Mr. Cao comes to Washington

What fresh nerve is this? A Republican prepared to vote more for the preferences of his constituents than the party poobahs in D.C.? A red-state man ready to throw party solidarity under the bus for the sake of the people who elected him?

This is not a dispatch from the bizzarro world. This is the refreshingly straightforward (if politically strategic) view through the eyes of Anh (Joseph) Cao, a lawyer and first-term Vietnamese-American Republican congressman from Louisiana.

His rise to public attention came on Saturday, as part of the roll call vote on final passage of the Affordable Health Care for America Act, the House health-care bill now moving with all deliberate sluggishness through the bowels of the Senate. The Democrats needed 218 votes for passage; it passed with 220, to the resounding cheers of jubilant Democrats in the House floor that night.

What was curious was that “1” Republican vote in the “YEA” column on the tote board shown on C-SPAN. The Republicans, bound and determined before the vote to present a solid front against the legislation, had a defector in their midst. His name was Joseph Cao.

Cao, who replaced the disgraced Democratic William Jefferson and represents the strongly Democratic district around New Orleans, was interviewed after the vote about his, uh, maverick vote in favor of a bill painted as anathema by the GOP.

Interviewed by Geraldo Rivera of Fox News, Cao was disarmingly direct.



“I believe it was the right decision for my district, based on the needs of the district. As you know, after Hurricane Katrina much of the health care system in New Orleans was pretty much devastated. A lot of people are poor, a lot of people are uninsured and I believe the health-care reform bill would greatly help these people.”

“Yes, I knew it would make some, uh … some talking points within the party … [but] to tell you the truth the party leadership was very professional about it, because they realized that I do have a very poor district and they realize that this health care reform bill or any kind of reform would help the people of my district.”

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It’s not the first time he’s bolted from the pack. In June, Cao joined a handful of other Republicans in voting for the Obama administration's $106 billion supplemental appropriation for the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Iraq. Cao put this vote in realpolitik terms: the bill included money to help restore the battered Gulf Coast, and to provide low-income housing for victims of Hurricane Katrina (and its cousin in destruction, Hurricane Rita).

Cao’s defection on the hot-button health-care issue isn’t likely to be repeated in the Senate, where a tougher fight for reform is expected.

But Cao’s lone vote, and his plain-spoken defense of that vote, reflected a long-overdue grasp of reality. Cao’s stand wasn’t exactly Capraesque; there was no Jimmy Stewart moment from the congressman before the vote.

In fact, Cao explained himself in more politically expedient terms on his Web page on the House Web site:

“Today, I obtained a commitment from President Obama that he and I will work together to address the critical health care issues of Louisiana including the FMAP crisis and community disaster loan forgiveness, as well as issues related to Charity and Methodist Hospitals. And, I call on my constituents to support me as I work with him on these issues.”

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Michael J.W. Stickings, blogging in The Huffington Post, took issue on Monday: “It's hard to fault Cao for worrying about his re-election prospects, but let's not mistake self-interest for nobility.

“Joseph Cao, in other words, is hardly a profile in courage.”

Maybe, maybe not. What Joseph Cao is is a profile in pragmatism, and these partisan days, that's more than enough. Given the automatic opposition of others on his side of the aisle, Cao's touch of practicality for Americans who need it is a welcome thing.

And Cao’s moment also shines because of what it wasn’t. There was no grandstanding on the House floor, no pounding the lectern to drive a point home. Just a vote of conscience — and yes, enlightened self-interest — on behalf of the people who sent him there in the first place.

Mr. Cao’s come to Washington, and never mind salvation: If the GOP brand has any hope of at least salvage, if the Republican Party wants to contend in the future, its hopes rest on more people just like him.
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Image credits: Cao: Public domain.

A ‘moment to deliver’

On Saturday night, around the eleventh minute after 11 p.m., in the eleventh month of the year, in a bid to overcome part of government’s pre-existing condition of institutional inertia, the House of Representatives voted 220-215, to approve HR 3962, the Affordable Health Care for America Act, the most sweeping health-care legislation since Medicare and Medicaid in 1965.

The legislation about to advance to the Senate is the first (and mostly unmitigated) domestic-policy triumph for President Obama; for Rep. John Dingell, the Ohio Democrat whose father was a pioneering congressional champion of health-care reform in the 1940’s; and, poignantly, for the late Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy, whose death 74 days earlier gave the lion of the Senate a best last hurrah after the fact.


The bill’s passage — sweetly achieved on the third anniversary of the Democratic takeover of the House — advances a plan that would cost more than $1.1 trillion over the next 10 years, and cover an estimated 96 percent of the population with health care that would include the much-debated, insurance industry-vilified public option. All working Americans would be required to buy a health insurance plan, and businesses would be required to offer it to their employees.

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But really, to call it a “triumph” may be something of an understatement. If it clears the Senate, this would be a capstone on the first year of a presidency unprecedented in modern times. Universal health care, or something at least approaching it, has been an elusive goal of presidents going back to Roosevelt. Teddy Roosevelt. President Obama stands on the edge of achieving, less than a year in office, the Holy Grail of domestic-policy initiatives ardently pursued since T.R. proposed the idea in 1912.

In the Rose Garden this morning, Obama made his final pitch. “Most public servants pass through their entire careers without the chance to make as important a difference in the lives of their constituents, and the life of this country. This is their moment, this is our moment to live up to the trust that the American people placed in us even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard. This is our moment to deliver.”

Hours later, the House did just that.

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It wasn’t all a high-five moment. Progressives who support abortion rights were seriously disappointed with tonight’s vote.

In the brutal calculus of horse-trading on Capitol Hill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi negotiated an eleventh-hour concession to some Democrats who threatened to walk away from the bill. Pelosi opted to let anti-abortion Democrats to try to further curb restrictions on coverage for abortions under any insurance plans receiving federal money.

That bitter pill of a concession left progressives facing a devil-and-the-deep-blue-sea choice of supporting an amendment they opposed, or trashing the bill outright, despite all its favorable components.

Tonight, with Democrats swallowing hard, the House approved an amendment by Democratic Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan, continuing a federal ban on the use of federal funds for elective abortions, and barring use of federal affordability credits to buy a health insurance policy that covers abortion. It passed 240 to 194.

“Passage of the Stupak Amendment does not impose a new federal abortion policy; it simply continues what has been the law of the land since 1977,” The congressman said in a statement after the vote.

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Soundly whipped, Republicans condemned the vote for final passage. “This government takeover has got a long way to go before it gets to the president’s desk, and I’ll continue to fight it tooth and nail at every turn,” said Texas Rep. Kevin Brady, Republican of Texas, to The New York Times. “Health care is too important to get it wrong.”

“This bill is a wrecking ball to the entire economy,” Georgia Rep. Jack Kingston told The Times.

And Chuck DeVore, California State Assemblyman and a candidate for the Senate, fired a warning shot on his Web site: "Tonight's passage of H.R. 3962, imposing the liberal Democratic vision of government-controlled healthcare on our country, is a saddening moment that starkly illustrates why we need to elect proven conservatives to the Congress and Senate in 2010. This fight is not over: the United States Senate must pass its own version, and that must be reconciled with the House bill. With the paper-thin margin Nancy Pelosi mustered this evening, Obamacare is no sure thing."

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In recent weeks and months, the punditburo was up in arms about what many of their number saw was a lack of personal conviction on Obama’s part. They always seemed to characterize it militarily, or in pugilisitic terms: when will Obama get tough, they seemed to say, when will Obama go to the mat, when’s he gonna lead the charge?

Such characterizations were more than a casual look in the rear-view mirror; they reflected the Beltway journalistic infatuation with the arm-twisting, hands-on, in-your-face style wielded by President Lyndon Johnson, who cajoled with menace in pursuit of several domestic action items, including agriculture, civil rights legislation and … Medicare.

Anyone looking for that kind of fight from President Obama was disappointed. If we’ve learned nothing over the past eleven months, we’ve found that Obama is both a master delegator and a thoroughly involved project manager of deft rhetorical timing and a pitch-perfect sense of the moment. There’s more than one way to move the bully levers of the presidency.

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Obama, who’s been said to have been privately working congressmen thought to be wavering in support of the bill, came to Capitol Hill and personally spoke with some of those still on the fence. But Obama left much of the heavy lifting to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and House Whip Jim Clyburn.


And some in the blogosphere understand the real distinction between campaigning and governing: only one of those you can do on your own terms. Matt Yglesias of Think Progress gets it:

“[I]n a unicameral United States of America, we would now have passed both a comprehensive health care reform bill and also the most important piece of environmental legislation in the history of the world. Now that’s not the world we live in. Instead we live in a world where neither of those things have passed and where their prospects aren’t clear. But think back on this point the next time you hear someone say Obama is struggling with his agenda because he’s not centrist enough, or else that Obama is struggling with his agenda because he’s not left-wing enough. The reality is that he’s struggling with his agenda because of the way our political institutions are structured."

Now the scene shifts to the Senate, where Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid said he expected a bill would be sent to the floor soon. Unless it all comes a cropper there — and anything is possible given the withering opposition mounted in recent weeks — the door is open for near universal health care in America. It’s not a slam dunk but the baller in chief has a lane to the basket.
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HR 3962: Still from Fox News. Clyburn, Pelosi and Obama: Unknown source, possible pool image.

A Yankee steals the show

It’s a dog-eat-dog world, that ain’t no lie, but despite the world’s tendency toward chaos and trouble, a measure of the natural order has been restored. The world has made a shift towards its proper axis: The New York Yankees are once again the kings of the baseball hill, having won the World Series on Wednesday night, defeating the Philadelphia Phillies in six games, 4-2, in front of delirious fans at the new Yankee Stadium (“Now it’s Home,” one sign in the stands read).

The Boston Red Sox watched it all from home. Life is good.


The so-called Core Four — Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, Andy Pettite and Mariano Rivera — were reliable as clockwork. The unflappable, Obama-calm Pettite pitched a gem on three days’ rest; and Rivera, the best closer in the history of the game, shut the door on the Phillies decisively.

But maybe it was days earlier, during Game 4 on Sunday in Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia, when you could sense the outcome. With one play in that game, one player’s daring WTF exercise of smarts and guts in the enemy’s house, the axis of possibility shifted. For good.

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The outcome of the duel of one pivotal at-bat in that game confirms for me a long-held suspicion: The longer an at-bat goes on, the more it favors the batter. Even the best major-league pitchers tend to have a limited, if powerful, repertoire. Most of the best don’t dabble in exotica for very long; they tend to rely on one or two of their best pitches: a reliable fastball; a solid curveball or maybe a slider.

So the longer a batter can hang in against a pitcher, the likelihood increases that the batter will see everything the pitcher’s got in his arsenal. Sooner or later, a pitcher’s prowess is subject to the law of diminishing returns. Sooner or later, the batter will make adjustments for the one or two specialty pitches coming his way.

It happened on Sunday. The Phillies were one out from cutting the Yankees lead in the Series to 3-2. Phillies reliever Brad Lidge pitched to Jeter, who struck out. Then Lidge pitched to Johnny Damon, who worked Lidge to nine pitches, battling back from being down 1-2, hitting four foul balls before slapping out a single to left field. The tying run was aboard, and Damon got there after making the necessary adjustments. Nine of 'em in a row.

Next up: left-handed Yankee Mark Teixiera.

Apparently anticipating Teixiera’s tendency to fly out to right field, the Phillies had already shifted the outfield in that direction. A lot.

The usually stellar Phillie shortstop Jimmy Rollins moved from his position over to the right of second base. Third baseman Pedro Feliz moved near to Rollins’ usual position.

Lidge threw a slider to Teixiera, and pretty much conceded Damon second base.

What happened a literal eyeblink after Damon took second base is already being hailed as the smartest move in the history of the World Series. You can debate that; it was inarguably a daring and unprecedented display of opportunism, the kind of bare-handed grab for the possible that New Yorkers take to their hearts forever:

Damon swiped second base directly behind Feliz, paused for a moment, bounced up — and headed for third base. He should’ve have been dead meat for Feliz … if only Feliz was covering third base. He wasn’t. Where was catcher Carlos Ruiz? Where was Rollins? Where the hell was Lidge? Where was anyone? Except for Lidge, they were all holding court on the right side, anticipating Teixiera. Third base was completely unoccupied; you could have landed a 747 in the space between home plate and deep left field.

Feliz tried to engage Damon in a foot race, but there was nobody on the other end for Feliz to throw to. In that three or four seconds, the arc of the game changed completely. The Phillies had just witnessed something never done before in a Series, maybe never done in the history of the professional game: John David Damon swiped two bases on the same pitch. Hell, not even Jackie did that.

Ken Burns, where are you now that we need you?

Rattled, Lidge hit Teixiera a few pitches later. And then it was A-Rod time. Alex Rodriguez, hungry for his first ring (and a man who loves the dramatic moment), hit a double that gave the Yankees the lead. Posada singled in two more runs for insurance.

Rivera, about as automatic as the sunrise, put down three Phillies in succession. And that was that: Yankees 7, Phillies 4. Ultimately, more accurately, that was That.

The power of Game 4 was undeniable. But it must be said: The heroics of Yankee Hideki Matsui in Game 6 can't be underestimated. Matsui tied a World Series record for RBIs (6, same as Bobby Richardson), coming through with clutch hits at key moments to become the World Series MVP, the first Japanese-born player to be so honored. It's not clear whether Matsui will be back; he became a free agent with the last out of the Series, and there's been speculation that he could join his friend Ichiro Suzuki on the Seattle Mariners. If that's true .... whew ... what a way to go.

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The Phillies will never admit it; you could waterboard everyone on that team and they wouldn’t admit it. But the Damon sprint was a dagger to the psyche, a blow to a team mentality no doubt already shaken by the daunting prospect of having to win two in Yankee Stadium during the Fall Classic, the Event That Yankees Built. They won one more at home to keep it interesting, or at least respectable. But a play like Damon’s has a way of chewing the heart out of a team’s resolve. In some ways, the World Series ended that night.

The game of baseball often pivots on a scale of inches: the inches between a strike and a ball, the inches between a foul ball and a fair one; the inches between a ground-rule double and a home run. This World Series had its climax by a bigger distance: the 90 feet between second base and third, and the miles of nerve that Johnny Damon summoned at exactly the right time.

That’s a moment that’s instantly become Yankee lore. If you love the game, you know it’s a moment to be saved, recorded, TiVoed, recounted from now until the world ends. And if you love the Yankees (and who wouldn’t tonight?), you know it’s a moment that’ll wear pinstripes, forever.

And the Boston Red Sox watched it all from home. Life is good.
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Image credit: The New York Yankees: Chang W. Lee/The New York Times. Damon: Fox Sports. Damon and Feliz: Keivom/New York Daily News. Matsui: AP Photo.

Not-so-super Tuesday

In two state off-year elections held on Tuesday, Democratic candidates lost (resoundingly in one case) to Republican challengers. Therein lies a cautionary tale — for Democrats and Republicans — in the year between now and the midterms next November.

In Virginia, by a double-digit margin, Republican moderate, former state attorney general Bob McDonnell thumped his challenger, Democratic state Sen. R. Creigh Deeds, a candidate who waged a lackluster, uninspiring campaign, and whose loss is a sobering counter to last year’s defection of the state to Democratic blue in the 2008 presidential election, and earlier votes that swept Democrats Tim Kaine and Mark Warner to power.

“My promise to you as governor,” McDonnell said, “is to strengthen the free-enterprise system, to create more jobs and opportunity so that every Virginian can use their God-given talents to pursue the American dream and liberty here in this great commonwealth.”

And in New Jersey — reliably, automatically Democratic New Jersey — Jon Corzine, the current Democratic governor and former Goldman Sachs poobah, had his ass handed to him, defeated by Republican challenger Chris Christie, a candidate whose everyday-mensch mien dovetailed with the blue-collar sensibilities of the Garden State.

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As you might expect, the national Republican Party apparatus and its media mouthpieces are rhetorically dancing in the streets. To a man, they’ve automatically, if obliquely, made the Tuesday results a referendum on the Obama administration, despite a lot of evidence to the contrary.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

“America, through the voices of those in Virginia and New Jersey, had something to say,” said Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele, on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” this morning.

"We're not crowing, we're just smiling," Steele said later in an interview on the CBS' "Early Show." "I think it's a bellwether for the party ... You look at where we were nine months ago."

The “Republican renaissance has begun,” Steele told Politico. “The message was sent yesterday. It's not about the change we need, it's about the change we want.”

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Hosannas like that overlook the results of an MSNBC exit poll on Tuesday. The poll found that 60 percent of New Jersey voters said President Obama was not a factor in who they voted for; a majority — 57 percent — said they personally approved of how Obama is conducting his administration.

Numbers like that soundly undercut any Republican notion that the New Jersey vote was any kind of a protest vote against Washington. “All politics is local,” the late and sorely missed House Speaker Tip O’Neill once observed. Tuesday’s vote proved that all over again.

And there’s evidence that Tuesday’s results in Virginia, at least, are less a demonstration of any fundamental political shift, and more an example of politics’ reliable tidal gravity.

Virginia has consistently (some might say perversely) cast ballots against the ruling party in off-year elections. “Since 1977, no party that has won the White House has gone on to capture Virginia's governorship the next year,” The Washington Post reported this morning. This pattern was expected to hold sway on Tuesday, and it did. The fact of Virginia’s historically proven tendency to vote against the party in power makes McDonnell’s win not quite the "bellwether" that Steele and the GOP leadership would have us believe.

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But still. There’s no doubt the Democrats have work to do. Political scholar and author Robert Creamer, writing a postmortem today in The Huffington Post, has a grasp of what’s required:

“Yesterday many of the independent voters that supported Obama in Virginia and New Jersey last year voted Republican. This trend may be slightly overstated since many Republican leaning voters who used to self-identify as Republican in exit polls are now self-identifying as independents. But there is little question that independent voters are very impatient. In 2008 Barack Obama sold them on change and hope. To continue to invest their hope with Democrats, swing voters are going to have to see evidence that change is happening.”

Creamer goes on to note the other factor for Democrats in the wake of Tuesday’s vote: a need to re-galvanize a base that’s no doubt gotten complacent after the 2008 victory (evidenced by the poor turnout Tuesday of black voters, young voters and other generally reliable Democrats).

“In Virginia and New Jersey, the Republicans turned out more strongly than expected and many, many Obama Democrats stayed home. There were some good Democratic and base mobilization get-out-the-vote programs in both states. Mechanics weren't the main problem. The problem was inspiration.

Inspiration was Barack Obama's not-so-secret weapon in 2008. Inspiration helped him persuade independent voters who wanted change, and mobilize base voters who wanted hope. Without an inspired base, Democrats cannot hold our own in 2010 -- it's that simple.”

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There may be more at stake for the Republicans than the Democrats in Tuesday’s results. The Republican Party has been lately caught up in the process of eating its young — purging itself of all but the most doctrinaire, reflexively obedient true believers. Moderates need not apply.

That willful self-isolationism cultivated by conservative rogue Sarah Palin, the Club for Growth, the Fox News wind machine and the high priest of prevarication, Rush Limbaugh, is dangerously at odds with what the successful McDonnell campaign proved on Tuesday: there is, or should be, a place for moderates in the Republican party.

It’s commonly understood that Deeds ran a poor campaign, and McDonnell’s deep-pocketed operation capitalized on that. But it’s important to look at what else McDonnell brought to the party. McDonnell ran a campaign that focused on taxes and the economy — things every Virginian could relate to — and smartly played down the cultural trip-wire issues that have come to define contemporary Republicanism.

Abortion rights, gay rights, racial and ethnic inclusion, immigration — all of these were largely subordinated by the McDonnell campaign, which focused on kitchen-table issues everyone could get their minds around.

McDonnell thus poses a problem for the Republicans. His campaign attracted many of the same people —independent voters, and those at least temporarily disenchanted with Team Obama — who are more politically moderate. And it’s these moderates, these voters who aren’t knee-jerk cultural-issue voters, people less likely to be swayed by extremist party-line argument, that the GOP will need to win a year from now (and again two years after that).

They’re the same moderates the GOP has been trying to chase out of the Republican tent for years. The Republicans are today celebrating a victory by the very kind of candidate the party leadership and its enablers are bound and determined to eliminate from the party’s ranks. That doesn’t augur well for any big GOP sweep next November.

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While the results of Tuesday’s vote at first blush might suggest something big happening, there’s really little real justification for gnashing of teeth by Democrats or bloviating by Republicans.

“Disquisitions on The Meaning of It All for President Obama or the 2009 results as a harbinger for Congress in 2010 have scant basis in reality,” The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus noted today.

Tuesday was not-so-super for the Democrats, and only slightly more so for the Republicans. A lot remains inconclusive, despite Tuesday’s results, and the handwriting large on the wall is writ with ink both red and blue.
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Image credits: Michael Steele and Bob McDonnell: Getty Images. Tip O'Neill: Robert Vickery (public domain). Rush Limbaugh: Via Fox News.

Overworked forklift needs a drink. Badly.

An exhausted forklift went on a rampage recently at a vodka warehouse in Russia, desperate for a libation to assuage the pain of being overworked, often for days on end, as Russian citizens have increased their consumption of alcohol to relieve the stress of being out of work. Authorities, who arrested the errant machine immediately, said it had reached a breaking point and that motor oil and gasoline were no longer enough to satisfy the forklift, which is currently undergoing counseling and re-education in Siberia.

The dignified transfer: Obama at Dover AFB

Regardless of the voting of press photographers and media associations in any end-of-December tally of their favorite photographs of the year, we may already have the single best, most riveting — and potentially galvanizing — image of 2009.

More properly, it could be any of several images taken today at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, at the intake site where the bodies of American forces killed in action in Iraq, and Afghanistan are formally repatriated, returned to a grateful nation and any number of broken families.


Early this morning, outside the Charles C. Carson Center for Mortuary Affairs, in a symbolically profound and emotionally resonant break with modern presidential history, Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States, stood at the foot of a C-17 transport plane and publicly saluted the remains of Army Sgt. Dale R. Griffin, of Terre Haute, Ind.

Griffin was one of 18 Americans killed, including three DEA agents, who died this week in Afghanistan. Ten died Monday when a military helicopter crashed after a firefight with suspected Taliban drug traffickers. The eight others died Tuesday, slain by roadside bombs.

With 55 troops killed, October ends as the deadliest month for U.S. forces in Afghanistan since the war started eight years ago.

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President Obama’s appearance at Dover emotionally punctuated the power of a recent shift in Pentagon policy. On April 1, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates approved a policy change that, under strict conditions, allows the media to record the Dover AFB transfer of the bodies of servicemen and women killed in action.


But what could have been another anonymous performance of the “dignified transfer” took on a stark new resonance with the president’s appearance. Obama’s salute finally, at the highest level, unifies the abstract experience of Americans at war with that war’s brutally visceral realities.

When a general calls for 40,000 more troops to fight in Afghanistan, it’s hard to get the mind around the human dimension of such a number. “40,000 more troops”: there’s a pieces-on-a-chessboard feel to the phrase itself; the words denature the human experience that’s behind them.

Standing silent at Dover, President Obama personalized not just the war but its ultimate, visible sacrifice in a way that will both burnish his biography and ennoble the office he holds.

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The power of the moment wasn’t lost on the man. "It was a sobering reminder of the extraordinary sacrifices that our young men and women in uniform are engaging in every single day, not only our troops but their families as well," Obama said later at the White House.

And Obama’s Dover salute can be seen another way: as, just possibly, a stunning and poignant rebuke to those on Capitol Hill and elsewhere who’ve basically called for the president to approve — consideration be damned — the request of Gen. Stanley McChrystal for an additional 40,000 forces in Afghanistan.

“Obviously,” he said, “the burden that both our troops and their families bear in any wartime situation is gonna bear on how I see these conflicts and … it’s something that I think about each and every day.”

The president is considering his options, which include more troops, fewer troops or a realignment of assets already in-country. Whatever’s ultimately decided, and when ever it’s decided, Obama has broken new ground for presidential decorum.

Historian Michael Beschloss said it tonight on MSNBC: “He wants to see the cost in person.” There's no greater tribute a president can make to the people he or she places in harm’s way. There may be no more eloquent statement this president can make about his decision on whether they should be in harm’s way at all.
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Image credits: U.S. war casualties: Still from MSNBC.