A lot of the problem with Hillary post-mortems is that the biggest problems had nothing to do with Hillary. I can't remember where I saw it, but some nitwit pundit talked about Hillary's insistence on individualism and her failure to involve Americans in a joint enterprise, and used, as evidence and without explanation, her slogan: "Stronger Together."
An awful lot of the Hillary critique is just insisting that one's own prejudices are backed up by the evidence, whatever that evidence is.
I think it is and should be a powerful political message to identify real problem as stains on the national character. But it also seems like a recipe for political demagoguery and of marrying petty grievances with apocalyptic rhetoric.
After four years of Trump, the Democrats will be able to recycle his slogan: Make America Great Again.
How about: "America: We're better than this."
The media are going to have to be fixed. That's the only real answer.
As it is, it looks like the best that we can hope for is that decent Americans can temporarily create an alliance with the less stupid and venal elements of the media and the Deep State. But once Trump is gone, any such alliance would melt away.
The fact that for 90% of the population incomes have been stagnant or declining for 40+ years may not seem like a crisis, but I think it is one emotionally for a lot of people.
The fact that things have gotten steadily better for the top 10% in that time causes a lot of resentment.
I agree with 1. I even like the slogan. I was thinking of "America: We Can't Possibly Be This Fucked Up" but pf's is better.
I basically agree with 1 - I refuse to blame Clinton for her loss, and will forever consider this a stolen election.
I don't disagree with 2. But I think the stagnant/declining wages are as much the result of "All those other people caused your problems, and you're not responsible for their problems" than their cause.
1: I had the thought that, for the 2008 Obama campaign GWB served as the problem that everyone wanted to have addressed (true in 2004 as well, but not as many people).
1 is correct, we won't need to work too hard to identify an appropriate crisis for Campaign2020, in 3 years there will be plenty to work with.
"You need to solve other people's problems, and you helped cause them, and you also caused your own problems."
The corollary of this is that problems are actually soluble. "Yes we can", IOW.
2: If that's the driving force in American politics*, then why didn't, "we are the 99%" get as much traction as, "make America Great Again"?
Incidentally, I wasn't trying to blame Clinton, just trying to put my finger on something that was a new thought to me.
* I'm not sure that it is, and I don't think the 90% figure is literally accurate.
then why didn't, "we are the 99%" get as much traction as, "make America Great Again"?
Racism! They'd rather blame the black guy than blame their boss, because they want to be the boss, not be his enemy.
And in terms of Making America Great Again the actual historical greatness has a strong liberal bias. DEMOCRATS won WWII, DEMOCRATS walked on the moon, DEMOCRATS won WWI*, DEMOCRATS built the atom bomb.
*Totally counts because who the fuck reads history books.
"We don't know who struck first, us or them, but we know that it was Democrats that scorched the sky. "
Nixon was president in 1969. But he hated the Apollo program (like most Americans).
11: It would certainly have gotten more traction if it had been the candidate's slogan. "Stronger together" got 3m votes more traction.
I'll disagree -- I think "the left" did identify common problems, and they resonated with some people, just not the evangelical so-called Christians, or the oil/gas dependent regions, who are on a bust cycle.
And I also think that perhaps people underestimated exactly how much certain groups in this country hated Clinton, or just hate the idea of a woman President. I admit I did -- I figured they'd stay home rather than support Trump.
I also agree with 2, and with 12. I feel pretty sure that 2 is a productive line of discussion, in that it's something that can be fixed -- even DeLong gets it now! Pretty soon he's going to acknowledge that Larry Summers' maybe had some errors in judgment in 1999.
12 will be remedied with time and mortality. My 14-year-old son, echoing me, has cheerfully informed me that everything will work out once me and my generation are dead.
how do you tap "you are not alone" on the left?
Historically, by unionising. But the American (and the British) left decided to let that go by default.
I'd say its a force not "the driving force."
I feel like we are the 99% percent did get a lot of traction. If President Obama had co-opted it instead of crushing Occupy it would have more salience.
However I think the 90% hate the top 9% even more than they dislike the 1%. The top 9% are more directly keeping them down.
It may make some sense to talk about quintiles instead, but the 90%/9%/1% breakdown is pretty useful.
15
He may have hated it (did he really?) but he got his name on the plaque. One of the sleazier things he did.
18.2 rests on the assumption that Republicans will allow themselves to be voted into oblivion. Evidence suggests they won't.
20 Was a reply to 11.
I'm not dismissing racism as a reason, but it isn't the only factor even if it is relatively bigger than class resentment. (I think it is.)
Even given that class resentment mobilizes fewer voters than racism I don't think it makes sense to abandon it as a motivating strategy.
20.2 is right. I recall that everyone was taken by surprise by how much traction Occupy/We are the 99% got.
We're now so used to Very Serious People taking the growth of inequality seriously as a problem that it's easy to forget how recently talking that way marked you as a beyond the pale raving leftist loon.
And indeed, it was a major failure of the Democratic Party (Clinton included, but it was pretty much the whole Dem establishment, not just her) that they chose to keep that movement and the sentiment that drove it at arms length.
If President Obama had co-opted it instead of crushing Occupy it would have more salience.
No shit. I was also reminded of the union protests that went on in Wisconsin in 2011, which national democrats stayed away from in droves. Maybe if they hadn't, the state wouldn't have gone red in 2016.
21: yes, definitely. In large part because it was Kennedy's idea.
17.1 (and follow-up to my 11.2). Part of my interest in writing the post was trying to figure out why so many people have made the argument that Clinton didn't have a positive vision when, to my eyes, she was being much less cautious than she was in 2008*.
I think part of the reason, as described in the OP, is related to her answer to the BLM activists** that she thinks about problems in terms of budgets and legislation rather than changing hearts and minds. I think both she and the Left did identify real and important problems. I also think she didn't push the, "she's against the same things I'm against" button as well.
One answer is just laziness. To say, "she didn't give people enough reason to vote _for_ her" is easy and unfalsifiable.
** which I respected.
We should not let the fact that the election was stolen blind us to Clinton's weaknesses as a politician. Any reasonably good Republican would have beaten her straight up. "I'm With Her"? Really? Still better than my preferred slogan: "America: The Fuck is Wrong with You?"
"America: The Fuck is Wrong with You?"
Careful, you might hurt the delicate feelings of WWC swing voters in Ohio, who are the most important people in the world.
20, 24, 25: For liberals, the most important takeaway from the Trump phenomenon is that there's no more point in blaming political parties for the failures of politics. The Republican Party was always a more disciplined party than the Democrats, and they were taken over by someone the Republican Establishment hated.
Trump really did speak to the "Silent Majority" (read: "Vocally Racist Minority") and the primary process was sufficiently democratic to permit them to get their way.
Say what you will about what a loser Hillary is, she still beat Bernie. The idea that Debbie Wasserman Schultz or the Party Establishment or whoever caused Bernie's defeat is nonsense.
I voted for Bernie and, especially in retrospect, I wish Warren had run. But maybe liberals are finally going to get it through their heads -- as Trump did -- that there is a party apparatus waiting to be taken over by the first semi-plausible person willing to actually do the work.
I disagree with 30.1. I don't think the Republican Party was really taken over by someone the Republican Establishment hated. Many of them vocally say they hate Trump, but those who were willing to do anything meaningful about it where close to non-existent. They may "hate" Trump, but less than they hate even a small bump in the capital gains tax. That's not really hate. That's not getting everything on your wish list and bitching.
We should not let the fact that the election was stolen blind us to Clinton's weaknesses as a politician.
Yes, we should. I am unwilling to discuss her weaknesses as a politician when she won the fucking popular vote by mountains, Comey ratfucked us, and when her opponent didn't think he'd have to govern and campaigned in a different plane of reality.
I'm super pissed at Dems for things like 25. But Clinton ran a stellar campaign and I'm not interested in blaming her for the racism and sexism that elected Trump.
They may "hate" Trump, but less than they hate even a small bump in the capital gains tax. That's not really hate. That's not getting everything on your wish list and bitching.
This is exactly right. There are two kinds of Republican voters: greedy rich people and suckers.
28- Yeah although her foremost weakness was that Republicans had been circulating negative stories about her for 30 years. The effect of that was huge. Most of the Democrats I know personally believe her to be unusually corrupt.
33: I think there are plenty of people who are just poor/moderate income racists getting exactly what they want.
34: I was flat wrong about how that would turn out. I thought there was a set of hard-core Clinton haters who believed it all, but that the fact that she'd been a functioning and not unusually disliked Senator and Secretary of State meant that everyone outside the crazy core dismissed all the stories as bullshit.
Turns out that was wrong. It's really, really, hard not to think 'where there's smoke, there's fire', I guess
We're now so used to Very Serious People taking the growth of inequality seriously as a problem that it's easy to forget how recently talking that way marked you as a beyond the pale raving leftist loon.
Fair point. I agree that Democrats were, broadly speaking, awfully slow to take up that banner.
I would note that, in 2004, Edwards rode inequality, as an issue, to become the vice presidential candidate (which, in retrospect, was doing better than he should have), and I think that the number of Democrats embracing it as an issue has increased steadily since then.
32: Won the vote by mountains, except where it counted. She ran a normal campaign. *Obama* ran stellar campaigns.
I am still so fucking furious that I have trouble keeping it together in threads like this. I can't quit zooming out and thinking of each little thing in terms of the gross destruction Trump's presidency is bringing/will bring about. HOW COULD THOSE FUCKING VOTERS CARE SO LITTLE.
This is cutting them slack that grown people don't deserve. But one of the lies they've been told since Reagan is that the government isn't doing anything useful or important, so breaking it doesn't matter. And by now they really believe it.
40- I think it is worse than that. I think the general spite vote is bigger than the specific racist vote. A lot of people voted for Trump BECAUSE of the "gross destruction."
"Stellar" is a bit much. "Serviceable" is about right.
It is kind of abstract to a lot of people though. I think because people are restrained from doing their worst in ordinary life. They can be rude to people but they know they can't just stab them to death. So they think that there is something restraining the Reps from poisoning the water so it outright kills people. I keep seeing quotes like 'someone would stop them if they tried to do something like that.'
32: I think we'll have to disagree. If you ignore the massive amounts of bullshit, you're left with a campaign that was basically OK. She was a poor public speaker, an incredible debater, and made some questionable judgment calls. If we run that campaign ten times, I'd bet we'd lose seven. Maybe six.
42: Right-o. It is too narrow to say that "racism" won Trump the election. But "hate" covers it entirely.
43: The Democratic Convention was conducted in a difficult atmosphere, and it came off brilliantly. There have never been three debate victories like the ones we saw this year -- at most, a candidate had a performance that dominant once. You can say, with the benefit of hindsight, that focusing advertising on the fact that Trump was a monster was maybe a bad choice, but it sure seemed appropriate at the time. And this business about insufficient attention to swing states -- well, that's just dumb. Let me know if you need me to explain why.
I was the guy who posed the
"I'm gonna give you your dicks back!" vs "Supplementary Semen Transfer Program eligibility"
rhetorical difference a few weeks back...that still seems important to me.
And it ties into gender, obv: proposals from a Democrat who is a also a woman are likely to get heard as the latter, rather than the former...
"I'm gonna give you your dicks back!" vs "Supplementary Semen Transfer Program eligibility"
This was right on then, and it remains so.
31, 33: It is possible that we also disagree about the level of Democratic Establishment hostility to liberalism. I say: Had Bernie won the nomination, he would have been treated much, much better by his Establishment than Trump was by his. Certainly this was the case in the primaries.
The Republican Party was a significant obstacle for Trump to overcome -- to the point where the conventional wisdom was that it couldn't possibly happen long after it was obvious that it was happening.
"Kill and Eat You" was elected president, and we are debating which pizza toppings might have been more palatable. Burn everything down.
The Democratic Convention was conducted in a difficult atmosphere, and it came off brilliantly. There have never been three debate victories like the ones we saw this year -- at most, a candidate had a performance that dominant once.
Sure, but the ground game, which was supposed to be an ace in the hole, ended up as a total flop.
At LGM, they occasionally post about the contest for DNC chair, saying that either Ellison or Perez would be a great choice, and that the heated fight that's developed is a pointless excuse to refight the 2016 primary and a huge waste of time and energy.
Inevitably, the resulting threads are filled with Bernie and Hilary supporters refighting the 2016 primary.
50--yep.
Has the polling fail actually become UNDER-discussed?
I remember finding a whole pre-election OT thread on some stats blog where they were discussing Comey and the October Surprise, all in terms like "how intellectually interesting! in a hypothetical, significantly closer electoral context the effect this is likely to produce might have been a big deal."
It seems like basically, if you had a PhD in a quant type of discipline, you got this election wrong.
42 is right on.
51 A flop, it was completely absent and relied on big centralized (in Brooklyn) data and ignored local ground conditions (and urgent desperate requests!)
I don't want to relitigate things but man, it's all shit.
But fuck Comey most of all.
(52 last is why I've largely stopped reading comments at LGM)
Sure, but the ground game, which was supposed to be an ace in the hole, ended up as a total flop.
Has the polling fail actually become UNDER-discussed?
Fivethirtyeight has been doing an interesting (if fairly dry) series of articles trying to figure out what lessons can be taken from the 2016 election, and the one about Clinton's ground game is fairly good).
So what went wrong with Clinton's vaunted ground game? There are certainly some things to criticize. There's been good reporting on how Clinton's headquarters in Brooklyn ignored warning signs on the ground and rejected the advice of local operatives in states such as Michigan. And as I wrote in a previous installment of this series, Clinton did not allocate her time and resources between states in the way we would have recommended. In particular, she should have spent more time playing defense in states such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Colorado and less time trying to turn North Carolina into a blue state or salvage Iowa from turning red.
Here's the thing, though: The evidence suggests those decisions didn't matter very much. In fact, Clinton's ground game advantage over Trump may have been as large as the one Obama had over Mitt Romney in 2012. It just wasn't enough to save the Electoral College for her.
Inevitably, the resulting threads are filled with Bernie and Hilary supporters refighting the 2016 primary.
I admit to having a touch of that feeling in this thread. I thought I'd had a semi-original idea, and, judging by the comments, either I failed to communicate correctly, or it isn't actually interesting to anybody other than me -- and that's perfectly okay. I fully understand using the open politics thread as a chance to continue venting about the awfulness of the current political moment.
Restate what you thought the original idea was?
Restate what you thought the original idea was?
People appreciate when politicians tell them that the issues that concern them personally are symptoms of larger issues which are eroding the social fabric of the nation.
1) This was a note that the Trump campaign sounded much more loudly than the Clinton campaign.
2) This explains part of the frustration with a "technocratic" approach to politics.
3) As Trump demonstrates, this can be a formula for combining petty resentments and apocalyptic visions*, and I'd like to figure out how to avoid that result while still taking advantage of the power of that sort of message.
* Glenn Beck also talked about this in his segment with Samantha Bee
Oh. I don't think that one can be exploited for good. The problem is that it comes down to "Everything is terrible and needs to be destroyed", and if you care about individual people, you need to not destroy the bridges and the schools and the roads and the sewage treatment plants and so on.
I think that message only comes out evil.
55.last:
Not your fault. There's some bizarre gravity that seems to pull all political discussions among liberals into refighting the 2016 primary.
It's especially annoying, because the question of whether the Dems will move substantively to the left instead of pursuing more of the same DLC style centrism is important. But any attempt to talk about it gets hijacked by Clinton vs Sanders.
The 2016 primary really does seem to have traumatized some people to a much greater degree than 2008. In those self-same LGM threads I mentioned there's one regular commenter whose brain seems to have been broken by the experience. Some people should probably just stay clear of politics if it's going to mess them up that much.
Well, in 2008 we won, so whatever happened must have been okay. This time, not so much.
60: True, but I reached my "brain broken" diagnosis for this particular commenter back before the election when everyone was assuming Clinton would win. This person seemed far more interested in nursing grievances over the primary than anything that was happening in the general election.
59.last You're pulling me back in AL. Got a thread I can look at to satisfy my curiosity?
61 Sounds like J f L but he went away before the election.
I think that message only comes out evil.
Huh, interesting. Not what I'd been thinking, so I'm curious if you can elaborate on that.
For example I'd thought that, historically, health-care was an issue which had been well-suited to that sort of framing on the Left -- presenting the lack of affordable health care as a national crisis rather than as just an inevitable outcome of market conditions (notice that, in that example, the left and right are on the opposite sides* as they were on the question of rust-belt manufacturing in the 2016 election).
* Rhetorically, at least. From a policy perspective, I think the Left had concrete proposals to make health care more affordable whereas I don't think Trump has policy ideas to save manufacturing.
57- I'm very sympathetic to wanting a good way to campaign on a work on those kind of issues. I think we are heading for a fall as society, even aside from the more concrete problems we have, but it seem hopelessly difficult to fix. Maybe even campaigning on it has to a bad thing.
I believe we have a real bureaucracy problem. The Republicans pander on this but their solution is worse than the problem. I know Al Gore did some useful work on this but I think it needs more than tinkering around the edges. If there were a solution we couldn't implement it without losing the lawyers and bureaucrats on our coalition.
I believe we have a real bureaucracy problem.
I think this is fundamentally idiotic, and that you're going to gesture vaguely at things you don't know anything about to defend it.
57, 59
Agreed that this is a resonant message; not just in places where unemployment and despair are leading to visible collapse, but also in comfortable exurbs. I guess because people there are concerned that "I got mine" may not be something they can pass on to their kids.
Regarding health care, instead of dull descriptions of technocratic subsidies and tax rebates for the necessary premiums, maybe improved fucking marketing. Broadcast exchanges as way for people to regain their independence. New times mean job changes for more Americans, you need independence to succeed in America. Image of smiling lady mechanic.
30last: Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were comparative* outsiders who seized the Democratic party apparatus (such as it is). So was Jimmy Carter, I guess.
My hobby-horse, as you folks have heard many a time, is how so many observers seem to miss how entrepreneurial, rather than institutional, our political system really is. I'm sure there are big city machines, but most of the activity outside of that (and I bet plenty in the big cities) revolves around individual effort and individual organizational talent.
19 -- I don't know much about the UK, but in the US, labor walked away from liberalism, as much as (or more than) the other way around. Reagan's victory over Mondale was real, and total. (I think this is exactly the victory Trump is hearkening to with MAGA, but never explicitly says.)
* Nothing like Trump, to be sure.
This from Twitter: "Of 24 districts that give Dems the best chance of winning the House, only 2 went for Bernie in '16. 22 went Hillary."
I guess it really depends on what is meant by "best."
66- :) Challenge Accepted.
The Banking Act of 1933
https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/scribd/?item_id=15952&filepath=/files/docs/historical/ny%20circulars/1933_01248.pdf
The pdf says 53 pages but if you look at the text it is less.
Dodd-Frank
https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-111publ203/html/PLAW-111publ203.htm
Well over 1000 pages.
And failed. Laws are wordier now, and this is an important bureaucracy problem because?
"Of 24 districts that give Dems the best chance of winning the House, only 2 went for Bernie in '16. 22 went Hillary."
Centrist districts prefer the centrist. Film at 11!
I think complaints about having too many IRB filings required will resonate pretty well with the modal voter.
LOL I'd have thought careful reading was a characteristic of lawyers.
I understand that appeals to the cob house building community are also broadly popular.
The cob house community is pretty relevant. They're big on getting building codes revised to allow cob houses in places that aren't so liberal even the bureaucrats keep hemp oil at their desk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuseppe_Zangara
Shot some people Feb 15, 1933
Executed March 20, 1933
The shortest wait for an execution in 2016 was 7 years.
Laws are wordier now, and this is an important bureaucracy problem because?
If all the words get used up writing laws there won't be any left for the rest of us.
The problem with election post-mortems is there are so MANY failure points where if things had gone differently Hillary would have won, so it's easy to point to any one instance and claim it's primacy:
1. Comey. If god is just, he'll be tried and jailed--or at least removed from office. God is not just.
2. Failure of Hillary's campaign to listen to the locals.
3. Micro-targeting on FB by the Trump campaign and associated PACs with fake news and lies designed to hit tailored prejudices that was completely invisible to anyone not inside the conservative bubble.
4. Voter suppression efforts in key states.
5. Hillary's lack of personal charisma. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a Hillary hater and as soon as the writing was on the wall for Bernie I turned to full-throated support for Bernie, but she has admitted that she is not a natural at speeches and one-on-one interactions. She tried, but it wasn't there.
6. Russian interference/collaboration.
7. My personal hobby horse: Barrack Obama. I love and respect the man as a good person with fantastic personal charisma and a desire to do the right thing. But he fundamentally failed as President because he was unwilling to fight fire with fire when it come to Republican intransigence--he brought a community organizer's mindset to a gutter fight. It just didn't work. Then he let the Democratic party apparatus languish for eight years--if he'd put the effort into importing his 2008 campaign architecture into play and insisted on a 50-state strategy, we would be a million miles better off.
9. Polling failures, and specifically an unwillingness to focus on the worst case scenarios that the polls showed. No efforts to hedge against black swans.
10. On and on ad infinitum.
I really don't think that the actions of courts and legislatures are really a good way to highlight problems with bureaucracy. Or at least those are all usually held to be different things. You can have a wordy law without creating much of a bureau and you can have a relatively brief law that creates a whole bunch of bureaucrats.
I find it hard to see how anyone could possibly be idiotic enough to ask;"Laws are wordier now, and this is an important bureaucracy problem because?"
When a law is 50 pages an interested party doesn't have too much of a hill to climb to figure out what is in it. When a law is over 1000 pages (and in more difficult language as well) no one know everything that is in it and only the very most dedicated can find out a close approximation.
No. That's nonsense. The 50 page laws, especially the ones for businesses, were largely not interpretable without looking at the legal decisions based on them over the years.
We (my union, sometimes with other orgs.) do a workshop on runaway inequality, financial strip-mining, wage theft, the Powell memo, and how institutional racism serves the 1%. I swear it's way more engaging and empowering* than it sounds, but it is pretty heavy. Toward the end of the day, we ask people to draw pictures on big easel paper of the community they'd like to live in, and it is like turning on the sun.
People come up with these wonderful communities with green spaces, good public services, community gardens, free higher ed, light rail, solar power. They're not creating utopias -- we've just spent several hours analyzing where the money for all this has gone and strategizing how to get it back.
That's what we're missing -- a broadly shared vision of how we want to live. Obviously it's more complicated than that, and plenty of people would settle for clean water and college without bankruptcy, but we have to be for more than "justice" or a particular policy.
Other people have said all this more eloquently, but it's the drum I'll keep banging on.
*I know, but I don't have a better word than "empowering."
80- All these things add overhead to society and are at least a small part of what makes infrastructure so expensive to build in this country.
A 50 page law isn't necessarily easier to understand than a 1000 page law; the 50 pager leaves far more room for interpretation which the non-expert reader won't necessarily have the tools to track down and understand. At least the 1000 page law spells it all out.
I'm not exactly sure what RtCB is arguing for.
But it seems to overlap with an argument that Tim Burke has been making (which, as I've said, I find provocative and interesting, but don't entirely agree with).
The general problem is that the modern liberal nation-state and its characteristic institutions are simply no longer capable of delivering on their baseline promises and possibilities to any national population anywhere. Even in nations that appear by most measures to be successful, the state withers due its lack of vision. . . .Very little policy gets made because it's the right thing to do; most policy is about transfer-seeking. Every dollar is spoken for. Every play is a scrum in the middle that moves the ball inches, never yards. Political elites around the world either speak in laughably dishonest ways about hope and aspiration or stick to grey, cramped horizons of plausibly incremental managerialism. Young people all around the world recognize that there is little hope of living in a better or more comfortable or more just world than their parents did, and their grandparents must often live every day with the possibility of losing whatever they've gained, that they are one lost job or sickness away from falling without a safety net.
2 (in comments)
I found Moises Naim's The End of Power interesting and useful to explain some of my feelings and why they're trending as you describe. Naim's analysis argues that people are increasingly feeling that they have no input into the systems that control their lives except a sort of refusal: they can block or stop or inhibit action by an institution or government or system, but they cannot initiate or propose or see an idea come to fruition. I see that certainly in my own working life: almost all interesting proposals that have some sharp or original objective or mission get ground down into a kind of procedural soup and grind slowly to a halt. I think even people in powerful positions feel this way, that they can have clear insights which are impossible to do anything about, and this is one reason that the "California Ideology" types like Elon Musk are so enamored of framing their actions as outside any imaginable form of collective action or collaboration, because they feel that to work with others or work inside organizations is to lose all hope of doing something dramatic in scale and impact. Naim basically observes that people are right to feel powerless at the same time that they're missing just how inclusive many organizations are.
We need to identify the necessary heart of our established systems and practices, whether it's in a small non-profit, a government office, a university, or a corporate department, and be ready to mercilessly abandon the unnecessary procedures, processes and rules that have encrusted all of our lives like so many barnacles. Those of us who are in some sense part of the larger networks of the Establishment world, even at its edges, can endure the irrelevance of pointless training sessions, can patiently work through needless processes of measurement and assessment, can parse boring or generic forms of managerial prose to find the real message inside. We've let this kind of baroque apparatus grow up around the genuinely meaningful institutional systems and structures that we value because it seems like too much effort in most cases to object against it
You are a smart guy Moby but 82 is moronic. When the Banking Act of 1933 was passed there was no history of precedent for it. That was an additional gradual and continuing accretion of bureaucracy around it.
We (my union, sometimes with other orgs.) do a workshop on runaway inequality, financial strip-mining, wage theft, the Powell memo, and how institutional racism serves the 1%.
Is that something like this? If so, congratulations. That sounds like genuinely fighting the good fight.
No. That's still just nuts. The FDIC was created by that act. It's a very good illustration of a relatively brief law creating a big bureaucracy. Sure, the entire FDIC didn't appear overnight, but it wasn't an accretion or somehow unforeseen. They wrote a law saying "collect this fee and create this insurance" knowing they were creating a great big government agency.
My hobby-horse, as you folks have heard many a time, is how so many observers seem to miss how entrepreneurial, rather than institutional, our political system really is. I'm sure there are big city machines, but most of the activity outside of that (and I bet plenty in the big cities) revolves around individual effort and individual organizational talent.
This seems at odds with the fact that Republican voters ultimately fell in line with a candidate they despised. They did not stay home, they showed up and voted for their team.
85- Could be true in theory. My understanding is that the language of modern statute is more opaque than that of 1933. I'm guilty of "gesture(ing) vaguely at things you don't know anything about" here though.
86- I liked that, but the final para is a little too bold for my tastes actually. The problem is the Reps are too ready to take a machete to the working parts of the red tape.
Roger I love you brother but you're talking nonsense. Like multiple kinds.
93- Thanks. I hope I am. I like it when it turns out something I thought was true was just more right wing bullshit. But I'm not convinced yet.
So, given that we have lots of reasons for Clinton's loss, does rehashing the loss make sense, especially since we are all generally on the same side? If egos and recriminations could be taken out of it, sure. But I don't know that that's possible.
What I'm interested in doing is figuring out a way to capture a broad winning coalition on the left that's going to focus on the real problems we and the world face--
1. Climate change has to be core. Slowing, mitigating and reversing--no matter the cost--the advance of global warming is the most fundamental problem we face. There are so many catastrophic cascading failure points--ocean acidification, ocean temperature rise (What happens when the North Atlantic Current shuts down? Nothing good.), melting permafrost causing methane release, king tides preceding actual sea level rise, etc. Immediate investment and aggressive targets for clean energy, etc.
2. The solidification of the .01%'s political power needs to be stopped. I don't have a mechanism because it seems so hopeless, but ending Citizens United through constitutional amendment seems like a necessary step. I'm also in favor of confiscatory taxes on income, wealth, and estates.
3. Social justice in all its forms needs to be emphasized--BLM, women's rights, LGBT rights, immigrant and refugee rights, etc., and framed in a way that gets broad support. Pass the ERA and look at other ways of enshrining minority rights. Fix the drug laws, eliminate mandatory sentencing, break the police, prison guard and immigration enforcement unions as political forces, while rebuilding the broader union movement.
4. Locking in a Dem majority by adding a few states--DC, Puerto Rico, etc.
5. Fixing gerrymandering.
6. Getting rid of the Electoral College (another constitutional amendment).
7. Getting rid of the Senate (yet another amendment).
8. Actively taxing religious organizations that participate in politics.
9. Active investment in infrastructure, both as a jobs program and as a way of making people's lives better.
10. This one is on my mind a lot lately. I think UBI needs to come and come fast, which will require a fundamental rethinking of the American relationship to work and income as a means of defining status. As near as I can tell, the simple fact is that there already aren't enough jobs to go around, and that trend is only going to accelerate as automation and AI advance (some ridiculous number of truckers are going to be out of jobs in the next decade as self-driving vehicles come online, and that's just one example--the work being done on agricultural robots points to the eventual elimination of migrant labor as another).
I think there's a shared consensus on the left that these are all important issues. There's also a wave of energy to be captured and ridden to electoral victory.
My personal belief is that means the left needs to capture the Democratic party at all levels--municipal, state, and national. Keith Ellison heading the DNC is a good start. I'm in the process of becoming a delegate to my local Cem party caucus for Minneapolis and figuring out other ways I can take concrete action. Things can change, we just need to get on the stick.
/rant
89- OK that's better. The FDIC is a sizable bureaucracy. I think Dodd-Frank also creates some additional reporting requirements.
Compare the amount of overhead in Medicare to that of Obamacare.
95.10: I was already aware that newly active Dems were flooding local party apparatus, and I just saw a headline that they are largely/mostly Bernie people. As I've said elsewhere, and maybe here, one of the reasons I never got down with Sanders is that his promised revolution didn't show up: he basically* got the same young/lefty coalition that always opposes the establishment Dem candidate and then never bothers to vote for another 4 years. But if the outcome here is that they become permanently engaged and active, that's only to the good. I feel reasonably confident that, as they do the actual work, they'll get past some of the dismissiveness/blindness to traditional party strengths that characterized the primary (just as the Women's March stuff has taught a LOT of Clinton voters about intersectionality and the flaws with white feminism).
Also, I basically agree with all of 79.
*and please, really, let's not relitigate this: I'm speaking broadly, and if I were wrong, he'd have won, or come as close as HRC did in '08
Healthcare bureaucracy is fucknuts all around, but I have no idea of the relative efficiency of Medicare to Obamacare. Having been witness to the receiving end of the Medicare-paper spigot, it certainly seems like a huge bureaucracy is behind it. The "This is not a bill" statements are frankly phenomenal. Of course, the bureaucracy of Medicare probably seems more invisible to recipients because it isn't trying to stop them from receiving services so often.
I'm on board with everything in 95 except maybe #7. I think it's good to have some mid-scals regional representation, and it could be done more fairly.
91 I don't find that a contradiction at all. The entrepreneur worked out great marketing pitch, and sold it to a whole bunch of people. Part of it was how much he'd do for them, and the other part was how awful the other people are (from Hillary down to the undocumented rapist hordes). I'm not saying that the RNC is/was a nothing, but it, and the other institutions, are tools, and lesser tools at that.
99- I brought it up because I remember there were a bunch of thinkpieces about how Medicare's overhead was so much lower that private insurance.
Compare the amount of overhead in Medicare to that of Obamacare.
Yes, but compare Medicare with both Medicaid and SSI. The first two are contemporaneous, but the one is simpler than the other, while the third is one of the simplest, most efficient programs in the whole gov't.
My point is that increasing overhead isn't just an inherent factor of time: it has to do with law design, with intention, and with political climate. Note that the easiest route to single payer is Medicare for All, but Medicare is way more complex than SSI. Not every problem is as simple as SSI.
That said, it's been noted that the 2nd Ave Subway in Manhattan costs 3X what a broadly comparable line in Paris did, despite both being old, dense, union-heavy cities. I'm genuinely curious what accounts for a difference of that magnitude. Not platitudes or cliches, but an actual blow-by-blow. Because I do agree that that sort of inefficiency is killing us.
My guess? It's that systems in America have to be incredibly complicated to get approval by reactionaries, because they fear nothing in the world so much as somebody who isn't white getting a good deal. So every project has a zillion veto points and complications, because anything else gets characterized as a slush fund.
95: I agree with all of this and all of 79. I don't want to fight over the campaign again and again, particularly if the wounds are still fresh. My only concern is that it might become received wisdom that the Clinton campaign was perfect. If we try that shit in '20 we're looking at 8 years of Trump. But, that discussion can wait.
I was also thinking of the ACA because of 85
"At least the 1000 page law spells it all out."
Which didn't entirely work in the ACA case because of mistakes in the language of a 1000 page bill. Exploited by a ruthless opposition. Seems like it would generally be hard to avoid that problem.
And indeed Dodd-Frank hasn't.
Administrative costs as share of total expenditures, 2015, CMS National Health Expenditures data:
Private health insurance: 12%
Medicare: 6%
Medicaid: 11%
CHIP: 18%
DOD: 8%
VA: 0.4%
Worker's comp: 34%
I don't think this includes administrative work done by hospitals/clinics (probably why it's so low for VA); and I don't know how they treat Medicare Advantage plans within Medicare, although I know the latter generate little overall savings.
105: But the ACA being excessively complex wasn't due to a bureaucracy problem, it was due to an asshole problem. The legislature was unfortunately stacked with assholes who wouldn't allow a less Byzantine system to be put in place.
103
-3 I wish I knew how to find out.
-4 The Republican are always to blame. I like that. Comity.
98: I'm on board with not relitigating--my point was that it's impossible to litigate because there were so many failure points. Opportunities for learning, mistakes to be fixed, yes--but finger pointing is pointless and gets in the way of moving forward. I should also note a typo in my point 5: after the writing was on the wall for Bernie, I turned to full-throated *Hillary* support.
100: The Senate is a fundamentally anti-democratic institution. Why should a South Dakotan have 10x (or whatever the ratio is) the representation of a California just because they live in a small state?
To no ones surprise I think the big problem is that the dems are a garbage party and more or less completely unable to function in opposition. Even the most recent protests are all organized outside the party and without any real party support. Does anyone think they'll fillabuster the SC nominee?
Ink live been saying this ad nauseum but the reason the ACA is a shit show is the democratic senate would't back a non-garbage plan because they did not want one.
People have hammered on the point about the page count of laws, but I also wanted to object to 77. Yes, it takes a while to execute people. Good. We shouldn't have the death penalty; given that we do, it should be applied more equitably and carefully; given that it isn't, we should at the very least have a very high burden of proof for the state and chances for the victim to appear or get a lesser sentence. That takes a while. Do you really want to go back to the justice system of 1933?
I'm pretty sure none of that is controversial, at least to the Left.
111: Hence my argument for the left to take over the Dems. Third parties are a Shitshow that only make things worse.
Here another albeit unrelated thought about 85; by trying to anticipate everything about how to implement a program into the law, in addition to making the whole edifice vulnerable to small language errors, they are trying to usurp powers that properly belong to the executive. I guess I don't have strong feelings about this but it's something.
112- I wondered why no one took that on.
I think the case is that if you are executing people taking 7 or more years to do so makes it unconstitutional. But IANAL.
I didn't take that on because I think most of the people who voted for Trump would happily go back to the days of very quick executions.
114: No. The executive does not have any inherent power to exercise more discretion than the legislature gives it. It's not possible to write a law that removes all discretion, but any practical level of legislative control is constitutionally proper.
It seems to me that constitutional amendments are a poor fit for this. They take way too long to get enacted, and way longer after that to improve anyone's life.
Folks are free, of course, to make calls etc in support of Sen Tester's effort to cure CU by amendment.
Can we shift the plan to curing Buckley v. Valeo? I don't think CU alone helps enough.
I'd like cured Buckley, but I'm trying to cut down on nitrates.
Roger, I think you're missing that the world at large has become more complex. You could do the Magna Carta in 3,600 words, but that document -- like the Bank Act of 1933 -- didn't tell you a thing about collateralized debt obligations or credit default swaps.
Which didn't entirely work in the ACA case because of mistakes in the language of a 1000 page bill.
You really are just spouting rightwing nonsense here.
The bill was completely clear, and the only part of it that got overturned had nothing to do with "drafting mistakes." Those "mistakes" were only errors in the sense that someone reading the document in a deliberately stupid fashion could misinterpret its plain meaning.
One rightwing technique is to spew so much bullshit that liberals can't possibly rebut it. So when the rightwing assholes said the language wasn't clear, liberals defended it by saying that, regardless of the language, the intent was clear. That's an appropriate defense, and it won the day ultimately with Roberts.
But what the liberals didn't say as often was that the language of it was also crystal clear.
118: I'm open to any solution that works. I just want it codified that money ≠ speech, and thus campaign finance is effectively regulatable again.
112- I wondered why no one took that on.
I didn't take it on because by that point (your second example), it became clear that, as LB predicted, you were "gestur[ing] vaguely" rather than explaining what you believed and presenting an argument that other people could agree or disagree with.
I still don't have a sense of what's bothering you other than mumble, mumble bureaucracy.
As far as Chopper's list. I'd be happy with all the items on there, and think that they would be good things. But I'm not sure that the list is actually a useful framework for discussion and organizing. It's so broad, and the goals are far enough off that it doesn't do much to guide day-to-day actions.
For example, there are three constitutional amendments on the list. I remember reading something recently that talked about conservatives getting excited about getting close to having control of enough state governments to call a constitutional convention (see this, something I grabbed from a google news search for constitutional convention). I think the right is much closer to being able to pass constitutional amendments than the left is right now.
I'm all for finding a way to not just play defense but, at the same time, I'd also oppose any efforts to call a constitutional convention at this time -- because the risk is not work the reward. So, sure, let's talk about constitutional amendments to reverse CU, as a way to focus the debate and keep attention on the issue, but lets not start getting people too excited about "lets change the constitution." I don't think it's a good time for that.
Or, to take another example, Climate Change. I agree, that I'd put it near the top of my list of priorities. But let's also recognize that we aren't close to having legislation ready. I remember Ezra Klein noting, that he believes that in 2008 Obama would much rather have tried to pass legislation addressing Climate Change than health-care reform. The reason why he ended up choosing to do health-care was that there was more of an infrastructure in place for that change. There was a clearer agreement on what framework might be possible, who had to be negotiated with, and what constituencies existed to support it. Even with that it ate up most of legislative effort during the two years that the Dems had majorities in the house and Senate. Passing major climate change legislation is going to be harder than that.
So, again, start working on it, build those alliances, and sense of understanding of who is willing to compromise on what. But realize it's not going to happen instantly.
Of course it's not going to happen instantly. We have at least four years before we can even get a majority in the Senate, much less get a new president. There are a lot of steps between here and there. I was just sharing the largest problems I see that need to be fixed.
I do think we are at a unique inflection point where there is a lot of energy available to be harnessed for taking those steps. And Step 1 is taking over the Dems.
88: Somewhat. They have overlaps but also different focuses. (Inevitably, the author has oversimplified and gives Na/var more individual credit than he deserves -- though he deserves a lot -- but she's right on the content.) That one is union staff training members as legislative/political activists. The one I'm talking about is popular education, with workers leading the workshop for other union members, who turn around and take pieces of it back to co-workers, friends, family. It's inspired by the populist grassroots education campaign of the late 1800's.
Further to 125: My piece is to help develop the curriculum and to run train-the-trainer workshops.
Here's Tester's text.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-joint-resolution/20/text
If you like it, tell your people. If you don't, send him an email with specific suggestions to improve language.
It's all very well to suggest that the Democrats ought to do something. Better still is getting in (as Chopper is doing, and teo too) and help make stuff happen.
There were not 50 votes for public option or single payer in 2009. This isn't because the Democratic party is garbage, but because individual senators are more directly accountable to likely voters in their states, than to either the senate democratic leader or the president. Similarly, there are not 50 votes right now for a return to status quo 2008, contrary to the expectations of some. The public pressure is working. That it is coming from many places, and not just from, say, senate democrats is a strength, not a weakness.
How is it the rtcb sounds liberal but regurgitates conservative talking points constantly? Simplicity is a good and accurate measure of ... simplicity and nothing else.
It's just so insanely stupid. Durrr. Stuff should be simpler and stuff, except for the exceptions to the simpler stuff that I happen to like. So fucking dumb.
It's inspired by the populist grassroots education campaign of the late 1800
That reminds me, you might be interested in the documentary about the Highlander Folk School. A bit slow, but an amazing story. here's a trailer.
Also, government should just be like 5 people who decide to do things my way, because running a government of the worlds richest nation should be simple. Durr.
The tax (and other) codes are complicated because there are people looking for loop-holes and when the loop-holes are patched the code gets more complicated. By patching (rather than starting fresh), you know the impact is going to be minor-ish and predictable.
Exactly. The law of unintended consequences rules. The simplest possible explanation is never the most correct. The simplest possible rules are never the most just.
"There were not 50 votes for public option or single payer in 2009. This isn't because the Democratic party is garbage, but because individual senators are more directly accountable to likely voters in their states, than to either the senate democratic leader or the president."
Those guys lost their seats anyway and now dems are stuck defending a kludge with some problems.
130: Thanks, I'll definitely check it out. Highlander is an amazing place and not nearly well known enough.
134: Call it a kludge, but it's been impressively durable -- I don't think the dems are at all "stuck" defending it.
The dems are dealing with maximally obstructionist opponents who control at least 2.5 branches of government and it's still an open question whether meaningful repeal will happen.
134 Right, but unless you can convince them that they would have won reelection if they'd gone single payer, you still end up with them replaying the same choice 95 out of 100 do-overs.
It may be that the post-Trump mobilization is enough to convince office holders to lead rather than follow. Senators are already doing more to resist cabinet appointments (and just wait until we get to subcabinet appointments*) then they'd expected to do in the run-up to the inauguration, and that's because of the public engagement.
* It may be that the best way to contain Bannon is reality-based deputies, if you can get them, in the NSC member departments. I'd expect Trump to defer to his general/secretaries over Bannon, and a strong group of deputies can set the table for that. This may indeed be why the WH process of nominating deputies is lagging so badly.
when you run a presidental campaign in part on a public option and the voters hand you complete control of the federal government, and then it turns out oops it was never an option because your own party doesn't support it. It kind of makes it seem like you run on ideas popular with your voters, good ideas that will help people, but you have no real intention of doing them no matter how much power you are handed. Pretty much the definition of garbage. Also see card check, mortgage relief etc.
Also likely voters in their states seems to be a misspelling of insurence lobby money.
"Complete control." I see where you've gone wrong here.
Money is a means, an essential one at that. If we had a statewide candidate who (a) wouldn't attract big money support because they're not the kind of person big money wants *and* (b) could nonetheless win election, that would be great. It seems to me that such people are pretty thin on the ground. There's no shortage of people who meet (a), it's (b) that's the problem. You seem to think this is because of the party, but I think it's a lot more because of the voters.
What the voters have done is completely reject the dem party at every level. It's possible that if in 2009 they had hung together and passed the things they had ran the national campaign on passing, after being handed basically as much control is possible in our system, that the public would of revolted and the dem party would be in even worse shape now. But that seems strikingly unlikely.
Google does exist.
Democrats had 60 votes in the Senate for exactly these time periods: July 7 2009-Aug 25 2009, Sept 25 2009-Feb 4 2010.
59th and 60th Senate Votes Joe Lieberman (Traitor-CT) and Ben Nelson (DINO, NE) demanded that the bill not include a public option and give states the right to prohibit coverage of abortion.
For completeness, despite a large advantage in the House, 34 Democratic representatives voted against the PPACA to allow it pass with 219 votes, just 3 more than the required majority.
Or they went as far as they thought they could get away with, and in many cases turned out to be wrong, because they went too far.
Whether the party as a whole is worse off now isn't the measuring stick anyone was using or can credibly use. A Democratic senator for a state that went for McCain (or, now, Trump) has no incentive to care what is going on in Massachusetts, California, or some socialist utopia we might imagine. They are looking at putting a coalition together in their state, and finding enough money to stay afloat.
Simplicity is good because it reduces the need to pay some private third party for access to your rights under the law. That's always seemed kind of abominable to me, that you need to pay some lawyer your hard earned money just for access to basic legal rights, and degree of access scales with the amount of money you have to spend. In a just society the legal profession would be nationalized like the NHS. No boutique law firms for the super rich and public defenders for the poor. Everybody gets equal representation. Until we hit that point I'm generally on the side of simplifying as much as possible. At least some people will be able to effectively represent themselves in minor matters, which is better than nothing.
Like Trump's EO requiring the elimination of two rules for every one new rule. It's brilliant good government because who could deny that 2>1?
144 that seems to be firmly supporting evidence for the party being garbage. Here's a question, how many more senate seats would they of had to win to pass card-check a policy that directly helps the dems politically and their presidental candidate was running on.
145 sabotaging your own political party and hurting the American people so you don't endanger your million dollar a year no responsability insurance company job when you get turfed out by the tea party is being garbage. And whats joe liebermans excuse?
148: There are smart and stupid ways to simplify. The existence of idiots does not prove the non-existence of smart people.
By your criterion, there is no non-garbage political party in America. Which might even be right! But calling the Democrats garbage doesn't conjure a non-garbage party, nor does it create the fantasy world where a hypothetical non-garbage Democratic party is more popular.
A non-garbage Democratic party by your criterion is a rump leftist party the will never control more than 30-40% of Congress.
How many seats would they of had to win to pass card-check. To what extent was dem "support" for it totally cynical in 2008.
My only concern is that it might become received wisdom that the Clinton campaign was perfect.
This seems like an insanely unlikely outcome. The odds that consensus will declare a losing campaign--in any field of endeavor--perfect are basically nil. When you add in the fact that about 60% of the country would never accept that Comey did it--although he did--should calm your fears, since that means 60% will aways insist that the campaign was a shitshow.
And Asteele is off the fucking rails here. What's the Party supposed to have done to Nelson, sent assassins? Is that what a non-garbage party would do?
It really is just a Rorschach test for most people: if only they had adopted my favorite set of policies they would have been more popular.
Nelson gave my dad a very good job, but not a great one.
Honestly I'd settle for them not running national campaigns promising to pass laws they have no intention of passing as a party.
151 the party promising to pass card-check and the public option won 60 votes in the senate.
You know what fuck that. I would settle for not nominating the least popular politician in the country and then letting their own political appointees sabotage her campaign leading us to president Trump.
1. She should have left negative campaigning to others. The bad word about Trump would have got out anyway, and negative campaigning lowers your likabilty
2. Have a better email frame. E.g. I didn't want to use email for secrets because email is insecure. For non-secret messages, I didn't want to use a gov account because the State Dept's system was clunky
3. Do some polling to find out which of the 30 policy positions on the website polled best with undecided voters. Talk about the best one or two over and over. People thought she wasn't offering anything positive
The Faroe whaling movie explains why Trump won.
The whales hacked the election?
Hordes of Faroese descending on Michigan?
"Rolling coal" merely the cover story for "rolling whale oil"?
Swing voters in Pennsylvania?
130: Thanks, I'll definitely check it out. Highlander is an amazing place and not nearly well known enough.
Yay! That is reason to count this thread as a success.
The odds that consensus will declare a losing campaign--in any field of endeavor--perfect are basically nil. When you add in the fact that about 60% of the country would never accept that Comey did it--although he did--should calm your fears, since that means 60% will aways insist that the campaign was a shitshow.
To back-up JRoth's comment, I was reading something today talking about hindsight bias which seems like it describes how these conversations generally go:
Hindsight bias, also known as the knew-it-all-along effect or creeping determinism, is the inclination, after an event has occurred, to see the event as having been predictable, despite there having been little or no objective basis for predicting it. It is a multifaceted phenomenon that can affect different stages of designs, processes, contexts, and situations. Hindsight bias may cause memory distortion, where the recollection and reconstruction of content can lead to false theoretical outcomes.
The first half of Maddow was about MT. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpglD_L6j_w
Nothing here is news to you folks, although you might enjoy Gov. Bullock.
I'm not excited to hear the Left version of "American Carnage."
But here is the challenge to our democracy: In this nation I see tens of millions of its citizens--a substantial part of its whole population--who at this very moment are denied the greater part of what the very lowest standards of today call the necessities of life.
I see millions of families trying to live on incomes so meager that the pall of family disaster hangs over them day by day.
I see millions whose daily lives in city and on farm continue under conditions labeled indecent by a so-called polite society half a century ago.
I see millions denied education, recreation, and the opportunity to better their lot and the lot of their children.
I see millions lacking the means to buy the products of farm and factory and by their poverty denying work and productiveness to many other millions.
I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.
But it is not in despair that I paint you that picture. I paint it for you in hope--because the nation, seeing and understanding the injustice in it, proposes to paint it out. We are determined to make every American citizen the subject of his country's interest and concern; and we will never regard any faithful law-abiding group within our borders as superfluous. The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.
Hordes of Faroese descending on Michigan?
There are 50,000 Faoese. Can you get a single horde out of that, let alone hordes.
I see 50,000 Faroese riding whales at me, I'm not sticking around to debate semantics.
How many seats would they of had to win to pass card-check. To what extent was dem "support" for it totally cynical in 2008.
God, card check. Failure to pass that - or even to go to the mat for it - was pretty damned inexcusable and was a huge factor in the structural erosion of institutional party support. Unions were not in a position to deliver WWC votes in 2016 because Democrats passed up a chance to throw them a lifeline in 2009.
Just to follow-up on this comment:
I remember Ezra Klein noting, that he believes that in 2008 Obama would much rather have tried to pass legislation addressing Climate Change than health-care reform. The reason why he ended up choosing to do health-care was that there was more of an infrastructure in place for that change.
Here's Ezra today.
It's worth noting one other thing Boehner said: "Republicans never ever agree on health care."
This is a more important point than people realize. Democrats did years and years of work in advance of Obama's presidency to come to a rough agreement on health care. Republicans haven't done that work. They know they loathe Obamacare, but they don't even agree on which parts of it they loathe.