Today’s big whoop in the manic conservative drive to kill health care reform is a Washington Post op-ed by Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen urging Democrats to abandon reform and work with Republicans on “bipartisan” proposals like “purchasing insurance across state lines, malpractice reform, incrementally increasing coverage,” and so on and so forth.
Now normally I don’t like to get into the motives or personality of people making political arguments, but in this case it’s inavoidable. The only reason anyone on earth is paying any attention to the views of Caddell and Schoen on this subject is that, as they note prominently in the WaPo piece, they used to work as pollsters for Democratic presidents (Schoen for Clinton, though it was really his business partner, Mark Penn, who had the White House account, and Cadell way back in the Carter administration). But the impression they give of being good Democrats who have finally spoken out in exasperation at the folly of health care reform is completely false. Schoen has never been much of a loyal Democrat; his latest enthusiasm has been encouraging a third party. And Caddell has a history of cranky eccentricity dating back at least a few decades. As Jon Chait points out, both of them have become fixtures on Fox News recently.
They are entitled to their opinion like anyone else, but Schoen and Caddell should check their worn-out Party Cards at the door before they write a piece repeating Republican talking points on health care reform.

As the hand-wringing and nail-biting about HCR shifts into overdrive, the latest polls bring some good news for Dems, explains WaPo‘s Chris Cillizza:

A new polling memo from Joel Benenson, the White House’s pollster of choice, argues that support for President Barack Obama’s health care plan has been building in the wake of his State of the Union speech in late January.
Since February 1, according to data compiled by Benenson, 44 percent of those tested in national surveys support the bill while 45 percent oppose it — a sea change from the 38 percent favor/52 percent oppose average of polls conducted in the three months prior.

Not that anyone is going to get overly-optimistic about the new polling numbers, but Cillizza also warns:

While Benenson’s numbers about the trend line of approval for the President’s plan will be encouraging to nervous Democrats, even under his best case scenario the America public is deeply divided over whether the plan will work or not.

However, the GOP meme that “the public opposes the Democratic HCR legislation” was always a gross oversimplification, but unfortunately one which got a lot of media play. In addition, Benenson notes:

…Obama remains a more trusted figure than Congressional Republicans on the issue citing, as evidence, a Gallup poll released earlier this month that showed 49 percent of the sample confident in Obama’s ability to reform health care and just 32 percent saying the same of congressional Republicans.

At least the trendline is in the right direction. In crafting their arguments during the next week (or longer if that’s what it takes), Dems should take note of the latest Gallup poll, conducted 3/4-7, which indicates “the main reason” for opposing Dem HCR is the concern that it “will raise costs of insurance,” cited by 20 percent of those opposing the legislation — up from 9 percent in the Sept 11-13 poll.

When we last checked in on the Texas textbook wars, the craziest advocate on the state School Board for rewriting American history was a dentist named Don McLeroy, who had become so embarassing that he faced a Republican primary challenge from a more conventional conservative. The good news is that McLeroy lost, albeit very narrowly. The bad news is that he remains on the Board for ten more months, and as James McKinley explains in the New York Times today, McLemore and the conservative bloc he leads on the Board is going for the gold in imposing its revisionist views on the school children of the Lone Star State (and many other states, given Texas’ outsized clout in the textbook market).
Check this out:

Dr. McLeroy still has 10 months to serve and he, along with rest of the religious conservatives on the board, have vowed to put their mark on the guidelines for social studies texts.
For instance, one guideline requires publishers to include a section on “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract with America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association.”
There have also been efforts among conservatives on the board to tweak the history of the civil rights movement. One amendment states that the movement created “unrealistic expectations of equal outcomes” among minorities. Another proposed change removes any reference to race, sex or religion in talking about how different groups have contributed to the national identity.

Don’t know if the instruction on the important role of the NRA will include in-class Eddie Eagle appearances, but it wouldn’t surprise me. The revisionism does not, of course, only pertain to relatively current events:

References to Ralph Nader and Ross Perot are proposed to be removed, while Stonewall Jackson, the Confederate general, is to be listed as a role model for effective leadership, and the ideas in Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address are to be laid side by side with Abraham Lincoln’s speeches.
Early in the hearing on Wednesday, Mr. McLeroy and other conservatives on the board made it clear they would offer still more planks to highlight what they see as the Christian roots of the Constitution and other founding documents.
“To deny the Judeo-Christian values of our founding fathers is just a lie to our kids,” said Ken Mercer, a San Antonio Republican.
The new guidelines, when finally approved, will influence textbooks for elementary, middle school and high school. They will be written next year and will be in effect for 10 years.

It’s long been a common ploy for Christian Right advocates to insist on the “Christian roots of the Constitution” as a way to marginalize the church-state-separatist legacy of Jefferson and Madison, and limit the protection of religious liberty to Christians (and we are talking about people with a rather rigid view of what constitutes a “Christian,” with the President of the United States or pro-choice Catholics often not qualifying). The elevation of Confederate leaders into a position of moral equivalency with Lincoln also has an old and unsavory history, as anyone who grew up in the Jim Crow South (as I did) can tell you. But it’s arguably not surprising to see such travesties gain ground in a state whose current governor has been known to flirt with antebellum theories of nullification and absolute state sovereignty.

Today’s strange quasi-political news is that Tiger Woods has turned to former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer to help manage public relations for his comeback to the professional golf tour. Fleischer last made national news by becoming the spokesman for college football’s Bowl Championship Series, and earlier represented Mark Maguire and (as they were getting rid of quarterback Brett Favre) the Green Bay Packers, powerfully unpopular clients all.
Ari’s rise to become the hottest ticket in toxic waste management ranks right up there with AIG’s bonuses as a talking point for those who argue that the world is ruled is operated by a malevolent demiurge rather than a just God. But perhaps, as he showed in the White House, he does have a unique talent for combining mediocrity with mendacity, and can protect his embattled clients by boring the news media into submission by repeating lies in a manner designed to induce a trance-like stupor.

The Republicans are flogging the ethics problems of Reps Massa and Rangel to smithereens in hopes of winning new support from independents and swing voters, a hefty percentage of whom see integrity in government as a pivotal issue. It would be a smart strategy — if not for the fact that their own ethics problems dwarf those of the Dems.
To call attention to this comparison, the DCCC’s Brandon English has just released a report entitled “Michael Steele: Republicans’ Glass House is Shattering,” and it provides an excellent example of the fine art of political counterpunching. The text follows:
“That cracking noise you just heard was Republican National Committee Michael Steele’s glass house shattering. While Republicans hypocritically try to make ethics an issue, they would be well served to remember a few facts:
It is the Democrats who passed and enacted historic ethics reform that broke the link between lobbyists and legislators: no gifts, no private jets, and no meals from lobbyists.
It is the Democrats who passed and enacted unprecedented levels of transparency and disclosure, shining sunlight on the activities of Members of Congress and lobbyists.
It is the Democrats who established the Office of Congressional Ethics.
It is the Democrats who got the Ethics Committee – which didn’t function under Republicans – back to work.
When questions about ethics have been raised about any Member of Congress, Democrats have acted quickly to make sure it the question was addressed by the appropriate entity.
The Republican culture of corruption under Tom DeLay and Republican leadership had devastating consequences that the American people are still paying the price for: a complex and costly prescription drug bill written by drug companies, an energy policy written by the Big Oil companies, and record deficits to pay for tax breaks for their most wealthy friends. That’s why it’s not surprising to see disgraced former Republican Congressman Richard Pombo—who embodied the Republicans’ culture of corruption—win the endorsement of NRCC Recruitment Chair Kevin McCarthy.
Here are some of the residents of Republicans’ ethical glass House:

Read more…

I was reading Spencer Ackerman’s scathing summary of the foreign policy/national security sections of Mitt Romney’s new book, No Apology, and had to laugh out loud at this brief aside:

Romney himself never served, and his unfamiliarity with military issues is evident in “No Apology.” He proposes adding “at least 100,000 soldiers to the army and the marines” (Marines are not soldiers)….

You don’t have to have served, but need simply to have known a Marine (and they never, by the way, become “ex-Marines”), to be aware that Marines strongly object to being lumped in with Army folk as “soldiers.” How that reference made it past the ghostwriter and various editors, in a book heavily focused on boosting Romney’s national security street cred in anticipation of another presidential run, is beyond me.
Ackerman’s broader indictment of the book is well worth a careful read. He covers Mitt’s weird tyopology of America’s enemies and “rivals;” his indifference to diplomacy, alliances and international institutions; and his shirking of any real analysis of what we should do in Afghanistan. His summation:

[A] glance through the remarkable conflation of conservative shibboleths, paranoid global fantasies and deterministic myopia in “No Apology” makes it difficult to avoid the conclusion that the perennial GOP candidate might have been better off saying nothing at all.

If, of course, you can’t talk about, say, health care policy without getting into deep trouble, maybe even bad prose on national security is preferable. But Mitt does need to avoid insulting Marines.

One of the oldest and hoariest debates among pollsters and political scientists is the measurement of public opinion according to likelihood to vote in a particular election. Some polls show results for “all adults,” some for “registered voters,” and some for “likely voters.” This last category is especially useful, if perilous, in projecting election results. It’s useful for the obvious reason that the views of people who don’t wind up voting are irrelevant to actual election results. It’s perilous because determining likelihood to vote is not an exact science, and moreover, can produce some serious distortions. Pollsters typically use two different methods for measuring likelihood to vote: some are subjective, mainly involving poll respondents’ own expressed interest in an election, and some are objective, including past voting behavior, and most controversial, post-survey “adjustments” of raw data to reflect the expected composition of the electorate. “Adjustments,” in fact, are one of those factors (others include question language and question order) the biases of pollsters or their clients can become pretty important, but in general, “tight” likely-voter screens have recently produced results more favorable to Republicans.
Aside from measurement factors, there are two important reasons why going into the November elections, “likely voters” are more likely to lean Republican than “registered voters.” The first is that historically, midterm elections attract an older and whiter electorate than presidential elections; given the weakness of Barack Obama among old white voters even in his 2008 victory, that’s significant. The second is that likelihood to vote measures intensity of political engagement, and right now, there’s little question Republicans are more “energized” than Democrats. So I’m certainly in full agreement that Democrats have what Jonathan Chait recently called (after examining the latest Democracy Corps/Third Way data on “drop-off” voters) a “turnout emergency” in 2010
But it’s a very different matter altogether to use public opinion surveys sifted for likelihood to vote in the next election to measure the current “mood” of the American people on this or that issue–in other words, to treat polls as a sort of plebiscite on the wishes of the electorate as a whole. You see this every day when conservatives argue that “the people” or “America” has rejected health reform because likely 2010 voters in a poll tilt heavily against some formulation of health reform legislation. Such polls may well indicate a possibility that voters in November will react poorly to the enactment of health reform, but do not present a fair representation of public opinion on the subject. No one would seriously argue that only those voting-eligible adults who get through a pollster’s LV screen are “people” or “Americans.” So no one should use LV data to construct some sort of plebiscite. LV’s will have their say in November. Let all Americans have their say when they are asked to express it.

In a period of great conflict and confusion over health reform, one of the most promising signs is the general refusal of Senate “centrist” Democrats to fish into a particularly devious Republican gambit: an effort by Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) to recreate the bipartisan Gang of 14 that notoriously headed off the “nuclear option” of a permanent elimination of judicial filibusters in 2005.
According to Politico‘s Carrie Budoff Brown and Chris Frates, Graham’s been targeting former Democratic members of the Gang of 14 to suggest they stop the use of reconciliation for helath reform and force a start-over based on a smaller bill.
But so far “centrist” Democrats aren’t buying it, and in fact, are making something of a mockery of Graham’s effort to treat the use of reconciliation for an eleven-page set of “fix” amendments to bills already passed by both Houses to the 2005 GOP threat to kill judicial filibusters forever. Check out this embedded quote from Gang of 14 member Ben Nelson:

The Gang of 14 averted a plan in 2005 by Republican Senate leaders to abolish the filibuster for judicial nominees. The group, which included 10 members still serving in the Senate, agreed that nominees should be filibustered only in “extraordinary circumstances.” Otherwise, they should receive an up-or-down vote.
Nelson said the two situations are not the same.
“It is different to say judges get up-or-down votes except in extraordinary circumstances,” Nelson said. “The Gang of 14 was directed at getting up-or-down votes. This is aimed at stopping an up-or-down vote.”

Bingo.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
This past Friday, without much fanfare, CBO submitted its analysis of President Obama’s proposed FY 2011 budget. The bottom line is worse than we thought. Despite sustained economic recovery, the budget deficit under the president’s proposal never falls below 4 percent of GDP over the next decade and rises to 5.6 percent by 2020. The aggregate deficit during that period is $9.761 trillion—close to $1 trillion each year on average. Not surprisingly, debt held by the public rises steadily and reaches 90 percent of GDP by 2020. If the historical study of financial crises conducted by Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart is correct, that level of debt is enough to reduce our long-tem growth prospects by about a percentage point each year.
Unfortunately, the much-ballyhooed alternative to Obama’s budget—Representative Paul Ryan’s “Roadmap for America’s Future”—is equally flawed. Despite drastic reductions in both discretionary domestic spending and entitlement programs whose wisdom and political viability is questionable at best, the roadmap contemplates budget deficits of 5 percent as late as 2037 and produces its first balanced budget in 2063. Not surprisingly, it runs the debt up to 100 percent of GDP before the curve turns down. And these mediocre results rest on a leap of faith—namely, that Ryan’s proposed tax reforms would actually produce revenues equal to 19 percent of GDP, in line with CBO’s assessment of current policy. (The CBO analysis notes dryly that while the proposal “would make significant changes to the tax system … as specified by your staff, for this analysis total tax revenues are assumed to equal those under CBO’s alternative fiscal scenario.”)
Ryan’s roadmap does have one incontestable virtue: It demonstrates that even with draconian spending cuts, there’s no way of achieving fiscal sustainability during the next three decades without additional revenues. And the president’s budget has the mirror-image virtue: Even with health reform and tax increases for upper-income Americans, spending shoots ahead much faster than politically feasible and economically prudent revenues possibly could.
In her testimony before the Senate Budget Committee last month, former CBO director Alice Rivlin stated that “the widening gap between projected spending and projected revenues is too large to be closed by either spending cuts or revenue increases alone.” As we can see, that’s not just her opinion; it’s a political fact. How long will it take for our reality-denying political system to catch up to it?

A coalition of corporate groups will spend between 4 and 10 million dollars in the weeks ahead to stop the Democratic health care reform package. As John D. McKinnon and Brody Williams explain in their Wall St. Journal article this morning,

The business coalition, Employers for a Healthy Economy, said it would run between $4 million and $10 million of ads targeting the districts of several dozen Democratic lawmakers, carrying the message that the bill would cause job losses. The ads are being funded by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other trade associations that represent a broad swath of industry, from health insurers and manufacturers to construction, retail and distribution companies.
The burst of TV advertising adds to the total of more than $200 million spent on ads last year, making the health-care debate the largest single advocacy campaign ever, according to Campaign Media Analysis Group, which tracks issue advertising. Both sides in the debate spent about equally on ads last year, according to Evan Tracey, the nonpartisan group’s president.

Sobering numbers for health care reform supporters. Their opponents plan to flood the airwaves with attacks against reform. And the ads will be targeted, as the authors report:

One group opposing the legislation, Americans for Prosperity, is targeting about 21 House districts around the country with $350,000 in TV and radio ads, as well as with rallies at lawmakers’ district offices. Still another conservative group, the American Future Fund, said this week it had launched TV ads targeting 18 congressional districts.

Unions, Health Care for America Now, the AARP and other pro-reform groups will struggle to match that investment, which may end up being substantially more than $10 million, if my hunch is right. That’s quite a change from last summer when insurers were running ads supporting bipartisan reform.
Next week tea party organizers plan to flood the halls of Congress with 1,000 protestors, no doubt attracting 24-7 coverage from Fox TV, wingnut radio and whatever msm outlets get hustled into providing over-coverage. It would be good if progressive supporters of HCR were ready with an impressive counter-protest, bearing signs with messages like the three in TDS’s “Noteworthy” box above, plus some version of E. J. Dionne’s soundbite, like “Don’t let a phony argument about process derail needed reform.” Also needed are messages and creative ads making a positive pitch about the good changes reforms will secure.
Of course the quality of the ad campaigns may determine their impact, as much or more than money and saturation. Democrats have the advantage of reasonable policy, but Republicans have the edge in message discipline and air wave media resources. It will require some creative media strategy to neutralize the GOP media campaign over the next two weeks. This DNC ad is an excellent start.