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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: April 2013

Austerity Advocates Called out for Faulty Research

Kevin Roose’s New York Magazine post “Meet the 28-Year-Old Grad Student Who Just Shook the Global Austerity Movement” is getting lotsa buzz on facebook and elsewhere. For those who haven’t seen it yet, here’s an excerpt:

Most Ph.D. students spend their days reading esoteric books and stressing out about the tenure-track job market. Thomas Herndon, a 28-year-old economics grad student at UMass Amherst, just used part of his spring semester to shake the intellectual foundation of the global austerity movement.
Herndon became instantly famous in nerdy economics circles this week as the lead author of a recent paper, “Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff,” that took aim at a massively influential study by two Harvard professors named Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. Herndon found some hidden errors in Reinhart and Rogoff’s data set, then calmly took the entire study out back and slaughtered it. Herndon’s takedown — which first appeared in a Mike Konczal post that crashed its host site with traffic — was an immediate sensation. It was cited by prominent anti-austerians like Paul Krugman, spoken about by incoming Bank of England governor Mark Carney, and mentioned on CNBC and several other news outlets as proof that the pro-austerity movement is based, at least in part, on bogus math.
…Herndon chose Reinhart and Rogoff’s 2010 paper, “Growth in a Time of Debt,” in part, because it has been one of the most politically influential economic papers of the last decade. It claims, among other things, that countries whose debt exceeds 90 percent of their annual GDP experience slower growth than countries with lower debt loads — a figure that has been cited by people like Paul Ryan and Tim Geithner to justify slashing government spending and implementing other austerity measures on struggling economies.

It gets even more delicious. Do click on Roose’s post to savor the rest of the feast.


ED Kilgore: Obama can’t overcome GOP extremism all by himself

The following article, by TDS managing Editor Ed Kilgore, is cross-posted from the Washington Monthly:
Charles Pierce and others obviously beat me to the punch in mocking Maureen Dowd’s excoriation of the president for a failure of leadership on gun control. But an awful lot of people read the New York Times, and an awful lot of progressives seem to share Dowd’s attachment to the Action Figure model of the presidency. To an embarrassing extent Dowd’s expectations of Obama are based on Hollywood. People a bit more grounded in the real world often compare Obama unfavorably with Lyndon B. Johnson, thought to have imposed civil rights and health care legislation on a reactionary Senate by sheer force of will (I did a revisionist take on LBJ’s dominance of Congress for TNR back in 2009, noting that even this primal politician with an unequalled understanding of Senate rules and an unparalleled willingness to use every lever available to a president had to compromise more often than is now remembered).
Some readers are probably familiar with the Green Lantern Theory, a sardonic approach to the belief that sheer willpower is the essential ingredient in national and especially presidential power, as first developed by Matt Yglesias and elaborated upon by Brendan Nyhan and others. Dowd seems to have devolved this fantasy right down to the level of The Little Engine That Could, or maybe a Don Draper pitch from Mad Men:
There were ways to get to 60 votes. The White House just had to scratch it out with a real strategy and a never-let-go attitude.
Obama hates selling. He thinks people should just accept the right thing to do. But as Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat, noted, senators have their own tough selling job to do back home. “In the end you can really believe in something,” he told The Times’s Jennifer Steinhauer, “but you have to go sell it.”
The problem, of course, is right there in Dowd’s text, though she doesn’t seem to notice it. Unlike LBJ in enacting Medicare or Medicaid, Obama didn’t just face the challenge of getting a majority of the Senate to enact Manchin-Toomey. Yes, LBJ did have to overcome a filibuster in securing passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but aside from all of the external events that helped make that happen, it took decades of efforts along with the blood of countless martyrs. Had LBJ faced a 60-vote Senate every day, even with the vast Democratic margins he enjoyed after his 1964 re-election, it’s unlikely his legacy would be as imposing as we rightly remember it.
So the demise of Manchin-Toomey can lead progressives in one of two directions. We can whine about Obama’s shortcomings or bewail the unholy power of the NRA and long for an action-figure president who can banish opposition with charisma and bare-knuckled exercises of power. Or we can put pressure on Senate Democratic leaders to use their own power to reduce if not abolish the unprecedented ability of obstructionist minorities to impose their views on the rest of us. Regular readers know which route I prefer. Filibuster Delenda Est.


Alterman: ‘Both Sides’ Stench Unbearable Even to Some Republicans

Eric Alterman’s “More B.S. About ‘Both Sides” at The Nation does a particularly good job of holding false equivalency pundits accountable for their unbridled distortions — including even some Republicans. As Alterman expalins:

…The recently concluded 112th Congress set a record for the lowest number of laws passed since record-keeping began, in 1948. We are in the midst (and at the mercy) of a budget sequester that was intended only to scare Congress into behaving responsibly. Republicans, in thrall to Tea Party fanatics, refuse even to discuss new sources of revenue. Barack Obama, meanwhile, has not only proposed a remarkably impecunious domestic budget but has also broken what has been an iron rule of nearly all Democratic politicians for more than half a century by offering to reduce future Social Security payments through the mechanism of a “chained CPI” that slows down the cost-of-living increases built into the payments received by seniors. Predictably (and understandably), he has infuriated his base by doing so.
How are these diametrically opposed approaches being portrayed in the mainstream media? According to Politico’s Jake Sherman, Obama’s offer “might have been viewed as a bit more substantive. But [the] Republican leadership’s calculus has changed. Since the fiscal cliff tax deal, which raised taxes on families earning more than $450,000, Republicans are demanding more expansive changes to entitlements.” The rest of Sherman’s report is devoted to detailing the Republican wish list without any sense of the radicalism of these demands, or their consistent unpopularity with real people (as opposed to pundits).
What about Slate’s John Dickerson? He blames unnamed “forces of partisanship, ego, and limited imagination that have made crisis budgeting so dreary to watch…. The two parties have not even been in proximity of a major bipartisan deal in so long the very fact that they are in the same neighborhood is a possible sign that our system is not irreparably broken.” Meanwhile, in a column called “Reclaim the Center” on the opinion page of The New York Times online, multimillionaire investment banker and Democratic Party funder Steven Rattner complains of “proselyt-
izers of wacky, extreme ideas” from “the left,” as well as from “conservatives,” before demanding that “the sensible center…rise up and push for a rational approach to our fiscal challenges.”
…The Republican Party has gone off the rails by virtually every available measure, and the media continue to blame “both sides.

It’s never hard to find examples of false equivalency excesses in today’s political environment. But Alterman’s got some numbers too:

Let’s look at some data. According to a forthcoming study in the Drake Law Review by Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, we are experiencing “the largest and most uniform gap in the ideological orientation and voting patterns in the Senate and the House of Representatives in modern times.” Keith Poole of the University of Georgia and Howard Rosenthal of New York University analyzed decades of data and discovered that Republicans have moved approximately six times as far rightward as Democrats have leftward in recent decades (and the Democratic drift is due almost entirely to the collapse of the Southern conservative wing of the party). The respected pollster Andrew Kohut reports: “In my decades of polling, I recall only one moment when a party had been driven as far from the center as the Republican Party has been today,” referring to the Nixon landslide against George McGovern in 1972.

Amazingly, even some Republicans are getting sick of it:

…Scot Faulkner, personnel director for the Reagan/Bush campaign in 1980, and Jonathan Riehl, former speechwriter for the right-wing Luntz Global consulting firm, recently complained of the corrosive effects of a “Republican world view that was devoid of facts and critical thinking,” combined with the creation of “a new self-perpetuating political echo chamber.” This follows on the remarks by longtime Republican congressional staffer Mike Lofgren, who noted two years ago that “the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe.” And respected scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein announced last year that “The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

The most interesting question is whether or not this “blame both sides” fatigue will set in with swing voters in 2014. if so, anemic mid term turnout may no longer serve as the GOP’s favorite hole card.


Political Strategy Notes

Right-wing media bias could soon get even worse. As Amy Chozick reports at The New York Times, “Now, Koch Industries, the sprawling private company of which Charles G. Koch serves as chairman and chief executive, is exploring a bid to buy the Tribune Company’s eight regional newspapers, including The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Orlando Sentinel and The Hartford Courant.” Read Chozick’s article for more on an even broader takeover of media outlets by conservatives.
Also at the Times, Charlie Savage reports that Republican politicians are pushing “to declare the surviving Boston bombing suspect an enemy combatant in order to question him without a lawyer and other protections of the criminal justice system.” The point being to make Republicans look more concerned about national security than Democrats, most of whom want to keep the case in the criminal justice system.
At FiveThirtyEight, however, Micah Cohen’s “Small Majority Approved of Miranda Rights for Terror Suspects” indicates that the public may have more sympathy for the Democratic position.
Ilyana Kuziemko, associate professor of finance and economics at Columbia Business School and Stefanie Stantcheva, M.I.T. doctoral candidate in economics, explore American attitudes towards inequality at the NYT Opinionator. They provided survey subjects with a “tutorial” on inequality before polling them, and found an interesting paradox: “Respondents reacted to our inequality tutorial by reporting lower trust in government, raising the possibility that Americans may have reacted to 30 years of rising income inequality by reducing their trust in government…On one hand, liberals can take heart in the news that Americans are deeply troubled about the current level of income inequality. On the other hand, conservatives may be glad to hear that despite this concern, Americans have a healthy skepticism that government can be trusted to do much about it.”
Post Politics’ Aaron Blake names 11 House Republicans who have been placed on the NRCC’s “Patriot’s Program,” a.k.a. the “incumbent protection program,” including: Rep. Mike Coffman (Colo.); Rep. Rodney Davis (Ill.); Rep. Jeff Denham (Calif.); Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick (Pa.); Rep. Bob Gibbs (Ohio); Rep. Chris Gibson (N.Y.); Rep. Joe Heck (Nev.); Rep. David Joyce (Ohio); Rep. Steve Southerland (Fla.); Rep. David Valadao (Calif.); and Rep. Jackie Walorski (Ind.).
Paul Krugman has a a well-stated observation obstructionist politicians ought to think about : “…When future historians look back at our monstrously failed response to economic depression, they probably won’t blame fear, per se. Instead, they’ll castigate our leaders for fearing the wrong things…The key question is whether workers who have been unemployed for a long time eventually come to be seen as unemployable, tainted goods that nobody will buy. This could happen because their work skills atrophy, but a more likely reason is that potential employers assume that something must be wrong with people who can’t find a job, even if the real reason is simply the terrible economy. And there is, unfortunately, growing evidence that the tainting of the long-term unemployed is happening as we speak.”
Michael Tomasky’s ‘The Conservative Paranoid Mind” at The Daily Beast describes the “common thread linking conservatives’ positions on gun control, immigration, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev: the constant need to stoke fear…They need to make gun owners fear that Dianne Feinstein and her SWAT team are going to come knocking on their doors, or, less amusingly, that they have to be armed to the teeth for that inevitable day when the government declares a police state. They need to whip up fear of immigrants because unless we do it’s going to be nothing but terrorists coming through those portals…”
If Chris Cillizza is right that the failure of the gun background checks bill makes it a little easier to pass immigration reform, we’ll take it, sad commentary that it is on the political morality of members of congress who make major decisions this way.
E.J. Dionne, Jr. shares a salient observation on “The way forward on guns“: “… The next steps are up to the supporters of gun sanity. They can keep organizing to build on the unprecedented effort that went into this fight — or they can give up. They can challenge the senators who voted “no,” or they can leave them believing that the “safe” vote is always with the NRA. They can bolster senators who cast particularly courageous “yes” votes — among them, Mary Landrieu and Kay Hagan — or they can leave them hanging.”
Have you ever read an article that so convincingly refutes it’s own premise as this one?


‘Working America’ Sets Out to Organize a Million Workers

Josh Eidelson’s “AFL-CIO’s Non-Union Worker Group Headed Into Workplaces in Fifty States” at The Nation spotlights a promising new project:

The country’s largest non-union workers’ group will soon announce plans to establish chapters in every state, achieve financial self-sufficiency and extend its organizing–so far focused on politics and policy–directly into the workplace.
“This organization has done really what nobody else thought could be done,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told The Nation, “and that’s recruit more than three million people without a union to be part of the labor movement.”
That organization is Working America, the AFL-CIO affiliate for workers without a union on the job. Created ten years ago, it now claims 3.2 million members–more than any of the individual unions in the AFL-CIO, or any of the other “alt-labor” groups organizing and mobilizing non-union workers in the United States. “We’re taking the momentum that we’ve built organizing workers in communities,” said Working America Executive Director Karen Nussbaum, “and beginning to organize a community in the workplace.”

Nussbaum envisions Working America chapters in all 50 states. “We want to figure out a way to make membership more open, to make membership in a union not depend on workers being willing to endure trial by fire in an election or extended pitched battle with the employer for voluntary recognition,” adds AFL-CIO General Counsel Craig Becker. Eidelson reports that a critical part of the campaign is establishing “financial self-sufficiency,” and:

Lacking union contracts with automatic dues payments from members, such groups generally draw the majority of their funding from donations from unions or non-profits. “In the long run, that’s the litmus test,” said Nussbaum, “because worker organizations that aren’t self-sustaining can’t be democratic.” Groups that are “dependent on outside funding,” she added, can “meet objectives, but they don’t sustain and build the labor movement in the long run. And I think that’s the challenge for us at this point.”…Organizers said last year that 15 percent of Working America’s members pay dues (suggested payment: $5 per year); they acknowledged that its membership ranks include people who no longer remember signing up in the first place.

University of Texas Law Professor Julius Getman, author of “Restoring the Power of Unions: It Takes a Movement” believes that Working America could help if “it puts the AFL-CIO in direct contact with workers, which is something that doesn’t always happen…there are lots of layers of bureaucracy and authority between the AFL-CIO and workers on lots occasions.” he believes it could help “develop a greater sense of working class solidarity” among non-union workers, and offer “a sense of being important, and being involved in something worthwhile.”
Restoration of a vibrant trade union movement in the U.S. remains a critical prerequisite for a stronger Democratic Party and a thriving middle class. Working America is looking increasingly like the vanguard organization the labor movement needs to make it a reality.


Dems Review Strategic Options for Gun Safety Reforms

Michael A. Memoli and Melanie Mason have an L.A. Times post, “Gun control backers consider strategy after Senate defeat,” which provides some interesting observations. Regarding Democratic prospects for electing a more favorable Senate in 2014, the authors say,

Supporters of stricter gun laws have organization, money and — after the Senate blocked an expansion of background-check requirements — fury…What they don’t have is a clear path to changing the political arithmetic of the U.S. Congress.
None of next year’s Senate races offers a good opportunity to replace a senator who backs gun rights with one who supports tougher laws.

At present it appears that 2016 may offer Dems and gun safety reform advocates a better political landscape.”Several Republican gun rights supporters face reelection that year in states where gun control has strong voter appeal; none fitting that description is on the ballot in 2014,” note the authors.
Sen. Chuck Schumer, on the other hand, sees a groundswell of support for reform in the making. “”Things change quickly here in Washington…they’ve changed for gay marriage. They’re changing for immigration. And they will change for gun safety sooner than you think.” Then there is the likelihood of more mass shootings in the not-too-distant future, if historical patterns hold, which could help fulfill Schumer’s prediction.
But it’s not about transforming public opinion, since polls indicate 90 percent or more of the public, including hefty majorities of Republicans and even NRA members support national legislation requiring background checks. With respect to electioneering, Dems don’t have enough one-issue voters for whom gun safety trumps other issues. But it is certainly possible that the issue could rise as a political priority among swing voters, either by more tragic events, or alternatively through more effective educational outreach on the part of the white house or the Democratic Party.
There is also a possibility that fed-up Dem leaders will secure filibuster reform, which would likely insure enactment of a federal background checks. Looking towards the 2014 election, however, it’s not hard to understand why Harry Reid may once again prove reluctant to weaken the Senate minority leader’s filibuster options.
One of the key lessons of the defeat of background checks is that money and activism can trump mere public opinion — even overwhelming majorities. As J. Adam Skaggs, Sr.,. counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU Law School explains in a NYT forum, “Last year, the N.R.A. outspent the leading gun control lobby 73 to 1. Senators facing tough re-election campaigns ignore the wishes of 90 percent of Americans because they fear the gun lobby could mount a $9 million ad campaign against them.” Skaggs proposes:

The solution to this political dysfunction is to empower regular voters as a counterweight to big political money. The Empowering Citizens Act, sponsored by Representatives David Price and Chris Van Hollen, would do precisely that. By matching grass-roots donations from regular voters with public funds, the system would give Congressional candidates an alternative path to victory in which they depend on constituents and voters, instead of deep-pocketed donors seeking political favors. Such a system would give officials the courage to stand up and act in the public interest, not on behalf of the special interests.

The gun lobby certainly has a financial advantage over reform supporters. But campaign finance reform could be the game-changer gun safety reformers need to level the battlefield. Now would be a good time to work on that.


American Majority Mines Data, Helps Shape Policy, Progressive Messaging

Wouldn’t it be great, you may have wondered, if some organization with the necessary resources reviewed all the relevant opinion polls on a regular basis and tapped leading experts to hone progressive policies and messages addressing public attitudes regarding critical issues like Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, taxes, the budget deficit and the role of unions?
Turns out there is such an organization — The American Majority, which addresses these critical issues from a data-driven progressive perspective and challenges the traditional media when their reporting lapses into bias.
For example, the American Majority cites a Morning Joe/Marist poll, conducted March 25-27, which indicates that “64 percent believe creating jobs should be the president’s and Congress’s top priority; only 33 percent of Americans think the top priority should be deficit reduction.” Take a look here, for a recent round-up of polling on some of the aforementioned issues. This web page lists the top progressive experts the American Majority tracks. On yet another page, “our writers and others explain where the American Majority stands on spending priorities and the federal deficit. They also address the challenge of getting these American Majority positions acknowledged by the media and acted on by Washington.”
It’s an invaluable resource for progressives, and it should play a significant role in helping Dems win on the issues in the elections ahead.


Creamer: GOP Will Likely Reap Public Backlash on Gun Filibuster

The following article, by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of “Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
On Wednesday, supporters of legislation to limit gun violence failed to muster the 60 votes necessary to stop a Republican filibuster of the Toomey-Manchin compromise that would expand background checks to include all commercial gun sales in the United States.
Polls show that universal background checks are supported by 90 percent of Americans — including a vast majority of gun owners and Republicans. A clear majority of senators are fully prepared to pass a background check measure. But no matter — the Republican leadership decided to obstruct the democratic process in the Senate to prevent an up or down vote on the measure.
Conventional wisdom continues to hold that, while the vast majority of Americans support universal background checks, in many areas it is still smart politics not to antagonize the NRA and their relatively small number of very active — very passionate — supporters. Conventional wisdom is wrong. Here’s why:
1). Wednesday’s Washington Post poll shows that 70 percent of all voters and nearly half of Republicans already think the GOP is out of touch with the needs and interests of the majority of Americans. By opposing a common-sense measure like universal background checks, that is supported by nine of out ten Americans, the GOP leadership threatens to further tarnish the GOP brand by appearing to be way out of the mainstream and not on the side of ordinary voters.
2). It is no longer true that large number of voters who favor measures to limit gun violence are less “passionate” about their views. It is also no longer the case that those views will be less likely to affect their voting than opponents of restrictions on guns.
In a poll released Wednesday by Project New America, over 60 percent of voters in Arkansas, Illinois, Maine, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Ohio said they strongly support background checks for gun purchasers.
And an overwhelming number of voters said they would be more likely to support candidates for Senate that supported background checks — 70 percent in Maine, 65 percent in North Carolina, 64 percent in Illinois, 64 percent in New Hampshire, 62 percent in Nevada, and 56 percent in Arkansas.
3). The GOP lost women 55 percent to 44 percent in the last election. Republican obstruction of gun violence legislation will only make their problem with women voters worse, since they are particularly passionate supporters of legislation to stem gun violence. The same goes for Millennial voters who overwhelmingly support gun violence legislation.


Political Strategy Notes – Betrayed Children Edition

For those who want to do something about the shameful vote in the U.S. Senate yesterday, Kos’s “In 2014, it will be the NRA against the American people,” notes two organizations you can contribute to who are committed to fight the NRA, with contributor page links added: “Mayors Against Illegal Guns and Gabby Gifford’s Americans for Responsible Solutions have already restored some balance in the public gun debate, pushing back against what was once a one-sided NRA attack. Bloomberg’s Independence USA SuperPAC has already shown a willingness to counter the NRA’s millions with millions of its own.”
The seats of thirteen Republican U.S. Senators in “Class 2” are up for re-election in 2014, including: Sessions; Chambliss (retiring); Risch; Roberts; McConnell; Collins; Cochran; Johanns (retiring); Imhoffe; Graham; Alexander; Cornyn; and Enzi. Only Collins voted with the Democrats on the background checks filibuster. Not all of them have announced opponents yet, but Sabato’s Crystal Ball names a few of their emerging opponents. Best bets for Dem pick-ups among this group are senate races in GA, KY and NE. But all would require upsets.
Every public appearance of the senators who voted wrong should be met with protesters bearing posters showing photos of the betrayed kids, and these senators should get photos of the kids in their office email and faxes — until we get some legislation.
if you had to pick one sentence in all the news coverage of the background check vote, this one from the Washington Post editorial board would do: “A COWARDLY minority of senators blocked a gun background-check proposal on Wednesday, in one vote betraying both the will of the American people and the charge voters gave them to work in their interest.” Rarely does the Post editorial board use all caps for emphasis in a sentence.
At The Washington Monthly Ed Kilgore flags Ezra Klein’s and Evan Soltas’s well-titled post, “The gun bill failed because the Senate is wildly undemocratic,” and adds “…For this to change, the first step is for political actors and political media to recognize and draw attention to the problem. I noted late yesterday that in a long report on the Manchin-Toomey vote in The Hill, the words “filibuster” and “cloture” do not appear, even though the vote in question was actually on a motion for cloture to end a filibuster. The defeat of the measure by a Senate minority was treated as just the way things are done. That is what has to change first, before real change can come to the Senate. And frankly, any post-mortem on the failure of gun legislation, however well-meaning, that doesn’t prominently mention the horrifically anti-democratic set-up of the current Senate is missing a crucial point.”
For Mitch McConnell, defeating yesterday’s background check initiative is not enough. he has to gloat.
It’s hard to see a ray of hope for a sane firearms policy in our future in yesterday’s senate vote on gun safety. But Jonathan Bernstein gives it a try at the Plum Line: “…While today is clearly a crushing setback for proponents of tougher gun legislation, overall the effort has been a very solid step towards eventual passage. If, that is, the people who strongly supported today’s amendment keep working to reward Senators who supported them, to make life difficult for those who opposed them; and, most of all, to make it a must-support for future candidates.”
There was a real hero in the U.S. Senate — up in the gallery. Maybe she should run.
I’m with those who would like to see some party discipline, perhaps in terms of funding or committee assignments, invoked on the four Democratic Senators who supported the filibuster. That would be Max Baucus of Montana, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and Mark Begich of Alaska. I understand their perceived predicaments. But party should mean something. At least “Never filibuster against fellow Dems” ought to be a principle that comes with a price for breaking it.
At least Sen. Chuck Schumer put Ted Cruz in the clown car.


Kilgore: Obama’s Critics Could Use Reality Check

Ed Kilgore’s “The Era of Big Accomplishments Is Over–For Now” at The Washington Monthly provides a much-needed reality check for critics of President Obama: As Kilgore explains:

Look, everybody knows the score: so long as congressional Republicans refuse to work with Democrats on legislation dealing with the major challenges facing the country, there will be no Era of Big Accomplishments for a Democratic president if the GOP has either control of the House or 41 firm votes in the Senate. Right now they have both, and they know it. As the gun issue has shown, big Democratic advantages in public opinion do not significantly inhibit Republican obstructionism. And even on the one big issue where many Republicans feel it is in their long-range interest to bend–immigration–it’s (a) not at all clear comprehensive reform legislation can survive conservative opposition, and even if it does (b) it will likely be a less progressive reform than George W. Bush was proposing six years ago.
Being as how Democratic presidents have a habit of wanting to govern, of course Obama hasn’t thrown up his hands or thrown in the towel in the face of this situation. He’s laid down second-term markers that reflect what he campaigned for in 2012, and what his supporters expect from him, and has also risked that support by making an offer to congressional Republicans on entitlements that seems designed to further expose their incorrigible obstructionism. He’ll also, I’m sure, try some executive gambits (e.g., on greenhouse gas emissions), though it’s unclear how many he can actually execute without practical control of Congress.
But we’ve known for a good while now that the odds of Obama being able to do much of anything other than protect the accomplishments he achieved before 2011 (and even that will be difficult) were low, and probably won’t improve a great deal after another midterm election cycle where Republicans have all sorts of advantages.
Inveterate Obama critics from the Right, and those on the Left who expect Obama to deploy magical powers to overcome the entrenched power of the GOP, will mock his record for its limited accomplishments. Lord knows he’s made mistakes and isn’t perfect. But at this stage, even if Obama combined the public charisma of FDR with the legislative skills of LBJ, it’s difficult to see how the road gets any easier. An unlikely House takeover in 2014 combined with a continued Senate majority willing to undertake radical filibuster reform might change everything. But anything less won’t change the basic dynamics.

Republicans are going to keep bashing away at the president regardless of what he does. Obama’s Democratic critics will continue to fault him for his mistakes, doomed bipartisan overtures and perceived lack of gumption. That’s OK. Democrats are supposed to press the president toward more progressive policies at every opportunity. But let’s get real about the unprecedented wall of obstruction he faces — and the only hope for breaking it, which is a major upset in the 2014 midterms.