As published for The Washington Post on March 10th, 2010:

Whatever the legislative fate of health reform — now in the hands of a few besieged House Democrats — the reformers have failed in their argument. Their proposal has divided Democrats while uniting Republicans, returned American politics to well-worn ideological ruts, employed legislative tactics that smack of corruption, squandered the president’s public standing, lowered public regard for Congress to French revolutionary levels, sucked the oxygen from other agenda items, reengaged the abortion battle, produced freaks and prodigies of nature such as a Republican senator from Massachusetts, raised questions about the continued governability of America and caused the White House chief of staff to distance himself from the president’s ambitions.

It is quite an accomplishment. For the president, it must also be quite a shock, because he thought he was taking a reasonable, middle path on health reform.

At the start of this process, many Democrats preferred a single-payer health system — essentially, Medicare for everyone. Short of this goal, they advocated a public option that would compete with private insurance companies and prove the superiority of government-run care. But President Obama rejected a single-payer approach and signaled early that the public option was expendable.

Obama also rejected the one genuinely bipartisan health reform proposal – made by Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Bob Bennett (R-Utah) — that would have ended employer-based insurance and given individuals a deduction to buy their own coverage from a menu of private insurance options. (Wyden has turned out to be the ignored prophet of the health debate. “If you . . . just pound it through on a partisan vote,” he said last June, “you have people practically as soon as the ink is dry looking to have it repealed.”)

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As published for The Washington Post on March 5th, 2010:

The most interesting political developments violate ideological expectations. Why did Bill Clinton fight for NAFTA and accept an end to the welfare entitlement? Why did George W. Bush push a Medicare prescription drug benefit? In each case, some bold political calculation or deep policy conviction was at work.

So why is President Obama pursuing education reform with such creative vigor?

In its rhetoric, spending and budget, the Obama administration has promoted two ambitious principles: serious consequences for chronically failing schools, including mass teacher firings and takeovers by charters, and the use of student performance to assess individual teachers and principals.

There is no purely political explanation for this approach. At the last Democratic Convention, about one in 10 delegates belonged to teachers unions. Unions, not unexpectedly, oppose the wholesale firing of teachers. In a number of states, unions have helped pass legislation making it illegal to base teacher evaluations or compensation on student perfor-mance.

Administration officials are careful to point out that measuring student performance by classroom is directed toward rewarding good teachers and improving the performance of marginal teachers, not just weeding out the weakest. A recent Gates Foundation survey of 40,000 public school teachers found a broad hunger for better information about student performance. Good teachers would rather not operate in the dark.

But this kind of data is likely to seed a revolution. It introduces a foreign concept — professional rigor — into public school teaching. Under the administration’s proposals, principals would be given information on individual teacher performance. I suspect that over time, parents would want access to those data as well. Some teachers would be honored or become motivated to change; others would be exposed and threatened. Merit works that way.

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As published for The Washington Post on March 3rd, 2010:

Americans, always fascinated by celebrity suicides, have a number of recent excuses for sympathetic voyeurism.Andrew Koenig, 41-year-old son of actor Walter Koenig, hanged himself in a Vancouver park after leaving a despondent note. Days later, Michael Blosil, the 18-year-old son of singer Marie Osmond, jumped from his eighth-floor apartment after writing that his depression had left him feeling friendless.

A few years ago, Brad Delp, lead singer for the band Boston, killed himself after writing, “I am a lonely soul.” South Korean supermodel Daul Kim wrote before her suicide last year, “The more I gain, the more lonely it is. . . . I know I’m like a ghost.”

People seem naturally interested in news indicating that the famous share our struggles. In this case, it is true. Suicides outnumber homicides in America, making self-hatred more lethal than violence by others. In 2009, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration reported that 1.1 million Americans had attempted suicide during the previous year. By one estimate, “successful” suicides have left behind 4.5 million family survivors, who live with ghosts each day.

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As published for The Washington Post on February 26th, 2010:

Such is the zeal in portions of the tea party right that it is not enough to sweep out living members of the establishment such as John McCain. A brisk, ideological scrubbing must be applied to history as well.

So Glenn Beck, speaking recently at the Conservative Political Action Conference, identified a great enemy of human freedom as . . . Teddy Roosevelt. Beck highlighted this damning Roosevelt quote: “We grudge no man a fortune in civil life if it is honorably obtained and well used.”

Ah, you don’t discern the scandal in this statement? Look closer. “This is not our Founders’ idea of America,” explained Beck. “And this is the cancer that’s eating at America. It is big government — it’s a socialist utopia.” Evidently, real conservatives defend wealth that is dishonorably gained and then wasted.

The problem with America, apparently, is not just the Great Society or even the New Deal; it is the Square Deal. Or maybe Beck is just being too timid. Real, hairy-chested libertarians pin the blame on Abraham Lincoln, who centralized federal power at the expense of the states to pursue an unnecessary war — a view that Ron Paul, the winner of the CPAC presidential straw poll, has endorsed.

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As published for The Washington Post on February 24th, 2010:

On health-care reform, the strategy of President Obama and Democratic congressional leaders is psychologically understandable — as well as delusional.

It is easy to imagine the internal dialogue: “Well, they voted for me, overwhelmingly. I didn’t hide my views on this issue; I highlighted them. If they actually knew what was in the plan, they’d support it. If I don’t believe in this, I don’t believe in anything. Sometimes you just have to lead.” But there is a problem with this reasoning: After a year of debate, Democratic leaders — given every communications advantage and decisive control of every elected branch of government — have not only lost legislative momentum, they have lost a national argument. Americans have taken every opportunity — the town hall revolt, increasingly lopsided polling, a series of upset elections culminating in Massachusetts — to shout their second thoughts. At this point, for Democratic leaders to insist on their current approach is to insist that Americans are not only misinformed but also dimwitted.

And the proposed form of this insistence — enacting health reform through the quick, dirty shove of the reconciliation process — would add coercion to arrogance. Majority Leader Harry Reid has declared that “everything is on the table” — as though Senate Republicans and Democratic moderates were the domestic equivalents of Iran. This is the political context that Democratic leaders have set for their historically “transparent” health summit — a threat as transparent as a horse’s head in a senator’s bed.

Obama now approaches the Rubicon. The Senate is in disarray. Its procedures frustrate his purposes. Before crossing the river with his army, Julius Caesar is reported to have said, “Let the dice fly high!” For what stakes does Obama gamble?

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As published for The Washington Post on February 19th, 2010:

As published for The Washington Post on February 17th, 2010:

CARREFOUR, HAITI

A helicopter flight low over Port-au-Prince reveals whole neighborhoods of flat, collapsed roofs next to areas that seem barely touched. The earthquake gods are not only cruel but arbitrary. The Presidential Palace leans drunkenly. Soccer fields and other open spaces are carpeted with tarp tents, offering scant protection as the rainy season arrives.

The pilot navigates toward a white lighthouse along the coast, between the earthquake epicenter at Leogane and Port-au-Prince. On the site of a collapsed amphitheater and park, the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines has established a camp in the city of Carrefour — a scene of beach and barbed wire, aqua sea and warships on the horizon, camouflage tents, milling Marines and chopper noise.

Carrefour is the fourth area these Marines have helped stabilize since the quake. Initially the greatest needs were order, food and medical treatment. Order came more quickly than the Marines expected. Haitians didn’t require a show of force, just the knowledge that someone was in charge. With the port in ruins, supplies were delivered on four beaches by landing craft. Long-range heavy lift — the ability to move masses of equipment, supplies and people across the world — is a demonstration of American global influence. It may be the best definition of that influence.

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As published for The Washington Post on February 12th, 2010:

It is the oddest of unintended airport stopovers — a short stay at Guantanamo Bay. Helicopter flights for the ship I was trying to reach off the coast of Haiti had been canceled. So I slept in an Air Force tent at Camp Freedom, an arrow’s shot from where Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed is imprisoned — his stay now extended longer than the Obama administration would wish.

“Guantanamo” has become a synonym for “prison.” Actually, it is a 45-square-mile U.S. Navy base, complete with a McDonald’s and a Subway. The Guantanamo Bay Children and Youth Program sounds like a violation of the Geneva Conventions. But there are families stationed here needing child care. The Navy conducts operations against drug running and human trafficking. The base is now a major transit point for supplies headed to Haiti.

But Guantanamo’s reputation is largely determined by roughly 200 detainees. Military personnel involved in holding and prosecuting these terrorists are proud of their work but can’t be public with their pride. When I saw one television camera attempt to film a soldier, he covered his face with his cap — not out of shame, but out of concern for the possibility of terrorist reprisals.

The highest-profile trials take place in courtroom No. 2, housed in a maximum-security compound of East German aesthetic sensibility — all concrete and barbed wire. On the fences are large signs reading “No photography.” The building also hides its face.

It is an ugly place — ugly to many Americans and to most of the world. By 2005, President George W. Bush wanted to close the Guantanamo prison. It had become a symbol of abuses that had little to do with the facility itself. But the administration’s internal policy debate became deadlocked over the question: What to do with the detainees? Without a clear answer, Bush refused to set an arbitrary deadline to shutter Guantanamo. Complexity had defeated symbolism.

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As published for The Washington Post on February 10th, 2010:

During his question time at the House Republican retreat, President Obama elevated congressman and budget expert Paul Ryan as a “sincere guy” whosebudget blueprint — which, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), eventually achieves a balanced budget — has “some ideas in there that I would agree with.” Days later, Democratic legislators held a conference call to lambaste Ryan’s plan as a vicious, voucherizing, privatizing assault on Social Security, Medicare and every non-millionaire American. Progressive advocacy groups and liberal bloggers joined the jeering in practiced harmony.

The attack “came out of the Democratic National Committee, and that is the White House,” Ryan told me recently, sounding both disappointed and unsurprised. On the deficit, Obama’s outreach to Republicans has been a ploy, which is to say, a deception. Once again, a president so impressed by his own idealism has become the nation’s main manufacturer of public cynicism.

To Ryan, the motivations of Democratic leaders are transparent. “They had an ugly week of budget news. They are precipitating a debt crisis, with deficits that get up to 85 percent of GDP and never get to a sustainable level. They are flirting with economic disaster.” So they are attempting some “misdirection,” calling attention to Ryan’s recently updated budget road map — first unveiled two years ago — which proposes difficult entitlement reforms. When all else fails, change the subject to Republican heartlessness.

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As published for The Washington Post on February 5th, 2010:

Former community organizer Barack Obama once seemed to recognize the important role of community institutions. It was among his few credible claims to ideological outreach. On the eve of his inauguration, cameras in tow, Obama took a paint roller to the walls of a D.C. homeless shelter. He retained the White House office that promotes community and faith-based charities. In June, during a speech saluting nonprofits, he said, “Solutions to America’s challenges are being developed every day at the grass roots. And government shouldn’t be supplanting those efforts, it should be supporting those efforts.”

But alliteration carries little weight in the budget process (to the disappointment of speechwriters everywhere). For the second budget in a row, President Obama has proposed to reduce the tax deductions on donations by the wealthy, making it about 10 percent more costly for them to give to charity — and gaining the federal government about $300 billion in revenue over 10 years.

The public justification for this tax increase is fairness. The budget reads: “Currently, if a middle-class family donates a dollar to its favorite charity or spends a dollar on mortgage interest, it gets a 15-cent tax deduction, but a millionaire who does the same enjoys a deduction that is more than twice as generous.” In the last budget season, Obama argued this tax increase would “equalize” a disparity and “raise some revenue from people who benefited enormously over the past several years.”

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