This item by TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira is cross-posted from The New Republic.
The debt ceiling deal has been struck and the score looks to be in the neighborhood of Republicans: a zillion, Democrats: zero. It is perhaps the inevitable outcome of a process in which Obama treated GOP default-threatening tactics as legitimate and accepted the GOP framework that cutting debt, not creating jobs, was the country’s central problem. As a result, we have a deal that severely undercuts Democratic policy priorities and cuts government spending just as the economic recovery is showing signs of tanking. Just how, exactly, did it come to this? The most plausible explanation is that Obama and his political advisors are convinced that striking a bipartisan compromise on debt reduction is the way to the hearts of America’s political independents, who famously abandoned the Democrats in 2010.
Following this logic, Obama’s actions–treating the Republicans’ extraordinary threat not as an illegitimate bargaining tactic but as an opportunity–begin to make a measure of sense. Since independents are supposedly fixated on a bipartisan compromise to reduce spending and cut the debt, Obama would use the leverage provided by the Republicans’ threat, in a judo-like fashion, to enlist both parties in a grand bargain to restore long-run fiscal health. As a result, independents would reward Obama for being, in that tired phrase, “the adult in the room” who stood up for their fiscal priorities.
But it hasn’t worked out that way. As Obama has talked endlessly about a “balanced” approach to getting the country’s fiscal house in order, the economy has continued to stagger and that support from independents is nowhere in sight. Pew data show his approval rating among independents down 16 points in the last few months to an abysmal 36 percent. As for Obama’s re-elect numbers, they have also tumbled, with just 31 percent of independents now saying they would vote to re-elect him, compared to 39 percent for a generic Republican.
To understand how very unlikely it is that Obama’s long sought-after deal is going to magically turn around his numbers, we must visit one of the most robust but amazingly underappreciated findings in American political science: independents are not independent. That is, the overwhelming majority of Americans who say there are “independent” lean toward one party or the other. Call them IINOs (Independents In Name Only). IINOs who say they lean toward the Republicans think and vote just like regular Republicans. IINOs who say they lean toward the Democrats think and vote just like regular Democrats.
Right now, according to Pew data, IINOs are 68 percent of independents, split 36/32 between Republican-leaners and Democratic-leaners, respectively. That leaves less than a third of independents who might really qualify as independent. This figure, in turn, translates into just 13 to 14 percent of adults, and inevitably a lower percentage of actual voters, since pure independents have notoriously low turnout. In 2008, according to the University of Michigan National Election Study, pure independents were only 7 percent of voters.
So how’s the debt deal going to go over with these different flavors of independents? Well, Democratic IINOs and pure independents both are concerned about the job situation over the deficit by a margin of two to one, according to Pew data. In fact, the only part of the “independent” pool that actually thinks the deficit is more important than the job situation are Republican IINOs, who right now give Obama a 15 percent approval rating, the same as regular Republicans. Good luck winning that group over.
But maybe pure independents only say they’re concerned with the economy when their real passion is bipartisan compromises on the debt, and so they’ll ignore the bad jobs situation and turn out in droves for Obama. That’s not likely to happen either. As John Sides has pointed out, voting preferences among pure independents are more influenced, not less, by the state of the economy.
These are the facts, but politicians, and Obama especially, seem to have a hard time grasping them. Perhaps that’s because independents are the Rorschach test of U.S. politics–you see in them what your beliefs and preferences incline you to see. Obama and his team want to see teeming hordes of voters who are above the partisan allure of party, untroubled by the bad economy (or, at least, not planning to vote on that basis), and pining for a Washington where the parties, darn it, just work together. So that’s what they see.
The administration’s chimerical search for the independents of their dreams has not served the country, nor the president, well. Obama has stumbled ever further into a political heart of darkness, hemmed in on all sides by radical GOP views on government and governance. And he can’t expect independents to bail him out.
Month: August 2011
This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Having spent some time inside the White House, I have some sense of how the world looks and feels from that unique vantage point. Its denizens always have a sense of operating under enormous pressure, subject to myriad constraints. When criticized, White House officials typically respond that they have done the best they could in the circumstances, and that if their critics had been in their shoes, they would have done the same thing.
The more outside observers focus on the immediate situation, the more they will tend to agree with the assessment of the White House. But if we step back and take a longer view, we often see roads not taken that could have led to better outcomes. That’s certainly the case with the just completed debt ceiling negotiations.
As many critics have pointed out, this man-made crisis was entirely avoidable. The Democrats could have raised the ceiling last December. They chose not to, handing a sword to their adversaries. Senate majority leader Harry Reid wanted to force the incoming Republicans to accept some responsibility for the increase. We’ve seen how that worked out. And if President Obama genuinely believed that the Republicans would cooperate because it was the right and responsible thing to do, then naïveté was the least of his mistakes. (A moment of introspection about his own 2006 vote against increasing the debt ceiling should have sufficed to disabuse him of that notion.)
But there are two other less-discussed forks in the road, the first of which occurred just two weeks ago. If news accounts are accurate, the Obama/Boehner talks broke down when the president proposed increasing the revenue component of the grand bargain from $800 billion to $1.2 trillion. Given what he ultimately accepted, $800 billion looks pretty good. (How likely is it that the new congressional committee will be able to agree on anything approaching that figure?) To be sure, we’d have to know more than we do about the other components of the proposed deal, especially the changes in entitlement programs, to reach a solid all-things-considered judgment. And it’s not at all clear that Boehner’s fellow Republicans in the House would have gone along with him on such a bargain, either. But it has been widely reported that the White House shifted its stance only after the Gang of Six made its framework public. If the bipartisan G6 was proposing $1.2 trillion in revenue increases, how could the White House accept less? At the time, that must have seemed like a slam-dunk argument. But it was too clever by half, and the White House ended up throwing away a chance to promote the president’s “balanced” approach to deficit reduction … and, by the way, to drive a wedge into the massed ranks of the opposition.
The most important road not taken, however, occurred many months ago, in December of last year, when the president chose to keep his distance from the recommendations of his own fiscal commission. Suppose he had endorsed its broad approach while making it clear that he disagreed about a number of specifics. Suppose further that he had reinforced that message by featuring it in his 2011 State of the Union address and by using it as the framework for his 2012 budget proposal. If he had done so, he would have had a full six months to build support for his “everything on the table” approach and to rally the American people who, as countless surveys have shown, strongly prefer it to the Republicans’ spending cuts-only strategy.
I have heard of two arguments against this strategy offered by White House officials. First, it is said the president did not want to step forward until after the Republicans had offered their own budget framework. If Representative Paul Ryan remained true to his principles, he would propose huge cuts in popular programs such as Medicare, generating a public backlash, after which the president could return to the fray in a much stronger position. Well, the president certainly smoked Ryan & Co. out. But what did he gain? As of now, I can’t think of anything. Sure, public approval of the Republican Party is way down. But so are his own numbers. And if the debt ceiling deal reflects a weakened Republican Party, one shudders to think of what a stronger one would have done.
To revisit one of the issues I discussed in an exchange with Glenn Greenwald at Salon last week, there’s a new Gallup weekly presidential approval tracking poll out, and it’s another interesting data point on the question of whether the White House strategy of ignoring progressive advice to appeal to independent voters is significantly hurting him with the former group or helping him with the latter.
So far, the answer seems to be: no and no. For July 25-31, Gallup shows the president’s approval rating dropping to 42%, a new low for his entire presidency. But among self-identified liberals, his approval rating ticked up last week to 72%, pretty much where it’s been all year (the same characterization is true of his 78% approval rating among Democrats). Meanwhile, among self-identified independents, the approval number dropped to an all-time low of 37%, and among “pure independents” (i.e., those not objectively leaning towards either party) to an abysmal 28%, matching his all-time low.
Maybe as the debt limit deal sinks in, these numbers will change. But for the moment, whatever opinion-leaders in either camp say or think, rank-and-file progressives are sticking with Obama and indies are spurning his overtures. Go figure.
While many progressives are denouncing the deficit deal as a sell-out, Five Thirty Eight blogster Nate Silver crunches some numbers – specifically the House vote affirming the deal – and concludes of the President’s negotiation strategy,
…I think the proper characterization of the deal that President Obama struck with Republicans is “pretty bad” rather than “terrible.” (That’s from a Democratic point of view. For Republicans, I’d say the deal should be thought of as “quite good” rather than “awesome.”)
…In the end, exactly half of the Democratic caucus members voted for the debt ceiling bill, which makes it hard to classify the deal as “terrible” from their point of view.
But almost three-quarters of Republicans voted in the affirmative. And even the Tea Party came around in the end. By 32-to-28, members of the Tea Party Caucus voted for the bill, despite earlier claims — which now look like a bluff — that they wouldn’t vote to raise the debt ceiling under any circumstances.
These results seem to suggest that Mr. Obama left something on the table. That is, Mr. Obama could have shifted the deal tangibly toward the left and still gotten a bill through without too much of a problem. For instance, even if all members of the Tea Party Caucus had voted against the bill, it would still have passed 237-to-193, and that’s with 95 Democrats voting against it.
With benefit of hindsight, Silver makes a pretty tight case, in light of the House vote, that Obama caved too much. Silver then goes on to speculate about the concessions the President could have wrangled since he “had a few Republican votes he could afford to lose,” and a few Democratic votes he could have gained.
Silver acknowledges that “Voting during roll calls can be tactical, and the results may have been skewed by the heartwarming and unexpected return of Representative Gabrielle Giffords to the House chamber.”
In his New York Times post “A Victory That May Be Brief,” Julian Zelizer, a Princeton-based presidential historian, cautions against the downside of quickie analysis in evaluating such deals:
Political victories in Congress are often short-lived. Opponents are frequently able to turn victories into sources of weakness. Tea Party Republicans could easily learn that the bold promises that help parties to achieve legislative victories can also come back to haunt them when voters don’t see the rewards they were expecting. When promises for transformation don’t come true, voters can quickly turn against their officials, just as happened to President Obama.
The chess game is not over until the Senate, which is expected to approve the package, has its say at about noon today. The tally will be interesting. But Silver’s analysis seems reasonable in the short run.
From a purely political, amoral, standpoint, however, the question is how the deal will look in November ’12, if it is still on voter’s radar screens at all. There is also a distinction to be made between the perceptions of the deal and its economic effects when the election rolls around. And if the economy tanks further or strongly rebounds, the deal probably won’t change many votes.
In his latest ‘Public Opinion snapshot,’ TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira has what should be the last word in any discussion about Medicare cuts. “Conservatives have successfully held the country’s economy hostage by refusing to raise the debt ceiling,” notes Teixeira. “But they’ve been less successful in cutting Medicare. There’s a simple reason for this: Cutting Medicare to reduce the deficit is very, very unpopular.” Teixeira adds,
Fifty-nine percent of respondents in the latest Kaiser Health Tracking Poll say there should be no reductions in Medicare to reduce the deficit, compared to 30 percent who support minor reductions and just 10 percent who support major reductions.
In fact, the public doesn’t even want to talk about the possibility, Teixeira explains:
Even more definitively, the public thinks reductions in Medicare spending should not even be part of the discussion about reducing the long-term budget deficit by an overwhelming 67-28 margin.
The message is clear for Dems, says Teixeira. “So progressives should continue to defend Medicare vigorously with the confidence that they have the public’s strong support.”
If you know anyone who believes that a disinformation campaign to confuse voters is beneath the dignity of the GOP, have them read Eric Kleefeld’s Talking Points Memo post “Koch Group Mails Suspicious Absentee Ballot Letters In Wisconsin” and think again. Kleefeld explains:
Is the Koch-backed conservative group Americans For Prosperity up to no good in the Wisconsin state Senate recalls?
As Politico reports, mailers have now turned up from Americans For Prosperity Wisconsin, addressed to voters in two of the Republican-held recall districts, where the elections will be held on August 9. The mailers ask recipients to fill out an absentee ballot application, and send it in — by August 11, after Election Day for the majority of these races.
“These are people who are our 1’s [solid Democrats] in the voterfile who we already knew,” a Democratic source told Politico. “They ain’t AFP members, that’s for damn sure.”
A little creative snooping helped i.d. the source of the disinformation, as Kleefeld reports:
There are two other recall elections being held on August 16, targeting two Democratic incumbents, but they are both a distance away from the recipients of these particular mailers.
Furthermore, a close look at the mailer shows a continuation of irregularities that have already involved conservative groups and absentee ballots in the state.
The mailing address for the applications is listed as “Absentee Ballot Application Processing Center, P.O. Box 1327, Madison WI 53701-1327.” A Google search shows that this address is not any sort of government office, but has been used by the conservative group Wisconsin Family Action.
In addition, Wisconsin Right To Life previously used the same address for absentee ballot application letters and phone calls that were sent out shortly before the July 12 Democratic primaries, but after the official deadlines for the applications. The group responded to criticism, saying the phone calls were intended to be for the general elections in August.
Calls placed by TPM to Americans For Prosperity Wisconsin, and to Wisconsin Family Action, were not immediately returned.
Kleefeld goes on to report that Americans for Prosperity Wisconsin director Matt Seaholm told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that the August 11 date in the mailer was a typo, and that the group is not trying to mislead voters. “No (mailing) list is perfect,” Seaholm said.
But “George C” adds in the comments in response to Kelfeld’s post “Not uncommon. Some guys on the Repub payroll were recently convicted in Maryland of posting fliers in African American communities stating that the actual voting day was the day after Election day. Not to mention the guy in NH who blocked calls to the Dem HQ on election day.”
UPDATE: According to Jason Zimmerman’s report at WBAY’s website (ABC Green Bay affiliate),
The Wisconsin Government Accountability Board is working to clear up confusion surrounding absentee voting in the upcoming recall elections…The board says it has reports of automated phone calls or telephone polls giving people the wrong election dates.
The GAB also says it has several reports of unofficial absentee ballot applications going out to voters.
While it’s legal for political parties and other groups to distribute absentee ballot applications, the GAB getting reports of forms containing errors, such as incorrect voting addresses and dates.
Gee, wonder who is behind all that? Sounds like it’s time for the DOJ to step in, find out and prosecute.
The drama underway in Washington over the tentative “deal” to increase the debt limit just one day before the deadline announced by the Treasury Department is gripping enough, with white-knuckle votes in both chambers on tap. But the “debate” is also taking place in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Austin, and other places where actual or potential 2012 Republican presidential candidates happen to be this week.
Prior to the “deal,” every 2012er other than going-nowhere Jon Hunstman (and including likely candidate Rick Perry) had signed onto the “cut, cap and balance pledge” that foreswore support for any debt limit increase that was not accompanied by the rather exacting measures in the pledge (big immediate spending cuts, a cap on domestic spending linked to a fixed percentage of GDP, and a balanced budget amendment including both percentage-of-GDP limit and a supermajority requirement for tax increases by Congress). During the end-game negotiations in Congress, Michele Bachmann, Ron Paul, Tim Pawlenty, Herman Cain and Rick Perry all periodically warned Republicans not to vote for a deal that violated that pledge. Bachmann and T-Paw specifically attacked John Boehner’s proposal that passed the House over the weekend.
Now that the “deal” is out there, Bachmann and Paul have already announced they will vote against it; Romney announced today that he was opposed to it; and Pawlenty and Perry have made hostile noises without, so far, taking a definitive position (since Cain has systematically opposed debt limit increases on principle, his position can be stipulated as pre-established).
It’s anyone’s guess as to whether the presidentials will have any impact at all on how Republicans vote in Congress. But it’s pretty clear their interests are aligned with those senators and representatives whose votes are largely dictated by the fear of being “primaried.” And more generally, it’s interesting that supposedly mainstream Establishment figures like Mitt Romney are being herded in the direction of irresponsible extremism set by Bachmann and Paul, who, until very recently, were considered noisy but inconsequential fringe figures in the House Republican Caucus.
Meanwhile, the candidate beloved of the Beltway Establishment who himself has become little more than a “fringe figure” in the GOP, former Gov. Huntsman, is now dismissing Bachmann’s influence as the result of her physical appearance. As Josh Marshall put it: “The new and brass-knucklier Jon Huntsman suggests Michele Bachmann gets so much press because she’s hot.”
So there is finally a “deal” to increase the public debt limit, agreed to, at least, by the president, Harry Reid, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner (Nancy Pelosi is assumed to be selling it to unhappy House Democrats behind the scenes). There is no guarantee it will be approved by the House, where both progressive Democrats and Tea Party Republicans would like to vote “no” for very different reasons. The pressure to approve it, though, was underscored by the positive response to news of a “deal” by financial markets, first overseas and then on Wall Street. Defeat of a deal now, on the eve of the supposed August 2 deadline, and at the hands of House Members with diametrically opposed reasons for killing it, would probably produce a pretty bad, interest-rate-boosting, 401(k)-melting, reaction, and leave no obvious course open (assuming the president continues to categorically reject the “14th Amendment option”).
Signatories to the deal are unsurprisingly spinning it their own way, but Ezra Klein’s assessment seems pretty sensible:
[Here is] the truth of this deal, and perhaps of Washington in this age: it’s all about lowest-common denominator lawmaking. There are no taxes. No entitlement cuts. No stimulus. No infrastructure. Less in actual, specific deficit reduction than there was in the Simpson-Bowles, Ryan, or Obama plans, and even than there was in the Biden/Cantor or Obama/Boehner talks. The two sides didn’t concede more in order to get more. They conceded almost nothing in order to get a trigger and a process, not to mention avoid a financial catastrophe.
There’s reason to be skeptical that a trigger and a process will do much to change these basic dynamics. We’ve now attempted to get a deficit-reducing grand bargain by yoking it to both a near-shutdown and a near-default, not to mention a series of negotiations, commissions, and senatorial gangs. None of it has been enough. And that’s because bipartisan commissions and terrible consequences have not been enough to convince Republicans to agree to revenues, and revenues are fundamental to large deficit-reduction compromise.
Aside from this “trigger and a process,” the deal includes pretty much the same immediate domestic discretionary spending cuts (half from domestic programs, half from “security spending”) negotiated by Biden and McConnell weeks ago, that were assumed to be baked into any agreement. The main last-minute wrinkles, which the White House is treating as significant wins, are that defense spending joins non-defense discretionary spending in the new “hostage room” of the automatic cuts that would be triggered by the failure to reach a second deficit reduction agreement by December, while Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare benefits (as opposed to provider reimbursements) would be exempted from such automatic cuts. Lingering in the background, of course, is the scheduled expiration of the Bush tax cuts at the end of 2012, which will keep revenues on the table in broader budget discussions even if they are not part of the current deal itself.
I think it’s safe to say that progressive hostility to this deal (which is pervasive, and varies mainly only in temperature) is more about the process that led up to it than the specific details worked out at the final minute. Some think the president fatally erred by even getting into a discussion of deficit reduction ( way back when he appointed the Simpson-Bowles Commission) so long as the economy was struggling. Many think he should have negotiated a debt limit increase as part of the deal at the end of last year that temporarily extended the Bush tax cuts. Still others think he should have threatened from the very beginning to use the “14th amendment option” if Republicans didn’t agree to a “balanced approach” (e.g, one including new revenues) to long-term deficit reduction. If you read what is likely to be the most influential progressive condemnation of Obama, Paul Krugman’s column today, it’s notable that virtually every false step he excoriates happened weeks or months ago, not during the end-game.
Some progressives obviously still believe, and will put votes behind the proposition in the House, that the potential consequences of a debt default are exaggerated, or in any event cannot justify the sort of damage an all-cuts, no-taxes deficit reduction agreement will inflict on the economy (via virtually certain big cuts in “investment” programs that most affect growth, and additional, perhaps massive, reductions in federal employment levels) and on diverse beneficiaries of federal programs, from K-12 school children to people who prefer to drink safe water and breathe clean air.
Any way you look at it, the aftermath of this depressing series of events will require some pretty serious rethinking of Democratic strategy, tactics and messaging for 2012. If the deal is defeated in the House, all bets are off and we’ll just have to see what happens both economically and politically. If it is approved, we’ll be looking at a Democratic Party that is not much in the mood to celebrate any theoretical improvement in the president’s approval ratings or 2012 prospects, and is forced to reconsider how it talks about its plans for a federal government that will be operating under new constraints beyond anything conservatives were proposing as recently as last year’s election campaigns.
TDS Co-Editor Stanley B. Greenberg’s article, “Why Voters Tune Out Democrats” in the Saturday edition of The New York Times addressed the disconnect between the public’s relatively progressive views on economic policy and their lack of faith in politicians and the government as a critical problem for progressives. Noting that voters in industrial democracies are “generally turning to conservative and right-wing political parties” in this time of economic crisis, Greenberg observes:
It’s perplexing. When unemployment is high, and the rich are getting richer, you would think that voters of average means would flock to progressives, who are supposed to have their interests in mind — and who historically have delivered for them.
During the last half-century or so, when a Democratic president has led the country, people have tended to experience lower unemployment, less inequality and rising income compared with periods of Republican governance. There is a reason, however, that many voters in the developed world are turning away from Democrats, Socialists, liberals and progressives.
My vantage point on voter behavior comes through my company, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, and its work for center-left parties globally, starting with Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in 1992. For the last decade, I have worked in partnership with James Carville conducting monthly polls digging into America’s mood and studying how progressives can develop successful electoral strategies. (I am also married to a Democratic congresswoman from Connecticut, Rosa L. DeLauro.)
In analyzing these polls in the United States, I see clearly that voters feel ever more estranged from government — and that they associate Democrats with government. If Democrats are going to be encumbered by that link, they need to change voters’ feelings about government. They can recite their good plans as a mantra and raise their voices as if they had not been heard, but voters will not listen to them if government is disreputable.
Oddly, many voters prefer the policies of Democrats to the policies of Republicans. They just don’t trust the Democrats to carry out those promises.
It’s a disturbing paradox, Greenberg explains further:
When we conducted our election-night national survey after last year’s Republican sweep, voters strongly chose new investment over a new national austerity. They thought Democrats were more likely to champion the middle class. And as has become clear in the months since, the public does not share conservatives’ views on rejecting tax cuts and cutting retirement programs. Numerous recent polls have shown that the public sides with the president and Democrats on raising taxes to get to a balanced budget.
But in smaller, more probing focus groups, voters show they are fairly cynical about Democratic politicians’ stands. They tune out the politicians’ fine speeches and plans and express sentiments like these: “It’s just words.” “There’s just such a control of government by the wealthy that whatever happens, it’s not working for all the people; it’s working for a few of the people.” “We don’t have a representative government anymore.”
…Just a quarter of the country is optimistic about our system of government — the lowest since polls by ABC and others began asking this question in 1974. But a crisis of government legitimacy is a crisis of liberalism. It doesn’t hurt Republicans. If government is seen as useless, what is the point of electing Democrats who aim to use government to advance some public end?
The bailouts added to the perception that government primarily serves the elites, Greenberg adds:
GOVERNMENT operates by the wrong values and rules, for the wrong people and purposes, the Americans I’ve surveyed believe. Government rushes to help the irresponsible and does little for the responsible. Wall Street lobbyists govern, not Main Street voters. Vexingly, this promotes both national and middle-class decline yet cannot be moved by conventional democratic politics. Lost jobs, soaring spending and crippling debt make America ever weaker, unable to meet its basic obligations to educate and protect its citizens. Yet politicians take care of themselves and party interests, while government grows remote and unresponsive, leaving people feeling powerless.
…When presented with vivid descriptions of income inequality in America, people are deflated, rather than empowered to bring change. In surveys, they tell me that they think the politicians and the chief executives are “piggybacking off each other.” They think that the game is rigged and that the wealthy and big industries get policies that reinforce their advantage. And they do not think their voices matter.
That government and the elite appear blithely to promote globalization and economic integration, while the working population loses income, makes the frustration more intense.
Our research shows that the growth of self-identified conservatives began in the fall of 2008 with the Wall Street bailout, well before Mr. Obama embarked on his recovery and spending program. The public watched the elite and leaders of both parties rush to the rescue. The government saved irresponsible executives who bankrupted their own companies, hurt many people and threatened the welfare of the country. When Mr. Obama championed the bailout of the auto companies and allowed senior executives at bailed-out companies to take bonuses, voters concluded that he was part of the operating elite consensus. If you owned a small business that was in trouble or a home or pension that lost much of its value, you were on your own. As people across the country told me, the average citizen doesn’t “get money for free.” Their conclusion: Government works for the irresponsible, not the responsible.
To address the concerns about Democrats in particular, Greenberg outlines a new messaging approach for Dems:
