Politico‘s Ben Smith presents a memo by Administration poll analyst Joel Benenson arguing that “Republican unpopularity could be the Democratic Party’s best defense against its own unpopularity.” According to Benenson’s bullet points:

• Today’s NBC/Wall St. Journal poll underscores the fact that with fewer than 90 days until the mid-term elections, the Republican Party’s standing is at one of its lowest points ever and its competitive position vs. the Democrats looks much as it did in the summers of 1998 and 2002, neither of which were “wave” elections.
• The NBC/WSJ poll shows that not only is the Republican Party’s image at its lowest point ever in their polling, their ratings are still lower than Democrats’ and their party image has worsened much more than the Democrats when compared with the last midterm elections in 2006.

See also Ed Kilgore’s post on the survey here. Further, Benenson adds,

• Only 24 percent of Americans gave the Republicans a positive rating while 46 percent were negative for a net of -22 (28 percent were neutral). This positive rating is not only a historic low, it is down 9 points since May — just three months ago. In addition, in July of 2006, a year in which Republicans lost 30 seats, their rating stood at 32 percent positive, 39 percent negative for only a -7 net rating or a change in the net rating of -15. During the same period the Democratic rating slipped only slightly by a net of -4 points from 32/39 in July 2006 to 33/44 today.
• This overall outlook is also consistent with an ABC/Washington Post poll from a month ago (7/13/10) that showed Americans’ confidence in Republicans in Congress to make “the right decisions for the country’s future” lagging behind Democrats:
– 73 percent say they are not confident in Republicans in Congress while 26 percent say they are, for a net negative confidence rating of -47 points.
– Democrats in Congress are at 32 percent confident (6 points higher than the GOP) and 67 percent who say they are not confident (6 points lower than the GOP), for a net confidence rating of -35, which is 12 points better than the congressional Republicans.
• When asked in the NBC/WSJ poll whether they prefer Democratic or Republican control of Congress after the November elections, 43 percent said Democrats and 42 percent said Republicans. While Democrats had a 10-point margin in 2006 when they gained 31 seats, the previous two midterms also showed a deadlocked preference in the summers of 1998 and 2002 in the NBC/WSJ polls. In both of those elections, the gains were only in single digits: 5 seats for the Democrats in 1998 and 8 seats for the Republicans in 2002.
• In addition, a Pew poll from early July showed that Republicans have a significant image deficit among Americans on the question of which party is “more concerned about people like me.” In that survey of 1800 Americans, 50 percent said Democrats were more concerned about people like them while only 34 percent said Republicans were.

Cherry-picked as Benenson’s data may be, all three polls appear to be methodologically-solid. If Benenson is right, Dems are in a better position, image-wise than Republicans. There’s plenty of room for improvement for Dems, but the GOP is in a deeper mess in terms of the way they are viewed by the public.

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In the tough but essential fight against outright lying in American politics, Ezra Klein has struck an important goal in a <em>Newsweek column today. As he points out, there are elements of the new health reform law that reduce the federal budget deficit (according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office) either directly by raising revenues (e.g., the tax on high-cost insurance policies) or indirectly by controlling health care costs. There are also provisions that in isolation would increase the federal budget deficit, either directly through more spending (e.g., subsidies for the purchase of private health insurance) or indirectly by boosting health care costs (requirements that people with pre-existing conditions be sold affordable policies).
Now Republicans are free to make the argument that the expensive stuff in the bill outweighs the stuff that reduces expenses, though simply asserting that against the independent expertise of CBO isn’t terribly persuasive. But as Klein points out, that’s really not where they seem to be going. Republicans are most focused on repealing cost controls, which generally aren’t popular, and are least interested, to the point of actual opposition in some cases, in repealing the very popular new benefits:

[O]ne of the unnoticed dynamics of health-care reform was that Democrats were so desperate to pass a bill that they were willing to accept cost controls that they would’ve laughed at in normal circumstances. They ran over unions to begin taxing employer benefits and created a process making it harder to protect Medicare from future cost-cutting reforms. Republicans could’ve used the opportunity to strengthen the sort of cost controls they’ve long said they wanted, while focusing their repeal efforts on the bill’s spending.
But they’re doing the opposite, and there’s a real risk to their strategy: if the bill’s hard choices are political losers, the policies that cost money aren’t. Subsidies for poor people are popular. Rules preventing insurers from discriminating based on preexisting conditions are popular. Tax credits for small businesses and closing the doughnut hole in the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit are popular. Cost controls aren’t. And Republicans, who’ve frequently argued that the bill is too costly, are taking direct aim at them.
If they repeal the parts but not the whole, we could end up with the bill’s cost control wrecked but its spending intact. “You can’t argue that you’re for fiscal responsibility then argue for taking out all the fiscally responsible parts,” says Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

It’s all the more reason that Republicans should be constantly pushed to offer their own vision for the health care system, not just attack the enacted reforms because some of them are unpopular.

At a time when it’s fashionable to draw analogies between 1994 and 2010, you hear some deficit hawks argue that Barack Obama needs to emulate Bill Clinton’s early emphasis on reducing the federal budget deficit instead of investing in job-producing activities on grounds that bond markets were sending a clear signal via higher interest rates that deficit reduction was imperative.
But as budget expert Stan Collender points out, bond markets today are sending exactly the opposite signal:

The economic situation today is the opposite of what existed at the start of the Clinton administration. In 1993, the bond market was worried about excess demand and soaring inflation, which would have eroded the value of bonds. Having the federal government spend less and tax more — that is, do things that would reduce the deficit — meant that the economy would cool rather than overheat, and therefore that the demand for goods, services, and workers would be reduced. This would keep inflation in check and allow federal bonds to maintain their value.
The big concern today is about deflation and slow growth rather than inflation and overheating. With unemployment high and capacity utilization low, the bond market not only isn’t worried about the excessive economic growth, it actually would welcome the additional activity that would be generated by higher spending and lower taxes.

Thus, concludes Collender, the pressure for deficit reduction right now is political, not economic, in nature. Markets aren’t reaching the conclusion that Herbert Hoover, not FDR, was right about how to deal with high unemploment and low consumer demand; politicians are, with self-fulfilling negative results as the federal government withdraws from efforts to stimulate the economy.

As I’ve been arguing incessantly, one of the most basic strategic imperatives for Democrats everywhere is to force Republicans who are not currently in positions of authority to explain in detail what they would do if they were. When GOP candidates do move from a position of simply and vaguely deploring the status quo, interesting things are revealed about their priorities.
Consider the Republican nominee for governor of South Carolina, the self-styled “conservative reformer” Nikki Haley (mainly known out-of-state as the victim of nasty sexual rumors and ethnic slurs). According to The State newspaper (via Think Progress), Haley’s first big policy proposal is to eliminate income taxes on corporations. This would blow a significant hole in a South Carolina budget that’s already under considerable stress, but the more significant thing to understand is Haley’s rationale: “To be able to say we are a right-to-work state and a no-corporate-income-tax state is going to cause businesses to want to come, and it will create jobs in the process.”
In other words, Haley’s entire understanding of state economic development policy seems to boil down to the ancient race-to-the-bottom mentality of cutting business costs to raid companies from other states. But at the same time, according to the same article in The State, Haley favors eliminating a current exemption from the state sales tax for food purchases, because creating that exemption in 2007 “didn’t create one job.” Interesting way of thinking about taxes, eh? Low- and middle-income people may need to eat, but their eating doesn’t create jobs, it seems. So they need to pony up more tax dollars so that out-of-state corporations can get a tax break if they move in to exploit the state’s low non-union wage rates.
You can imagine the implications of this approach if elevated to the national level, where you can’t pretend that you’re going to be able to raid jobs from your neighbors, and you have to come right out and admit you believe that whatever’s good for corporations is good for America. So think about that next time you read about Haley being a future president of the United States, or when she throws her political prestige behind one of her recent benefactors like Sarah Palin or Mitt Romney.

A new NBC/Wall Street Journal survey shows the Democratic Party’s favorable rating dropping to 33%, the lowest level since July of 2006. The same survey, however, shows the Republican Party’s favorable rating dropping to 24%, the lowest level ever recorded by the pollster.
On another front, PPP has released one of its perioidic 2012 presidential election polls. It shows President Obama’s job approval/disapproval ratio as being slightly in negative territory at 47-48. But it also shows the favorable/unfavorable ratios for the most commonly named GOP opponents all in negative territory as well (Huckabee: 32-34; Palin: 37-54; Gingrich: 31-48; Paul: 23-34; Romney: 35-37). Obama also leads all these worthies in head-to-head match-ups.
It is often forgotten that elections do involve comparisons of parties and candidates. Perhaps the GOP will have a big mid-term election based on simply a rejection of Democratic governance or unhappiness with the status quo. But in presidential years, the “out” party needs a bit more than being “out,” and Republicans continue to show that they don’t have the platform or the leadership to look good by comparison.

On the outside chance that you are an incurable optimist who thinks the political, economic and international challenges facing the Obama administration have been overrated, you should check out Jeffrey Goldberg’s long article in The Atlantic about the slowly growing likelihood that Israel will soon decide to launch a unilateral military attack on nuclear facilities in Iran.
Putting aside the more obvious risks to life involved, the economic consequences of a regional war in the Middle East are simply terrifying. And it appears it will take an extraordinarily deft diplomatic stance by the United States–or abundant good luck of the sort that’s been hard to find of late–to head off some sort of armed confrontation between Israel and Iran, with “moderate” Arab states in the background urging the Israelis on.
If Goldberg’s even half right about the trajectory of events, this issue needs to become much more prominent in U.S. politics, beyond the saber-rattling of neocons whose Iraqi adeventure didn’t satisfy their taste for archair military strategery.

As charges fly back and forth in connection with White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs’ outburst at “the professional left,” TDS contributors Robert Creamer and Mike Lux offer some useful perspective:
Here’s Creamer:

They used to say that the thing that is most likely to end war and conflict between the nations of the world would be an existential threat from a group of aliens from outer space.
The same must be true for Democrats and Progressives. Time to give up the bickering, the infighting, the name calling — and unite to prevent the Empire from striking back.
No more aspersions about the “professional left.” No more talk about how the Obama White House sold out this or that issue or cause.
For those who are so inclined there will be plenty of time for all that once again after November 2nd. Right now our job is to make sure that Republicans do not become a majority in either House of Congress, for that is certain to bring serious progressive change to screeching halt.

And here’s Lux:

Our job as progressives is to never be satisfied, to always be impatient with the pace of change. Frederick Douglass, Alice Paul, Walter Reuther, Martin Luther King, Jr.- none of them were ever satisfied with the progress being made, and the Presidents they worked with were constantly aggravated at the pressure they received. But big changes got done when Presidents understood the importance of working effectively with them and the movements they represented.

As both Creamer and Lux suggest, the White House and the “professional Left” have distinct jobs to do, and they should focus on doing them without unnecessary recriminations.

If you thought the Republican “anchor babies” scam to repeal the 14th amendment citizenship clause was just an escalation of their boilerplate xenophobia, Harold Meyerson gets down to the real nitty-gritty in his WaPo column today:

The Republican war on the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause is indeed directed at a mortal threat — but not to the American nation. It is the threat that Latino voting poses to the Republican Party.
By proposing to revoke the citizenship of the estimated 4 million U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants — and, presumably, the children’s children and so on down the line — Republicans are calling for more than the creation of a permanent noncitizen caste. They are endeavoring to solve what is probably their most crippling long-term political dilemma: the racial diversification of the electorate. Not to put too fine a point on it, they are trying to preserve their political prospects as a white folks’ party in an increasingly multicolored land.

Meyerson’s got numbers:

…The demographic base of the Republican Party, as Ruy Teixeira demonstrates in a paper released by the Center for American Progress this summer, is shrinking as a share of the nation and the electorate. As the nation grows more racially and religiously diverse, Teixeira shows, its percentage of white Christians will decline to just 35 percent of the population by 2040.
The group that’s growing fastest, of course, is Latinos. “Their numbers will triple to 133 million by 2050 from 47 million today,” Teixeira writes, “while the number of non-Hispanic whites will remain essentially flat.” Moreover, Latinos increasingly trend Democratic — in a Gallup poll this year, 53 percent self-identified as Democrats; just 21 percent called themselves Republican.

Meyerson has hit on the longer-term goal behind the repeal effort. But no doubt the Republicans hope to gain some short term advantage from swing voters by whipping up anti-immigrant animosity for the mid terms.
It’s a cynical bet — that Hispanic-bashing will win more votes from economically-fearful whites than they will lose from Hispanic voters. At last count, the Republicans had 91 House sponsors of the measure, which was reportedly submitted in the House last year by former congressman Nathan Deal, who was designated one of “the 15 most corrupt members of congress” by the nonpartisan Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
Today Deal became the GOP’s nominee for Georgia Governor. Georgia’s Latino population is smaller in percentage terms than many other states, although it is growing very fast. Still, it would be poetic justice if Deal lost the race by a small margin to Democrat Roy Barnes as a result of the latter’s lop-sided support from Hispanic voters.

Last night’s primary returns from four states were enough to keep me up past my bedtime. The biggest upset was probably Dan Malloy’ easy win over Ned Lamont in the CT Democratic gubernatorial primary, though the size of Michael Bennet’s eight-point win over Andrew Romanoff in the CO Dem Senate primary certainly surprised me. Three races expected to be very close–the Republican gubernatorial and Senate races in CO, and the GOP gubernatorial runoff–were in fact very close. Karen Handel’s concession to Nathan Deal in GA, with absentee ballots still to be counted and just over two thousand votes separating the candidates, was a bit of a surprise after a long and bitter campaign. Ken Buck’s 52-48 win over Jane Norton showed the value of political “home cooking;” virtually all of his margin can be attributed to a stellar performance in his home county (Weld) and the one next door to it (Larimer). You wish there could have been an exit poll for the CO GOP governor’s race to find out what voters thought they were doing when they cast ballots for Dan Maes. And you’d like to know if there was a point in the long evening when former Senator and now gubernatorial nominee Mark Dayton thought his long political career was finally over.
But here’s the really interesting thing: Democrats are at the moment front-runners in the gubernatorial contest in all four of these states, three of which currently have Republican governors. That’s a bit of good news for the Donkey Party during a tough year.

Probably no term in the political lexicon evokes more confusion that ‘populism,’ which has been carelessly tossed around to describe philosophies ranging from progressive to outright racist demagoguery. Fortunately we have Mike Lux to straighten out the mess and put the term in modern context to describe what it means for progressives and how it can be leveraged to help Democrats win a stable majority. In his HuffPo post “A Modern Progressive Populist Platform,” Lux explains:

With voters angry at the establishment and incumbents in general, and deals in particular, Democrats who are defenders of the established order are working overtime to beat down the idea of winning elections by using scary populism. Using faulty historical analogies, polls with carefully designed questions in order to elicit certain answers, and the specter of far-right anti-intellectualism as reasons not to be populist, they fear what might happen if Democrats actually start listening to real voters and make the changes people were promised in 2008.
The good news is that if the Democrats running for office in this tough, tough year will respond to the anti-establishment anger that is out there and ride it, they can do better than anyone is currently predicting. Of course, if that happened, it would be a very bad thing for corporate Democrats who don’t want anything to change, because it would prove the lie that the only way for Democrats to win is to kow-tow to special interest power and conventional wisdom.

Lux takes writers Matt Bai and Kevin Mattson to task for adding to the confusion about populism, and critiques Mattson’s article in the Aug. 3rd edition of The American Prospect:

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