I'm still trying to figure out why so many writers, especially allegedly liberal ones, still peddle the line that conservatives want to limit the size of government.  Conservatives are on the front-lines of expanding the size of government, although their idea of what should be expanded (e.g., the military) differs from what liberals would like expanded (e.g., social programs).

Writers do a disservice by helping conservatives manipulate the debate this way.

I don't consider myself a conservative, but I favor both limiting government and maintaining polarization. Some conservatives may espouse both tactics, but they own neither.

A society, including its govenment, seeks certain ends. Those ends are in some cases liberal and in others conservative. For example, a liberal may believe that a society has an obligation to provide each of its citizens with adequate, affordable healthcare. Doing so may (likely will) require government in some fashion or another, but if methods can be found to provide healthcare without government that prove superior to those methods government would use toward the same end, the liberal choses the non-governmental position. He who chooses government in all cases isn't a liberal; he's a bureaucrat, or possibly a totalitarian.

Same goes for conservatives. The end, not the means, drives their ideology. A conservative eager for U.S. military supremacy will happily fund DOD programs because she knows the military-industrial complex is a far better source of B-2 Stealth bombers than is Main Street.  It isn't a love for or against big government that's driving the funding, it's the love of armed force.

Because both liberals and conservatives have a tendency to devolve from damp idealistic young pups into bone-dry arrogant self-satisfied corrupt vultures after each absorbs sufficient power, it's handy for us common folk that partisanship keeps two hands on the wheel--one pulling left, one pulling right, keeping the old buggy (US of A) along the straight and narrow and away from roadside ditches.  It's no coincidence that we have a two-party system of long standing, not a one-party system or a five-party system but a two-party system, and that at the same time we're one of the most successful and powerful societies in multiple regards in recorded history.

I wish Obama a Happy Christmas and thereafter, and I might even vote for the guy when we get around to it here on the Left Coast, but he needs to keep partisanship in his toolkit for when he needs it.  And if he's serious about doing away with it, then he needs to reverse the media- and money-dominated campaign structures that encourage it, and the district gerrymandering that ensures it. Good luck with that.

I think this post is right on.  People really misunderstand Obama on this.

I also thought the Mark Schmitt article was excellent -- a much better rebuttal to Krugman than Alter, although I thought Alter's article wasn't bad either.  I've been a big fan of Krugman's and have been rather shocked and dismayed by his simplistic and ill-considered take-downs of Obama's approach to issues.  I would be fascinated to see Krugman's response.  

There was also a lengthy comment posted after the article by a reader named "steady eddie" that was very good.  I would definitely recommend reading that if you haven't already.

Obama knows exactly what he's doing. Krugman says he doesn't fight, but he fights in a way that Krugman doesn't recongnize as fighting, and it works MUCH better. It reminds me of that puppet show I got dragged to once when I was little, and I wanted to stay home and watch Charlie Chan

on TV. And that puppet show blew my little mind. It was about the wind and the sun. Hooray for the internet:

ancienthistory.about.com/.../bl_aesop_wind_sun.htm

Krugman wind, Obama sun, and here is the sun at work:

www.cnn.com/.../index.html

These are fascinating issues and the various articles cited, the main posts and the comments--including that of Steady Eddie--are exceedingly good and interesting.

My sense is that the simplistic campaign generated notions of "hope" as against "confrontation" as against "work" in taking on entrenched interests to get progressive social change are just that--simplistic. And I how wonder how much difference in reality there is amongst the ways each of the top three would seek to accomplish such change.

(I wish I could generalize from own negotiating experience in my work, single parties pitted against each other knowing that if they don't compromise a  judge will, like Chuck Norris, tell them the way it is. But I don't think I can. I'm not trying to get health care introduced; I'm just trying to get a husband, say, to pay less rather than more spousal support.)

My intuitive problem with the articulated Obamian approach is that where the stakes are hugely high, and where the interests are overarchingly powerful, and the weapons are way beyond the presumption of good faith arguments, and include every demagogic, bad faith arrow in the quiver without constraint by conscience or shame and are part of a vast and a seeming  infinitely well funded arsenal, it seems to me--with all due allowance given to myself for being wrong--that a "theory of change" or interest based negotiations premised on good faith are fanciful. They may even be  distracting from the reality of how tough a fight say universal, single payor health care with profit drummed out of the heart of the health delivery system will be.

I would think any of the top three would be as accommodating, good faith and interest based as they could be if with that they could succeed, and then would be as tough and as ruthless as they needed to be, had the will to be, and were capable of. More, as amongst them all, reasonable people can reasonably differ on whom amongst them would be most effective in bringing change.

But it's not, I think, that Krugman is wrong or right, or that Schmitt and Alter and Patashnik or Steady Eddie are wrong or right. They have all have good points and cases to make;  but all the differences amongst all their theorizings as to how accomplish radically  progressive social change like the kind of health care I have described might well, I would argue, dissolve and melt into each other in the reality of a fight for such change, should that fight really get joined. (And one might worry about that latter point too, after seeing the Democrats' great success in getting Bush out of Iraq.)

I'm a conservative who would be interested in finding common ground with liberals.  The fear is that the only way to demonstrate to Mr. Patashnik that I'm a good-faith conservative is to be an unconservative conservative.  No sooner does he extend an invitation to sit down at the big table and bargain in good faith than he dismisses Bill Kristol's 1994 rejoinder to Hillarycare as cynical and nihilistic.  The scorched-earth barbarism Kristol advocated included making health insurance more portable, limiting insurers' ability to deny coverage because of pre-existing medical conditions, and reducing paperwork costs by creating a standardized claims form.  Decent and reasonable people can disagree about the wisdom or adequacy of such proposals.  They can hardly do so, however, if the price of the ticket to participate in the debate is to first confess that we conservatives are all either ideologues or stooges for rapacious corporations.  If Patashnik wants to see good faith, he'll have to show some.

"There were times when patronage politics worked pretty well for the down and out. ... That's not true anymore"

Spoken like the supporter of corruption which Obama is.  If every Obama supporter would spend 5 minutes looking at Chicago and Cook County government, see what Obama did to defeat the reform candidate in a very narrow race and look at some of the other people he's endorsed, they'd think a lot less of their newfound saint.

I think what bothers Krugman, et al about Obama is less his talk about post (and bi) partisanship and more about his rhetoric, which cedes ground to the right on issues like mandates and social security.  That said, Schmitt's piece is not very convincing--he's equally guilty of projecting as Krugman, he just chooses different aspects to latch on to.

Josh: Thank you for clarifying and elaborating your ideas.  (I note that you and I have exchanged views in the past; I'm Bill Voegeli, whose article on "The Trouble With Limited Government" you discussed a few weeks ago.  This exchange is germane to that one.)

It appears that before liberals and conservatives can have good-faith negotiations over policy issues, we need to have good-faith meta-negotiations over what distinguishes good-faith from bad-faith negotiating. According to the 1994 Bill Kristol essay you link to, his position was that "the passage of the Clinton health care plan IN ANY FORM" would "guarantee an unprecedented federal intrusion into the economy" and "signal the rebirth of centralized welfare-state policy."  To say that such a position is an example of bad-faith politics (not to mention cynical and nihilistic) is to say that Kristol's viewpoint was not merely wrong, but illegitimate.  You're banging the gavel and ruling him out of order: We're here to make a "genuine attempt to reach an agreement acceptable to all parties" regarding national health policy, not to talk about the proper size and scope of government.  Since that question is "unrelated to the policy issue at stake," Kristol was guilty of "valuing gridlock for its own sake."

Obviously, the power to limit  "what we're here to talk about" is very important.  Saying that those of us who dispute the chair's rulings about what we can and can't discuss are negotiating in bad faith is a dubious way to encourage constructive engagement around the big table.  Conservatives and liberals should have equal rights to object to what they regard as a camel's nose under the tent.  Kristol's opposition in 1994 to Clinton's health care plan in any form was identical, in this regard, to Democrats' opposition in 2005 to privatized Social Security accounts in any form.  If I understand your position correctly, however, Kristol demonstrated bad faith when he encouraged Republicans who had minorities in both houses of Congress and had just lost a presidential election to refuse to yield on the basic question about expanding the scope of government, but Democrats who were in the minority in both houses of Congress and had just lost a presidential election were acting in the only honorable way they could by refusing to yield on the basic question of reducing the scope of government.  

Josh, perhaps one way of shedding light on this question would be to expand your statement that Democrats, too, have been guilty of valuing gridlock for its own sake.  You regard the Democrats' posture on Social Security in 2005 as a non-example of such intransigence.  What would be a good - and, therefore, illuminating - example?

Josh: It's an interesting and important question, no?  When politicians sit down to negotiate about a particular public policy question they are always going to have three other things in mind.  First, there will be other policy questions.  The positions you take and the deal you strike over Issue A could affect your negotiating position over Issues X, Y and Z, often in ways that are difficult to foresee but important not to be surprised by.  Second, there will be ideological questions about whether a particular deal or position strengthens or weakens a general disposition to a whole range of policy issues.  Third, there will be electoral questions about how your negotiating position will help you and your party win the next election and the ones beyond it.  Furthermore, not only is the public policy issue on the table related to each of these other kinds of questions, but they are all related to one another.  So it's always complicated.

The ethical question is at what point a politician's or activist's attention to all these related questions causes his conduct in the debate over the public policy issue on the table to cross the line from being realistic and legitimate to being cynical and illegitimate.  Let's say, for the sake of the argument, that the center-left legend is true, and Bill Kristol really did urge Republicans in 1993 to refuse to avoid any constructive engagement with Pres. Clinton on health care for the sole purpose of helping Republicans win subsequent elections.  I don't think such a posture is self-evidently nihilistic.  Politics ain't beanbag, and everything a politician wants to do or prevent will be aided by winning elections and gaining power, and harmed by losing elections and power.  Furthermore, since everything is ultimately up to the voters, there was nothing to prevent the Democrats from counterpunching against the Kristol position, appealing to the voters to punish the Republicans for being obstructionists, misrepresenting the Clinton plan, and offering no alternatives of their own.  It's not Kristol's fault that Democrats either didn't make or couldn't sell this argument.

There is one asymmetry worth noting.  It's much harder, politically, to dissolve an entitlement program than to create one.  Republicans knew that if they offered to make "health care that's always there" a social insurance obligation in exchange for spending cuts in other social welfare programs, the new entitlement program would exist forever, while the spending cuts would be ephemeral.  The Republicans who took Kristol's advice in 1993 had these other policy battles and ideological and electoral issues in mind.  Realism verges into cynicism when every policy question is refracted into an electoral one, so that governance is completely devoured by politics.  At that point, everything in politics is reduced to winning elections, and the only reason to win elections is to win more elections, which is a clear-cut example of nihilism.  I don't think the 1993 Republicans' efforts against Clinton's health care proposals were circular in this way.  They wanted to limit the socpe of government and prevent an expansion that would be politically irreversible and would promote the expansion of the welfare state in other ways.  That's a contestable political objective, but not an illegitimate one.

An excellent post improved by stimulating comments. I regret that this type of exchange is now only possible on the blogs after the callous destruction of any meaningful possibility of dialogue in comments on the main articles. I'd like to see the editors 'fess up about this decision rather than continuing to make obviously disingenuous assurances that "it's being fixed".

It seems to me the most important idea is the starting point. If one frames the process as an attempt to find pragmatic solutions to generally agreed upon problems, Obama's strategy of granting initial respect for good faith and sincerely held beliefs with some factual basis to interlocutors is clearly going to be effective. Behavior that conflicts with this frame will be obvious, and probably counterproductive.

In political terms, I'm convinced that most voters are absolutely fed up with the kind of mindless partisanship that frames every debate as a death-struggle between The Good Guys and Devil-spawn agents of Darkness.

The Democratic half of that Globe poll I just mentioned shows Obama pulling ahead in New Hampshire--he

RP: I believe that you and I have already commiserated regarding the loss of substantive discussion following main articles.  I fully agree that the changes affecting comments after feature articles have severely limited the value of TNR Talkback as a whole since the blog discussion threads are very rarely as rich as this one or as the post-feature thread were prior to October 2007.

However, I wanted to make sure that you were aware of Franklin Foer's signed post to the effect that he acknowledges the damage done to Talkback and lead article comments in particular and is working to fix it.  If, as I myself had previously suspected, the changes occured not as the result of technical oversite but as conscious demands of the new CanWest owners, then Franklin Foer is a bald-faced liar.  Given his willingness to commit himself personally, I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt--for a while longer at least.

aero--thanks. I read at least one such assurance some time ago from the editor(s), whether or not the Foer one  I don't recall.  Any way it goes, this is either a) an internal power issue , b) evidence of grave incompetence, or c) both. Technically it can't be a problem--if comments on blogs show up right away, so can comments on anything else.  I've already cut back on my time here, and an unscientific look over the site indicates I'm not alone in that regard.  Here's hoping it gets sorted while there's still someone around who cares. In any case, Merry Christmas to you and the rest of the talkbacksters.  It's Dec. 23--maybe this will see the light of day before the 25th.

to willwright and josh, thanks for the great dialog. civil, intelligent, interesting. kudos to josh for weighing in especially.