Congress

Capitol Hill is a wild, rowdy beast, and a president either rides it or gets bucked out of town. President Obama has learned that lesson the hard way over the past 12 months, and the question that loomed largest as he strode into Congress for his first State of the Union address was this: Can he regain control of the Beltway’s always fractious debate—or will the “ways of Washington” tear him down?

Democrats are considering using the reconciliation process to pass health-care reform in the Senate, a maneuver that would require only 51 votes. Republicans are outraged. Using reconciliation to pass health care, they insist, would be undemocratic.

How polarized is America today? Not all that polarized by historical standards. In 1856, a South Carolina Congressman beat a Massachusetts Senator half to death with his cane in the Senate chamber — and received dozens of new canes from appreciative fans. In 1905, Idaho miners bombed the house of a former governor who had tried to break their union. In 1965, an anti–Vietnam War activist stationed himself outside the office of the Secretary of Defense and, holding his year-old daughter in his arms, set himself on fire.

To understand why Senator Evan Bayh’s surprise retirement is such a big deal, it’s important to realize that Indiana has always held a special place in the Democratic Party’s heart. It was the state, more than any other, which created the legend of Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 presidential bid. In the late 1960s, the state had a reputation for racism, a reputation built from decades of Klan power, and from its heavy support in 1964 for the presidential bid of arch-segregationist George Wallace.

As Arizona Senator John McCain runs for his fifth term, he should be untouchable. Instead, he's facing a primary challenge from J.D. Hayworth, a former Republican congressman who lost his deep-red seat in the Phoenix suburbs in the Democratic tidal wave of 2006. All recent polls show McCain beating J.D. Hayworth—a man the Arizona Republic memorably accused of "bombastic rhetoric and obnoxious behavior"—by a wide margin, from 59 percent to 30 percent in a poll sponsored by McCain to 49 percent to 33 percent in a poll sponsored by Hayworth.

Are Americans clamoring for more bipartisanship from President Obama? Or do they want him to get things done? For most of the last year, I've been arguing that the public is less interested in bipartisanship than in sensing that the president is basically on the side of anxious voters who fear losing their jobs if they haven't lost them already. As a candidate, Barack Obama won the presidency because voters believed that he understood middle-class insecurity on a gut level while his Republican opponent did not.

If there’s one thing the media knows about the Tea Partiers, it is that they are populists. They hate Washington; they hate Wall Street; they wouldn’t be caught dead on Martha’s Vineyard; the mere sight of tofu turns their stomach.

But what if they’re not?

I was flipping channels this week when I came across Sean Hannity and Michelle Malkin discussing Barack Obama’s disrespect for the American military. Turns out Obama incorrectly pronounced Navy Corpsman (he pronounced the “s”) at a recent prayer breakfast. (He was in the middle of praising “the extraordinary work our men and women in uniform do all around the world,” but Hannity and Malkin overlooked that part.) “It’s quite galling,” announced Malkin, a decorated veteran herself (I made that up). “What does it tell you about how out of touch this man is with the military?”

Let me get straight to the point: Americans' profound distrust of government is neurotic -- irrational, defensive and born of emotional trauma.

That doesn't mean I discount other sources of our disabling distrust of Washington. I believe the scholars who cite watershed events like Watergate and Vietnam as having undermined our belief in governing institutions.

After weeks of anticipation and speculation, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has unveiled the legislation that will bring health reform to the Senate floor in the coming weeks.

While waiting for the details of the bill to come out Wednesday, we created a little office pool, called the Price is Right for Health Reform. In an office-wide email, we asked our peers to guess the CBO's estimates of the gross costs of the bill. Showcase Showdown rules (closest without going over) applied. We were intentionally vague in our question because estimating the true costs of the bill is inherently a difficult process.

The number we were looking for was $848 billion. The CBO's estimate of the gross cost of the bill is essentially the total cost of coverage provisions over the next 10-years. This is the number most frequently reported in the media as the "cost" of the various health reform bills being discussed. But is this really the best indicator of the true costs of health reform? Maybe not. First, timing matters: $848 billion over ten years is a lot different than a $787 stimulus bill where 90 percent of the money is spent within the first 3 years. So do deficits. How much does a bill cost if it's fully paid for and in fact reduces the deficit as is the case for both the House ($109 billion) and Senate ($130 billion) bills?

We received plenty of calls from our co-workers asking just these questions. We tried to stay quiet, because we were interested in what the educated, non-health policy wonks think about the cost of reform. True to our think tank's "post-partisan roots" we got a range of answers from "too little" to "$600 trillion, Obama lies." We got a couple of "$1" which we assume was a reference to the bill's deficit neutrality, and $90 billion which seems like a reasonable estimate of yearly costs. But the majority of the answers clustered within the $800-$900 billion range, surprisingly close to the final answer. Few people seemed willing to go above $900 billion, suggesting the power of the official price tag President Obama put on reform during his September address to a Joint Session of Congress. So who won? The answer after this non-commercial break: