New York Times — When the Budget Director Talks, People Will Listen
The E.F. Hutton of the health care debate is about to pipe up on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s bill. And with new polls from the AP and the Washington Post showing that increasing costs – individual and those paid by all taxpayers — are a paramount concern among opponents, supporters, and undecideds.
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Congressional Budget Office Director Doug Elmendorf is holding the future of the legislation in his hands. A pricey score on Reid’s bill may push Democratic leaders to water down the legislation like well drinks at a college bar. A good score means Reid can start hammering away at nervous moderates from Red states and states that are part of what Michael Barone calls, in dignified fashion, “the Jacksonian belt,” and what I call The Hillbilly Firewall.
Writer Sheryl Gay Stolberg provides a useful, compact picture of Elmendorf that will help you understand the fireworks, likely later this week, when the CBO score comes out. She also gave a shout out to The Examiner’s “Geek with Guts” headline on Elmendorf. Many thanks.
“David Cutler, an economist at Harvard and Mr. Elmendorf’s close friend, agrees. He said the budget office was ‘doing a great disservice’ by ignoring evidence about how to reduce cost savings. He and Mr. Elmendorf have known each other since their student days; Mr. Cutler said the relationship is suffering.
‘It’s a bit painful,’ Mr. Cutler said, ‘which is sad.’
Hearing this, Mr. Elmendorf grows quiet, though unapologetic. ‘Obviously,’ he said, ‘I can’t lead C.B.O. to reach conclusions to make particular friends of mine happy.’
Mr. Elmendorf said he wished there was not so much ‘personalization of what C.B.O. does around me.’”
Washington Post — A centrist in health-care debate, Lincoln hears it from all sides
National public opinion may be divided on health care, but what really matters is how the residents of key states feel about the plan.
Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, facing a potential primary challenge from her right and a decent field of potential Republican opponents for her 2010 reelection bid, is looking at polls that show the residents of her state do not like the plan at all and think she’s doing a rather poor job herself. In the state’s most cosmopolitan congressional district, in and around Little Rock, 55 percent oppose the bill and only 32 percent support it. President Obama is toting a 41 percent approval rating.
Writer Shailagh Murray, though, is mystified why the poor Arkies from Pine Bluff to Arkadelphia aren’t lining up for the health-care equivalent of government cheese.
“Hundreds of thousands of Lincoln’s constituents are low-income and lack insurance, the very kind of voters
expected to benefit under the Senate bill. Lincoln, a second-term senator, helped write some of the legislation’s key provisions as a member of the Finance Committee, and her sometimes uncomfortable role near the center of the debate could cost her in culturally conservative Arkansas. Despite the potential benefits for many in her state, polls show her support weakening, and constituents are expressing doubts about the proposed overhaul.”
Wall Street Journal — Time Crunch Looms for Health Bill
For those wondering how Congress will or will not get the job done on health care in the weeks ahead, Writer Greg Hitt provides a concise picture of the state of play.
“Republicans will likely filibuster the “motion to proceed,” which simply allows the Senate to begin debate. Delaying consideration of the bill until 2010, an election year, could jeopardize its chances and turn the intricacies of the Senate timetable into a political tool for the bill’s opponents.
This week could offer a test of Mr. Reid’s ability to hold together Democrats and independents in the 60-vote majority needed to shut off any filibuster.”
Lloyd Grove — The All-New Sarah Palin
You didn’t watch Palin on Oprah? Don’t worry. You’ll have the chance to see her on Barbara Walters, Rush Limbaugh, and book events from Washington to Wasilla this week.
Palin doesn’t seem to be overtly running for president, and if she does, it will be an unconventional (Obamian?) kind of bid since GOP grandees are allergic to her dramatic flourishes and bare-it-all style of personal politics.
Kudos to Grove for reviewing Palin’s appearance on Oprah in detail and not as a Rorschach test for his own feelings about the former governor. He said she did a good job, but slipped into unattractive pettiness when she talked about the father of her grandson.
“Never has Sarah Palin appeared so comfortable in her own skin on national television as she did Monday afternoon on The Oprah Winfrey Show. She spoke in clear, easily diagrammable sentences—none of those weird locutions about Putin rearing his head somewhere in the stratosphere over the Aleutian Islands. She was approachable and full of pep. And even with that percussive laugh—the raucous call of an exotic plumed bird during mating season, perhaps—she displayed an appealingly mordant sense of humor.”
Robert Reich — China and the American Jobs Machine
President Obama is looking for China to become a peer nation in one very important sense — a fellow consumerist culture with which we can expand and continue that inflationary Ponzi scheme that is the modern American economy.
But as Bill Clinton’s former labor secretary observes in an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal, China has other goals that preclude helping keep the spending cycle going.
“The Chinese government also wants to create more jobs in China, and it will continue to rely on exports. Each year, tens of millions of poor Chinese pour into large cities from the countryside in pursuit of better-paying work. If they don’t find it, China risks riots and other upheaval. Massive disorder is one of the greatest risks facing China’s governing elite. That elite would much rather create export jobs, even at the cost of subsidizing foreign buyers, than allow the yuan to rise and thereby risk job shortages at home.
To this extent, China’s export policy is really a social policy, designed to maintain order. Despite the Obama administration’s entreaties, China will continue to peg the yuan to the dollar—when the dollar drops, selling yuan in the foreign-exchange market and adding to its pile of foreign assets in order to maintain the yuan’s fixed relation to the dollar. This is costly to China, of course, but for the purposes of industrial and social policy, China figures the cost is worth it.”
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