Since the start of the Obama presidency, I’ve made a few arguments, in columns and occasional media appearances, regarding what the president should do if his goal is to maintain and expand his political power and strengthen the Democratic coalition over the long term. Let me stress that I’m not talking about what the president should do in the abstract — in the abstract, I’d like him to govern like a conservative. That is a separate issue. So again, what Obama should do to advance his agenda:

(1) Focus on the right kind of bipartisanship. At the start of health reform, the White House seemed strangely focused on winning over center-right policy wonks by selling health reform as entitlement reform. The idea, I suppose, was to craft a proposal that moderate Republicans could embrace. This was exactly backwards. Conservative-leaning independents had abandoned President Bush for a variety of reasons, from the war in Iraq to — and this is important — Social Security reform. Of course, some conservative voters loved the idea of voluntary personal accounts. Older white voters who’ve seen their private pensions perform poorly, or go from defined benefit to defined contribution, felt otherwise. Many were Republicans, and that was an early source of discontent on the right in 2005 and 2006.

Rather than focus on Republican legislators, Obama should have focused on Republican voters, particularly older voters. The president performed relatively poorly with older white voters in 2008, and blunting the Republican advantage here was vitally important. Talking at length about trimming Medicare was not the way to do it. Instead, he should have advanced a Medicare buy-in from the beginning, plus an expansion of Medicaid. This was easy to understand and it would put Republican legislators in the same difficult position they found themselves in during the S-CHIP debate. Personally, I think Medicaid expansion should only happen if we federalize the program. But we’re not talking about what should happen in the abstract.

Moreover, it would block off the opportunity Republicans gleefully seized over the last year, namely the opportunity to become the defenders of Medicare. Democrats condemn this as a cynical move. But politics is hydraulic — if a large constituency wants something and is not being served, the two-party system creates powerful pressures to exploit that underserved market.

Ezra Klein is now making the case that the White House should pursue this strategy going forward.

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.

The goal of the reform effort, as Klein has explained, was to create a universal structure. This effort, however, yielded an unworkable universal structure that was – worse still — politically near-toxic.

So again: don’t worry about conservative wonks or Republican legislators. Worry about actual voters, who, to the dismay of yours truly, absolutely love Medicare and Medicaid.

(2) Wage war on Wall Street. In August, I wrote a piece that apart from advocating the aforementioned strategic shift on health reform (which I discuss in the aforelinked pieces in greater detail):

Earlier this month, The Washington Post published a fantastic dispatch by Sandhya Somashekhar on Virginia’s gubernatorial race. Somashekhar interviewed a number of Obama voters who felt sorely disappointed by what they saw as the president’s failures, and they were thus tempted to support Republican candidates. Interestingly, they didn’t see Obama’s supposed embrace of big-spending liberalism as his central failure; rather, they believed that while he was bailing out rich bankers, he wasn’t doing nearly enough for working and middle class families. Stephanie Slater, who according to Somashekhar leans Republican, was most frustrated by Obama’s failure to curb excessive Wall Street compensation and to aggressively regulate credit companies. Neither of these are positions you’d associate with the free market right. Rather, we associate attacks on predatory lenders and financial tycoons with the populist left. … The political antidote is awfully simple: call for a sweeping right-to-rent for foreclosed homeowners, an idea championed by liberal economist Dean Baker; keep hammering home the notion that only the rich will see tax increases, despite the fact that taxes will eventually have to increase for everyone; and find new and creative ways to stick it to wealthy bankers. On that last front, a number of economists, including Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, proposed lower-cost alternatives to the bailouts that were never seriously pursued. Going forward, it’s hard to think of populist measures that are also good policy, but that’s not the central issue: the public wants to know that Obama is on their side.

Granted, this wasn’t terribly detailed. But imagine how different the world would look if the president designed to pivot in a more populist direction in August.

Now, of course, the White House is belatedly embracing the war on Wall Street, and my guess is that they will put conservatives in an awkward position. I tend to favor fairly regulations along the lines proposed by Nicole Gelinas and Zingales, so I think Republicans can counter this wave. But I’m not sure they have the time or inclination to do so — and they’re getting cocky.