One of the most predictable amusements of this new Congress is to watch the fiery, nothing’s-off-the-table budget hawks of the Republican Party begin to make exceptions for defense spending, even, in fact, opposing cuts already being advocated by the Pentagon.
Elisabeth Bumiller and Thom Shanker of the New York Times have a rundown on efforts by more senior GOP solons to “educate” Tea Party freshmen about the importance of defense spending to the country and to their own districts. That’s because so few said a word on the subject during the recent campaign:

The discordant Republican voices on military spending have bred confusion on Capitol Hill, among military contractors and within the military itself, where no one is exactly sure what the members backed by the Tea Party will do. It also shows why taking on the military budget will be so hard, even though a widening deficit has led the president and the leaders of both parties to say this time they are serious.
Most Tea Party candidates spoke little about national security and the military in fall political campaigns focused on cutting spending over all.

This dilemma has been brewing for quite some time. Back during the campaign, Sarah Palin took it upon herself to act as the defense industry’s main emissary to the Tea Party Movement, urging fiscal conservatives to give the Pentagon a pass:

There’s growing concern among Republicans — and especially among the pro-defense neoconservative wing of the party — that national security spending, which is under a level of scrutiny and pressure not seen since the end of the Cold War, could fall victim to the tea party’s anti-establishment, anti-spending agenda. The former Alaska governor, as the unofficial leader of the movement and its most prominent celebrity, is moving to carve out such funding from any drives to cut overall government expenditures.
“In the conservative ranks and within the party, she’s really quite a crucial piece in this puzzle,” said Tom Donnelly, a defense fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “She’s got both political and tea-party/small-government bona fides, but she also has a lot of credibility in advocating for military strength.”

More recently, would-be president John Bolton took this same no-cuts position on defense spending It will be most interesting to see what some other presidential candidates–e.g., Mitt Romney, who’s tried to pose as Mister Tough Guy on foreign and defense policy–will have to say on this rather obvious contradicton in the conservative message and agenda.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
The ideas and policy proposals in Barack Obama’s 2011 State of the Union Address were anything but fresh and original. Much of it could easily have been harvested from any number of interchangeable speeches given during the last 20 years–not just by presidents by members of Congress, governors, mayors, and CEOs–from both parties. Yet that may have been exactly the point. By staking his claim to decades of well-worn political detritus, I think Obama has set a cunning political trap for his enemies.
A crash program for economic competitiveness? We’ve heard it dozens of times, and Obama’s speech mainly substituted new global rivals for old ones. Harrumphing about how education and a skilled workforce are they key to national prosperity? Obviously an old theme. Reorganizing major federal departments was one of Jimmy Carter’s signature initiatives. Tax simplification was one of Ronald Reagan’s. Making government a lean, mean efficiency machine has been promised many times, most notably by Bill Clinton. Across-the-board spending freezes, support for small business entrepreneurs, growing green jobs, better infrastructure, boosting exports (without, presumably, those pesky imports)–we’ve heard it all. One conceit–the “Sputnik Moment”–was so old that you wonder if the president’s young speechwriters just found out about it.
And that’s the beauty of Obama’s address. He basically put together every modest, centrist, reasonable-sounding idea for public investment aimed at job creation and economic growth that anyone has ever uttered; and he did so at the exact moment that the GOP has abandoned the very concept of public investment altogether. He’s thrown into relief the fact that Republicans no longer seem interested in any government efforts to boost the economy, except where they offer an excuse to reduce the size and power of government.
Paul Ryan’s deficit-maniac response played right into Obama’s trap: Ryan barely mentioned the economy other to imply that every dollar taken away from the public sector will somehow create jobs in the private sector economy (a private sector economy wherein, as Obama cleverly noted, corporate profits are setting records). For those who buy the idea that government is the only obstacle to an economic boom, this makes sense. But for everybody else, the contrast between a Democratic president with a lot of small, familiar ideas for creating jobs and growth, and a Republican Party with just one big idea, is inescapable. It’s a vehicle for the “two alternate futures” choice which Obama will try to offer voters in 2012.
Moreover, Obama’s tone–the constant invocation of bipartisanship at a time when Republicans are certain to oppose most of what he’s called for, while going after the progressive programs and policies of the past–should sound familiar as well. It was Bill Clinton’s constant refrain, which he called “progress over partisanship,” during his second-term struggle with the Republican Congress. During that period, the Republicans being asked to transcend “partisanship” were trying to remove Clinton from office. And Clinton wasn’t really extending his hand in a gesture of cooperation with the GOP but, by creating a contrast with their ideological fury, indicating that he himself embodied the bipartisan aspirations of the American people and the best ideas of both parties. It was quite effective.
By playing this rope-a-dope, Obama has positioned himself well to push back hard against the conservative agenda. Having refused to offer Republicans the cover they crave for “entitlement reform,” while offering his own modest, reasonable-sounding deficit reduction measures, he’s forcing the GOP to either go after Social Security and Medicare on their own–which is very perilous to a party whose base has become older voters–or demand unprecedented cuts for those popular public investments that were the centerpiece of his speech. Either way, in a reversal of positions from the last two years, Obama looks like he is focused on doing practical things to boost the economy, while it’s Republicans who are talking about everything else. Boring it may have been, but as a positioning device for the next two years, Obama’s speech was a masterpiece.

Dial testing and follow-up discussions with 50 swing voters in Denver, Colorado showed that President Obama’s 2011 State of the Union struck a powerful chord as he described his economic vision for the country. Following the speech, voters gave the President impressive assessments on key economic measures and were especially drawn to the President’s emphasis on three of the themes he emphasized in his speech; innovation, education, and America’s competitiveness in the future. As one of these swing voters put it, “the future belongs to the people who make the what and the how.”
Despite their strong response to the State of the Union, these swing voters remain skeptical about Washington’s ability to deliver and are hungry for tangible changes in the economy. The President’s references to the nation’s past accomplishments and his description of how we must invest in small businesses and out-innovate to create tomorrow’s jobs helped overcome this skepticism, but getting past their skepticism will clearly be a central challenge.
This was a difficult audience for Obama, yet his speech largely won them over. It was a heavily Republican-leaning group (48 percent Republican, 18 percent Democratic) that split their votes in 2008 (48 percent Obama, 48 percent McCain) but had moved away from the President over the past two years. At the outset, majorities expressed disapproval with his job performance and unfavorable views of him on a personal level.
Despite this Republican tilt, Obama saw significant shifts in his overall standing — larger even than after his well-received State of the Union address last year. His overall job approval among these voters jumped by 26 points (10 points more than he gained last year) while his personal standing flipped from decidedly cool (30 percent warm versus 62 percent cool) to much warmer (52 percent warm, 27 percent cool).

Read more…

One pundit-task that has a shelf-life so inherently short as to make it pointless is the State of the Union Address (SOTU) forecast, which focuses on the secret of the presiden’s remarks that the whole world will soon know. So I’m more inclined to wait until after the speech to say anything.
But there’s one source of confusion going on in the runup to SOTU 2011 that is very likely to survive it: the belief that in conveying a “pro-business” tone in the speech Obama will be making goo-goo eyes at Republicans in pursuit of a “bipartisanship” they have no intention of reciprocating.
I don’t think so. Yes, Obama is likely to make a very Clintonian pitch for “progress, not partisanship” and lay out modest spending and tax proposals aimed at promoting private-sector job creation–the kind of thing Republicans used to like.
But in the current political context, this sort of “centrist” pitch will represent a deadly attack on the very fundamental tenets of the Republican Party. GOPers have now decided, and tell us every day, that the Great Recession was caused by Big Government (too much spending, taxes and regulation), and that the way to bring the economy roaring back is very simple: reduce the size and strength of government. Never mind if indiscriminate budget cuts result in layoffs of public employees and reduced buying power for consumers losing government benefits; recessions aren’t about consumer demand, they are about “job creators” going on strike, Galt-like, because they are constrained by high taxes and regulation.
Having half-convinced themeslves that Obama was going to give them the political cover they need to go after Social Security and Medicare (beloved of their own electoral base), or offer to negotiate a budget based on their enormous lists of non-defense-discretionary targets, GOPers will not react well to a speech that talks about new public investments that promote growth and innovation; the very idea offends them at this point. So however conciliatory Obama sounds, he appears to be setting a trap whereby conservatives go out of their way to make it clear they don’t give a damn about the economy except as the latest excuse to grind old axes against progressive governance and policies. We’ll soon know if I’m right, and if I am, if it works.

It won’t be official until a Senate Democratic Caucus meeting this afternoon, but it’s abundantly clear that the hopes raised during the inter-session break of Democrats lining up behind a package of serious filibuster reforms have been dashed.
Aside from the fact that there are less than 50 Democratic votes for major changes in the threshold for cutting off debate, there aren’t 50 Democratic votes for the proposition that a simple majority can set the rules for the Senate in each Congress, which was the premise of this whole “reform” exercise. Here’s HuffPo’s Sam Stein on this key point:

Some Democrats are wary of exercising the so-called “constitutional option” — which would allow them to set the chamber rules with just 50 votes — pushing instead to settle for a smaller package of reforms capable of garnering the 67 votes needed for a midsession rules change.

This is another step back after an earlier step back: the substitution of very modest measures sponsored by Sens. Udall and Merkley that didn’t really touch the 60 vote requirement, instead of the more significant reforms promoted earlier by Sen. Dick Durbin. Now even the Udall-Merkley package isn’t doable, says Stein:

The Udall-Merkley approach, said one former Senate aide following the talks, was more or less dead because “the votes aren’t there” for doing something via the constitutional option. And since that means Democrats need 14 Republican votes, the party was all but assured to settle on the low-hanging fruit.

The “low-hanging fruit” will at best involve reductions in the number of mid-level administration appointments requiring Senate confirmation, and changes in post-cloture debate and amendment procedures to make filibusters less attractive on relatively minor legislation.
While unanimous Republican opposition to real filibuster reform is the ultimate problem, it’s important to acknowledge that progressive ambivalence on the subject had a lot to do with this very disappointing outcome. Some Democrats are clearly looking ahead to the possibility of a GOP takeover of the Senate in 2012 (a real possibility even in a good Democratic year because of the Senate landscape). And they’re more concerned about their ability to defend the programmatic and policy objects of conservative wrath than to enact good legislation.
That may make some sense in the short run, but it should be obvious that the party of public-sector activism is in trouble if it supports procedures in the Senate that make progressive governance virtually impossible. Given the inherent and disproportionate power of small states in the Senate, there’s no telling if or when Democrats will ever secure 60 votes in that chamber again and obtain an outside chance of enacting legislation against the will of a united opposition. Throwing away the chance for even modest filibuster reforms sets a very bad precedent, and individual Democratic senators who made this happen need to come forward and explain themselves.

House Republicans passed repeal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), with loads of bluster about their doing the will of the people. But when you look at public opinion poll data, that support is “very soft indeed,” according to TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira’s latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ in the Center for American Progress web pages.

…The fact is people like a great deal about the new health care reform law and are reluctant to give up these advances. Consider these results from the latest CBS/New York Times survey. Forty-eight percent of those polled said they preferred to let the new law stand compared to 40 percent who wanted to see it repealed. The latter figure is obviously significant and, in fact, has been up to 10 points higher in other surveys.

Turns out, however, that support for repeal gets downright mushy when respondents are asked “whether they would still support repeal if that meant insurance companies were no longer required to cover those with pre-existing medical conditions.” Teixeira adds, “This query reduced the number supporting complete repeal to just 21 percent.”
No matter how loudly House conservatives crow about their “victory,” the public is not ready to sign on this particular take-away, especially with no alternative to replace it.

The news that a panel of Illinois Court of Appeals Court judges have ruled Rahm Emanuel ineligible to run for mayor of Chicago because he is not a resident of that city has mostly been greeted with cheers and jeers from Rahm-bo’s various detractors, Left and Right. Others probably assume it’s a problem that will be fixed, one way or another, before the mayoral primary on February 22.
On this last issue, I don’t think there’s much doubt the ruling creates large and immediate problems for the man leading every poll for the Democratic mayoral nomination. Early voting begins one week from today. And election officials are scheduled to begin printing ballots tonight (the process had been delayed pending this decision), without Emanuel’s name. There’s not much time for appeals or any other sort of maneuvering.
On the broader question of the ruling’s “fairness” (putting aside the proper interpretation of Illiinois’ unusually strict residency requirements for candidates), it’s obviously something of a travesty. Not only is Emanuel a native Chicagoan who has spent most of his life there, and represented the city and state in Congress; he is often said to personify the “Chicago” approach to politics. He’s a non-Chicagoan only in the sense that John F. Kennedy might have been considered a non-Bostonian because he left town to serve in the Navy, the Congress and the White House.
You also have to wonder how Alan Keyes managed to qualify to run for the U.S. Senate from Illinois in 2004 against Rahm’s former boss, the President of the United States, having never resided in the state for a moment until he was tapped to replace a disgraced Republican candidate.
Residency requirements are often hazy and even more often abused, as you might expect in a country where the national elites are typically temporary residents of the capitol, with a remarkable number of them harboring political ambitions “back home,” even if they can’t afford to maintain a physical residence in two places. As you may recall from last year’s political cycle, Dan Coats of Indiana managed to get returned to the U.S. Senate as a Hoosier despite having voted in Virginia for a decade and then buying a retirement home in still another state. My personal favorite residency story involved then-Senator, now-proto-presidential-candidate Rick Santorum, who by all accounts was living in the Horse Country of Virginia while the taxpayers of Pennsylvania bore the cost of an internet-based charter school education for his kids (Santorum eventually decided to home-school the kids).
Since there’s zero doubt Emanuel intended to remain a Chicagoan, and did nothing that cost the people of his city or state a dime for living elsewhere for a couple of years, it’s weird he could be disqualified. If he’s a carpetbagger, then so was Scarlett O’Hara.

Accompanying a modest but real upward drift in the president’s approval rating in the last couple of weeks has been some cross-talk about which element of the electorate–particularly independents–might be responsible for it.
Well, TDS Contributor and Emory University politician scientist Alan Abramowitz put together a chart (published here by Brendan Nyhan) that compares approval ratings for Obama from various groups with their actual vote-shares for him in 2008, and finds that they are remarkably similar, and in many cases identical. Obama’s potential victory coalition in 2012 isn’t any mystery; it’s hiding in plain sight, in the coalition that elected him in 2008.

Sad but true, much of the commentary on the State of the Union Address is going to focus on “signals” allegedly being sent by the president concerning this or that group of powerful people, most notably a Republican Party that is getting itself ready to be offended by his refusal to accept their policy agenda.
There will also be talk about the president’s success or failure in wooing business leaders, whose confidence in him, we are often told, is essential to economic recovery. On that topic, Matt Yglesias provides an important reminder:

The notion that economic growth depends crucially on the subjective feelings of the business executive class is one of the most pernicious ideas to take hold over the past 12 months….
The fact of the matter is that businessmen like conservative politicians. If you ask them “how do you feel about the incumbent politicians these days” they say “I feel great” if and only if the incumbent politicians are conservatives. Economic growth was better in the 1990s than in the 2000s, but businessmen liked George W. Bush better than Bill Clinton. Growth was better under FDR than under Eisenhower, but businessmen liked Ike. And that’s fine, businessmen are free to like or dislike whomever they want. But their subjective view of politicians doesn’t cause or hamper economic growth.

If we really believe the profit motive is an important factor in the functioning of a capitalist economy, we have to accept that capitalists will take advantage of opportunities offered by an economy governed by politicians they don’t approve of. Sure, business folk rightly look to the political class for stable policies and competent management. But beyond that, anxious measurement of their temperature towards Obama and his administration is a waste of time.

A new poll conducted 1/9-12 by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps and Campaign for America’s Future presents “a clear and dramatic message” for the President and Congress: It’s all about jobs and the restoration of a healthy economy. As the memo from TDS Co-Editor Stan Greenberg, James Carville and Robert Borosage, explains:

The media pundits and Washington conventional wisdom say deficit reduction and cutting gov-ernment spending are the top priorities for the nation; yet, the Republican Congress has prioritized health care repeal and Social Security cuts (which are on the table for the first time.) They could not have it more wrong. It is jobs, stupid.

This survey results, released on the eve of the President’s State of the Union address, shows a significant uptick in his “personal favorability” ratings, all the more impressive since it was conducted before his much-praised address memorializing the victims of the Tucson shooting. Also, for the President, “strong disapproval has plummeted.” Moreover, President Obama is “marginally ahead of Mitt Romney and dramatically ahead of Sarah Palin in the 2012 race.”
The poll also shows some modest improvement for congressional Democrats over 2010, when they were down by 8 points. Dems trail Republicans in a named Congressional ballot by 3 points and by 4 among Independents. The survey concludes that Dems and the GOP “are at rough parity in public image.” The authors warn, however, that,

…Right now, Democrats are basically invisible on the economy and jobs. Republicans are more trusted by 4 points on the economy and the parties are at parity on creating jobs…We all know the unemployment rate will exceed 9 percent for some time to come, and will probably remain above 8 percent up to the election. There is no more important fact. In this survey, 17 percent report being unemployed in the past year; 41 percent counting themselves or someone in their immediate family – one half of white non-college men.

But, looking forward, Dems could gain traction:

Voters could be on the verge of registering some buyers’ remorse for the Republican leadership…Republicans are about to confront the gap between the mandate they claim and the voters’ priorities. This presents an opportunity for Democrats to define themselves, the choice ahead, and more importantly, to finally show what they believe about the economy and how they plan to achieve growth – above all, how to create jobs now and in the future…The President and the Democrats have to start over in communicating their vision on the economy. The country embraces long-term plans for investment to create jobs and favors growth as the best route to deficit reduction – strongly favoring investment over austerity.

In terms of priorities, the survey findings couldn’t be more clear:

Though respondents could choose two problems, just 25 percent say “the budget deficit is big and growing.” While it is important, it is not their top concern.
Just 17 percent think the priority for the new Congress should be repealing health care. The Republican obsession with health care repeal does not correspond with the views of the voters…
The new Congress is about to get it very wrong. The voters believe the top priority should be economic recovery and jobs (46 percent), protecting Social Security and Medicare (34 percent), and making sure children receive an education for these times (27 percent). Cutting spending and the size of government is fourth on the list, at 25 percent, and reducing the size of the budget deficit is sixth–at only 15 percent.

The poll presents additional data indicating that the Republicans are on shaky ground with proposals to cut Social Security, reduce spending and repeal health care reform. For Dems, it is a “better environment than last November,” according to the authors, who dilineate the demographic challenge ahead for Dems:

…In the broad base at the heart of their electoral majority, Democrats are doing respectably at the outset of 2011, though they have to make significant additional gains with young voters and unmarried women if they are to get back to 2012 levels. They also need to do better with union households.

In addition, the authors note continuing Democratic weak support with “white non-college voters,” “white seniors” and “rural non-South white voters.” To make inroads with these and all constituencies, Greenberg, Carville and Borosage see a clear path to victory in 2012: “This is an opportunity for Democrats and the president to show that they get the message: jobs and a big plan to get America going. Protect Social Security and Medicare. This is both good policy and good politics.”