Commentary: Plenty of skepticism about Americans Elect

• Posted on Wednesday, September 28, 2011

By Dan Morain | The Sacramento Bee

Americans Elect is nothing if not audacious.
A startup political organization seeded with $20 million from anonymous donors, Americans Elect promises to offer voters a centrist candidate who will challenge Barack Obama and whomever the Republicans nominate for leadership of the Free World in 2012.
Be skeptical, very, very skeptical. Odds are that Americans Elect will be a footnote in the coming presidential campaign. But before shrugging it off, take a look at some of the political brains working on the effort.
There's pollster Doug Schoen, who helped elect President Bill Clinton and is an expert on independent voters. There's Mark McKinnon, a Texan who helped elect and re-elect President George W. Bush.
McKinnon worked for Sen. John McCain in 2008 until Obama locked up the Democratic nomination, at which point he stepped off the Straight Talk Express and declared that Obama's election would send a "great message to the country and the world." Disappointed by a president he thought would be The One, McKinnon is volunteering for Americans Elect because the system is "utterly broken and incapable of reforming itself."
And there is Darry Sragow, who recently signed on as political director. I wrote about Americans Elect a few months ago and would not revisit it so soon, except that Sragow, at 65 and having run campaigns for four decades, is worth listening to.
"The political system is out of date and it is broken," said Sragow, whose role will be to recruit potential presidential candidates. "It is delivering nothing that voters expect."
Unlike most of the rest of us, Sragow has seen up close the warts of the denizens of the political system. He ran the late Sen. Alan Cranston's re-election campaign in 1986 and worked as the Assembly Democrats' main consultant in the 1990s and early last decade. He has had his losses, having worked for the failed gubernatorial campaigns of Sen. Dianne Feinstein and rich guy Al Checchi.
He quit campaign work a few years ago, becoming managing partner of the Los Angeles office of the international law firm SNR Denton. But junkies never truly change their ways, and he remained involved, studying focus groups and polling, and advising candidates, Jerry Brown among them.
For years, Sragow has worried about societal upheaval, that jobs once held by people with few skills have become automated, that the divide between rich and poor is widening, and that political leaders fail to address basic issues.
"People we elect get stuck fighting in the sandbox over the debt ceiling, whatever that is," he said. "Voters' needs are not being met. But I remain optimistic about the vibrancy of this country. It is time to bring something new to market."
Americans Elect could be just another gimmick. It certainly has elements of gimmickry. But it also could have an impact, especially given the level of discontent.
A Public Policy Institute of California poll shows that even in the Democratic stronghold of California, barely half the voters approve of Obama's performance, and almost two-thirds of the electorate disapprove of the Republican Party.
"President Obama promised hope and change. He has delivered neither," Sragow said. "But the fact is that Americans still want hope and change."
Americans Elect offers itself not as a third party but rather as a You-Generation political vehicle. Billionaire investor Peter Ackerman gave $2.5 million to seed the group, and signed a 47-page pitch last year soliciting other donors and describing the concept. It's not simple, which is one of its flaws. Tentative rules read a little like those for a rather complicated board game.
The key, the pitch says, will be to gain ballot access in all 50 states, no small feat. In California, the group gathered more than a million signatures and will learn in the next few weeks whether it has gained a spot on California's ballot. Other states have different rules. The group may need to sue to gain access in some states.
We don't yet know who that candidate is, except that organizers expect him or her to be a centrist. The candidate to be named later would be nominated in voting conducted on its website starting next May. Any registered voter can shape a platform or campaign to draft their ideal candidate.
Americans Elect's assumptions, described in the booklet, certainly are hopeful. Candidates will emerge once it is understood that 50-state ballot access is certain. A ticket representing the center-right and center-left can win. Delegates, on their own initiative, will fund the ticket.
It sounds more hopeful than realistic. But lots of ideas are weird. Imagine thinking that what people truly need is to post personal photos on a public website and invite "friends" to comment, or that revolutionaries could use 140-character messages to plot to overthrow dictators.
"It's either going to be iTunes or Friendster. ... They're either going to change the world, or not," said Dan Schnur, a former GOP political consultant who teaches government at USC.
Americans Elect's pitch invited donors to give $500,000 and join what it called the John Hancock Society, named for the first brave man who signed the Declaration of Independence. The booklet also said donors would be publicly disclosed. That hasn't happened. Americans Elect attorney Daniel Winslow of Boston said some donors fear retribution if they become known.
That's, of course, a canard. John Hancock risked being hanged. People able to shell out $500,000 on an upstart have nothing of significance to fear.
Winslow, long a supporter of Mitt Romney, says Americans Elect is not a project of any candidate. Sragow says candidates could include politicians, military officers, business or labor leaders. It could be a Republican, including one who fails to win the GOP nomination, or a Democrat. Al Gore? Michael Bloomberg? Without knowing the donors, it's impossible to know the organization's motives.
Americans Elect most likely will be little more than a blip in 2012. History is littered with failed third-party candidates. At most, its candidate might be a spoiler. Then again, smart guys are involved. Maybe, just maybe, 2012 could be different.

Foundation Auction 2012: Bought Health Care

Dylan Ratigan

Host, MSNBC's 'The Dylan Ratigan Show'; Author, 'Greedy Bastards'; Founder, Get Money OutPosted: 02/ 1/2012 2:01 pm

Auction 2012 is a week long series in partnership with The Huffington Post and United Republic.  


The point of seeing a doctor -- or being one -- should be to improve health.  After all, besides your mother or spouse, who do you count on to care about your well-being more than your doctor does?  That is literally his or her job.  But what I've found, and I've written about in my new book Greedy Bastards, is that the same incentives distorting banking, energy, education, and government are distorting our very bodies.
The American health care system has incentives so out of alignment for everyone involved that it's a Greedy Bastard paradise.  For American health care providers, the goal isn't to get you healthy, but to get you paying.  And similar to banking where the costs of a low interest loan might be a hidden balloon payment, the costs of our health care system are hidden from the end consumer.
One basic problem with the system is how doctors are paid, the fee for service model.  In fee for service models, doctors are paid based on the treatments they deliver rather than the health outcomes they generate.  So for instance, if you need an expensive surgery, your doctor gets paid to operate.  If you don't need surgery, your doctor doesn't get paid.  This creates an obvious incentive to recommend surgery, even when you don't need it.  And it also discourages looking at the evidence of what works and what doesn't, because expensive but ineffective procedures create more profit for the doctors and hospitals that host and perform them.
This prioritizing of money over health outcomes shows up in the political influence the American Medical Association uses to stifle competition.  Shikha Dalmia, a senior policy analyst for the nonprofit think tank Reason Foundation, described in Forbes how the AMA used its political influence to insist that only doctors could deliver babies, even though midwives have performed this service for years.  "In 1995 thirty-six states restricted or outright banned midwifery, even though studies have found that it delivers equally safe care at far lower prices than standard hospital births."
Then there's the prescription drug problem, where pharmaceutical companies leverage their political influence to protect and expand drug monopolies.  In one case, a company called KV Pharmaceuticals got the FDA to give it an exclusive franchise over a hormonal agent used for years by obstetricians.  The price jumped from $300 a treatment to $25,000.  Pharmaceutical companies advertise to convince you that you are sick, and spend $61,000 per doctor on promotional costs to get doctors to prescribe you their drugs.
This wouldn't be affordable for most of us if we had to pay the sticker price.  But we don't, because most of us are covered by increasingly expensive third party health insurance (through our employers, which is yet another problem).  This insurance is protected by a law granting health insurance companies the right to monopolize state coverage, a monopoly retained by the enormous sums spent by the health insurance industry in Washington ($263 million from 2009-2010 alone).
None of this improves health outcomes, or is necessary for good health.  Sometimes it is counterproductive, because it discourages collaboration and the adoption of best practices.  In my book, I spent time learning about the Mayo Clinic, where doctors are paid on a flat salary, and where they operate in teams.  This promotes the sharing of information, and leads to far better health outcomes.  I also spoke with Jeff Brenner, a specialist in Camden, New Jersey, one of the poorest areas in the country.  He assembled a team to specifically target the most expensive cases, and using this technique of hotspotting, was able to save millions of dollars.  For instance, he found out that one diabetic was continually relapsing because he wasn't wearing his glasses when he injected himself with insulin, and so was taking the wrong dose.  This alone saved thousands of dollars in hospital bills, but in our fragmented health system, it wouldn't be anyone's job to tell you that you aren't taking your medicine correctly.  In fact, the hospital would make money on every return visit.
As with banking, energy, and education, we have the skills and tools we need to improve outcomes and cut costs.  We know how to stop Greedy Bastards from ruining the system and bankrupting us.  They are after all operating according to certain incentives, and those incentives are malleable.

Click through to view full Infographic

The Venn of Ron Paul and Other Mysteries of Libertarianism Explained

—By Josh Harkinson

| Fri Jan. 6, 2012 11:26 AM PST

Congressman Ron Paul's third-place finish in Tuesday's Iowa Republican Caucus was a remarkably strong showing for a candidate who has so little in common with mainstream Republicans. Perhaps the nation's most politically unique congressman, Paul shares policy stances with conservatives, liberals, and libertarians, while differing markedly from all of them.

So where does Paul fit in the Libertarian universe?

LIBERTARIAN THEOLOGY

Libertarianism might be a simple ideology, an aversion to big government in all its forms, but don't tell that to libertarians: "Like any movement of any size," says Nick Gillespie, editor of the libertarian magazine Reason, "it is an endless operation of trying to figure out more and more ways in which people who agree on 99.9 percent of everything can really hate each other's guts."

Anarcho-Capitalists: The most radical of the lot, they want to abolish government entirely (though, unlike regular anarchists, they do support private property rights). "The state acts like a band of thieves and killers," explains Lew Rockwell, the best-known exponent of this strain. "The private sector doesn't do that."

Minarchists: Archrivals to the anarcho-capitalists, they support a minimalist version of government: Let the state handle roads, policing, and defense—but nothing more. Many, including Ron Paul, view the Constitution as the ultimate minarchist document.

Cosmopolitan Libertarians: Term used by the minarchist editors ofReason to describe their embrace of world citizenship and deride rivals as hayseeds

Economic Libertarians: Worship free-market absolutists like Milton Friedman

Hippie Libertarians: Worship freedom-loving freaks like Larry Flynt

Religious Libertarians: Worship deities of their choosing, care about politics primarily as it affects religious freedom. In 17th-century England they were Puritan Roundheads. In 21st-century America they're Mormons.

Gold Bugs: Advocate a return to the gold standard, or some equivalent, as a way to diminish the fiscal powers of the state; dismiss foes as "inflationists"

Objectivists: Followers of philosopher Ayn Rand who love morality tales, hate anarchy, and endorse a scorched-earth foreign policy. If "flattening Fallujah to end the Iraqi insurgency will save American lives," Ayn Rand Institute director Yaron Brook has written, "to refrain from [doing so] is morally evil."

Neolibertarians: Libertarian neocons; big supporters of the Iraq War

Paleolibertarians: Old-schoolers who despise the neolibertarians for selling out to the system. Also think atheism is overrated.

Technolibertarians: Extropians, transhumanists, sci-fi-fans, they strive to transcend humanity's meat-puppet limitations and take self-determination to the final frontier.

South Park Conservatives: Find their politics articulated in a show created by two avowed libertarians; a seminal episode follows a race for school mascot between a giant douche and a turd sandwich. Which, says Reason's Gillespie, "pretty much sums up how most libertarians approach politics."

Paultards: Blogosphere dis for those who annoy the online masses by relentlessly shilling for their man in comment threads, polls, and social networking sites
—J.H.

RAND OF THE FREE

Around 9 percent of Americans are libertarians. What makes them tick?

85% are white.

67% are men.

53% are under 50.

59% say they are satisfied financially.

82% say government is almost always inefficient and wasteful.

67% say they're politically independent, yet 
70% say they'll vote for a Republican in 2012.

27% say Mitt Romney is their top pick; 
13% say Ron Paul.

36% say they don't know where Obama was born.

38% regularly watch Fox News.

60% say we shouldn't give up privacy to be safer from terrorism.

54% support legalizing pot.

71% say homosexuality should be accepted,

Yet only 
43% support gay marriage.

63% say there's no solid evidence of global warming.

Susan G. Komen’s priceless gift

FRIDAY, FEB 3, 2012 7:00 PM EASTERN STANDARD TIME

A radical decision woke the country up to an alarming rightward drift, and gave new life to women’s health advocacy

BY REBECCA TRAISTER AND JOAN WALSH

• 
  

Members of Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America and more than 20 other organizations hold a "Stand Up for Women's Health" rally in Washington  (Credit: Joshua Roberts / Reuters)

TOPICS:PLANNED PARENTHOOD, BREAST CANCER, EDITOR'S PICKS

The starling intensity that we saw this week in response to Susan G. Komen for the Cure’s decision to pull its grants from Planned Parenthood — an intensity that prompted the Komen foundation to reverse its decision today — may be the best thing that’s happened to the conversation about reproductive rights in this country for decades. It certainly should be.

Practically since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, reproductive rights activists have been left to play stilted defense against ideological opponents who grabbed the language of morality, life, love and family as their own, always deploying it with reference to the fetus. The rhetoric around reproductive rights, which has more recently begun to creep into arguments over contraception, has become suffocating in its emotional self-righteousness, but too muscular, too ubiquitous to effectively combat.

But the overreach by the Komen foundation, while surely intended to strike yet another blow on the side of antiabortion activism, succeeded instead in waking a powerful constituency — armed with precisely the language and emotional heft they’ve been lacking for too long.

That this week’s blow against Planned Parenthood came not directly from John Boehner’s House of Representatives – which, ever since taking power a year ago promising to focus on jobs, has manfully focused on the single task of attacking women’s reproductive rights – but instead from a popular, officially nonpartisan organization dedicated wholly to women’s healthcare somehow brought this argument into the open.

The response to Komen was surely so tinderbox explosive because it had been building with every politically theatrical investigation launched by Cliff Stearns and every grizzly abortion scene enacted on the House floor by U.S. Rep. Chris Smith, But it was not just Washington wonkery, and was not ginned up or amplified by professional political cranks. It was the reflexive kick of a shin hit just below the knee, and the visceral anger spilled everywhere, from a Planned Parenthood Saved Me tumblr and onto Facebook, where people posted images of Komen’s pink ribbon cut in half. It poured from bank accounts, including that of New York Mayor and former Republican Michael Bloomberg.

It came from often dispassionate media figures like Andrea Mitchell, was tweeted by novelists like Judy Blume, Terry McMillan and William Gibson, actors Ellen Barkin and Martha Plimpton, politicos like Donna Brazile, Reps. Gwen Moore and Jackie Speiers, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and from 22 senators including Frank Lautenberg, Al Franken and Kirsten Gillibrand, who signed a letter urging Komen to reverse its decision. It came from callers to radio programs, announcing their intentions to drop out of Komen races, and from the American Association of University Women, which canceled a scheduled service event with Komen. In the three days after Komen’s announcement of its Planned Parenthood break, Planned Parenthood received more than $3 million in donations, said PPFA president Cecile Richards in a press call on Friday.

More than that, though: The starkly observable attack against something as crucial and basic as breast exams for poor women, as well as the fact that so many divergent voices were pulled into it, meant that the conversation was not about partisan politics; it was about women. For the first time in what feels like forever, passion and fury were being loudly, proudly given in a full-throated voice, on behalf of women – women as moral actors; women as citizens with rights, health, bodies, freedoms; women as people with families and economic concerns.

Taken together, these factors mark this as a watershed moment in the contemporary conversation about reproductive rights. This is a story in which we see the possibility of a turned tide, a new way to gauge how the public actually feels about women’s rights and health, and a new way to talk about it, as well. Because what we saw this week was big. It was mass. It was emotional. This was so different from the various polls activists on both sides of the abortion question are always throwing around, polls that depend so much on how a question is asked; polls that offer far less clarity than head-banging confusion about where America stands on the issue of reproductive heath. This was not a poll. This was America announcing that it cared about women’s health, and more specifically, that it cared about Planned Parenthood.

In many ways, the activism that forced Komen to backtrack was ignited by Boehner’s House Republicans a year ago, when they voted to cut off all funding to Planned Parenthood because it provides abortion services. This despite the fact that since 1976’s Hyde Amendment, no federal money has been able to be used to provide abortion services. The organization Republicans want to squash provides more than 800,000 women a year with breast exams, more than 4 million Americans with testing and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases, and 2.5 million people with contraception, which prevents unintended pregnancy and thus abortion. But playing to what they must imagine is overriding public sentiment, Republicans have worked tirelessly to lodge the image of Planned Parenthood as an abortion factory deep in the American imagination.

A year ago, some of the anger at this strategy began to bubble over. In response to Smith’s description of a second trimester abortion, read on the House floor, Democratic U.S. Rep. Jackie Speier went to the House well and described her own painful second trimester abortion. “For you to stand on this floor and suggest that somehow this is a procedure that is either welcomed or done cavalierly or done without any thought, is preposterous,” Speier said, directing her comments at Smith. “Planned Parenthood has a right to operate. Planned Parenthood has a right to provide services for family planning. Planned Parenthood has a right to offer abortions. The last time I checked, abortions were legal in this country … I would suggest to you that it would serve us all very well if we moved on with this process and started focusing on creating jobs for the Americans who desperately want them.”

It was around this time that a viral “Thank You Planned Parenthood” meme cropped up online. With participants noting the instances in which they had relied on PPFA for birth control, breast exams, gynelogical care, and yes, abortions. Twitter, Facebook and blogs began to be dotted with “I stand with Planned Parenthood” emblems. Comedian Lizz Winstead kicked off a tour called “Planned Parenthood, I am here for you.”

But this recent wave of defense of Planned Parenthood has remained broad, ambient. The politics of the congressional witch hunt have been so labyrinthine, so convoluted, that it has been difficult to know how to effectively harness an angry response. When, last fall, Rep. Cliff Stearns launched an investigation into PPFA’s bookkeeping, the move was so needless, such a trumped-up piece of political stagecraft (since PPFA does receive federal funds, it must scrupulously account for every dime it spends, no special investigation required) that it was hard to even know how to make sense of it, let alone respond. This week, a caller to WNYC’s “Brian Lehrer Show” professed her belief that the Stearns investigation centered on whether Planned Parenthood was performing late-term abortions.

The demonization of Planned Parenthood should have awakened the country to the radicalism of the right, and how far it has pushed the political conversation. It’s been hard to measure the degree of the radicalism, so slowly and unceasingly has it crept across our consciousness and the political discourse. But it’s important to remember how mainstream Planned Parenthood used to be. It was the respectable, even Republican, advocate for women’s health, including reproductive services; the leaders of the National Abortion Rights Action League were the activist agitators. Sen. Prescott Bush, the father of President George H.W. Bush, served as treasurer of Planned Parenthood’s first national fundraising campaign. Richard Nixon signed the family planning legislation in 1970 that authorized its federal funding.

As a congressman, George Bush and his wife, Barbara, were reliable friends of the organization. Barry Goldwater’s wife, Betty, was a founding member of Arizona Planned Parenthood; President Gerald Ford’s wife, Betty, was a high-profile supporter of the group. More recently, Ann Romney, wife of the 2012 GOP presidential front-runner, donated $150 to Planned Parenthood in 1994. And when a Romney relative died of a botched abortion in 1963, the family asked that memorial donations go to Planned Parenthood.

But what happened this week was a clarifying moment. Right-wing extremism, coming this time not from the partisan mill but from a mainstream women’s organization, was put in a direct and unflattering spotlight. Suddenly, so much was clear, and finally, the response was unified and thunderous. Right-wing overreach — and the backlash it inspired — feels a lot like the way other radical GOP power grabs in the last year have galvanized the public to fight back. Attacks on collective bargaining, public workers and unions by Republican governors in Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana have produced mass mobilization in those states, the likes of which we haven’t seen in decades. Public workers – cops, firefighters, nurses, teachers, paramedics, sanitation workers – once were the proud backbone of the middle class. Now they find themselves derided by the GOP as the new welfare queens who are taking more than their fair share. Ohio voters repealed a law that abolished collective bargaining in November, and pro-union organizers in Wisconsin have forced a recall election for Gov. Scott Walker.

Efforts to restrict voting rights are likewise waking up the citizenry; Maine repealed a law that banned same-day voting and registration in November, and Ohio blocked a voter photo ID bill. Even on the issue of reproductive rights, a draconian “personhood” amendment to the state constitution failed to pass in Mississippi, one of the reddest of the red states. Overreach by the right has re-inspired movements – unions, voting rights, women’s rights — that have too long been dormant and too easily dismissed by their ideological opponents as outside the mainstream of American values, when in fact, they used to represent the most American of values.

For defenders of Planned Parenthood, and more broadly for reproductive rights activists, this moment of repositioning is a valuable one. Until now, it has proven very difficult for advocates to resuscitate their side with language anywhere near as powerful as that used by antiabortion forces. Instead they have relied too heavily on the fungible, limp, endlessly open-ended language of “choice.” (Even among “pro-choice” advocates, the “I choose my choice!” joke from “Sex and the City” has become a ubiquitous critique.)

But what happened this week was powerful. It was mass. It was direct. It was emotional. And it restores women as the moral center of this conversation — which is where they belong.