Setti Seeks Senate Seat?

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Setti Warren Launches Senate Bid To Take On Incumbent Scott Brown

Jon Terbush | May 9, 2011, 5:15PM

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Newton Mayor Setti Warren (D)

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Newton Massachusetts Mayor Setti Warren (D) formally added his name to the growing list of Democrats aiming to take on incumbent Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) when he seeks reelection next year in one of the nation's bluest states.
In a campaign video posted to his website, Warren talked at length about his parents' lives as civil rights activists, and how they founded in him a sense of "shared responsibility." Warren often returned to that theme throughout the five-minute video, taking some direct swipes at Brown along the way.
"I believe Scott Brown is an honorable man, but he has not been the independent voice in the Senate that so many expected him to be," Warren says in the video.
In particular, he accused Brown of voting against policies that would help some of the state's most needy individuals.
"Scott Brown admits that he doesn't think about his own life when he votes against the very same programs that helped lift him as a troubled teen out of poverty," Warren says.
"We can never forget the sacrifices that others have made on our behalf," he adds.
Democrats see the Massachusetts Senate race as an important opportunity to wrest back control of a longtime Democratic seat, despite Brown being enormously popular with his constituents. Brown assumed office last year after winning the special election to replace the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, who had held the seat for nearly a half century.
Several polls have shown Brown cleaning up in hypothetical head-to-head contests. A Suffolk university poll released last month showed Brown trouncing the virtually-unknown Warren, 52% to 9%.
Warren, the mayor of an affluent Boston suburb, is the first incumbent politician to enter the race so far. City Year co-founder Alan Khazei, attorney Marisa DeFranco, and local activist Bob Massie have all thrown their hats in the ring, though some big-name Democrats -- including Boston Mayor Tom Menino and Gov. Deval Patrick -- have stayed on the sidelines.
Despite being the first African American to win a mayoral election in Massachusetts, Warren is still relatively unknown, even in Massachusetts. A Suffolk poll last month found that over 70% of Massachusetts voters didn't know who he was.
Warren addressed that anonymity up front in his campaign video, hearkening back to how Brown seemingly came out of nowhere to win the 2010 election.
"Many of you don't know me," Warren says. "I'm probably about as well known as Scott Brown was two years ago."

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Deficit Hawks Up To Old Tricks

Image by KCIvey via Flickr

Published on Tuesday, April 27, 2010 by The Guardian/UK
Deficit Reduction: Argument by Authority

by Dean Baker
The deficit hawks are going into high gear with their drive to cut social security and Medicare. President Obama's deficit commission is having a big public event on Tuesday in which many of the country's most prominent deficit hawks will tout the need to reduce the budget deficit. The next day, Wall Street investment banker Peter Peterson will be hosting a "summit on fiscal responsibility", which will feature more luminaries touting the need to get deficits under control.

What will be missing from both of these events is any serious debate on the extent of the deficit problem and its causes. These affairs are not about promoting a real exchange of views on issues like the future of social security, Medicare, and public support for education, research and infrastructure, the purpose of these events is to tell the public that everyone agrees, we have to cut the deficit. And, this means cutting social security and Medicare. This is argument by authority.

Many public debates in the United States take this form. The issue is not what is said, but rather who says it. A few years ago all the authorities said that there was no housing bubble. The large body of evidence showing that house prices had hugely diverged from the fundamentals did not matter when the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, the president's Council of Economic Advisers and other leading lights of the economic profession insisted that everything in the housing market was just fine.

Going further back to the mid-90s, many of this same group of deficit hawk luminaries tried to use argument by authority to cut social security. They came up with the story that the consumer price index (CPI) overstated the true rate of inflation. After workers retire, their social security benefits are indexed to the CPI. This crew (which included then Senator Alan Simpson, a co-chair of President Obama's commission, and Peter Peterson) argued that social security benefits should lag the CPI by one percentage point a year. In other words, if the CPI shows 3% inflation, then social security benefits will only rise by 2%.

That may seem a small cut, but it adds up over time. A worker retired for 10 years would have their benefits reduced by approximately 10%. A worker retired for 20 years would have their benefits cut by almost 20%.

To push this agenda, they put together a panel of the country's most prominent economists, all of whom blessed the claim that the CPI overstated the true rate of inflation by at least one percentage point. In addition to this panel, the social security cutters also pulled in other prominent economists, including Martin Feldstein, formerly President Reagan's top economist and the head of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The social security cutters were so successful in rounding up the big names that virtually no economists were prepared to publicly stand up and question their claims about the CPI. They had near free rein, running around the country with the "all the experts agree" line.

As events unfolded they were not able to get their cut in social security benefits. (Ted Kennedy and Dick Gephardt deserve big credit on this.) But what is really interesting for the current debate is what happened to the experts' claim on the CPI. There were some changes made to the CPI, but in the view of the expert panel, the major causes of the biases in the CPI were not fixed. They concluded that even after the changes the CPI still overstated the true rate of inflation by 0.8 percentage points annually.

If this claim is really true then it has enormous ramifications for our assessment of the economy. It means, for example, that incomes and wages are rising far more rapidly than the official data show. It means that people in the recent past were far poorer than is indicated by official statistics. If the claim about the CPI being overstated is true, then we would have to re-examine a vast amount of economic research that starts from the premise that the CPI is an accurate measure of inflation.

However, almost no economists have adjusted their research for a CPI's overstatement of inflation. In fact, even the members of the expert panel don't generally use a measure of inflation that adjusts for the alleged bias in the CPI. In other words, when they are not pushing cuts to social security, these economists act as though the CPI is an accurate measure of the rate of inflation. This could lead one to question these experts' integrity.

This history should give the public serious grounds for being suspicious about the latest efforts to cut social security and Medicare. A serious discussion of the deficit will show that in the short-term the deficit is not a problem and that the longer-term deficit problem is really a problem of a broken US healthcare system. The public should not allow the deficit hawks to derail a more serious discussion with their argument by authority.
© Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer ( www.conservativenannystate.org) and the more recently published Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of The Bubble Economy. He also has a blog, "Beat the Press," where he discusses the media's coverage of economic issues. You can find it at the American Prospect's web site.

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Alicia Brody Commentary on Scott Brown Victory

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A Sad, Sad Day for Massachusetts
Wow. I'm still stunned. Not to mention upset. I've been following some of the news coverage of what happened in last week's election, to fill the late Senator Edward Kennedy's seat in Congress, and I think that many of the people who voted for Scott Brown are soon going to realize they made a mistake. I predict that, within the next six months, "Don't blame me, I voted for Coakley" bumper stickers are going to start appearing on cars around the Bay State. If this one vote really means that the entire nation heads back down into the awful mess we were mired in under the prior administration, Massachusetts voters for Brown will feel even worse. I don't think it will, but it will be interesting to see where we go from here.

Based on anecdotal evidence, I think most Democrats and Independents who voted for Scott Brown did so because they wanted to kill this health care bill. That, in my opinion, is short sighted on two counts. First, killing this health care bill because of scary things that have been said, or because one doesn't like parts of it, doesn't fix our problem of 40,000,000 uninsured Americans. Once we have a health care bill in place, we can fix the parts of it that don't work or don't work as well as we would like. If we don't have a bill at all, we are going to have to start from scratch each time this debate comes up.

In addition, a lot of the statements that have been made about the bill (huge amounts coming out of people's paychecks, death panels, the government interfering with treatment) just aren't true. Second, think about all the other things that many Democrats and Independents in Massachusetts believe in: marriage equality, a woman's right to choose, affirmative action, environmental justice, waging peace, and corporate responsibility. Do you really think that Republican Senator Scott Brown will stand up for those issues? Scott Brown did not run as a moderate and was not, again based on anecdotal evidence, elected to help the U. S. Senate's political parties agree on a healthcare compromise. What makes anyone think that he will become a moderate now?

Martha Coakley didn't run the greatest campaign. She, like many politicians, stuck her foot in her mouth a few times. She probably did assume that, having won the Massachusetts Democratic Primary, she was destined to be seated in the Senate. She should not, however, have to shoulder the blame alone. The Democratic Party has not done a good job of educating the public about the healthcare bill. If they had, many citizens wouldn't have voted for Scott Brown just because they feared that legislation.

There is one thing I'm glad I haven't heard in the aftermath of this election. I was afraid that widespread voting irregularities would be revealed and, while I wouldn't mind seeing Scott Brown removed from office if it turned out that he cheated, I'm pretty sure he was elected fairly by voters who were trying to send a message to Washington but went about it the wrong way. My hope is that we learn from this and that the Democrats really change.

We the people need to hold our legislators accountable. Not for being human, but for breaking promises, breaking the law, and acting immorally (and I'm not referring to who's sleeping with whom---I'm talking about doing the right thing). I was reminded recently that I can't have all the power and none of the responsibility. I have to participate and make my voice heard on election day and beyond. I am responsible. We are responsible.

Flawed Bill Harms Health of Democratic Party

Image by Jeffrey Guterman via Flickr

Published on Monday, January 18, 2010 by Huffington Post
A Wake Up Call from Massachussetts

by Robert Kuttner

How could the health care issue have turned from a reform that was going to make Barack Obama ten feet tall into a poison pill for Democratic senators? Whether or not Martha Coakley squeaks through in Massachusetts on Tuesday, the health bill has already done incalculable political damage and will likely do more. Polls show that the public now opposes it by margins averaging ten to fifteen points, and widening. It is hard to know which will be the worse political defeat -- losing the bill and looking weak, or passing it and leaving it as a piñata for Republicans to attack between now and November.

The measure is so unpopular that Republican State Senator Scott Brown has built his entire surge against Coakley around his promise to be the 41st senator to block the bill -- this in Ted Kennedy's Massachusetts. He must be pretty confident that the bill has become politically radioactive, and he's right.

It has already brought down Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, a fighter for health care and other reforms far more progressive than President Obama's. Dorgan championed Americans' right to re-import cheaper prescription drugs from Canada, a popular provision that the White House blocked. Dorgan, who is one of the Senate's great populists, began the year more than twenty points ahead in the polls of his most likely challenger, North Dakota Governor John Hoeven. By the time he decided to call it a day, Dorgan was running more than twenty points behind. The difference was the health bill, which North Dakotans oppose by nearly two to one. The fact that Dorgan's own views were much better than the Administration's cut little ice. He was fatally associated with an unpopular bill.

So, how did Democrats get saddled with this bill? Begin with Rahm Emanuel. The White House chief of staff, who was once Bill Clinton's political director, drew three lessons from the defeat of Clinton-care. All three were wrong. First, get it done early (Clinton's task force had dithered.) Second, leave the details to Congress (Clinton had presented Congress with a fully-baked cake.) Third, don't get on the wrong side of the insurance and drug industries (The insurers' fictitious couple, Harry and Louise, had cleaned Clinton's clock.)

But as I wrote in Obama's Challenge, in August 2008, it would be a huge mistake to try to get health care done right out of the box. Obama first needed to get his sea-legs, and focus like a laser on economic recovery. If he got the economy back on track, he would then have earned the chops to undertake more difficult structural reforms like health care.

Deferring to the House and Senate was fine up to a point, but this was an issue where the president needed to lead as only presidents can -- in order to frame the debate and define the stakes.

Cutting a deal with the insurers and drug companies, who are not exactly candidates to win popularity contests, associated Obama with profoundly resented interest groups. This was exactly the wrong framing. This battle should have been the president and the people versus the interests. Instead more and more voters concluded that it was the president and the interests versus the people.

As policy, the interest-group strategy made it impossible to put on the table more fundamental and popular reforms, such as using Federal bargaining power to negotiate cheaper drug prices, or having a true public option like Medicare-for-all. Instead, a bill that served the drug and insurance industries was almost guaranteed to have unpopular core elements.

The politics got horribly muddled. By embracing a deal that required the government to come up with a trillion dollars of subsidy for the insurance industry, Obama was forced to pursue policies that were justifiably unpopular -- such as taxing premiums of people with decent insurance; or compelling people to buy policies that they often couldn't afford, or diverting money from Medicare. He managed to scare silly the single most satisfied clientele of our one island of efficient single-payer health insurance -- senior citizens -- and to alienate one of his most loyal constituencies, trade unionists.

The bill helped about two-thirds of America's uninsured, but did almost nothing for the 85 percent of Americans with insurance that is becoming more costly and unreliable by the day -- except frighten them into believing that what little they have is at increased risk of being taken away.

All of this made things easier for the right, and left people to take seriously even preposterous allegations such as the nonsense about death panels. It got so ass-backwards that the other day Ben Nelson, who successfully held out for anti-abortion language and a sweetheart deal for Nebraska's Medicaid as the price of his vote, found himself facing a wholesale voter backlash.

Nelson began running TV spots assuring Nebraska voters that the Obama health plan is "not run by the government." That's one hell of a slogan for a party that relies on democratically elected government to offset the insecurity, inequality and insanity generated by private commercial forces. If not-run-by-government is the Democrats' credo, why bother?

So we went from a politics in which government is necessary to provide secure health insurance -- because the private insurance industry skims off outrageous middlemen fees and discriminates against sick people -- to a politics in which Democrats, as a matter of survival, feel they have to apologize for government. Thank you, Rahm Emanuel.

The budget-obsessives around Obama also insisted that most of the bill not take effect until 2013, so that all of the scary stuff gets three years to fester before most people see any benefit. Call it political malpractice.

Finally, the health insurance battle sucked out all the oxygen. When Obama made time to work the phones personally, it wasn't to enact serious financial reform (this was left to the tender mercies of Tim Geithner) or to fight for a real jobs program (deficit hawks Peter Orszag and Larry Summers got to blunt that one). No -- Obama got on the phone and met with legislators to round up the last vote or two for a sketchy health reform that crowded out far more urgent issues.

As a resident of Massachusetts, in the last two days I've gotten robo calls from Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Bill Clinton, Martha Coakley, and Angela Menino, the wife of Boston's mayor -- everyone but the sainted Ted Kennedy. In Obama's call, he advised me that he needed Martha Coakley in the Senate, "because I'm fighting to curb the abuses of a health insurance industry that routinely denies care." Let's see, would that be the same insurance industry that Rahm was cutting inside deals with all spring and summer? The same insurance industry that spent tens of millions on TV spots backing Obama's bill as sensible reform?

If voters are wondering which side this guy is on, he has given them good reason.

Looking forward, one can imagine several possibilities. Suppose Coakley loses. Obama and the House leadership may then decide that their one shot to salvage health reform after all this effort is for the House to just pass the Senate-approved bill and send it to the president's desk. They can fix its deficiencies later. This is an easy parliamentary move. But the bill passed the House by only five votes; many House members are dead set against some of the more objectionable provisions of the Senate bill; a Coakley loss would make the bill that much more politically toxic; there will be Republican catcalls that Congress is using dubious means to pass a bill that has just been politically repudiated; and the House votes just may not be there this time.

Alternatively, let's say Coakley narrowly wins, the Democrats have a near death experience, and the House and Senate stop squabbling and pass the damned bill.

Either way, the Massachusetts surprise should be a wake-up call of the most fundamental kind. Obama needs to stop playing inside games with bankers and insurance lobbyists, and start being a fighter for regular Americans. Otherwise, he can kiss it all goodbye.
© 2010 Huffington Post

Robert Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect magazine, as well as a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the think tank Demos. He was a longtime columnist for Business Week, and continues to write columns in the Boston Globe. He is the author of Obama's Challenge and other books.