washington, dc

The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: April 2011

Obama’s Liberal Base Problem Exaggerated?

Adam Serwer makes the case that, President Obama’s “liberal base” problems are “way overstated.” In a Plum Line post Servwer explains:

…Despite the loud criticism of Obama from prominent lefties, liberal and Democratic rank and file support for Obama remains solid. The one who really has the most to fear from an angry base is House Speaker John Boehner….The Post reports:
“Key liberal groups, which helped elect Obama in 2008, are raising concerns that he has given up political ground to Republicans, allowing the message of reducing government to trump that of creating jobs and lowering the unemployment rate.
Seizing on Friday’s deal, which would cut $38.5 billion from the fiscal 2011 budget, activists on Tuesday threatened to sit out the 2012 presidential campaign if Obama goes too far with further cuts.”

Serwer argues that Obama may have gotten a better budget deal than expected and is holding his own with progressives in recent polls:

…Gallup’s weekly demographics poll shows Obama’s approval rating among liberals and Democrats has been relatively stable over the past month. A recent CNN poll also showed that Democrats and independents broadly approved of the budget compromise even before the details were really out, which makes sense since unlike Republicans who seemed eager for a shutdown, Democrats tend to like compromise.
Indeed, it’s precisely because Obama’s standing among liberals and Democrats is so strong that liberal activists and elites have to make so much noise to hold his feet to the fire. Conservative elites, through an incredibly influential media ecosystem that includes Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and others, have much more influence over the opinions of the conservative base than liberal elites do over theirs.
Boehner is the person who really has to worry about pleasing his base. That same CNN poll, while giving him broad approval ratings among Republicans, still showed that a bare majority of GOPers believe he has given up too much ground, and his approval ratings among conservatives and Republicans are far lower than Obama’s standing among liberals and Democrats.

Serwer concludes that President Obama is leveraging his leeway to compromise, which makes it “all the more important for liberal groups to pressure him to prevent him from giving too much ground.


Obama’s Speech and Democratic Discontents

Reactions to the president’s “budget speech” today are slowly rolling in, but based on how he tackled the basic issues, I think we can expect two fundamental positions from Democratic opinion-leaders.
Some progressives believe any talk about budget deficits being a paramount issue or spending cuts being necessary concedes crucial ground to Republicans. Others–often the same people–think any talk of a “budget deal” with Republicans concedes equally crucial ground, because (a) GOP intransigence will inevitably make any deal a victory for their cause, no matter what Republicans say about it publicly, and (b) any gestures of bipartisanship make both parties seem equally responsible for failures to reach agreement, which disguises GOP extremism
To these folk, Obama’s speech probably represented a continuation of a deeply flawed strategy, albeit not so bad as the full-throated endorsement of the Bowles-Simpson recommendations that some had feared.
Other progressives think genuine public concern (not to mention elite concern) over deficits is now significant enough that it cannot be ignored, and that the persuadable element of the public also wants bipartisan action with visible participation by the president, which means regular gestures of bipartisanship are valuable if only to expose Republican extremism.
For this faction, which views deficit-talk and bipartisanship-talk as a strategic necessity, Obama’s speech will probably be viewed as quite good, particularly since most of it was devoted to an attack, explicit and implicit, on the GOP “narrative” of the deficit problem and its recommendations for dealing with it.
Without question, the president provided a brisk but pointed critique of Paul Ryan’s budget proposals that highlighted their radical intent–not just in the context of public opinion but of American history–and deceptive nature. He also, however briefly, introduced a discussion of income inequality as background to his call for “shared sacrifice” and his resistance to Ryan’s demand for still more tax cuts for the wealthy. These are themes progressives have been begging him to raise.
All in all, the speech will probably reassure those progressives who hadn’t already despaired of Obama’s budget strategy. And it’s worth noting that this cohort of Democrats remains dominant among the rank-and-file, if not elites. The latest Gallup weekly breakdown of presidential approval ratings showed 80% of self-identified “liberal Democrats” approving of his job performance. For the record, that’s a bit better than Bill Clinton’s 76% approval rating among Democrats as a whole at this point in 1995.


Ryan Proposes End to Great Society (Except for the War Part)

This item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on April 5, 2011.
The wave of conservative hype greeting the release of Rep. Paul Ryan’s draft budget resolution is a pretty clear indication the Republican Party is about to take a deep breath and go over the brink into a direct assault on the programs and commitments that gave the United States a small replica of the modern welfare state common in the rest of the developed world. So excited are they that the New York Times‘ David Brooks, who normally likes to position himself as an eagle soaring above the grubby machinations of both political parties, just can’t contain himself:

Over the past few weeks, a number of groups, including the ex-chairmen of the Council of Economic Advisers and 64 prominent budget experts, have issued letters arguing that the debt situation is so dire that doing nothing is not a survivable option. What they lacked was courageous political leadership — a powerful elected official willing to issue a proposal, willing to take a stand, willing to face the political perils.
The country lacked that leadership until today. Today, Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, is scheduled to release the most comprehensive and most courageous budget reform proposal any of us have seen in our lifetimes. Ryan is expected to leap into the vacuum left by the president’s passivity. The Ryan budget will not be enacted this year, but it will immediately reframe the domestic policy debate….
The Ryan budget will put all future arguments in the proper context: The current welfare state is simply unsustainable and anybody who is serious, on left or right, has to have a new vision of the social contract.

Wow, you can almost hear the soaring music of a Tim Pawlenty ad when you read that passage! As Brooks would have it, Ryan’s assault on “the welfare state” isn’t really debatable; it’s based on Revealed Truth that all honorable people will accept and only scoundrels will deny. Anyone second-guessing this leader who has exposed Barack Obama’s cowardice must come with his or her own six-trillion dollar package of cuts for benefits affecting those people whose aspirations to luxury items like health insurance are now “unsustainable.”
But while Brooks and others praising Ryan’s budget are laughable in lauding the “courage” of a safe-seat congressman throwing red meat to his party’s base while taking on the poor and disabled and delighting private health insurers and anyone paying corporate taxes–they are right about Ryan’s audacity.
The simple way to put it is that Ryan’s budget steers clear of taking on the signature New Deal social program, Social Security, but takes dead aim on the Great Society’s accomplishment of a partial set of guarantees for access to health care.
By any meaningful measurement, Ryan’s proposal would kill Medicare by privatizing it and capping its costs, and kill Medicaid by making it simply a soon-to-be-phased-down grant to states with no obligation to provide a set of minimum benefits for the poor and disabled.
On the first point, Josh Marshall nicely explains why privatizing Medicare destroys its very rationale:

We all know about pre-existing conditions. You’re a cancer survivor so no insurer will cover you. Or you have one of the myriad possible conditions that make you a bad risk. And no insurer wants to issue a policy for someone who odds say is likely to cost a lot of money. Well, guess what, people over 65 all have a preexisting condition: they’re old!
Now, not that people aren’t living longer and longer lives. And plenty of folks in their late 60s are in better health than folks 10 or 20 years younger. But by and large, we all know how this life thing works. When you hit your mid-60s or so, things start breaking down. And eventually, you die. That’s a bald way to put it. But we all understand that this is true. The simple truth is that for all the problems with private health insurance for the young and working age populations, it just doesn’t work for seniors.
We tried it. That’s why we ended up creating Medicare.

We created Medicaid (originally a Republican alternative to universal health coverage) to ensure that people with insufficient funds to purchase health services or insurance or whose health costs outstripped their ability to pay would not, to put it pretty bluntly, get even sicker and/or die. Ryan’s “block grant” proposal would end any personal claim on health services for any American, and would simply subsidize state health care programs for the indigent and the disabled (a subsidy guaranteed to be a fat target in futue federal deficit reduction efforts once the “problem” is thought of as a state responsibility). Here’s a mild estimate of what that would involve from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities:

States would most likely use their additional flexibility to cap Medicaid enrollment and put people on waiting lists once the cap was reached (which they cannot do today), significantly scale back eligibility for millions of low-income children, parents, pregnant women, people with disabilities and seniors — driving many of them into the ranks of the uninsured — or cut services substantially, with the result that many of the nation’s poorest and most vulnerable people could become underinsured.

With respect to Medicaid, the downward spiral of eligibility and benefits contemplated by Ryan’s proposal would occur after the immediate disqualification of an estimated 15 million Americans who would obtain Medicaid coverage under the provisions of last year’s health reform legislation, which Ryan would repeal. That’s quite a giant leap backward for anyone supporting the basic idea of universal health coverage.
Against the background of a budget that will apparently leave defense spending pretty much as it is, while applying any savings from closing tax loopholes to the lowering of top and corporate rates, Ryan’s Medicare/Medicaid proposals are astoundingly unbalanced. For all the talk about his “courage,” it’s also noteworthy that Ryan insulates today’s seniors (who happen to be more heavily Republican in their voting preferences than at any time in recent memory) from any changes in Medicare, while targeting a Medicaid-eligible population with few GOP voters.
To conservative ideologues who think America went fatally wrong in the Great Society years–except, of course, for the establishment of a National Security State supporting a vast array of overseas military commitments that helped our allies afford their own welfare states–Ryan’s budget makes perfect sense. In taking on Ryan, it’s imperative that Democrats begin by making it clear exactly what is at stake.


Waiting For Mitt to Fall

When the alleged presidential front-runner of the allegedly ascendant political party takes his first formal step towards candidacy, and pretty much everybody either yawns or jeers, it is clearly not a good sign for the politician in question. And in general, I can’t recall a presidential “front-runner” who’s been written off as a hopeless loser long before the contest begins by about half the political cognoscenti.
But that’s where we are with Mitt Romney. In a piece designed to be studiously neutral, and the first of a series outlining the strategies of the leading GOP candidates, Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post goes through the case for Romney’s nomination methodically: he’s got the obsessive economic message the country’s waiting for; he’s got two early caucus and primary states he ought to win; and he’s got money out the wazoo. Then Chris gets to the “hurdle” part of his analysis, and pretty much says he doesn’t think Romney has a clue about how to overcome it:

Today marks the five-year anniversary of his signing of a health care bill in Massachusetts that has drawn unfavorable comparisons among conservatives to the law pushed by President Obama last year.
Romney, to date, has given little indication of how he will clear this hurdle; he never mentioned health care in his announcement video on Monday, for example….
Romney allies also insist that the idea that a single issue will bring down his candidacy ignores the recent history of nomination fights, noting that Sen John McCain’s embrace of comprehensive immigration reform didn’t foreclose his chances in 2008. (Of course, only when McCain abandoned any talk of immigration reform did he begin his political comeback.)
What’s clear is that whether or not Romney wants to talk about health care, his primary opponents are going to do their damndest to make it issue number one for him.

Over at the Daily Beast, long-time Republican operative Mark McKinnon didn’t bother to attempt neutrality:

[W]hy is it that with the announcement of his exploratory committee today there seemed to be a huge collective yawn? And the refrain from most people, including me, “What, I thought he announced his exploratory committee a year ago.”
Mitt Romney is damned by timing and circumstance.
Let us ponder some of Romney’s problems:
• He is an entirely conventional candidate in an entirely unconventional time in American politics. People don’t want the Cola. They want the Un-Cola.
• He may try to make the moves, but he sure doesn’t look or sound like a Tea Party candidate. And the more he makes the moves, the more he looks like the human pretzel he became in 2008, when he contorted himself to try to please the right wing of the party.
• The No. 1 issue for Republicans in 2012 is going to be President Obama’s health-care law. And Romney is already wrapping himself around the axle trying to explain how the health plan he engineered in Massachusetts is substantially different than Obama’s. And how is this for irony: Romney announced his exploratory committee on the fifth anniversary of “Romneycare.”
• Nobody really thinks or talks about Romney as the prohibitive favorite he ought to be.

Whatever else it means, this insider attitude guarantees that Romney is going to be operating without a net once the campaign is under way. With the entire political world impatiently waiting for his inevitable demise so that the “real” campaign can get under way, every mistake the man makes is going to get exaggerated in the hope that he will see the light and stop taking up space.
I do know people who think Mitt will win the nomination, but only because they rate the GOP field as so bad and chaotic that Romney will probably wind up in one-on-one competition with someone blatantly unelectable (e.g., Michele Bachmann) or incapable of rubbing two nickels together (e.g., Mike Huckabee). In other words, Romney’s a loser unless he’s facing an even bigger loser than he is.
From the perspective of the Invisible Primary of elite opinion, it’s not the sort of atmosphere that makes you hear faint but unmistakable strains of “Hail to the Chief” when Romney enters the room.


Double Talk On Taxes

Since it’s reasonably clear the president is going to talk about the need for more revenues in his budget speech today, the theological opposition of the Republican Party to any measures that raise tax rates on the wealthy is of more than passing interest right now. And according to Politico‘s Jake Sherman, there are signs John Boehner, of his own volition or under pressure, is back-tracking on prior statements that revenues, like everything else, are “on the table” in budget talks.

[O]n Tuesday Boehner seemed to firm up his stance in advance of President Barack Obama’s speech on the deficit at George Washington University Wednesday, calling tax increases a non-starter.
“(I)f the President begins the discussion by saying we must increase taxes on the American people – as his budget does – my response will be clear: tax increases are unacceptable and are a nonstarter,” Boehner said in a statement. “We don’t have deficits because Americans are taxed too little, we have deficits because Washington spends too much. And, at a time when the American people face skyrocketing prices at the pump, energy tax hikes are a particularly bad idea.”

A “non-starter,” eh? But not, according to his spokesman, precisely “off the table”:

A spokesman for Boehner, Michael Steel, added that the statement doesn’t preclude discussion. “What Boehner said is that he’s willing to talk to anyone to try to find common ground,” Steel said.
“Raising taxes will hurt our economy, and it certainly won’t be part of any common ground. We have a spending problem, not a revenue problem, and raising taxes is only going to make it harder for small businesses to create jobs in America.”

So apparently Boehner will talk about taxes so long as it’s understood he is not open to persuasion on the subject. This is how he reconciles roles as Big Time Washington Wheeler Dealer and conservative ideologue.


Waste Is A Terrible Thing To Mind: Regaining Public Trust By Rethinking Government Spending

This item, a response to the Demos-TDS forum on Restoring Trust in Government, is by Eric Schnurer, president of Public Works LLC, a policy consulting firm specializing in state and local governments.
As Bill Galston notes in this forum’s lead-off essay, “The public’s evaluation of both competence and integrity are shaped to some degree by its perception of government as steward of public institutions and public funds.” Patrick Bresette presents this problem as almost a Catch-22, in that progressive attempts to root out waste only reinforce public perceptions of government as wasteful. Writing of the Clinton-Gore National Performance Review (NPR), he bemoans that “[t]he media’s attention to the efforts of the initiative – and thus the public’s attention – focused on all the most egregious examples of wasteful spending that were being uncovered – from outrageously overpriced ashtrays, toilet seats and hammers to overlapping and duplicative governmental agencies and processes.”
Nevertheless, as Bresette observes, the NPR was part of an overall revival in Clinton Administration fortunes – and public trust in government – during the final six years of the Clinton presidency. I have seen similar results at the state and local levels, where I have overseen comprehensive performance reviews of government spending modeled on the NPR in seven states and helped governors in a half-dozen others to develop budget plans based on the principles discussed in this article.
This is not as dichotomous as it might seem: Revealing waste in government might increase public cynicism, but doing so also increases public confidence in the politician doing so, especially if that politician is a Democrat. The opinion research by John Halpin and Ruy Teixiera supports this argument, finding extremely high public responsiveness to an agenda of “[e]liminating inefficient programs and redirecting support to the most cost-effective programs” and like initiatives as a prelude to further progressive policies.
As both Galston and Bresette observe, Clinton and Obama rose in public esteem when they were able to convey the message that they were centrists or a “different kind of Democrat” and sank when they appeared otherwise. Clinton, according to Galston, floundered when he became embroiled in the flap over gays in the military – and, I would argue, when he decided to pursue health care reform before welfare reform – and Obama lost ground when he shifted his focus from economic recovery to the health care issue. This makes clear that the effect of fiscal responsibility on faith in government – and in those governing – also is closely related to Galston’s “third key determinant of trust in government”: responsiveness. “If people feel that the government is listening to them and working on the problems they think are most important, trust tends to rise. In recent decades, the public has come to view the federal government as much less responsive to their needs and preferences than it should be.” Conservatives have exploited the perception that Obama hasn’t been working on the right problems, focusing, instead, on bailing out banks and pursuing a health care reform that liberals cooperated in presenting as primarily transferring huge subsidies to the poor rather than lowering costs for all. As Thomas Edsall argues, this critique has fed on voter fears that limited resources were being taken from them and given unfairly to others.
Whether that constitutes a politics of selfishness, defined largely by racial and generational warfare, as Edsall warns, is debatable, however. In polling and focus group research throughout the 1990s in which I was able to participate as an advisor to various gubernatorial and Senate candidates, I found Americans amazingly receptive to paying for government programs to help needy Americans – such as education, job training, family counseling, child support, and transportation – if and when convinced of their effectiveness and efficiency.
A related concern is decline in the ideal of a shared social fate, as cited, for instance, by Bresette. It is often argued that shared commitment died when Ronald Reagan encouraged Americans to ask not what they could do for their country, but rather, “Am I better off today than I was four years ago?” It is again debatable whether Americans have been this incorrigibly self-centered for the last 30 years; in 2008, Barack Obama seemed to tap successfully into a majority yearning for some sense of community. While public attitudes on this issue may shift in a complex relationship with the competence and integrity of political leadership, as Galston discusses, or the economic vicissitudes that preoccupy Edsall, one thing has remained constant since Reagan: The willingness of political leaders, both left and right, to indulge the notion that we can have it all and not pay for it.
It is tempting to see in this our political “leaders” simply catering to the public’s own immature desire to have things both ways. But it’s also just possible that the public is making a much more sophisticated demand – to have things a different way. Might it possibly be that the public expects its leaders to figure out how the public sector can actually deliver more in services, with more customer choice, and do it for less? Preposterous, except that the technological advances of the last few decades have allowed consumers to demand that the private sector do exactly that. Politicians’ failure to respond to the same imperatives with anything more than demagoguery or transparently vapid “reforms” might actually be a cause of public dissatisfaction, rather than simply the most advantageous political response to it. Perhaps a more honest and sophisticated approach to these issues might engender public support.


CNN Poll: Obama, Dems Have Edge with Public in Budget Deal

President Obama is catching a lot of heat from progressive Democrats as a result of the budget deal averting a government shutdown (see here, here and here). But it appears he has bested the Republicans in the eyes of the public, according to a new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll.
The poll, conducted 4/9-10, found that 54 percent of Americans approve of President Obama’s handling of the budget negotiations, with 45 percent disapproving. Nearly half, 48 percent of respondents give Obama and Democrats more credit for the agreement, compared to 35 percent giving congressional Republicans more credit. (11 percent gave both credit, with 3 percent choosing “neither” and another 3 percent undecided).
Further, according to Steven Shepard’s ‘Hotline on Call’ report at The National Journal:

Notably, Obama scores better than congressional leaders from both parties. Equal majorities, 54 percent, disapprove of how leaders of each party handled the negotiations. In fact, House Speaker John Boehner now has an upside-down job approval rating: 41 percent of Americans approve of Boehner, while 43 percent disapprove.
Overall, a healthy majority, 58 percent, approves of the budget agreement. Just 38 percent of Americans disapprove. Majorities of Democrats (66 percent) and independents (56 percent) support the agreement, but Republicans are split virtually down-the-middle, with 47 percent approving of the agreement and 49 percent disapproving of the deal.

Not that the public likes all the GOP budget cuts — 65 percent favored continued funding for Planned Parenthood. An even larger majority, 71 percent, wants continued funding for the Environmental Protection Agency and its efforts “to enforce regulations on greenhouse gases and other environmental issues,” with just 28 percent in favor of preventing the EPA from funding enforcement. As for implementing the new health care act, 58 percent want the government to fund implementation, with 41 percent opposed.
In all, 31 percent of self-identified Democrats said President Obama and the Democrats “gave up too much” in the negotiations, while 63 percent said they did not. For independents, the figures were 16 percent agreeing that Obama and Dems gave up too much, with 77 percent disagreeing.


SoCal Crucible

Anyone interested in the history of the Christian Right–and given its continuing power in the conservative movement and the GOP, that should include readers of this site–is encouraged to take a look at my latest book review for the Washington Monthly. It’s a review of From Bible Belt to Sun Belt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism, by Purdue University historian Darren Dochuk.
It’s a complicated book, but well worth the effort. Dochuk convincingly argues that much of what later became the Christian Right was first incubated not in the Deep South, but among southern transplants in the Los Angeles area. In the cultural maelstrom of southern California in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, an impressive array of evangelical ministers who combined rigidly conservative theology and politics with a highly adaptive institutional style pioneered a variety of innovations that later “went national,” including close cooperation with corporate leaders, joint Protestant-Catholic initiatives, parachurch organizations, school textbook and curriculum wars, the “Jesus Movement,” neo-pentecostalism, and even megachurches. All this happened long before the southern-led Moral Majority organization helped elect the favorite politician of SoCal evangelicals, Ronald Reagan, as president.
Dochuk’s book is also a good primer on the post-WW2 history of La-La-Land itself, with its rapidly expanding defense industry, its land use battles, its labor and racial conflicts, and the search of many of its citizens–particularly white working-class migrants from Oklahoma, Texas and Arkansas–for certainty amidst radical cultural and economic change.
You’ll learn a lot about California history, but even more, about California’s influence on the country as a whole, even now.


Creamer: GOP Leverage on Debt Freeze Damaged by Deal

Despite congressional Republicans assurances to the contrary, last week’s budget deal, which jettisoned the tea party’s treasured anti-abortion measures, also weakens their leverage to force cuts in Medicare and Medicaid, according to political strategist Robert Creamer, in his HuffPo post on the topic.
The GOP cave on women’s health clinics, family planning — and Planned Parenthood was a result of recognizing that the public was against them 2-1 and that they needed to compromise at this stage to appear “reasonable.” But the main factor in forcing the comprise, according to Creamer, was their lapdog devotion to making the fat cats happy:

Most important for the future is the role of the real base of the Republican Party — Wall Street and Big Business. The Republican CEO caucus — and the Chamber of Commerce — are hell bent on destroying unions, shrinking the public sector, lowering tax rates for millionaires, etc.
Frankly, they could care less about the right wing social agenda. In fact, they view social conservatives as cannon fodder to win elections. And once they had gotten all that they could on the economic side, they were not the least bit interested in jeopardizing their political fortunes or the economy simply to advance the Tea Party agenda…Apparently the Chamber and the CEO class’s chief operative, Karl Rove, weighed in heavily against a Republican shutdown.
…The Republican House Budget Chairman, Paul Ryan has proposed…about $4.2 trillion of tax cuts over the next decade for corporations and the wealthy. In other words, Ryan has proposed pulling the plug on Medicare, Medicaid and food support in order to give tax breaks to millionaires.

So now the Republicans will put their declining leverage into their fall-back position to appease the Tea Party — a cap on federal spending as a percentage of the gross domestic product. As Creamer explains it,

Holding the debt ceiling increase hostage to their radical economic demands is pretty much equivalent to a radical suicide bomber threatening to blow himself and everyone else up, if they don’t agree to his radical religious demands.
…While the Wall Street/CEO Republicans really want to wring as much as possible out of Democrats in the way of less regulation, a smaller public sector and lower taxes for them, they are not likely to knowingly allow the Tea Party extremists to blow up the credit markets and the economy….And though the Republican political class would love for the economy to stagnate between now and 2012 — they certainly don’t want to be caught with their hands on the grenade pin if the economy blows sky high.

As Creamer puts it, “The deal that was struck last week demonstrated clearly that the CEO/Wall Street faction of the Republican Party — and its political elite — are not yet prepared to allow the inmates to run the asylum.”


The Spirit of Compromise

If you are a progressive depressed by the concessions made on appropriations by the White House and congressional Democrats late last week, maybe it will help to read this assessment from the very influential conservative blogger Erick Erickson:

The most depressing bit of all of this is how quickly conservative pundits who promised they were to going to throw off the shackles of fidelity to the Republican Party after Bush and become again true conservative warriors for freedom have descended, automaton like, into guttural cheerleading for a Republican Party that just went from $100 billion in promised cuts to a third of that in actual cuts while selling out the unborn for roughly $1000 per murdered child assuming reports are true that they got the Democrats to increase cuts $1 billion in exchange for dropping the defunding of Planned Parenthood.

Actually, I’d encourage a careful reading of this and similar posts by anyone who is under the illusion that a compromise over abortion policy is ever a lively possibility.