THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2010 GEORGE F. WILL
Swing time in Bucks County?
F langhorne, pa.
rom the 1930s through the 1950s, Bucks County northeast of Philadelphia ac- quired a glamorous reputation as a re-
treat for Manhattan celebrities, including Os- car Hammerstein, who, according to local leg- end, was inspired by the view from his Doylestown front porch to write “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’, ” the opening song of “Okla- homa!” Today the county, which is 93 percent of Pennsylvania’s 8th congressional District, figures in Republicans’ plans to sing that song on the morning of Nov. 3. The district has about 209,000 Democrats, 189,000 Republicans and 66,000 independ- ents. The seat is held by a Democrat, Patrick Murphy, 36, the first Iraq war veteran to serve in Congress. He was elected in 2006 when he defeated the one-term Republican incumbent, Mike Fitzpatrick, a 47-year-old attorney who is Murphy’s opponent again this year. More than half of the 7 percent of the district
that is not in Bucks County is in northeast Philadelphia, where a lot of the city’s police and firefighters live — they are required to re- side in the city — and many conservative Dem- ocrats, too. The remainder of the district is in suburban Montgomery County. Lower Bucks County is primarily blue collar, the upper county is agricultural and the central portion is an upper-income bedroom community for Philadelphia. Fitzpatrick, who had been a Bucks County commissioner for 10 years, won in 2004, a good Republican year. He lost in the Repub- licans’ annus horribilis of 2006, when they suf- fered the first of two consecutive wave elec- tions. (In a wave, a party gains or loses a net of at least 20 seats in the House of Representa- tives.) The Democrats’ 2006 candidate for gov- ernor was Ed Rendell, the former Philadelphia mayor who was much loved in the suburbs for making the central city — he was called the “mayor from Pine to Vine,” two downtown streets — safe to visit for meals and entertain- ment. Rendell defeated his Republican oppo- nent in the 8th District by 40 points. So, 2006 was a Republican nightmare: Incumbent Sen. Rick Santorum lost the district by 20 percent. Still, Fitzpatrick lost by just 1,518 votes out of
249,817 cast, and he carried the Bucks County portion of the district. He did not attempt a comeback in 2008 because he was receiving chemotherapy and radiation for colon cancer. He is now well. Although Bill Clinton campaigned for Mur-
phy in 2006, perhaps with his wife’s 2008 presidential candidacy in mind, Murphy be- came the first Pennsylvanian holding federal office to endorse Barack Obama’s candidacy. Today, the Clinton-Obama contest still re- verberates. Political analyst Charles Cook doesn’t hire dummies, and one of his talented associates, David Wasserman, has this theory: Democratic members of Congress who are in peril are dis- proportionately from districts where Demo- crats preferred Hillary Clinton over Obama in 2008. She decisively beat Obama in the 8th District with 63 percent, and in November 2008 her voters were not Obama swooners: They simply hired him to fix the economy. Murphy has voted with House Speaker Nan-
cy Pelosi 97 percent of the time, including on the stimulus, health care, “cash for clunkers,” the cap-and-trade climate legislation and orga- nized labor’s priority, “card check,” which would abolish workers’ rights to secret-ballot elections in workplace unionization decisions. Fitzpatrick is a centrist in a Republican Party where the center is migrating to the right. He favors extending all the Bush tax cuts and re- scinding to the Treasury all unspent TARP and stimulus funds. The 8th is a swing district that should swing in a year like this. Polls indicate, however, that the race is not settled. Fitzpatrick says that although he was his
family’s first Republican, his seven siblings have all seen the light. He and they grew up in the 8th District, in Levittown, one of the in- stant suburbs (the first, also called Levittown, is on Long Island) that were mass-produced af- ter World War II by William Levitt. They were incubators of the postwar middle class, many of whose members’ bought their first homes from Levitt for $7,990. Bucks County is emblematic of not only
20th-century America but 18th-century Amer- ica, too. It was from the Bucks County bank of the Delaware River that George Washington, on Christmas night, 1776, launched the boats that carried the attackers that surprised the Hessians in Trenton. Republicans hope that on Nov. 2 a piece of another, if rather less mo- mentous, moment in America’s political evolu- tion will occur.
georgewill@washpost.com
Health reform’s six-month checkup S
by Drew Altman
ix months after its enactment, there are two totally different stories to tell about the health-
reform law. The public remains split on the law largely along traditional partisan lines. Confusion and mis- perception are rampant, with more than a third of seniors still thinking the law contains “death panels” (it does not). Yet beneath the political battle lies a success story of early im- plementation: The federal govern- ment that many regard as sluggish and ineffective has turned major ele- ments of the legislation into reality right on schedule. Since the bill’s passage, the Depart- ment of Health and Human Services has set up a program to help people with preexisting health conditions get coverage through state or federal high-risk pools; established a pro- gram to help employers provide health insurance to early retirees; is- sued rebates to help pay drug costs for Medicare beneficiaries stuck in the “doughnut hole”; provided tax credits to small businesses to provide insurance coverage; and created a consumer-friendly Web site,
HealthCare.gov, that rivals anything coming out of Silicon Valley (where our organization is based). Several popular provisions take ef-
fect Thursday. They include allowing adult children up to age 26 to be on their parents’ insurance; banning life- time benefits caps and loosening an- nual limits on insurance coverage payouts; prohibiting insurance com- panies from kicking people off of their policies when they get sick; and requiring that newly purchased in- surance policies cover preventive ser- vices at no cost to patients. Still, our monthly polling finds the public split on the law, with 49 per- cent in favor vs. 40 percent against in September and the rest undecided. Public sentiment about health reform has shifted within a narrow band since the spring, with slightly more in favor in some months and slightly more against in others. For many who oppose it, the law reflects deeper dis- content. When we asked people who said they were angry about the law why they were angry, the vast major- ity reported that, more than being up- set with the law itself, they were an- gry about the general direction in Washington. Meanwhile, with a few notable exceptions — such as requir-
E.J. DIONNE JR.
Tempest in a very small teapot I
s the Tea Party one of the most suc- cessful scams in American political history? Before you dismiss the question, note
that word “successful.” Judge the Tea Party purely on the grounds of effective- ness and you have to admire how a very small group has shaken American politi- cal life and seized the microphone of- fered by the media. But it’s equally important to recog-
nize that the Tea Party constitutes a sliv- er of opinion on the extreme end of poli- tics receiving attention out of all propor- tion with its numbers. Yes, there is a lot of discontent in America. But that discontent is better represented by the moderate voters who expressed quiet disillusionment to President Obama at the CNBC town hall meeting on Monday than by Tea Party ideologues who proclaim the unconsti- tutionality of the New Deal and every- thing since. The Tea Party drowns out such voices because it has money — some of it from un-populist corporate sources, as Jane Mayer documented last month in the New Yorker — and has used modest numbers strategically in small states to magnify its impact. Just recently, Tea Party victories in the
Alaska and Delaware Senate primaries shook the nation. In Delaware, Christine O’Donnell received 30,563 votes in the Republican primary, 3,542 votes more than moderate Rep. Mike Castle. In Alaska, Joe Miller won 55,878 votes for a margin of 2,006 over incumbent Sen. Li- sa Murkowski, who is now running as a write-in candidate.
Do the math. For weeks now, our na- tional political conversation has been driven by 86,441 voters and a margin of 5,548 votes. A bit of perspective: When John McCain lost in the 2008 presi- dential race, he received 59.9 million votes.
Earlier this year, much was made of
the defeat of Sen. Bob Bennett, a Utah conservative insufficiently conservative for the Tea Party. Bennett lost not in a primary but at a Republican convention attended by all of 3,500 delegates. Even in larger states, the Tea Party’s triumphs were built on small shares of the electorate. Rand Paul received 206,986 votes in Kentucky, where there are more than 1 million registered Re- publicans and nearly 2.9 million regis- tered voters. Sharron Angle won with 70,452 votes in Nevada, a state with more than 1 million registered voters. The media have given substantial cov-
erage to Tea Party rallies and even small demonstrations. But how many people are actually involved in this movement? Last April, a New York Times-CBS
News poll found that 18 percent of Americans identified as supporters of the Tea Party movement, but slightly less than a fifth of these sympathizers said they had attended a Tea Party rally or meeting. That means just over 3 per- cent of Americans can be characterized as Tea Party activists. A more recent poll by Democracy Corps, just before Labor Day, found that 6 percent of voters said they had attended a Tea Party rally or meeting. The Tea Party is not the only small group in history to wield more power
POST PARTISAN Excerpts from The Post’s opinion blog, updated daily at
washingtonpost.com/postpartisan
RUTH MARCUS
Twisting Obama’s words on terror
The right’s atwitter about President
Obama’s comment to Bob Woodward that America “can absorb a terrorist attack.” This unobjectionable remark — maybe it would have been better if the president had said the country would crumble in the face of another attack? — is taken as evidence that Obama is uncaring about the prospect of American lives lost and unserious about prosecuting the war on terror. The reaction says more about Oba- ma’s critics than it does about Obama’s worldview. “How can an American president say
that as if he’s a detached observer and doesn’t care about Americans dying,” for- mer United Nations ambassador John Bolton told Fox News. “I think people have been worried about his qualifica- tions to be commander in chief for a long time, and that ought to prove it.” Marc Thiessen piled on, calling the quote “stunningly complacent words from the man responsible for stopping such a terrorist attack. . . . He is effectively saying: An attack is inevitable, we’ll do our best to prevent it, but if we get hit again — even on the scale of 9/11 — it’s really no big deal.” Woodward’s book isn’t out yet, but The
Post account of it, and the context in which the quote is used, says it “portrays Obama and the White House as barraged by warnings about the threat of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil and confronted with
the difficulty in preventing them.” Hardly the picture of a White House heedless of or complacent about the terrorist threat. Then there are the president’s own words, which the critics seem determined to ig- nore. What Obama told Woodward was, “We can absorb a terrorist attack. We’ll do everything we can to prevent it, but even a 9/11, even the biggest attack ever . . . we absorbed it and we are stronger.” How does this fairly translate to not caring about Americans dying and dis- missing an attack as no big deal? Put the same words in George W. Bush’s mouth — that the country absorbed the shock of 9/11 and was stronger for it — and these same folks would be cheering him on. And which is a more responsible presi- dential statement: that the country has the fortitude to withstand another terror- ist attack, or the mocking, inciting “bring
’em on” that Bush offered up? If Obama is, as Thiessen asserts, “stun- ningly complacent” about the prospect of an attack, what does that make Dick Che- ney, who said the question about another terrorist attack was “not a matter of if, but when”?
Or consider this “stunningly compla-
cent” government official: “There will be another terrorist attack. We will not be able to stop it. It’s something we all live with.” That was FBI Director Robert Mueller — in 2002. Woodward’s book may end up showing the president in an unflattering light — at least, to those who believe that Afghani- stan may require more time and resourc- es than the president appears prepared to give. That’s a fair subject for debate. Twist- ing Obama’s words about a terrorist at- tack isn’t.
75 Net favorable: 49% 50 Net unfavorable: 40% 25 0
April 2010
May June July
Don’t know/refused: 11% Aug.
Among the 32 percent who feel ‘angry’ about the health reform law:
Angry about the general direction in Washington and health reform is one of many things upsetting you
Don’t know/refused: 3% SOURCE: Kaiser Family Foundation monthly health tracking polls
ing that people have insurance — the law’s major provisions appear to be very popular with the public. The provisions that will touch the most people — an expansion of Med- icaid, new insurance marketplaces in every state, tax subsidies for working people without insurance, guaran- teed access to insurance and the hotly debated requirement that almost everybody purchase coverage — do not come until 2014. And eventually, real-world experience with these changes will trump political argu- ment when the public renders its ver- dict on the law. Consider what happened when a Republican-controlled Congress cre- ated the Medicare drug benefit in 2004. Three times as many seniors opposed the law as favored it, and many liberals criticized the legisla- tion as a first step toward privatiza- tion of Medicare, just as some conser- vatives call current health reform a government takeover. Within three years, though, supporters of Medicare
Part D outnumbered detractors as it became clear the program was work- ing well and helping seniors afford their medicines. The new health-re- form law represents a much bigger change than the Medicare drug ben- efit was and may work out differently, especially if Republicans succeed in their efforts to block full implementa- tion. But if the reform continues on pace, as happened with Part D, the law’s fate will be determined not by the early political debate but by how people believe the law is working for them and their families and friends once its major elements are imple- mented.
At the six-month mark, the politics of health reform remain as ugly as ever, but implementation of the law’s benefits and changes has been a suc- cess story so far. There is a lot of heavy lifting still to come.
The writer is president and chief executive of the Kaiser Family Foundation.
77% 20%
Angry about health reform in particular
A Sept. 100% Views on health reform
KLMNO
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A27
The election campaigners we can’t see
by David Axelrod
ll of Washington is in a frenzy, speculat- ing about the outcome of the fall elec- tions. Yet the development that could most tip the scales is getting far too little public attention. That hidden factor is the audacious stealth campaign being mounted by powerful corporate special interests that are vying to put their Republican allies in control of Congress and turn back common-sense reforms that strengthen America’s middle class. In Senate and House races across the coun-
try, industry-fueled front groups such as “Americans for Job Security” have spent tens of millions of dollars on negative ads as mislead- ing as their benign-sounding names — aimed almost entirely at Democratic candidates. These floodgates were opened by a January Su- preme Court ruling that upset long-standing precedent by giving U.S. corporations an un- fettered right to spend and influence our elec- tions. Now, for the first time, Wall Street, the in- surance lobby, oil companies and other special interests can fill our airwaves, mailboxes and phone lines right up until Election Day. And by funneling their money through not-for-profit social welfare and trade groups, they can do it without publicly acknowledging their partici- pation. Legislation to close this loophole and force the groups to publicly identify their chief do- nors on their ads has been blocked by a Repub- lican minority in the Senate that’s determined to reap this political windfall of special-interest support while keeping the American people in the dark. The Senate is scheduled to try again before the fall recess to break this logjam, pos- sibly as soon as today, so Americans can learn who is behind these stealth campaigns. In races that will determine control of the
House and Senate, these stealth front groups, virtually all of them run by seasoned Repub- lican operatives, could eclipse the spending of political parties and the candidates themselves. Exactly who is behind these groups? They
won’t say. Their corporate donors know that if they revealed their sponsorship, these mislead- ing negative ads would lose all credibility. But here’s what we know from published reports:
Special interests are spending millions on campaign ads — without publicly acknowledging their participation.
One of these groups, the newly established Crossroads GPS, is spearheaded by President George W. Bush’s former chief strategist, Karl Rove, and secretly bankrolled by major Repub- lican donors. This group and its partner, Amer- ican Crossroads, have raised $32 million to run negative ads against Democrats; they promise to spend $50 million by November. Americans for Job Security, another major
than you’d expect from its numbers. In 2008, Barack Obama did very well in party caucuses, which draw far fewer voters than primaries. And it was Lenin who offered the classic definition of a vanguard party as involving “people who make revolutionary activity their profession” in organizations that “must perforce not be very extensive.” But something is haywire in our me- dia and our politics. Jill Lepore, a Har- vard historian whose new book is “The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle Over Amer- ican History,” observed in an interview that there is a “hall of mirrors” effect cre- ated by the rise of “niche” opinion me- dia. They magnify small movements into powerhouses, while old-fashioned journalism, which is supposed to put such movements in perspective, reacts to the same niche incentives. There is also the decline of alternative forces in politics. The Republican estab- lishment, such as it is, has long depend- ed far more on big money than on troops in the field. In search of new bat- talions, GOP leaders stoked the Tea Par- ty, stood largely mute in the face of its more outrageous untruths about Oba- ma — and now has to defend candidates such as O’Donnell and Angle. And where are the progressives? Sulk- ing is not an alternative to organizing, and weary resignation is the first step toward capitulation. The Tea Party may be pulling a fast one on the country and the media. But if it has more audacity than everyone else, it will, I am sorry to say, deserve to get away with it.
ejdionne@washpost.com
player in this special-interest campaign, re- portedly was founded with support from the American Insurance Association to advance that industry’s agenda. Yet another group, Americans for Prosperity, is funded by billionaire oil men, David and Charles Koch, to promote Republican candi- dates who support their right-wing agenda and corporate interests. The group has gone to great lengths to conceal information about its donors and their motives, but the New Yorker magazine recently revealed that this group has been quietly guiding the organizing efforts of the Tea Party— in other words, billionaire oil- men secretly underwriting what the public has been told is a grass-roots movement for change in Washington. The ferocity of their efforts is a testament to
the battles the Obama administration has fought against special interests on behalf of the American people.
Over the past 20 months, we’ve eliminated tens of billions of dollars in unwarranted sub- sidies to bank middlemen to make college more affordable for millions of students. We’ve beaten back a furious lobbying campaign from Wall Street to protect people with credit cards and mortgages from hidden fees and penalties. We’ve taken on the health insurance lobby to protect Americans with preexisting conditions from being denied needed coverage. We’ve closed egregious loopholes that allow corpora- tions to get tax breaks for tax shelters they’ve set up overseas.
And now the empire is striking back. The Re- publicans have offered an agenda that would reverse many of these gains and put special in- terests back in the driver’s seat. Prohibitions against rampant corporate spending in our elections were championed by Theodore Roosevelt. They were written in reac- tion to the untrammeled political power of the “robber barons,” who used their money to bend the national agenda to their interests, and were strengthened after the Watergate scandal, which involved secret campaign spending by corporations. By reversing long-established safeguards, the Supreme Court has turned back the clock. There is still time for the media to shine a light on these front groups. There is still time for an aroused public to rise up against this ominous special-interest hijacking of our elec- tions. There is still time for candidates on both sides of the aisle to take the side of average Americans and challenge these groups to dis- close their secret funders. And there is time for Republicans to stop blocking a law that would require these groups to disclose who is influ- encing our elections. Pundits will spend a lot of time predicting who will win in November. But more is at stake than the fate of Democrats or Republicans. What’s at stake is whether the powerful corpo- rate special interests will go back to writing our laws or whether our democracy will remain where it belongs — in the hands of the Amer- ican people.
The writer is a senior adviser to President Obama.
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