Osborne Ink || News that's fairly liberal, but never unbalanced.

So my representative in Washington is switching from the Democratic Party to the Republicans? Shock!

I am SHOCKED, I say, that a man who pandered to teabaggers at health care town halls with Soylent Green death panels and immigration hysteria, openly advocated removing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and who boasts an impressive seven percent progressive rating versus a mere 33% conservative rating, has turned coat. Whodathunkit?

With Griffith, disingenuous politics are a given. He’s cut from the George Wallace mold. He can’t even be honest about his reasons: speaking to POLITICO, Griffith made the case that Obama’s cancellation of a missile shield was his proximate cause for the switch. Sure, the strategic choice of a sea-based system closer to Iran did take contracts away from Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, at the center of his district, and direct them to other states. But that was in September — why do this now?

More likely is the explanation that Griffith has never actually been a Democrat. He voted against the Lily Ledbetter Act, every version of health care reform, and the stimulus bill, while actively working against the union workers who put him over the top.

If the man is starting to sound like a closet Republican finally going home, then you’re getting the picture.

Griffith’s latest move is all about cutting off his right flank. He’s a first-term representative elected by a razor-thin margin over Republican Wayne Parker, a wingnut among wingnuts who (rumor has it) will run again.* In becoming the GOP incumbent, Griffith hopes to cut off his main opponent and face an empty Democratic field.

But good luck with that strategy in the age of Teabag Terror. Red State’s Eric Erickson has already declared him persona non grata:

We should now hope him [sic] be an extremely endangered Republican in a primary. We will not fix the GOP’s problems if we keep allowing people who are not one of us to suddenly switch the letter next to their name and magically become one of us.

How ironic, how deeply delicious, would it be to see Griffith embrace the Teabag Terror only to get crushed? That vision is all the sweeter when you realize that Griffith’s politics have never been those of a Democrat or even a Republican.

Griffith has always been about Griffith.

It’s in the way this oncologist speaks of tort reform as a magic silver bullet to solve the health care crisis. It’s plainly etched in the career path of a doctor who made his sizable fortune by embracing the trend towards patients-as-profit-centers. It’s in the spectacle of Griffith throwing red meat at Norton Auditorium in August.

It’s in his embrace of the party that paid for this disgusting ad used against him (h/t to GottaLaff):

Anyone who would want to belong to that kind of politics is not a Democrat or even a Blue Dog, but a self-serving hypocrite. Alabama progressives are actually better off without him, and that’s sad.

*UPDATE: Apparently my information on other GOP candidates is out-of-date. From POLITICO:

Madison County Commissioner Mo Brooks will be remaining in the race, according to his campaign manager Bruce Tucker, who called Griffith’s party switch “a desperate political move.”

Also, the Rush Limbaugh of Huntsville has spoken:

“He’s a liar. Michael Steele should be ashamed of himself. The NRCC should be ashamed of itself for not coming out and immediately repudiating this guy. He was unacceptable a year ago and he’s acceptable now? A year ago, they were saying this guy was a murderer.”

Teabaggers are so predictable. Too bad Griffith couldn’t predict their rejection.

Though we have heard of foolishly rushing to war, we have never seen cleverness in war associated with long delays…Delay tends to favor misfortune over good fortune. As long as affected parties have at least adequately prepared for the moment at hand, delay risks an escalation of misfortune. –Sun Tzu, The Art of War

In contrast to the way Obama builds consensus through 11-Dimensional Chess, conservatives in Congress have adopted a strategy of pure delay. By saying no, the GOP hopes to sabotage his agenda and regain some control of Congress, if not the White House. Blue Dog Democrats have been willing to play partner.

But the extended battle over health care reform has strained that relationship. Obama is pressing for action, public support for reform is increasing, and polls show voters are getting tired of delay tactics. Max Baucus and Ben Nelson find themselves at odds with their constituents, unable to explain themselves.

I have written before about Obama’s strategic decision to place health care reform ahead of environmental and social issues. What we’re seeing here is a preview of 2010 as those issues come up to the floor of Congress: the Republicans will say no and send out the teabaggers. The Blue Dogs will try to slow down their own Democratic majority.

Remember that moment last October when the GOP realized Sarah Palin could not save them, the oh noes evaporated, Republicans threw the same kitchen sink they’d been throwing since March (only they threw it harder) and Obama won?

Looks to me like we’ve cycled back around to that phase again.

Chuck Grassley (R- Oppositesland) finally admitted today there are no “death panels” in the health care reform legislation. He then blamed Republican hysteria on mixed signals from the White House:

But in fact, what the “mixed signals” from Obama’s White House have done is create a wave of progressive support for health care reform and the public option. That has also translated into immense pressure on Democrats, especially Blue Dogs. Montana doesn’t approve of Baucus right now:

Only 42 percent of Montana residents — and 34 percent of Democrats — said they favored the work Baucus had done in shepherding health care legislation through the Senate Finance Committee. Forty-four percent of respondents said they disapproved, according to the poll of more than 600 people in the state.

And here’s the lede: it’s because the Democrats are mad.

The results may be partially attributable to Baucus’s apparent decision to craft legislation without a public option. Within Montana, 47 percent of the public supports creating a “public health insurance option,” while 43 percent oppose it. Looking closer at the numbers, slightly less than one-quarter of Republicans (23 percent) support a public plan. Forty-eight percent of independents and 78 percent of Democrats support the provision.

Ads have been hitting the air:

Baucus said in May that he was fighting hard for the public option. Then, in late June, he changed his mind. Let’s see if he can change his mind again.

Two days after Charles Krauthammer’s failed attempt to shock life into the death panels meme, the wave of tinfoil-hattery surrounding the health care debate has crested. With the mainstream media finally debunking this narrative, it is turning into Zombie Outrage™.

Not only has town hall astroturfing failed, it has left the GOP utterly marginalized. They only have themselves to blame: instead of engaging, they determined to oppose reform of any kind. Obama has finally signaled his readiness to stop pursuing bipartisanship and use his congressional majority to ram legislation through.

Suddenly aware they cannot control the process and lack any leverage, Republicans are getting desperate:

WASHINGTON — Sen. John McCain says President Barack Obama will have to drop proposals for a government-run health insurance option if he hopes to reach congressional agreement on health-care reform.

Grassley suddenly thinks reform should need 80 votes, while Mike Enzi concurs. No bill in history has ever “needed” such a supermajority. This is not the framing of a confident party; it is a bluff, and a bad one.

They’re grasping at straws. Doubling-down on the “kitchen sink” approach, they’re resurrecting the “Obama is going too fast” meme. A new reform-is-unconstitutional meme is gaining some traction in the village media, but not among Democrats — which is the only demographic that matters now.

Max Baucus is not alone. The most ineffectual Senate Majority Leader in history, Harry Reid, is in trouble too. In fact, the whole Blue Dog coalition has a new fundraising problem. Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi and a strong core of House Democrats are standing firm on the public option.

No wonder Obama guaranteed reform would pass. He’s holding all the cards and he knows it. The public option is polling higher than ever, and rumors of its death have been greatly exaggerated.

For all the talk about Obama “over-learning” the lessons of Clinton’s health care reform failure, he has gotten one thing absolutely right: he has whipped the progressive movement into a frenzy of support, and that is the crucial leverage in passing his agenda with a friendly majority.

UPDATE: during a conference call today, Max Baucus finally endorsed the public option.

I wish I had thought of this. Blogging over at Preemptive Karma, The Chinuk has a new name for Blue Dog Democrats trying to water down and/or derail health care reform: “BLUE CROSS DEMOCRATS.”

Use early, use often. Lather, rinse, repeat.

To judge by the way the press is covering health care reform lately, you’d think Nancy Pelosi has no reason to be the least bit optimistic for its chances According to the Village, everything is going wrong. “Blue dog” Democrats are rebelling against the public option:

The Blue Dog revolt against the House leadership’s health care overhaul took a new turn Tuesday morning, when a several members of the centrist faction made overtures to House Republicans about joining forces to slow and reshape the bill.

Republican aides said there was great interest among GOP lawmakers in trying to work with dissidents in the 52-member Blue Dog Coalition to try to stop the legislation. “Blue Dogs will be the main event all week,” said one GOP aide, referring to efforts by Republicans to woo Blue Dogs

The Gang of Six in the Senate Finance Committee wants to throw out the public option, leading Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) to say that Senate leaders should “pull the plug” on bipartisan negotiations:

“What concerns me about what’s happened in the Senate Finance Committee is that they’ve had a whole lot of time to work these things out, and just don’t seem to be able to break the impasse,” Van Hollen said in an interview on the liberal “Bill Press Radio Show.” “It doesn’t seem to be as much about a disagreement over policy issues, and it seems more to be just the lack of the political will on behalf of some to get it done.” (Emphasis mine)

But given Harry Reid’s lack of spine, Van Hollen is probably asking too much. Nor is the Senate alone: blue dogs on the House Finance Committee are obstructing the legislation as well, even though chairman Henry Waxman offered them a deal late last night over their chief concern:

The fiscally conservative Blue Dogs were at odds with the leadership over setting rates for the payments to doctors and other health care providers under a proposed government-run health plan that would compete with private insurance. The House bill models the payments based on Medicare, but Blue Dogs want a negotiated rate similar to private insurance.

Press coverage of the health care debate has gotten very pessimistic, highlighting these and other setbacks. The Village Media pays an almost fawning attention to the Gang of Six. The legislation is certainly not going to meet Obama’s preferred deadline this Friday. Yet Nancy Pelosi remains confident that health care reform will pass:

Defying skeptics in her party, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi vowed Sunday to overcome lingering obstacles and pass health-care reform in the House, restoring momentum to President Obama’s top domestic priority and order to her own unruly Democratic caucus.

“When I take this bill to the floor, it will win,” Pelosi (Calif.) said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “This will happen.”

At Obsidian Wings, blogger Publius explains that many of the 52 House blue dogs are in vulnerable districts that either voted for McCain or barely voted for Obama. But eleven of them are in very pro-Obama districts:

In short, the Blue Dogs are both stronger and weaker than I thought. Most of the ones causing trouble seem to be structurally limited by electoral realities. Mike Ross, for instance, doesn’t need to be seen as helping Obama in an Arkansas district that shifted from Bush +3 to McCain +19 (I wonder why the district would do that?).

At the same time, though, there are many Blue Dogs whose districts will push them the other way. Loretta Sanchez, for instance, has come out strongly for the public option. And you can understand why. It just seems impossible for the Blue Dog leadership to muster a 52-strong bloc.

And that, then, is the way to undermine the Blue Dogs. The leaders seem hopeless because they’re enjoying their day in the sun AND are constrained by their districts. So the better option is not to work from the top down, but from the bottom up.

And at FiveThirtyEight.com, Nate Silver doubts the plan from the Senate’s Gang of Six has a chance because

this particular permutation on health care reform looks an awful lot like the incomplete draft of the HELP Committee’s bill that the CBO scored last month, which also lacked an employer mandate and a public option but contained an individual mandate. That bill, the CBO estimated, would cost about $1.0 trillion — but would only cover a net of about 16 million people. In contrast, the revised version of the HELP Committee’s bill, which did include both a public option and an employer mandate, would cost about the same amount but cover a net of 37 million people. (Emphasis mine)

Furthermore, a CBO report says the blue dogs’s biggest complaint — that a public option will destroy the insurance industry — is pure nonsense:

The report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said the public option proposed by Democrats would not drive private insurers out of business and most people would still choose to get their medical coverage through employers.

[...]

The CBO report estimated only about 10 million to 11 million people would sign up for the public option by 2019, far fewer than the 103 million cited in another analysis by the Lewin Group. The Lewin Group is part of Ingenix, a wholly-owned subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group.

The CBO report also estimated the Democratic proposal would boost enrollment in employer-based plans by about 12 million people because of the mandate for individuals to be insured. (Emphasis mine)

As I said a week ago, rumors of the death of health care reform have been greatly exaggerated. In fact, the numbers on the Democratic plan keep scoring well with the CBO:

Washington, D.C. — The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released estimates this evening confirming for the first time that H.R. 3200, America’s Affordable Health Choices Act, is deficit neutral over the 10-year budget window – and even produces a $6 billion surplus. CBO estimated more than $550 billion in gross Medicare and Medicaid savings. More importantly, the bill includes a comprehensive array of delivery reforms to set the stage for lowering the future growth in health care costs. (Emphasis mine)

Maybe Nancy Pelosi just understands the numbers better than the Village.