Too Depressing

The most surprising dimension of this story is that after three long years Belle and others expect this most political of administrations to make public health decisions on factors such as public health. I agree, btw, that everyone should have unrestricted access to contraceptives. It remains to be seem whether the blame for the capitulation will ultimately fall upon Trig, Limbaugh, or the Koch brothers.

Am I wrong in thinking that paracetamol is now a behind-the-counter drug in the UK? Be careful with those cynical comments …

You are indeed wrong in thinking that paracetamol is a behind-the-counter drug in the UK.

sg@3
You are wrong. Paracetamol can be bought over the counter in any UK corner shop, albeit only in small packets.

kidneystones- the infuriating thing is that even from a totally cynical perspective I’m unable to see how this could possibly be smart politics. It can’t conceivably win over enough right-leaning independents to make up for the damage to Obama’s core support.

Which is the calculation.

What I’m saying is that it’s an obviously bad calculation. The wingnuts who can’t tell the difference between RU-486 and Plan B aren’t going to vote for Obama under any circumstances. It’s another in the long series of inexplicable panders to people whose votes are just not there to be gained.

Is Kathleen Sebelius actually responsible for this in any important fashion? Isn’t this really Obama’s call? People used to be fond of DeLong’s “the cossacks work for the czar”, but that was back during the Bush years.

“It can’t conceivably win over enough right-leaning independents to make up for the damage to Obama’s core support.”

I’ve seen this from various people too. What left-leaning people is this actually going to lose? The left-leaning independents are notoriously low-information voters, and I doubt if anyone who was going to vote for Obama before is going to vote for the Republicans instead because of this. What damage to his core support is he going to take? Even this post, from someone informed and concerned, doesn’t say “that’s it, Obama just lost my vote”. People likely to say that have already said it.

Note for US readers: paracetamol is what’s called “acetaminophen” here (Tylenol).

While they haven’t done that to acetaminophen, you do have to go to a pharmacy counter and sign something to get pseudoephedrine, apparently because it’s possible to use it to cook meth. It’s not a huge hassle, but it does vastly reduce the number of stores where the stuff can be sold, since there has to be a pharmacy.

Is Kathleen Sebelius actually responsible for this in any important fashion? Isn’t this really Obama’s call?

That should go without saying. Any cabinet secretary who made such a high-profile decision- reversing a unanimous expert recommendation- without marching orders from the White House would suddenly discover a burning need to spend more time with her family.

They’re in full campaign mode, so I suspect the phone call she received was from Axelrod.

It remains to be seem whether the blame for the capitulation will ultimately fall upon Trig, Limbaugh, or the Koch brothers.

I blame the Professional Left. If they hadn’t given Republicans a House majority last year, this never would have happened. Indeed, the Obama Administration’s refusal to make science-based policy makes it all the more important to vote for Obama and his party in order to restore science-based policy making.

[/snark]

I suspect the “foot soldiers” argument, turned around, might lie behind this; namely, to avoid giving the Fox-listening Christian right another issue that would make them more likely to vote. Remember that, barring some very strange turn, the Republican candidate will be either a cult member (Romney) or someone much easier to beat on other grounds.

I also remember buying paracetamol from the counter in the UK, but I needed the chemist to look up “acetaminophen” in his big book.

Whereas in the US it’s increasingly difficult to get liquid cold medicine without acetaminophen.

Belle: It is indeed a huge FU, but like Rich, I don’t see that it’ll actually make a lot of difference in many people’s behavior. I seem to have teetered over the edge of the cliff and regard Obama’s administration as bad enough for my concerns that “lesser of two evils”, while true, no longer rouses me to any particular action. But I’m very much in the minority in my social scenes for that outlook, and Rich’s more vigorous disengagement is even rarer in the part of the country I experience. Since the Republicans are worse, and will certainly remain so next year, I anticipate the core doing just as it did in 2010, with more frowns but without much change in actual behavior in voting, campaigning, etc.

Basically, I think, the people most angry about it will continue to underwrite it. It’s people on the margin who will drift away, as in 2010.

And it isn’t as if Obama is particularly novel in his capitulations to the right, it’s that he’s not novel. He’s well in the mainstream of Democratic Party behavior, which I’ve lived with for a long time. The trouble is just that we’re in unusual times and we need better.

I think the only thing for it is to keep trying to tug on the frame of political discourse through extra-partisan movements like OWS and the like, and hope the system can eventually accommodate. Conservatives managed to do that pretty successfully starting in the 1960s.

Hi Tom. I said the decision was political, not necessarily smart politics.

That said. It isn’t hard to see how the WH arrived at the decision. Liberal tribalism ensures that all the folks huffing and puffing over the latest outrage will still pull the lever for the donkeys at election time. For this group, voting isn’t about issues. It’s about identity. This gang loathes the right as matter of principle.

The Davids understand the phenomena well. They know that the administration can comfortably pander to the right and still collect liberal votes and cash come election time. The left choir is perfectly willing to fashion a fine suit of nothing and call it success.

The proof is in the air pudding currently being touted as manna at various liberal sites right now. Dionne and company are singing hymns over the administration’s recent outpouring of words, this time a bunch of words uttered in Kansas City. As Marc Schmidt famously observed, ” maybe O doesn’t have a lot of experience doing anything. O still ran a great campaign and that’s enough.”

Or, perhaps it isn’t.

I don’t believe the bit about money and foot-soldiers; he seems to have had quite good fund-raising recently. When it comes down to him or Newt, those people will come back.

This is 100% anecdote, but I can name four people I know well who are already behaving differently than at this time four years ago. They’re not ward leaders or committeepeople, but they are committed and thoughtful educated liberals. If over the next 10 months they don’t send their $20 or $30 every few weeks, or talk up Obama to their neighbors, that WILL have an inpact.

Yes, they’ll still vote for Obama in Nov. 2012. But people aren’t islands. Voting is incredibly social. Without these folks’ enthusiasm, a lot of the people whose beliefs boil down to “a pox on both their parties” will stay home.

I’m sure I remember going into Boots in the UK and having to ask for paracetamol at the counter.

If it was combined with codeine in a co-codamol formulation, for sure, but not on its own. I think the French are stricter about plain paracetamol: perhaps the reason the US is happy to sell it in 250-tablet bottles is that if people really want to kill themselves, there are guns for that.

I’ve always been more inclined to support some kind of BTC access to emergency contraception — this story from the BBC is useful context here — except that in the US there’s no real BTC system, and you run into the ridiculous ‘conscience clause’ where pharmacists are granted the power not to do their damn jobs.

Even more worrying, from a parent’s perspective–at one point last year, there was no infants’ acetaminophen or ibuprofen to be found, anywhere. I think we finally ended up tracking down some generic acetaminophen, possibly in a bottle for a bigger kid, but this lasted for months.

I think it’s an indefensible decision.
I don’t think it’s obviously bad politics. Rich is right that this won’t impact independents and it won’t sway pro-life Repubs to vote Democrat. But the idea, I assume, is that the issue would be an ideal issue for Republicans to mobilize and rile up their base – something with which they’re apparently struggling at the moment: http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2011/12/08/graphiti-declining-gop-enthusiasm-advantage/
The flipside of this is of course that you’re also lowering your own sides enthusiasm (plug Belle, Witt et al.) – but that’s a trade-off and which of the two is more important is an empirical question and the consultants in the administration may well be right that this is politically beneficial in the most narrow sense. (Again – this is just to outline the likely thought process of the political operatives in the WH – not to defend it in any way).

The tylenol/aspirin thing is pretty widespread in pharmaceuticals. I’m kinda surprised about people’s reaction here, though, since this is a pretty far-reaching and endemic phenomenon. Not too many popular drugs are actually the best or the safest, from recreational drugs like tobacco and alcohol, all the way to cancer treatments like taxol.

Shit, for situational depression and anxiety, kava is occassionally more effective and is generally safer than prescription antidepressants. Of course, it got tagged with the whole it’s gonna kill your liver scare that originated in Germany. Not that there aren’t risks, but the majority of that risk is about *really* improper processing.

AAAAaaaanywayz. This looks bad, and should look bad. I’m not sure how meaningful this is in the long run. Or if this was an unsavoury trade of some sort. But given how ad hoc the US’s relationship to drugs are, I’m not sure this is, in the least, surprising.

As far as the whole Obama isn’t better than a Republican, well, I’m from Newt Gingrich’s old congressional district. I have some degree of awareness of his history. I can conscientiously assert that his adulation of the mores of Cinderella’s step-mom is quite normal for him. In other words, were Gingrich liable to be a credible winner in the elections, you all seriously had better campaign for Obama as if your very lives (and oh yes, I do mean that literally) depended on it. The Republican Party, for all intents and purposes, is an undead lich that will suck your marrow given the least opportunity. I seriously doubt, though, that they intend to win this particular election, given that it’s easy to see that any winner will be driven to the economic left by exigent circumstances, and that there will be little loot to spread amongst friends. If things are better in 2016, expect the Supreme Court to install another friendly Republican.

It can’t conceivably win over enough right-leaning independents to make up for the damage to Obama’s core support.

I suspect what they are concerned about (among other things) is the enthusiasm of the opposing side. If BO is merely Antichrist, that’s one thing, but if he turns out to be, in fact, Satan himself, that could, I imagine, produce a phenomenal Republican turnout. Who needs that.

The next presidential election is about a handful of states, starting with Pennsylvania. The numbers may crunch to microscopic granularity. This decision is about not making any provocative change to the status quo before November, except as to the economy, in order, as noted above, to avoid giving the other side a base motivator.

It doesn’t make any medical sense and is of debatable legality, but politically it’s astute. And crass.

“In other words, were Gingrich liable to be a credible winner in the elections, you all seriously had better campaign for Obama as if your very lives (and oh yes, I do mean that literally) depended on it.”

I think this is more true than many posters here realise. Gingrich could blow up the world in a fit of hyperactive glee. Obama is a disappointment but I trust his finger on the button. I do NOT trust Gingrich in the same state as the button.

@Watson Ladd:
You don’t need a doctor at all – Plan B is sold OTC to everyone over 18 (since 2006), i.e. if you’re a teenager you ‘only’ need a trusted adult to buy it for you. The current decision refers to people under 18 (technically 17 I think- I can’t quite follow the legal wrangling that took place there).
The problem of course being that there are likely many teenagers who don’t have an adult they trust enough to tell her/him “I got drunk yesterday and had unprotected sex can you get Plan B for me?”

And I stand corrected on the situation for over-17s, thanks to Sebastian(1).

Sebastian(1)> You don’t need a doctor at all – Plan B is sold OTC to everyone over 18 (since 2006), i.e. if you’re a teenager you ‘only’ need a trusted adult to buy it for you. The current decision refers to people under 18 (technically 17 I think- I can’t quite follow the legal wrangling that took place there).

Yes, thank you for pointing this out — I have no idea why the conversation has gone on for so long about paracetamol when the post itself is fundamentally incorrect.

Thanks Sebastian(1) for correcting me. I was waylaid by the quoted paragraph, but this decision is still worrying. The idea that reproductive rights are up for legislative horse-trading has apparently come to dominate the democratic party.

I think the Times just phrased the sentence poorly. What HHS refused was “to allow emergency contraceptives to be sold over the counter, including to young teenagers.” What they permit is “to allow emergency contraceptives to be sold over the counter, other than to young teenagers.”

The reading of the sentence that makes the Times look incorrect is the most natural reading of that sentence in isolation, but reading the whole story makes the correct facts clear.

The NYT article also mentioned that half of all pregnancies are unplanned. I’ll confess that is a bit higher than I would have thought.

I’d say the same, except that “unplanned pregnancy” is weasely, so it’s hard to say what that means. Does it cover only pregnancies that disrupt plans, more-or-less unwanted pregnancies, or does it include pregnancies that a couple is deliberately making no effort to prevent and awaiting the course of events, as my wife and I did until we discovered that that wasn’t going to work. If half of all pregnancies are contrary to plans and more-or-less unwanted, that’s bad; if a large number of those pregancies are more-or-less spontaneous, that’s a different matter.

Rich at #68 is probably right, but I’d call it naked calculation rather than 11-dimensional chess. I’d also substitute “if” for “when”.

MPA Victoria at # 51 provides the “we have no choice but to accept all actions or a Republican president will blow up the world” boilerplate. This despite the fact that Republicans have provided the majority of US presidents since the invention of nuclear weapons, and the fact that the only US president to actually employ nuclear weapons was a Dem.

Gee, who knew that “kidneystones” was Karl Rove’s pseudonym?

” This despite the fact that Republicans have provided the majority of US presidents since the invention of nuclear weapons, and the fact that the only US president to actually employ nuclear weapons was a Dem.”

Yeah because the party of Eisenhower and the part of Gingrich are pretty much the exact same. You keep shining you crazy diamond you.

Up next: banning over-the-counter sales of paracetemol.

Heh. Same thing occurred to me at the time.

MPAVictoria @69 wrote,

Yeah because the party of Eisenhower and the part of Gingrich are pretty much the exact same. You keep shining you crazy diamond you.

That’s not exactly the same thing as what you mentioned previously—namely, that it’s possible Newt is unhinged in a way that would make him a dangerous president, completely apart from concerns about his ideology.

I was recently thinking of a Gingrich win and had that reaction. I felt the same way about McCain in 2000 and 2008 (the latter especially in light of the Georgia vs Russia stuff).

Post title is apt, but perhaps a different perspective is in order.

“God knows we wouldn’t want one of the groups least likely to use contraceptives properly to be able to easily get their hands on some Plan B.” Look at it this way; it’s not as if “the groups” are good at anything besides baby-making, so my man Newt is fundamentally being pragmatic about the future. How so? you might ask.

First: http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/11/fundamentally-newt-gingrichs-favorite-word.html

Second: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/11/newt-gingrich-thinks-school-children-should-work-as-janitors/248837/

Why would anyone want to abort babies that we could exploit as child janitors? We need “those groups” to produce free (and by free I mean slave) labor, so that our tax dollars are not spent paying custodial staff to clean up schools for students that should really be taught to clean up their own facilities. Newt gets so little credit! There are much more depressing things in comparison.

grismcthorn

MPAVictoria@80: I agree with you; one cannot look at Pres. Obama’s nominees– for the justice dept, for health, and just recently for the consumer financial protection bureu–and think that there is no difference between the two parties; substantive change is usually incremental, but pure believers may be impatient.

Similarly the US is alone in taxing us as we work abroad; our European friends are mystified. The thing is, they’re confident we’re coming back. It’s an expression of faith in America. Like, “hey, where they gonna go?” California has similar self-confidence. It’s all, “I know you want to move back to California, don’t fight your natural urges to live in the golden state.”

It’s quite a bit worse than that. In order to avoid US taxes on foreign income, you have to actually renounce your US citizenship, and even after that — the IRS will insist on collecting taxes for 10 years if you are a high-earner (or, if I’m reading it right), if you spend more than 30 or 60 days in the US during that year, or are not on good terms with the IRS when you leave). I am a little surprised, though, that European governments haven’t yet proposed similar policies in their efforts to fight ‘tax havens’.

“I agree with you; one cannot look at Pres. Obama’s nominees—for the justice dept, for health, and just recently for the consumer financial protection ”

Obama’s Justice Department has actually beenworse than Bush’s — it codified the worst “secret law” practices of that administration and widened them from torture to assassination. John Ashcroft probably did more to defend civil liberties from his hospital bed than any Obama appointee has. Obama’s lead appointee to the Department of Health is Kathleen Sibellius, who is currently proving that just as only Nixon can go to China, only an Obama appointee can do what this blog post writes about. For consumer financial protection, Obama didn’t support Elizabeth Warren, and now is engaged in a long bout of kabuki over those bad Republicans preventing him from doing things that he has the existing statutory and regulatory authority to do if he actually wanted to.

And yeah, anyone who writes that gets labelled a “pure believer” who “may be impatient.”

mw, European countries are fundamentally uninterested in collecting taxes from people who don’t use the services of the country they are citizens of. If I live in Switzerland, I pay Swiss taxes and benefit from their institutions. Why should a country who does not provide my police, my water, my fire, my electricity take my income for the simple reason that I was born there?

MPAVictoria 12.09.11 at 3:18 pm

Like I said Rich, different worlds.

Its continually amazing to me that you guys have no shame. Obama is a passive actor who has no choice but to act Republican, and its always the fault of Jane Hamsher or Glenn Greenwald. Obama is sending the IRS after legal marijuana dispensaries in California, something he is not forced to do by Congress, where medical marijuana has 80% public support, and something he specifically promised not to do before he was elected.

Is it really too much to ask that he act like George W, rather than worse? According to you, yes.

Watson Ladd: “European countries are fundamentally uninterested in collecting taxes from people who don’t use the services of the country they are citizens of. If I live in Switzerland, I pay Swiss taxes and benefit from their institutions. Why should a country who does not provide my police, my water, my fire, my electricity take my income for the simple reason that I was born there?”

Well, I agree with you — I’m just a little surprised that European governments do. Why might they not? The thinking would be, presumably, that you’re tax evader who moved away just to avoid the taxes that ‘rightfully’ belong to the country whose government paid to educate you and perhaps also provided the environment where you first became successful. And note — the Swiss are on the list:

http://www.stepjournal.org/news/news/main_story/sarkozys_new_blacklist_of_ta.aspx

If he did win, I’d expect him to govern essentially no differently from Obama

The Plan B decision was appalling, but this is nuts. Obama is substantially to the left of George W. Bush, and Romney is likely to govern to Bush’s right. (What Romney “really thinks” is irrelevant. As the leader of the Republican Party he’s committed to the basic agenda of an essentially homogenous coalition.) If you think Romney would do things like signing pay equity legislation, an expansion of health care, the end of DADT, appointing moderate liberals to the Supreme Court, etc. etc., you’re out of your mind.

Yeah, “this is nuts”, “you’re out of your mind”, “what is the pop music like on your world”, etc. Charming!

I think that the pay equity legislation that Obama signed had a mostly symbolic rather than actual effect, that Obama’s’ expansion of health care was the largest since Bush’s expansion of health care, that DADT was on its way out before Obama and that Obama delayed getting rid of it, and that the moderate liberals that Obama appoints to the Supreme Court mostly serve to not embarrass the right into ever having to admit that their base isn’t going to get what it wants socially. Obama is happen to take credit for things like DADT, or for preserving health care for the insurance industry, but his main effect was to seize a chance for far-reaching change and reduce to the amount of change that any Republican would have been forced to allow.

But I don’t expect actual arguments back, or anything like that. It’s obvious that Obama is to the left in some worthwhile sense because he says so, and because Bush, and because Newt would go for the nuke button right away.

Yeah, Popeye, it’s probably worse. If people on the left faced cartoon Newt, they could conceivably beat him and maybe actually win something. They could also conceivably not beat him, and be motivated to try harder next time. Facing Obama, they never can do anything — they can only be disappointed, and then go and vote for him again.

And by the way, I never said Obama was “on the left,” at least as the term applies across liberal democracies. There’s a long distance between “left” and “indistinguishable from George W. Bush.”

Rich Puchalsky @85: “Obama’s Justice Department has actually been worse than Bush’s—it codified the worst ‘secret law’ practices of that administration and widened them from torture to assassination. John Ashcroft probably did more to defend civil liberties from his hospital bed than any Obama appointee has.”

You don’t like people calling you nuts or asking what it’s like on your planet, so I’ll just say that what you said there is either ignorant or disingenuous, and it’s beneath you.

As I’m sure you’re well aware, John Ashcroft did quite a few things in the Bush years. He was enthusiastically in favor of every spooky provision of the PATRIOT Act in spite of his frequent denials that the FBI ever used its new powers. He repeatedly proposed legislation and executive policies that went so far beyond that awful bill that even Bush and the Congress wouldn’t swallow them. After 9/11 he led a mass roundup of people suspected of being foreign and/or Muslim; friends of mine spent many months standing in protest outside a prison in Brooklyn where those people were being held and (we learned later) beaten. If you think that that, or something worse, is still going on today, please enlighten us. And if you think that I should forgive Ashcroft for all that because he did the right thing one time in the hospital– a bold stand that (a) was the only one legally available anyway since Comey was the acting AG, and (b) we have no reason to believe actually stopped any surveillance from taking place– sorry, I won’t.

Also, there was a second Bush term and Ashcroft wasn’t in it. His replacement, Gonzales, a man without even Ashcroft’s modicum of principles, was the only Justice Department official who can honestly be said to have “codified” illegal practices of torture and rendition. The Obama administration hasn’t done so. The Awlaki memo, hideous as it was, was a different thing and I’m not convinced that it is a significant departure from the hideous behavior of our military and quasi-military agencies in past generations; to call it a “civil liberties” issue is to stretch that term out of recognition– unless you consider American citizenship to be a magical quality that makes it much worse for the CIA to kill one Awlaki than for contractors to torture a dozen anonymous non-citizens to death.

I doubt you’re really interested in what “any Obama appointee” has done to defend civil liberties, but I can think of a couple of things: Holder’s DOJ has sued Arizona to block SB 1070, and has dropped Bush’s bullshit suit against the New Black Panther Party. It’s revived the Civil Rights Division and opened a large-scale investigation into civil rights abuses by police departments, which, even if it never bears fruit, will still be more than Bush (or Bill Clinton) would’ve ever allowed. You can admit those things and still not be happy with Obama.

I hadn’t checked Crooked Timber for the past day, and I am glad to see and appreciate Belle’s clarification in the Update above.

“After 9/11 he led a mass roundup of people suspected of being foreign and/or Muslim; friends of mine spent many months standing in protest outside a prison in Brooklyn where those people were being held and (we learned later) beaten.”

No doubt it would have been better if, like Obama, he’d just had them killed by drone strikes. I really like that “unless you consider American citizenship to be a magical quality that makes it much worse for the CIA to kill one Awlaki”. It’s just one guy! I guess the just-one-guy exception also covers his 16 year old son. All right, it’s only one guy and one teenager. Oh and seven other people. All right: one guy, one teenager, and some other teenagers. But that’s just how our “military and quasi-militiary agencies” behave, I guess, and has nothing to do with particular decisions by Obama — and there’s nothing new in the Department of Justice saying that it’s perfectly legal, even when we haven’t even bothered to declare a fake war. I don’t know why Obama even bothered to have that memo written, when everyone should be so blasé about the whole thing. Other Presidents have had people tortured and killed en masse and concealed it, but when Obama claims the legal right to do it it’s like a breath of fresh air.

As for the police investigation — I love that “even if it never bears fruit” part. It’s just like Ketehi! Even if her investigation never bears fruit, she’s doing a good thing by investigating why that police officer pepper sprayed those people.

And I never said anything about heightening the contradictions, or about wanting things to get worse. I said what’s obvious; people were willing to actually oppose misdeeds when they were committed by someone with an (R) after his name. I’m not sure what “I condemn this action by Obama, but then I’m going to vote for him” is, but I hesitate to class it as opposition.

My take on the Obama administration’s place in history begins with my take on the modern Republican leadership, and it’s this: since they’re all either sociopaths or have trained themselves to act like ones, they don’t care about anything but losing the power and control they seek. They relish the hatred of those they despise, and they feel no shame when it comes to the opinion of anyone outside their circle. They want power, as much of it as they can get, to indulge as many of their whims and passions as they can.

I was born in 1965, and the big story of partisan politics in the US for that whole span and then some is of Republican grabs for power and, sometimes, Democratic pushbacks. The Republicans are good at ratcheting; it takes a lot to dig them out even a little, in any lasting way. And as soon as they find a fresh grip, they’re back at it again, pushing and pushing for all they’re worth.

This is the catastrophe of the Obama administration. The Republicans – and their Democratic buddies in catastrophe-making – have lost nothing in lasting terms. Nobody responsible for the war crimes and global financial misery of this last decade paid any price at all. Many of them got rewarded with continuing power, and even more. The rules that Republican obstruction relies on in Congress are intact. There was no purge of crooks and fanatics in the Justice Department or anywhere else in the executive branch. Abusive secrecy remains in place, and in fact expanded and freshly defended. Immunity for the authorities and vindictive punishment for leakers remains the norm. The administration keeps setting up arrangements obviously vulnerable to Republican abuse, and then capitulating.

It’s true that Obama has signed some good laws Republican counterparts wouldn’t have, and opposed some good ones less than they would have. But every major element of Bush’s build-up of Republican power remains in place, and now there are fresh goodies for the new president to abuse. It remains structurally a Republican, or at least entirely Republican-ready, federal government. That’s a catastrophe.

Even if I felt confident that I understood Obama’s political strategy, I would feel confounded by being unable to identify my own.

I find I cannot quite manage to thread Scott Lemieux’s needle, where I am alarmed by the Republican past (Bush) and future (Romney or worse?), but am, somehow, not alarmed by the Obama present. If Obama is to be excused by Republican obstructionism, why is Romney not to be neutralized by Democratic obstructionism? Ah, perhaps, because there wouldn’t be any Democratic obstructionism? That’s seems to be a bigger problem, long-term — that public opinion appears to scarcely matter on any subject of economic substance, while what’s right, or scientifically true, doesn’t seem to matter all that much on any other matter.

It feels to me like democracy has failed to function. Simon Johnson’s bankers’ coup wasn’t just a metaphor; it is political reality, and the state is lost to the mass of ordinary people.

The ACA, flawed as it was, was the most important progressive legislation to have passed in at least a quarter century

I’m not sure what ‘progressive’ means exactly, but how about this:
Assume a for profit medical insurance industry. It’s completely unnecessary, extremely harmful, and heading for a collapse. Bummer. What can we do? Why, we can regulate it, and thus preserve it, by postponing the collapse, or avoiding it altogether.

This is, I gather, what the main role of the Democratic party is now: to preserve the most harmful institutions (for-profit medicine, the empire, the big finance, etc.), by containing the overwhelming enthusiasm of the other party for expanding and empowering these institutions beyond a sustainable limit.

At this point, I think one should ask oneself: is the notorious “heightening the contradictions” really as bad an idea as the common wisdom says it is? What’s the alternative?

But it’s not going to happen.

It sure is not going to happen now, with this ACA thing enacted. Like I said, all it does is preserving the status quo, including some of the most harmful aspects of it. Patching it up, without addressing the underlying causes.

Lots of lives are going to be saved by ACA.

Compared to what? Sure, as an alternative to, say, a total nuclear war it is just outright wonderful.

At this point, I think one should ask oneself: is the notorious “heightening the contradictions” really as bad an idea as the common wisdom says it is?

I guess we could get some of that H5N1 ultra-flu going.

Whenever anyone points out that health insurance pre-ACA was headed for a collapse, someone else brings out the rhetorical “you like heightening the contradictions, maybe we should give people ultra-flu”.

What did “headed for a collapse” mean? It meant that health care was getting more and more expensive for businesses, which had gotten stuck with paying for it as a standard worker benefit for local historical reasons. The Wal-Marts of the country got around this by evading having to pay for it in various ways, and business in general liked certain aspects of it, such as the way in which it discourages people from changing jobs or agitating for better pay or conditions. But the cost of it was increasing more quickly than anything else, and they couldn’t continue to pay for it indefinitely.

What would have “collapse” meant? Not mass die-offs. After all, all of the doctors and hospitals and so on would still actually be in existence. It would have meant that finally everyone would have had to admit that the system was broken, and that European models were doing fine. And we would have gotten some kind of European model in a crisis atmosphere.

With Obama, we got the beginnings of the crisis atmosphere, and this was diverted into a situation in which business is no longer on the hook, but in which the health insurance industry still exists. That is superior to a Mad Max apocalyptic die-off. But it is not superior to just about any other way in which the situation could have turned out. Since everyone can see that, people who defend how it turned out pretty much have to pretend that the alternative was the Mad Max die-off, just as people pretend that the alternative to Obama is Dr. Strange love.

What would have “collapse” meant? Not mass die-offs. After all, all of the doctors and hospitals and so on would still actually be in existence. It would have meant that finally everyone would have had to admit that the system was broken, and that European models were doing fine. And we would have gotten some kind of European model in a crisis atmosphere.

This is profoundly mistaken. There is absolutely no shred of a groundswell in the American business community (or any other powerful constituency) for European-style health care; whether it would objectively be in their interest is beside the point. The destruction of the private insurance industry was not going to happen, period. Legislative change in the United States, because of the high number of veto points, has always involved buying off existing interests. In a period of even greater crisis, when there was a genuine leftist groundswell, the major New Deal programs involved far worse and far more immoral compromises than the ACA (benefits that would be considered too stingy by Mississippi Republicans, African Americans largely and intentionally excluded from benefits.) To think that Republicans would happily support single-payer if Obama had just allowed the continuation of a system that works perfectly well for the wealthy is delusional.

Although, I must concede that the last exercise in heightening-the-contradictions worked brilliantly. Who can forget the period after Nader threw the election to Bush, in which we had a progressive Republican administration, an extremely effectual organized left, and a Democratic Party to the left of the Swedish Green Party. I’m sure it will work even better next time!

Yeah, Popeye, it’s probably worse. If people on the left faced cartoon Newt, they could conceivably beat him and maybe actually win something. They could also conceivably not beat him, and be motivated to try harder next time. Facing Obama, they never can do anything—they can only be disappointed, and then go and vote for him again.

They could conceivably beat cartoon Newt by what, electing Obama or some other Democrat to take his place?

I for one am greatly relieved that Gore didn’t become President in 2000, because after 8 years of losing to ridiculous nonsense from Bush, the left was finally motivated to push for real change, and we finally broke the vicious circle of right-wing politics.

I have no interest in defending Obama, but I really do have to wonder about certain person’s phenomenological experience of pop music.

SL: “The destruction of the private insurance industry was not going to happen, period.”

RP: “I’ve never thought it was a good idea to purposefully make things worse so that people will find the situation intolerable. But a lot of the drivers of making-things-worse aren’t under anyone’s control. Environmental or resource constraints, or the shocks of having crony capitalism control everything, are going to get us eventually.”

Compare and contrast, I guess.

It is remarkable to me how much of Scott Lemieux’s political worldview consists of emphatic statements, which replace choices made, with the inevitability of “it was never going to happen”. As if politics was not about making choices, but, rather, was an wholly overdetermined, predestined process.

At least Rich makes his “drivers” more genuinely exogenous to political choices.

Popeye @ 124

Maybe, you are missing the thread: public opinion doesn’t matter; electoral politics doesn’t matter.

Some of us think it should matter, that electoral democracy, in principle, can be a useful check on the tendency of government to drift into kleptocracy, where the oligarchic elite grabs pretty much everything, without regard to how the mass of people are made to suffer or, in less dramatic language, how well the nation-state functions..

As a matter of fact, it doesn’t matter. The U.S. has become a kleptocracy. And, democracy doesn’t offer any obvious route back from kleoptocracy.

Is that coherent enough for you?

As a matter of fact, it doesn’t matter. The U.S. has become a kleptocracy. And, democracy doesn’t offer any obvious route back from kleoptocracy.

Is that coherent enough for you?

Yes, the thing about an incoherent perversity/futility/jeopardy argument is that if you step back and focus on only 1 leg (in your case futility), you gain coherence. As you might imagine, I wasn’t responding to your argument, as it wasn’t posted at the time I was commenting.

Weirdly enough, Bush didn’t get rid of abortion rights.

He did everything he could to get rid of abortion rights, by putting the two most consistently reactionary Supreme Court justices since World War II on the Supreme Court with the two vacancies he had. The fact that it will take the Republican president you’re hoping for in 2012 to finish the job doesn’t really prove anything.

He didn’t even do a lot of the things that Obama has been doing that have already been mentioned in this thread.

Like what? He did crack down on medical marijuana dealers. He did believe that the United States could declare anyone an unlawful combatant and once this was done the actions of the executive branch could not be controlled by anyone. There is no issue on which Bush was to Obama’s left.

Now it is true, of course, that Bush — like all presidents — is subordinate to Congress when it comes to domestic policy, hence the failure of his Social Security privatization scheme. And it is also of course true that all presidents are subject to political constraints, and that electoral politics is merely a subset of politics writ large? All of this is completely irrelevant to your transparently erroneous assertion that a Gingrich administration would be indistinguishable from an Obama administration.

Rich, I have to agree with Scott that you’re under-evaluating Bush’s level of pushing the reactionary agenda. Obama’s big problems are mostly a matter of staying the course with reactionary people and policies. But Bush get a lot of them rolling in the first place. It wasn’t, for instance, Clinton’s Justice Department that stacked the ranks with Federalist Society moral defectives. Bush’s people purged vigorously and vigorously filled the gaps with their own kind.

“was about the Awlaki memo being a civil liberties Rubicon, and that was entirely about the citizenship status of one man. ”

Nope. There’s an assassination list, and the memo was about justifying it. Awlaki was only one case. His son, and the others mentioned, weren’t killed in the same attack as you seem to think. The Awlaki memo, as far as anyone knows, justifies the killing because “the Justice Department concluded that Mr. Awlaki was covered by the authorization to use military force against Al Qaeda that Congress enacted shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001”. That covers anyone who the administration wants to kill who is Muslim, basically. And even before that, we knew that it wasn’t just Awlaki — “Although he was not the focus of the strike and was not killed, he has since been added to a shortlist of U.S. citizens specifically targeted for killing or capture by the JSOC, military officials said. ”

“My point is that if you want to rank politicians by how bad they are on civil liberties, you can’t do it on the basis of their actions where bombs are involved, because then they really are all terrible.” So you can say that they are all just terrible when it comes to bombs, and effectively excuse them from any personal responsibility for their decisions, but I can’t say that they are all just terrible when it comes to civil liberties. The distinctions that would make Obama look good are *important*, and the ones that would make people say there’s no difference have to be ignored because everyone knows there’s no difference. OK.

“Rich, I have to agree with Scott that you’re under-evaluating Bush’s level of pushing the reactionary agenda. Obama’s big problems are mostly a matter of staying the course with reactionary people and policies. But Bush get a lot of them rolling in the first place. ”

I disagree, Bruce. If Bush had done everything that he did, and then Obama had repudiated those things, Bush’s 2 terms would now be seen as a historical anomaly. Obama didn’t just stay the course, he actively asserted that he was going to do all the same things. By doing so, he made those things bipartisan. There is now no way to say that Republicans have a theory of law in which the President gets to send people to black sites, and have them tortured or killed, but the Democrats hold otherwise.

For that matter — and to get back to the more narrow subject of this thread, since some people seem to want to complain about that — Bush never had HHS overrule FDA. That’s an Obama original, a way in which Bush was to Obama’s left, as people above insist that he never was. If Bush had done this, people would be talking about the war on science. When Obama does it, they’re disappointed, but…

Obama has normalized Bush’s agenda, made it firmly mainstream. And yes, that is worse for all of us than getting it started in the first place.

The evil I vote for, affirm and support, has to be very “lesser.” In fact I think it has to be net good. Obama is not, IMO.

Here’s the guy killing three kids and there’s the guy killing ten kids. I save seven kids by voting for the former? Or I validate the killing of three kids?

Y’all go ahead, and feel pragmatic and righteous or whatever. I’m staying home.

Look the center-left has been incompetent at least since 1976, and by giving us a standard-bearer who couldn’t even win his home state in 2000 not only gave us George Bush, but couldn’t even with manage any meaningful resistance to Bush’s horrific policies and appointments. Their failures are accelerating.

They deserve no attention. They have earned marginality.

The question of who might make a better president is a good one. Those interested in learning something about the Right’s view of the issue may wish to vote in a poll over at Pr. Satan’s website. Anyone can skew/contribute to the poll and then view the comments. The few I read don’t provide much fodder for the “all right-wingers are cult members” meme, but there’s enough group-think on display to satisfy the hostile.

Here’s the guy killing three kids and there’s the guy killing ten kids. I save seven kids by voting for the former? Or I validate the killing of three kids?

That suggests the difference comes down to a different answer in the Trolley Problem (or a different interpretation of which version of the problem this represents). I would flip the switch in the classical formulation of the problem. I sounds like you wouldn’t. I would partly blame you for the 7 unnecessarily lost lives, you’d (partly) blame me for the 3 lives lost. That makes sense as an explanation at least.

“most folks in the former group at least acknowledge that Obama has not done squat to deserve that support other than fill space that a hypothetically even-more-destructive Republican could be occupying ”

That’s not my experience. I haven’t yet met someone who argues for voting for Obama on pure lesser-evil grounds; generally there’s a lot about ACA, DADT, etc. going all the way down to investigations of police agencies that may hypothetically bear fruit.

To clarify what I’m saying, which may be a bit different than what Salient is saying: I’m not claiming any greater effectiveness. As far as I can tell, being involved in electoral politics and rejecting it are equally totally ineffective unless you’re very rich. I’m not claiming any that rejection is ethically better. Lesser-evilism is, arguably, ethically more responsible than disengagement (the whole concept of “disengagement” is complicated, since I spend a lot more time on Occupy than I ever did with electoral politics, but whatever).

It’s just that becoming an anarchist at this point does lead to not having to tie yourself up in frankly silly rationalizations. Newt will press The Button? We can’t say that there’s no essential difference between how Obama and (generic GOP) would govern because every President kills people with bombs anyways? It’s perfectly possible to condemn the actions, in some meaningful sense of that word, of someone who you plan to vote for? The ACA was inflexibly determined as the best we could do, and Obama went out there and got it for us? Obama just rejected science in favor of politics in a way that’s never been done before, yet he’s never been to the right of Bush on anything?

It’s nonsense. If we’re going to be ineffective, I’d rather not also have to believe this stuff.

Uncle Kvetch, I was referring specifically to #51, with “Gingrich could blow up the world in a fit of hyperactive glee. Obama is a disappointment but I trust his finger on the button.” I’m not really sure why you think the repercussions of war with Iran would dwarf those of war with Iraq, but that’s sort of a different question. Obama did go out and have us conquer Libya to spread democracy, and he was admittedly canny enough to pick a smaller target, but I don’t see much difference between the quality of the pro-war lies between the two cases. We were assured, right here on CT, that the war in Libya was to protect people, not to overthrow the dictator, and that was openly abandoned about as quickly relative to the length of the conflict as Saddam’s WMDs were. Obama also ginned up the odd Iranian terror plot flap. I pretty much assume that a second Obama term is likely to have us at war with Iran anyways, based on that.

Obama also ginned up the odd Iranian terror plot flap. I pretty much assume that a second Obama term is likely to have us at war with Iran anyways, based on that.

Point taken, Rich (although of course I hope you’re wrong about the war part).

I do think that there’s a decent argument to be made that Gingrich is not just your garden variety venal Republican, but something much more potentially destructive, given his massive delusions of grandeur. I would guess that you disagree.

On the broader question of lessers and evils, I see you and Salient and others here making good points in both directions, and I remain agnostic…but I still lean towards the position that there’s a real-world difference between “really shitty” and “even shittier,” even if that’s not the range of choices we would like to have available to us.

@Salient – that’s a good summary. I don’t think all of team lesser will agree with me, but all that I’d ask of a member of team evil is to a) vote and b) don’t claim it doesn’t make any difference who wins the election. I would very much not expect donations, volunteering, flaming defenses of Obama to neighbors etc. (for people from team evil with more of a public platform I’d add c) don’t form alliances with the uber-dark side ala Naomi Wolf (tea-party) or Jane Hamsher (hc-reform opponents) . I’d frame this very narrowly – I think it’s perfectly fine to join with libertarians, even Cato-types, when it comes to civil liberties and drug policy, e.g.)

@Rich – “I haven’t yet met someone who argues for voting for Obama on pure lesser-evil grounds” I think that’s generally a correct observation – two points, though. If one says “I think Obama appointed some good people to executive and judicial positions” (which I think he did) – is that already making an active case for Obama, or is it just making a case for “lesser”? In other words – how much is arguing for “lesser” vs. arguing for “Obama” really in the eye of the beholder?
The other point is that the debate really gets confused when political feasibility comes in. I actually think ACA was a tremendous achievement because it was the maximum that was politically feasible and from what we know from insider accounts, Obama personally played an important role in getting to this maximum. So yeah, I think leftist criticisms of ACA are misguided – but that obviously hinges on my assessment of what’s feasible, with which you clearly disagree when looking at a medium run (I don’t buy your collapse argument at all).
On the other hand, I think progressives and leftists are absolutely right to be angry about civil liberties and decisions like the Plan B or smog regulations: They’re executive decisions and there are no sixty senate votes to take into account, all there is in terms of political constraint is a rather dubious political calculus that relies on your voters not getting too angry at you.

Rich, you’re assuming away the part where the 16 year old was a combatant in a war. The AUMF clearly authorizes the president to use military force, and that means killing people because they wear a particular uniform. All a member of al-Queda has to do to avoid being killed is not associate with al-Queda. This is no more or less due process then any soldier in a war receives. The Yemen operations are authorized under the AUMF for al-Queda. So I don’t see what the issue is unless it is with the AUMF.

Rich, that American state which you so recklessly condemned to the flames is the only thing standing between the black southerner and the noose. Localities are the most venial of dictatorships: the lord of the mannor is the worst tyrant in history, since his power is exercised with no checks or rationale. Do not forget: the flag that flies today before every courthouse flew over Shiloh and Gettysburg.

“You’ll be inevitably worn down. Ten years from now, you’ll be wondering why you ever thought this distinction between parties was so important.”
that’s just silly. You’re the one who apparently thought Obama was going to channel some type of fundamental change, driven by the newfound revolutionary spirit of some imaginary powerful left that had arisen during the Bush years. I never had that type of delusion, which is why I’m not terribly disappointed. You’re the one who is worn down because you apparently had a naive and dewy eyed view of politics pre-Obama. I didn’t then and I don’t now – I never thought that fundamental change was going to come about by voting for a Democrat.

I thought that Obama had the opportunity for change of a type which would differentiate the two parties, just as FDR did. That opportunity is gone. The rest is the usual “delusion” “naive” “dewy eyed” verbiage that always makes you people so convincing. Strangely enough it didn’t work when Obama called the people who disagreed with him sanctimonious purists either.

Bruce, the Geneva Conventions cover the case of war against armed groups that are non state actors in Article 3. It’s not a great stretch to apply that article to a worldwide terrorist organization. Violations of the laws of war do not determine whether something is or is not a war. Anyway, even if we can’t be at war the question is about the AUMF, not the actions undertaken by Obama. That’s where Rich’s quarrel lies, not with the specific and time honored tactics of aiming for the guy with the big hat.

I thought that Obama had the opportunity for change of a type which would differentiate the two parties, just as FDR did.

While I hesitate to call you “naive,” Rich, I’m with Sebastian(1) @ 158: I never saw an inkling of that kind of potential in an Obama presidency. His rhetoric from day one was explicitly post-partisan. He ran and won as a triangulating, DLC-type technocrat, albeit with a heavy overlay of inspirational but calculatedly vague evocations of “change.” I’ve been consistently frustrated by his administration, but not all that surprised.

FDR didn’t run as the person who we now think of him as either

Fair enough, but did he run as a Democrat? I’m not being flippant here; it’s an honest question. Obama has consistently hewed to the line that partisanship is part of the problem. Look at his big speech just last week: “These aren’t Democratic values or Republican values. These aren’t 1% values or 99% values. They’re American values.” When he refers to party labels at all, it’s almost always in the context of saying that they shouldn’t matter.

And that plays well with a wide swathe of American public opinion, which has bought into the faux-centrist notion that politics as struggle, as the clash of competing interests, is some kind of avoidable tragedy, instead of being…well, politics.

This was the core of Ross Perot’s schtick–it’s not about Democrats and Republicans, it’s about getting all the smart people together in a room and saying “fix everything.” It still has currency with a large number Beltway dimwits like Tom Friedman. And it’s been an integral part of the Obama brand since he’s been on the national stage.

Maybe the same was true of FDR back in the day…I honestly don’t know. But I doubt it.

I expected him to be a leftist leader? No. A self-interested leader? Yes.

So let’s see what you’re saying: we have to vote for Obama, and not tell people that there’s no difference between the parties. Even though anything substantive is in fact dependent on the strength of the left, “shifts and divisions within capital”, etc. We can’t expect anything out of Democratic Party leaders, or that pluralist democracy will work, but nevertheless it’s important not to tell people that pluralist democracy won’t work, because… And we never should have expected anything from Obama, yet you “actually think ACA was a tremendous achievement because it was the maximum that was politically feasible and from what we know from insider accounts, Obama personally played an important role in getting to this maximum”?

Well, 20-20 hindsight and sarcasm about anyone who can’t discern exactly what is structurally possible and calibrate their expectations of politicians to that effect is what I associate with a certain branch of the left, that’s true. Of course, since it’s hindsight, what is structurally possible always turns out to be what actually happened.

a) vote and b) don’t claim it doesn’t make any difference who wins the election.

The b) makes me nervous, since asking one another to withhold statements is a strong thing. All we really have is our voices.

What I was reacting to was the statement that Obama is no better than a Republican to be named later.

Ok, we might be falling into a language trap. I might say, “there’s no difference between my distance from Tokyo and my distance from London.” You might say, “not true, look at this map, there are thousands of miles difference!” And I say, “so? if a place is already thousands of miles away from me, what’s a few thousand miles extra?” You might say, “One is nearly twice the distance of the other! That’s a huge difference!” And I might say, “Not really. They’re both too far away.”

Obama is a far distance from us, and the hypothetical Republican somewhere even further along the ray. Team evil says “Ugh, look how horribly far away they both are!” Team lesser says “but look at how much further away the Republican is!” Team evil says “But look how horribly far away they both are!” Team lesser says “but look at how much further away the Republican is!”

Rich: there’s absolutely no contradiction in what I’m saying – I don’t think one should have reasonably expected Obama to bring about any fundamental change in the structure of the economy, in the way the country is governed, in the way it conducts its foreign policy etc. So within the relatively small policy space that is left once you take that away, I think ACA was a tremendous achievement. And while I don’t think the outcomes of pluralist democracy US-style has a reasonable chance to turn the US into a just&fair society, I think they can help make it a bit less shitty (e.g. by giving about 20million people a chance a getting somewhat decent medical care) and I think there’s nothing wrong with expending a limited amount of energy on that.
And my sarcasm isn’t about your inability to _exactly_ predict what’s structurally possible (who can?) but by you being _completely_ wrong about what was structurally likely and possible. (As an aside – you complain about other people’s tone in every second post – you do realize that you sound at least as condescending and smug, right?)

@Salient – I obviously don’t want to tell anyone to say something they don’t believe is true. This is about your other point – I think it’s unhelpful (and – at least in your example – objectively untrue) to claim that New York – London is the same distance as New York – Tokyo, even though they’re both far apart. But I think the difference really matters if you want to get from A to B – I’d much rather not be in a long distance relationship at all, but if I have to be in one, I’d much, much rather have it be NY-London. The same is true if you insert Democrats and Republicans back into the example.

> Rich: there’s absolutely no contradiction in what I’m saying – I don’t
> think one should have reasonably expected Obama to bring about
> any fundamental change in the structure of the economy, in the way
> the country is governed, in the way it conducts its foreign policy etc.
> So within the relatively small policy space that is left once you take
> that away, I think ACA was a tremendous achievement.

Where this line of argument can been seen to fall down is in the mortgage fraud “settlement” currently being pushed by the Treasury Dept. Whether to vigorously prosecute those who engaged in widespread and blatant financial fraud at the expense of the small homeowner and taxpayer, or to ram through a “settlement” including ex post facto exoneration of those who committed the fraud, was entirely within the Administration’s power to decide. And they chose the latter. As Duncan Black noted, why is it only the dirty smelly hippies who point out that a stable, law-abiding financial system in which those who commit fraud are identified and punished is a critical underpinning of the capitalist system that we all claim to love so much, yet Obama chose to allow those who committed massive fraud to keep on keepin’ on.

Cranky

Rich (and partly Cranky) – again, you’re misunderstanding me.
When I say “structural” I don’t mean “not within the legal powers of the President of the US” – many of the things that Obama has done he would have legally had the power to do differently. While even on that I completely disagree with you on ACA – I have no idea why you think there was ever a chance on earth to get 60 Senate votes for single payer, I doubt there were 50 – your other examples (and Cranky’s) are perfectly fine examples of where POTUS could have legally acted differently. But that pretends POTUS is elected and acts in a power vacuum, which is simply not the case – the fact that he was elected with huge amounts of WS support, that the entire DC power structure is dominated by corporate interests, that the only reason he was able to become a serious candidate was support from oligarchic power brokers like Jarret and Pritzker etc. matters. You seem to know quite well what a structural explanation actually is, yet your last reply suddenly makes it sound like “structural = legal constraints” which we both know is not what that word actually means – it’s certainly not what I mean by it.

I realize there is a Democratic party line defense of Obama that says to progressives “he did everything he could give the evil Republican obstructionism”. I think that’s true for health care and _maybe_ for a larger stimulus, but it’s obviously bullshit for any of the other things we’ve been talking about here and it’s not my argument. My argument is “look at US politics over the last 40 years, look at the structures of DC, look at the platform Obama ran on, look at his donors, look at his early supporters – what would have give you reason to believe he’d be a transformative president of the left???”

(And, again – I started calling you “dewy eyed and naive” after your condescending remark about how me (and others) were finally going to see the light in 10 years: “You’ll be inevitably worn down. Ten years from now, you’ll be wondering why you ever thought this distinction between parties was so important. ” – I just think it’s rich that you feel you can lecture people about what they’ll be wondering about in 10 years when you were so disastrously and predictably wrong three years ago.)

But that pretends POTUS is elected and acts in a power vacuum

…doesn’t arguing to us that it crucially tremendously matters incredibly much which party controls the POTUS kinda sorta contradict this?

Maybe “there’s strong tension between X and Y” is more accurate than “X contradicts Y.” I realize there are ways to thread the needle to make the two claims technically non-contradictory, but it’s also not something to rush through or presume settled. A lot of team lesser’s claims depend upon convincing us that there is a set {A, B, C} of horrible things that will happen under POTUS-R that won’t happen under POTUS-D, and those claims fall to pieces unless we are safe to presume the horrible things are things the POTUS is empowered to independently do or make happen. I’m not saying it’s impossible to build and support such a claim; I’m suggesting I don’t feel I’ve seen plausible blueprints.

People got me to shut up about this a couple years ago by proposing a Republican President would start wars in Iran and Syria. In light of Libya (as well as the mysterious transition to operations conducted by contracted private-sector forces instead of military in Iraq), I no longer have any faith that POTUS-R would bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran any more readily than POTUS-D, not because I think POTUS-R is going to be any kind of responsible steward, but because it seems our POTUS-D is rather eager to provide plenty of “humanitarian” bomb bomb support.

@Rich – I’m going to leave it at this – I think I have a good idea of what you’re saying/thinking and I think our exchange has been helpful in clarifying that for me, but we’re not going get any further.

@Salient – yeah, I’m a foreign policy skeptic: I think the US foreign policy takes up a very narrow ideological patch, so that going from one party to the other doesn’t make a huge difference – I think there was a brief moment when the craziest neo-cons had disproportionate influence in the GOP where that wasn’t the case, but I think that’s pretty much over.
On domestic policy, though, as I say above, I think the party in power and the President matters in small-ish but important ways. To circle back to the OP, take reproductive rights. On the one hand, yes, Obama/Sebelius have caved on Plan B (and as I’ve said repeatedly here, they should be called out on that). On the other hand

The Obama Administration has done plenty to protect reproductive rights and access to contraception. Abroad, it rescinded the Mexico City directive prohibiting federal assistance to global health organizations that promote or perform abortion services. At home, it has poured significant new money into family planning clinics.

(from Jon Cohn here, who also mentions some other things. These things directly reversed developments under Bush.
Or take the environment, because Obama’s disgraceful smackdown of Lisa Jackson and the EPA on ozon/smog regulations is still fresh in mind. I think Obama’s environmental record is overall one of the more disappointing parts of the administration. But even there – he reversed Bush on mercury emissions, he reversed Bush on several wildlife protection issues, he instituted car fuel efficiency standards – too little, too weak, no question – but still, I’d argue that these things matter.
Those are the types of issues {A,B,C} that I think team lesser has a very strong case saying would be worse if the current administration were Republican and will be worse if the next one is.

177: basically, Rich had the idle hope that Obama would be something vaguely approaching what Republican propaganda depicts him as. The truth is that when you compare the parties only the Republicans are likely to produce a President who will energetically stretch the limits of tradition in the way Rich proposes.