Greg Sanders

Obamas tactic for reducing effectiveness of obstructionism

2010-02-05T17:04:33-05:00

President Obama has finally laid out a vision for the last mile on health care. In short, big public debate then vote. I was initially quite worried about the alternate strategy after reading about it in the Washington Post. However, I think the Post story actually does get it wrong, I don’t see any indication that this is an alternate strategy, it does seem to be consistent with passing the bill via reconciliation in the likely event that there’s no more Republican support. Jon Chait takes a stab at decoding the strategy:

I think Obama sees the perception that the process is broken -- that it's backroom deals and "ignoring the will of the people" -- to be the biggest impediment to passage of the bill. So he's proposing a remedy to that perception.

The most important part is what Obama says should happen first: Democrats should settle their differences and work out a final bill. That's crucial. Then he wants to sit down with both parties, and health care experts, and walk through the details in a methodical way. I'd guess he's imagining a process that might look a little like his back-and-forth with House Republicans -- they present him with wild claims about a government takeover, and he calmly responds…

He's [also] saying that Congress can't just ignore the issue and let it die in quiet. It needs to have a vote, relatively soon, and make a decision, rather than decide by default to keep the status quo.

Jon Cohn thinks that this manages to put the ball in the Republican’s courts, although he also notes that Obama will still need to help getting to a final bill. A friend, [Matt Lewis]m talking me down after the Post article similarly thought it [might] mean they’d have to defend the status quo. I think the inclusion of experts here is key, if the Republicans don’t show up the Democrats can discuss this with experts, that is to say that outright boycott is not as rewarding of a strategy.

An interesting feature of this strategy is that it in some ways riskier if the Republicans do participate. As Krugman has pointed out, the bill is a three legged stool and thus not especially agile. This is especially true because the reconciliation mechanism can only be used for budgetary matters thus any major regulatory style changes would make the bill again vulnerable to a filibuster. However, I think that gets to the feature of a public debate that wasn’t present in the Baucus gang of six affair, participating in the negotiations is high visibility and requires either effectively defending your ideas or being willing to make concessions.

On the whole, I’m fairly displeased with where we are and do feel on the whole let down by the leadership over the past year. This sort of approach might be a great idea for starting to go after the filibuster if used in conjunction with a popular set of proposals that weren’t complex and interlinked, like banking reforms. However, as Kevin Drum discusses, the Republicans are demonstrating a fair amount of hubris and are more likely to repeat their government shutdown mistakes than to actually participate in governing. I think Obama may just have managed to devise an approach where pure obstruction is an inferior tactical choice versus participation. It’s actually quite clever, hopefully not too clever.

On the whole, I’ve also been a bit moody over the past month as a result of this fight. I don’t like it. Maybe I should pick up meditation or something. Might be a downside of not blogging as much, Twitter really doesn’t cut it in terms of letting ideas air out.

Could actually see the patterns in snowflakes today

2010-01-30T13:17:55-05:00

Kate's glove

Sunset 2010 Jan 23

2010-01-23T18:08:03-05:00

Greg Sanders

Health Care Reform back on track?

2010-01-20T23:28:29-05:00

Ezra Klein summarizes:

Barney Frank walked back his unexpected comment that health care was dead now that Democrats only had 59 seats in the Senate. "I have realized that my statement last night was more pessimistic than is called for," he said, admitting that he had been "perhaps overreacting." Later on, he told Brian Beutler [God was I glad to see that come down on his twitter feed] that "I'm strongly inclined to vote for the thing."

News that Barack Obama had told ABC that he wanted a pared-down bill led to instant and aggressive push back from the White House. As they pointed out, he didn't actually say that in the interview (it was a reporter's interpretation), and they released their own statement saying his preferences remain constant (though the statement is notably vague). Sources also say that the White House is letting the immediate shock of Brown's election settle, and that the president will be significantly more involved in the days to come.

So the plan is to have the House pass the Senate version, and then to make any changes via the reconciliation process. Reconciliation is not capable of doing things like banning discrimination based on pre-existing conditions, but it can adjust budgetary matters such as subsidies and the exact dimensions of the excise tax on Cadillac insurance plans. It is by no means clear that we’ll win this, but it looks like we’re actually going to fight.

So not sure where the rally started, but someone’s done a good job calming the horses. Seems like the House leadership was keeping their powder dry until they had a chance to get everyone on the same page, we’ll see if the Speaker makes a statement soon. All that said, today was literally terrifying, those acting as the face of the party panicked because we went from 60 seats in the Senate to 59. To shorten a Kevin Drum round-up: this was disgusting. All that said, even though the best shot is the Senate version improved by reconciliation, this still has the potential to be the greatest liberal victory of all the years I’ve been alive, let alone the ones I’ve been politically aware.

Don’t choke.

Don't want to see it out my windowsill

2010-01-20T17:42:35-05:00

Well, review the House Democratic reaction, it appears that the one way likely to pass anything comprehensive, just passing the Senate Bill in the House, isn't happening (see precedent for the pass the bill/ping pong strategy). It bloody well should, John Cohn explains why, but should and will are different things.

There are worthwhile things that could be done by reconciliation. Here's Ezra Klein:

Democrats could scrap the legislation and start over in the reconciliation process. But not to re-create the whole bill. If you go that route, you admit the whole thing seemed too opaque and complex and compromised. You also admit the limitations of the reconciliation process. So you make it real simple: Medicare buy-in between 50 and 65. Medicaid expands up to 200 percent of poverty with the federal government funding the whole of the expansion. Revenue comes from a surtax on the wealthy.

And that's it. No cost controls. No delivery-system reforms. Nothing that makes the bill long or complex or unfamiliar. Medicare buy-in had more than 51 votes as recently as a month ago. The Medicaid change is simply a larger version of what's already passed both chambers. This bill would be shorter than a Danielle Steel novel. It could take effect before the 2012 election.

If they can pull that off, I'll take it. There's also the option to cut a deal with Republicans by toning things down. That said, a more productive use of our time would be to clap hard and say we do believe in fairies and pull off a resurrection. As for me, I believe in incentives, I'm not sure how the Republicans have managed to achieve absolute loyalty, but I do know that the case for it is now even stronger than it was before. Obstruction is easy, stops governing agenda, and isn't punished by voters. They're going to keep pulling that move until we learn to play hardball, and if Rep. Barney Frank is rolling over, we haven't yet learned to play hardball.

In any event, I think I've just got to accept that the best we're going to get is reconciliation and even our House leadership is unwilling or unable to whip members into shape. Bleak unmitigated despair seems to be the appropriate response for now. Then we toughen up, drop our expectations, revise our strategies, and figure out what to go for next. My personal thought is that defeating the filibuster probably needs to take its place at the top of liberal's long-term agendas. We can't just wait for the stars to align and national crises to occur. But for now, I need a break. And a drink.

Ways to help Haiti (for twitter readers, txt HAITI to 90999 to donate $10 to Red Cross)

2010-01-13T23:33:38-05:00

This disaster seems especially unfair. To have an earthquake hit in an area that doesn’t have reason to be particularly prepared for it and to strike so close to a major population center like Port-au-Prince seems particularly devastating. Haiti is particularly poor, even compared to other Caribbean nations, but in some ways things had been improving of late. I do tend to favor disaster aid as it tends to be one of the most effective form of aid, because recovery and dealing with temporary problems is easier than development. There is no question that this is devastating for Haiti, but that doesn’t mean despair and official government aid are the only way to go.

Via @MontgomeryCoMD a list of organizations accepting donations [I went with Doctors Without Borders as I’ve read a lot about them (aka MSF) in grad school [Also Lutheran World Relief, which from past research I know to have low overhead]]:

[Lutheran World Relief - community.elca.org
Catholic Relief Services – www.crs.org
American Jewish World Service – www.ajws.org
United States Fund for UNICEF – www.unicefusa.org
Interaction Coalition – www.interaction.org/crisis-list/earthquake-haiti
American Red Cross – www.RedCross.org
Doctors Without Borders – www.doctorswithoutborders.org
International Medical Corps – www.imcworldwide.org
For other information on how to help earthquake victims, go to the Department of State’s website at www.state.gov.

Via Ackerman a list from whatisleft there’s a good number of options, I’m including the phone ones for convenience, I don’t know these as well aside from the Red Cross. :

1) Text "HAITI" to "90999" to donate $10 to the Red Cross … (Update: I am told this only works in the US)

2) Text "Yele" to 501501 to donate $5 to Yele Haiti … Check out more on Yele Haiti. [I don’t know that group as well, but they’re apparently a longstanding foundation formed by Wyclef Jean to help Haiti]

Beyond the links, Chris Sacca covers a few ways to learn more about Haiti.

Photo from Globovision used under a Creative Commons License

Finished Avatar [the Last Airbender], good satisfying ending

2010-01-11T08:19:27-05:00

Season 2 will probably be my favorite, but 3 was quite good. Overall, I think Avatar is now my favorite coming of age story and in my top 5 overall series, animated or not. It gets there through a wide range of strong characters, a beautiful well-realized world, and terrific comedy.

There are definite problems with the casting of the film, that said, season 2 does present one way to partially ameliorate it since there’s a new lead to cast.

Uncharted 2 and moving beyond quick time events

2010-01-09T21:53:34-05:00

I’ve finished Uncharted 2 and loved it (bias note, I’m friends with one of the game designers, but mine is hardly a unique opinion). Since the game has been out for a while and has been well reviewed I’m going to skip the consumer advising part of this post and instead give a link-fest: great, if familiar, characterization and writing; an example of the potential of authored, as opposed to self-authored, narrative in game; and polish that gets so many little things right. Instead I want to focus on the “Active Cinematic Experience,” to use Naughty Dog’s term. Brainy Gamer Michael Abbott mentioned an interest in doing a post on that topic, but if he did I’m not finding it (it may have come up in the podcasts; I listened to some of the Uncharted 2-relevant ones before playing the game). I don’t have his theater training, but I hope to have an interesting thing or two to say. I don’t know to what extent this was true of Uncharted 1; I just got my PS3 (Thanks Kate’s parents!) so I haven’t yet played the original and thus can’t compare them.

I think the main innovation of Uncharted 2 is keeping the player in control over the vast majority of set pieces without resorting much to quick time events. In the past days of gaming, many of the awesome things your character did occurred in cut-scenes or didn’t use the main mechanics of the game. One of the most common solutions was quick time events, basically making cut scenes more interactive by requiring the player to place a certain button when it flashed up on the scene. In the past year I’ve played Shenmue 2, a series known for originating the term, and in a given cut scene you may have to duck and weave around a crowded market, disarm someone as they draw a knife on you, or make a difficult jump to a distant rooftop. I enjoyed what I played of Shenmue 2, but I got stuck in part because of the reliance on quick time events. I’m bad at brawlers and the game gave me relatively little practice with the core fighting system. In some ways, quick time events were an advance over just watching a video, but as game play goes they’re pretty thin gruel.

Uncharted 2 doesn’t completely avoid quick time events. They show in a few of the boss and special enemy fights when you go to fisticuffs, but they rely on them far less than say, God of War, in combat. More important, the game has a variety of crazy sequences: fights on trains, gun fights on a truck convoy, escaping a collapsing building, etc. that allow for full control while doing things that would be cut scenes in other games. I think the hand-to-hand combat is also an example of this phenomenon.

Against unaware enemies you can pull off visually entertaining stealth attacks with a single square button press. In other cases you mash the square button to attack an enemy but need the triangle button to break out of grabs. The game helps you some, more with weaker enemies, by slowing down when you need to break out of a pin but this doesn’t break the organic feel in the same way that quick time events do.

So how did they pull this off?

I haven’t read too much about the making of the game, although I did watch the one bonus tech and game play video (which did include a quick shot of my friend). So, the following are mostly guesses, but I think they’re educated ones:

Level design: Uncharted 2 is a highly linear game. The player’s reward for such linearity is good writing, 12-15 hours of play without a lot of fat, and a great deal of designer attention to each level. Scripted events abound with ledges regularly collapsing under Drake and the like without punishing the player (I’ve seen some complaints in comments about excessive collapses; there’s a point there, but I think different, not less, scripting is the likely solution).

Good use of predictable and context-sensitive controls: Here I’m primarily thinking the jump controls and to a lesser extent the melee combat. Mitch Krpata describes the jump mechanics:

Nathan does a lot of climbing, swinging, and shimmying, [as a side note, I thought the swinging was the weakest mechanical element] which always has the potential to be a bear. Some games have done this stuff better than others.Although a lot of people liked the magnetic approach of inFamous, I thought it was intrusive. Uncharted 2 has a little bit of auto-assist too, but it's much more subtle. Nathan will turn and grab a ledge if you walk off it, but not if you run or jump off. Instead of being sucked toward grabbable objects in mid-air, most of Nathan's jumps are directed in such a way that you can't help but move in the right direction to begin with. This is the advantage of the linear, scripted approach over a more open world. [Emphasis mine]

The ubiquity of the locomotion elements of the game play make the context sensitivity feel natural. I like being able to grapple over cover in Gears of War and Resident Evil 4&5, but that feature came up intermittently. In my view, the weakest component of this was the swinging. Maneuvering on something you could also swing from was hard, but otherwise the controls were the opposite of finicky.

The Jump button is fairly smart which helps keeps pointless jumping puzzle deaths to a minimum. Opportunities to jump are also fairly ubiquitous so the smart controls feel less restricting than in say, Gears of War and the later Resident Evil games, where you can leap over cover but it’s obviously tied to certain terrain elements which makes it feel less like a game play element. Triangle key for pin break does a pretty good job of giving visual clues, though apparently not such a good job that it was trusted for all boss fights, so there’s still some work to do there. I’m sure some hard core jumping puzzle types don’t like the lack of control, but the context sensitivity allows for much faster game play which introduces challenges in a different form. At the same time, the controls aren’t confused by introducing a bunch of mini-games or alternate uses: e.g. there’s a lot of vehicles but driving is never a significant part of game play.

Intuitiveness of new situations: Drake’s habit of talking to himself and his chatty allies also go a long way to helping the player figure out what to do even in a frantic situation. A great checkpoint system that starts you pointed in the right direction helps a lot if you don’t figure out something the first time. If anything the checkpoint system seemed slightly too forgiving. I’d sometimes manage to die immediately on entering a new area and then re-spawn as if I’d gracefully crossed the finish line. I suspect that ample play testing was also part of this process. I could tell a couple of sequences were pretty heavily railroaded (see: one shooting puzzle in a jumping level midgame) probably because players just weren’t getting it.

Outright trickery: I’m sure that some of this level design is out and out trickery; I’ve heard that accounts for much of what people loved about Half Life 1’s AI. That’s okay; it doesn’t make the sequences less fun, but it does mean that you can’t just license the code work for Uncharted 2 and expected it to work without a lot of good level design and scripted events. This gets to one of the advantages of the highly disciplined game design: it means that the various tricks don’t wear out their welcome.

So will we see these widely applied? Sadly, no; I don’t expect we’re going to see a mass proliferation of a lot of these innovations as the controls are the main procedural part of this equation. Good design tools will go a long way, but I have no idea if the ones used to do Uncharted 2 will be available for license and even then I suspect that we’ll just see big-budget titles using them.

However, I do think Mitch Krpata gets it right in emphasizing the ruthless discipline of Uncharted 2. For games without an open world and that don’t feel forced to inflate game play hours, Uncharted 2 shows the benefit of focusing on design work. Games that can pass for movies are just going to be heinously expensive to produce, but I think this approach probably works in other genres and Uncharted 2 will provide a literal textbook example of how to do with mechanics what was once done with cut scenes.

Also, as a grateful side note, there’s a chapter select option for any of the 26 chapters, one that lets you select difficulty and that lists the number of secrets still unfound. I’m sure this has been done before, but it’s a lovely feature and one that should be widely used in quality over quantity titles in the future.

Switching the blog to irregular posting

2009-12-29T22:17:35-05:00

In the time management exercise that is life, I’ve realized that my various blog ideas are probably coming somewhat at the expense of doing somewhat more substantial pieces. So, I’m letting myself off the goal of daily posting, and will be focusing more on work publications as well as posts over at Next America. I’m going to try to be pretty good about cross posting, although I’d encourage international relations interested people to try out the Next America feed on Twitter or the like, as it isn’t just me.

I’ve been better at updating my own twitter feed now that I’ve got a smart phone: GregorySanders. Although for those people that follow me on Facebook it’s essentially redundant.

Snow on the ground, but no (Sen.) Snowe for health care reform

2009-12-19T14:29:00-05:00

Sorry for the terrible title joke, but as the picture shows I’ve really got to comment on the DC-area weather. Regardless, instead it appears that the 60th vote will be Sen. Nelson (D-[Nebraska]N.D.). The price is some limitations to abortion coverage but a better deal than Stupak’s:

Under the new abortion provisions, states can opt out of allowing plans to cover abortion in insurance exchanges the bill would set up to serve individuals who don't have employer coverage. Plus, enrollees in plans that do cover abortion procedures would pay for the coverage with separate checks - one for abortion, one for rest of health-care services.

Of these, the state opt out is more important I’d think. I wonder how that will interact with the provisions for nationwide insurance plans. The existence of nation-wide plans with the coverage should make the politics of fighting against those bans easier. There was also some weakening of cost-cutting measures and logrolling for [Nebraska]North Dakota that will probably be fiscally insignificant since almost no one lives there [the population is less than 2 million, less than 1% of U.S. pop]. Shame Sen. Snowe isn’t playing ball or we could instead be subsidizing Maine while providing with more abortion coverage. Sen. Landrieu didn’t muck around with the content too much and just got some giveaways for Louisiana which probably serve a legitimate policy purpose given ongoing recovery from Katrina.

Nate Silver rounds up the remaining challenges and from what Ezra Klein is reporting the conference committee should be highly expedited. I’ve long felt about this bill like I do when watching a film or TV series where there’s a major victory that risks being a false dawn. There’s so many distractions, so many risks, far too many sacrifices, but if we can just We are making the crucial first step here to providing a floor of health care coverage to all Americas. The Republicans are fighting so hard because they realize that so long as we achieve this in a fiscally sustainable way voters will become as protective of this entitlement as they are of the others. I’ll leave the final word to Victoria Reggie Kennedy, the widow of Sen. Ted Kennedy:

The bill before Congress will finally deliver on the urgent needs of all Americans. It would make their lives better and do so much good for this country. That, in the end, must be the test of reform. That was always the test for Ted Kennedy. He's not here to urge us not to let this chance slip through our fingers. So I humbly ask his colleagues to finish the work of his life, the work of generations, to allow the vote to go forward and to pass health-care reform now. As Ted always said, when it's finally done, the people will wonder what took so long.