Some interesting data from Andrew Gelman and Daniel Lee. First the familiar finding that support for marriage equality is strongly correlated with being young:

Second, who tells pollsters that they know someone who’s gay:

Now one assumes that America’s senior citizens are actually mistaken about this and have, in fact, been acquainted with a gay person or two over the course of their lives. But they probably didn’t realize it.

At any rate, there are interesting age-related patterns in both questions but they look to be very different patterns. The under-30 cohort’s strong support for marriage equality, in particular, doesn’t seem to stem from any notably greater familiarity with gay individuals.

It doesn’t have specific bearing on the viability of using the budget reconciliation process to enact substantial health care reform, but this bit of history from Pete Davis helps us understand the context:

When the Budget Act was enacted in 1974, reconciliation was envisioned as the final accounting at the end of the fiscal year containing spending cuts and tax increases to bring the budget deficit back to the level approved in the original budget resolution. The idea was to circumvent the normal impediments, like the Senate’s filibusters and never ending amendments, to achieve deficit reduction. The first reconciliation bill at the end of 1980 fit that conception, as tiny as it was, but the next reconciliation bill, President Reagan’s 1981 tax cut used reconciliation to enact the largest tax cut in U.S. history. Former GOP Congressman and OMB Director David Stockman’s brain child, using reconciliation to expand the deficit with massive tax cuts to take away the federal government’s credit card, worked like a charm legislatively, but spending took off anyway, particularly for defense, leaving record high peacetime deficits that persisted until 1997.

The point is not to praise Reagan or to condemn him, but simply to note that by and large that 1981 reconciliation bill was “the Reagan Revolution.” And since that time there just haven’t been any comparable huge structural shifts in the direction of US domestic policy. It’s not really clear that modern conditions leave any other feasible route to such legislation until such time as some Senate majority decides to change the filibuster rule.

David Ignatius wants Barack Obama to forget about the uninsured and focus on changing the health care delivery system:

If liberals really want to show they are serious, they should begin with our existing single-payer behemoths, Medicare and Medicaid. Cortese argues that the White House should mandate that, within three years, these programs will shift from the current fee-for-service approach to a system that pays for value — that is, for delivering low-cost, high-quality care. If doctors performed unnecessary tests that ballooned costs, their compensation would be reduced. And doctors would be compensated by regional formulas, to encourage them to work cooperatively in local networks where they could all make more money by practicing better medicine. [...]

This “pay for value” approach would amount to a cultural revolution in American health care. It would take our bloated system and make it cheaper and better. The adjustments wouldn’t be easy, and the medical profession would balk unless respected doctors such as Cortese led the way.

I think there’s a lot of logic to this point of view. At the same time, the implication that the reason Barack Obama isn’t doing this is because “liberals” aren’t “serious” could really stand for some more scrutiny. Similarly, the idea that the medical profession might under any circumstances not balk at this is a bit nuts. No professional guild ever embraces the idea that they should be forced to completely change the way they do business. Anyone who proposed doing this would be savaged by medical professionals who would convince seniors that it amounted to a drastic reduction in their standard of care.

Indeed, Ignatius might have noticed that the health reform bills pending before congress already do take small-but-important steps in this direction and it’s already freaking seniors out. Nevertheless, allegedly unserious liberals are happy to vote for such bills. It’s moderate and conservative legislators who are balking.

This phrase is getting kicked around a lot lately, I’m sort of in search of an operational definition. Fortunately, here’s Richard Haas:

Wars of necessity must meet two tests. They involve, first, vital national interests and, second, a lack of viable alternatives to the use of military force to protect those interests. World War II was a war of necessity, as were the Korean War and the Persian Gulf war.

If that’s what people mean by “war of necessity” then I think we can probably do without the phrase. “Necessary” is a very strong claim and the phrase, defined Haas-style, seems like a way to try to smuggle more heft than the situation actually warrants.

I’ll happily grant Korea as a great example of a “good war.” You have a country friendly to the United States becoming the victim of unprovoked aggression from an unfriendly country. Pretty much everyone believes that South Korea has a right to fight back in its own defense. And it’s only a very small leap from a belief in self-defense to a belief in the idea of “collective self-defense” whereby countries who are friendly to South Korea should help it out in its hour of need. That’s how Harry Truman saw it and that’s how I see it decades later.

Nevertheless, the Korean War doesn’t fit any intuitive concept of a given course of action being “necessary” for the United States. It’s not like once the DPRK’s tanks hit Seoul they’re just a hop, skip, and a jump away from San Francisco. “Necessary” implies that failure to fight would lead to national extinction. Of course the Korean War was a necessary war for South Korea. But the wisdom and morality of American involvement in the war is basically parasitic on that fact. It’s like mounting a “defense of others” argument in a criminal case. For the United States, which is conveniently located on the North American continent adjacent to two friendly and relatively weak countries, it’s going to be very hard for anything to meet a strict necessity test.

I’ve been reading Steven Walt (here and here) and Peter Bergen (here) on the question of Afghanistan and “safe havens.” I think that what the debate needs is some kind of comparative perspective.

Suppose the Taliban manages to secure stable control over a sizable swathe of Afghanistan’s Pashto belt. Then suppose a terrorist detonates a bomb in a western city and kills hundreds of people. Where do we think that terrorist is more likely to have come from: Kandahar or Rotterdam? My money’s on Rotterdam. Or Paris or London or Hamburg. In part this is just common sense; a radicalized Dutch Muslim is already in the West making it a relatively simple logistical matter to detonate a bomb in Amsterdam. And it’s even fairly simple to fly from Western Europe to New York or Washington—you don’t need a visa, etc. Afghanistan is on the other side of the planet.

Which isn’t to say we should invade Europe instead. But merely that we need to keep the balance of risks in perspective.