Given the election results in VA and NJ earlier this month, and the steady din of conservative propaganda suggesting that the public is ready for some sort of coup d’etat, you’d think public opinion research would show a radical worsening of the President’s approval ratings in recent month, particularly among those independents who are all supposedly signing up for tea parties.
At pollster.com, Charles Franklin takes a long look at polls for the last three months that break down public opinion by partisan self-identification, and reaches a very different conclusion:

There have been several articles in the last week about independents deserting the Dems. A good bit of that was spurred by the huge Rep margins among independents in VA (66-33) and NJ (60-30-9) governors races. There are also some indications on policy issues that independents are not supporting Democratic positions.
But support for Obama has not plummeted among independents, and that needs to be clarified before it becomes erroneous conventional wisdom. It especially makes no sense to compare independent support in January with independent support now, and conclude there has been a collapse of support. The pattern this fall, since Sept 1, has been quite stable among independents. Depending on which polls you use, a shade up or a shade down, but overall, not a huge trend either way over the past 3 months.

In fact, says Franklin, Obama’s approval ratings among Americans other than conservative Republicans are pretty stable. And despite all the talk about vicious infighting among Democrats, no variety of Democrat seems to be changing its mind about Obama:

There is no evidence that any group of Dems, especially liberal Dems are unhappy with Obama’s performance. Critical is that moderate and even conservative Dems have not moved away since August. Angry conservative Reps are indeed very unhappy with Obama, at almost the same level of disgust as Dems felt for Bush, but they too have reached a plateau at a steady 10% approval. The small number of moderate Reps have also plateaued (I’d discount small moves in the last week of the aggregation.)
So the point is simple: Claims of abandonment of Obama by independents (or lib-Dems or con-Dems) are substantially exaggerated over the past three months. Significant decline from May through August, yes indeed among Inds and Reps, but that trend halted in August.

In other words, a lot of the talk about Obama’s descent into a public opinion slough of despond is just the usual spin.

Editor’s Note: This item is a special guest post by Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, a student at Harvard Divinity School and the director of The Progressive Project, a national organization that works in communities across the country to elect progressive candidates and promote LGBT civil rights. This article is based upon TPP’s work on the “No on 1” campaign in Maine, and on other campaigns to defeat similar ballot measures. Several interviewees quoted in the piece are not identified by name at their own request. Jasmine has written for The Democratic Strategist in the past, and her writing has appeared in The Advocate, Alternet.org, American Short Fiction and other publications.
Back in late September, I traveled with two friends to Biddeford, Maine, to volunteer with the “No on 1” campaign, which was working to defeat Question 1, a proposal to strike down a law legalizing same-sex marriage in that state. It rained all day, the kind of weather that oscillates between mist and downpour and that, on a mild day, makes you laugh at its sheer excess. Our task was straightforward: go door to door, ask people how they planned to vote, rate them on a scale of one to five, and move on. The campaign was in the final stretch of the persuasion stage and this would be one of the last times they had face-to-face contact with swing voters. We were assigned to a middle-class neighborhood in which single-family homes dotted either side of a busy two-lane road. There were no sidewalks, and passing cars gave me a wide berth as I mucked along on the shoulder of the road, as obtrusive as a safety-conscious hunter in my orange raincoat.
Since 2004, the LGBT movement has lost thirty such campaigns across the nation and a lot was at stake in Maine. All of those losses had been explained by factors like inadequate funding, or in the case of the California “No on 8” campaign, an anemic field operation. The “No on 1” campaign was determined to do things better, and by all standard metrics they did.
At that point in the campaign season, the polls were dead even, which in these kind of ballot measures usually means we are actually down by a few points. But the “No on 1” campaign had already raised over $2 million, twice as much as the other side. Volunteers had been canvassing since early summer, and there were paid organizers on the ground across the state. A national network of donors and field volunteers was also bolstering our efforts. Perhaps most significantly, the campaign had already identified the number of supporters they needed to win. Campaign lore holds that if you have these names on paper by early October and run a tight turnout operation, you will win in November.
I was almost done with my shift when I approached a brick ranch house with an open garage. A man in his sixties was wiping off an Allen wrench. Next to him was a motorcycle with long, athletic lines and a gleaming turquoise body. He was friendly as we talked about his bike and the weather. If he raised his eyebrows when I explained why I was there, the conversation didn’t abruptly stop in its tracks, as sometimes happens. “I’ll be voting yes,” he said evenly.
“Can I ask why?”
“The Bible says one man, one woman.”
I nodded. In literal terms, he was right. In moments like this, I’ve often responded by coming right back about what else the Bible says. But this has never led anywhere except a quick dead end. So instead, I asked if I could talk with his wife.
She joined us in the garage, and it was then that I noticed the scooter propped next to the motorcycle, its body a turquoise that perfectly matched the bigger bike’s.
“Do you ride together?” I asked.
They laughed. “I let her get ahead,” the man said, “and then I catch her.”
She explained that she also opposed gay marriage. “As a married gay person, I can tell you that not much changes for anyone but the couple,” I said. “It mostly comes up when you’re talking about things like hospital visits, times when you really need your rights.”
“Our grandson is gay,” the woman said. “We raised him.” She went on to explain that their grandson was having a difficult time. From the time he was a child, she said, she’d known he was gay.
“I never picked up on it. She had to tell me,” her husband chimed in and they laughed again.
“Is it hard for you that he’s gay?” I asked the man.
He seemed surprised by this question and this in itself was telling. It became clear that their grandson was part of their life and much loved, if not fully understood. The conversation continued and then a bit suddenly, the man choked up and wiped his eyes. “I knew a guy growing up who was that way and he got picked on a lot. I used to stand up for him.” His wife put her arm around him. “He can’t stand when people get picked on,” she said.
For a moment, it was silent in the garage.
“Making same-sex marriage illegal sends a message that we’re second class citizens. It opens the doors for people to get picked on, and worse,” I said. They listened, but weren’t terribly persuaded. The conversation circled back to The Bible. I told them I was Christian and brought up an example of scripture that we don’t tend to follow literally – the mandate to give away all your material possessions. We spent a few minutes on this. But again, not terribly persuasive.
“Should I put you both down as planning to vote yes?” I asked.
“You know, I’m still making up my mind,” the woman said. “I just don’t know.”
The conversation ended a few minutes later when their dog – small, blind and adventurous – raced out of the garage and toward the road. The woman went to rescue him. I asked them to keep thinking about the issue and thanked them for the conversation, one of the longest I’ve ever had canvassing. It was also one of the most moving. I have thought of it countless times since then.
Walking away, I rated her as a “three,” or swing voter, and him as a “four,” or likely to vote yes. According to a literal interpretation of the campaign playbook, this conversation had actually been a waste of time in every regard except one: the campaign now knew not to spend time and resources doing further outreach to this couple. At this point in the campaign cycle, an exacting calculus kicks in and attention shifts to turning out identified supporters, “one’s” and “two’s” on the scale. All other voters are lumped together and categorized as unwinnable. For the next five weeks, this couple and voters like them would not hear directly from the campaign, except in TV ads. This is considered smart organizing, and typically it is.
So what went wrong when, five weeks later, the voters of Maine passed Question 1 by a margin of 53 – 47%, making gay marriage illegal? There has been virtual consensus that the “No on 1” campaign was well-run. The leadership of national organizations blamed the loss on the slow tides of history and the bigoted tactics of our opponents. Some grassroots activists said that after thirty-one losses, we should accept that these campaigns are unwinnable and start focusing our efforts elsewhere. Pundits also weighed in, with Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com observing that, “this may not be an issue where the campaign itself matters very much; people have pretty strong feelings about the gay marriage issue and are not typically open to persuasion.”
Here’s where I disagree. This loss confirmed a lesson that the thirty preceding it only suggested: we cannot win the support of swing voters by adhering to the traditional campaign playbook. To do so, we must tear out a few pages and write new plays.

Read more…

There’s a well-established rhetorical practice available very often in the op-ed pages of The New York Times that ought to be called the Brooks Maneuver. It involves framing a complicated public policy issue in terms of abstract and conflicting principles that the columnist sympathizes with but deems tragically incompatible, before concluding that any resolution will require a brave new kind of politics that just doesn’t exist. Thus, sadly, no action is advisable until that great day when wise solons take charge, a course of action that happens to coincide, amazingly, with the short-term strategy of the Republican Party.
Mr. Brooks provided a virtuoso performance of his Maneuver yesterday, in a column on health care. Check out this opening gambit:

[L]ike all great public issues, the health care debate is fundamentally a debate about values. It’s a debate about what kind of country we want America to be.
During the first many decades of this nation’s existence, the United States was a wide-open, dynamic country with a rapidly expanding economy. It was also a country that tolerated a large amount of cruelty and pain — poor people living in misery, workers suffering from exploitation.
Over the years, Americans decided they wanted a little more safety and security. This is what happens as nations grow wealthier; they use money to buy civilization.

From this lofty perspective, Brooks goes on to stipulate that the health care reform debate represents a choice between “security” and “vitality,” because, he says (on the authority of a Wall Street Journal column), the current legislation is sure to rapidly accelerate health care costs and seriously damage the economy.
And so he concludes:

[Reform] would heal a wound in the social fabric while piling another expensive and untouchable promise on top of the many such promises we’ve already made. America would be a less youthful, ragged and unforgiving nation, and a more middle-aged, civilized and sedate one.
We all have to decide what we want at this moment in history, vitality or security. We can debate this or that provision, but where we come down will depend on that moral preference.

The Brooks Maneuver on health care accomplishes two devious purposes.
First, it identifies the opponents of health care reform with “vitality” and “growth.” In reality, what most reform foes are defending is the status quo in health care, which is hardly “vital” or entrepreneurial in any significant way. Costs are already skyrocketing, most health decision are greatly affected by massive private and public-sector bureaucracies, and the “cruelty” Brooks admits is accompanied by extraordinary inefficiency. Brooks is a past master at “plague on both houses” formulations, but this one, more than most, represents a terribly false moral equivalency.
Second, by lamenting the supposedly long-lost opportunity to control costs, Brooks suggests indirectly that someday, somehow, a health care reform strategy might be devised that transcends the terrible choice between ruthless laissez-fairism and economic collapse. That must, surely, be worth waiting for, right? So without coming right out and saying it, the column leads the reader in the direction of rejecting today’s reforms for those that will someday emerge, when the horrible partisan viccisitudes of the past few years are behind us and America once again finds the “sweet spot” where conflicting values can be reconciled.
Am I overinterpeting Brooks? Maybe, maybe not. But without question, by arguing that the health reform debate poses an impossible choice, he’s avoiding the real choice between a status quo whose few virtues are fading each day, and a chance to head in a different direction. That, too, is a matter of “moral preference.”

In his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot at the Center for American Progress web pages,’ TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira cites a new bipartisan poll from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner/Public Opinion Strategies, conducted for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Trust for America’s Health, which addresses “the neglected prevention aspect of health care reform…providing people with information and resources and creating policies that help people make healthier decisions.” According to Teixeira:

This poll finds 71 percent of Americans backing more investment in prevention versus just 23 percent who are opposed….Reflecting this strong support, investing in prevention ranked just behind the massively popular prohibition against insurance companies denying coverage for pre-existing conditions in a list of health care reforms given to respondents. Prevention was given an average priority rating of 7.7 on a 10-point scale, compared to 7.9 for the coverage denial prohibition.

Sounds like a focus that Dems can use to win broad support. “Prevention may not get much press,” says Teixeira. “But it is very popular with the public. Maybe it’s time for the press to start paying attention.”

When you’ve been away from blogging, and from regular access to political news, for more or less a month, as I have, there’s a lot of stuff to catch up on. But I have to say, the thing I missed that amazes me the most, while confirming some of my own uncharitable fears about conservatives, was last week’s PPP poll showing that a majority of self-identified Republicans think the struggling and marginal grassroots organization ACORN stole the 2008 election for Barack Obama.
Matt Compton, Adam Serwer and Eric Kleefield all offered some thoughts on this poll. But I somehow don’t think most progressives are fully grasping the centrality of ACORN to the conservative world-view these days.
I’ve written about this several times over the last thirteen months, but bear with me: ACORN has assumed an all-purpose demonic role for Republicans. They were, in the lurid view of Fox News enthusiasts (embraced on at least one occasion by the McCain-Palin ticket) the cause of the mortgage crisis and the financial meltdown, thanks to the alleged help they provided to shiftless people to obtain mortgages they couldn’t or wouldn’t pay. They then demanded bailouts for their clients. And because a whole lotta socialism was necessary to keep them afloat, they stole the election for their close ally Barack Obama. Coincidentally, of course, and irrelevant to the narrative of ACORN running the country, was the fact that the group is one of the most visibily minority-oriented organizations in national public life.
The fact that there is virtually no empirical evidence for any of these contentions about ACORN (particularly the election-stealing stuff, which is an absolute hallucination by any standard) hasn’t much mattered; the group was far, far too convenient a scapegoat for everything that displeased conservatives since September of 2008.
But in talking about this so many times, it never really occured to me that a majority of Republicans bought into the ACORN Derangement Syndrome, with only a quarter of them rejecting the idea that this group stole the 2008 elections. Analogizing this to the Democratic reaction to Florida 2008 is ludicrous; Gore did win the popular vote, Florida was incredibly disputed, and the Supreme Court did shut down the recount to get Bush across the finish line. There is not a shred of evidence that Obama didn’t legitimately and decisively win the election, and no significant Republican spokesman doubted it at the time. It took a full year conservative shrieking about ACORN to instill this crazy theory into the consciousness of rank-and-file Republican, nicely validating their hatred of Obama, their bizarre claims that he’s some sort of totalitarian revolutionary determined to destroy the Constitution.
It’s a case history in viral demagoguery of the most toxic sort, and reputable Republicans should be even more upset about it than I am.

As has been the case all year, progressives are giving mixed reviews to the latest legislative step health care reform legislation, the 60-40 Senate vote-to-proceed, which is basically a preliminary cloture vote. While everyone’s happy that the vote wasn’t lost, there’s a fair amount of angst over the threats of some Democrats to vote against the final bill, or against cloture on the final bill, unless actions unacceptable to most progressives are taken to change the bill.
And again, as has been the case all year, nearly all the focus among progressive worriers is over the public option, which Senators Lieberman and Nelson seem to be ruling out categorically.
Let’s look at these two issues separately.
If, indeed, wavering Democrats who voted for the motion to proceed nonetheless conclude that they have no obligation to vote for cloture on passage of the bill unless their substantive demands are met, then we might as well start rediscussing the reconciliation strategy, because there is no version of health reform, now or at any point in recent history, that could command 60 votes in the Senate. To get to 60 on cloture (even granting that a Republican or two might still be lured across the line), it will be necessary to convert those who basically said “I hate this bill but I don’t want to prevent the debate” to a position of “I hate this bill but I don’t want to prevent a vote.” And that will require not just moral suasion but pressure and maybe serious threats of reprisals from the Senate leadership, supplemented by a robust public campaign over the next few weeks to demonize the de facto 60-vote requirement, which much of the public knows nothing about. Keep in mind that health reform isn’t the only progressive initiative that’s doomed if it takes 60 Senate votes to enact anything serious on any subject, and also keep in mind that an increase in Democratic votes in the Senate in the immediate future is exceptionally unlikely.
On the second issue, the public option focus, it’s as good a time as any for progressives to finally begin looking at this legislation as a whole, and as compared to what will happen if no legislation is enacted before the 2010 elections. It is entirely possible (particularly if you are a single-payer advocate) to conclude that a reasonably strong public option is more important than covering most of the uninsured, more important than the level of subsidies to make coverage practically affordable, more important than regulation to end highly discriminatory insurance practices, and more important than how and when health reform is phased in, just to mention four competing priorities. But it’s equally possible–and more to the point, legitimately progressive–to consider one or more of these factors to be as important as a conventionally constructed public option–again, if you major concern is the practical effects of reform rather than setting the stage for a future single payer system. In any event, an intra-progressive debate on priorities that goes beyond the public option issue needs to happen right away.

Nate Silver has a perceptive ‘where do we go from, here’-themed post, entitled “Is The Public Option Un-Un-Dead?” up at his FiveThirtyEight.com blog. Among Silver’s insightful observations, is this one that offers some comfort to public option advocates:

The fundamentals of the public option are, in some sense, still fairly strong. It polls well. Perhaps more importantly, the CBO seems to think that it would save money. For this reason, I don’t think we can completely rule out the possibility that Lincoln, Nelson, et. al. could be persuaded about its merits. Also, importantly, the bill that will be reported to the Senate floor will contain a public option, which leaves it with a certain amount of inertial momentum.

As for a strategy to save the public option, Silver takes a strong position favoring ‘persuasion’ over ‘strong arm tactics’:

The two strong-arm tactics that people seem to be excited about are reconciliation — a procedural maneuver to pass the bill through a majority-rules environment — and a “progressive block” strategy in which progressives threaten to vote down the health care bill unless a reasonable public option is included. I don’t think either of these are liable to have their desired effect.
What’s wrong with the progressive block strategy? For one thing, it’s not clear that the threat is credible. Technically speaking, the bill that the House passed did not contain what had initially been defined as a “robust” public option — meaning one pegged to Medicare rates. But only one or two progressives wound up voting against it for this reason, even though many had threatened to do so.
But suppose that the threat were credible — that Bernie Sanders and Roland Burris, say, were prepared to carry it out. And suppose that you’re Blanche Lincoln. Don’t you now have something close to the best — or perhaps the least bad — of both worlds? Now you can vote against a bill which is unpopular in your state and dodge some of the blame for doing so, insisting that it was those no good socialists lib’ruls who were responsible for torpedoing the bill’s chances.

Read more…

The ‘glass is half-empty’ crowd might describe what Democrats accomplished with Saturday’s vote on health care reform as “barely enough U.S. Senators agreed to begin debating a health care reform bill some of them hope to actually pass.” WaPo columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. acknowleges all of the complaining about the reform bill, but he emphasizes the more optimistic view in his ‘Post-Partisan’ blog, “Can’t we celebrate a little on health care?“:

Something truly momentous happened in the United States Senate last night…Okay, it’s entirely true that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s success in putting together 60 votes to let debate on a health-care bill go forward is only a first step. ..But can we pause to note that a comprehensive health-reform bill has never been this close to passage?…Is it really so hard to remember that for the 15 years since the failure of President Clinton’s reforms, the conventional take was that health-care reform is impossible?

Dionne recommends Rob Brownstein’s post at The Atlantic on cost-containment in health care reform legislation, and adds,

Brownstein’s point is that while the Senate health care bill is not perfect on this front — has any legislative body ever enacted a perfect law? — the bill is winning praise from very tough-minded health-care analysts for how extensive its cost-containment measures are. There is nothing naïve about Brownstein’s post, and he offers a lot of sensible caveats, but he’s right to suggest that this round of legislating may well be “a milestone in the health care journey.”

The praise the Reid compromise has gotten from cost-containment advocates is an important angle for supporters to promote more energetically. As Dionne concludes, “Let’s celebrate the fact that we are dealing with an issue that we have left unattended for far too long.”

The Democratic Strategist finally has a Twitter feed, and you should follow us @DemStrategist.
Most of what you’ll find are links to stories published on the Daily Strategist, but over time, this will become a place where we occasionally announce breaking news and other information. Of course, we also want you to send us feedback with replies and comment on the work we’re doing.
If you want to keep up on the latest from TPS and follow what we’re up to, Twitter just became your new favorite tool on the web.

In Friday’s HuffPo, TDS contributor Mike Lux takes a step back to put the battle for health care reform into the big picture — how it enables momentum in support of the broader struggle for a more progressive agenda. As Lux writes,

Being into the whole history thing enough to have written a book on it, I tend to take a long view on the big policy battles we fight today…At the end of the day you also have to ask yourself two very big questions. The first is whether the passage of this legislation sets the stage on other issues for better or worse things to come. The second is whether the legislation, even with all of its flaws and compromises, creates a platform to build on in the future…These two questions are equally applicable to the other big fights looming immediately in front of us- climate change, financial reform, immigration, maybe (hopefully) a jobs bill, Employee Free Choice Act. In every single case, progressives are going to have to make difficult decisions re the compromises they will be forced to make. On none of these issues will we be able to get what we want, and some of the tradeoffs will really suck. But as we are debating the policy pros and cons, we also need to keep those two big questions in mind.

Lux draws the painful, but instructive lesson from the Clinton Administration’s failure to enact health care reform:

…When we lost on health care in 1994, and then lost Congress in the elections because our base was so discouraged that they didn’t turn out, it made Clinton and Democrats in general hyper-cautious about trying to do anything big or bold the rest of his Presidency. If we had won on health care, we would have kept Congress, and we would have emboldened Democrats to try other big things. It is one of the most basic laws in politics: victory makes you stronger, and defeat makes you weaker. You can fault Obama for some of his specific policy proposals, and for being too ready to compromise on some things, but one thing he has been willing to do is try to do big things, and if health care goes down, the attempt to do big things will probably will stop- climate change probably is given up on as too hard, financial reform gets weaker, efforts to create more jobs probably is given up on, immigration reform very likely gets shelved. If a health care bill is passed…it will create the possibility of doing other big things.

Lux uses the example of Social Security legislation as a foundational reform that paved the way for strengthening amendments:

…When it was first passed, it was far weaker than today, and had many flaws progressives of today would have been rightfully upset about, but that it was a platform future progressives could build on. I think that’s how we have to view this health care bill, the climate change bill, and at least some other legislation coming down the pike.

A salient point. We want the strongest possible legislation, but a bill’s weaknesses can be corrected later. Lux, author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, concludes:

…Where there is some early success, momentum can build into something bigger and more progressive over time: Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, and LBJ all achieved most of their big historic changes after more than a year in office. We need to create that platform so we can build big change one step at a time. Every one of those steps will be slow and painful and infuriating. I still have hope, though, if we can get the first step of health care done, we can take another step, and then another one, and that we will be able to look back many years from now with pride because we made big change history when our opportunity for it came.

The opportunity is upon us, and ‘big change history’ now calls Democrats everywhere to action.