“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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Paul Krugman: Health Reform Realities
Health reform is the signature achievement of the Obama presidency. It was the biggest expansion of the social safety net since Medicare was established in the 1960s. It more or less achieves a goal — access to health insurance for all Americans — that progressives have been trying to reach for three generations. And it is already producing dramatic results, with the percentage of uninsured Americans falling to record lows.
Obamacare is, however, what engineers would call a kludge: a somewhat awkward, clumsy device with lots of moving parts. This makes it more expensive than it should be, and will probably always cause a significant number of people to fall through the cracks.
The question for progressives — a question that is now central to the Democratic primary — is whether these failings mean that they should re-litigate their own biggest political success in almost half a century, and try for something better.
Charles M. Blow: G.O.P. and the Apocalypse
Last week I suffered through another dust-dry Republican debate in which a slimmed-down roster of seven candidates leveled many of the same attacks and regurgitated many of the same staid pitches. [..]
But what struck me most about the debate was just how unremittingly bleak the tone of it was.
These Republican candidates have countered Obama’s “ Hope” and “Change” message from 2008 and “Forward” message from 2012 with “War” and “Ruin” and “Backwards.”
There seemed to be a competition to see who could describe the state of the country.
Understandably, a candidate has to identify a problem that they plan to fix. That’s simply the nature of politics. If there is no problem to fix, there is no need of a fixer.
Democrats are identifying problems as well.
There seemed to be a competition to see who could describe the state of the country.
Understandably, a candidate has to identify a problem that they plan to fix. That’s simply the nature of politics. If there is no problem to fix, there is no need of a fixer.
Democrats are identifying problems as well.
Michael Brenner: NFL! NFL! NFL!
So the St. Louis Rams NFL football team (ne LA Rams, Cleveland Rams) is moving to Inglewood, California where it likely will have as a companion the San Diego Chargers (ne LA Chargers). The Oakland Raiders (ne LA Raiders) also would love to return to the Southland. Mobility is as American as apple pie. Sports teams seem ever ready to hit the road whenever the former home town is sticky about coughing up the money to pay for grander stadiums or arenas that will fatten the bank accounts of billionaire owners. If the promise of largesse is big enough, they’ll pull up stakes whatever the marks in city and state governments put on the table in desperate efforts to keep their town “big league.”
It’s a rigged game whose outcome is as certain the spin of the roulette wheel. The owners win; the localities lose; and the fans are played as pawns in a game of financial wheeling-and-dealing. Loyalty is found only among the forlorn souls whose emotional needs for tribal identity and ritualized mock warfare are manipulated by the sports industry as part of a lucrative business plan. It is money that makes the sports world go round these days — no different from the financial shenanigans that mark the market for sub-prime mortgages, commodity speculation, “inverse” tax schemes and out-sourcing. The fans’ passions about who wins and who loses are genuine. Many appreciate the athleticism. Owners, league officials and the parasites who feed off them don’t give a damn about any of that. This is, after all, America’s second “Gilded Age” where all value is measured in dollars and dollars can satisfy all our desires.
Robert Kuttner: The Election Carnival Has Just Begun
This could well be the first election since 2000 with an independent candidate. That has happened only four times in the past century, the others being 1912, 1948 and 2000.
And a three-way — or even a four-way race –would be a wild card. It could take any of several forms, with different partisan winners and losers. Consider:
Suppose Donald Trump is the Republican nominee and Hillary Clinton is the Democrat. Establishment Republicans will be convinced that their party has been hijacked by a bizarre rabble-rouser; GOP elites will be unsure which is worse — the prospect of Trump losing, or Trump winning.
Result: pressure builds for a “real” Republican to run as an independent — a conservative but not a rightwing populist. That could be, say, Paul Ryan, or John Kasich, or Mitt Romney again.
Advantage: Democrats. The analogy is to 1912, when two Republicans ran — incumbent president William Howard Taft and former president Teddy Roosevelt as a Bull Moose progressive Republican — and Democrat Woodrow Wilson won without a popular majority.
Malcolm Harris: Wealthy cabals run America
On December 28, the New York Times ran an article about a small group of powerful people in Minnesota. The members of the Itasca Project, who aren’t elected, are, in the words of Times journalist Nelson D. Schwartz, “a private civic initiative by 60 or so local leaders to further growth and development in the Twin Cities.” But rather than exposing the group as a secret cabal running things in a large American city, the article reads more like an advertisement. Schwartz calls the 13 men and women of the Itasca Project’s Working Team “The Establishment 2.0,” and he doesn’t seem to mean it in a bad way. [..]
When we Americans talk about capitalism, it’s usually as an economic system that complements the political system of democracy. Competing capitalists keep the state from accumulating too much power, and the elected government puts a regulatory check on business interests. At least that’s how it’s supposed to work. In practice, it goes a little differently. Think of the presidential election: Not one person has cast even a primary ballot, but the wealthy have already spent untold millions preparing our choices. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was forced to drop out of the campaign in September for lack of funds. His particular demise is no loss for the country, but if even a union-busting midwestern Republican can’t afford to compete, then how much of a choice do we really have?
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