My final pre-vote piece at The Daily Caller is on Bart Stupak’s fig leaf, Nancy Pelosi’s big win, and where we go from here on health care reform.

In the end, Pelosi and Obama’s achievement is likely to come at a hefty political price. It seems clear that the American people aren’t as easy to buy off or cajole as their elected officials, and over the coming months, as they learn more about what’s within this new system, Republicans are counting on them disliking it. In a time of economic tension, the effects of new tax requirements could be immediate and tangible. And in the long term, the most significant aspect of this reform that no one has talked about that much is what it will do to the American job market — thanks to taxpayer-funded subsidies for coverage which create “cliffs” at certain income levels, many Americans will experience new penalties for success which will impact their decisions in the future.

I hope you read and find it of interest. The vote is just a few hours away.

On Capitol Hill, the Rules Committee is meeting this morning to run through some last minute amendments to the health care legislation. You can read those here. But they’re irrelevant — it’s clear the final standoff on Capitol Hill in the eleventh hour of the health care debate will be over Rep. Bart Stupak’s small band of fellow Democrats who oppose taxpayer funding for abortions.

The mere fact that Speaker Nancy Pelosi is conversing with Stupak behind closed doors at this late moment is a sign that she remains short of the vote total needed to pass the Senate bill, even after the imposition of the so-called “Slaughter strategy” to give political cover to members. There are still many concerns among Blue Dog Democrats that the bill in question will not sufficiently address the cost problems of the health care system, and the latest exchange with the Congressional Budget Office has done little to assuage their worries.

It is Stupak’s small coalition, which once numbered 12 but now seems closer to 3, who could decide the entire issue.

CNN reports today on the latest news, and progressives at FireDogLake have the language in question, which would be attached to the legislation via a “tie bar” which would require Senate approval.

Yet therein lies the challenge for Stupak: he is well aware that there are at most 45 votes for his provision on the Senate side, so an addition at this moment would be functionally meaningless. In reality, it would only give him and his small group the cover they need to support the legislation, even knowing that their views will not be honored.

Pelosi continues to work to flip votes in favor of the legislation, with several notable successes. But HCN’s unofficial whip count still has her behind by five votes as she heads toward the Sunday showdown.

crossposted at Health Care News.

Apropos of nothing – Alexander Hamilton’s letter to his wife, prior to the duel.

This letter, my very dear Eliza, will not be delivered to you, unless I shall first have terminated my earthly career; to begin, as I humbly hope from redeeming grace and divine mercy, a happy immortality.

If it had been possible for me to have avoided the interview, my love for you and my precious children would have been alone a decise motive. But it was not possible, without sacrifices which would have rendered me unworthy of your esteem. I need not tell you of the pangs I feel, from the idea of quitting you and exposing you to the anguish which I know you would feel. Nor could I dwell on the topic lest it should unman me.

The consolations of Religion, my beloved, can alone support you; and these you have a right to enjoy. Fly to the bosom of your God and be comforted. With my last idea, I shall cherish the sweet hope of meeting you in a better world. Adieu best of wives and best of women. Embrace all my Darling Children for me.

Ever yours

AH

Coffee & Markets will wait til Sunday (we want to see how things turn out), so here’s a brief podcast with a few thoughts from me on the eve of health care reform’s final vote: “Obama’s dedication to passing this spectacularly flawed and unpopular health care bill appears to be based on the assumption that the American people like a winner even if the victory comes at their expense.”

You can read the whole thing at CBS News.

Related Links:

TNL: How Obamacare Will Reshape the Workforce
DC Examiner: Pro Reform Liberals Admit This Wasn’t a Battle Against Special Interests
Heritage: More Bad News in the House Health Care Bill
Keith Hennessey: Understanding the Health Care Bill
Jane Hamsher: 18 Myths About HCR Debunked
The Note: Rep. Frank Says HCR Could Still Fail
NRO: Obamacare’s IRS Connection
NEMJ: 46% of Family Doctors Forced Out of Medicine Under Obamacare
Fred Barnes: Health Care Wars Only Beginning

The tea party activists took to DC today in a big way, in person and on the phone. And a lot of their frustration seems to be tied to the so-called “Slaughter strategy,” which Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) says is great “because people don’t have to vote on the Senate bill,” which the Washington Post calls “dodgy,” and which makes Robert Gibbs duck. The whole thing has served to put Democrats on the defensive for adopting the parliamentary strategy, which has been used on occasion in the past, but never for a sweeping social reform of this magnitude, which will effect so many Americans.

The interesting part is that in reaction to opposition to the approach from within his own party, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) acknowledges this is a tactic that is only taking place because they don’t have the votes for the Senate bill as an “up or down” matter. But that’s been a talking point for the bill’s supporters since day one, and the American people clearly understand it. Does Hoyer really believe they won’t respond?

Today I talked to Maureen Martin, senior fellow for legal affairs with the Heartland Institute, on the latest podcast from Health Care News. We talk about whether the proposed Slaughter strategy is constitutional, the individual mandate, the Health Care Freedom Acts, and other topics — including whether the Supreme Court will rule on these issues, and when. We make reference to this column in the Wall Street Journal, which hashes out the Article I issues involved. You can listen to it here.

Closed Door Negotiations to the End

Michael Cannon at Cato has some questions for thoughtful Obamacare supporters, including: “What does it say that pharmaceutical-industry lobbyists are meeting with House Democrats to write this legislation behind closed doors? Or that the pharmaceutical industry is preparing to spend millions of dollars on advertisements in support of the legislation?”

This should be of concern to more than just reasonable Obamacare supporters. In particular, as Politico notes, it should concern people that:

Drug makers were asked to sign off on multiple solutions, giving Democrats backup options should any of the fixes run into problems passing muster with the Senate parliamentarian, who, because of procedural rules, essentially has the final say over what’s included in the legislative package.

This is jarring stuff — industry getting to sign off on public policy behind closed doors, policies the American people haven’t even been able to see yet? Talk about a disturbing lack of transparency, but that’s par for the course.

Don’t Worry, It’s Not Like Massachusetts

More warnings from the former Massachusetts Treasurer, a Democrat now running as an Independent, about the consequences of this reform package at the national level.

The Massachusetts treasurer said Tuesday that Congress will “threaten to wipe out the American economy within four years” if it adopts a health care overhaul modeled after the Bay State’s.

Treasurer Timothy Cahill — a former Democrat running as an independent for governor — said the local plan enacted in 2006 has succeeded only because of huge subsidies and favorable regulatory changes from the federal government.

He asked, “Who, exactly, is going to bail out the federal government if this plan goes national?”

Cahill’s remarks serve as one more illustration why the people of Massachusetts delivered such a surprising electoral victory to Scott Brown in their primary: disgust with their state’s attempt at reform.

The Emergency Room Myth

A strongly worded piece from Robert Samuelson today, worth noting because of its rebuke of one of the oft-repeated justifications for nationalized reform which, like so many others, falls apart upon further study:

How often, for example, have you heard the emergency-room argument? The uninsured, it’s said, use emergency rooms for primary care. That’s expensive and ineffective. Once they’re insured, they’ll have regular doctors. Care will improve; costs will decline. Everyone wins. Great argument. Unfortunately, it’s untrue.

A study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that the insured accounted for 83 percent of emergency room visits, reflecting their share of the population. After Massachusetts adopted universal insurance, emergency room use remained higher than the national average, reports an Urban Institute study. More than two-fifths of visits represented non-emergencies. Adult respondents to a survey said it was “more convenient” to go to the emergency room or they couldn’t “get (a doctor’s) appointment as soon as needed.” If universal coverage makes appointments harder to get, emergency room use may increase.

The Pro Life Case

Pro-life groups are pushing back against arguments that the Senate bill’s protections against abortion funding are acceptable (they aren’t). Groups are organizing events and running ads, and the Catholic Bishops released a statement detailing their opposition:

The American people and the Catholic bishops have been promised that, in any final bill, no federal funds would be used for abortion and that the legal status quo would be respected.

However, the bishops were left disappointed and puzzled to learn that the basis for any vote on health care will be the Senate bill passed on Christmas Eve. Notwithstanding the denials and explanations of its supporters, and unlike the bill approved by the House of Representatives in November, the Senate bill deliberately excludes the language of the Hyde amendment. It expands federal funding and the role of the federal government in the provision of abortion procedures. In so doing, it forces all of us to become involved in an act that profoundly violates the conscience of many, the deliberate destruction of unwanted members of the human family still waiting to be born.

The Job Ramifications

We’re not just talking about physicians jobs — though the fallout of health care reform for those are significant, according to the latest news from the New England Journal of Medicine:

46.3% of primary care physicians (family medicine and internal medicine) feel that the passing of health reform will either force them out of medicine or make them want to leave medicine.

But the latest piece from Yuval Levin and James Capretta outlines why the reform package is essentially an anti-jobs measure:

Beyond taxes and spending, Obama-care would also wreak havoc on the labor market. Because employers would get penalized if any of their low- and moderate-wage workers ended up in the new subsidized insurance pool, they would avoid hiring such workers. Democrats claim they want to jam through health care reform so they can turn their attention to jobs, but the bill provides a strong disincentive for businesses to hire those who need jobs the most.

The plan would, moreover, trigger an inefficient and costly re-sorting of American labor. Under the bill, despite the enormous cost of subsidizing coverage in the new government-run “exchanges,” only 18 million people would be getting such subsidized coverage in 2016—even though there are 127 million Americans today with incomes in the targeted range of between one and four times the poverty rate. The vast majority of workers would still be in job-based plans and get no additional help. Gene Steuerle of the Urban Institute estimates that a worker making about $60,000 per year in 2016 would get $4,500 more in federal aid if he were able to get his insurance through an exchange rather than through his employer. That’s a powerful incentive for workers and firms to rearrange their operations to take advantage of the federal money. In time, the American economy would be divided into companies with low-wage workers getting government-subsidized health care and others with higher-wage workers who continue to get employer-based plans. This would make the labor market far less efficient (harming productivity), and it would mean that the subsidies themselves would cost far more than the CBO now estimates.

And for those workers who do end up getting federal subsidies for their insurance, the program is a trap. If they get a pay raise, they will lose some of their insurance subsidy. Indeed, the schedule of subsidy withdrawal is so severe that it will push many low-wage families into effective tax brackets of 60 percent to 80 percent, according to a CATO Institute analysis. Obama-care would thus provide a strong disincentive to work and so undermine the most successful policy initiative in generations: welfare reform.

This follows on the same path that my own piece at CBS did this week, on Obamacare’s Two Americas.

crossposted at Health Care News.

CBS News features my latest piece on Obamacare’s effect on the workforce. It’s a topic that has received surprisingly little attention, given the radical impact this legislation would have in a time of economic strain. Over at Patterico, DRJ points out that “Section 401 imposes a tax on uninsured individuals equal to 2.5% of AGI effective after 12/31/2012, and an excise tax on businesses of 8% of wages for employers who do not provide health care. ‘Small’ employers with payrolls under $400,000 a year pay excise taxes based on a sliding scale from 0-6%:”

Does not exceed $250,000 — 0%;
Exceeds $250,000, but does not exceed $300,000 — 2%;
Exceeds $300,000, but does not exceed $350,000 — 4%;
Exceeds $350,000, but does not exceed $400,000 — 6%.

There’s an easy response to this, of course, if you’re a small business: convert your employees into contractors, and make them buy their own insurance. And they have to be real contractors — the IRS is going to be sticklers about that according to Obama’s budget blueprint.

As Francis says: “Pelosi says we’re at the doorstep of history. We’re about to slip on the ice.”

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This is it, folks — the health care endgame. Appropriately named Slaughter strategy, come on down!

In addition, it looks like House Democrats won’t have to vote directly on a Senate bill they really don’t like. The speaker hasn’t made a final decision, but she told her rank-and-file during the meeting that the plan now is to craft a rule that would “deem” the Senate bill passed once they approve the package of fixes.

Let’s pull together a few key issues as we go into what is in all likelihood the final week in the runup to the vote within the House of Representatives, a vote that could reshape America’s health policy and economic future.

The first and most important thing to remember: they don’t have the votes right now, but that doesn’t mean they won’t when it comes to the floor. Pelosi can only allow for 37 “No” votes from Democrats, and my current count has her at 45…but we’ll soon see how solid those are.

Timeline

Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) sent out this memo regarding the timing and procedures for the coming week. Assume that this is the way things will hash out:

TODAY or MONDAY: CBO will publish final scores on legislative language

THEN: House Budget Committee must approve using the reconciliation process to pass this

THEN: The bill will go to the Rules Committee, rule will be constructed for consideration on the floor, and language will be posted online (on the Rules website) and the 72-hour clock will start. When this happens, we will start to have a better idea on what the process will be.

THEN: A Manager’s Amendment will be constructed that will make some final changes

THEN: The Manager’s Amendment will be posted online and the 72-hour clock will start (this may overlap with the 72-hour clock on the reconciliation language). When Manager’s Amendment is done final process decisions will be locked in.

THIS MEANS: We will likely vote Friday or Saturday. (As you probably saw, POTUS pushed back the departure for his Asian trip from Thursday the 18th to Sunday the 21st; this was not a coincidence.) The Speaker has publically committed to trying to get a vote on both the reconciliation bill and the Senate bill on the same day. They are still trying to work out the final process on this and much of what we do depends on what the Senate Parliamentarian decides. You may be receiving calls about the “Slaughter Rule” and other rumors about what the process will be. Again, please understand: no decision has yet been made on the process for consideration on the House floor.

The Abortion Issue

While this issue has gotten the most press, it’s also the one that has gone almost exactly as expected over the past month: Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has refused to budge or to allow a vote on the issue.

Sources tell me that in a meeting last week with Planned Parenthood, Pelosi promised abortion supporters in the strongest possible terms that she would not cut any deal with Rep. Bart Stupak, leader of the pro-life Democrats, on the bill.

This is a significant difference from last November, when Pelosi had merely promised to “do what I can” to keep from letting Stupak’s amendment pass — ultimately relenting when it became clear the bill needed Stupak’s supporters to proceed (or at least to proceed without forcing moderates to support it).

Pelosi’s promise to her hard-core abortion backers is backed up by her actions: she has shut out Stupak from negotiations and will not deal with him, having given up on offering pro-life Democrats even a fig leaf vote where they could express their views.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., on Friday told NBC News that striking an abortion deal is out of the question.

“We don’t want to go without their votes but we do want to forge ahead,” Hoyer said about the anti-abortion Democrats.

Hoyer had previously floated the idea of having a sidebar measure which could satisfy pro-life Democrats. Instead, they are writing them off — assuming they will be able to peel off enough of them to pass the bill.

For Stupak’s part, he is clear about what this means for pro-life Democrats in an interview with Robert Costa:

If Obamacare passes, Stupak says, it could signal the end of any meaningful role for pro-life Democrats within their own party. “It would be very, very hard for someone who is a right-to-life Democrat to run for office,” he says. “I won’t leave the party. I’m more comfortable here and still believe in a role within it for the right-to-life cause, but this bill will make being a pro-life Democrat much more difficult. They don’t even want to debate this issue. We’ll probably have to wait until the Republicans take back the majority to fix this.”

Other Issues

The strong late-game push from the left to insert a public option in the legislation came to nought — unsurprisingly — thanks to Nancy Pelosi’s decision, even though it appears that there are enough votes to pass such an option through reconciliation (or at least that it’s within shooting distance).

The side effect of this decision is that the progressive wing of the party will be less eager to put pressure on members to support this bill. This shows in the continued unwillingness of some key committee chairmen to establish their support for the legislation.

One final key sign that the coalition Pelosi has assembled is fragile indeed was the announcement by Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL), a key Latino leader in Congress, that he would oppose the bill. Immigration politics has been injected into the current debate to a greater degree than expected, and Gutierrez’s concerns may have to be addressed.

crossposted at Health Care News.

David Brooks has done something unusual for him: he’s posted his own application for an Obama Administration job in the New York Times.

It looks outwardly like his regular column. He says that liberals and conservatives both see what they want in the president, and the two pictures are as at odds with reality as they are with each other.

The president, in Brooks’s reality, is a moderate progressive, trying to expand the government’s role in small ways while preserving the dynamism of free markets. (To the conservatives reading this: I’m not making this up. To the liberals: I’m not making this up.)

So how does Brooks square his perception with the fact that nearly everyone believes something completely different? That’s easy. He concludes that our country isn’t a sensible one.

I’m guessing he’d like to be anointed as the guy whose job is to set everyone straight on both left and right.

Here’s the worst thing you probably haven’t heard about President Barack Obama’s health care plan, which he and his allies are about to force through the Congress despite enormous opposition from the American people: it makes everything onetime vice presidential nominee John Edwards once said about the class divide of “two Americas” come true.

The dirty little secret of this plan—which wouldn’t be a secret if opponents of this legislative package weren’t distracted by a dozen other wrongheaded policies in it—is that it will bring a major and irreversible upheaval to America’s labor markets. In a time of economic tension, this plan will displace millions of workers and push more people into becoming contract employees, resulting in increased instability for working families.

One of the many original stated goals of the White House’s health care reforms was the promise that you can keep your health plan if you like it. However, the White House wanted to give businesses much-needed relief from burdensome health costs. Like the desire to create a new entitlement while reducing the budget deficit, these aims are nearly impossible to reconcile, so Obama chose a path that accomplishes neither.

The president’s plan penalizes an employer for not providing insurance, but the government will subsidize the health care of workers without employer-provided insurance. This effectively allows workers to receive the same compensation package they get today, but with government footing the health-benefits part of the bill, so employers have no need to make up the difference in cash.

The economic benefits of that subsidy far outweigh the penalties—for low income workers, it can result in an enormous difference of over $17,000 per year.

It’s obvious what will happen under this plan: it will not make economic sense for any small business which employs lower-income workers to offer health insurance. And any small business which does so will almost certainly fail, burdened by higher costs than their competitors.

This dilemma could be solved by making the penalties more draconian, but that too would cause business failures, and as with the individual insurance mandate, too steep a penalty would make the plan even more coercive and unpopular.

As John Goodman of the nonpartisan National Center for Policy Analysis recently described it, “High-paid workers with employer-paid insurance will cluster in some firms, while average- and below-average-wage workers will cluster in others. Overall, ObamaCare will create irresistible economic pressure to restructure the entire labor market.”

The only likely outcome of this plan will be for companies to drop coverage entirely. Younger, lower-income workers will be eligible for a subsidy and forced into the health exchanges. That will compel them to do something that doesn’t make economic sense. Most young workers don’t use health care much—unless you give them an incentive to over-consume care by paying for it up front for them.

There’s a final step here, though, that’s critical to understand: once those younger and lower-income workers are forced into a system that eliminates rational decision-making, they are made beholden to these taxpayer funded subsidies, and face massive penalties if their income rises such that they lose the subsidies. The marginal tax penalty for an individual moving up from to $40,000 a year to $45,000 is massive, as also for families earning $95,000 versus $90,000, creating an artificial cliff that dramatically penalizes success.

Thus a new picture of Obamacare emerges: it will force people to pay for what they don’t want and purchase what they don’t need, in a massive expansion of the size and power of government. The entire proposal functions not as a method of improving care or lowering premiums but as a massive regressive tax falling disproportionately on the young and those on the lower end of the income scale. And once in place, it will trap its supposed beneficiaries in ways that cannot be undone.

Combine this regressive tax with a massive increase in spending via a government entitlement which will only grow, and you have a recipe for long-term economic stagnation and the permanent enshrinement of two Americas into our national social policy.

Ben Domenech is editor of The New Ledger and managing editor of Health Care News.

My personal back of the envelope whip count on health care reform today puts the total House Aye votes at 205.

The New York Times this morning has a report on a key parliamentary decision which will determine whether the current strategy on health care is even possible. We noted this yesterday in the context of reconciliation news, and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) had mentioned it earlier as a very real possibility. Essentially, this parliamentary requirement would demand that the president sign or veto the Senate health care bill after it theoretically passed the House, meaning that no reconciliation changes could be done in the Senate in time.

As with all parliamentary decisions, this is going to raise a lot of questions and result in some delay, but will probably turn out to be a false barrier to proceeding. There is always a way to navigate around such provisions.

Whip Counts

As resources for tabulating names, Reid Wilson’s whip count at the Hotline and Jay Cost’s whip count at RealClearPolitics are both worth looking at. But you should keep in mind that whipping has not yet begun in earnest according to House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn — primarily because there’s no legislation to actually count votes for!

Clyburn, the third-ranking House Democrat who serves as chief vote-counter, said that Democrats are waiting to see the final legislative language on healthcare before they worry about counting votes.

“When we get that language, we will start our whipping operation,” Clyburn said during an appearance on MSNBC. “We haven’t started whipping yet.”

The lack of legislative language is also preventing CBO from scoring the bill, which provides a natural excuse for some Blue Dogs to not take a position on the matter.

Swing Votes

Nonetheless, it seems clear who the swing votes are on health care — the factions include progressives reluctant to support a bill without a public option, undecided committee chairmen, and the much-discussed abortion faction, of which Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) is the most prominent. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) made a point of saying yesterday that abortion funding is a serious issue which must be resolved before they can proceed.

Stupak, who talked to us months ago about his commitment to hold the line on taxpayer funding for abortions, discussed his position yesterday with The Weekly Standard. Stupak again points out that he needs to see the language of an actual bill before he determines his path:

The president still hasn’t put forth his proposal. I mean, other than the 11 pages [of changes], we’ve seen nothing in writing. It’s different than what the Senate did. So do they take three [measures] and merge it into one and stick it in a bill called reconciliation, or just do the Senate bill as a stand alone?

For his stance on the abortion issue, Stupak has already received a primary challenger.

People Still Oppose Bill

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) attracted attention for insisting in remarks this week that people won’t appreciate how great the health plan is until after it passes — saying “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it – away from the fog of the controversy.”

Yet it shouldn’t surprise anyone that this is Pelosi’s approach, given that the American people don’t seem to appreciate the bill at all:

Fifty-seven percent (57%) of voters say the health care reform plan now working its way through Congress will hurt the U.S. economy, while just 25% think the plan will help the economy.

All this contrasts poorly with the latest remarks from Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), who acknowledged that “Anyone who would stand before you and say well, if you pass health care reform, next year’s health care premiums are going down, I don’t think is telling the truth. This is accurate, of course — but unwise to say in public.

No wonder Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) says this is about ideology, not policy.

crossposted at Health Care News.

The latest issue of New York magazine has an extended profile of the Cheney family by Joe Hagan, which is worth reading in its entirety. It’s notable both for its evenhanded tone — there are a few tacked on asides, and suggestions of political mythmaking, but it’s otherwise devoid of the normal ridiculous tone which infects so many Cheney profiles — and its forward looking outlook, focused primarily on the vice president’s daughter. Cheney’s history has been written and written again — the Washington Post series, the essays, the books — and it’s refreshing to read a slightly different take on the man.

The aging political warrior, who many expected to fade into the shadows when he left office, gives no sign of going quickly or quietly. Despite his numerous heart problems, despite the continued attacks on his tenure, and despite his politically divisive nature, it appears that Cheney is going to have a significant role to play in shaping the Republican Party of the future.

What’s surprising to consider, less than two years removed from the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, is that Cheney may well be the only person to emerge from the Bush administration who has that power.

The amount of policy influence wielded by some former Bush administration officials on current debates is still significant, but in political terms, nearly all of Bush’s clan is on the outs. Insulated from the populist surge of the last few years, and tainted by poor decisions, W’s political team has very little to do with the direction of the GOP. Consider the total rejection of the Bush clan’s approach in their own state of Texas just last week — Kay Bailey Hutchison had gained near-total endorsements from ex-Bushies — prompting one prominent GOP consultant to suggest to me that “I think Karl [Rove] is just completely out of touch with what’s happening on the ground.”

A few years ago, a statement like that would’ve been laughed out of the room. Today, it’s an open question.

Cheney, though, is the exception to this rule. The White House’s decision to elevate him as an opponent last year was profoundly unwise, and his direct confrontation of President Obama plays well to the CPAC crowd. He’s adopted a public approach that he was unable to under the hesitant communication policies of Bush, and bears more than a passing resemblance to Winston Churchill’s wilderness years — one can easily see Cheney on Meet the Press today, glowering at the camera, intoning: “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor, and you will have war.”

Newt Gingrich summarized Cheney’s argument succinctly in a speech last year: “The reason we have Guantanamo Bay is that we have people there who want to kill us. They are called terrorists. It’s good not to have terrorists anywhere near us because it makes it harder for them to kill us.” That’s a message in sync with the majority of the American people — by 3-to-1 odds according to some polling — and thanks in part to Obama’s poor rollout of his decisions, and the ludicrous security risk of conducting a civilian trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York, Cheney’s already won his first political victory. And Obama’s supporters know it: as Jonathan Alter wrote yesterday, “this is a complete cave and it makes everyone involved look craven.”

The anger Cheney brings out of the left — and, frankly, the middle — glosses over a few facts worth noting. If I have one complaint with the New York magazine piece, it’s that it still casts Cheney as a “hard-right conservative.” Yet by nearly any measure, Cheney himself is a socially liberal and fiscally moderate Republican — he is and was to Bush’s left on abortion policy and same-sex marriage, and his record of endorsements is entirely moderate and establishment candidates (including KBH). His hard-right credentials are confined only to the arenas of national security and foreign policy.

Liberal commentators who jokingly suggest Cheney is building the basis for a 2012 campaign ignore the truth that, even removing health from the equation, Cheney himself would never survive a national Republican Primary. He is popular today among conservatives because he is advancing a winning argument, and because many on the right, still angry at John McCain’s non-confrontational campaign, enjoy seeing Obama confronted by a serious man wielding a rhetorical sledgehammer. Cheney’s surprise appearance at CPAC this year had a point to it: even though Ron Paul won a plurality of votes in the event’s minor straw poll, as long as the former vice president gets that kind of reaction from the base, it’s a sign that the party base will reject any attempt to regain majority status by appealing to the antiwar libertarian’s active supporters.

The question going forward is whether Cheney’s daughter, Liz — who this piece describes as a possible candidate for the Virginia Senate seat currently held by Jim Webb (George Allen and Ed Gillespie are two other mentioned possibilities, but Allen’s got a challenging road, and it is hard to see any basis for the election of Gillespie) — is cut from her father’s cloth. The profile paints her as a staunch defender of her father’s views, and she’s clearly a capable and blunt advocate on television, but it remains to be seen whether she can be a less divisive politician than her father, building and uniting a coalition as one of the voices of the new GOP. With her father’s connections and a good deal of natural media savvy, she’ll have every opportunity to do so.

As for the pater familias, Cheney will continue to do what he does: argue, insist, and infuriate. He is very good at this.

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Before a single town hall, debate, primary or caucus, Mitt Romney’s blown his chances for the presidency in 2012. What the 2008 also-ran had to say today on Fox News Sunday was the same thing I and others have witnessed him say a half dozen times over the past few months behind closed doors — a stubborn refusal to admit any similarity between President Obama’s national health care plan and his own disastrous solution in Massachusetts.

Here’s one quote:

There’s a big difference between what we did and what President Obama is doing. What we did, I think, is the ultimate conservative plan. We said people have to take responsibility for getting insurance, if they can afford it, or paying their own way. No more free-riders. And we solved this at the state level, not a federal plan, but a state plan.

James Pethokoukis, who blogs over at Reuters, had an interesting post the other day about Romney’s TARP problem — essentially arguing that Romney’s weak explanations for his continued support of TARP will function as a “scarlet T” for conservatives in the 2012 primaries. [Note: Both I and Francis have argued on Coffee & Markets that a vote for TARP is not only forgiveable, but justified. More than one conservative voted for TARP, and I think they can defend that vote today. Support for the auto bailouts and the stimulus package, however, are both completely unjustified.] But the blowback that will come for Romney’s support for TARP pales in comparison both to the stubborn silliness of his defense for the Massachusetts plan, and for his inability to recognize the opportunity this moment presented.

First, a simple statement of fact: the similarities between the current plan pending on Capitol Hill and what was proposed in Massachusetts’ Commonwealth Care approach are great indeed. The Boston Herald’s Michael Graham has even referred to it as “Obamacare: The Beta Version.” As Phil Klein has detailed on more than one occasion, there is very little daylight here:

For one thing, while the Romney camp would like to argue that the bill he signed did not raise taxes, in actuality, it did include a mandate that individuals purchase insurance or pay a penalty. In arguing against Obamacare, conservatives have described the mandate as a middle class tax hike. Republican candidates will spend all of 2010 describing it as such, and if anybody else were running against Obama in 2012, it would be used to argue that he violated his pledge to not raise the taxes of those making under $250,000. If Romney wants to spend the Republican presidential primary siding with Democrats and the Obama administration in arguing that the individual mandate isn’t a tax, I’m sure his opponents will be thrilled.

The CATO Institute put together a fairly definitive study outlining the poor outcomes of the Commonwealth Care plan, and Jeff Emanuel detailed the failings in cost and access on TNL last year in stark terms:

Far from reducing the cost of health insurance, Massachusetts’s individual mandate has driven costs up at twice the average national rate. This was entirely predictable; after all, what can possibly reduce downward pressure on a price more effectively than a legal requirement to purchase it, whatever the cost? According to the Connector, the least expensive price for an insurance policy for a 50 year old non-smoker in 2008 was $3,599 a year ($299.94 per month), with a $2,000 deductible. Next door in Connecticut, that price was just $1,468 a year ($122.36 per month, with a $2,500 deductible) – and Connecticut hadn’t even spent $1.3 billion on controlling and engineering their state’s health care marketplace!

This has had political ramifications, too — Soren Dayton and Mark Hemingway have both argued that one reason Massachusetts voters supported Scott Brown in his surprising upset were their negative experiences with Romney’s plan.

What should be most frustrating to Romney’s more intelligent supporters is that he missed a strategic opportunity to become the strongest voice against Obama’s plan, in a way that could’ve set him up as a defender of pro-market, pro-small business solutions. Romney could easily have given speeches along the lines of:

“Look, I did the best I could in Massachusetts, I tried a coverage plan along these models, and just look what happened. Higher taxes, higher costs, lower access, and only a marginal decrease in the uninsured. And that was the best plan we could get! This model didn’t work in my state, and it won’t work nationally. I’ve learned from my mistake, and President Obama should, too.”

Romney’s got a new book out, which I haven’t read yet but which Ron Brownstein suggests indicates he can’t decide between a reasonable campaign and an angry one (if you can’t do populist, do angry). From most reports, Romney has not yet decided how he’ll run in 2012 — though signs point to a more honest, pragmatic, pro-business approach than his attempt in 2008 to be all things to all right-wingers.

It’s early, of course — who knows who’ll even run — but even with a presumed advantage in money, name identification, and organization, when you consider Romney’s association with big business and Wall Street, his inability to connect with common people, and his refusal to reject his mistaken health care plan, it’s hard to see how he’ll navigate the primaries when he is sure to have stronger candidates to fend off than John McCain and Mike Huckabee. And if I recall, even with a massive lead in money, organization and endorsements, he couldn’t beat them, either.