summer and he has said, “enough.” That the President has heard too many horror stories about our health care system, seen too many die from lack of coverage and he has said, “enough.” That he has watched as his party’s noble goal has been morphed into a caricature of a death squad, and he has said, “enough.” Enough already.


It is time to lay a New Foundation. And it can begin on Wednesday night.

I've been in that wilderness before

After the midterm elections in 2002, and again after the 2004 election, Democrats were doing a lot of soul searching. In fact, for a couple years it felt like that’s all we were doing. We had “lost” the White House in 2000, gotten our asses handed to us across the country in 2002, and failed to win back the White House against a president with an approval rating below 50 percent. Massachusetts, Maryland and Connecticut – notoriously blue states – elected Republican governors.

In November 2004, the AP wrote, “Soundly rejected in their attempt to win back control of Congress, Democrats face months of soul searching as they watch Republicans flex their increased power in the House and Senate and celebrate the defeat of one of the Democrats' most visible national leaders.” The Democratic Party seemingly had no message. And once again, as the adage goes, we formed a circular firing squad, trashing our own and refusing unity.

I can recall being at the Democratic Leadership Council’s National Conversation in Philadelphia in 2003, sitting in breakout sessions that were more like group therapy, with everyone leaving more frustrated than when the session started. We had brainstorming luncheons designed to define our core principles (a group shouldn’t be meeting to decide what it’s going to stand for). Mark Penn presented a PowerPoint explaining that the Democratic Party was on its deathbed, but of course presented no ideas on how to correct it.

We were completely lost. Who were our leaders? Who should we be listening to? Was it Michael Moore? Al Franken? Howard Dean?

After he won re-election in 2004, but watched as his party’s leader was defeated, Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) said, “We have lost the ability to connect with people's value systems and we're going to have to work to get that back."

That sounds an awful lot like RNC Chairman Michael Steele. But imagine if, after 2004, we actually had let Michael Moore become the guiding force of the Democratic Party, do you think we’d have the White House, huge majorities in both houses of Congress, and control of a majority of state houses? I doubt it. While I feel for anyone who would ever have to be trapped in an elevator with those two, the difference between Michael Moore and Rush Limbaugh is that Moore actually had some ideas. Limbaugh just has hatred. The Republican Party can’t shout and scare their way out of this problem. But in following Rush Limbaugh, that’s exactly what they’re doing.

My point is, I know exactly where the Republicans are right now. I’ve been in that wilderness, and the path out admittedly isn’t very clear. We likely only found it because of two people: George W. Bush and Barack Obama. That, and we got very, very lucky – which, unfortunately, was mostly at the expense of others: the residents of New Orleans, soldiers in Iraq, the middle class, and at least a few Congressional pages. And if the economy does not improve by 2012, the GOP may find the same fate, but that’d be a short-term fix for their party, and if we’ve learned anything from the past decade, I would hope it is, in part, that short-term fixes have long-term consequences.

But, alas, the Republican Party doesn’t learn. They just continue to shout.