• In praise of Obama's boring transition.

• Nominate-designate-leekees.

• This time around, health care revamp has wings.

• Failing home economics.

• Primary care doctors in short supply.

I was pretty hard on the idea of Tom Vilsack as Agricultural Secretary. Former governor of the corn state, and longtime supporter of corn subsidies, did not strike me as the appropriate resume. But Tom Philpott, Grist's food writer, says:

Even in this era of "change," it seems like you generally need to have proven your fealty to GMOs and corn-based ethanol to win serious consideration as USDA chief. Former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack, who briefly vied for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2007, is emerging as a front-runner. Vilsack hews tightly to the biotech-industry party line; and he hotly promoted corn-based ethanol while governor. On the other hand, none other than Grist's own David Roberts declared his energy plan during last year's Democratic primaries the "ballsiest and most detailed any candidate from either party has offered." And Ferd Hoefner of the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition told me that Big Ag commodity groups had mounted a backroom campaign against Vilsack's bid for USDA chief. Evidently, the former governor is more of a champion of conservation programs than they can tolerate.

There are certainly more egregious names on the short list than Vilsack. Last week, Pennsylvania ag secretary Dennis Wolff emerged as a contender. Wolff is notorious for unilaterally trying to prevent his state's dairy farmers for labeling their milk rBGH-free. Former Texas congressman and Big Ag lobbyist Charles Stenholm is another profoundly depressing name.

That's not the same as saying Vilsack is a great choice, but it may indeed be that he's better than some of the alternatives. And as some correspondents noted, he is a serious policy wonk, and if his food subsidy policy has been weak, his energy policy has been notably forward-looking, and so it's possible he could come around. One thing you're seeing here is the immaturity of the food movement. Until the last year or two, most folks who specialized in agriculture did it from the perspective of industry, or culinary concerns, or GMO worries. Only as global warming has become more salient has food policy emerged as a broader issue, the sort that could grab the interest of young politicians and agency administrators. But it's all new enough that we don't really know who those folks are, and so it's hard for people to find good candidates to rally around. The fact that there was a petition going around to name Michael Pollan Ag Secretary sort of proves the point: Right now, the movement has ideas and advocates, but few converts who are credible on the cabinet level.

That said, there are some other names out there. Philpott continues:

One name I'm intrigued by is John Boyd, president of the National Black Farmers Association. Boyd helped lead the fight to hold USDA accountable for its long history of stiffing black farmers; his nomination is being championed by the Congressional Black Caucus. Virginia-based Boyd himself runs a relatively small-scale farm; seems like his position as a USDA outsider might lead him to champion the interests of small farmers in an agency that's long been beholden to large industrial operations.

I'm a fan of non-traditional picks for offices like this one, if only because they don't have quite the same legacy of longtime ties to industry. That doesn't mean Boyd would be a good choice, but he's an interesting candidate.

This is a sidenote to a very good Ross Douthat post on a somewhat related topic, but he worries that on education policy, "the most interesting arguments are between liberal reformers and liberal interest groups, with conservatives sitting on the sideline talking about vouchers and occasionally praising the Michelle Rhees and Corey Bookers of the world." True enough, but I'm not sure it's the sort of thing Republicans can really fix. Education is a fundamentally local issue. And the most consequential battles in education policy are being waged at the point of maximum dysfunction: Urban schools. And urban schools tend to be in urban centers, most of which are incredibly hostile to Republicans. Rhee is in DC and Booker in Newark, and the demographics of both cities make continued Democratic a near-certainty.

Conversely, on the national level, which is friendlier to Republicans, it was Bush who pushed through the most significant education reform in recent decades, and it's Democrats who are worrying that they've lost momentum on the topic.

Matt Miller, a longtime deficit hawk who cops to reading Peter Peterson's deficit-scare books on his honeymoon, says that the facts have changed, and so too much the deficit hawks. What we need, he says, is a "New Deficit Indifference," and admission that, "for the economy's sake, we're all deficit-addicted Keynesians now." Amen.

Responding to an earlier post, Alyssa Rosenberg notes that judging from the biographies of the folks staffing Obama's "Technology, Innovation, and Government Reform" team, we're really just looking at a technology policy team. And nothing wrong with that: Technology is important, and using it to radically enhance government transparency is an incredibly worthy goal. But it's also a potentially missed opportunity:

This would have been a great place to get a serious management person on board, someone with deep, deep experience with the civilian and political workforces. It didn't happen, and that's a lost opportunity. Maybe these folks have really innovative government reform ideas. Maybe they're ethics experts. Maybe they have some cutting-edge private sector models they think would work in government that we're all going to think is a game-changer. I hope so. But least in Obama’s choice of people to run this team, government reform is just a tacked-on phrase.

Alyssa knows a lot more about this than I do, but the state of the federal workforce is a pretty serious problem, and there's much that could be done to improve it. When people talk about this, my sense is they're generally talking on the agency level, but from a political perspective, it's also crucial to improve the basic experience people have with government: The DMV and the IRS and the postal service. If folks are too trust government to do big things, they need to be impressed when they find government doing little things. That said, I'm really going on stereotype here. The DMV might be a hellhole, but I've always found the postal service almost comically impressive.

Generally I frown on this sort of commentary, but I think it's illuminating to note that the stocks of the Big Three automakers tumbled following John Dingell's ejection from the Energy and Commerce chairmanship.

Word is Janet Napolitano, the impressive governor of Arizona, will be heading up the Department of Homeland Security. This would be a good moment to read Dana's profile of Napolitano. And her post on Napolitano and Homeland Security. This means that a Republican will probably take Arizona's governorship, but as Matt points out, "she’s getting out as governor of Arizona while the going is still good. Being a governor of any state in 2009 is going to be ugly. It’s going to be all about cutting spending and raising taxes, while dealing with increased demand for public assistance and in all likelihood rising crime rates. Arizona was a major real estate bubble state, so it’s going to be especially unfun." Though that said, DHS is really, really screwed up. Napolitano's got a big job ahead of her.

If my metric is "large media institutions making outlandish claims abut my virtues," then it's been a pretty good day or two. But as Matt Yglesias says, it's a bit unnerving to realize just how much of my career is the product of starting a blog during a very narrow window that spanned from 2001 to early-2003. I always say that if I had done the same work on my school paper, no one would have noticed, but it's actually worse than that: A week after starting my first blog, I was rejected from City on a Hill press, Santa Cruz's student newspaper. And it's entirely possible that if I hadn't been rejected from City on a Hill, I would have put a lot of effort into that, and let my little vanity blog expire. Now, of course, it's harder to break into blogging, even as the talent and sophistication of the contenders has rocketed. Dylan Matthews, for instance, is smarter and more informed than I am now, and he's 18. And not 18 in the sense that 18 stands in to dramatize some low number. He's just actually 18. It's terrifying.

All of which is to say, luck is important, and more people should be Rawlsians.

Harold Meyerson on Henry Waxman:

Waxman is a legislative genius. Most of his legislative accomplishments came before the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress, when he chaired the health and environment subcommittee of Energy and Commerce. Progressive legislating has been pretty much off the table since then, which is why he shifted focus to Congress's chief investigative committee. Those who have served in Congress for fewer than 14 years weren't around when Waxman greatly strengthened the Clean Air Act and authored the legislation that expanded Medicaid coverage to the poorest children (enlisting Republican abortion-foe Henry Hyde as his partner in the effort). They didn't see Waxman steer to passage the bills that gave rise to the generic drug industry, required uniform nutrition labels on food, heightened standards of care at nursing homes, created screening programs for breast and cervical cancer, provided health care for people with HIV/AIDS, or expanded Medicaid coverage to the working poor.

In the midst of the Reagan era's cutbacks, Waxman expanded the number of working poor eligible for Medicaid a stunning 24 times. He consistently won key Republican backing for these regulatory and programmatic expansions. In fact, the Wall Street Journal's editorial page ran a series of articles complaining of "the Waxman state," in which, horror of horrors, businesses were compelled to meet environmental and consumer protection standards.

Some of Waxman's achievements were to keep bad things from happening. For virtually the entire 1980s, Waxman blocked Dingell and the Reagan administration from weakening auto emission standards. At one point, he blocked a key vote on a bill to debilitate the Clean Air Act by introducing 600 amendments, which he had wheeled into the room in shopping carts. Waxman also led the war on secondhand cigarette smoke. He publicized an obscure EPA report that established secondhand smoke as a carcinogen, uncovered the onetime Philip Morris lab director who had determined that nicotine was addictive, and publicly grilled tobacco company CEOs about their failure to share that fact with the public.

For a more in-depth look at Waxman in the direct aftermath of his heyday, see, uh, Harold Meyerson's 1994 article profiling The Lion in Winter.

I gave Robert Zirkelbach, AHIP's director of Strategic Communications, a call to talk through the proposal his organization released today and get more specifics on their stance towards community rating, public plans, and affordability questions. Our chat is transcribed below. For my earlier posts on the AHIP proposal, see here and here.

Ezra: What compelled you to release this statement?

AHIP: This summer, we launched our "campaign for the American solution, which is a national grassroots and educational initiative to build support for healthcare reform. We travelled the country hosting round-table discussions with Americans from all walks of life to hear their healthcare stories, to hear their priorities for healthcare reform, and receive feedback on the proposals that we put forth. And, one of the things that we heard everywhere we went was that individuals are concerned about lack of coverage due to preexisting conditions; concern that if they lost their job, they wouldn't be able to get coverage.

And so our board of directors responded by coming out with the proposal that we announced yesterday, which is too guarantee that health plans provide coverage for preexisting conditions in conjunction with mandate that individuals keep and maintain healthcare coverage. So, this was done in response to what we heard from the American people when we travelled the country throughout the summer.

Ezra: And let me make sure I understand this proposal, as currently formed. So somebody could come onto the individual market, and they could say, "listen, I lost my job recently; I lost my health insurance; about four years ago I was diagnosed with breast cancer; it's in remission." This proposal, as far as I understand, does not have anything saying that the care would be affordable, just that it couldn't be straight-forwardly denied. Right?

AHIP: Well, affordability has to be a top priority. I mean, we need to ensure that there are adequate tax credits for moderate-income folks. There needs to be a strong safety net for the lower-income individuals. And, we have to tackle the cost-drivers that are driving up the cost coverage. We need to find a way to make sure that healthcare coverage is affordable for everybody.

Ezra: But, so without something more concrete about that in this proposal, I guess my question is, what are we actually looking at here? Because it seems to me that the question that you related from the folks you spoke to in the Campaign for an American Solution -- what they were saying is, "I'm worried that I'm not going to be able to access healthcare coverage, not just that I won't be able to have insurance sold to me at some price, but that price will be something I can't afford." And we have to solve that.

AHIP: Well, the affordability issue is up there with ... you know we heard questions, concerns about affordability just as much as we heard concerns about preexisting conditions. Both of those issues have to be a priority. And we have been ... all of this is in the context of what we've been doing for two years and what we've said about affordability, and how to bring down costs. And, we're gonna have more to say, and as you well know, there's a lot of specific policy issues that need to be worked out with policy makers and stakeholders to find out how best to do this. But when we came out yesterday, we said, "the best way to get everybody into the healthcare system is to have a guarantee issue coupled with an individual mandate." And that is a big step forward from where we had been previously.

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For a long time, Australia has been harboring a secret shame: Almost alone among developed nations, they don't have a paid maternity leave policy. It's absurd. What sort of wealthy country can't guarantee its citizens paid time off to care for their newborn infant? What does such an oversight say about the values of that country? Kevin Rudd, Australia's recently elected prime minister, swore to end the sorry state of affairs, but his plans for paid leave have been buffeted by the recession, which is costing the government billions in revenue. No matter, says Rudd. Maternity leave is "not negotiable."

So come this time next year, Australia will join the ranks of the decent and have itself a paid maternity leave policy. Then there'll be only one developed nation so inescapably callous, so unconcerned with families, that they lack paid leave legislation. Us.

Image used under a CC license from Aldo Risolvo.

I'm rather excited for Justin Fox's upcoming book, The Myth of the Rational Market. The problem is, it doesn't have a subtitle. And no one will buy a book that's too lazy to develop a subtitle. So go help Justin think one up. I'm sort of partial to Here Be Idiots: The Myth of the Rational Market, myself. Or maybe some play on "a fool and his money."

It's not often that food writing and education wonkery collide. But Ben Miller did a good job of it yesterday, when he pulled out "cohort default rates" -- a metric that "measures how many student loan borrowers from a graduating class default on their debt within two years of graduation" -- to figure out if culinary school was worth the cost. CDRs are useful for this because lone default tends to signal that the borrower hasn't found a job. And if a professional education, like culinary school, isn't catapulting you into work, then it's not doing its job.

On average, the CRD is about 5 percent. Miller found that for culinary schools, it's a bit higher: 6 percent. But that's not bad. And if you attend the Culinary Institute of America, which is the flagship culinary school, it's only 2 percent. But below that, the default rate rises, and fairly few of these schools participate in federal loan programs, so it's probably not that good of an idea. The other thing you'd want to test is the outcomes for aspirational chefs who decide to eschew formal training and go straight to a kitchen. If the outcomes are no worse, but you spend a few years being paid money rather than paying someone else money, that's a good deal. It's somewhat analogous to journalism, where you can go to J School, but few in the industry would recommend it, and almost no one considers it a good deal. Better to actually do the work, as that's what will get you hired.

I don't have a lot to say about Michael Lewis's essay on the End of the Wall Street Boom, as it's one of those articles that's Too Good To Blog About. Suffice to say, it's the best, and certainly the most comprehensible, of the recent pieces written on the subject. But I did want to amplify this point:

Now, obviously, Meredith Whitney didn’t sink Wall Street. She just expressed most clearly and loudly a view that was, in retrospect, far more seditious to the financial order than, say, Eliot Spitzer’s campaign against Wall Street corruption. If mere scandal could have destroyed the big Wall Street investment banks, they’d have vanished long ago. This woman wasn’t saying that Wall Street bankers were corrupt. She was saying they were stupid. These people whose job it was to allocate capital apparently didn’t even know how to manage their own.

What's come clear in all of the post-crash reporting is how many people simply didn't know what they were doing. And that's no surprise. UCLA and Santa Cruz didn't send a lot of kids to investment banking, but it seems to have been a rite of passage if you went to an Ivy. When you're 13, you have your Bar Mitzvah, and when you're 22, you have your first Merrill Lynch job offer. And these folks all had the cultural markers of People We Should Trust. They had the right degrees and lots of money and lots of prestige. The signifiers were all correctly aligned. And yet these Masters of the Universe turned out to have been massively stupid and ignorant and irresponsible.

A lot of forces contributed to the crisis, but what Lewis's clarifies is that you really can't underestimate the role of the Cult of Finance in not only convincing the country to trust the finance sector, but in getting the finance sector to trust itself. Since everyone was diving into mortgage-backed securities, it had to have been safe for everyone else to follow. And if you didn't, either because you didn't understand the instruments or because you didn't think them worthwhile, you seemed either an idiot or a crank. In theory, the market should correct for this: The possibility of making incredible amounts of money off of everyone else's folly should have been incentive enough to create more contrarian traders. But money isn't as powerful an incentive as you might wish. Social pressures are fierce. People are comfortable in the herd. Lewis's article focuses on Steve Eisman, who did bet against the market. But it's pretty clear that he could only do that because he paired the correct analysis and the correct experience with the correct personality type: Aggressively anti-social and crankish. You can't trust that there will be a lot of those folks around, and if that's the case, you definitely can't trust that people will be brave enough to not be stupid.

Secret Twitter sources say that Henry Waxman -- who, according to my Google image search, is shorter than Arianne Huffington by a startling margin -- just beat John Dingell for chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee by 15 votes. If you care about action on global warming, that's a very big deal indeed. And frankly, a bit unexpected. Dingell is an old lion in Congress. He's got a lot of friends and has done a lot of people favors. His loss isn't personal. Rather, it's evidence that Democrats are serious enough about climate change to want the relevant committee to be something more than an arm of Detroit.

And though this is a direct victory for Waxman, it's a quiet triumph for Pelosi. Without her tacit support, Waxman's campaign would have quietly died. Meanwhile, few in the House will forget that she tried to solve this problem months ago by letting Dingell remain at Energy and Commerce and creating a new Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. Dingell fought her efforts, and managed to neuter the new committee. It has nothing more than an advisory role. But it's now clear that what looked like a win for Dingell was actually prelude to a much larger loss. He not only loses jurisdiction over global warming, but over health care and most everything else. And on some level, he's been publicly humiliated. Recalcitrant chairmen are going to be far more afraid of crossing Pelosi this afternoon than they were this morning.

And finally, Waxman's chief of staff, Phil Schiliro, was named last week as Barack Obamas director of legislative affairs. Energy and Commerce is probably the most important committee for Obama's agenda. With Schiliro in the White House and Waxman holding the chairmanship, you're likely to see an intense and easy cooperation between the two branches.

As a follow-up to the post below, let me repeat an old point: Liberals pay too much attention to the insurance industry. I have a couple of hypotheses on why this is. The malign elements of the insurers' business model -- namely, denying specific people with sympathetic stories concrete care -- are more forthrightly cruel than anything mustered up by the other players. The insurance industry was responsible for the Harry and Louise ads, which became iconic after the defeat of the Clinton plan. The private insurance industry is the sector of the system that it's easiest to see how we live without.

But when you're dealing with health care reform, the insurance industry is actually one of the easiest to buy off, or evade entirely. They're much more fearful than the other sectors: You need doctors because everyone likes them, and you need hospitals because you don't want to bleed on the carpet, and you need pharmaceutical companies because you need drugs. You don't really need insurers. It's just that they're here now, and very hard to get rid of. Relying on the status quo bias of the electorate is a pretty good strategy, but it's by no means perfect, particularly not if we entered into some period of crisis. And it's all the worse for insurers, who are incredibly unpopular, and much more so now, post-managed care, than they were in the early-90s. It's entirely possible that some level of insurer opposition could be turned into a public relations coup for a reform plan.

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The big news of the day is that the insurance industry has offered a deal: In return for a mandate in which every American must purchase health care coverage, they will stop refusing to sell insurance to those with preexisting conditions. Some deal. They're basically saying that if we legislate that every American must purchase insurance coverage, they will sell insurance coverage, at some price, to every American. Their "concession" here is something called "guaranteed issue," and it's an important step, but not a sufficient one. The question is not whether they'll offer to sell coverage at all, but at what price? Selling insurance products that no one can afford may mean you're not technically denying people access to insurance, but it doesn't guarantee accessibility, which is a necessary precondition for a universal system. For that, you need "community rating," which would force insurers to offer coverage at the same price to everyone, spreading risk equally and ensuring that coverage is no less affordable for the sick than the well. So I e-mailed Robert Zirkelbach, AHIP's spokesman, to ask if this proposal had a community rating provision:

the proposal we issued yesterday was for guarantee issue combined with an individual mandate.

We also need to take steps to ensure coverage is affordable for all. There needs to be an adequate safety net and we should provide tax credits to low and moderate income workers. We also have to address the key medical cost-drivers that drive up the cost of coverage.

In other words, no. At least not yet.

That said, this discussion is an important step forward. The current composition of the insurance market inevitably means that one of two things will happen: Either we will screw them, or they will screw us. Health insurance is fundamentally a collision of information. We know whether or not we're sick. The insurers do not. If the game stopped there, the economically rational act would be to wait until we were sick to purchase health care coverage. But then the insurance pool would be solely composed of the ill (and, arguably, the stupid), and it would inaffordable for everyone, and unprofitable for the insurers, and that would be the end of that.

But insurers are perfectly aware of this. So they run the opposite play: They gather data on whether or not we're sick, or likely to get sick, and then use that to refuse to sell us care. The individual health insurance market, fundamentally, is incoherent: Insurers try to deny coverage to those who want it and to sell to those who don't. That's because the most profitable customer for an insurer is one that never gets sick, and the least profitable is one who falls very ill. But that's not how you want your health insurance market to work. We want sick people to get care. That's the point.

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• Is culinary school worth it (surprisingly wonky!)?

• CAP defends its crappy lunches.

• The poetry of the Congressional Budget Office.

• The Audacity of Patience.

Dana Goldstein says Linda Darling-Hammond, who's running Obama's education policy team, is a "conservative" choice:

Not ideologically conservative, but rather, conservative in terms of what it says about Obama's plans for education. Groups like Democrats for Education Reform -- which favor charter schools and merit pay -- have been hoping for Obama to embrace their agenda. And indeed, early in the primaries, Obama was booed at a teachers' union event for saying he supported merit pay. But since he clinched the nomination, Obama's statements on education have been more circumspect. The appointment of Darling-Hammond, a teacher quality expert who opposes merit pay and is more critical than supportive of NCLB, signals that Obama wishes to avoid a fight with the unions. He'll spend his political capital on energy and health care instead.

Brad DeLong's article on Ben Bernanke, and the Republic of the Central Banker, is really, really good:

Now go further back in history to 1844, and pick up the story that leads to Bernanke's current power and eminence. The place is London. The occasion is the debate in Britain's House of Commons over the terms on which the charter of the Bank of England -- the government's bank -- is to be renewed. The British government was then the largest economic institution the world had ever seen, and Britain, the fastest-growing economy ever seen: It was the age of the original Industrial Revolution, with the first large-scale automated factories, the first steamships, the first net of railroads, and the first time that any national economy had developed the chronic disease that we call the industrial business cycle.

Before the 19th century the causes of times of economic distress were obvious: war, famine, or disease, or a state bankruptcy -- a government that decided that it was simply not going to pay its debts. You could see what was going wrong and what had caused it.

The industrial business cycle was different -- and mysterious. Factories would be shut but not because of a lack of raw materials or of workers who wanted the jobs or of people who needed the products. Construction workers would be idle but not because the country had enough railroads or buildings or ports. People would be much poorer than they had been a couple of years before but not because an invading army had burned their cities or a plague of locusts had eaten their crops.

DeLong goes on to give some fascinating history, and then continues:

But just because central banking is independent of politics does not mean that politics is independent of central banking. "You may not be interested in the dialectic," Leon Trotsky once said, "but the dialectic is interested in you." That we now have independent central banks run by technocratic philosopher-princes like Ben Bernanke, and that we have these central banks because elected legislators and executive politicians do not want to challenge their authority or change their charters, has powerful implications for the freedom of action and choices that presidents and elected governments can make. Let me give three examples:

You should go read the examples.

Rahm Emanuel sez:

He stressed that the new administration would "throw long and deep," taking advantage of the economic crisis to push wholesale changes in health care, taxes, financial re-regulation and energy. "The American people in two successive elections have voted for change, and change cannot be allowed to die on the doorsteps of Washington," Mr. Emanuel said.

Of course, the key is not what they want to achieve, but what they can achieve. The clear theme of Obama's transition team, White House staff decisions, and leaked cabinet appointments has been experience. Rahm Emanuel. Tom Daschle. Eric Holder. John Podesta. Hillary Clinton. Jim Messina. Pete Rouse. Phil Chiliro. And on, and on, and on. There's not much "change" here. Rather, the emphasis is on folks who know how Washington works, with the clear operating theory being that they'll know how to get things done. That's a different conception of "change" then presidents who come in and bring a lot of new people, which is what Clinton did (though, to be sure, Clinton didn't have a successful recent administration he could draw on for talent). But it's very similar to what Obama did in the primary.

And give him his due: It worked. David Plouffe was a former Gephardt staffer. So was Bill Burton. Axelrod did some DCCC work in 2006 and served as national spokesman for John Edwards in 2004. After watching Gephardt and Edwards' 2004 runs, did anyone expect that their former staffers could execute something like Obama's campaign? Seemed unlikely. But the idea was that they had incredible technical competence that just needed to be matched by moment, candidate, and money. And that turned out to be correct.

The transition argument seems to be something similar: The longtime Democratic operatives and wonks are really quite good. Paired with this president, and this moment, and this congressional majority, they can go much further than they did under the Clinton administration. It's hard to say whether that'll prove right or wrong. But deciding to shorten the executive learning curve as much as possible and appoint folks with the experience to harness a transient opportunity isn't an implausible strategic decision. The staff will carry out the president's agenda. What's being sought out, then, is not brilliant new ideas for what that agenda should look like, but indisputable technical competence. If the e-mails I'm getting from Obama supporters are representative, however, it's nevertheless not the approach most of them expected.

It's really hard to overstate the role that "Free Lunch" plays in getting underpaid journalists to cover your event. And the better the lunch, the more journalists who show up. And as Spencer Ackerman writes, all journalists know that the American Enterprise Institute has, by far, the best lunches. And breakfasts. This is also how they attract young talent. If you go to AEI's internship web site, literally the second bullet point, before "conferences and lectures" or "career talks," is "Complimentary breakfast and lunch prepared by AEI’s own in-house gourmet chef, served in our dining room." They know their audience.

I'm not going to argue with Janet Reno's contention that Eric Holder is perfectly qualified for the attorney general slot, but even so, it's hard for me to believe that Obama couldn't find anyone for the post who wasn't the workhorse behind Bill Clinton's pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich. Holder, obviously, was just doing his job, but appearances matter in this town. Republicans will have no problem attacking the choice, and your average voter will be rather confused as to why Obama made it. Whatever Holder's merits -- and I grant that they are many -- it's a nomination that recalls the worst of the Clinton era, and it's not clear why that needed to be done.

Via Brian Beutler, looks like Henry Waxman won an important vote today, netting the Steering and Policy Committee's endorsement to supplant John Dingell as chair of Energy and Commerce on a 25-22 vote. The full Democratic Caucus will vote tomorrow, and it's still unclear how that will fall, but this is a good sign for Waxman, and evidence that even if Dingell survives, he'll be well aware of the fragility of his position.

I didn't include these two questions in the original interview transcript because I wanted to use them for a later article I was thinking of writing on the reconciliation process -- the process by which a procedural rule can be invoked to shut down the filibuster and pass policies with budgetary implications by a simple majority -- and health care. I never quite got around to it. But they're worth putting up now:

Ezra Klein: Many of these ideas, some similar, some not, have fallen by the wayside. Why would this get to 60? Or 50, depending on whether it can go to budget reconciliation?

Tom Daschle: This would only succeed if we learn lessons from the past. And there are so many lessons to learn. You know, one of the lessons of the past that we should learn is we gotta broaden the coalition as much as possible. I think our potential for broadening the coalition this time is really great. I think there’s a lot more interest in it. Secondly, I think we’ve got to realize that there are not one but three categories of health problems: access, quality and cost. All three have to be dealt with, and all three have different constituencies. And so we have to address the constituencies where the political problems lie. With the doctors, it’s going to be malpractice. With patients, it should be quality and cost. With businesses, it’s going to be cost. So we’ve got to go right to the heart of what is the core concern for these core constituencies and try to address it. Third, we’ve got to have a lot more transparency. We have to break the myth, we have to put opponents of change on the defensive. In the past, it’s been proponents of change who’ve been on the defensive. We have to turn the tables. And as I said, procedurally, we have to use reconciliation to bring the threshold from 60 down to 50 votes.

EK: Why do you think you can use reconciliation when it was nixed by Robert Byrd and others in 1993?

TD: Two reasons. First, our Republican friends have done us a favor in one respect. By using reconciliation in the past for all kinds of public policy issues, including the passage of ANWR,, that has been a White House as well as a Republican majority attitude that reconciliation is an appropriate vehicle. They’d be hard-pressed to argue now that it isn’t. The second is more important. There are huge fiscal consequences for what we do on health care, it’s now a fifth of our economy. It’s 2.3 trillion dollars. We spend more on health care than we do on almost any other thing in the country. So how we address health care, what we spend on medicare, what we spend on Medicaid, if we’re going to keep those programs, how we look at overall expenditures, clearly is clearly going to be affected by this.

Daschle made similar comments at a recent appearance with Jonathan Cohn. The idea here is not that reconciliation is where you start, but that you make clear it's where you're willing to end. As I've said before, Congress is weird in that though the minority might believe that killing a bill is their first best option, their second best option is not voting ineffectually against it. It's good to oppose a failure, but not a success. Their second best option is often to vote for the bill and get their priorities included, or ensure their constituencies are cared for. So if it's clear that the Democrats can pass the legislation -- that they can go to reconciliation and ram it through on a party line vote -- it becomes less likely that they'll need to use reconciliation. The threat of 50 votes can give you an outcome of 70 votes, because it changes the incentive structure. The threat might well be enough. And with Daschle having signaled his willingness to use reconciliation and Max Baucus having told me that he's willing to use reconciliation, the threat is certainly live.

(For those really interested in budget reconciliation, the other major player is Kent Conrad, chair of the Budget Committee. He'll set many of the rules around reconciliation, and to my knowledge, he's not said much publicly on the subject.)

The good folks over at Tapped have the names of all of Obama's policy team leaders today, plus their bios. Check it out. I'll say that it's interesting that "Immigration" and "Technology, Innovation, and Government Reform" got their own policy teams, while things like Taxes, Iraq, and so forth got folded into the larger groups. The general Democratic tendency in transitions is to bow to a lot of constituencies and have 37 working groups so everyone feels represented. That's not what you're seeing here.

CNN is reporting that Tom Daschle will not only be Health and Human Services Secretary, but also health reform czar under the Obama administration. This is huge news, and the clearest evidence yet that Obama means to pursue comprehensive health reform. You don't tap the former Senate Majority Leader to run your health care bureaucracy. That's not his skill set. You tap him to get your health care plan through Congress. You tap him because he understands the parliamentary tricks and has a deep knowledge of the ideologies and incentives of the relevant players. You tap him because you understand that health care reform runs through the Senate. And he accepts because he has been assured that you mean to attempt health care reform.

Compare the choice of Daschle to Clinton's decision to task Hillary Clinton and Ira Magaziner with health care reform. Neither Clinton nor Magaziner had any relevant experience in Washington, either with the health care bureaucracy or with the legislative branch. They did not have deep relationships on the Hill or a nuanced understanding of the players. Hillary Clinton had spent the last few decades in Arkansas. Magaziner had helped Rhode Island build a new economic plan. Both of them were, fundamentally, policy wonks. And so they built a process that was, in essence, by wonks and for wonks. The resulting bill might have passed a meeting of the Brookings Institution's Executive Committee. It was an elegant and innovative policy idea. But it was not a robust piece of legislation. It was not responsive to the concerns of the public, and it was not built to win votes in Congress. All of this is explained at greater length in the lessons of 1994.

The choice of Daschle suggests that the Obama team has learned those lessons well. Magaziner and Clinton signaled that the Clinton administration viewed health care as a policy problem. For them, the key to success was the genius of the policy team. Daschle signals that the Obama administration view health care as a political problem. The key to success is votes. And Daschle is a guy whose last job was lining up votes. He is also a guy who has recently written a book on health reform. Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis should now be on every health wonk's reading list. Among other things, his book argues that reform must be comprehensive, as we can no longer afford incrementalism or inaction, and that the real problem with health care reform is, well, Congress. I interviewed Daschle on his book here.

Because I'm a very interesting person, I spent last night watching a panel on the collapse of the financial sector. One thing you heard a lot -- from some folks on the left as well as some folks on the right -- is that we shouldn't overlearn the lessons of this crisis. It almost certainly won't happen again. Regulations meant to protect against its recurrence would be like putting a lock on the barn doors after the horses have escaped. And, in any case, the markets will self-correct for these particular failures. Mortgage-backed securities won't be a profitable product ever again.

There's a surface logic to all of that. But it forgets that human being are very stupid, and very forgetful. Forty years ago, for instance, we got involved in an invasion of a small country whose government we didn't like and whose people did not desire our presence. Big mistake, we all agreed. Let's not do that again. A few decades later, the Soviet Union did the same thing. Big mistake, we laughed. Good thing we'll never do that again. And now here we are.

That said, it's probably true that this exact crisis won't happen again. It won't be a subprime crisis, for instance, And mortgage-backed securities won't be at fault. Subtle regulations meant to prevent a precise recurrence are a very stupid idea. But there are bigger, more basic errors that sit beneath the specific financial instruments. Namely, long periods of expansion mixed with the natural incentives of the financial sector erode risk aversion. But however much risk the bankers felt they could assume, they were only able to actually assume that risk because of a regulatory regime that allowed absurd levels of leverage. Conversely, the commercial banks, who had saner capital requirements, not only survived, but enjoyed a windfall, as they purchased a slew of insolvent investment banks at firesale prices.

So though this might not be a moment for subtle, clever regulations, it may well be a time for bigger, dumber regulations. If folks are indeed correct that the market would never again permit such absurd levels of risk, then why worry about such laws? Banks will never bump against their constraints anyway. But the thing about adding a lock to the barn door after the horses have left is that eventually the horses will be caught and returned to the barn. And eventually, the farmhand will forget to fear their escape. If the door now has an automatic lock, they won't escape. But if you're just trusting the farmhand's memory, you're in rather more trouble. That's not to say there aren't problems with various regulatory schemes or that large changes don't require serious consideration. But as Brad DeLong likes to say, there's government failure and there's market failure, and in any given case, you have to decide which is worse. Right now, we're watching market failure. And it's pretty goddamn bad.

Looks like Mark Begich has won the election, and Senator Ted Stevens will be retiring to spend more time with his seven felony convictions.

Max Baucus keeps saying all the right things. From his opening statements at today's "health care and the economy" hearing:

In Washington, people often present choices between alternatives — between option A and option B. And it is often the case that the right choice between option A and option B . . . is “Yes.” The right choice is often to reject that false choice. We often can, in LBJ’s famous phrase, “walk and chew gum at the same time.”

We are clearly facing a significant recession. That economic challenge commands a significant investment of government resources. Some say that we will have to choose between fixing the economy and enacting comprehensive health reform.

I reject that false choice. I say, we can and should do both. We can walk and chew gum at the same time. Not only can we, but we have to.

Health care reform is not a distraction from addressing the economy. Health care reform is central to restoring America’s economy.

The costs of inaction, both in human terms and financial terms, are greater than the costs of reform.

I think five or six of your questions were about Joe Lieberman, so let's talk it out. Marceau, I think, frames the issue correctly:

So, now the prevailing wisdom is this; now that Lieberman has gotten to keep his coveted seat, he will be more amenable to voting with the democrat caucus, and be supportive of President Obama when it comes to key policy legislation. So - what evidence is there to support this, and what then is to be done when Lieberman "votes his concience" and sides with the GOP on health care, bankruptcy, Iraq, etc.etc.?

Here's what you need to say about Lieberman: His heterodoxies have remained contained. Unlike John McCain, who conveyed his post-2000 disgust with the Republican Party by sponsoring a lot of liberal legislation on essentially random issues, Lieberman's fight with the Democrats has not strayed from foreign policy. For instance: His 2007 AFL-CIO voting record was 84 percent. That's exactly the same as his lifetime AFL-CIO voting record. In the most recent Congress, his score from the League of Conservation was 96 percent (which is actually a recent career high). Lieberman is, arguably, an extremely reliable Democratic vote. The exception, of course, is foreign policy, where he's an extremely reliable Republican vote.

But he's not really needed on foreign policy votes. The president has broad autonomy on strategic questions. The recent votes to force Bush to withdraw from Iraq were Congress trying to impose its will on the executive. Obama can withdraw almost without congressional involvement, unless they decide to muster 60 votes to stop him, which is not going to happen. So Lieberman's heterodoxies are now almost irrelevant from a legislative perspective.

That said, the operational effect of stripping Lieberman would have been that he becomes a Republican, and caucuses with them. It would have meant his incentives shift to curry favor with Republican voters. It would have, in other words, made him a fairly unreliable Democratic vote on domestic issues. The question became, then, does the satisfaction of retribution outweigh the value of one more vote in an extremely close Senate? It's hard to say that it does. And now, of course, Lieberman owes his safety to Obama, and is certainly aware that there's a healthy constituency that would love to strip him of his seat, or his chairmanship. So he'll presumably go out of his way to be helpful. That's not to say it's a satisfying outcome to see him escape all consequences for his actions in recent years. But this isn't about satisfaction. It's about votes.