Great Point by Paul Krugman

This is from Paul Krugman's blog, "Conscience of a Liberal."

We’ve seen this before. One thing that has been sort of written out of the mainstream history of politics is the sheer insanity of the attacks on the Clintons —they were drug smugglers, they murdered Vince Foster (and lots of other people), they were in league with foreign powers. And this stuff didn’t just show up in fringe publications — it was discussed in Congress, given props by the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, and so on.

What it came down to was that a significant fraction of the American population, backed by a lot of money and political influence, simply does not consider government by liberals (even very moderate liberals) legitimate. Ronald Reagan was supposed to have settled that once and for all.

I remember on election night in 1992 watching Senator Bob Dole trying to discredit the election of Bill Clinton by announcing that the Senate Republicans would represent the 55% of the American people who hadn't voted for Clinton.

That was the start of the right-wing myth that Perot's presence on the ballot gave the election to Clinton. Never mind the fact that polls taken of Perot voters showed that their votes would have split roughly 50/50 between Clinton and Bush if Perot hadn't been running.

Then, about a month after Clinton took office, I saw a vehicle with an Impeach Clinton bumper sticker. Never mind that there was no evidence that Clinton had done anything in his first 30 days to warrant impeachment. Those two events, Dole's statement and seeing what was obviously a professionally done bumper sticker, started me thinking that the Republicans weren't going to accept defeat.

Over the next several years the GOP did everything in its power, including shutting down the government, to try and get Clinton defeated in 1996. When it didn't work, they really went ballistic which led to his impeachment for basically lying about private, consensual sex.

Of course, the GOP's concern about elections not reflecting the will of the people was shown to be hypocritical when a black-robed coup, otherwise known as the Bush v. Gore decision, put Bubble-Boy in the White House. Its concern about the morality of politicians was shown to be hypocritical when this year they nominated a man who divorced his first wife following a car accident in order to marry a much younger, much prettier, and much, much wealthier woman in order to use her family's money to run for office.

The reason, by the way, that Republicans don't see their own hypocrisy is because their philosophy can be summed up in one phrase: "We're better than you." If you are African-American, Hispanic, Asian, female, gay, liberal, a Democrat, or non-Christian, they think they are better than you.

Of course, the election of Barack Obama, if it happens, is going to drive them right over the edge. I half-expect Rush Limbaugh's big head to literally explode on election-night if Obama wins.

Is Obama Attacking Clinton's Health Care Plan with Right-Wing Tactics?

A lot of commentators think so, including Paul Krugman of the New York Times. According to experts, Clinton's health care plan, by calling for mandated coverage, would cover millions more Americans than Obama's plan, which, except for children, does not mandate coverage for all Americans.

This is how Krugman puts it in his February 4th column:

But as I’ve tried to explain in previous columns, there really is a big difference between the candidates’ approaches. And new research, just released, confirms what I’ve been saying: the difference between the plans could well be the difference between achieving universal health coverage — a key progressive goal — and falling far short.

Specifically, new estimates say that a plan resembling Mrs. Clinton’s would cover almost twice as many of those now uninsured as a plan resembling Mr. Obama’s — at only slightly higher cost.

Krugman explains that last comment by later citing in his column to a study by a MIT professor:

Mr. Gruber finds that a plan without mandates, broadly resembling the Obama plan, would cover 23 million of those currently uninsured, at a taxpayer cost of $102 billion per year. An otherwise identical plan with mandates would cover 45 million of the uninsured — essentially everyone — at a taxpayer cost of $124 billion. Over all, the Obama-type plan would cost $4,400 per newly insured person, the Clinton-type plan only $2,700.

That doesn’t look like a trivial difference to me. One plan achieves more or less universal coverage; the other, although it costs more than 80 percent as much, covers only about half of those currently uninsured.

Further, Obama attacks Clinton's plan using right-wing style language attacking Clinton's plan on the issue of mandates. Krugman compares this to the infamous Harry and Louise ads of the 1990s that were created by the insurance industry:

You see, the Obama campaign has demonized the idea of mandates — most recently in a scare-tactics mailer sent to voters that bears a striking resemblance to the “Harry and Louise” ads run by the insurance lobby in 1993, ads that helped undermine our last chance at getting universal health care.

What Krugman worries about is that even if Obama later decides that there should be mandates, his campaign's rhetoric against mandates will be used to defeat such a plan in Congress.

Obama's supporters like to claim that he practices a cleaner, more progressive form of politics, but using right-wing scare tactics against Clinton's health care plan doesn't strike us as particularly progressive.

Three Good Columns in the N.Y. Times

The New York Times has three good columns in the Sunday, October 14, 2007 edition. One is by Frank Rich in which he asks the question: As the Iraq War drags on, are we all becoming "Good Germans"? Paul Krugman talks about the right-wing's assault on Graeme Frost, the 12-year old boy who gave a radio address in support of expanding health insurance coverage for children, and Stephen Colbert does a column for Maureen Dowd at her invitation. Check them out.

NPR Interview with Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman has released a new book called The Conscience of a Liberal. National Public Radio did an interview with Krugman on its show All Things Considered. During this interview Krugman made the point that starting with the Ronald Reagan there has been an conscious attempt by the conservative movement to dismantle the programs of FDR that alleviated the effect of income inequality in the United States. These programs included helping unions organize, increasing the minimum wage, and social security. These programs were aided by the Johnson initiatives such as Medicare, Medicaid, and, perhaps most importantly, the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Since 1980, though, all of these programs have, at one time or another, been under attack by the political right of the United States with varying degrees of success. Democrats have been on the defensive for the last generation, only occupying the White House for 8 of the last 27 years and losing control of both Houses of Congress for 12 of those years. When asked why he thought that so many Americans were willing to vote against their economic self-interest Krugman replied with one word: race.

He pointed out that other western societies have not seen the same degree of political support for politicians who want to do away with government programs to help the economic middle and working classes. He says that the difference between those societies and the U.S. is race. He points out that the base of the Republican Party in presidential politics is in the South, the 11 states that made up the Confederate States of America. They started voting Republican in 1964 when four of them voted for Goldwater. Republicans increased their vote in the South in 1968 and 1972, and then really expanded it in 1980. White southerners became Republicans after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act. The Republican gains in the South did not take place because white southerners woke up one day and decided to embrace tax cuts. They took place because of race, a fact that Republicans and their media allies don't, for the most part, want to talk about.

Paul Krugman on Race and Politics

Over the last two weeks, the New York Times has dropped its requirement that Internet readers pay to read certain articles and columns appearing in the NYT. This means that we can now link to articles like this one that appeared on Monday, September 21, 2007 on the Times website and in the print version of the Times. What Krugman does in this article is acknowledge that the political success of the Republican Party in national elections since 1968 has depended on getting Southern whites to vote Republican. The following quotes are from the article:

Consider voting in last year’s Congressional elections. Republicans, as President Bush conceded, received a “thumping,” with almost every major demographic group turning against them. The one big exception was Southern whites, 62 percent of whom voted Republican in House races.(emphasis added)

And yes, Southern white exceptionalism is about race, much more than it is about moral values, religion, support for the military or other explanations sometimes offered. There’s a large statistical literature on the subject, whose conclusion is summed up by the political scientist Thomas F. Schaller in his book “Whistling Past Dixie”: “Despite the best efforts of Republican spinmeisters to depict American conservatism as a nonracial phenomenon, the partisan impact of racial attitudes in the South is stronger today than in the past.”

Appealing to white Southerners is why Republicans candidates aren't appearing at black forums. Its why George W. Bush campaigned at Bob Jones University. It's why Ronald Reagan kicked off his 1980 campaign by appearing at Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were murdered and gave a speech praising "state rights", code words for white racism. When Republicans told you that impeaching Bill Clinton wasn't about sex, you just knew it was about sex, and when they tell you that appealing to white Southerners isn't about race, you just know it is about race.

Ralph Regula Backs Health Insurance Companies Over Uninsured Children

Democrats in the House passed a bill that will increase the number of children covered by the States Health Insurance Program, (SHIP), while decreasing the amount of money paid to Medicare HMOs by the Federal Government. Republicans opposed this bill because (1). they don't think that the Federal government should be covering more uninsured children and (2). they think that private insurance companies should get Federal money even when, as in this case, the Federal Government pays 12% more for these private Medicare HMOs than it pays for traditional Medicare coverage. In short, as Paul Krugman recently wrote, they believe that insuring children is less important than helping private health insurance companies. Krugman was right when he called that philosophy "immoral."

Representative Ralph Regula, (OH-16), backed the Republican position and voted against expanding access to health insurance for America's children. Congressman Regula, we are sad to say, put the interest of private health insurance companies ahead of uninsured children. Think about that if he runs for re-election in 2008.

Why Paul Krugman Likes John Edwards' Health Insurance Plan

Click on the link in this entry's title to learn why New York Times columnist and economist Paul Krugman likes the new healthcare proposal made by John Edwards. It is a very interesting analysis on the Edwards plan.