TheTradingReport

Absolutely nothing has changed. [Parker Griffith] signed up in 2008 to run to be a member of Nancy Pelosi’s congressional majority. And he is! The dominant thinking at the House leadership was that members from conservative districts should be given a lot of leeway to vote “no” on key legislative priorities. And they have been! Griffith’s voted against ARRA, against ACES, against health care, and even against financial regulatory reform and nobody’s broken his knees over it.

Color me confused as to why Barack Obama would tell the Washington Post he didn’t campaign on a public option when he fairly clearly did…

The American system, by promoting an overwhelming bias toward the status quo, encourages politicians to engage in “cheap talk” promises. There’s a very robust debate happening on the Internet right now as to whether or not Barack Obama really supported a public option. That’s an absurd kind of debate to be having. In a normal country, a government that wants to move to the center has to move to the center, and a government that wants to do what its activist base wants has to actually do what its activist base wants. US administrations get to exist in a kind of indeterminant state that confuses the public. And not because the public is dumb—even people who follow these issues professionally have difficulty figuring out what’s what.