JustOneMinute

Ezra Klein delivers a laugher on healthcare reform; Megan McArdle has already spanked him, but why should she have all the fun?

Over to Ezra:

For some time, I've been trying to find good polling from the passage of Medicare. According to Greg Sargent, though, the Democrats beat me to it

For about fifteen seconds I tried using Google to find good polling data on the passage of Medicare.  For folks feeling lucky, here is the top of the list from my first search, on "gallup poll medicare 1965":

Health Care Reform Circa 1965: Polling on Medicare

My goodness, that is from Ezra's very own Washington Post back in July of 2009, now being recycled by those intrepid sleuths at the DNC.

Ezra concludes his excerpt with this:

After Lyndon Johnson was elected, a Harris poll found only a minority, 46%, supported a Federal plan to extend health care to the aged. Today, of course, Medicare is overwhelmingly popular.

Had Ezra read on, he might have found a bit more context:

Following Pres. Lyndon Johnson's election, Americans remained somewhat divided on the plan, with 46 percent telling Harris pollsters in Feb. 1965 that they'd prefer "a Federal law which would provide medical care for the aged by a special tax, like Social Security" and 36 percent more inclined to support "a plan of expanded private health insurance."

Hmm, Medicare was more popular than a private alternative.  DId Ezra know that and just forget to pass to on, or is this Book of Revelation time?  Let's soldier on for more surprises:

Asked another way, 62 percent said they favored "President Johnson's program of medical care for the aged under Social Security." A smaller majority, 56 percent, backed the American Medical Association's alternative plan, which would have "everyone who could afford it covered by private health insurance" and "those who couldn't afford it ...covered under a government health plan."

Assessing these conflicting views, pollster Louis Harris concluded, "So deep is the concern about medical care for the aged that the American people would welcome any of a variety of national plans."

So asked another way there was still more support for Medicare than the private alternative.

Let's cut to Ezra's punchline:

I wonder how many of the legislators who took the tough vote to move Medicare forward regret doing that today.

The tough vote!  A bit more research (I cleverly went with "medicare senate votes 1965"and took the first result) shows us that Medicare passed the House in April by a tough vote of 313-115 and went to the Senate where a similar bill wheezed through on July 9 by 68-21.  The House-Senate conference reported a bill on July 26 and the final product cleared the House by 307-116, the Senate by 70-24, and was signed into law on July 30.  Hey, in time for the August recess, just like Obama wanted!

Some Times story mentioned that the bill cleared the relevant Senate committee by a tooth-pulling 12-5.  As to bipartisan backing, the final bill was supported by a majority of House Republicans (70-68) and 40% of the voting Republican Senators (13-17).

Well.  I wonder how many of the lefty bloggers who took the tough decision to move this DNC talking point forward regret doing that today.

DARN THAT PESKY CBO:  This New England Journal of Medicine history of the passage of Medicare includes this lesson:

Johnson did one more crucial thing over the course of the winter and spring of 1965: he managed the economics of the Medicare and Medicaid legislation. This was much easier to do in 1965 before the creation of the Congressional Budget Office, which now provides independent economic reviews of all legislation, and a similar office within the White House, the Office of Management and Budget. But it was still necessary then, as now, to confront arguments that expansions of health care coverage were unaffordable. To do this, Johnson detailed loyal aides, including Cohen and Treasury Department personnel, to work quietly with legislators on designing taxes and benefit packages. When Mills still expressed concern about the costs of adding Part B and Medicaid to the Medicare package in March 1965, Johnson told him not to worry:

I'll take care of that, I'll do that. . . . When they asked me, do you want to put in another 400 or 500 million [to cover Mills's Medicare expansion], . . . what did I say about it? . . . I said we had an old judge in Texas one time . . . we called him Al Caldy . . . old Al Caldy Roberts, and he said, when they talked to him one time that he might've abused the Constitution and he said, "What's the Constitution between friends?" And I say, tell Wilbur that 400 million's not going to separate us friends when it's for health. . . .²²

Cavalier as Johnson may sound here, especially in light of the huge subsequent costs of these programs, his comments signal an unpleasant reality worth pondering: Johnson underestimated the numbers and evaded economic projections to smooth the passage of Medicare and the rest of his Great Society program. An accurate economic forecast might have sunk Medicare. Moreover, Francis Bator, a national security aide to Johnson at the time, recently asserted that during 1965 Johnson also suppressed news of the escalation of the Vietnam War and its attendant costs so that Congress would not question whether the nation could afford the president's Great Society initiatives

And the lesson:

Sixth, the most heretical generalization to emerge from the historical experience may be the following. The expansion of health care to large populations is expensive, and presidents may need to quiet their inner economists. Johnson decided, in effect, to expand coverage now and worry about how to afford it later. Accurate cost estimates might very well have sunk Medicare. In fact, this generalization holds across every administration from Harry Truman to George W. Bush. Major expansions of health care coverage rarely fit the budget and generally drew cautions (and often alarms) from the economic team.²⁴ Of course, under current federal budgetary circumstances, managing the economics of health care reform may be more difficult than ever before.

The Eric Holder Comedy Tour aired some new material on Osama bin Laden and the intensive planning that has gone around his possible capture:

Attorney General Eric Holder told a congressional panel Tuesday that the question of reading Osama bin Laden his Miranda rights is absurd — because he won’t be brought in alive.

“Let’s deal with reality,” Holder said. “You’re talking about a hypothetical that will never occur. The reality is that we will be reading Miranda rights to the corpse of Osama bin Laden. He will never appear in an American courtroom. That’s the reality. ... He will be killed by us, or he will be killed by his own people so he’s not captured by us. We know that.”

Ezra Klein was swept into the presence of The Pelosi to hear her plans for passing health care reform. The result was brain-freeze (my emphasis):

But today, Pelosi made her clearest statements yet on how she means to finish this bill. The issue is how to sequence the Senate health bill, which the House doesn't like, with the package of fixes (including, Pelosi said, the elimination of the Nebraska and Florida deals, the delay of the excise tax, more affordability and oversight provisions and more funding of community health centers), which the House does like. There are a number of procedural options on the table, but today, Pelosi said that she favors the “deem and pass” strategy.

Here's how that will work: Rather than passing the Senate bill and then passing the fixes, the House will pass the fixes under a rule that says the House "deems" the Senate bill passed after the House passes the fixes.

The virtue of this, for Pelosi's members, is that they don't actually vote on the Senate bill. They only vote on the reconciliation package. But their vote on the reconciliation package functions as a vote on the Senate bill. The difference is semantic, but the bottom line is this: When the House votes on the reconciliation fixes, the Senate bill is passed, even if the Senate hasn't voted on the reconciliation fixes, and even though the House never specifically voted on the Senate bill.

It's a circuitous strategy born of necessity. Pelosi doesn't have votes for the Senate bill without the reconciliation package. But the Senate parliamentarian said that the Senate bill must be signed into law before the reconciliation package can be signed into law. That removed Pelosi's favored option of passing the reconciliation fixes before passing the Senate bill.

Is that what the parliamentarian ruled did?  Gee, I thought he ruled that the Senate could not take up a reconciliation until the underlying bill was signed into law.  By eerie coincidence, Klein reported the same thing on March 11, with a post headlined "Senate parliamentarian rules that bill must pass before reconciliation can be used".

If the Senate has to wait until Obama signs the Senate bill as passed in unamended form by the House before they can take up the reconciliation "fixes", then there is no way that Obama can have a joint signing ceremony where he signs both bills at once.

This next bit from Klein is utterly baffling:

So now the House will vote on reconciliation explicitly and the Senate bill implicitly, which is politically easier, even though the effect is not any different than if Congress were to pass the Senate bill first and pass the reconciliation fixes after.

The effect is not any different?  Well just for starters, what does Obama sign?  The House-passed bill of "Senate plus fixes" is not textually identical to the Senate-passed bill.  Per that tedious Constitution (which, even if it is living and breathing, will have its last gasp this week if this strategy is upheld), the President needs to sign a bill passed by both houses - where is that bill?

Or are Pelosi and Klein arguing that the House will vote on a 'rule' under which two separate bills pass simultaneously, one then being sent to the President and the other to the Senate?  Why even bother with that bizarre facade, then? Per the "enrolled bill" scenario described and considered by Jonathon Adler, if the House and Senate leadership deem a bill ready for presentation to the President, it is ready, regardless of what has transpired before.  This point is back in the news today.

A point to ponder - critics have noted that employers may be reluctant to hire while their prospective liability under health care reform remains up in the air.  If the House passes this bill by a method that is highly likely to end up in the courts and prolong the suspense as to the status of the health reform effort, will that be bad for jobs, jobs, jobs?

Democratic leaders are trying to bluff their way to victory with the health care bill:

Democratic leaders scrambled Sunday to pull together enough support in the House for a make-or-break decision on health-care reform later this week, expressing optimism that a package will soon be signed into law by President Obama despite a lack of firm votes for passage.

The rosy predictions of success, combined with the difficult realities of mustering votes, underscore the gamble that the White House and congressional Democrats are poised to make in an attempt to push Obama's health-care plans across the finish line. The urgency of the effort illustrates growing agreement among Democratic leaders that passing the legislation is key to limiting damage to the party during this year's perilous midterm elections.

But House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) pledged to do "everything we can to make it difficult for them, if not impossible, to pass the bill." He also joined other Republicans Sunday in warning that Democrats would pay for the legislation by losing even more seats than expected in November.

The most optimistic talk on Sunday came from the White House. Obama senior adviser David Axelrod predicted that Democrats "will have the votes to pass this," and press secretary Robert Gibbs declared that "this is the climactic week for health-care reform."

But Rep. James E. Clyburn (S.C.), the Democrats' chief head-counter in the House, cautioned that the party has not yet found the 216 votes needed to win approval of the health-care bill passed by the Senate in December.

"We don't have them as of this morning, but we've been working this thing all weekend," Clyburn said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "I'm also very confident that we'll get this done."

This is a transparent fauxmentum strategy.  The Dem leadership is looking at a small group of hard-core "No" votes, a large group of committed "Yes" votes (who will later feign surprise when the reconciliation effort falls apart in the Senate), and a swing group that does not want to vote on this at all because they don't want to lose their jobs, offend the leadership, or torpedo the Obama Administration.

The leadership plan is to pretend that any day now they will sound the whistle, announce that the train is leaving the station, and holler "All aboard that's getting aboard".  At the fateful moment of decision (they hope), enough of the swing bloc will opt for placating the leadership and promoting Team Obama, and the bill will pass.

Now, will they blow the whistle without the votes in hand?  I am sure they are bluffing, but I don't know what they will do if their bluff is called.  I Boldly Predict that this will be an interesting week.

Paul Krugman finally answers a rhetorical question he posed in September of 2003. Way back then he was bashing Bush for Iraq (natch) and for going hat in hand to China to talk to them about their undervalued currency.  His Nobel Prize for international trade was still in the future, so on the gloomy prospects of a currency confrontation between China and the US the extent of his "analysis" was this:

But [President Bush, by way of Treasury Secretary Snow] got no satisfaction. A quick look at the situation reveals one reason why: the U.S. currently has very little leverage over China. Mr. Bush needs China's help to deal with North Korea — another crisis that was allowed to fester while the administration focused on Iraq. Furthermore, purchases of Treasury bills by China's central bank are one of the main ways the U.S. finances its trade deficit.

Nobody is quite sure what would happen if the Chinese suddenly switched to, say, euros — a two-point jump in mortgage rates? — but it's not an experiment anyone wants to try.

That was during the 2003 recession and recovery when the Fed was keeping the Fed Funds rate below 2%.

But the years have passed, as has the Bush Administration, and now Paul Krugman has joined the world in decrying the undervalued Chinese currency.  And he has answers on the economic front!

Tensions are rising over Chinese economic policy, and rightly so: China’s policy of keeping its currency, the renminbi, undervalued has become a significant drag on global economic recovery. Something must be done.

...

If Treasury does find Chinese currency manipulation, then what? Here, we have to get past a common misunderstanding: the view that the Chinese have us over a barrel, because we don’t dare provoke China into dumping its dollar assets.

What you have to ask is, What would happen if China tried to sell a large share of its U.S. assets? Would interest rates soar? Short-term U.S. interest rates wouldn’t change: they’re being kept near zero by the Fed, which won’t raise rates until the unemployment rate comes down. Long-term rates might rise slightly, but they’re mainly determined by market expectations of future short-term rates. Also, the Fed could offset any interest-rate impact of a Chinese pullback by expanding its own purchases of long-term bonds.

It’s true that if China dumped its U.S. assets the value of the dollar would fall against other major currencies, such as the euro. But that would be a good thing for the United States, since it would make our goods more competitive and reduce our trade deficit. On the other hand, it would be a bad thing for China, which would suffer large losses on its dollar holdings. In short, right now America has China over a barrel, not the other way around.

Hmm, some of those points were obvious even to me back in 2003.  As to debunking the "common misunderstanding" that China has us over a barrel, one wonders why that was less obvious back when Bush was raising the issue. One might also wonder whether Krugman was contributing to that misunderstanding with his "Nobody is quite sure what would happen if the Chinese suddenly switched to, say, euros" fog-burst.  And while we are wondering, we might ask when it was that Team Obama solved the North Korean problem that featured so prominently in Krugman's 2003 rhetorical sally.

So many questions.  No doubt some will be cleared up by a Krugman column in 2017.

MORE:  Dan Drezner decries Krugman's bellicose unilateralism and manages to limit his "I told you so-ism" to much less than seven years.

California's next Senator Mickey Kaus gets some attention from Deborah Soloman of the NY Times Magazine:

Questions For Mickey Kaus

The Blogging of the Candidate

By DEBORAH SOLOMON<

After years of sitting in a room in Southern California writing a blog for Slate magazine, you’re planning to challenge Senator Barbara Boxer in the Democratic primary in California in June. What led you to get into politics? 

I’ve been a blogger since 1999, and it hasn’t done the job. In California, the Democratic Party is worse than it was when I started. The only thing left is the interest groups. It used to be a functioning party independent of labor, and now that has atrophied.

Mickey's Manifesto was presented at The Huffington Post over the weekend (Briefly, he will be going after liberal sacred cows like a Hindu on a bender.  Well, he phrases it differently...).  Why is he declaring there and not Slate?  We get a clue:

Now that you’re running, can you continue to write for Slate, which is owned by The Washington Post and may not want to be issuing paychecks to political candidates? 

I’m certainly going to blog during the campaign. The question is whether it’s for Slate or whether it’s not for Slate.

Dems who find Obama insufficiently cerebral will flock to Mickey's banner.

Ezra Klein peddles the latest Dem spin should the reconciliation door slam shut on eager Democratic health care reformers:

The thinkable has happened, and the Senate parliamentarian has ruled that the president must sign the health-care reform bill before the House and Senate can act on a reconciliation package.

In the Democrats' Senate Caucus meeting today, Kent Conrad apparently argued that this left the Democrats in an even stronger moral position. The reconciliation rider fixes unpopular elements of the health-care bill: the Nebraska deal, the Florida deal, the excise tax and so forth. If Republicans figure out some nuclear level of obstruction that could actually derail the reconciliation process, then they will effectively own the worst elements of the Senate bill, and Democrats can just spend their time hammering Republican obstructionism that has so lost touch with reality that they'd rather keep legislation they're against than let Democrats fix it. Or so goes the argument.

OK!  Democrats wanted to pass a good bill but Evil Republicans wouldn't let them.  That is why we see sixty members of the Dem caucus on record passing the December Senate bill, a majority of the House, all Democrats, ratifying it (if Nancy can work her dark magic), and President Obama signing it.

Some points to ponder:

1 - Hold your fire.  Conrad isn't really trying to persuade moderate, independent and uncertain voters with this patent BS; his target audience is nervous House Democrats, many of whom have a strong will to believe that passing some sort of bill makes sense.  Conrad is simply trying to jolly along their process of self-delusion and rationalization.

2 - The Democratic message machine has spent the last year failing to convince the Great Unwashed of the glories of their health care reform.  Are they really going to break through with this Blame-the-Republicans message?

3 - Why won't the Republicans just say "We all agree, the bill stinks - send us to Washington and we will fix this"?

It's Easter season - let's find out how many Democrats believe in miracles.

Roll Call reports hard news for the Dem strategists hoping to reconcile a bill that hasn't been passed:

The Senate Parliamentarian has ruled that President Barack Obama must sign Congress’ original health care reform bill before the Senate can act on a companion reconciliation package, senior GOP sources said Thursday.

The Senate Parliamentarian’s Office was responding to questions posed by the Republican leadership. The answers were provided verbally, sources said.

House Democratic leaders have been searching for a way to ensure that any move they make to approve the Senate-passed $871 billion health care reform bill is followed by Senate action on a reconciliation package of adjustments to the original bill. One idea is to have the House and Senate act on reconciliation prior to House action on the Senate’s original health care bill.

Information Republicans say they have received from the Senate Parliamentarian’s Office eliminates that option. House Democratic leaders last week began looking at crafting a legislative rule that would allow the House to approve the Senate health care bill, but not forward it to Obama for his signature until the Senate clears the reconciliation package.

The NY Times runs a guest op-ed by Prof. Richard Schmidt, who tackles the question of sudden acceleration in Toyotas.  Prof. Schmidt studied the sudden acceleration problem for Audi in the 80's and has some thoughts:

THE Obama administration has said that it may require automakers to install “smart pedals” on all new cars. This kind of system — already used in BMWs, Chryslers, Volkswagens and some of the newest Toyotas — deactivates the car’s accelerator when the brake pedal is pressed so that the car can stop safely even if its throttle sticks open.

The idea is to prevent the kind of sudden acceleration that has recently led to the recall of millions of Toyotas. Federal safety regulators have received complaints asserting that this problem has caused accidents resulting in 52 deaths in Toyotas since 2000. Smart pedals might help prevent more such accidents if the cause of unintended acceleration turns out to be some vehicle defect.

But based on my experience in the 1980s helping investigate unintended acceleration in the Audi 5000, I suspect that smart pedals cannot solve the problem. The trouble, unbelievable as it may seem, is that sudden acceleration is very often caused by drivers who press the gas pedal when they intend to press the brake.

I am sure driver brain-lock is to blame some of the time; others are OK with the "It's the stupid driver, stupid" theory as well, as an explanation for some incidents.

However, Prof. Schmidt closes with an odd puzzle:

The fix now championed by the Obama administration could work in situations in which there is an actual vehicle defect. It would tell the car that if it receives signals to both accelerate and brake, the accelerator should go dead so that the brake alone will work.

But this smart-pedal system can be of no use if the driver is simply pressing the accelerator and not touching the brake. The unintended acceleration — and the crash — would still occur.

What the smart pedal may do, however, is finally give us a sense of whether sudden acceleration tends to stem from operator error. If the reports of acceleration continue (and the smart pedals work properly), then there will be nothing and no one left to blame but the driver.

It's a longish op-ed and maybe Prof. Schmidt lost his train of thought between the first and last paragraphs, but really - if the "smart pedal" technology is already installed in certain types of cars (Prof.Schmidt cited BMW, Chrysler and Volkswagen),why not look at the data?

I tried, and was left with a head-scratcher - in 2009, per this NPR database, Volkswagen/Audi had the highest rate of complaints per 100,000 vehicles sold, at 11.5; Toyota/Lexus was second with 7.5, and BMW was third at 5.8.

In 2008, Volkswagen led the pack again, this time with 21.8 complaints per 100,000 vehicles sold; Toyota/Lexus was second at 6.8, pushed hard by BMW at 6.3.

2007, however, was odd - Suzuki roared off with the prize, scoring 27.4; Toyota/Lexus was second at 15.2, then Volkswagen at 8.0 and BMW at 5.4 (I ignored Jaguar at 24.3 because that was 4 incidents amongst 16,460 cars).

So it seems that some sort of data set already exists as to whether the smart pedal can prevent runaway cars and avoid accidents. I was not able to pry into the NHS database and figure out whether these hapless BMW and Volkswagen drivers were crashing or having a frightening but ultimately harmless moment of fright before the throttle over-ride took over.  But Prof. Schmidt ought to!

Gallup tells us that public belief in global warming is fading; Charlie Martin at Pajamas Media tells us that the independent data sets demonstrating global warming may not be that independent.

I have several objections to the Gallup article.  First, they trumpet a trend but bury the current level of public attitudes:

Americans' Global Warming Concerns Continue to Drop

Multiple indicators show less concern, more feelings that global warming is exaggerated

PRINCETON, NJ -- Gallup's annual update on Americans' attitudes toward the environment shows a public that over the last two years has become less worried about the threat of global warming, less convinced that its effects are already happening, and more likely to believe that scientists themselves are uncertain about its occurrence. In response to one key question, 48% of Americans now believe that the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated, up from 41% in 2009 and 31% in 1997, when Gallup first asked the question.

The trend is important, but after skipping past several charts and paragraphs we learn that the majority hold another view:

A majority of Americans still agree that global warming is real, as 53% say the effects of the problem have already begun or will do so in a few years. That percentage is dwindling, however. The average American is now less convinced than at any time since 1997 that global warming's effects have already begun or will begin shortly.

Which leads me to me second quarrel with this article.  Setting aside for the moment questions of dubious data, the IPCC was unequivocal in their 2007 conclusion that global warming was happening.  The key disputes are whether there is a significant human contribution to that warming, and whether any proposed plan to mitigate the human contribution can pass any rational cost/benefit test, both in the developed and developing world. 

Gallup took a stab at sorting through this nuance with a question about whether warming is due more to human activity or natural climate cycles:

In a sharp turnaround from what Gallup found as recently as three years ago, Americans are now almost evenly split in their views of the cause of increases in the Earth's temperature over the last century.

In 2003, 61% of Americans said such increases were due to human activities -- in line with advocates of the global warming issue -- while 33% said they were due to natural changes in the environment. Now, a significantly diminished 50% say temperature increases are due to human activities, and 46% say they are not.

The debate is going the wrong way for Al Gore but it is hardly over.

Scott Rasmussen has a good article in the WSJ explaining the steady public to ObamaCare.  His Big Finish:

The reason President Obama can't move the numbers and build public support is because the fundamentals are stacked against him. Most voters believe the current plan will harm the economy, cost more than projected, raise the cost of care, and lead to higher middle-class taxes.

That's a tough sell when the economy is hurting and people want reform to lower the cost of care. It's also a tough sell for a president who won an election by promising tax cuts for 95% of all Americans.

Well, that, and Obama can't sell lemonade by the side of the road...

The Times and the WaPo explain that the reconciliation process seems to require reconciliation of an existing law - Congress can't reconcile talk and good intentions, as Keith Hennesey explained recently.

That means the House has to pass the Senate bill they don't like, then hope the Reid is able to shepard a reconciliation bill through the Senate maze.

Sinister Republicans are fanning the embers of distrust that already (and always) exist between the House and Senate (E.g., ask any House Dem how happy they are that the Senate is abandoning Waxman-Markey on cap and trade.)  Here is nasty Mitch McConnell:

"House Democrats will have to decide whether they want to trust the Senate to fix their political problems," McConnell said. He listed perks that Senate Democrats won for Nebraska, Louisiana, Florida and labor unions; House members insist that all must be removed through a separate "fixes" bill under special budget reconciliation rules.

"They will be voting, when they pass the Senate bill, to endorse the Cornhusker Kickback, the Louisiana Purchase, the Gator-aid, the closed-door deal, the special deal for the unions, which may or may not bother any Democrats, I don't know," McConnell said.

Not to mention Bart Stupak and his problems with the Senate language on access to Federally subsidized abortion.

Sen. Lamar Alexander wins the metaphor du jour contest:

“We believe what the president is doing is asking House Democrats to hold hands, jump off a cliff and hope Harry Reid catches them,” Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the No. 3 Republican, said on Tuesday. “And Senator Reid is not going to have any incentive to catch them because by the time the reconciliation bill gets to the Senate, the president will have already signed the health care bill into law and he’ll be well on his way to Indonesia.”

Left unmentioned - Harry Reid will be trying to catch the leaping House Dems while Republicans parade by with trombones and kick sand at him.  (For the non link-clicker, that would be invoking the Byrd rule and offering many, many amendments.)

Obama continues to discover that bering The One ain't all it's cracked up to be:

Delay on Arms Pact Slows Reset of U.S.- Russia Ties
By PETER BAKER and MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — When President Obama got on the telephone with President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia last month, he was under the impression that they were finally close to wrapping up a long-delayed arms control treaty that he had originally expected to sign in December.

But to Mr. Obama’s surprise, Mr. Medvedev was not ready to sign off on a deal and raised issues that required more discussion, American officials said. As he hung up, the officials said, a frustrated Mr. Obama realized that the two sides were not as close as he had thought and sent negotiators back to the table.

The fitful effort to fashion a treaty that would be a signature achievement of his presidency has demonstrated the hurdles Mr. Obama faces in his drive to reset relations with Russia after years of tension.

I am going to hope this next bit is just ther eporter's flourish and not based in reality:

After months of delay and discord, administration officials said, they have learned that when it comes to deal-making with Moscow, nothing is done until it is done, and rarely will it go as smoothly as anticipated.

They have just figured out that dealing with the Russians can take a while?  I'm done laughing, and I don't believe it.