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Via Blue Lyon, there are poll numbers available from Massachusetts that try to answer the question: Does the result of the Massachusetts Senate race on January 19 mean voters want the Democrats to be more forthrightly Left (aka, progressive) or does it mean voters want the Democrats to be more centrist (aka, move Right)? The poll - commissioned by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Democracy for America, and MoveOn.org - interviewed 500 people who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 but voted for Scott Brown on Tuesday; they also interviewed 500 voters who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 but did not vote on Tuesday.
One caveat: I do not entirely understand how these voters were selected. The poll information says:
2774 Obama voters from 2008 who voted Tuesday were reached -- of which 2274 (82%) voted for Democrat Martha Coakley and 500 (18%) voted against her.quote
Assuming the pollsters simply started cold-calling people this seems like a reasonable selection process. However, I do not see similar information on how the 500 homebodies (2008 Obama voters who did not vote on Tuesday) were selected.
The presentation of the poll is a little confusing: the description says Obama voters who voted for Brown were asked a different set of questions than Obama voters who just stayed home but that’s not quite right. Both groups of voters were asked the same questions. The poll results for the two groups are presented in a slightly different order and I assume that reflects the order in which the two groups were asked the questions. Here are my takeaways:
1) Massachusetts has a lot of voters who are not registered as either Democrat or Republican yet it has voted heavily Democratic for a long time leading some to assume that the Independent (or “Unenrolled”) label doesn’t mean much. Nonetheless there does appear to be at least one clear difference between voters registered Democratic and those who are not registered: of the 500 Obama voters who voted for Brown, 423 were Independent; of the 500 Obama voters who just stayed home, 447 were Democrats. Independents could bring themselves to vote for a non-Democrat (whatever their reasons); Democrats could only bring themselves to stay home. The numbers are overwhelming enough that we can speak fairly confidently of the Brown voters as Independents and the homebodies as Democrats. Further, this means the poll breakdowns by party affiliation use woefully small numbers for the Republican and Democrat percentages among Brown voters and for the Republican and Independent percentages among homebodies.
2) Both Obama voters who voted for Brown and Obama voters who stayed home overwhelmingly favor a public option: 82% of Brown voters and 86% of homebodies. I don’t think this is news - I believe previous polls have always shown that a significant majority of people in the country as a whole favor a public option - so it’s interesting to consider why no public option is on the table. My guess - and it is just a guess - it that when it came time to run the numbers no one could figure out how to have a public option that could match private insurance company premiums without a subsidy from the taxpayers. And a subsidy from the taxpayers would blow the idee fixe of budget neutrality out of the water.
3) The poll asked two questions about the Senate version of health care reform: Do you favor or oppose and, if you oppose, do you think it goes too far or not far enough? If you aggregate the numbers for those two questions, here’s what you get:
Favor: 32% Brown voters, 34% homebodies
Oppose, doesn’t go far enough: 17% Brown voters, 23% homebodies
Oppose, goes too far: 11% Brown voters, 3% homebodies
Oppose, not sure if it goes too far or not far enough: 20% Brown voters, 17% homebodies
Not sure if favor or oppose: 20% Brown voters, 23% homebodies
I have no idea what that tells me except that 40% of both groups either aren’t sure whether they oppose it or oppose it but aren’t sure why.
4) The individual mandate is unpopular: 59% of Brown voters and 55% of homebodies oppose it.
5) It’s not clear how important it is to these voters that the Democrats change Republican policies. In answer to the question:
Generally speaking, do you think Democrats in Washington, DC are fighting hard enough to challenge the Republican policies of the Bush years, aren't fighting hard enough to change those policies, or are fighting about right?
the answers (which don’t really match the question) were:
Not enough: 37% Brown voters, 39% homebodies
Too hard: 15% Brown voters, 12% homebodies
About right: 21% Brown voters, 25% homebodies
Not sure: 27% Brown voters, 24% homebodies
That means 37% of both groups think the Democrats are fighting about the right amount or too hard, i.e., don’t need to be doing more to challenge the Republican policies. This is not significantly different from the number who think the Democrats should be fighting harder to change these policies.
6) A surprisingly large number of respondents in both groups answered “Not sure” to a surprisingly large number of questions. This means that some results are hard to interpret. For example, in answer to this question:
What would do more to improve our nation's economic conditions: Decreasing government spending OR tightening government regulation of Wall Street and corporate executives?
a plurality of both groups think tightening regulations for Wall Street and corporate executives (43%, 46%) would do more to help the economy than decreasing government spending (25%, 21%) but so many people answered “Not sure” (32%, 33%) that I don’t know how much that means. On the other hand, people were pretty clear in their answer to this question:
If the Democratic Congress passed a bill that laid down stronger rules of the road for Wall Street and cut bonuses for the executives of companies that received government bailouts, would that make you more likely or less likely to vote Democratic in the 2010 general election?
Now 53% of Brown voters and 56% of homebodies said more likely, while 14% of Brown voters and 5% of homebodies said less likely. (The “No effect” numbers are very close to the “Not sure” numbers in the previous question: 33% of Brown voters, 39% of homebodies.) Does this mean even people who think decreasing government spending would be better for the economy still want the government to tighten up on Wall Street? Or are the answers to the second question being triggered by the “cut bonuses” proposal that wasn’t really in the first question? I suspect the latter but who knows?
Similarly the “Not sure” answer played a big role in questions about how important national health care reform is in deciding how to vote; whether Democrats are more on my side or the side of lobbyists; and - for homebodies - whether Democrats changed Washington and whether Democrats are more on the side of Wall Street or Main Street. Interestingly, a majority of Brown voters said Democrats did not change Washington (52%) and were more on the side of Wall Street (51%) but only a plurality of homebodies said the same (41%, 38%).
All this makes me suspect that there is a mix of progressive (far Left) and populist (tea party) concerns going on here. I wish the poll had included an open-ended question like:
Why did you vote for Obama in 2008 but vote for Brown/not vote in this election?
So what did the Massachusetts election tell us? People are unhappy with the way things are going in Washington. They overwhelmingly favor the public option; they overwhelmingly think neither Brown nor Coakley did a good job representing their economic interests; a solid majority of both groups wants tighter regulation of Wall Street and/or bonus cuts for executives; and a solid majority of both groups opposes the individual mandate. Beyond that, the exact nature of their unhappiness and even more the question of what they would like to see instead is open to debate.
The more references I saw on blogs to Game Change, the book by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, the more it sounded to me like the book was just supermarket tabloid fare in an expensive wrapper. I was sort of gearing myself up to track down more information and go into a long, dreary, patient, and nonjudgmental explanation of why this sort of “reporting” really isn’t worth spending any time even talking about, much less thinking about.
Thank the goddess! Reclusive Leftist has already done the job - and in only a dozen words:
Press bus gossip in book form = true! history!
God, people are stupid.
(Yes, I know - I gave away her punch line. However her subsequent parenthetical explanation is still worth the click.)
[Updated August 19, 2011: I reversed the 2008 numbers when discussing Perry's conclusions. Fixed and the fix is shown via strike-throughs.]
The fourth of my five health care issues was:
As currently structured, all insurance - private or government, cheap or expensive, HMO or traditional, catastrophic or first-dollar - masks the true costs of treatment from those who purchase that treatment. This is bad for patients and bad for health care providers and bad for any hope of reining in health care spending through individual decision making.
Enter Investor’s Business Daily (via Greg Mankiw). Looking at Department of Health and Human Services’ data, their editorial features a chart that graphically (heh, heh) demonstrates the extent to which Americans do not pay for their own health care with what they can easily identify as their own money. In 1960, Americans paid for almost 50% of their health care out of their own pockets, in 2008 they paid for only about 12% of that spending out of their own pockets.
Enter also Dan Mitchell of Big Government (via The Gormogons) who used the same data to produce the same chart.
Enter finally Mark Perry of The Enterprise Blog (via The Corner) who took the same data and created two charts. Clearly an over-achiever.
Perry attributes the decreasing share coming from consumer out of pocket spending solely to increased government spending on health care; in fact, he entitles his piece “Government Funding Increases Health Care Costs”. Mitchell is somewhat agnostic on the question of who is picking up the spending consumers are no longer doing out of pocket. The third-party payers he mentions are government entities but he doesn’t specifically attribute the entire change in who is paying to the government’s role. IBD assigns a role to both the government and insurance companies:
Patients have little direct connection in paying for their care. Their role has fallen significantly. Meanwhile, the government's involvement has grown, as has that of the insurance industry.
IBD is correct. One of the charts Perry produces shows us that health care spending breaks down this way:
In 1960:
- consumers’ out of pocket payments accounted for 46.9% of health care spending
- public funds accounted for 24.5%
In 2008:
- consumers’ out of pocket payments accounted for 47.32% 11.88% of health care spending
- public funds accounted for 11.88% 47.32%
According to Perry:
But the chart above (data here) shows what might be the two most important reasons for rising healthcare costs over the last 50 years: a) declining out-of-pocket payments for medical expenses, which have fallen from 47 percent of total health spending in 1960 to a record low of only 11.9 percent in 2008, and b) expanding public funding of healthcare, which reached a record high of 47.3 percent in 2008. There’s now been a complete reversal—whereas consumers paid 47 percent of total medical costs in 1960, it’s now the government paying 47 percent of health spending, while consumers pay less than 12 percent out of pocket for healthcare. That reversal is a guaranteed prescription for rising healthcare expenditures.
Although Perry mentions consumers’ increased reliance on employer-provided health care in the next paragraph, he never shows us the numbers. We can, however, back into them by figuring out what his figures leave unaccounted for:
In 1960, third party payments from other than public funds accounted for 28.6% of health care spending.
In 2008, third party payments from other than public funds accounted for 40.80% of health care spending.
So, yes, public third-party funding of health care has increased from 24.5% to 47.32% of total spending. But private third-party funding of health has also increased, from 28.6% to 40.80% of the total. It’s not just government spending on health care that keeps us from realizing how much it actually costs us:
As currently structured, all insurance - private or government, cheap or expensive, HMO or traditional, catastrophic or first-dollar - masks the true costs of treatment from those who purchase that treatment. This is bad for patients and bad for health care providers and bad for any hope of reining in health care spending through individual decision making.
*****
Reading:
Fact Check: Health insurer profits not so fat - . I increasingly tend to believe that insurance companies do not have a role to play in health care going forward. However, that doesn’t mean they’re the spawn of Satan making windfall profits off the death and suffering of their hapless victims. They are simply an industry that may have outlived its usefulness due to changing technology, economic issues, and government regulation.
Markets, Not Mandates (via The Corner) - Presents an interesting look at a possible free market health care landscape that includes insurance companies. I’m unimpressed - as long as health insurance companies exist they will be interfering with market pricing mechanisms - but the author is correct in his description of how the market can reduce costs. And it’s worth reading just for the quote from Uwe Reinhardt:
when you’re down on your luck, you’re unemployed, you lose your insurance.…Only the devil could ever have invented such a system.
I’m doing my part to hold down health care costs - From Reclusive Leftist, the other side of the story. What happens to people who don’t have money if we implement systems that make people pay more of their own money for health care?
In this series of posts I’m taking a look at three proposals for government-paid or government-provided catastrophic health care. I explained the proposals and compared them in the first post in this series. In my most recent post, I looked at whether the proposal by Martin Feldstein was paid for and concluded it was not. In this post, I’ll look at whether the proposal by Brad DeLong is paid for. You can read about his plan in detail in my first post but here’s a brief summary to go on with:
Brad DeLong proposes government take 20% of everyone’s income. Five percent goes to pay for government-provided catastrophic health insurance/care. The other 15% goes into a Health Savings Account. If you spend everything in your HSA in one calendar year, the catastrophic insurance kicks in. If you don’t spend everything in your HSA in one calendar year, you can roll what’s left into an IRA or just get the money back to spend as you please. He does not explicitly propose any type of government assistance for those with low incomes. Very, very simple.
So is DeLong’s plan paid for? Again, this is a different question from whether we can afford it, either nationally or as individual taxpayers. Here I’m just examining whether the income stream DeLong’s plan depends on is sufficient to cover the costs of the health care it must pay for. Let’s do a little math.
I’m looking at two sources for my calculations. First, Historical National Health Expenditure Data (hereinafter “NHE”). The Website is here; I’m using the pdf you can download via the “NHE Web tables (PDF, 1.1 MB)” link. The other source is the Congressional Budget Office Data on the Distribution of Federal Taxes and Household Income (hereinafter “CBO”). The Website is here; I’m using the pdf you can download via the “All of the Above Information” link under “Historical Effective Federal Tax Rates and Income, by Income Category (1979-2006)”. I’m looking at 2006 numbers since I believe that is the most recent CBO data available. Here we go.
According to NHE, in 2006 the United States spent $2.1127 Trillion on health care; our population was 265.4 Million. A little quick division and we discover we spent $7,960.44 per person for health care; I’ll use $8,000 to make life easier. What’s $39.56 among friends? Okay.
According to CBO (page 7), in 2006 there were 116,100,000 households in the United States. A little more quick division and we discover that each household contains 2.29 people. So each household is going to need $18,320 worth of health care in a year - on average, or course.
The CBO has graciously reported its average income numbers in quintiles with each quintile having approximately the same number of households. We can, therefore, pretend there are only five households in the country when we do our math. So.
The CBO (still page 7) tells us that average household pre-tax income looks like this:
Lowest quintile: $17,200; 20% of that is $3,440
Second quintile: $39,400; 20% of that is $7,880
Middle quintile: $60,700; 20% of that is $12,140
Fourth quintile: $89,500; 20% of that is $17,900
Highest quintile: $248,400; 20% of that is $49,680
So if we take 20% of the pre-tax income from each of our five households, we’ll have a total of $91,040. If we distribute that equally across our five households, that’s $18,208 per household. We need $18,320 to pay for their health care so we’re very, very close - short $112 per household. Or at least we were in 2006. We can easily make up the difference by having the richest household pay 20.25% rather than just 20%. I know we don’t want to soak the rich but an extra 0.25% is not really soaking them. So I say DeLong’s plan is paid for.
Now that’s using pre-tax income. DeLong doesn’t specify pre-tax or after-tax when he talks about 20% so let’s take a look at the numbers if we assess the DeLong fee on after-tax income.
The CBO (now page 8) tells us that average household after-tax income looks like this:
Lowest quintile: $16,500; 20% of that is $3,300
Second quintile: $35,400; 20% of that is $7,080
Middle quintile: $52,100; 20% of that is $10,420
Fourth quintile: $73,800; 20% of that is $14,760
Highest quintile: $184,400; 20% of that is $36,880
When we take 20% of the after-tax income from each of our five households, we have a total of $72,440. If we distribute that equally across our five households, that’s $14,488 per household. We need $18,320 to pay for their health care so we’re short $3,832 per household. If we want to make up the difference only from the wealthiest quintile, now they’re going to have to toss in 30.4% of their income rather than 20%. That doesn’t sound too workable especially given that whole “no tax raises for anyone making under $250,000 per year” thing.
When I thought about it, though, I realized that my numbers weren’t quite right. If we implement the DeLong plan, our after-tax income will go up: the amount that now gets taken out of each paycheck for Medicare should disappear. Not even the greediest Federal government could justify continuing to remove that amount once Medicare ceases to exist. So that boosts our after-tax income a little right there.
Beyond that, though, are other taxes that should disappear under the DeLong plan although I’m sure we’ll have to fight our governments tooth and nail to make them do so:
- Some part of our Federal income tax goes to fund Medicaid.
- Some part of our State taxes go to fund Medicaid.
- Some part of our Federal, State and possibly local taxes go to fund health care for those who have no form of insurance and are too poor to pay for care.
If we implement the DeLong plan we should insist out tax burden drop by whatever amount now goes to these health-care related expenses.
And there’s the other side of this, too: under the DeLong plan we hand over a chunk of our income but at the same time some of the expenses we incur now drop. Most obviously, we will no longer be paying health insurance premiums ourselves. Less obviously, we currently forego some wages because our employers contribute to our health insurance in the form of premiums and administrative overhead. Theoretically, we could write the DeLong legislation to require employers to “’cash out’ the money they currently pay for health benefits and distribute it as wages”; alternatively, we could just let the market do its work. It will take time - particularly so long as unemployment is up - but eventually companies will start using their extra breathing room to raise wages. Last, but not necessarily least, if some corporate income tax revenue goes to pay for health-care related expenses, we should insist that the corporate tax burden by cut by that amount. Since individuals end up paying these taxes in the form of higher prices, eliminating them will raise our disposable income.
At this point I began to wonder if the reduced taxes and increased disposable income I was thinking about might actually add up to the amount the DeLong plan would take from all of us. That was when I had one of those head-slapping, V-8 moments: of course it did. I wasn’t working with some theoretical cost of health care; I was working with the actual amount we spend on health care. This meant that - one way or another - we all do actually pay 20% of our before-tax income for health care. Maybe you don’t individually - although I think each of us might be surprised if we did the math - but on average we all do. We have to: that’s how much we spend.
Although there is, of course, one way around this: if we as a nation are borrowing to fund our health care. In which case, yes, we can argue we aren’t actually spending 20% of our before-tax income on health care and, yes, we can claim we can’t afford to pay that much for our health care. I’m just not sure the future generations that will have to pick up the tab are going to be much impressed by that argument and that claim.
The DeLong plan brings us face to face with the intractable truth at the heart of health care reform: if we’re horrified at how much the DeLong plan will cost us and argue we can’t afford it then we’re forced to admit we can’t afford what we as a nation are spending on health care now and we have to cut back. If we argue we can afford what we’re spending now then either we can afford the DeLong plan or we have to admit that we’re fine with getting health care we’re not paying for and leaving the bill to our children and grandchildren.
You pick ‘em.
*****
Reading:
William McGurn in the Wall Street Journal - What Singapore Can Teach the White House
Making someone else pay : This Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Journal Sentinel article is from October of 2009 which means it’s practically antediluvian in health care bill terms but it’s a nice, brief look at the idea that everyone wants Congress to ask - and thinks Congress is asking - someone else to pay for health care. It makes me think of that ditty attributed to Russell Long:
Don’t tax him. Don’t tax me. Tax that man behind the tree.
It’s also worth noting that - at least according to this article - under the Baucus plan (remember that?) the average family in Waukesha Country would be looking at premiums of 12% of income. That’s not far off DeLong’s 20% and under the Baucus plan taxpayers would still be footing the bill for Medicare, Medicaid, and whatever the government throws into paying for health care for the uninsured.
I’ve run into a number of posts about David Brooks’ piece in the New York Times. JustOneMinute and Grim are writing about it. Someone (I think The Corner’s Web Briefing) sent me to NoLeftTurns which in turn sent me to Armed and Dangerous where I think the discussion of complexity run amok is quite persuasive.* Armed and Dangerous sent me to Will Collier whose post is excellent - and not just because he made me nod by quoting Megan McArdle and made me smile by designating Sarah Palin as the “Tea Party matriarch”.
So. Yes, Brooks’ piece is annoying - really annoying. Anytime you find yourself talking about “the educated class” you really should stop writing immediately. It’s hard to think of a more loaded phrase especially when Brooks insists upon imputing to that “class” any number of beliefs that aren’t necessarily shared by everyone who has, well, has what? An Ivy league education? A law degree? An advanced degree? A degree in something soft - like, say, history - rather than in something hard - like engineering? As deep an understanding of political philosophy as Brooks himself? Or is Brooks’ “educated class” not in common possession of anything except the set of beliefs he says “the educated class” shares. That would be a bit circular but perhaps historians don’t worry about that sort of thing.
Still I’m inclined to be both more tolerant and less tolerant of Brooks’ column than many of those whose opinions I link above. More tolerant because I heard him talk about the tea party movement on one of the Sunday morning shows and I thought he was quite fair-minded about it. His thesis is repeated in his recent NYT piece although it’s buried under all the “educated class” nonsense: outsiders with passion are the ones who define the political landscape of an era and the tea partiers are the outsiders with passion right now:
... the tea party movement has passion. Think back on the recent decades of American history — the way the hippies defined the 1960s; the feminists, the 1970s; the Christian conservatives, the 1980s. American history is often driven by passionate outsiders who force themselves into the center of American life.
In the near term, the tea party tendency will dominate the Republican Party. It could be the ruin of the party, pulling it in an angry direction that suburban voters will not tolerate. But don’t underestimate the deep reservoirs of public disgust. If there is a double-dip recession, a long period of stagnation, a fiscal crisis, a terrorist attack or some other major scandal or event, the country could demand total change, creating a vacuum that only the tea party movement and its inheritors would be in a position to fill.
It speaks well of Brooks that he can apparently loathe a movement, all its people, and everything it stands for and yet see clearly that it could be a transformative power in politics. That’s far better than so many pundits who assume that everyone and everything they don’t like is doomed to failure at best, failure and ridicule more likely. It also speaks well of him that he can credit the tea partiers with honest passion rather than dismissing them as living, breathing astroturf.
And the less tolerant part? That’s because I’ve never fully recovered from learning about Brooks’ bedazzlement at Barack Obama’s ability to spend 20 minutes giving Brooks:
a perfect description of Reinhold Niebuhr's thought, which is a very subtle thought process based on the idea that you have to use power while it corrupts you.
For Brooks that was reason enough to overlook his own description of Obama as “a very mediocre senator” and to fail to apply to Obama the same test he considered Palin to have failed:
The more I follow politicians, the more I think experience matters, the ability to have a template of things in your mind that you can refer to on the spot, because believe me, once in office there's no time to think or make decisions.
As a result of reading the above, I flinch any time Brooks begins using words like “intellectual”, “educated”, or “class”. I’m not saying Reinhold Niebuhr is not useful reading for someone in the political world. I’m just appalled that Brooks believes being able to discuss Niebuhr for 20 minutes makes up for mediocrity and inexperience in a President. And - to bring things full, um, circle - perhaps this is what Brooks really means by “the educated class”: those who can discuss Niebuhr for 20 minutes. If so, then it’s easy to understand why Brooks’ “educated class” has - in Collier’s words - “proven so many times that [they’re] no damn good at” ruling the rest of us
*****
* I also think Armed and Dangerous is, in fact, a dangerous website. The post on Brooks presents a feast of enticing hyperlinks, some of which lead to other Armed and Dangerous posts which present yet more feasts of enticing hyperlinks. I suspect this site could eat up a day or a week quite easily.
There’s quite a bit of linking to Shelby Steele’s Wall Street Journal piece on Barack Obama. Steele’s article is well worth reading. He writes again of the “bargain” between Obama and whites which is an interesting look at a piece of our national struggle with race. He also writes of Ronald Reagan’s individuation, forged through years of political involvement and conflict, and that rang quite true for me. However, I don’t really buy Steele’s view of what’s inside Obama’s head.
Steele refers to Obama’s “lack of economic understanding” and his "lack of a larger framework of meaning" not just in economics but in foreign policy and attributes this unreadiness for the Presidency to our “post-modern” race problem. That problem, he says, contributed to an unprepared man being elected President in two ways. First:
white America conditioned Barack Obama to emptiness—valued him all along for his "articulate and clean" blackness, so flattering to American innocence.
Second, Obama responded to this conditioning by taking on the attributes he believed he needed in order to succeed:
I think that Mr. Obama is not just inexperienced; he is also hampered by a distinct inner emptiness—not an emptiness that comes from stupidity or a lack of ability but an emptiness that has been actually nurtured and developed as an adaptation to the political world.
I do think Steele is right that our tangled web of race is part of what made it possible for a man who was inexperienced and barely known to be elected to the highest office in the land. And I certainly accept that Obama was well aware of that web and used it to his advantage. I don’t, however, think that race shaped Obama’s interior political landscape and I certainly don’t think that interior political landscape is empty.
Rather I think Obama’s political landscape was shaped by his environments - both those he was born into and those he chose and is chock-a-block with liberal tenets. He has a list of things that are every liberal knows are good: environmentalism, universal health care, labor unions. He has a list of things that every liberal knows are bad: corporations, oil, guns. He has has a list of stuff that liberals can safely say to sound bipartisan and post-racial: abortion is a difficult issue, white people sometimes resent affirmative action, no higher taxes on the middle class. There’s a virtually infinite supply of liberal talking points, liberal notions, liberal convictions, liberal views of the world along with a smattering of lip service to the other side.
Does this mean I agree with Neo-neocon who admires Steele’s article but disagrees with Steele’s conclusion?
I think this is very finely put, but I would add the following: I do not believe that Obama’s political emptiness is real. Rather, I think he is quite full—of leftist ideology, that is.
No. Obama cannot be politically ideological because he lacks an integrated world view. His beliefs are simply items on lists, plucked out of the air around him and jotted down hastily. Obama has not thought about how these ideas tie together, how they might conflict with each other, what they say about how the world as a whole works or can work. He has no overarching ideology; he simply has lists.
With all due respect to Steele and Neo-neocon, the best analysis of Obama came from Peggy Noonan. She was describing Sarah Palin at the time but if you make appropriate substitutions of “he” for “she” and swap “liberal” and “conservative”, you’ve got Obama cold:
But she was not thoughtful. She was a gifted retail politician who displayed the disadvantages of being born into a point of view (in her case a form of conservatism; elsewhere and in other circumstances, it could have been a form of liberalism) and swallowing it whole: She never learned how the other sides think, or why.
There's been some uncertainty about what clever nickname to give Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. I've heard some doozies but many of the clever ones are simply too long and unwieldy. The shorter names in contention were:
Undi-Bomber: This is visually a decent play on UnaBomber but doesn't really work sound-wise.
BVD Bomber: Some nice alliteration and all those similar sounds are good but this is kind of a tongue twister.
Then I saw a great one.
KnickerBomber (sometimes Knicker-Bomber): Kind of a whole retro thing with it’s derivation from “knickerbocker” plus the use of “knicker” is nicely derogatory with its silly underwear implication. And talk about somebody getting his knickers in a twist.
I thought that was going to be hard to beat but when I told my husband about it, he came up with a real beaut.
Fruit of the Boom: This is it for me. Now it’s important to realize that the usage of Fruit of the Boom will be different from the usage of the other possibilities. So while you would say:
You’d think someone would have paid attention when the KnickerBomber checked in with no luggage and paid cash for his ticket.
when you use “Fruit of the Boom” you drop “the” and simply say:
You’d think someone would have paid attention when Fruit of the Boom checked in with no luggage and paid cash for his ticket.
You can also abbreviate this as “FotB” - which I understand is nice for all that Twittering stuff - although a friend raises a good question: would you pronounce the abbreviation as separate letters - F-O-T-B - or as two syllables - Fot-B? I prefer the latter but I’m prepared to allow for some individual variation here. Kind of like the whole “twenty-ten” versus “two-thousand ten” thing.
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