I've posted before about why I think Obama's style of progressive politics would him make not only a good president for the next four years but the best spokesperson for progressivism over the next decade.  In case you haven't seen it, there's been a pretty interesting conversation over at TAPPED, the blog of the American Prospect, about three presidential campaigns visiting Planned Parenthood today.

A lot of Obama's agenda is still being developed and rolled out piecemeal, but the TAPPED discussion provides some hints about where it's going and some background on Obama's policy director Karen Kornbluh, who has been a proponent of what Ezra Klein calls "family-based progressivism" and creating a new social insurance system relevant to the needs of today's families.

I'll just post a few of the highlights here, it's worth going over to read it.  Dana Goldstein summed up the day.  Elizabeth Edwards went first and has some great lines:

Representing her husband, Elizabeth Edwards was charming, glowing, funny, and very warmly-received. "If I wanted Rick Santorum's opinion" on my reproductive health choices, "I would call him up," she quipped. In what sounded like a dig at Hillary Clinton and her perceived radical left agenda, Elizabeth argued, "We need a pro-choice candidate who can be elected on a pro-choice platform."

With unfond memories of the post-Clinton-lunch hysterics yet fully to be repressed, I noted this piece The Byline Gender Gap by one of the Feministing girls.

Apparently, leading lefty mags offer a pretty dismal sex ratio amongst their writers: the Prospect manages 21:12 (2:1 is around the average ratio for those mags listed, not all lefty), but the Nation only gets to 26:4, despite being edited by a woman.

Hard to credit, really.

Over at the Prospect, they're declaring victory already!

Ezra Klein (who I'd not rated as a fire-eater) is not traduced by his copy editor with the hed and dek his piece was topped off with: Learned Aggressiveness/Regardless of the outcome tomorrow in Connecticut, the netroots have already won

When it was announced that a form of universal health coverage was coming to Massachusetts, quite a few people on our side of the aisle were excited by the news. After all, isn't universal coverage something progressives have been striving for for the better part of the last century? There were a few notable dissenters, however. John Sweeney of the AFL-CIO was perhaps the loudest, and while I think his criticism may have been a bit harsh, I agree with his general read of the situation.

This legislation leaves middle-income families dangling without a safety net, jeopardizes families who currently have employer-sponsored health care, and gives employers a free ride.

The bill protects workers with the lowest incomes, but punishes middle-income families. A typical family in which the husband and wife each earn a little more than $30,000 and who have two children would be forced to purchase health care, but would not be qualified for any help even if their employer does not offer any coverage or they can't afford their share of the premium. With the average employer-sponsored insurance premium costing more than $4,000 a year for single workers and close to $11,000 a year for working families, Massachusetts' new requirement will bankrupt many middle-class families.

Yesterday at The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner waded into the debate as well. He exhibits some mixed emotions, seeming to come down on the side of of those who would say this is not a great bill, but is perhaps the best we're going to get at the moment, even if it is based on "three dubious assumptions" made by Governor Mitt Romney. They are "that basic health insurance could be had for $2,400 a year," "that 'market reforms' could liberate hundreds of millions of wasted dollars to redirect to coverage," and "that health insurance is like auto insurance; government should just make everyone buy it." Economic writer that he is, Kuttner sums up the facts about the bill quite well.

Given these limitations, the bill that finally emerged is a small miracle. It cobbles together several pots of money -- Medicaid, the existing uncompensated-cost pool, projected savings from "market reform" and from sick people being treated by doctors rather than in emergency rooms. It adds $125 million a year in new state spending, and another $50-100 million from proceeds of a $295 per worker charge and other assessments to be paid by employers who fail to provide insurance and whose workers disproportionately tap the free care pool. Romney delicately calls this new tax a "fee." It is pitifully low, compared to the several thousand dollars per worker that insurance costs. It is far too feeble an incentive to induce any non-insuring employer to provide decent coverage, but it was all the business lobbyists and Romney would deign to accept.

The key criticism there is the same one made by the folks PLAN. The $295 fee per uninsured employee is an absurdly small stick with which to disincent employers from refusing to provide coverage to workers. When the pay for CEOs is averaging somewhere in the neighborhood of four hundred times that of workers, it's ridiculous that the corporate penalty for not insuring their workforce should be over three times less than the penalty imposed on the workers.

The need for universal health coverage is rapidly becoming an unavoidable fact of American life. There are a variety of ways this can be achieved and, to be sure, the Massachusetts plan is one of them. But as John Sweeney points out, it's straight out of "the Newt Gingrich playbook for health care reform." It's largely a 'market-based' approach to a problem that the market has consistently proven incapable of dealing with effectively. Worst of all, while it may not be so bad for those living in poverty or those whose employers wouldn't dream of taking away their health benefits, the hardest hit are the middle class. At the median income level, the bill for quality health insurance represents a huge chunk of the family budget.

The progressive alternative to this is some form of increased public involvement in healthcare, whether it's in the form of a single-payer system or a hybridized system of public subsidies and private add-on coverage. Point being, the Republicans are warming up their healthcare fixes, from the Massachusetts plan to Health Savings Accounts, and I'm not hearing enough from Democrats about alternative proposals. This is one debate we cannot afford to lose.

Easily the greatest New Jersey-by-way-of-Texas blogger on the scene, Thurman Hart has an interesting post up at The American Prospect's Midterm Madness blog about The Washington Times wading into the Senate race between Sen. Bob Menendez and Tom Kean Jr here in New Jersey. As Thurman notes, the Times claims that Kean Jr "has been helped by an unlikely Republican ally" in the New Jersey media, "which has been running stinging editorials and news stories" against Sen. Menendez. That would be interesting, if it were true.

Yet a review of the top-circulating Jersey paper, the Star-Ledger, reveals no negative news articles about Mr. Menendez at all. Furthermore, the junior senator has not even been the topic of an editorial in the last two weeks. The same goes for the New York Times. In fact, quite the contrary; both newspapers have run a number of articles that are unfavorable to Kean, and those articles and editorials critical of Menendez cited by the Washington Times actually date back to before he was appointed senator.

The Times further reports that Kean, Jr. has enjoyed a "slight edge" in "most early polls." Yet the truth is that the polls have been fairly evenly split -- with the lead switching back and forth.

To take his critique of the Moonie Times story one step further, it's notable that the two polls they cite don't really support their pro-Kean Jr claims either. The first set of numbers they offer up is from a Quinnipiac University poll that gave Sen. Menendez a lead of 40% to 36%, with a 2.9% margin of error. Remind me again, Times, how this equates to "a virtual tie," as you claim? The other poll is from Strategic Vision, which has Kean Jr leading by 32% to 30%, and a 3% MOE.  This, of course, could pretty accurately be called "a virtual tie," but it seems more or less to be an outlier. The most recent polls -- Rasmussen, which gives Kean Jr the lead, and Zogby Interactive, which Menendez leads -- are also quite tight, but ought to be taken with a grain of salt as the former is an automated telephone poll and the latter is an internet poll of people who've expressly said they'd like to be polled. Most other polls, it should be noted, have been much kinder to Menendez.

My point here, as I believe was Thurman's, is not to spin the polls one way or the other. Rather, it's to point out that this is a classic Moonie Times smear disguised as news. Not really shocking, but still worth calling attention to. The rightist smear machine is already in full gear, working to shape conventional wisdom in every state of the union, no matter the reality on the ground. The anti-Menendez "stinging editorials and news stories" are simply a figment of the rightist imaginations of Tom Kean Jr and his smear artist allies at the Times.

Rob Anderson of The New Republic has posted a response to Matt's story about what he saw as progressive blogger-bashing in defense of Ben Domenech. It's an interesting self-defense, and I think he deserves some credit for logging on to respond directly, so allow me to front page some of his comments.

My article is about conservatives in the media and what type of conservatives one boss at one blue-state media outlet is looking to hire to be his in-house right-winger (and, of course, how that boss isn't just an extreme-liberal outlier). The world needs less right-wing blowhard pundits. For that to happen, the media gatekeepers have to accept that there are conservative pundits out there who aren't shrill and who can write intelligently and politely (and who don't personally insult writers because of what they write...uh-hem).

I can see where he's coming from, but I still agree with Matt in criticizing the original article. Rob's key point seems to be that "blue-state elites" are simply out of touch with real "red America." I don't buy that, but possibly for a different reason than Matt. The use of the "blue state," "red state" constructs is completely off. Rob seems too eager to accept that we're living in a nation cartoonishly divided along red/blue lines. The red Americans are real, honest Americans, while blue Americans are snooty intellectual elites. This has become conventional wisdom in the Beltway and beyond, and it's as personally insulting as it is misguided.

Rob seems to miss the point of The American Prospect list of blue state/red state statistics he cites. The point wasn't that blue staters are actually better than red staters. Rather, it was to point out the folly of taking for granted the idea that folks in the red states aren't quite so "morally elite" as the conventional wisdom would have us believe. Oddly enough, only a few days ago, another article ran in the print edition of TNR that also worked at chipping away some of the CW. Jonathan Chait's latest 'Washington Diarist' column takes on this very topic.

In yet another nervous liberal attempt to placate the red-state hordes, The Washington Post recently started a blog called Red America. The blog's author, displaying a typical hair-trigger sensitivity to blue-state elitism, used his first entry to flay his Post editors for their unfamiliarity with the 1984 pro-gun action flick Red Dawn. He also proceeded to declare, "Red America's citizens are the political majority." Except that the blue states accounted for more than half the population in 2000. Conservatives cope with this inconvenient fact by redefining blue states as a few urban enclaves and making a fetish of the political map, with its misleadingly large, depopulated red states. To take a typical example, a 2004 postelection Wall Street Journal column by Daniel Henninger announced triumphantly, "[I]f you adjust the map's colors for votes by county ... even the blue states turn mostly red. Pennsylvania is blue, but, between blue Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, every county in the state is red. California, except for the coastline, is almost entirely red." This is a persuasive point if you believe in the principle of one acre, one vote.

Tom Wolfe recently took this analysis a step further, declaring that the blue-state elites are not part of the United States of America. "They literally do not set foot in the United States. We live in New York in one of the two parenthesis states. They're usually called blue states--they're not blue states, the states on the coast. They're parenthesis states--the entire country lives in between." I wonder if Wolfe and his fellow travelers realize how much their mau-mauing of blue staters is, well, Maoist. Mao, like the contemporary American right, saw his country as divided between the great virtuous, patriotic interior and the decadent, traitorous coastal cities. Intellectuals--or, in the Maoist parlance, the "stinking ninth category," a phrase so pungent and catchy I can't believe Bill O'Reilly hasn't picked it up yet--were forcibly relocated from the cosmopolitan cities to the countryside to "learn from the poor and lower middle peasants."

He also points out the absurdist logic of painting culture in red America as good and culture in blue America as bad, as so many Republican pundits enjoy doing. He calls it "an orgy of reverse snobbery." Again though, even Chait falls prey to accepting some ridiculous premises. 'Red America' was a "nervous liberal attempt to placate the red-state hordes." Right, there's that liberal media meme again. Domenech's mention of Red Dawn was a result of his "hair-trigger sensitivity to blue-state elitism." Damn those blue state elites! But the hordes hounding the Post for "balance" weren't red staters at all. They're Republican Beltway elites who are just as out of touch with rural America as rural America is with urban America.

The problem is not that the progressive minority are out of touch with the conservative majority, as the blue and red characterizations make it seem. The problem as I see it is that, inside of the insular Washington, DC punditocracy, people have forgotten about the rest of America. To them, it's just a map. Everyone in the red part of the map thinks, feels, and believes X and everyone in the blue thinks, feels, and believes Y. They forget that 51% to 49% isn't a landslide. They forget that the largest majority is the colorless group who feel so left out of the process that they don't even vote. They certainly care about issues like Iraq and healthcare and the economy and the environment, but they've been bombarded with so many messages about nonsense identity politics that they no longer know which end is up. I'm not the first person to say it, but we need to stop talking in terms of red and blue. It's a false dichotomy.

I have to admit that I thought the recent dust-up between Garance Franke-Ruta of The American Prospect and Matt was a bit silly. At the end of the day, we're ultimately going to be on the same side of the issues 99.9% of the time. Garance believes in the FEC regulating the blogs, and we obviously don't. For that, Matt said that she harbored an "elitist regulation fetish" that served as "a great example of groupthink within the press corps." I don't really disagree, but she took umbrage, lashing out at Matt in a way that I found to be weirdly personal.

Either way, while I've disagreed with her throughout this whole thing, I never took it too seriously. She's entitled to her opinion, even if I think she's wrong. But now it seems that she's decided to wage something of a war on blogs, from the Prospect's own blog, no less.

Today, The New York Times editorial board offers readers greater transparency about who its writers and editors are than does Daily Kos, where designated site co-authors like georgia10 and SusanG use handles but not their names, and do not post easily locatable biographies, or MyDD, which provides very little information about its authors, one of whom is currently employed by a likely 2008 presidential candidate.

Uh... what exactly are we being accused of here? I think it's utterly bizarre for Garance to include MyDD on her target list, as we've made it a policy for front-pagers to use their real full names. I am Scott Shields. Jonathan Singer is Jonathan Singer. And so on. When she refers to someone being "currently employed by a likely 2008 presidential candidate," she's talking about Jerome, who hasn't been writing here full-time and has always made clear the fact that he's working for Mark Warner. So what's the problem?

Further, it's downright weird for Garance to go after SusanG for not being open about her identity when Garance herself has interviewed Susan and freely published information about her. I mean, if you're going to go after people for blogging anonymously, go after people who are actually blogging anonymously.

I just don't get what her problem is here. As Matt noted originally, she never makes it clear why the blogs should be regulated. She seems to think that there's value in transparency, which is okay by me, but then why not FEC regulation of internet forums? And if blatantly partisan messages are the problem, hell, why not regulate magazines like the Prospect? What we're doing here is engaging in free speech.

Rather than turning the heat up on this conversation, I'd like Garance to come back down to Earth and continue this discussion without the attacks and innuendo. I can't help but read her post and think that this looks like and old media/new media catfight that is really non-productive. And I'm not sure what kind of answer would satisfy her questions. No campaigns pay me to write anything. She already seems to think that as a blogger (as opposed to a legitimate journalist like herself), I'm fundamentally dishonest, so will she believe me? Who knows.

So Garance... what do you want to know that Google and Wikipedia couldn't tell you already?