Monthly Archives: October 2008

Gold-Plated Health Care

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Recently I was diagnosed as having sciatica, a.k.a. a “slipped disc” in the spine, a common ailment that (they tell me) ought to be fixable. The orthopedic guy who diagnosed me prescribed physical therapy, three times a week for a month. Yesterday I got a letter from Empire Blue Cross saying they were overruling the doctor. I need only two weeks of physical therapy, they said.

I’ve had one week of therapy already, and I am doubtful just one more week is going to fix me, but I guess I can continue to do most of the exercises by myself. As medical aggravations go, this is hardly a tragedy. But this is the way life is for most of us. If you aren’t wealthy, the medical treatment you receive is what your insurance provider, not your doctor, decides you should have.

And that’s if you are lucky enough to have insurance. At least I could go to a doctor and get a diagnosis, and now I have some idea of what I need to do to take care of myself.

One of the most persistent myths on the Right is that health care is too expensive because we are indulging ourselves with too much of it. The persistently stupid Jeff Jacoby writes in today’s Boston Globe,

With health benefits tax-free if they were employer-supplied, tens of millions of Americans were soon signing up for medical insurance through work. As tax rates rose, so did the incentive to keep expanding health benefits. No longer was medical insurance reserved for major expenditures like surgery or hospitalization. Americans who would never think of using auto insurance to cover tune-ups and oil changes grew accustomed to having their medical insurer pay for yearly physicals, prescriptions, and other routine expenses.

We thus ended up with a healthcare system in which the vast majority of bills are covered by a third party. With someone else picking up the tab, Americans got used to consuming medical care without regard to price or value. After all, if it was covered by insurance, why not go to the emergency room for a simple sore throat? Why not get the name-brand drug instead of a generic?

I think righties must be blessed with unusually good health, since clearly they’ve never had to deal with health insurance.

First off, although it may be different in Massachusetts, many years ago insurance companies stopped paying for emergency room visits if they decide after the diagnosis that the medical problem wasn’t an emergency. Although exactly why anyone with insurance would choose to an emergency room for a non-emergency eludes me.

But what happens if you think it’s really an emergency? Is the sudden chest pain a heart attack, or heartburn? If you pick A and go to the emergency room, it turns out to be B, you just ran up a several thousand dollar medical bill that the insurer won’t pay. If you pick B and it turns out to be A, you could die. Coin flip?

Same thing with generic versus name-brand drugs. Most insurers simply will not pay for the name brand if a generic is available. The consumer has no choice.

Also, in New York a “routine” office visit is somewhere in the $100-200 range, and even “generic” prescriptions can cost over $100 a month. Lots of people on limited and fixed incomes will not spend that kind of money just because. They’ll wait until they are really sick. But a lack of preventive care is one of the factors driving up health care costs.

When patients think someone else is paying most of their healthcare costs, they feel little pressure to learn what those costs actually are – and providers feel little pressure to compete on price.

Jacoby has no clue how the system works. Health providers aren’t pressured by consumers to compete on price. They are pressured by the insurance companies to compete on price. Then insurance companies compete with each other to provide the lowest costs to employers. So the company that puts together a network of cheap doctors can offer a better price to the employer, but in my experience the employer doesn’t give a bleep whether the doctors know a spine from a sock. Quality is optional.

De-linking medical insurance from employment is the key to reforming healthcare in the United States. McCain proposes to accomplish that by taking the tax deduction away from employers and giving it to employees. With a $5,000 refundable healthcare tax credit, Americans would have a strong inducement to buy their own, more affordable, insurance, rather than relying on their employer’s plan.

Unfortunately, since the actual cost of a year’s worth of health insurance is a hell of a lot more than $5,000, only very well-paid employees will be able to use the credit. And, of course, if you have a pre-existing condition, in most states you can kiss off buying insurance at any price.

BTW, after the elections I may be asking for donations so I can pay for accupuncture. I figure it’s worth a try. I’d like to be able to take walks again.

Update: Jacoby’s email address (published in the Boston Globe) is [email protected].

Fairness, Justice, Equality, Stability

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As anticipated, Sec. / Gen. Colin Powell endorsed Barack Obama this morning. Yes, we all remember how Powell allowed himself to be a tool, but many still admire him. Matt Yglesias:

His endorsement helps ratify the post-Palin trend toward McCain solidifying his base but losing his once-formidable support from moderates. Plus I bet it’ll inspire someone at the Corner to say something racist.

We can all look forward to that. And speaking of racism and other forms of discrimination, I give you the Rightie Genius of the Week, Robert McCain, who writes,

This idiotic liberal tendency to equate inequality with injustice is indefensible as logic.

If you need to stop and reflect on that for a bit, take your time.

In context, I believe Mr. McCain was using the word equality to mean identical, which I think only works in mathematics — not even then, if I’m doing the mathematics. However, here in Real World Land, equality — as in equal treatment under the law — is the cornerstone of justice. When elements are equal they are not necessarily identical, but they have the same intrinsic value even if they have different attributes.

Mr. McCain was commenting on this column by Jonathan Cohn, “What’s So Awful About ‘Spreading the Wealth’?” Cohn’s primary point is that progressive income taxes are fairer than flat taxes. As part of this argument, he writes,

Another rationale for progressive taxation is the fact that random chance has profound effects on everybody’s financial well-being. (A guy named John Rawls once wrote a thing or two about this.) Mandating economic equality–i.e., carrying out a truly socialist agenda–would obviously be wrong. But there are compelling moral and economic arguments for asking the fortunate to pay a little more in taxes, in order to blunt the influence of chance on people’s lives.

Mr. McCain is having none of that. Which takes us to equating inequality with injustice:

Why is random chance “unjust”? Whence the “moral” obligation to equalize outcomes? This idiotic liberal tendency to equate inequality with injustice is indefensible as logic.

But Cohn didn’t use the words justice or injustice anywhere in his column. Mr. McCain leaped to the conclusion that Cohn wants to “blunt the influence of chance on people’s lives” out of a sense of justice, but that’s not what he said, and that wouldn’t be my primary argument, either.

What is the purpose of government? Cohn writes, “Government performs certain essential functions, from education to national defense.” How do we know which functions are “essential” and which are not? And why would blunting “the influence of chance on people’s lives” be a function of government? This is what we need to think about.

I say government is a means — not the only one, but the major one — by which people maintain civilization. Through government, theft and murder are criminalized and discouraged. Through government contracts are enforced, which enables people to work together to build cities and engage in commerce.

Put another way, the principal purpose of government is to maintain some sort of orderly and stable system that allows people to live peacefully in proximity to other people. Ideally, public and private sectors work together to maintain conditions in which people can provide for themselves and pursue their own interests as freely as possible.

Reasonable people can disagree about which functions should be public and which should be private. But that argument often is not about “morality” or “equality” or “justice.” It’s about balancing stability and liberty.

A classic problem for democratic government is the balance of civil liberty versus crime control. Like it or not, totalitarian governments generally do a better job of controlling crime than democratic governments. If you want to really clamp down on crime, whip up a police state. But most of us don’t want to live in a police state. So we put limits on police powers and accept a higher risk of crime. In this equation, we take away from stability and add to liberty.

For years conservatives have called for deregulation for this or that part of the private sector, because regulations get in the way of profits. But the point of many of those regulations is to discourage risk-taking. Recent events ought to be teaching us that risk-taking has its down side. If it were just a matter of some investors taking risks with their own money that would be one thing, but we see that risk-taking can create widespread financial instability with widespread harmful consequences.

So, the primary point of putting limits on what financial managers can do with investors’ money is not just to protect the investors from losses, but to keep the economy itself from becoming unacceptably unstable. Unfortunately, this is a lesson that has to be re-learned every few decades.

Likewise, the primary reason government has an interest in blunting the influence of chance on people’s lives is to maintain political and social stability. Certainly, the government cannot be ready with a band-aid every time a citizen stumbles. But history teaches us that when a large portion of citizens, especially middle-class citizens, are facing catastrophic disruption and falling through the economic cracks, political and social instability are right around the corner.

I’m not talking about saving people from their own folly. I’m talking about saving them from other peoples’ folly, or the consequences of natural disaster, or something else that’s bigger than they are. Self-reliance is a wonderful virtue, but sometimes it isn’t enough. And maintaining the integrity of the middle class as a whole is good for everybody.

Let’s go back to Mr. McCain.

The purpose of taxation is to collect revenue for the government, not to reward or punish various classes of citizens.

I agree, but the rest of this paragraph suggests to Mr. McCain suffers some sort of brain damage.

The fiscal action of government is never equal, and inevitably divides the population into taxpayers and tax consumers (as another famous guy said), and tax consumers will always argue for the expansion of revenue. If left unchecked, government become nothing more than organized theft, plundering one part of the population in order to enrich another part.

I like the part about government being unchecked. Once again, we see that the ideal of government of the people, by the people, and for the people has been forgotten. Rather than being an instrument for We, the People, to govern ourselves, government has become an alien fungus that no one can control. But let’s go on …

First, I’d like to know which Americans are not “tax consumers.” Who living here does not benefit, directly or indirectly, from the justice system, the national security system, meat inspectors, highways, etc.? Show of hands? Anyone?

Who is being “plundered” and who is being “enriched”? Certainly there’s a lot of plundering going on, but seems to me it’s the corrupt, not the poor, who are the perps. If Mr. McCain actually believes that the poor are benefiting disproportionately from his tax dollars, he should try being poor for a while. Mr. McCain may not be on food stamps, but he receives benefit from his tax dollars whenever he uses air transportation, buys a steak, or has good shipped across country.

Remember the “lucky ducky“? This would be funny if it weren’t so, I don’t know, pathological.

I’ve argued in the past that one defining features of righties is that they don’t grasp interconnections. They have rigidly linear thought processes and don’t see the complexity of interrelationships that supports all of us. Well, here it is again.

Update: Matt Yglesias again:

Meanwhile, as John McCain says, it’s true that forty percent of the workforce pays no net income taxes. But everyone who works pays payroll tax. Payroll tax is a tax, ergo if you work you pay taxes, ergo if you work you could receive a tax cut. It’s true that the method by which you deliver tax cuts to people with no income tax liability is via a refundable tax credit, but that doesn’t change the fact that you’re talking about reducing the tax burden on people who pay taxes. You’re offering them a tax cut, in other words. Or as McCain puts it, “socialism.” Meanwhile, George W. Bush is nationalizing banks and John McCain wants to buy up bad mortgages so that those who currently own them don’t need to pay any financial penalty for their unsound lending practices.

It stuns me that McCain doesn’t think taxes taken out of paychecks count as taxes.

The Right Hates America

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Sarah Palin thinks some parts of America are not the “real” America. A McCain staffer says northern Virginia is not “real” Virginia. I’m sure that’s going to go over well with northern Virginia voters. See also Marc Ambinder, “McCain’s Cosmological Breakthrough: Unreality Is Expanding.” Hysterical.

John McCain thinks tax cuts for the middle class amount to “welfare.” A congresswoman thinks Americans are sending un-Americans to Congress.

In St. Louis, 100,000 people show up for an Obama rally, and a rightie blogger writes,

100,000 IS A LOT OF DUPES.

* STILL: HE GOT A BIGGER CROWD IN BERLIN THAN IN ST. LOUIS. WHY!?
* WAS THERE A ROCK BAND IN ST. LOUIS, TOO?
* WHO BUSSED THESE HORDES OF MORONS INTO ST LOUIS? WHICH UNIONS?

JUST ASKING…

So all those decent, hard-working citizens of St. Louis who came out today, hoisting their kids on their shoulders to see the candidate, are “hordes of morons.” The Right spits on you, St. Louis.

However, I disagree with Ambinder. I don’t think unreality is expanding. I think the Right’s fantasy world is imploding. They aren’t used to having to deal with the real world. No wonder they’re confused.

Obama in St. Louis

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[Update: This photograph moves me deeply, and not just because of the size of the crowd. The blue-domed building in the background is the old courthouse, where the Dred Scott case was tried in the 1840s 1850s.]

There was a massive Obama rally in St. Louis this afternoon. Here’s some coverage from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Video diary of Obama rally

Watch: Video from the Obama crowd at the Arch

Obama rally: Secret Service puts crowd at 80,000

The Secret Service estimated 80,000 people attended the rally at the Arch today, but St. Louis police estimated 100,000. That’s a lot of people. Missouri recently slipped from the leaning-McCain column into the slightly-leaning-toward-Obama column, I understand, although it will be very close.

And judging by the videos, people at Obama rallies are nicer than people at McCain rallies.

Tigers! Maul those Longhorns!

Update: “All I Can Say Is, Wow“

One of These Things Is Not Like the Other

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Never underestimate the ability of the Right to stoke its victim complex. Headline at Pajamas Media:

Obama Supporter Assaults Female McCain Volunteer in New York

As the media fumes over nonexistent hate at Palin speeches, it ignores leftists who go berserk on city streets.

Oleg Atbashian writes,

While the Democrat-leaning media continues to scare undecided voters with bedtime stories about some mythical angry McCain supporter whom nobody has seen, here is a real district attorney’s complaint documenting an unprovoked assault by an enraged Democrat against a McCain volunteer in midtown Manhattan: “Defendant grabbed the sign [informant] was holding, broke the wood stick that was attached to it, and then struck informant in informant’s face thereby causing informant to sustain redness, swelling, and bruising to informant’s face and further causing informant to sustain substantial pain.”

I make no excuses for the assailant, and I sincerely hope he is punished to the full extent of the law.

BTW, here are some of the “mythical angry McCain supporter whom nobody has seen.”

The distinction between angry McCain supporters and the one assailant in New York, beside numbers, is in the word incite. The Palin-McCain campaign is inciting rage. It’s stoking rage as hard as it can stoke. Veep candidate Palin insinuated that entire parts of America are anti-American.

Palin also made a point of mentioning that she loved to visit the “pro-America” areas of the country, of which North Carolina is one. No word on which states she views as unpatriotic.

The Obama-Biden campaign is not inciting rage. There are enraged Obama supporters, but the Obama campaign is not demonizing McCain as un-American or a traitor or someone otherwise outside the mainstream of American politics.

See, righties, that’s why one of these things is not like the other.

For example:

This woman is not some random whackjob off the streets like the New York assailant. She’s an elected whackjob in the U.S. Congress who is speaking on behalf of the McCain Administration. She’s ready to reconstitute the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Rep. Bachmann, btw, has had some of her own “guilt by association” problems. Maybe she’s anti-American too. Click here to donate to the Dem running against her.

I’m sure if one looked hard enough one could equally crazy Obama supporters. But in Congress? or in a paid position with the Obama campaign or the Democratic Party? Not so likely.

Yesterday I linked to a blog post that accused “the Left” of totalitarianism because the news media had the nerve to publish unflattering stories about Joe the Plumber. Apparently someone reminded the blogger of the Right’s rabid hyena attacks on the parents of SCHIP poster child Graeme Frost. Not the same thing, the blogger argues. The Frosts were acting as spokespersons for the Democratic Party. All Joe did was ask a question.

Well, no. Nobody gave a bleep about Joe until John McCain made him the centerpiece of his election campaign. It was McCain, not the question, that made Joe a news item. If Joe decides the media attention has been detrimental, I hope he sues McCain and the GOP out of its socks. And I think a case could be made that using a private citizen like that without the citizen’s permission ought to be criminal.

However, it appears the Joe the Plumber ruse is coming back to bite McCain. After explaining why Joe the Plumber is not, in fact, Joe, or a plumber, Joe Queenan writes (emphasis added),

There is nothing wrong with being as phony as a three-dollar bill. It is, in fact, a rich American tradition. But there is something unnerving about a supposedly sophisticated political organisation that trumpets the dodgy virtues of grassroots phonies when millions of authentic working-class people could have handled the mythological chores perfectly well. All across America, there are plumbers named Joe and Jim and Jack and Mike and Dan and Dave and Ed and Fred whom the McCain campaign could have recruited to be their mascot.

In my own family, there was Joe the truck driver, Joe the postman, Bill the typewriter salesman, and Johnny the jack-of-all trades. Right here in my own neighborhood, I can point to Tony the deliveryman, Vinny the postman, Charley the cook, Tony the token collector. Any one of these guys qualifies as a real-life working class hero. Instead of them, McCain’s people went out and corralled themselves a 24-carat phony. What’s more, they found themselves a phony who doesn’t even pay his taxes on time. This strongly suggests that nobody in the McCain camp has ever met a working-class person before; they think anybody with a shaved head and a hoody must be “authentic”.

Bingo.

Collusion

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Todd Spangler, Detroit Free Press:

Barack Obama’s legal team wants a special prosecutor to determine whether partisan politics is at play in a reported though unconfirmed Justice Department investigation of a voter registration effort which has been the target of numerous complaints of late, including one in Michigan.

With the election just over two weeks away, Bob Bauer, Obama’s chief lawyer, said in a conference call with reporters this afternoon that he is asking U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey to to hand over to special prosecutor Nora Dannehy any probe into what Bauer called “bogus claims of vote fraud” that mirror concerns raised by Republicans two years ago.

According to a recent Justice Department report, those issues played a role in the controversy over the forced resignations of nine former federal prosecutors.

Bob Bauer was just on Olbermann’s program saying that there was an appearance of collusion between the McCain campaign and the White House. The Justice Department is engaged in “investigations” to bolster the McCain campaign’s claim that ACORN is destroying democracy as we know it.

Update: More details at Bloomberg.

Spreading the Wealth Around

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The Right-wing media and bloggers are high-fiving over Barack Obama’s “spread the wealth around” comment. “Did Barack ‘Spread the Wealth’ Obama Just Blow the Election?” says one. “Can you say Karl Marx?” says another. The GOP claims the phrase reveals Obama’s “socialist agenda.”

My favorite is “The Left’s Evolution into Totalitarians Completed.” See, the reason the Left is crucifying Joe the Plumber is to distract people from Obama’s “spread the wealth” remark.

During the debate every time McCain repeated the remark, with a “gotcha” smirk on his face, I think most viewers must have wondered what planet he was from. I realize just about any use of the word “wealth” by a liberal sets of alarm bells on the ideological Right. But most working people are getting tired of a system that keeps them shut out of “the wealth,” even though their labor is creating it.

Most of us are fine with capitalism as long as it is kept fair. And, frankly, a capitalist system in which wealth is “spread around” — where workers are paid well and can buy stuff, so that wealth is kept in broad circulation instead of being hoarded by a minority — is a healthy capitalist system that benefits everyone, including the very wealthy.

But the wages and standard of living of working people have been flat for some time. Indeed, most working class folks are worse off than they were eight years ago. And the rot has reached the middle class as well.

Yet, until very recently, we were assured America’s wealth is going up and up and up.

I don’t know if John McCain understands the unfairness that increasing numbers of Americans are feeling. If you think about it, aside from his POW experience (which I do not belittle) he has led a relatively sheltered life, and a life very far apart from most working and middle-class people. As far as I can tell he has no personal experience of how working people in America actually live. Possibly he has no clue how he is coming across when he makes fun of “spread the wealth around.”

John McCain often expresses admiration for Theodore Roosevelt. Like nearly all dead white guys, TR was a mixed bag. He had many of the standard white guy views of his time that are repugnant to us now — “white man’s burden” stuff. But he got one thing right — Americans need a square deal.

So what did TR say about spreading wealth around?

“The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been, and must always be, to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows.”

“At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress.”

“The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. The prime need is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise. We grudge no man a fortune which represents his own power and sagacity, when exercised with entire regard to the welfare of his fellows. … We grudge no man a fortune in civil life if it is honorably obtained and well used. It is not even enough that it should have gained without doing damage to the community. We should permit it to be gained only so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community. This, I know, implies a policy of a far more active governmental interference with social and economic conditions in this country than we have yet had, but I think we have got to face the fact that such an increase in governmental control is now necessary.”

“The right to regulate the use of wealth in the public interest is universally admitted.”

— Theordore Roosevelt, “The New Nationalism,” 1910

“Here in this city of the State of Lincoln I can set forth the principles for which we stand to-day in the words which Lincoln used fifty-four years ago, when in speaking of the then phase of the eternal struggles between privilege and justice, between the rights of the many and the special interest of the few, he said:

“That is the real issue. That is the issue which will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between two principles-right and wrong-throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time. The one is the common right of humanity, the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says: ‘You toil and work and earn bread, and I will eat it.’ No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who bestrides the people of his own nation and lives from the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.”

“Were Lincoln alive to-day he would add that it is also the same principle which is now at stake when we fight on behalf of the many against the oppressor in modern industry whether the abuse of special privilege be by a man whose wealth is great or is little, whether by the multimillionaire owner of railways and mines and factories who forgets his duties to those who earn his bread while earning their own, or by the owner of the foul little sweat-shop who coins dollars from the excessive and underpaid labor of haggard women. We who stand for the cause of progress are fighting to make this country a better place to live in for those who have been harshly treated by fate; and if we succeed it will also really be a better place for those who are already well off. None of us can really prosper permanently if masses of our fellows are debased and degraded, if they are ground down and forced to live starved and sordid lives, so that their souls are crippled like their bodies and the fine edge of their every feeling blunted. We ask that those of our people to whom fate has been kind shall remember that each is his brother’s keeper, and that all of us whose veins thrill with abounding vigor shall feel our obligation to the less fortunate who work wearily beside us in the strain and stress of our eager modern life.”

— Theodore Roosevelt, “The Case Against the Reactionaries,” 1912

Interesting guy, TR.

Why Am I Not Surprised

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Today the seething aggregate of hate known as “Michelle Malkin” is raging about “Operation Joe the Plumber.”

My syndicated column today reports on Team Obama and the Obamedia’s mission to tear down Joe the Plumber. Yes, we are in the midst of a new contagion: Joe The Plumber Derangement Syndrome. JTPDS.

In truth, not Team Obama but the mainstream news media began to “background” Joe the Plumber as soon as John McCain made him his tax policy poster boy. And it turns out he’s not a plumber, his name isn’t Joe, he owes taxes on his property. Most of the stories I’ve seen about “Joe” have been mild in tone, however. Public interest stuff to satisfy the curious.

Frankly, he doesn’t interest me that much except as an example of a pig-headed conservative who continues to vote against his own economic interests. We’ve seen his type before. It’s called “dumb.” But let’s go on …

Does anyone else remember the crusade led by Little Lulu against the parents of Graeme Frost? Thanks in part to Lulu, the Frosts got death threats.

Another of Lulu’s targets, Denise Denton, committed suicide a few weeks after Michelle published Denton’s work address on her blog, along with the accusation that Denton aided sedition. To be fair (some of us try to be fair) Denton had a number of other crises in her life at the time, but being the target of a hate swarm could not have helped. Lulu, of course, refused to acknowledge even a peripheral responsibility for Denton’s death.

I could spend the morning digging up more examples of Malkin’s reckless cruelty toward ordinary people who have done something to displease Miss Perpetual Indignity. But you get the picture.

Obama and the Art of Wu Wei

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I keep hearing pundits say that McCain won the three debates “on points” but that Obama won “on style.” I think these guys were watching a different sports event from the one I watched.

The “on points” pundits were scoring a boxing match. McCain was more aggressive. He landed punches. He got in zingers. Last night Pat Buchanan compared Obama to a boxer in the late rounds who was sitting on a lead (doesn’t that mean he was ahead “on points”?) and was dancing around to avoid being knocked out while he ran out the clock.

What I watched was more like kung fu. In the martial arts, aggression for the sake of aggression is more likely to work against you than with you. The master knows how to use his opponent’s energy against him. He lets the more unskilled fighter beat himself.

Martial arts masters employ the principle of wu wei — the action of non-action. This sounds like passivity — it often looks like passivity — but it is the art of channeling the flow of energy around you to accomplish a task or defeat an opponent. Put another way, it is the art of letting action act itself, or letting movement move itself, while you go with the flow.

It’s also the art of knowing when not to act. If your opponent is beating himself up, don’t get in his way.

Those who think Barack Obama should have been more aggressive in his debates with McCain are, IMO, entirely wrong. If Obama had been more aggressive, he risked seeming angry or mean and giving McCain sympathy points. Instead, Obama masterfully let McCain beat himself and didn’t get in the way.

McCain, IMO, lost the debate when he got stuck in whiny, petulant mode and wouldn’t let go of statements by Congressman John Lewis — which were not spelled out in the debate, and I doubt most viewers had any idea what McCain was talking about — and Bill Ayers. Obama actually gave McCain several opportunities to drop the subject, and McCain would not. For that entire sequence McCain was, in effect, punching himself in the face, while Obama stood aside and let him do it.

This was skillful. It also took discipline — a lesser debater would have interrupted McCain to defend himself more forcefully, and I’m sure that’s what Pat Buchanan et al. thought Obama was supposed to do. But Buchanan and McCain are old-style Irish pugilists who stand straight up and punch away. Obama was in crouching tiger, hidden dragon mode.

______

I was struck by the pundits’ reactions to the abortion section of the debate. Granted, I was mostly watching MSNBC — sometimes flipping over to CNN — and I realize reactions may have been different elsewhere. But pundits I saw were shaking their heads over this part of McCain’s argument:

MCCAIN: Just again, the example of the eloquence of Senator Obama. He’s health for the mother. You know, that’s been stretched by the pro-abortion movement in America to mean almost anything.

That’s the extreme pro-abortion position, quote, “health.” But, look, Cindy and I are adoptive parents. We know what a treasure and joy it is to have an adopted child in our lives. We’ll do everything we can to improve adoption in this country.

McCain spoke of women’s health with a sneer on his face. He made “air quotation marks” around the word “health,” as if the mother’s health concerns were some kind of joke. He can’t stop whining about what John Lewis said about him, but women facing health complications in their pregnancies are just supposed to suck it up.

I realize the “criminalize abortion” movement routinely argues that “health of the mother” can mean a bad hair day, but in the real world pregnancies — including planned and wanted pregnancies — don’t always go well. I think most adults understand that. And most of the post-debate commentary I saw criticized McCain for the “health” comment.

Four years ago, in the Kerry-Bush debates, Bush had a simple message on abortion — he was against it. Poor Kerry had to put together more than two sentences to explain his position — that he opposed it personally but didn’t intend to impose his views on others. The post-debate commenters — including Andrea Mitchell, as I recall — said of this that Kerry doesn’t know how to talk about abortion. (What the hell was he supposed to say? “I’m for it”?)

But now it’s the Republican who doesn’t know how to talk about abortion. Times, I believe, have changed.

And I’m sure you enjoyed this bit —

MCCAIN: I would consider anyone in their qualifications. I do not believe that someone who has supported Roe v. Wade that would be part of those qualifications. But I certainly would not impose any litmus test

Um, dude? You just imposed a litmus test.