TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira’s latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ at the Center for American Progress website will not gladden the spirits of Republican spin-meisters who argue that, as the public becomes more aware of the facts about the Affordable Health Care Act, polls will show an uptick in support for repeal of the act — and GOP congressional candidates. First, a plurality of poll respondents view the legislation favorably, as Teixeira explains:

…Consider these results from the latest Kaiser Health Tracking poll. First, the poll records a slightly more favorable (46 percent) than unfavorable (40 percent) reaction to the “new health reform law.” Thus, it is not the case that polls even now are uniformly showing unfavorable reaction to the new law.

And looking toward the very near future, Teixeira notes that, while a majority of voters say they don’t yet have enough information to understand how the law will affect them personally, the provisions scheduled to kick in this year are polling very well, indeed:

…Just 43 percent say they now have enough information to make this judgment, compared to 56 percent who say they don’t. Thus, more information could presumably make a difference to current feelings about the Affordable Health Care Act.
This is where the conservatives’ big problem comes in. There are a wide variety of changes that will take effect this year as a result of the law. Kaiser tested favorability to 11 of these changes, including “allowing children to stay on their parents’ insurance plans until age 26” (74 percent favorable), “providing tax credits to businesses with fewer than 25 workers that provide health insurance to their employees” (86 percent favorable), and “making it harder for insurance companies to drop someone’s coverage when that person has a major health problem” (81 percent favorable). The average across the 11 changes was 73 percent favorable, with no change lower than 57 percent favorable.

As Teixeira concludes, “…As the public hears more about these changes and encounters them when interacting with the health care system, favorability toward the new health care reform law is likely to grow.” And, if the law’s beneficial provisions are well-publicized, GOP spin-doctors will be spinning their wheels more than anything else.

Even as Republicans try, somehow, to make the Gulf oil spill disaster “Obama’s Katrina,” the evidence of actual responsibility is pointing in a very different direction: right at former Vice President, Halliburton executive, and self-appointed czar of All Things Petroleum, Dick Cheney.
TDS Co-Editor William Galston has an important piece up on the New Republic site today marshaling the evidence for Cheney’s culpability for BP’s failure to utilize a device that would have largely prevented the disaster, which was required by federal authorities prior to 2003.

So here’s my question: what is responsible for the [Mineral Management Service’s] change of heart between 2000 and 2003 on the crucial issue of requiring a remote control switch for offshore rigs? What we do know is that unfettered oil drilling was to Dick Cheney’s domestic concerns what the invasion of Iraq was to his foreign policy—a core objective, implacably pursued regardless of the risks. Is there a connection between his infamous secret energy task force and the corrupt mindset that came to dominate a key program within MMS? Would $500,000 per rig have been regarded as an unacceptably expensive insurance policy if a drill-baby-drill administration hadn’t placed its thumb so heavily on the scale?

As Galston notes, it’s indisputable that Halliburton was responsible for the drilling process, known as “cementing,” that appears to have led to the Gulf spill, and to previous spills elsewhere. And it raises new questions about the conflicts of interest involved in the secretive energy policy process that Cheney set up as vice president, which really got into the weeds of the oil drilling business.
So let’s don’t hear any more about “Obama’s Katrina” until we’ve figured out whether the man who so often declared Barack Obama unfit for the presidency might have played a tangible role in making this disaster happen.

While Democratic unity is, given the objective circumstances, pretty well intact, there remains some serious progressive grumbling that the president and congressional Democrats are failing to take advantage of populist fury against the Washington status quo and reclaim the mantle of “hope and change.”
The esteemed progressive journalist Paul Starr has an article up on the American Prospect site arguing that the long-term policy results of Democratic policy initiatives should remain a higher priority than manuevering with the Tea Party Movement for the Angry Populist high ground.

Many progressives blame Obama, saying that he fell in with the wrong crowd in Washington and Wall Street, gave too much ground on policy, failed to mobilize his grass-roots organization, and lost his true voice, at least until the final weeks of the health-care battle when he barnstormed the nation and looked like the candidate the public elected in 2008.
Envious of the Tea Party’s angry crowds, even saying they sympathize with them, these progressives yearn for Democrats to express that same populist anger — but to direct it against the big banks and other corporations….
But there are good reasons why Obama cannot and should not indulge in a full-bore populism that, in practice, would yield nothing but deadlock and disaster.

Starr contrasts Obama’s approach to that of Republicans in power, who pandered for votes with an unfunded and poorly designed Medicare prescription drug benefit precisely because they didn’t care about the real-life consequences. With Republicans now abandoning any real pretense of offering a practical agenda for the country, Democrats have the particular burden of being “the party of responsible government, [because] America needs at least one of those.”

[F]or all their limitations, the bailouts and other policies have put the economy back in gear. Growth has resumed, productivity is up sharply, and employers are beginning to hire. This is how recoveries look: The market anticipates change, while employment lags it. And because most people cannot yet see the fruits, Democrats are paying a price in public approval and may well pay one in November.
For the fall, Democrats could well use more tactical populism, and the battle over financial reform should provide plenty of opportunity for it. But their true hope lies in building a record as the party of responsible government. Let the Republicans drink the Tea Party’s brew. Progressives shouldn’t wish for the equivalent. Calm and intelligent leadership is ultimately a better formula for long-term public support.

With the current conservative surge relying heavily on record-high public distrust of government, Starr has a good point that running against government as inveterately corrupted by corporate influence is a potentially self-defeating strategy for the party of public-sector activism. Certainly government should be more progressive. But if people don’t believe government can govern effectively at all, it’s the irresponsbile anti-government party that will benefit politically.

Like observers from all over the partisan and ideological spectrum, I’ve been following the fallout from Arizona’s new immigration law (compounded by conflicting reports that the Obama administration and/or congressional Democratic leaders might be moving up federal immigration legislation in the queue) very closely, given the implications this issue has for both 2010 and (particularly) beyond.
But in his weekly column for National Journal over the weekend, Ron Brownstein has done us all the great service of carefully documenting how far and how fast Republican members of Congress have moved on this subject since the Senate passed a comprehensive immigration reform bill in 2006:

Just four years ago, 62 U.S. senators, including 23 Republicans, voted for a comprehensive immigration reform bill that included a pathway to citizenship for illegal aliens. That bill was co-authored by Arizona Republican John McCain and Massachusetts Democrat Edward Kennedy. President Bush strongly supported it. The Republican supporters also included such conservative senators as Sam Brownback of Kansas and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky….
The measure almost certainly could have attracted the necessary 218 votes to pass the House. But it died when House GOP leaders refused to bring it to a vote because they concluded that it lacked majority support among House Republicans.
Since 2006, Republican support for comprehensive action has unraveled. In 2007, Senate negotiators tilted the bill further to the right on issues such as border enforcement and guest workers. And yet, amid a rebellion from grassroots conservatives against anything approaching “amnesty,” just 12 Senate Republicans supported the measure as it fell victim to a filibuster. By 2008, McCain declared in a GOP presidential debate that he would no longer support his own bill: Tougher border enforcement, he insisted, should precede discussion of any new pathway to citizenship.

So the GOP position was moving rightwards at warp speed even with a supporter of comprehensive immigration reform, George W. Bush, still in the White House, being advised by Karl Rove, who viewed such legislation as critical to maintaining a competitive position for Republicans among Hispanic voters. But it’s shifted even more since then, even though levels of immigration have significantly dropped.

For months, Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., have been negotiating an enforcement-legalization plan that largely tracks the 2006 model with some innovative updates, including a “biometric” Social Security card to certify legal status for employment. On balance, their proposal appears more conservative than the 2006 bill.
Yet it has been stalled for weeks because Graham had demanded that a second Republican sign on as a co-sponsor before the legislation is released, and none stepped forward. Even Graham angrily backed away this week, after Senate Democratic leaders briefly suggested they would move immigration reform ahead of climate-change legislation he is also negotiating. Reform advocates suspect that Graham is withdrawing from the immigration effort partly to avoid embarrassing his close ally McCain, who faces a stiff primary challenge from conservative former Rep. J.D. Hayworth.

So it appears that Senate Republican support for comprehensive immigration reform (or to be exact, a more conservative version of it) has dropped from 23 to 1 and perhaps soon to nada.
Underneath this shift, notes Brownstein, is the self-replicating demographic isolation of the GOP, which, as Rove forsaw, could make the construction of a Republican majority much harder in the medium-to-long-range future:

[T]he hardening GOP position also shows how the party is being tugged toward nativism as its coalition grows more monochromatic: In a nation that is more than one-third minority, nearly 90 percent of McCain’s votes in the 2008 presidential election came from whites. That exclusionary posture could expose the GOP to long-term political danger. Although Hispanics are now one-sixth of the U.S. population, they constitute one-fifth of all 10-year-olds and one-fourth of 1-year-olds.

This may not matter to Republican candidates in tough primaries this year, who aren’t looking beyond their noses and figure they can’t afford to get outflanked by opponents who are “getting tough” on immigration. But they are in danger of taking an existing demographic problem facing the GOP and making it immeasurably worse, and more immediate.

Writing in a Washington Post op-ed he says:
On the one hand:

Most important, tea partiers must remain distinct from both political parties. The GOP would like nothing better than to co-opt the movement and control the independent conservatives who are its members.
…But we must keep in mind that perhaps the single biggest mistake of the conservative movement was becoming an appendage of the Republican Party.
… Remember that most conservative leaders and organizations in Washington were silent when George W. Bush and congressional Republicans were expanding government at a record-breaking pace.
Even today, too many conservatives are willing to overlook the fact that the GOP’s leaders in Congress, Sen. Mitch McConnell and Rep. John Boehner, were willing accomplices of Bush’s spending policies and that Mitt Romney was for Obamacare before Obama was.

But on the other hand:

… If conservatives fall into the third-party trap, they will split the right-of-center vote, thereby guaranteeing the left’s control of America for at least another generation. The opportunity of a lifetime will have been wasted.
The tea party electoral strategy should be simple and consistent: We must run principled conservatives in the primaries and then throw our support behind the most conservative major-party candidates in the general election.

OK. Everybody got that? Like the man says, it’s “simple and consistent”

“Don’t become an appendage” to the Republican Party
“Remain distinct” from the Republican Party
“Don’t allow [The Republican Party] to co-op you”
Don’t forget their many betrayals
…but, oh yes, vote for them – all of them — in November anyway

It’s sure lucky that Viguerie clearly labeled this strategy the “simple and consistent” one. I’d hate to see what the inconsistent one looks like.