So you can definitively take David Petraeus off that 2012 Republican presidential list:

I thought I’d said no about as many ways as I could. I really do mean no. We have all these artful ways of doing it. I’ve tried Shermanesque responses, which everybody goes and finds out what Sherman said was pretty unequivocally no. I’ve done several different ways. I’ve tried quoting the country song, ‘What Part of No Don’t You Understand?’ I mean, I really do mean that. I feel very privileged to be able to serve our country. I’m honored to continue to do that as long as I can contribute, but I will not, ever, run for political office, I can assure you.

The idea of another Eisenhower scenario had been tempting some Republicans (particularly Iraq-focused neocon types) to talk about a Petraeus candidacy. Or maybe the buzz simply reflected an honest look at the GOP’s 2012 field, which is less than impressive at present.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Sunday night’s House vote on health reform clarified the contours of the mid-term elections. The contest has been nationalized, with two dominant issues—the economy and health care—and one overriding theme: the proper role of government.
The administration and Democratic congressional leaders should not believe that the new health care legislation will speak for itself. In fact, the debate over the next eight months may well be as robust and consequential as was the debate during the past eight months. If the public can be persuaded to modulate its doubts about the wisdom of health reform, House Democrats may be able to minimize their losses, as the Republicans did in 1982. If not, the results could resemble the catastrophe of 1994.
Three recent surveys define the challenge Democrats face between now and November. In a Pew Research Center survey released last Thursday, only 38 percent of the respondents said that they favored the health care bills currently in Congress, while 48 percent were opposed. A CNN survey made public on March 22 showed an even more negative reaction: 39 percent in favor and 59 percent opposed. Although the March Kaiser Health Tracking poll found somewhat more support for the pending congressional legislation, it showed that only 42 percent of the people wanted an up-or-down vote on that legislation; 36 percent said Congress should go back to the drawing board, and 20 percent wanted Congress to drop the topic entirely. A plurality of 45 percent favored a bipartisan approach over a Democrats-only bill. Forty-one percent believed that the proposed bill would force them to change their existing health care arrangements. Only 35 percent thought it would make them and their family better off; 32 percent said worse off, and 28 percent said no difference. (Again, the CNN survey was even more negative: 47 percent of respondents thought it would make them and their families worse off, and only 19 percent expected to be better off.) Fifty-five percent of the Kaiser respondents and 70 percent of the CNN respondents thought the bill would increase the budget deficit—a significant finding in light of rising public concern about our fiscal future.
A Gallup survey released this Tuesday, after the bill’s passage, paints a somewhat rosier picture for Democrats: 49 percent said it was a “good thing” the bill passed, with 40 percent calling it a “bad thing.” Democrats were overwhelmingly satisfied (82 to 11), Republicans dissatisfied (79 to 16), while independents were split down the middle, 45 satisfied to 47 not. Nonetheless, there were signs of a continuing gap in motivation between the bill’s proponents and detractors. Only 29 percent of Democrats described themselves as “enthusiastic” about the bill’s passage, versus 41 percent of Republicans who said they were “angry.” Among independents, 20 percent were angry, versus 10 percent enthusiastic.
So where is the opening for the Democratic counterargument? There are four areas of opportunity. First, the Kaiser poll has long shown a strong plurality (often a majority) supporting the proposition that the country as a whole would be better off if Congress passed health reform, and voters often ask “How are we doing?” not just “How am I doing?”
Second, both surveys suggest that the public regards the congressional legislation as superior overall to the status quo. Pew reports that while 51 percent think that health care costs would increase if the proposal passed, 63 percent think costs would increase if it didn’t. And according to Kaiser, far more think that key areas—health care costs, access to insurance, and quality of care—would improve with reform than with the status quo.
Third, there are appealing features of health reform that begin quickly and will make a tangible difference in the lives of individuals and families—among them, allowing young adults to remain on parents’ policies until age 26 and eliminating preexisting conditions as grounds for denying coverage to children.
And finally, despite their current adverse judgment about the health reform bill, Americans continue to trust President Obama and the Democrats on this issue more than they do the Republicans. Even the CNN survey, while strongly negative about the politics of the bill overall, found President Obama more trusted than congressional Republicans by a margin of 51 to 39 percent, and congressional Democrats more trusted than congressional Republicans by 45 to 39 percent.
Half a century ago, political scientists Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril observed that while Americans are ideologically conservative, they are operationally liberal. If the debate between now and November is generic—about the role of government—Democrats will probably lose. If the debate is more specific—comparing the bill to the status quo and pointing out its concrete advantages—the public’s view may well become much more favorable.
One thing is clear: Democrats will have to be more focused and effective in the next eight months than they were in the past eight months. Their wobbly, ever-changing rationale for health care reform nearly undermined the entire effort. To raise their game, the White House and congressional Democratic leadership would be well advised to take a page from the standard Republican playbook: decide on the key points to emphasize, agree on punchy language to describe them, and stick to that script between now and November. In electoral politics, repetition is a necessary condition of persuasion.

In his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ at the Center for American Progress web pages, TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira reports that “the public appears to be warming” to “President Barack Obama’s decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan but start withdrawing forces in 2011.” Teixeira elaborates:

Prior to the announcement back in November, just 36 percent thought the military effort in Afghanistan was going very or fairly well and 57 percent thought the effort was not going too well or not at all well. This month, a new Pew poll shows these figures almost reversed: Fifty-two percent now think the effort is going very or fairly well, while those with a negative judgment are down to 35 percent.

The even better news for the President is that the uptick carries over into his approval rating for his Afghanistan policy, as Teixeira notes:

Reflecting this more positive assessment, Obama’s approval rating on handling the Afghanistan situation has also improved over the time period. Before the decision to send troops was made, 36 percent approved of his handling of Afghanistan, compared to 49 percent who disapproved. In the new Pew poll, his approval ratings have flipped to 51 percent approval and 35 percent disapproval.

An impressive turn-around for the President and his Afghanistan policy, contributing to a very good week at the white house.

Front page articles in The New York Times and Washington Post today have already noted a sudden spike in threatening behavior against Democratic politicians since the passage of health care reform – bricks thrown through the windows of offices, pellets fired from air-rifles, propane gas lines to a private house severed, and veiled and overt death threats issued over the phone.
While some leading conservatives are continuing to stoke the flames, others are already trying to back away from the Pandora’s Box they have opened. It is not possible, however, for them to reverse the effects of an entire year of irresponsible rhetoric — calling Democrats Nazi’s, fascists, Storm troopers and so on –with a few brief statements to the press. To the extent that many grass-roots conservatives have become sincerely convinced by the grotesque accusations against Obama and the Democrats, it becomes no longer irrational for them to think that violent resistance may be required and justified.
Unfortunately, the problem is inevitably going to become significantly worse in the coming period because of several reinforcing social trends:

• First, the failure to defeat the health care bill will cause many of the more moderate and less committed anti-HCR protesters to become demoralized and fall away, leaving a smaller hard-core group of the more extreme protesters in control of the websites, message boards and discussion threads of the anti health care movement. This hard core will include both traditional organized extremist groups – neo-Nazi, skinhead, White Power, LaRouche followers — and individuals mobilized by the new generation of Fox News and internet-based commentary and social networks.
• Second, within this reduced group, the failure of legal protest to stop the health care bill will generate a strong pressure in favor of more extreme acts. The inability to stop the “slide into fascist dictatorship” will be offered as “proof” of the need for violence and also provide its justification. This social process of radicalization was evident in the 1960’s and early 1970’s – in the U.S. in the case of the Weathermen and Weather Underground and in Europe with the German Red Army Faction and the Italian Red Brigades.
• Third, a vicious cycle will quickly develop. Provocative acts like those noted today force federal and local authorities to begin investigations. To the hard-core protesters, their actions then “prove” the existence of the imminent fascist takeover and justify and stimulate more extreme acts.

The problem is profoundly exacerbated in the United States today because of the increasing number of states with “Open Carry” laws for firearms and the growing movement among conservative gun owners to aggressively assert these new rights by gathering and openly carrying their weapons in public places like coffee shops and political meetings.
It is therefore likely that there will soon be organized very intentionally provocative marches and demonstrations that feature the ostentatious display of both guns and also signs expressing clear threats to use them against Democrats. There will also be the creation of secessionist “militia camps” like those in the 1990’s that will violate various kinds of state and national laws in order to deliberately dare and provoke law enforcement officials to come in and create an incident.
Law enforcement officials are fully aware of this strategy and, since the Waco, Texas conflict and the Oklahoma City bombing have refined their tactics for dealing with such intentional provocations. Despite this, it is unfortunately likely that one or more tragedies will occur in the coming period. The only thing Democrats can do is to recognize the danger and take whatever precautions they can devise.

You may have heard that Republican Meg Whitman held a narrow lead over Democrat Jerry Brown in the latest Field Poll on the California’s governor’s race. But yesterday’s state reports on the spending of the candidates puts that in a better perspective.
EMeg (as the former eBay exec is often called) has spent a total of $46 million–most of it from her own fortune–on her gubernatorial bid so far, shattering every California spending record, months before the June primary and long before the November general election. Brown has spent a bit over $700,000, giving Whitman more than a 60-1 financial advantage. To put it another way, Whitman has already spent about as much as her political mentor, Mitt Romney, spent on his entire 2008 presidential campaign.
The fine Golden State political blog, Calbuzz, compared the Whitman and Brown spending records this way:

Our Division of Green Eye Shades and #2 Pencils calculates that if you take what Whitman has spent on private aircraft ($371,000), bookkeeping ($466,000) and catering ($113,000), it’s more than Jerry Brown has spent altogether ($716,000). The most catering cash –$67,800 – appears to have gone to Christopher’s Catering for a bunch of events, but our favorite is last May’s $10,962.69 paid to Wolfgang Puck for one event.

The bigger issue, of course, is that Whitman has been running saturation TV ads all across California, beginning with the Olympics, when she was far more ubiquitous than Apollo Ohno or Shaun White, and hasn’t let up since then (though she has recently shifted from a positive bio ad to attacks on conservative Republican rival Steve Poizner).
Whitman’s spending isn’t likely to slow down. Poizner has just launched his own ad blitz, and reportedly has $19 million stashed away for that purpose, and Meg has said she’s willing to spend $150 million on her own campaign before it’s all over.
Jerry Brown won’t be cash-strapped; he’s got $14 million in cash on hand, most of it raised before he even announced as a candidate, and will benefit from an estimated $40 million in independent expenditures by unions and other progressive groups.
It’s actually good news for Democrats that he’s basically even with Whitman after she’s spent like a waterfall and he’s spent like a bathtub trickle.

Back on February 12, a CNN/New York Times poll gave us our first good look at the Tea Party Movement, and it didn’t confirm the media stereotype of angry average citizens who were somewhere in the “middle” on issues and equally disdained the two parties. Instead it showed the Tea Party folk to be, basically, very conservative Republicans determined to pressure the GOP to move to the right or suffer the consequences–in other words, a radicalized GOP base.
A new poll from Quinnipiac confirms that impression, and it’s really getting to the point where any other intepretation of the Tea Party Movement is probably spin (e.g., among Tea Party leaders who want to maintain their leverage over Republicans by pretending to be more independent than they actually are).
The alternative explanation has been that the Tea Partiers represent independent voters who are fed up with government and will join with Republicans to create a stable majority in this “center-right nation” if and only if Republicans stop talking about cultural issues and focus on lower taxes, smaller government and the economy. Nothing in the Quinnipiac poll supports that proposition. On question after question, self-identified Tea Partiers (13% of the total sample) are much closer in their views to self-identified Republicans than to self-identified independents. Most notably, the approval/disapproval rating for the Republican Party is 60/20 among Tea Partiers and 28/42 among indies. Among those voting in 2008, Tea Partiers went for McCain by a margin of 77/15; indies split down the middle (going for McCain 46/42). Tea Partiers have a favorable view of Sarah Palin by a 72/14 margin (significantly higher than among Republicans), while indies have an unfavorable view of her by a 49/34 margin. Tea Partiers self-identify as Republicans or Republican-leaners by a 74/16 margin. These are not the same people by any stretch of the imagination.
The poll doesn’t ask enough questions to get at the details of Tea Party ideology, but it also doesn’t supply any ammunition to the common perception that Tea Partiers are libertarians at heart, and/or that they are displacing the Christian Right within the conservative coalition. Actually, 21% of self-identified white “born-again” evangelicals consider themselves part of the Tea Party movement, well above the 13% figure for all voters. And the the two categories of voters share a rare positive attachment to Sarah Palin (white “born-agains” approve of her by a 55/29 margin, Tea Partiers by a 72/14 margin).
At some point, the more questionable assumptions that pundits are making about the Tea Folk–they are right-trending independents, they are hostile to the Christian Right–need to yield to empirical evidence. Now would be a good time to start.
UPDATE: I should have probably mentioned that Quinnipiac has undermined the findings of its own poll by releasing it with this title: “Tea Party Could Hurt GOP In Congressional Races, Quinnipiac University National Poll Finds; Dems Trail 2-Way Races, But Win If Tea Party Runs.” That’s based on a few questions offering three-way trial heats of unidentified Democrats, Republicans and Tea Partiers. Since there will not actually be such contests in November beyond a few scattered races with virtually unknown independent candidates claiming kinship with the Tea Parties, the whole line of reasoning is specious.

Glenn Thrush and Marin Cogan tally up the Republicans’ shameful behavior of late in their Politico post “Republicans weigh costs of losing ugly” and it adds up to a very disturbing look at a once-dignified political party. The authors cite the Republicans’ “graceless response” to the Democratic health care reform victory in the form of “shouted insults,” along with “encouraged outbursts from the galleries” and “veiled threats” left in the seats of undecided members in the House chamber. In addition:

…Texas Republican Rep. Randy Neugebauer shouted “baby killer!” as anti-abortion Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) spoke on the House floor…In an interview for POLITICO’s “Health Care Diagnosis” video series, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) called the “baby killer” outburst “horrible”…“In our conference [Sunday] before the vote, a lot of us said, ‘Look — no screaming, no shouting, no yelling, no nyah-nyah-nyah. If they pass this thing, be somber be glum,’” Ryan said. “I said look, ‘We’ve got to be adults about this..

The Politico article notes the “even uglier series of events outside the chamber Saturday” in which tea party bigots reportedly “shouted the N-word at civil rights hero Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), spit on Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) and hurled an anti-gay insult at Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.)”
Not all tea party activists are Republicans, and not all of them are vicious bigots. But when the Republicans and FoxTV ginned up the tea party protests, they also created a sometimes racist, violence-prone Frankenstein they can no longer control. Boehner was clearly shaken when he recently urged conservative activists to cool it.
A few other Republicans, if not the leaders, seem to grasp the disaster they are courting more fully. As Cogan and Thrush report,

…Neugebauer’s outburst, which echoed the infamous “You lie!” shout by Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.), had Republicans worried about the impact on “persuadables” — independents skeptical about President Barack Obama but leery of the GOP’s increasingly conservative tilt.
…The incident also undermined attempts by Republicans to project the image of a sober, less combative party willing to meet Obama halfway. And it prompted a salvo of rebuke from Democrats, who spent much of their post-passage Monday accusing the other party of violating the chamber’s decorum and coarsening debate.

History will record that the adults in the G.O.P. did not prevail. It wasn’t always this way. Try to imagine Eisenhower, for example, putting up with this kind of childish, mean-spirited crap. It just doesn’t compute. It can be argued that the Republicans lost their sense of shame a long time ago. But the modern G.O.P. is a political party that has lost its sense of dignity, as well. It’s as if the new working motto of Republican ‘leadership’ boils down to “dignity, schmignity.”
To tweak a popular catch-phrase of recent years, “God don’t like ugly,” perhaps 2012, if not this year, will bring the lesson that ‘voters don’t like ugly’ either.

A new poll of American Jews finds strong support for President Obama and his Middle East peace efforts. The poll, sponsored by J Street, designed by Gerstein | Agne Strategic Communications and administered by Mountain West Research Center and Opinion Outpost, was conducted 3/17-19 “in the aftermath of escalating tensions between Israel and the United States after Israel announced new housing construction in East Jerusalem during Vice President Biden’s recent trip.”
According to the news release announcing the poll’s findings (survey data here):

Obama’s approval in the Jewish community is holding steady at 62 percent. Gallup reported 64 percent approval rating in an October 2009 poll. Obama’s approval rating among Jews is 15 points higher than among all Americans, 47 percent, according to a Gallup poll conducted during the same period.
And in a hypothetical 2012 matchup against his most vociferous Republican critic during the last few weeks on Israel, Obama beats former Alaska Governor and Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin by 70-18 percent.

Jeremy Ben-Ami, executive director of J Street explains:

As the Obama administration moves forward toward the goal of achieving Middle East peace, they should be reassured that significant numbers of American Jews support their efforts and recognize that these efforts benefit the shared national interests of both the United States and Israel

The poll also found solid support for the Obama administration’s even handed approach regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict:

And by a 71-29 percent margin, American Jews support the United States “exerting pressure” on both the Israelis and the Arabs to make the necessary compromises to achieve peace. An earlier J Street poll last March found a similar level of support.
A majority of all American Jews, 52-48 percent, still support an active role even if the United States were to publicly state its disagreements with only Israel. American Jews are evenly split on support for exerting pressure on only Israel, a notion that J Street opposes.

What Jim Gerstein, a top expert on public opinion of U.S. Jews and Israelis, who heads the Gerstein | Agne firm, noted about a survey conducted last year is still true: “Jews believe that President Obama is honest and trustworthy…and that he is restoring America’s standing in the world…Trust in the new American President also extends to his Middle East policy…”