On a more positive note, Jonathan Cohn in the New Republic finds Clark's healthcare proposal may have an edge over those of the other candidates. We emphasized this yesterday in a blog post, "Policies that set Clark apart."
For about $70 billion a year, Clark's plan would cut about 32 million people from the rolls of the uninsured--a substantial improvement that would probably represent the biggest jump in coverage for the uninsured since the creation of Medicaid in the 1960s.
The details: Estimates by Emory University's Kenneth Thorpe suggest that, relative to other Demoratic plans, Clark's plan actually covers more of the uninsured even though it comes with one of the lowest price tags--a selling point the campaign emphasizes. But that's primarily because in the other plans some of the new spending ends up lowering premiums for people who already have insurance or providing an economic stimulus. Both are perfectly respectable goals. Also, Clark's plan wouldn't actually kick in until 2006, which is one reason it costs a little less.A more important strength of the Clark plan is that, like the proposal Edwards has made, Clark's would make insurance for children mandatory--thereby making coverage for children truly universal, something the other plans would only approximate, at least in the early stages.
The most novel feature of the Clark plan, though, may be its focus on improving the quality of health care. All of the candidates have paid lip service to this notion, but Clark has gotten more specific. Among other things, Clark would establish a commission to develop quality treatment guidelines, require all federal programs to abide by them, and then--in what seems like a pretty aggressive move--demand that private insurers follow if they want to keep receiving any tax subsidies.
If Clark ever got to be president and tried to implement such a scheme, conservatives would howl about all the unnecessary regulation. But Clark has a pretty good retort: He merely wants to do for all Americans what the military already does for its soldiers. The military has been aggressively promoting prevention and quality care for years, figuring it's better to make sure soldiers don't get sick rather than treat them once they are. Clark used this language in his speech on Tuesday: "It seems to me that just as our soldiers can't do their jobs without adequate health care, our families shouldn't be expected to do their best jobs without adequate health care, either." And at least some experts are impressed: "The rhetoric is stronger than any other candidate I've seen, and it relates to his personal experience," says one well-respected policy analyst who advises Democrats. "He really thinks there needs to be much more emphasis on prevention and quality."
Say it ain't so, Josh? Talking Points Memo spares the crew in Little Rock little in today's condemnation of the campaign thus far.
. . . Let's be honest: the air's going out of his campaign. In money, in direction, in the polls, at the grass roots.
In fact, that doesn't even quite capture it. The air's going out of his candidacy because he doesn't have a campaign. Where's the campaign, the strategy, the organization?What's surprised me most is that he's managed to do as well as he has over the last six weeks even with the complete lack of direction and organization from Little Rock.
The operation is being run by an interlocking directorate of folks who can't be bothered to be more than absentee proprietors of the general's campaign. (We'll say more about the details on these points in a follow-on post.)
I have to imagine Clark can see this. How could he not? The question is whether he's going to really do anything about it. Getting a national campaign up and running on the quick is no mean task, especially if you're new at it. And I still think he's a very strong candidate. But even the strongest candidate can be run into the ground by a bad campaign operation. He needs to get some new heads in the operation and let some others roll.
The Washington Monthly has a lengthy piece exploring the "murky" demographics of the military electorate, and more importantly, the vastly larger "national security" electorate, who base their vote on which party appears to better respect and support the military. It provides a lot of evidence to support the points I made in an earlier blog post, "It's a Volunteer Army." While the eroding relationship between the GOP and the military, their families, and the states where they are influential voters may not necessarily work to the Dems' benefit, some of the statistics sited reinforce my tendency to give WKC a pass on his Republican "leanings," which Lieberman, Kerry, et al. would have us believe disqualify him to run as a Democrat.
". . . The consensus view seems to be that the military as a whole votes Republican by a margin of slightly less than 2-to-1, Benjamin Wallace-Wells tell us, with enlisted men and women Republican by 3-to-2, and Republicans outnumbering Democrats among officers by 8-to-1."Speaking more directly to Wesley Clark, the young officer who voted for Richard Nixon and eagerly served as a White House Fellow under President Ford, Wallace-Wells notes:
By the early '60s, the ranks reflected the conservatism of the 1950s. Vietnam made the military even more conservative. First, the all-volunteer military established by the 1973 abolition of the draft gave the troops a different demographic cast. They were disproportionately Southern, rural, poor, and morally traditional -- the cultural base which would drive Nixon's Southern Majority and, 30 years later, Red America. Second, and perhaps more importantly, scholars say, men who had fought in Vietnam came out of that era with the sharp sense that they had been abandoned by American liberals, and to a lesser extent by the nation as a whole. A profound cultural divide appeared to develop between civilians and the military, two institutions with different sets of values. The distinction served, social scientists say, to help sharpen the soldiers' conservatism.. . . Thomas E. Ricks, a Washington Post reporter then with The Wall Street Journal, wrote a remarkable journalistic account of this divide in The Atlantic Monthly in '97, which found that soldiers tended to find civilians undisciplined, immoral, unpatriotic, and selfish.
Though Clark has been criticized (without evidence) for failing to inspire rank and file troops under his command, I think he is particularly tuned in to the findings of a 1999 Duke University study:
One important moderating influence, sociologists think, has been the presence of large numbers of uniformed African Americans and, later, Hispanics and women. In 1973, when the brass tried to figure out how to staff a volunteer force, they chose to focus their recruiting efforts in large cities, where the most potential enlistees lived. By the mid-'80s, the military was the one place in America "where blacks regularly commanded whites," sociologist Charles Moskos wrote in 1984, and its reputation for giving minorities a fair shake drew increasing numbers of blacks, Hispanics, and women. Blacks now comprise almost a quarter of the military, women are nearly 15 percent, and Hispanics are more than 9 percent. The blacks, Hispanics, and women in the military are less liberal and Democratic than blacks, Hispanics, and women in the general population, but they are also less conservative and Republican than white men in the Armed Forces.And here's a statistic to ponder:
A reassignment of less than two-hundredths of 1 percent in the military vote to the Democrats from the Republicans in Florida in 2000 would have moved that state to the Democratic column, and a similar shift of less than 5 percent in the veteran vote alone would have given Arkansas, Nevada, and New Hampshire's electoral votes to Gore, not Bush. And Pennsylvania and Ohio, expected to be crucial swing states in the next presidential election, each have more than a million veteran voters.Can Clark connect with these voters? If not, Democrats should ask themselves who can?
To respect the military doesn't simply require the sort of offhand pieties that liberal politicians frequently toss at it, but a deeply felt sense of belonging, a sense that the military embodies values which most of the country believes in. Treatment of the military consequently acts as an indicator for tens of millions of Americans who aren't enlisted of how seriously a party, administration, or politician takes the nation's security, and how competent he is to defend it. Political scientists call these people national security voters. ". . . What should really worry the Republicans is the potential for all of these problems you hear about to add up to an impression for the national security voter that the Republicans may not be so good for the military."All of which may speak to a frustration on the part of military Republicans that mirrors that of Democrats without necessarily changing the balance. Wallace-Wells sat in on a local conservative call-in show in North Carolina:
"The president keeps dragging these boys over there to be shot at; we don't know when it's going to end," one widow, from Morehead City, whose husband had been a veteran, told me. But she, and the other callers, had a near-sputtering, subarticulate hatred towards the Democrats - from Wesley Clark on left. "The Democrats are the ones who drew down the forces to begin with," Tony, a young ex-marine from Havelock, N.C., told me. "They have no respect for what we're trying to do."If Wesley Clark can't reach these potential swing voters, does anyone believe Howard Dean can? South Carolina should be interesting.