The latest Washington Post poll – dramatically titled “Faith in Obama Drops as Reform Fears Rise” — has caused a tremendous amount of consternation among Democrats and no small amount of demoralization – arguably more than is actually warranted by the results.
We’ll look at some of the numbers in a moment, but, to begin, it is important to note that the reaction among Dems has been quite extreme — “Obama is rapidly losing support”, “the voters are turning against us”, “we had the public on our side, but now they’re changing their minds”. “We’re losing the battle.”
Many commentators do indeed take note of the inevitable end of any president’s post-election honeymoon but they combine it with an implicit assumption that an optimal strategy could have limited any decline in support to just a fraction of the drop off that has actually occurred.
This has led to a quite rancorous intra-Democratic debate over “what we did wrong” — “we didn’t communicate our message”, “the other side won the spring debate”, “our strategy was fundamentally flawed” and so on.
Given the poll results, at first glance this way of viewing the problem seems unavoidable. But it is vital to stop for a moment and ask if this is really the right way to conceptualize what the poll results indicate is going on? It is without question the most demoralizing possible way of framing the issue, but is it also the most accurate one?
It is possible to gain a useful perspective on this question by looking at a somewhat comparable situation that very often occurs in a very different realm of strategy — the world of military affairs. In this other field, a rather parallel event is interpreted in a quite very different way.
Again and again in military history a general will begin a battle standing at the head of vast, awe-inspiring ranks of recently recruited soldiers — often peasants and laborers rounded up by paid recruiters and given only a few days or weeks training — only to see them melt away at the first taste of combat, dropping their weapons and fleeing the field in total disarray. Throughout military history — from Caesar’s campaigns in the Roman Empire to the behavior of native forces recruited to support European colonial armies in the 19th and 20th century — this kind of sudden collapse of untested forces in their first experience with combat is a common, recurrent event.
But military analysts virtually never interpret this kind of collapse as the result of some particular mistake in the general’s military strategy or as a failure of his leadership. Nor do they describe the unreliable soldiers as men who were previously loyal, motivated and committed but who for some reason changed their minds on the day of battle. Rather this kind of breakdown is invariably viewed as an entirely predictable – indeed often inevitable — pattern that occurs when “green” troops – soldiers who have not been “battle-tested” in the heat of actual combat – are employed. In military history, it is a general rule that only after troops have been “seasoned” or ” combat-hardened” by experience under fire that they can be fully and confidently relied on to stand their ground in a new confrontation.
To put it simply, in the military sphere it is considered basically false to visualize untested soldiers as suddenly “losing” a confidence, warrior spirit or aggressiveness that they previously possessed; on the contrary, the military perspective is that they really never really had such characteristics in the first place.
Translated over to the realm of political strategy, this raises the question of whether it really makes sense to conceptualize a group of voters as genuine and solid “supporters” of some policy simply because they endorse it on a single survey question. It can be argued that this substantially mischaracterizes the cognitive structure of their attitudes.
Let’s face it — we are all perfectly familiar with the typical pattern of high opinion poll approval for some progressive program that then declines sharply when the follow up question is asked “would you still be in favor of this reform if you have to pay higher taxes for it.”
This familiar, indeed, almost universal shift in attitude does not reflect the existence of two separate opinions or of a change of opinion from one moment to another. Cognitively speaking, both survey responses above are aspects of one single perspective that is measured in one way by expressing the proposal positively as a potentially desirable goal and then further explored by presenting arguments against it. It can reasonably be argued that it is really the number of people who support not only the initial statement of the program but who continue to support it after a range of effectively expressed arguments against it are presented who can properly be defined as real or genuine “supporters” of the program.
This is doubly true when one knows in advance that the policy in question is absolutely certain to be subject to severe, ruthless, dishonest and merciless attack. Much like untrained conscript soldiers, ordinary voters can also be profoundly frightened and demoralized by the “shock and awe” of observing a near-hysterical and almost demented assault on a program or proposal.
With this in mind, consider the data in the poll:

Read more…

What with conservative opinion-leaders beginning to concede that the “death panel” claim about health care reform is, as the editors of National Review put it, “hysteria,” it’s a bit depressing to note that a lot of Americans still buy it.
According to a new Pew poll, 86% of Americans have heard the “death panel” claim. Of those, 30% think it’s true; 50% think it’s false; and 20% don’t know. The partisan breakdowns? Nearly half (47%) of self-identified Republicans think that health reform legislation will, indeed, lead to “death panels.” The number drops to 28% among independents, but then a startling 20% of Democrats think it’s true.
Now when Sarah Palin started this nonsense with her famous Facebook post, lots of observers thought she had finally jumped the shark and had discredited herself for the foreseeable future. Anyone who dismisses her chances for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 should reflect on the fact that half her party has gone along with her ravings. I’d be willing to bet the number goes a lot higher among the conservative activists–heavily dominated by her fellow hard-core right-to-lifers–who participate in the GOP’s Iowa Caucuses.

Eric Alterman has a perceptive post at The Daily Beast with the somewhat unfortunate title, “Obama’s Fake Bipartisanship,” which provides a slightly different angle than Ed Kilgore’s “What Price Bipartisanship?” post below. Alterman also responds to Kuttner’s question, “Will somebody please explain to me why Barack Obama is still on his bipartisan kick…What do these guys think they are getting by continuing to kiss up to the Republicans?”:

I think the answer to Mr. Kuttner’s conundrum can be found in an article, ironically enough, by one Mark Schmitt, who happens to be executive editor of, you guessed it, The American Prospect. Way back in December 2007, when supporters of both Hillary Clinton and John Edwards were pummeling Obama on what they deemed was the wishy-washiness of his bipartisan appeal in the face of so nasty an opponent, Schmitt published an influential (among liberals) argument, “The ‘Theory of Change’ Primary.” In it, Schmitt argued that liberals were “too literal in believing that ‘hope’ and bipartisanship are things that Obama naïvely believes are present and possible, when in fact they are a tactic, a method of subverting and breaking the unified conservative power structure. Claiming the mantle of bipartisanship and national unity, and defining the problem to be solved (e.g. universal health care) puts one in a position of strength, and Republicans would defect from that position at their own risk.”
…This man is, like FDR, a genuine liberal, but also a serious politician. He is not interested in moral victories or noble defeats. He wants to win. What he’s figured out, however, is that—particularly after two full decades of Bush/Clinton/Bush wars—the American people feel more comfortable with a politician who appears to reach out to the other side, who gives them a chance to play ball. This works both as an electoral strategy and a governing strategy.

if Alterman is right, and I think he is, what we have is a very crafty President, who understands that verbal gestures of goodwill and appeals for bipartisan cooperation are not necessarily the same thing as giving away the store. The public wants more civility. They are tired of what Jesse Jackson termed the “rat-a-tat-tat” of the politics of polarization. The cool hand Obama displayed in the campaign is emblematic of his approach to conflict. — a version of TR’s “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” I could be wrong, but I trust President Obama to fight for a public option, using all of the leverage he can muster, but without bellicose posturing.
Sure, Obama could also use a little more of TR’s ‘bully pulpit,’ and show more passion in advocating for the uninsured and for the public option in general. But he’s right not to get suckered into personalized attacks that make everyone involved look silly. A little dignity looks awfully good nowadays, particularly compared to the GOP’s recent side-show.
Alterman goes on to caution that Obama’s approach might not work. After all, today’s Republican party is sadly devoid of leaders like Sens. Jacob Javitz, Lowell Weicker and others who would often confound their GOP colleagues by doing the right thing. Bipartisan outreach may produce few votes across the aisle on health care. But a President who expresses a willingness to negotiate, reaches out and invites his adversaries to join him can not fairly be faulted for selling out.

For months now, hardly an hour has gone by without someone in the progressive chattering classes complaining about President’s Obama’s “bipartisanship” talk. One of the strongest recent complaints was from the estimable Robert Kuttner at HuffPo, where he plausibly asked what the administration has gotten for its willingness to reach out to the GOP, and concluded, also plausibly, that it hasn’t produced much in the way of tangible benefits.
But at some point, it’s equally important to flip the question and ask: Has the bipartisanship talk done any real damage?
On the stimulus legislation, concessions were made to a few Senate Republicans (along with several Democratic allies) to get their votes, which were necessary for passage of the bill.
On climate change in the House, concessions were likewise essential to passage of the bill.
On health care reform, has the administration made any concessions to Republicans so far? Not that I’m aware of. Henry Waxman (presumably with White House approval) did make some concessions to Blue Dog Democrats to get enough of them to support a bill in order to lift it out of the Energy and Commerce Committee to the House floor. In the Senate, the administration has allowed Max Baucus and Kent Conrad to negotiate with a handful of GOPers, but to the extent there have been substantive concessions (e.g., hints that coops might be an acceptable substitute for a public option), they’ve been necessary to secure Democrats, while keeping open the possibility of defections from two or three Republicans, which may well prove necessary to enact a bill, depending on how the reconciliation gambit works out. But at the same time, publicly and privately, the White House has made it clear it’s willing to pursue a Democrats-only strategy if that proves possible, and if that’s what it takes.
Now you can make the argument that the bipartisanship talk has “discouraged the base,” but frankly, at this point, the enthusiasm level of “the base” is germane only to the extent that it translates into votes in Congress. Throughout the 2008 campaign, there were also fears expressed that Obama’s bipartisan or post-partisan talk would “discourage the base,” and that didn’t actually happen, did it?
Beyond that, as I’ve argued many times before, Obama appears to be pursuing a long-term strategy of constantly forcing Republicans to either cooperate with him or obstruct him openly, on the theory that the former option might produce a few key votes, and the latter option will further paint the GOP into an extremist corner.
A little further down the road, when attention focuses largely on wavering Democrats in the House and in the Senate, the administration and the congressional leadership will have to make a judgment call as to whether a directly partisan “disciplinary” approach, or the “cover” of securing a few Republicans with a few concessions that those same Democrats happen to support, will work best. Until then, progressives would be best advised to maintain some perspective in complaints about “bipartisanship.” It’s not costing progressives much of anything we don’t already have to pay to keep Democrats in line, and we’ll need just about all of them if the fight does become strictly partisan.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

There’s very little question that two basic decisions by the Obama administration on health care reform have significantly complicated efforts to mobilize public support for actual legislation. The first, which was actually made during the early stages of the 2008 presidential campaign, was to adopt a relatively complicated approach to reform that involved competing public and private plans, health insurance “exchanges,” and subsidies, among other technical-sounding features. The second, after the election, was to promote reform generally through the congressional committee system, without issuing a detailed blueprint the President would insist that Congress follow.
There were very good substantive and political reasons for both these decisions, but inevitably, they have made it harder for Americans who only vaguely want health care reform to embrace Obama’s approach, and easier for reform opponents to cherry-pick provisions in various bills that can be blown out of proportion or demonized, and to simply lie about features that are difficult to explain.
This has created a gap in public opinion between what people might support if they understood it, and what they support in the absence of any understanding. In a new post at The Atlantic on recent polling, Ron Brownstein takes a closer look at that gap:

The NBC/Wall Street Journal national survey also released this week…found that just 31 percent of independents now approve of Obama’s handling of health care, while 54 percent disapprove, according to crosstabs from the poll provided by Public Opinion Strategies, one of the pollsters. Asked their view of Obama’s health care plan, just 28 percent of independents said they consider it a good idea, while 43 percent described it as a bad idea, and the rest said they didn’t know.
Yet when the pollsters read a description of the Obama proposal to respondents, the attitude among independents sharply shifted. Opposition among them remained roughly the same at 44 percent. But support jumped to a 52 percent majority. The gap between potential and actual support for Obama’s plan among independents suggests two things: that the White House is losing the struggle to define the plan so far, and that they may have room to increase their support if they can regain the initiative.
Obama faces a formidable gap between potential and actual support even among Democrats in the NBC/WSJ poll. Just 62 percent of Democrats described his plan as a good idea; but after hearing the explanation, 78 percent of them said they would support it. (Even among Republicans, support jumped from just 9 percent to 23 percent when they were provided a description of the plan.)

So voters need to hear this explanation, from the President and every available ally, the moment the White House decides on a reasonably clear vision of what can be ultimately wrested from Congress. There won’t be a lot of time for this to happen, and in the end, some congressional Democrats from competitive districts or states will need to vote for reform in hopes that constituents will like the results even if they are doubtful about what they understand to be the plan. After all, most of the fears being fed by reform opponents will not actually materialize if a bill is enacted; the seniors who are so negative about reform will discover that little or nothing has changed in Medicare; death panels will not be convened; doctors will not lose their right to control treatments.
Reality ought to count for something in the health reform debate; reform proponents need to explain what they can, and also count on the consequences of the legislation to make its enactment a political plus.

It’s a long, long way to 2012, but Public Policy Polling has a new set of data out that measures the favorability of four possible Republican candidates (Palin, Huckabee, Gingrich and Romney) and also matches them against President Obama.
Obama leads all four, but the somewhat surprising thing is that Mike Huckabee comes the closest, trailing the President 47-44. When you look a little deeper, you see that Huck is rated favorably by 24% of self-identified liberals, 40% of moderates, and 61% of conservatives. It’s pretty clear that we’re talking here about the genial and funny Kevin Spacey Lookalike and bass player of 2008, who lashed Wall Street and didn’t talk that much about his history of theocratic views. Since he’s spent a good part of this year participating in the echo chamber of Fox, rebonding with the more exotic precincts of the Christian Right, and comparing Obama’s agenda to that of Lenin and Stalin, it’s reasonable to assume that his standing among non-conservatives is destined to decline. It’s less clear whether he can repair his frayed relationship with economic conservatives, who pretty much decided in 2008 that he was prone to taking Gospel pronouncements about helping the poor a mite too literally.
Meanwhile, the probable front-runner for 2012 at this point, one Mitt Romney, has Huckabee Lite numbers, with favorable ratings from 22% of self-identified liberals, 34% of moderates, and only 49% of conservatives.
The solid winner in favorability among the self-identified conservatives who dominate the Republican nominating process is clearly Sarah Palin, at 68%. And she, unlike Huck or Mitt, has no need to reposition herself to appeal to the Republican base. That’s where she lives, whether it’s in Alaska or some place warmer.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

On Monday, a radical cleric issued a statement rejecting a two-state solution for Israel-Palestine, suggesting that one of the two parties involved in the conflict should be made to find a homeland “elsewhere.”

The “radical cleric,” needless to say, was the Rev. Huck.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
As the Dog Days of August descended upon us, there developed across the progressive chattering classes a deep sense of malaise bordering on depression, if not panic–much of it driven by fears about the leadership skills of Barack Obama. The polling numbers seemed to weaken every day, and Democratic unease was matched by growing glee on the airwaves of Fox and in Republican circles everywhere.
Within ten weeks, however, Obama was elected president and joy returned to the land.
Yes, dear reader, I am suggesting that this August’s sense of progressive despair feels remarkably similar to last August’s. This week last year, the Gallup Tracking Poll had McCain and Obama in a statistical tie. The candidates were fresh from a joint appearance at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, which was widely viewed by progressives as a strategic error by Obama. More generally, Democratic confidence, so high earlier in the year, was sagging. “Liberals have been in a dither for several weeks now over Barack Obama’s supposedly listless campaign performance following his return from Europe,” influential blogger Kevin Drum summed up sentiments at that time, “and as near as I can tell this turned into something close to panic.”
These doldrums dissipated by the time of the Democratic convention later in the month, but reemerged in September, when McCain actually moved ahead in some polls. And the diagnosis of the problem was typically that Obama was too passive, and wasn’t articulating a clear enough message. This should sound familiar to connoisseurs of contemporary progressive concerns about Obama.
Now, this deja vu sensation I’m having obviously doesn’t guarantee that the current struggles over health care reform and climate change will have as happy an ending as the presidential contest. But it may well provide a plausible argument for giving the president the benefit of the doubt today as we should have done a year ago.
Part of the psychological problem now may be a matter of unrealistic expectations. Much of the trouble Obama has encountered in promoting his agenda has been entirely predictable. His approval ratings are gradually converging with the 2008 election results. Health care reform is a complicated challenge that threatens a lot of powerful interests and unsettles people happy with their current coverage. Major environmental initiatives lose steam in a deep recession. A new administration gradually begins to assume blame for bad conditions in the country. Republicans, adopting a faux populist tone, are fighting Obama tooth and nail. Democratic activists are frustrated by compromises and sick of having to put up with the Blue Dogs. The Senate is still the Senate, a monument to inertia, pettiness, and strutting egos.
Progressives are waiting for Barack Obama and his team to work the kind of political magic they seemed to work in 2008–except when they didn’t. Cutting through all the mythologizing of the Obama campaign, the real keys to his stretch-run success last year were his legendary calm (“No Drama Obama”); his confidence in his own long-range strategy; his ability to choose competent lieutenants and delegate to them abundantly; and his grasp of the fundamentals of public opinion and persuasion. There was zero sense of panic in the Obama campaign itself late last summer, because they stuck with their strategy and organization and didn’t let the polls or news cycles force them off the path they had chosen.
The administration’s demure approach should thus not be terribly surprising, nor a sign that it has lost its heart or its mind. Obama has not, presumably, lost the qualities he showed in the tougher moments of the 2008 campaign. As it planned its legislative agenda for 2009, Team Obama knew health care reform was going to be challenging, and also knew they could probably get away with blaming the economic emergency for paring it back or slowing it down. They decided this was the right time to act, and it’s far too soon to assume they were wrong.
This particular moment might be more endurable if, as it used to be, August was a political and legislative dead zone. We’d all get a breather, maybe calm down and look ahead to the real deal going down in the fall. But the “August Doesn’t Matter” era has ended–perhaps dating back to the grand jury testimony in the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal in August 1998, if not earlier. (It arguably began to fade when Washington got air-conditioning.) Now, even if nothing substantive is actually happening this month, the absence of action is itself painful, and feels like defeat.
While I certainly don’t know if the Obama game plan for the next couple of months is going to be successful, I’m reasonably sure a game plan exists. On the issue most on everyone’s mind, I certainly don’t know how to reconcile the sharply contrasting demands of House Democrats and Senate “centrists” on sticking points like the public option. But the odds remain good that the House will pass a bill, the Senate will pass a bill, and then we will find out if the White House and the Democratic congressional leadership have the skill to make something happen that we will be able to recognize as “change,” and perhaps even a victory for progressives. Until then, it’s probably a good idea to drink a tall glass of cold water and wait out the August political heat.

Jonathan Singer’s MyDD post, “WSJ: Dems Could Split Bill, Use Reconciliation,” flags an interesting ‘trial balloon’ being floated to move health care reform forward in Congress. Singer cites a Wall St. Journal report by Jonathan Weisman and Naftali Bendavid that Democratic leaders are considering “a strategy shift that would break the legislation into two parts and pass the most expensive provisions solely with Democratic votes.” Singer says,

…There is a better than even chance that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, working in consultation with the Obama administration, will move forward in this regard — passing the easier parts of healthcare reform in normal order, and passing the more difficult parts using the budget process. In such a case, the Democrats could afford to lose as many as 10 votes in the Senate (including that of Ted Kennedy, who has not been seen in the Senate for months) while still enacting the more contentious portions of reform, namely a public option.

Bendavid and Weisman report that “Privately, those involved in the talks now say there is a 60% chance the split-bill tactic will be used.”
The idea here is to cull the ‘low-hanging fruit’ provisions of the health care reform package, such as requiring insurers to cover those with pre-existing illnesses and pass these measures with a few Republican supporters, allowing President Obama to keep his campaign promise about earnestly seeking bipartisan support for reforms. The more hard-to-pass elements, like as ‘the public option; would be voted on afterward through the reconciliation process, which requires only 51 Senate votes.
One upside of the strategy is that it guarantees The President and Congressional Democrats a significant victory before they fight the most bruising battle. It could build support for the more difficult to pass health care reforms, since voters would likely be impressed that the Administration passed needed reforms, sort of a confidence-builder. Momentum can be a ‘force multiplier,’ as was clearly demonstrated by Obama’s election victory (I was one of the clueless who didn’t think Iowa would be all that important in the nominating process).
If there is a downside, it might splinter Democratic supporters into “I like this, but not that so much” camps, diluting support for the more controversial measures. It might also give some members of Congress cover: “I voted for package ‘A,’ because it made sense, but not package ‘B’ because it was too expensive.”
No one really knows how this would play out. An important health care win could build support for another victory, narrow the focus and sharpen the debate. Better if they had broken the bill down into strategically-sequenced components from the get-go, gaining momentum with each new victory, instead of betting the ranch on one huge bill. That’s how single-payer systems were achieved in most democracies that have it.
That said, if the decision is to stick with the big package after all, I’m for it. The provisions seem solid, and glitches can be corrected later by amendments and new legislation. Whatever strategy President Obama and Democratic congressional leaders chose, none who call themselves Democrats should sit this one out.

At 538.com, Tom Schaller points out a reasonably obvious but oft-forgotten reason for the steady erosion of President Obama’s approval ratings over the last few months: he’s trying to do a lot, and trying to do a lot depletes political capital more rapidly than trying to do very little:

Big change is costly, and not just in actual dollars from the Treasury, but in terms of how much of his capital reserves a president is willing to spend to get what he wants. Obama is not plugging for school uniforms, folks. He’s re-regulating Wall Street, trying to stimulate the economy by pumping nearly $1 trillion into it, and attempting to tackle the policy problem too many of his predecessors never could: reforming our messy, complicated health care system. Accordingly, he’s paying the price for even trying.

To put it another way, what would you prefer if you are a Democrat: that the President keep his approval ratings above 60 without working to implement the agenda he campaigned on, or lose some points and mybe get something done that won’t have to be done later or left undone entirely?
No gain without pain, folks.

If you’re wondering why the so-called “public option” in proposed health reform plans is such a line-in-the-sand non-negotiable requirement for so many progressives, you should definitely read Mark Schmitt’s brief item for The American Prospect explaining the history of this concept.
It all started, Schmitt explains, among single-payer advocates who had been convinced by pollster Celinda Lake that their approach just didn’t have enough popular support to carry the day:

One key player was Roger Hickey of the Campaign for America’s Future. Hickey took UC Berkley health care expert Jacob Hacker’s idea for “a new public insurance pool modeled after Medicare” and went around to the community of single-payer advocates, making the case that this limited “public option” was the best they could hope for. Ideally, it would someday magically turn into single-payer. And then Hickey went to all the presidential candidates, acknowledging that politically, they couldn’t support single-payer, but that the “public option” would attract a real progressive constituency.

John Edwards signed on, and then Obama and Clinton, and a hybrid proposal that added the public option to the prevailing concept of a competitive system of private insurance plans became the standard Democratic approach.
But baked into the cake was a subtle but important difference in perspective between single-payer fans who viewed the public option as the sine qua non, and other progressives who viewed it as just one of many moving parts in a comprehensive system.
That division continues today. Here’s how Schmitt describes the passion of single-payer advocates for a “robust” public option, as many House Democrats call their demand:

So now this energetic, well-funded group of progressives is fired up to defend something fairly complex and not necessarily essential to health reform. (Or, put another way, there are plenty of bad versions of a public plan.) The symbolic intensity is hard for others to understand. But the intensity is understandable if you recognize that this is what they gave up single-payer for, so they want to win at least that much.

So hard-line defense of the public option is about substance, but it’s also about emotion, and about people who think they’ve already compromised enough by accepting a system built around private health insurance. This is all worth remembering when the final deals get cut in Congress on health reform.