It is hard to read Remedy and Reaction, Paul Starr's remarkable chronicle of the hundred-year effort to legislate universal health insurance in the United States, without recalling Robert Gibbs's tortured quip that Democrats who've denounced the Obama White House for having knuckled under to Republican principles or intimidation "ought to be drug-tested." Nobody with a sense of history--that is, nobody who reads Starr's book--could doubt how sensible and brave was the president's effort to drive the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 through Congress. Nobody with a feel for the present moment should doubt how imminent is the threat to the act, how urgent it is for progressive Democrats to rally around Obama--and without all the condescending qualifications that "independents," who flock away from allegedly weak or incompetent leaders, interpret as contempt.

Starr, who teaches at Princeton and, with Robert Kuttner and Robert Reich, founded The American Prospect, has written 300-plus pages of tightly woven policy description, narrative and polemic; but one needn't be a wonk to benefit from the tutorial or detect an occasional sigh between the lines. Literary scholars speak of a pathetic fallacy, the idea that inanimate objects have intentions and feelings. Starr makes clear that various political commentators have been susceptible to a somewhat different fallacy, pathetic in its own way, that America's desires can be fathomed through polling and that the president must somehow be at fault if a desire is not fulfilled, as though flawed legislative institutions, entrenched political forces, conflicting popular incentives, regional rivalries and sheer corruption do not shape political outcomes.

Starr learned his lessons the hard way. He closely advised the Clintons on health strategy in the early 1990s (he still knows and has debriefed key Congressional staffers). The centerpiece of Remedy and Reaction is a long section, full of illuminating asides, on the frustration of the Clintons' plans. Starr shows that, even as Bill Clinton submitted his bill to Congress, some 70 percent of voters subscribed to the principles embodied in the legislation he proposed. Yet the bill didn't come close to being enacted. True, Clinton was losing altitude by then, but to suppose his failure was largely a matter of leadership--you know, that he didn't use his bully pulpit forcefully enough, the sort of gripe heard relentlessly on MSNBC, the Huffington Post and Daily Kos about Obama and the "public option"--is to suppose that willows really weep.

Obama's actions were cannier than Clinton's, but they also amounted to a profile in courage. When Obama came into office, Starr explains, only 11 percent of Americans thought reform would have a "negative personal impact," but by August 2009 this segment of the population was trending to 31 percent. Both Rahm Emanuel and Joe Biden were urging retreat. Starr writes, "Obama not only resolved to go ahead; in September and again in the new year, the president took charge of the effort to steady the health-care initiative and prevent it from careening off the tracks." Nor was the final bill anything less than what might reasonably have been expected, filling as it did the negative space left by four generations of government programs and serial compromises. Starting with clean sheets of paper was never realistic when one-sixth of the economy was at stake.

Starr's great fear is repeal of the Affordable Care Act, which would not only deny healthcare to more than 30 million people but would cast doubt on whether "Americans will ever be able to hold their fears in check and summon the elementary decency toward the sick that characterizes other democracies." Obamacare, in short, was healthcare reform's best--and last--shot, and it would be unconscionable for liberals to remain cavalier about its defense, or Obama's, for that matter. It's past time to discard the misguided assumption that in a better economy, or with more of "a fighter" in the White House, something like a Canadian-style single-payer system might have been (or might sometime fairly soon be) enacted.

Read on at the Nation's website. Or download a pdf.

In his State of the Union address two years ago, in 2010, President Obama kept alive faltering hopes for our fraudulent and now broken political system by appealing to Republicans for bipartisanship and civility. As Ryan Lizza reminds us in a New Yorker article that "everyone" is discussing, Obama had made such appeals even before his inauguration by meeting with George Will and a gaggle of Reaganite pundits.

But even in 2010 Obama was addressing a Congress -- including its Democratic-controlled House, which had been elected with him -- that was stuffed to its gills with frauds, as I put it here in "Pearls Before Swine," because it was owned lock, stock, and barrel by the banking, real-estate, insurance, oil, and myriad other corporate interests that have nearly ruined the country.

Congress still is stuffed that way, this year's State of the Union address had the slightly edgy, at times faintly desperate tone of a man who knows it better than he did in 2010. "Beyond the few measures on which there is a rare alignment of stars," I wrote two years ago, "nothing Obama called for will happen, unless his road trip unleashes a firestorm in the American people against Congress for the systemic sins mentioned above. " Here's why I wouldn't change a word now:

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The human body is an amazing creation. It's not only the most complex system known to mankind, but it embodies within it signals that tell its owner that something has gone wrong. A similar signaling system exists in political bodies. Those tasked with reading the signals--be they individuals, physicians or politicians--can choose to consciously ignore the warning signs. The Middle East peace process between Palestinians and Israelis has been emitting SOS signals for decades, but only recently are those signals being received and analyzed for what they are transmitting--a clear and irreversible message that the entire paradigm of "two states for two peoples" has collapsed.

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Two days ago Dissent magazine ran my warning that critics of racism in Republican presidential campaigns should beware of compounding that scourge by reinforcing the Republicans' social-conservative claim on "whiteness." But that's what a January 15 New York Times essay by Lee Siegel does, intentionally or otherwise.

Siegel is a tummler -- the Yiddish word for a character, familiar in that culture and therefore in the American literary marketplace, who cavorts through the public sphere turning cartwheels and overturning pushcarts, mainly to call attention to himself, in Siegel's case as a scourge of conventional wisdom or unconventional pietism. That's very appealing these days to some editors, punch-drunk as they are, staggering in search of a lamppost to light up their ratings.

Siegel works hard to elevate such antics to Dostoyevskyan brilliance. And sometimes he succeeds! But this wasn't one of them, and somebodyhaddasayit, for this time there are serious consequences. So I've said it, and although the Dissent site doesn't take comments, responses I've gotten to it encourage me to share my warning right here.

in response to the Atrios post here

I'm a big admirer of Atrios (Duncan) and hope he doesn't think I'm being picky. But he doesn't have it quite right as to the past; yes as to the future.

As to the history, the way it was was this way: The entrenched interests were not interested enough or entrenched enough in the Internet space (old usage) to fight hard enough to have their way with the Internet. But all along we (yes, including very much Al Gore, but also Grove, Gates, Yang, Cerf, Schmidt, Magaziner, and many others) focused very hard on making sure that it was deemed to be very good sense not to stop the Internet.

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As the internet's avatar Google uses its huge billboard -- the search screen -- to protest the proposed legislation aimed at enhancing intellectual property rights (or censoring the Net, depending on your point of view), some say this is the first time Netizens have used their prowess to lobby.

That's not accurate.

In my term as FCC chair, AOL mounted a massive user-based email campaign to defend my decision to bar narrowband internet access providers (telephone companies) from charging end users for using a telephone line to reach the internet, instead of just making a voice phone call. This was a seminal moment in the development of the internet, and the first exercise of the medium itself to defend the "free" culture of the new common medium.

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Depending on how you look at it, tensions with Iran are mounting to: an accidental war, an intentional war, a recession-causing oil price spike, a dizzying sequence of moves / countermoves / signals, an escalating cycle of assassinations, renewed negotiations, or a combination thereof. At any rate, they're mounting.

Even before all the drama of last week, looming sanctions against the Iranian central bank sparked a debate on whether such harsh economic measures are the functional equivalent of seeking regime change. I argue that the international pressure forged by the Obama administration has been consistent in its aim: opening Iran's nuclear program to the kind of scrutiny that will prove its civilian character. The administration has had to ratchet up the pressure because of Iranian leaders' intransigence. As I said in my post last Monday, it's vital to distinguish this policy-change goal from regime-change because "the only way Iranian leaders would cooperate in proving Iran's non-weapon status is if that would make them less, rather than more, vulnerable."

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Many people have written over the past couple of years--including faithful (and valued) commentators here in response to my last post--that President Obama blew it pretty much from the start by failing to adopt a more "populist" line. This is code for other code: populist means more committed to fighting for the "economic interests of lower-income people," which in recent days has come to mean, rather misleadingly, the other 99%.

Sure, Republicans and Democrats from red states blocked him on almost everything he tried, from climate change to immigration to infrastructure spending. But Obama after (or is it before?) the healthcare reform "failed to make the case" that the federal government could be a lever to redress the grotesque inequalities that have grown up over the past generation.  It was the economy, Stupid. Okay, not Stupid, Timid.

The background premise is that "class" trumps (or, with the right leadership, could be made to trump) other divisions. Many progressive Democrats of a certain age (me, too) acquired this premise reading socialist classics in the 1960s, and it's circulated like an antibody ever since, reinforced, oddly, by the sincerity (or vanity) of professional economists of all kinds.

If you appeal to citizens' "bread-and-butter" interests, presumably, you've got them. Obama's task was to rally "ordinary working people" to confront those whose income is 10 or 20 times theirs. Obama "failed to connect" with "lunch-pail Democrats" because he allowed himself to be identified rather with Robert Rubin's acolytes. (Obama's "they-cling-to-guns-or-religion-or-antipathy-to-people-who-aren't-like-them" remark didn't help, though it was a window onto his understandable apprehensions.)

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Today is the New Hampshire primary, Romney is calling for "leadership," and he seems to be getting away with it. He's not really calling attention to his own qualities, since he's rather slavishly followed his market the way a person who thinks he's a corporation would. No, Romney is tapping into a pervasive feeling--or what reporters, it seems pervasively, call a pervasive feeling--that Obama's leadership has failed. "Leadership" is for the new Romney what "law and order" was for the new Nixon. He's got (as we sang while Nixon shrugged) a ticket to ride.

The question is, why this feeling about Obama? Really. Why? How has it become so hip to doubt Obama's leadership even as--here comes another cliche--"people like him"?

I won't now recount all the accomplishments of the Obama presidency, certainly by comparison with any president in living memory. Others have done a good job compiling these (check out this list to 2010, before Libya, etc., and take a few minutes to contemplate it). I will myself be publishing a review essay in The Nation shortly, reconsidering his greatest accomplishment, healthcare reform, which took a hundred years to enact.

Still, Obama's re-election seems anything but certain--Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, etc. all seem within Republican reach--and he's polling around 45% (he won with only 52.8%). If he loses, the "leadership issue" will likely be the critical one, which is a little like saying he will lose because he's widely thought to be a loser.

THERE IS ANOTHER way of looking at this, of course. Almost from the moment he was elected, Republican leaders in the Congress announced that their mission was to obstruct and defeat him--not only on issues where they might have genuine disagreements, but also on things they generally endorse but might improve the economy, like roads and bridges. The Republican fear, quite openly expressed, was that Obama might get credit if things improved.

It was as if  surly, jealous crew (one that could not be fired, Mr. Romney) had announced at the outset of a voyage that they intended to sabotage the ship's engines to make the captain look bad. And yet the passengers, once at sea, and with the ship foundering, do turn on the captain. What did congressional Republicans know about American politics that allowed them to assume they could indeed get away with this?

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These days we're hearing two sets of concerns about the US and international pressure on Iran over its nuclear program. From one direction, GOP presidential candidates and other ultra-hawks argue for an escalated conflict with Iran. According to them, President Obama isn't doing enough or is actually coddling Tehran. Not that the candidates really know much about the Administration's Iran policy, but that's par for the course and part and parcel of an increasingly bizarro Republican foreign policy aproach.

For some of Obama's critics, their faith in military action gives them utter confidence that attacking Iran would squelch its nuclear ambitions without the kind of backlash we might regret. (Hmm, where have we heard that before?)

Yet another set of commentators, who are less sanguine about a war with Iran, warn that tightening the screws of economic sanctions -- currently being prepared -- already puts things on a dangerous course. Prominent voices in this camp are Trita Parsi and Suzanne Maloney, two of the foreign policy community's top experts on the region and certainly warranting close attention. Indeed, the questions they raise are central: has the Obama administration put higher priority on the sanctions than on the nuclear program itself, and in the process complicated (if not doomed) the effort to reach a peaceful solution?

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Someone please explain for me this idea that President Obama "owns" the situtation in Iraq. As I work to catch up on some of the Iraq pull-out commentary from over the holidays, I won't try to match the depth of Steve Clemons' counterpoint to Fred and Kimberly Kagan's recent Weekly Standard piece. Instead, I'll direct some of the views I share with Steve toward engaging Peter Feaver over at Shadow Government and ploughing the ground Feaver stakes out: setting fair terms to judge the president's Iraq policy. His questoin is "Can Obama take credit for ending the Iraq War without taking blame for what happens next?" To which my answer is: "why the hell not?"

Feaver cries foul on the attempt he sees by Obama supporters to give him full credit for anything positive in Iraq and saddle President Bush with everything negative. Well, what is the Obama Administration claiming to have done? President Obama claims credit for extricating American forces from nearly nine years of military involvement there. By the way, can I pause for a moment to say how absurd it is to talk about a hasty exit after nine years?!?

But returning to Feaver's argument, he'd have a stronger point about taking responsibility for the bad along with the good if Obama was claiming credit having locked in a stable future for Iraq. Except that's not the claim. Like President Bush before him, the president has tried to use the US military presence to the best stabilizing effect for Iraqis and express gratitude and pride in the efforts of the those who served that mission. But how did all of this come about, and by what notion of fairness and responsibility do we treat the original act of invasion as water under the bridge?

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Tomorrow morning the Obama administration will present the findings of its latest national security strategy review. The review has been undertaken with an eye towards scaling back Pentagon spending in a way that best provides for the defense of the country. This "strategy first" approach to defense reform makes good sense. The question is whether the administration will put forward a strategy that is in keeping with the threats we now face, or whether it will attempt to pass off minor adjustments as a major policy shift.

A new strategy is long overdue. The most recent Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) - the U.S. government's official, public strategy document - was in many respects just a laundry list of missions that the U.S. military was expected to carry out, including counterinsurgency, counter-terrorism, protection of allies from conventional or nuclear attack, curbing the spread of nuclear weapons, ensuring freedom of the seas, promoting economic development, providing military assistance, participating in disaster relief operations, and carrying out humanitarian interventions. To make matters worse, the QDR process makes no attempt to estimate the cost of doing all of these jobs, much less determining whether some of them might be better addressed through non-military means.

What would a new strategy look like? First and foremost, it would be more modest, more disciplined, and more focused. That will entail shedding or scaling back missions and capabilities that are unnecessary and/or counterproductive. Obvious examples include de-emphazing large scale counterinsurgency and nation building and trimming our bloated nuclear arsenal.

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It's the end of the year and time to turn the page after a bit of reflecting. What better way to reflect than to contrast image and reality, and even more so when the topic is Palestine's economy? For starters, I ask, Do we have an economy, real or imagined? For a long time, many would just sweep this question under the rug of the Israeli military occupation and say No. How could we when every aspect of our livelihood is ultimately micromanaged by the Israeli government?

But such a knee-jerk answer did not make sense after the Oslo Agreement and the advent of the Palestinian Authority. From that point on, the economic reality under occupation was spiced up with heavy doses of self-made artificial images. The starting image, if my memory serves me well, was that we would "build a Singapore." May God rest that imager's soul. I hope the real Singapore never asks Palestinians to compensate them for the damage done to its good name.

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Embedded within some of the critiques of the mounting Iran War fever are clues to the larger problems of the Republicans' foreign policy approach. A new Foreign Affairs "Time to Attack Iran" article by Matthew Kroenig has drawn responses from fellow Democracy Arsenal blogger Michael Cohen as well as ForeignPolicy.com bloggers Stephen Walt and Dan Drezner. All of them highlight the right wing tendency to inflate threats and discount potential blowback, but it's also important to see this as part of a larger pattern of playing fast and loose with reality.

In a weird way, I'm kind of envious of the critics who offer themselves as a replacement for the Obama administration. Foreign policy is so much easier the way they do it. True to Mencken's classic put-down, they have a clear and simple answer for every complex problem. I like how Michael Cohen encapsulated it in a recent ForeignPolicy.com piece on the candidate debates:

To listen to the GOP candidates on Iran is to think that an American president can use a little military force here, drop a few sanctions there, and voilà, the Iranian nuclear program will be stopped dead in its tracks.

Right, magical thinking.

Plus, they get to feel all Winston Churchill-ey -- which may indeed be a main point. As Churchill's presumptive heirs, they pride themselves on unique insight into the true nature of the threats we face (i.e. worse-than-Democrats-recognize) and the necessary response (i.e. tougher-than-Democrats-would-do). Republicans have become so entranced by this political self-image that they are staking their entire foreign policy on moral clarity, threat-inflation, defiance toward the rest of the world, and toughness for its own sake.

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