The big development on health care reform that began to emerge from Senate negotiations over the weekend was the idea of replacing the (relatively weak) public option in the bill pending for floor action with a national menu of private plans that would be made available though the federal Office of Personnel Management or perhaps the Federal Health Benefit Plan. This would, as the popular slogan goes, give Americans (at least those eligible for the exchanges, and who live in those states that didn’t “opt out” of such an option) the same kind of health insurance available to members of Congress, without, of course, any prior guarantees about the price or the quality of coverage.
The initial reactions to this idea are interesting and illustrative of many of the underlying dynamics of the health care reform debate among progressives. The “father of the public option,” Yale’s Jacob Hacker, has rejected any “public option” that isn’t actually public in its insurance offering:

A bill that forces people to take private insurance but doesn’t create competition or a public benchmark is a prescription for unaffordable coverage, runaway costs, and political backlash. The “middle ground” is nowhere to stand if it’s going to crumble beneath you.

Hacker’s piece is a reminder of the irony that many supposedly tight-fisted moderates and conservatives are opposed to the one element of health reform–a publicly run insurance plan that could force down premiums for private plans–most likely to reduce public and private costs. For Hacker, it’s the use of Medicare’s structure for operating a “fallback” or “guaranteed issue” plan that represents a new line in the sand now that the use of Medicare rates has been dropped (even in the House).
Meanwhile, Ezra Klein of the Washington Post explains the genesis of the non-public national option in a progressive-centrist negotiating team put together by Harry Reid, and suggests it may be a first step towards deal-making that extends beyond the public option issue and encompasses other goals important to progressives (e.g., subsidy levels, degree of insurance regulation, and phase-in periods for the whole system).
Looks like another wild and confusing week on the health care front.

Alan I. Abramowitz has a post at Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball that should be required reading for Democratic Senate Leadership. Abramowitz, senior editor at the Crystal Ball and a TDS contributor, makes a tight case that the time has come for Democrats to change Senate rules, so America will no longer be held hostage by the filibuster. First, he sets the stage, reviewing Democratic prospects for overcoming the filibuster under current rules

…While Democrats have a good chance of retaining control of the Senate in the next two election cycles, their majority is almost certain to be reduced.
In 2010 Republicans will be defending 19 of the 38 seats that are up for election so their opportunities for gains will be limited. In 2012, however, Republicans will have a much better chance to recoup some of the losses that they suffered in the 2006 and 2008 elections because Democrats will have to defend 24 of the 33 seats that will be up for election.
The results of the 2010 and 2012 Senate elections will depend on the national political climate when those elections take place. In the long run, however, Democrats will probably find it very difficult to maintain anything close to a 60-seat majority in the Senate. Since the end of World War II, Senate majorities of 60 or larger have been unusual and the current 60-seat Democratic majority represents a sharp break with the recent pattern of relatively small majorities. While Democrats now enjoy an edge in party identification in the electorate, their advantage among regular voters is fairly small. Moreover, at least 22 of the 60 Democratic Senate seats would appear to be highly vulnerable. Democrats currently hold 11 Senate seats in states that were carried by the Republican Party in all three presidential elections since 2000 as well as 11 seats in states that were carried by the Republicans in two of these three elections. In contrast, Republicans hold only two seats in states that were carried by the Democratic Party in all three presidential elections and only two additional seats in states that were carried by the Democrats in two of these elections.

Abramowitz explains further that the “small state bias” favors Republicans since Dems are disproportionately concentrated in major urban areas in the large states. Dems do currently hold 11 of 24 seats of the 12 small states, Abramowitz notes, but this is likely to diminish in the next elections. He then concludes:

A reduced Democratic majority will make it almost impossible to invoke cloture. This leaves progressive Democrats with two options: try to build bipartisan coalitions or change the Senate’s rules. Bipartisanship is very popular with many Washington political insiders. However, given the deep ideological divide that separates the two parties, bipartisanship is simply not a viable option in today’s Senate. In a Senate with a narrow Democratic majority, the swing vote on cloture would not be moderate Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe. It would be someone like conservative Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback. In order to gain enough Republican votes to invoke cloture, progressive Democrats would have to abandon many of their key policy commitments.
A reduced Democratic majority would leave only one viable option for progressives to save their policy agenda: change the Senate’s rules to end the filibuster. Short of a constitutional amendment, nothing can be done about the small state, Republican bias of the Senate. But the Senate’s rules can be changed by a simple majority vote. All it takes is the political will to drag the Senate kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

Clearly this is a challenge that must be met by reform-minded Democrats sooner, than later — or we may not get another chance for decades.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
An explosive political scandal in my home state of Georgia serves as a reminder that in state elections in 2010, there are many Republicans who are currently in control of statehouses, and could suffer the vicissitudes associated with malfeasance in office and a surly, wrong-track-dominated electorate.
Georgia’s Republican House Speaker Glenn Richardson resigned yesterday, a few days after his ex-wife in a television interview said she knew for a fact that the conservative solon had conducted an extramarital affair with a utilities lobbyist even as he championed legislation highly beneficial to the lobbyist’s employer. What made this charge political dynamite is that House Democrats had filed an ethics complaint against Richardson in 2007 making that exact charge, which was briskly dismissed by Republicans.
The story was made more lurid by the fact that Richardson had obtained considerable public sympathy last month by disclosing he had attempted suicide out of depression over the dissolution of his marriage. His ex-wife took to the airwaves in part to charge that the “suicide attempt” was in fact no more than an act of manipulation aimed at controlling her–and presumably, her mouth.
Georgia Republicans, of course, quickly handed Richardson an anvil, but it may not be so easy for them to avoid collateral damage; the scandal is already bleeding over into the borderline-vicious GOP gubernatorial primary for 2010. One candidate, Secretary of State Karen Handel, has already reminded Georgians that one of her rivals, former state senator Eric Johnson, chaired the ethics panel that peremptorily dismissed the Democratic complaint against Richardson, which now appears to have been entirely legitimate. Another of her rivals, state Rep. Austin Scott, was one of Richardson’s strongest allies in the legislature. Moreover, the blame-game over Richardson’s sex-and-corruption scandal can’t help but remind voters of the cozy relationship between the GOP and corporate influence-peddlers.
With two Democratic candidates for governor, former Gov. Roy Barnes and Attorney General Thurbert Baker, both looking reasonably competitive against the fractious GOP field, Republicans may not have much of a margin for error, even in this conservative state. Power has its privileges, but in this particular day and age, being the incumbent party comes with handicaps as well.

All of the arguments referenced in Ed’s post yesterday on the substance and symbolism of the public option in health care reform, pro and con, have some validity. Yes, the public option has been watered down to the point where it’s value has been seriously compromised. And, yes, it’s quite possible that “larger subsidies for insurance purchases and tighter regulation of private insurers would accomplish more” than the public option as presently constitued, as Ezra Klein argues.
On the other hand, bloggers Digby and Open Left‘s Chris Bowers share the concern that ditching the public option would compromise liberal strength, and that is sufficient grounds for continuing to fight for it. Liberal strength and solidarity are important. But there are a couple of better reasons to fight for the public option.
First, we need a public option ‘beachhead’ codified in health care reform. Even a weak public option can be strengthened as political circumstances improve down the road. Establish the precedent now, while we have a chance, even if it requires some sort of ‘trigger.’ If we fail now, it could damage prospects for enacting any kind of public option well into the forseeable future, especially if Dems lose seats next year, as many commentators expect. With even a rudimentary public option established, amendments to broaden access to it piece by piece, would later have a much lower profile and better chances of success. The ‘trigger mechanism’ could be loosened up later, with the loudest stage of the ideological clash over public vs, private behind us.
Secondly, I know ‘rules is rules,’ but to cave and allow a relatively small number of obstructionist Democrats kill the public option entirely when a majority of both houses of congress support the proposal sets a dangerous precedent. If a healthy majority of Dems opposed the public option, I would say, OK ditch it, even though it’s the best idea out there. But that’s not the case. In addition, public opinion indicates that most Americans want it. Are we going to let a few Senators trump all that?
If we do, it will only embolden them to do it again and again. Much better to make them justify their untenable positions under the increasingly hot glare of public scrutiny, until they begin to offer more reasonable compromises. Thus far, they have all been able to get by with vague generalities. Better to make them fully accountable than to roll over. Otherwise, there will be no end to it.

It’s reasonably safe to say that the President’s Afghanistan speech on Tuesday night did not exactly get rave reviews from opinion-leaders. Many progressives are flatly opposed to his approach, and others are troubled by the similarity of his rationale for a “surge” to that made by George W. Bush in Iraq. Even some who support his strategy for Afghanistan were underwhelmed by his explanation of it. Meanwhile, most conservatives savaged him for identifying a rough timetable for withdrawal of troops, or for failing to “admit” he was taking a course in Afghanistan that he opposed for Iraq (as though the two countries were the same).
In any event, it’s good news for the White House that the public seemed to have liked his speech more than the “experts.” A USAToday Gallup poll released today shows that Americans favor Obama’s strategy for Afghanistan by a 51%-41% margin–pretty impressive given the previous measurements of public opinion that showed consistent majorities opposing new troops and generally getting tired of that war. Interestingly, 56% of self-identified Republicans and 58% of self-identified Democrats support Obama’s strategy (indies split 45% positive and 44% negative), undoubtedly the first time in his administration that the president has achieved strongly bipartisan support.
The most lopsided finding in the poll was that respondents opposed the idea of a “war surtax” by a 68%-24% margin. No wonder Obama didn’t embrace it in his speech.
In any event, the President, as intended, seems to have bought some time for his approach to Afghanistan and Pakistan. That’s not to say that he won’t have some strong resistance in and out of Congress from elements of both parties–progressives because they disagree strongly with his decision to continue and (at least temporarily) escalate the war, conservatives because they wish him ill. But it appears the president’s speech served its purpose, and found its audience.
UPDATE: New polls from CNN and even Rasmussen also show a pretty good positive impact from Obama’s speech. According to CNN, the new troop commitment to Afghanistan is supported by a 62%-36% margin (even though a narrow majority opposes the war itself). Interestingly enough, the poll also shows 66% favoring “Obama’s plan” to begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan by 2011. Rasmussen has respondents favoring the new troop commitment by a margin of 53%-30%, but the numbers for overall support for “Obama’s new plan for Afghanistan” are 37% support and 38% oppose.

As the White House and the Democratic Senate leadership continues health care negotiations with Democratic “centrists” and a Republican or two, with a nervous eye cast towards what House Democrats can tolerate, the intra-progressive dispute over the indispensibility of the public option has erupted once again.
The ever-estimable Paul Starr, who’s been beating this drum virtually all year, fired the first shot in the latest debate on Monday in the New York Times, arguing explicitly that the public option as it has evolved in Congress is not worth fighting for:

An earlier version of the public option, available to the entire public, might have realized progressive hopes and conservative fears. By paying doctors and hospitals at Medicare rates (which are 20 percent to 30 percent below those paid by private insurers), the public option would have had a distinct price advantage. But by severely cutting revenue to health-care providers, it would also have set off such a political crisis that Congress would never have passed it.
Instead, the bills in Congress now call for the government plan to negotiate rates with providers, as private insurers do. That limitation exposes a defect in the idea. The government plan may well have to charge higher premiums because it is likely to attract more than its share of the chronically ill and other high-cost subscribers. It could go into a death spiral of mounting costs.
But giving the exchanges the necessary authority to regulate private insurers could solve many of the problems that motivated the public option in the first place. Strengthening that authority and accelerating the timetable for reform are what liberals in Congress should be looking for in a deal.

Two days later, the influential Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein echoed Starr’s argument, suggesting that larger subsidies for insurance purchases and tighter regulation of private insurers would accomplish more than a largely symbolic rearguard fight to preserve an already-watered-down public option.
Another influential online voice, Hullabaloo’s Digby, took up the challenge with an eye-catching post:

Ezra believes that if the votes aren’t there for a decent public option then the horse trading should be around getting something good in return for giving up the public option rather than negotiating the terms of the public option. That would make sense if the public option were just another feature of the health care bill. But it is not. It is the central demand of the liberal base of the Democratic Party in this rube goldberg health care plan and has long since gone way beyond a policy to become a symbol.
Perhaps that is wrong on policy grounds. People will argue about that forever. But that doesn’t change the fact that it is no longer a matter of policy but rather a matter of political power. And to that extent it cannot be “bargained away” for something like better subsidies, even if it made sense. “Bargaining away” the Public Option is also the bargaining away of liberal influence and strength.

And that led my Progressive Policy Institute colleague Elbert Ventura at ProgressiveFix to charge that Digby had “given the game away” by admitting the public option was about symbolism, not substance:

Digby argues that the implications of the public option extend far beyond health care, that “powerful people” are “desperate that the liberals are not seen to win this battle.” Funny, because I thought the way that progressives win this battle is by making health care accessible and affordable to millions of Americans who currently don’t have it. According to some very smart people, the public option is playing a steadily diminishing role in achieving that goal. But don’t tell that to Digby, whose position now boils down to: Why bother with policy advances when we can have symbolic victories (or, heck, defeats)?

While personally, I ultimately come down on the side of Starr, Klein and Ventura in this debate, and have felt the public option has been overemphasized by both sides of the health care battle for a good while, I think Digby’s critics are missing something important that has implications for the endgame of health care reform and other issues as well. She speaks for a considerable number of progressives who basically despaired of a good health reform bill the moment the House eliminated the linkage of the public option from Medicare payment rates–the “robust” public option that so many Progressive Caucus members had pledged to demand at the risk of their votes on final passage. Unlike the public option as it exists in the Senate debate, that “robust” PO wasn’t a matter of symbolism; it reflected the views of millions of single-payer advocates on whose behalf the PO was devised in the first place. These are folks who believe the existence of a for-profit health insurance industry in this country is a moral calamity, and supported a “robust” public option in order to demonstrate that private insurers could not compete with a properly constituted public system. Moreover, they believed, and still believe, that a “reformed” system that includes an individual mandate and public subsidies for private insurance purchases, without a “robust” public option, represents a massive taxpayer subvention of for-profit companies that is arguably worse than the status quo.
From this perspective, what’s strange is that defenders of private health insurance–or what Digby calls “Republicans and corporate centrists”–are still fighting the largely symbolic public option as it exists in the Senate today. She interprets that as a matter of pure power politics, and as an effort to crush progressive liberalism. Naturally, she thinks the Left should respond in kind–not out of indifference to “substance,” but as a recognition that the real substantive fight has largely been lost, and as a demonstration of the Left’s own power, backed up in this case, she argues, by public opinion.
If my interpretation of the dynamics here are right, then ironically, there may be less intra-progressive fighting over the endgame of health care reform that one would initially expect. The underlying contempt of capital-P Progressives for the weak public option at stake in the Senate may mean that if and when it’s sacrificed, it will be a matter of relative indifference to some of the “robust” PO’s strongest supporters. Chris Bowers of OpenLeft, not only a “robust” PO champion, but someone extremely interested in the ability of the Left to flex its muscles on this and every other issue, created another stir this week by concluding that he supported final passage of a health reform bill on the limited grounds that even access to bad, immoral health insurance policies would save lives. Others will probably reach the same conclusion, though not happily.
But what this debate illustrates is a broad and pre-existing gulf between Democrats on a pretty fundamental issue. Those of the Clintonian, “New Democrat” tendency have long argued for the use of “market means” to implement progressive “public goals.” In the context of health care, that’s always meant support for what used to be called “managed competition,” and more recently, “premium support”: a private health insurance system regulated and subsidized by government to provide universal coverage. On much of the Left, as noted earlier, “market means” are considered inherently illegitimate when it comes to health care. In the end, the “public option” didn’t serve to bridge that gap. But we all need to be honest about the gap itself, and aware of its possible existence in other areas of public policy.

It’s been apparent for years now that increasingly large elements of the conservative movement in this country have been building a parallel universe with its own facts, its own rules, and its own drama of good versus evil. It’s largely impervious to empirical data, and relies heavily on assertion and reassertion of key claims that flow from ever-more-lurid (and thus inherently unverifiable) conspiracy theories.
One key claim that’s grown to truly monstrous proportions is that the U.S. Constitution is being perpetually threatened by “voter fraud”–vast numbers of unqualified voters drawn from minority groups, herded to the polls to support Democratic candidates who in turn promise the loot the virtuous law-abiding white majority to pay off miscreants with “welfare.” This claim has been around for decades, but used to be little more than a cynical effort to find some rebuttal to better documented Democratic claims that the Republican Party routinely sought to intimidate or disenfranchise minority voters (a practice that came to especially bright light during the 2000 election crisis).
The growing importance of voter fraud allegations to the GOP in recent years was made evident by the U.S. Attorneys scandal of the Bush administration, in which failure to produce such allegations was the rationale for several politically motivated firings.
But it’s during the last year-and-a-half that the same old undocumented claims of voter fraud have become linked to a broad right-wing narrative of vote-buying and election-stealing on a massive scale that supposedly explains both the financial crisis and the election of Barack Obama, and that centers on the activities of a previously obscure and marginal grassroots organizing group named ACORN.
Regular readers of this site know the narrative by now: engorged with federal grants, ACORN engineered the housing and financial crises by intimidating lenders into offering mortgages to poor and minority families with no means or intentions of making their payments, and then when the chickens came home to roost, gambled everything on an illegal effort to secure bailouts and a general “socialist” takeover of the country by stealing the White House for its long-time associate and radical community organizer, Barack Obama.
The extraordinary strength of this crazy theory, which has the particular advantage of absolving the Bush administration and Wall Street of responsibility for the financial crisis and the current recession, was astonishingly demonstrated by a recent poll showing that an actual majority of self-identified Republican voters believe that ACORN stole the 2008 elections.
Any narrative this powerful has to be fed continuously, which is why the recent congressional vote stripping ACORN of nearly all access to federal grants was a pyrrhic victory for conservatives. How could they keep fear of ACORN alive?
That necessity led to yesterday’s strange event in the U.S. House, a partisan “forum” on ACORN that was sort of a parody of a congressional hearing, based on the circular reasoning that the refusal of the House itself to launch an wide-ranging investigation of ACORN was proof of the conspiracy’s power.
You can read Dave Weigel’s detailed account of the “forum” by following the link above, but the main claim yesterday (specifically by Rep. Darrell Issa of CA) was that the White House serves as a “war room” for ACORN, as “proved” by Obama’s tangential relationship with ACORN years ago in Chicago, and more recently, by the hiring of Democratic election law wizard Bob Bauer as White House Counsel. Bauer’s smoking gun, it seems, is that he once wrote a memo dismissing broad-based GOP election fraud claims, and warning (accurately) that they would be retailed by the McCain-Palin campaign. Anyone denying the conspiracy, you see, is obviously a party to it.
Personally, I hope yesterday’s “forum” is the first of many such events. The centrality of the ACORN Derangement Syndrome to the contemporary Right’s world-view–along with the opportunity for more responsible conservatives to repudiate it–needs to be right out there in the open, and not secluded in viral emails or segregated at Fox News. It helps explain not only the virulence of conservative passion against the Obama administration, but the rat’s nest of self-exculpation, paranoia, and yes, racism that too often underlies it.

It’s reasonably well understood that this year’s federal economic stimulus legislation helped (though not as much as it might have) cushion state and local governments from a fiscal disaster attributable to falling revenues, automatically increasing entitlement expenditures, and balanced budget requirements. The rationale for this federal aid–to keep states and localities from counteracting the stimulative effect of federal spending via tax increases and spending cuts–is less well understood. So, too, is the fact that the continuing fiscal crisis around the country continues to undermine the impact of federal stimulus.
That’s the departure point for an important new article by Harold Meyerson in The American Prospect. Aggregating the numbers, Meyerson reaches a startling but entirely justified conclusion:

[H]ow much does the government’s stimulus come to when we subtract the amount the states and localities are taking out of the economy from the amount the feds are putting in? The two-year Obama stimulus amounted to $787 billion, of which $70 billion was really just the usual taxpayers’ annual exemption from the alternative minimum tax, and $146 billion was actually appropriated for the years 2011 to 2019. That leaves $571 billion that the federal government is pumping into the economy during 2009 and 2010. Subtract the amount that state and local governments are withdrawing from the economy (they have a combined shortfall of around $365 billion, but let’s say they do enough fiscal finagling so that the total of their cutbacks and tax hikes is just $325 billion), and we’re left with $246 billion.
At $787 billion, the stimulus came to 2.6 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product for 2009 and 2010 — not big enough, but a respectable figure. At $246 billion — the net of the federal stimulus minus the state and local anti-stimulus — it comes to just 0.8 percent of GDP, a level lower than those of many of the nations that the U.S. chastised for failing to stimulate their economies sufficiently.

In other words, most of the debates we’ve heard about the size and impact of the federal stimulus effort have ignored the actual net spending once you aggregate federal, state and local government actions. That’s a pretty big ommission, and that’s why the University of Chicago’s Harold Pollack and I argued earlier this year that we need to start thinking comprehensively about intergovernmental coordination:

[F]ederal budget debates should expand to include the national budget, the sum total of spending, taxes and policies that implement and finance national governance. At a minimum, the Office of Management and Budget and the Congressional Budget Office should routinely scrutinize the financial impact of proposed federal policies on every level of government.

Meyerson goes on to examine other damaging aspects of our federal system with respect to economic policy that are well worth reading. But what’s most interesting and alarming about his analysis is that it’s so unusual. Most policy discussions in Washington either ignore state and local governments, treat them as an unimportant sideshow, or assume that the many parts of the intergovernmental system move roughly in coordination, and in the same direction. Now more than ever, it’s time to understand that the left hand of our system may be working at active cross-purposes with the right.

The Republican reaction to the President’s Afghanistan speech was predictable enough, centering their negative spin on Obama’s setting an 18-month time frame for beginning de-escalation. A key challenge for Democrats, however, is to allow room for the skepticism of many anti-interventionist Dems, while tweaking the policy as needed to build a broader consensus. As The Washington Post‘s editorial on the President’s speech said, “he is embarking on a difficult and costly mission that is opposed by a large part of his own party.”
The skepticism was well-presented by Senator Barbara Boxer, who is quoted in Carl Hulse’s New York Times reaction round-up: “I support the president’s mission and exit strategy for Afghanistan, but I do not support adding more troops because there are now 200,000 American, NATO and Afghan forces fighting roughly 20,000 Taliban and less than 100 al Qaeda.”
In WaPo‘s ‘Topic A’ wrap-up of the views of selected foreign affairs scholars, opinion analysts and leaders, Rep. Dennis Kucinich voiced the left-progressive critique:

Why are we still in Afghanistan? Al-Qaeda has been routed. Our occupation fuels a Taliban insurgency. The more troops we send, the more resistance we meet. The people of Afghanistan don’t want to be saved by us; they want to be saved from us. Our presence and our Predator drones kill countless innocents and destabilize Pakistan. The U.S.-created Karzai government is hopelessly corrupt and despised by the Afghan people…We’ve played all sides in Afghanistan, and all the sides want us out. They do not want our presence, our control, our troops, our drones, our way of life

Even some moderate Dems have reservations, including Sen. Arlen Specter, who asks,“If Al Qaeda can operate out of Yemen or Somalia, why fight in Afghanistan where no one has succeeded?”
Maria Newman reports in her blog at ‘The Caucus’ in The New York Times that MyDD‘s Jerome Armstrong predicted that Obama’s Af-Pak policy is “going to drive a deep division into the Democratic Party” that will make “the current healthcare reform debate look like patty-cake play.”
Harold Meyerson observes from his post “The Right Anthem for this War” at WaPo’s ‘Post-Partisan’ WaPo blog,

Every American war has its distinctive anthems, and on due consideration, the one that seems most appropriate for our almost simultaneous escalation and withdrawal in Afghanistan is Groucho Marx’s entrance song in Animal Crackers: “Hello, I Must Be Going.”…In a sense, “Hello, I Must Be Going” is the appropriate song for an empire in decline. Like imperial Rome and Churchillian Britain, the United States can no longer afford to fight the wars it once took on with reckless abandon, even when it concludes it can’t quite abandon the battlefield, either.

Some influential Democratic leaders were more cautious in their assessment. Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued a noncommittal statement on the speech, saying “the American people and the Congress will now have an opportunity to fully examine this strategy.” Senator Durbin said “I am going to take some time to think through the proposal he presented tonight.”
Others were more supportive. Bill Nelson said the President had “a sensible plan.” Evan Bayh argued We must do what it takes to prevent Afghanistan from once again becoming a platform for attacks on the United States.” Majority Leader Harry Reid said President Obama made a “convincing case” that the deployment serves our national security.
As I go to press there are no reports of polls or focus group reaction to the President’s speech. A USA Today/Gallup Poll conducted before the speech, from 11/20-22, found that 35 percent of adult respondents approved of “the way Barack Obama is handling the situation in Afghanistan,” with 55 percent disapproving. Asked if they would support an increase of 40K troops sent to Afghanistan, 37 percent supported the increase, with 39 percent prefering to “reduce the number” of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and 10 percent wanting to increase troop strength by less than 40K. The poll also found that “a slim majority of Obama’s fellow Democrats approve of his handling of the issue.” Given President Obama’s formidable powers of oratorical persuasion, so ably demonstrated in his speech, I expect this percentage to increase shortly.
But many Democratic doves (myself included) will continue to view large-scale military occupation of Afghanistan with skepticism regarding its prospects for creating lasting security, even while recognizing that we have legitimate security concerns in that nation. If the President can figure out how to begin withdrawing troops even sooner than his suggested timetable, he — along with other Democratic candidates — should benefit substantially in 2012.