In the gang

Via Steve Benen, Mike Enzi outlines his approach to the “Gang of Six” health reform negotiations:

“If I hadn’t been involved in this process as long as I have and to the depth as I have, you would already have national health care,” he said.

“Someone has to be at the table asking questions,” Enzi said, showing a flash of passion.

But Max Baucus still thinks this Grassley/Enzi process is going to deliver a bill….

David Petraeus makes a joke:

Come to think of it, in fact another bedrock element of the Marine Corps is unquestionably having the best recruiting ads on television. But this concept is not just an advertisement. The marines’ sense of toughness permeates the Corps’ lore as well as its reality. To recall an illustrative story, a soldier is trudging through the muck in the midst of a downpour with a 60-pound rucksack on his back. This is tough, he thinks to himself. Just ahead of him trudges an Army ranger with an 80-pound pack on his back. This is really tough, he thinks. And ahead of him is a Marine with a 90-pound pack on, and he thinks to himself, I love how tough this is. Then, of course, 30,000 feet above them an Air Force pilot flips aside his ponytail. Now — I’m sorry. I don’t know how that got in there — I know they haven’t had ponytails in a year or two — and looks down at them through his cockpit as he flies over. Boy, he radios his wingman, it must be tough down there.

As Robert Farley says, this kind of thing is a pretty typical ground forces joke but “the AFA whining reveals a certain insecurity.”

It’s worth observing that this issue is going to become much more severe in the years to come. Air Force officers are already sensitive to the accusation that their service is less physically rigorous or risky than other forms of combat. And of course there’s some real truth to the accusation. Looked at rationally, this is the appeal of air power and always has been. Why try to blow something up at relatively close range on the ground from a base that’s located inside the war zone when you can blow it up from the relative safety of the sky, and then have the vehicle retreat to a far-off base where it can be serviced by people who are at relatively little risk of being killed?

The trouble is that advanced technological developments are driving this logic even further forward through the use of unmanned aerial vehicles. From a rational point of view, UAVs piloted from afar from operators far from the field of battle are a huge win. Since there’s no pilot in the UAV, the cost of having one shot down is relatively low, so it’s viable to use cheaper planes and just resolve to build more if you need them. And since the pilots are safe, you never have to worry about losing your best-trained veterans in combat. Pilotless planes can also do aerial moves that might kill a human being.

At the same time, as you see in Petraeus’ joke and the reaction to it, the military—like all effective military organizations I’m familiar with—is an institutional culture that puts a great deal of stock on honor, courage, and difficult physical work. A service that consists of guys sitting in cubicles playing video games is going to have trouble holding its head high amidst a warrior ethos. And consequently, the Air Force is tending to resist the technological imperative to go more remote. Ultimately, however, that resistance is doomed and it’s not really clear what will come of it.

Apparently Ted Kennedy, in addition to his other accomplishments, was the first member of congress to have a website:

Netscape!

Ezra Klein reminds us of how a real political party operates:

The more plausible argument is that Grassley fears his fellow Republican senators. I’m hearing that Grassley is getting reamed out in meetings with his colleagues. The yelling is loud enough that staffers in adjacent offices have heard snippets. But the real threat isn’t the yelling of his colleagues. It’s their capacity to deny Grassley his next job. Ruth Marcus hints at this in her column on Chuck Grassley today, but it’s worth explaining in a bit more detail.

This is the final year that Grassley is eligible to serve as ranking member — the most powerful minority member, and, if Republicans retake the Senate, the chairman — of the Senate Finance Committee. His hope is to move over as ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, or failing that, the Budget Committee. But for that, he needs the support of his fellow Republicans. And if he undercuts them on health-care reform, they will yank that support. It’s much the same play they ran against Arlen Specter a couple of years back, threatening to deny him his chairmanship of — again — the Judiciary Committee. It worked then, and there’s no reason to think it won’t work now.

I’ve emphasized the fact that progressives have very little leverage over key stakeholders like Kent Conrad and Max Baucus. That, however, is because whereas the Senate Republican caucus operates like a political party, complete with rules designed to hold senior members accountable to the rank-and-file and thus to the party’s policy objectives, the Senate Democratic caucus operates like a somewhat boring social club. Committee chairs don’t face term limits and assignments are handed out in blind order of seniority.

I’ve mostly encouraged people to focus their ire on Senate moderates rather than the White House, but this is one of the few areas in which the White House could be making a difference. Surely they can find at least an ally or two up on the Hill to float the notion that Democrats need to adopt Republican-style rules about this. When both parties operated in a discipline-free manner, lack of discipline may have worked. But the current asymmetry in the organization of the parties basically means that progressives do legislative fights with one hand tied behind our backs.