This post from the Brookings Institution’s Henry Aaron is the first contribution to the joint American Prospect/Democratic Strategist forum, Progressive Perspectives on the Future of the New Deal/Great Society Entitlement Programs. It is cross-posted from the Prospect.
For U.S. progressives, the 20th century was a triumph. They fought for social insurance, and they won. They supported many income-tested benefits to ameliorate poverty, which became law.
In retrospect, one can identify at least four reasons for these successes. First, the Great Depression taught usually individualistic Americans that the harsh discipline of capitalism is acceptable only if softened with economic protections. Second, the monumental collective victory in World War II made clear to a traditionally government-phobic nation that collective action could deliver the goods. Third, starting in 1940, the United States enjoyed nearly four decades of almost continuous economic growth. Over that period, most people enjoyed improved private living standards even as they collectively helped others. Fourth, the defense budget shrank from more than 10 percent of GDP after the Korean War to less than 4 percent after the collapse of the Soviet Union. That contraction allowed domestic spending to increase without the need to raise taxes.
These conditions endured long enough to seem normal, but they were not. The deceptions and failures of the Vietnam War began to undermine trust that government is honest and effective. Watergate accelerated disillusionment. The first oil shock in 1973 caused stagflation. Stock prices remained depressed for years. For a time it seemed that the economic triumphs of the Clinton presidency might initiate a new progressive era, but Clinton’s personal indiscretions, the Nader candidacy, and a politicized Supreme Court intervened.
The first decade of the 21st century was calamitous. George W. Bush pushed for and Congress enacted imprudent tax cuts just as the baby-boom generation began to retire. These cuts recklessly squandered fiscal surpluses laboriously created during the fiscally prudent 1990s. Two wars, one rashly and dishonestly begun and both mismanaged, sharply boosted federal government spending. Most of the fruits of economic growth accrued to the rich. The middle class languished. Unemployment and under-employment soared. Budget prospects deteriorated. Debt ballooned. Suddenly, the liberal successes–Medicare, Social Security, and income-tested programs such as Medicaid and Food Stamps–seemed to many to be unaffordable.
Meanwhile principled opposition to the very concept of social insurance reemerged. When initially debated, Social Security and Medicare elicited political Jeremiads, warning that these programs would destroy personal freedom. President Obama’s health reform legislation has elicited the same absurd warnings. But even more, it seems to have aroused near-hysteria among libertarian conservatives that they are engaged in political Armageddon, a final struggle against freedom-destroying statism.
With opposition to social insurance more intense than in decades, progressives need to consider carefully what extensions of social insurance they want to seek, what redesigns of the current system they should entertain, and what cutbacks in the current system they might tolerate in exchange for high-priority gains.
A key baseline fact should be kept firmly in mind: U.S. social insurance is parsimonious, compared to that of other nations or to the domestic past. Social Security pensions are 30-40 percent lower than the average of other developed nations. Furthermore, Social Security benefits have been and will be cut about 15 percent under legislation enacted in 1983. There is no good reason to cut them more. In fact, the arguments for raising benefits, especially for the very old, are compelling. A recent poll indicates that large majorities of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents are willing to pay enough in added taxes not only to sustain the current program, but also to raise benefits somewhat.
Medicare is also far from generous. It covers barely 60 percent of its beneficiaries’ medical costs. Most people are driven to obtain supplemental coverage through other sources. The program could be improved and the lives of beneficiaries simplified if a super-Medicare program were offered at a premium that fully covers the cost of incremental benefits and thereby avoids any net impact on the federal budget.

Read more…

An important new online forum was announced this morning by TDS Managing Editor Ed Kilgore and American Prospect editor-in-chief Kit Rachlis:
This week and next, The American Prospect, in conjunction with The Democratic Strategist, is proud to sponsor a special forum titled: Progressive Perspectives on the Future of the New Deal/Great Society Entitlement Programs.
This unique forum will proceed through seven essays–from Henry Aaron, Andrew Levison, Bob Kuttner, Bill Galston, Dean Baker, Mark Schmitt, and Will Marshall–with occasional summaries from the co-moderators, Kit Rachlis of the Prospect and Ed Kilgore of the Strategist.
The distinctive goal of this forum is to offer a “progressives-only” debate on entitlements–a debate that is often avoided or distorted by the necessity to resist conservative ideological assaults on the New Deal and Great Society safety net or by media-driven elite “deficit hawk” campaigns that seem to begin with the assumption that America’s only fiscal problem stems from “unaffordable” or “runaway” entitlements.
That in the mainstream media “entitlement reform” has become a synonym for structural changes in entitlements designed to cut benefits, shift costs to beneficiaries, or abandon national responsibility for these programs, has inhibited an important intra-progressive debate over how the safety net can be enhanced, sustained, and harmonized with other important progressive priorities.
Progressive discussions of this subject are also frequently hampered by the conflation of substantive arguments about social policy itself with those focused on more practical matters of political strategy.
Now, we believe, is an ideal time to re-open and clarify the intra-progressive debate over the future of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid (and perhaps food stamps and the post-entitlement cash assistance program Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which also form elements of the safety net). After all, declining federal budget deficits have taken a lot of the steam out of the “fiscal crisis” campaigns on the right and center-right. Moreover, the abandonment of any “grand bargain” budget negotiations for the foreseeable future (mainly due to conservative refusal to consider tax increases on the wealthy) has taken “entitlement reform” proposals–particularly those conditionally proposed by the Obama administration–off the table as well. And finally, the “wait and see” period we have entered with respect to implementation of the Affordable Care Act means we can now discuss long-term prospects for Medicare and Medicaid without assuming these programs are eternally defined by their present role in the “Obamacare” system.
We have asked a broad spectrum of progressive thinkers and writers to offer their thoughts on the future of entitlements. Some of these individuals are generally identified with a staunch defense of Social Security and Medicare as they are now, others fear entitlements violate intergenerational equity or threaten non-entitlement “investments.” participants What they all share, however, is a fundamental commitment to the preservation and strengthening of a robust social safety net as a central goal of progressive social policy.
Aside from the light this forum may cast on the options facing progressives in maintaining a strong social safety net and the economic climate needed to sustain it, we also hope the forum will offer a model for an enhanced intra-progressive discourse. With the Obama administration soon to enter its final stage–and with progressives coming out of the defensive crouch conservative political tactics have induced–it is likely that we will soon witness one of those periodic “struggles for the soul” that occur when values, goals, policies, strategies and tactics are all under active discussion.
As we all know, such discussions have in the past occasionally taken on a bitter tone of recrimination and name-calling, and have also become associated with the agendas of individual politicians and organized factions. In keeping with the philosophy of the Prospect and the mission of the Strategist, we have sought to foster an atmosphere of civil and empirically-based debate in which no one is presumed to have a monopoly on the mantle of progressivism and no one attempts to score political points by decrying either excessive orthodoxy or incipient heresy rather than achieving persuasion by careful, reasoned argument.
As a practical matter, after the initial essays in this forum have been presented, we will then entertain rejoinders and follow-ons from all participants–and if appropriate, from others. The forum will continue until all that’s worth saying has been said. We hope you enjoy, and most of all, benefit from, this discussion of Progressive Perspectives on the Future of the New Deal/Great Society Entitlement Programs.

From “A Diary by Hamden Rice” cross-posted from Daily Kos:

I would like to remind everyone exactly what Martin Luther King did, and it wasn’t that he “marched” or gave a great speech.
“Dr. King ended the terror of living in the south.”
Please let this sink in and and take my word and the word of my late father on this. If you are a white person who has always lived in the U.S. and never under a brutal dictatorship, you probably don’t know what my father was talking about.
But this is what the great Dr. Martin Luther King accomplished. Not that he marched, nor that he gave speeches.
He ended the terror of living as a black person, especially in the south…

Read the article after the jump:

Read more…

The following article by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of “The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Noam Scheiber was out with a great new piece last week contrasting Elizabeth Warren’s political message and priorities with New York City Mayor’s Bill de Blasio, where he described Warren’s populism as the “anti-government left,” an intriguing phrase. While I generally agree with the article, as I relate below, I would frame things differently. Also out was a thoughtful new article in The Democratic Strategist by Andrew Levison on how a successful populist strategy requires more than just economic issues. A series of big events in the last couple of years has prompted a lot of discussion in Democratic circles and the media about the new wave of populism that is building: Obama using Bain-bashing populism to win reelection in a tough economy, Warren’s victory in 2012, the election of Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, the reelection of Sherrod Brown in Ohio, the election of de Blasio and Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, the emergence of Warren as a powerful new iconic leader for progressives, and the going down in flames of Larry Summers as a potential Fed Chair nominee. As someone who has been a progressive populist my entire career, and who believes it can be a winning political formula in purple and even red states as well as blue ones, this is an exciting time, and I do believe this may become our moment if our movement creates a successful message and strategy. But the challenges that have kept progressive populists from winning presidential elections and creating a lasting majority movement are still there, and those of us who want to pursue this path need to be aware of them and have a strategy for dealing with them. This blog post lays out the challenges I think we have to overcome, and a strategy for doing so.
Let me say at the outset that I call this blog post “Winning Warren-Style” not because she is necessarily following all of the strategy I lay out below. She is setting her own course, and while I respect her and am inspired by the kind of politics she is pursuing, the ideas in this piece are the course I believe we should follow, not the course I think she is following. However, because Warren is inspiring a new generation of progressive populist activism and creating an iconic brand and a way of framing issues that is fresh and exciting, I think Warren has already become the leader of a new kind of modern populism that will grow into a bigger movement.
But before discussing that new movement, let’s go back and look at the history of the last half-century. It was 50 years ago that the New Deal era reached its pinnacle of political power and success, when LBJ won his overwhelming landslide victory in 1964. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were constructing a politics that had great potential for uniting working-class whites and blacks into a powerful political coalition. But 1964 would be the last time a full-throated progressive populist on economic issues won the presidency. The Vietnam War broke apart the progressive coalition, and King and Kennedy were dead by assassins’ bullets four years later. Even though plenty of populists have won big competitive races in purple states many times since then, and even though populists have tended to way outperform the amount of money that has been raised in presidential politics, there are some deeply entrenched reasons that Democratic populists (as opposed to the faux-populists in the Republican Party) have failed to win national elections in that time. Here are the four biggest barriers to a populist progressive president and Congress:

1. The money thing. Let’s start with the most obvious point, which is the fact that big-money special interests don’t like progressive populists, and those big-money types have a huge sway over the political process. It’s not just that they don’t give to populists, and do give a huge amount to their opponents, historically meaning that the kind of candidates people like me support are way outspent. That is just one part of the distortion that big money makes in our political system. There is also the huge influence, and control through actual ownership or advertising dollars, that big-money corporate interests plays with the journalistic coverage of the campaign. And there is the fact, to which I can directly attest from years of conversations on campaigns, that, a great many times, Democrats distort, mute, and muffle a populist message — even if it polls well, which is usually does — because of fears about not being able to raise enough money from the business interests if they are too open in their populism.
I would add another note here as well. One of the problems the entire Democratic party has suffered from since the 1970s is that the power of big money has made the party, even in the years we controlled both Congress and the presidency, look weak or worse policy-wise in terms of actually delivering tangible benefits for working families. We couldn’t pass labor law reform or health care in the 1970s, but we did deregulate a bunch of industries (like oil companies, airlines, trucking) and let them run roughshod over people. We couldn’t pass health care reform in the 1990s, but we did pass NAFTA and banking deregulation, things that ended up badly hurting the economic standing of most Americans. When we did pass health care reform and financial reform in 2010, that was good, but we made enough compromises that seriously weakened those bills’ ability to help make tangible improvements for most Americans, lessening in a big way the political credit that we could have gotten for the legislation.
2. The race and poverty thing. As Stan Greenberg found in his seminal research into the attitudes of white working-class voters in suburban Detroit in the 1980s, Republicans had been very successful at convincing those kind of voters that when Democrats talked about economic fairness, who they really cared about were poor and black people. (Now we can add Hispanic immigrants to the mix.) The infamous GOP “Southern strategy” worked for a long time in the industrial Midwest too. This dynamic is still around, although it is fading somewhat as our nation’s demographics change, but it is still a big thing Democrats have to deal with, because we can’t build a long term national majority without a significant share of the white working-class vote.
3. The business thing. Working-class voters, who tend to account for the bulk of swing voters in national elections, have a very complicated set of mixed emotions about business. They don’t like the businesses that exploit their workers, outsource jobs, pay huge CEO salaries, and care only about their enormous profits, but they also know that businesses are the source of badly needed jobs, and they don’t want to hurt the ability of businesses to create and maintain those jobs. Thus, if populist Democrats seem like they are too anti-business, or that they are too angry at business abuses to be able to help those businesses create more jobs, it makes those voters nervous.

Read more…

To commemorate the MLK holiday in a relevant way, begin by reading Ned Resnicoff’s “Four ways Martin Luther King Jr. wanted to battle inequality” at MSNBC.com, which includes this nugget: “The 1968 Memphis strike was not the first time King had reached out directly to the labor movement. He had been delivering speeches before crowds of union members for years, calling for greater cooperation between the civil rights movement and the labor movement…”The labor movement was the principal force that transformed misery and despair into hope and progress,” he told the Illinois State AFL-CIO in 1965. “Out of its bold struggles, economic and social reform gave birth to unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, government relief for the destitute, and, above all, new wage levels that meant not mere survival but a tolerable life.”
From Toluse Olorunnipa’s post “Christie Meets Florida Donors in Private Amid Democratic Taunts” at Bloomberg.com: It’s not every day that we have a governor visit Florida whose scandals burn so brightly that they outshine even those of our own scandal-plagued governor, Rick Scott,” said U.S. Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Florida Democrat and head of the DNC, at the press conference.
Nicole Hemmer’s “The Conservative War on Liberal Media Has a Long History” at The Atlantic illuminates the development of he environment that lead to the Roger Ailes/Fox News era.
Obama is cranking up the bully pulpit for the midterm elections, reports Jules Witcover at the Baltimore Sun.
Julian Zelizer’s CNN politics post “Five big questions on 2014 elections” offers this observation: “There are certain must-wins for Democrats if they are to show that they are capable of taking advantage of this moment. In Florida’s 13th District, Alex Sink, a well-known and well-respected Democrat, is attempting to win the seat of long-term Republican veteran Bill Young, who recently died, leaving open this highly competitive district. If Democrats can’t win this special election on March 11, it will signal trouble…Democrats will also be looking for a win in Florida’s 2nd District, where Gwen Graham is trying to defeat Rep. Steve Southerland in a test of whether the South has really softened as conservative territory. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has been pouring resources into the district to paint Southerland as a poster child for the House GOP. “Congressman Southerland’s reckless plan to repeal the entire Affordable Care Act would mean 614,200 consumers in Florida would be left without health insurance rebates,” said one party spokesperson.”
And Kyle Kondik notes at the Crystal Ball that “we’re changing the rating in the FL-13 special election from Toss-up to Leans Democratic. Unless national factors become so unfavorable for Democrats that they lift Jolly, we think this race is Sink’s to lose.”
From The Salt Lake Tribune, in the mother of all red states: “Poll: Utahns favor stricter air quality rules for industry.”
Roxana Hegeman writes at AZcentral.com that “The U.S. Election Assistance Commission on Friday rejected requests by Kansas, Arizona and Georgia to modify federal registration forms to allow their states to fully implement proof-of-citizen voting laws for their residents…The agency found that granting the states’ requests would “likely hinder eligible citizens from registering to vote in federal elections,” undermining the core purpose of the National Voter Registration Act.”
Meanwhile, Michael Muskal reports at the L.A. Times that “Pennsylvania voter ID law struck down by judge as unconstitutional.”

As we prepare to honor Martin Luther King, Jr., on Monday, it’s time for progressives to prepare ourselves for a fresh effort by conservatives to purloin his legacy and rewrite the history of the civil rights movement. Just yesterday, Sen. Rand Paul, a serial offender, tried to compare defenders of the filibuster–the filibuster!–and other restraints on popular democracy to advocates for the civil rights of racial minorities. I addressed this effort at WaMo today:

Last April [Paul] gave a speech at Howard University that pursued the ridiculous theory that the New Deal was essentially a complement to Jim Crow in its “enslavement” of African-Americans to the terrible indignity of material living assistance. And now we have this, via WaPo’s Aaron Blake:

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), in an interview Thursday, likened President Obama’s governing philosophy to the kind of “majority rule” that led to Jim Crow laws and Japanese internment camps.
Speaking on Fox News, Paul reacted to Obama’s repeated assertions that Republicans should win elections if they want to control the agenda in Washington. Obama has also suggested in recent days that he might pursue more executive actions — changes made without Congress.
“The danger to majority rule — to him sort of thinking, well, the majority voted for me, now I’m the majority, I can do whatever I want, and that there are no rules that restrain me — that’s what gave us Jim Crow,” Paul said. “That’s what gave us the internment of the Japanese — that the majority said you don’t have individual rights, and individual rights don’t come from your creator, and they’re not guaranteed by the Constitution. It’s just whatever the majority wants.”
Paul added: “There’s a real danger to that viewpoint, but it’s consistent with the progressive viewpoint. … Progressives believe in majority rule, not constitutional rule.”

Don’t be confused with the conflation of the Japanese interment outrage–a temporary product of wartime hysteria which no one at the time regarded as “progressive”–with Jim Crow. The original Constitution which Paul and his followers worship certainly didn’t concern itself with the rights of racial minorities. It took the most egregious exercise of “majority rule” in U.S. history–the Civil War–to abolish slavery. Only a majority given extraordinary power by the self-exclusion of southerners was in a position to pass the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution, the most important efforts taken until 1964 to vindicate the rights of racial minorities. It was a failure of will by the majority that led to the abandonment of Reconstruction and the establishment of the Jim Crow regime. And it was the power of the minority in the Senate (and by the 1930s or so, the minority in the Democratic Party) to thwart majority rule via the filibuster that kept Jim Crow in place for so very long.
And BTW, it’s conservatives, far more than progressives, who perpetually chafe at judicial enforcement of individual rights, unless it happens to coincide with their own policy goals. But in any event, Paul and others like him really need to stop trying to invoke the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement to attack “majority rule” on behalf of a “constitutional conservatism” aimed at creating a oligarchical or even theocratic dictatorship of absolute private property rights and puny government. The “minorities” they want to protect are snowy white and very privileged.

It’s very important, morally and politically, to fight back against the kind of egregious revisionism and phony parallels offered by those who are the ideological (and in some cases, literal) descendants of the people who fought against King and the Civil Rights Movement. It’s the least we can do to honor the sacrifices made by so many to create the kind of society the “constitutional conservatives” are determined to bury.

Another political myth appears ready for obliteration, the current fav which says that America is a ‘center-right’ nation. Democratic strategist and former AFL-CIO political director Steve Rosenthal wields the stake in his WaPo op-ed “America is Becoming More Liberal,” and he rams it straight into the heart:

…After two consecutive elections in which the Democratic candidate for president garnered more than 50 percent of the vote — a one-two punch last achieved by Franklin Roosevelt — it is worth questioning that assumption. The country is getting more diverse, and as the proportion of white voters shrinks, so, too, does the conservative base. As demographics shift, so do political preferences — in this case, toward the left. A close examination of U.S. attitudes in the past decade-plus reveals that the United States is steadily becoming more progressive.
It’s been well publicized how America has “evolved” on marriage equality. Washington Post/ABC News polling last year found that, by a margin of 58 percent to 36 percent , people believe their fellow Americans should be able to marry whomever they choose — something that would have been unthinkable less than a decade ago.
This progressive trend isn’t isolated to this issue. Over the past 10 or so years, national polls have shown that the general public is becoming more liberal on:
● Immigration. The last time the nation considered immigration reform, in 2006, 52 percent of respondents told Gallup that the priority should be halting the flow of illegal immigration. Just 43 percent preferred to deal with the undocumented immigrants already here. When Gallup asked the same question last July, the numbers had flipped: 55 percent thought the focus should be on immigrants already here, while 41 percent said the priority should be strengthening U.S. borders.
●Marijuana. In 2000, just 31 percent of Americans believed marijuana should be legalized, Gallup found, and 64 percent were opposed. The pro-legalization number has since tracked steadily upward. In October Gallup polling, 58 percent of respondents favored legalization and just 39 percent were opposed.
● Big business. Americans have grown more mistrustful of big business since 2002, when 50 percent of respondents told Gallup they were “very or somewhat satisfied” with the influence of major corporations. This number bottomed out at 29 percent in 2011 and 30 percent in 2012.

Looking at the states, the trend prevails, as Rosenthal explains:

…In recent elections, states that were once reliably Republican red in presidential elections — including Colorado, North Carolina and Nevada — have become competitive or even solid Democratic blue.
In the November election in Virginia, issues well to the left of the “Old Virginia” (read: conservative) mainstream not only failed to hurt Democrats but might even have helped them. Gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe (D) was vocal about his support for expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, while Republican Ken Cuccinelli harped on Obamacare to curry favor with voters unhappy with the law. In the end, of course, McAuliffe won, and there was little evidence that health care hurt him or helped Cuccinelli’s final numbers. In the attorney general’s race, Democrat Mark Herring defied long-standing conventional wisdom and played up his position on gun safety. Herring defeated his opponent by pointing out Republican Mark Obenshain’s weak record on common-sense gun legislation such as comprehensive background checks and closing the gun-show loophole.
In the swing state of Iowa, recent extreme weather has convinced more people that the science behind climate change is real. In an Iowa State University annual poll of farmers — a traditionally conservative set — the share who believed in climate change last year was 74.3 percent, a significant jump from 67.7 percent in 2011, when the question was first asked.

Rosenthal argues, further, that “This should be a guiding light for politicians…Democrats no longer need to fear running on their beliefs. They should stop letting special interests on the right hold ideas and ideals hostage and start listening to voters.”
He concludes that “Progressives have an opportunity not only to come into the mainstream but also to lead — and shape public opinion…Democrats ought to argue for populist solutions such as raising the minimum wage, raising taxes on millionaires and corporations, rebuilding infrastructure, investing in education and instituting paid sick leave. Americans crave solutions, and they are moving to the left to find them.”
The “America is a center-right nation” myth will continue to resurface as a conservative meme targeting low-information voters. But those who read and reason should recognize it for what it is — the death throes of a long-discredited ideology.

At The Cook Political Report Amy Walter puts what one hopes is the final nail in the coffin of widespread pundit references to “independent voters” as a major force in swinging elections.
It’s been one of those stubborn myths that refuses to die among political talking heads of lighter weight, particularly those favoring the ‘Dems in disarray’ meme, despite extremely convincing work by Alan Abramowitz and others. Walter covers some familiar territory, noting that “pure independents” are 10 percent tops and she adds to our understanding of what is really going on with the increase in self-described ‘independents’. Walter analyzes data from a recent paper by Kimberley Norman and Zachary Zundel for the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy which explains:

that “the majority of Independent voters have political opinions that align with one of the two major parties at least as well as party members.” In fact, they write, “independents who “leaned” toward one party or the other actually had stronger alignment than those who identified as “not very strong” in the same party. Additionally, their results were far more similar with those who identified themselves as being “strong” in their party.”
In other words, those who call themselves “independent” may actually be closer to the views of the core GOP or core Democratic policy positions than even those who identify themselves as a party member.
Using the 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study as their source of public opinion, the authors of the study compared the opinions of 55,400 Americans (34 percent Democrat, 25 percent Republican, 30 percent independent) with the official party positions of the Democratic and Republican party platforms of 2012. They broke the 23 policy issue questions into roughly equal buckets of economic and social issues.The further an individual deviated from the “official party” position, the higher their score. For example, a Democrat who believed that “by law, abortion should never be permitted” got a score of two. One who said that “the law should permit abortion only in case of rape or incest or when the woman’s life is in danger” got a score of one. The Democrat who believed a “woman should always be able to obtain an abortion as a matter of personal choice” was give a score of zero.
On average, those who identified as an independent who “leaned” toward one party or the other, had lower deviation scores (i.e. were more closely aligned with core positions of the party) than those who were not as strongly identified with the party.
Among Democrats, those who said they were “strong Democrats” had an average score of 7.97. Those who said they were independent with a “lean” to Democrats had an average score of 7.73. But, those who said they were “not very strong” Democrat had a higher average score of 9.46.
The Republican gap looks similar, with “strong Republican” averaging 5.95 and independent, “lean” Republican at 6.63. Meanwhile, those who identified themselves as “not very strong Republican” had an average score of 8.58.

Contrary to much pundit palaver, Walter concludes that ‘independent’ voters are not abandoning self-identifying with the two parties because they are too extreme. Rather, “many may be leaving because they see the party as getting too moderate or insufficiently aligned with its core values…These voters may be better aligned with strong partisans than they are with those who are not as committed to their party label.”
None of this is to say that the 10 percent of “pure independents” can’t swing an election if they line up with one party or the other. But they usually break roughly even, or stay at home. Chasing them is most always a fruitless endeavor.

Sarah Kliff’s Wonkblog post “Don’t believe the hype: Health insurers think Obamacare is going to be fine” provides a welcome antidote from industry experts to the GOP hysteria.
HuffPo’s Jason Linkins illuminates Christie’s ‘Shadow Primary’ problem with this quote from Matthew Yglesias: “…in order to win, any candidate needs to first gain the allegiance (or at least nonhostility) of a wide range of elites outside his immediate political circle. House members from South Carolina. State senators from Iowa. Anti-abortion activists in New Hampshire. Talk radio hosts. Fox News executives. Donors. Lobbyists. State-level Chamber of Commerce chiefs. These people are paying attention right now, and they’re thinking about who they want to back and who they want to bandwagon against. And there’s just no way this bridge thing is making any of those people more likely to support Christie than they were six months ago. Republican elites are mostly looking to find a candidate who is both conservative, effective, and electable and this makes him look less electable and less effective without making him look more conservative…” Linkins adds, “When you consider that Christie is likely to draw competitors like Jeb Bush, Paul Ryan and Scott Walker, as opposed to Tim Pawlenty, Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain, there’s no reason for party elites to be desperate or settle early.”
WaPo’s Paul Kane discusses prospects for a Blue Dog resurrection.
But at The Hill, Mario Trujillo’s “Blue Dogs recruit four vulnerable Dems” notes that “All the new members won their last elections with less than 55 percent of the vote. The National Republican Congressional Committee has singled out both Barber and Rahall, who represent red-leaning districts that went to Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election.” However, “Democrats have also looked to protect the swing districts held by the new Blue Dog members. All but Rahall have been named to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s Frontline Program, which protects vulnerable incumbents.”
In an NYRB cover story, Gary Wills concludes that Joe Scarborough’s plan to save the GOP from itself has a few major blind spots: “Scarborough’s silly picture of American politics leaves out most of the things that matter–including (but not restricted to) race, religion, and money. And the greatest of these is money.”
Politico’s Tal Kopan, Politico and Gallup headline writers have what strikes me as a textbook example of biased poll interpretation for government-bashing. Here’s her lede: “Americans continue to identify government itself as the biggest problem facing the nation in a new poll, although the numbers have come down since the end of the government shutdown…Asked to name the most important problem facing the country today, 21 percent of those surveyed in a Gallup poll out Wednesday cited government and politicians.” But the exact wording of the choice that received a 21 percent response to Gallup’s question was “Dissatisfaction with government/Congress/politicians/poor leadership/corruption/abuse/power.” Some of the blame, however, should be shared with the ejits who crafted the response choice, which is so broad as to make the poll worthless.
Politico’s Manu Raju and Carrie Budoff Brown have a more nuanced analysis of “Obama’s Plan to Save the Senate.”
E.J. Dionne, Jr.’s profile of Rep. George Miller, “The Lost Art of Tough Liberalism” merits a thoughtful read by m.c.’s and their staffers and offers an interesting suggestion: “Congress could use more liberals who can brawl and negotiate at the same time. Perhaps Miller will now open a school for progressive legislators. He could name it after Ted Kennedy.”
Can the Koch brothers buy a U.S. Senate seat for the Republicans in N.C.? Kris Kromm discusses the disturbing possibilities in his Facing South post “Hagan, Southern lawmakers targeted in Obamacare attack ads.”