A poll of nation-wide RV’s conducted Sept 6-8 by YouGov for the Economist has Bush leading Kerry 46-45 percent, with 1 percent for Nader.
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TDS Strategy Memos
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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March 4: Despite the Criticism, Biden’s Doing Well
After reading a few days worth of carping about Joe Biden’s performance, I decided enough’s enough and responded at New York:
Joe Biden has been president of the United States for 43 days. He inherited power from a predecessor who was trying to overturn the 2020 election results via insurrection just two weeks before Inaugural Day, and whose appointees refused the kind of routine transition cooperation other administrations took for granted. His party has a four-vote margin of control in the House, and only controls the Senate via the vice presidential tie-breaking vote (along with a power-sharing arrangement with Republicans). Democratic control of the Senate was not assured until the wee hours of January 6 when the results of the Georgia runoff were clear. Biden took office in the midst of a COVID-19 winter surge, a national crisis over vaccine distribution, and flagging economic indicators.
Biden named all his major appointees well before taking office, and as recommended by every expert, pushed for early confirmation of his national security team, which he quickly secured. After some preliminary discussions with Republicans that demonstrated no real possibility of GOP support for anything like the emergency $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief and stimulus package he had promised, and noting the votes weren’t there in the Senate for significant filibuster reform, Biden took the only avenue open to him. He instructed his congressional allies to pursue the budget reconciliation vehicle to enact his COVID package, with the goal of enacting it by mid-March, when federal supplemental unemployment insurance would run out. Going the reconciliation route meant exposing the package to scrutiny by the Senate parliamentarian
,It also virtually guaranteed total opposition from congressional Republicans, which in turn meant Senate Democratic unanimity would be essential.The House passed the massive and complex reconciliation bill on February 27, right on schedule, with just two Democratic defections, around the same time as the Senate parliamentarian, to no one’s great surprise, deemed a $15 minimum wage provision (already opposed by two Senate Democrats) out of bounds for reconciliation. The Senate is moving ahead with a modified reconciliation bill, and the confirmation of Biden’s Cabinet is chugging ahead slowly but steadily. Like every recent president, he’s had to withdraw at least one nominee – in his case Neera Tanden for the Office of Management and Budget, though the administration’s pick for deputy OMB director is winning bipartisan praise and may be substituted smoothly for Tanden.
Add in his efforts to goose vaccine distribution — which has more than doubled since he took office — and any fair assessment of Biden’s first 43 days should be very positive. But the man is currently being beset by criticism from multiple directions. Republicans, of course, have united in denouncing Biden’s refusal to surrender his agenda in order to secure bipartisan “unity” as a sign that he’s indeed the radical socialist – or perhaps the stooge of radical socialists – that Donald Trump always said he was. Progressives are incensed by what happened on the minimum wage, though it was very predictable. And media critics are treating his confirmation record as a rolling disaster rather than a mild annoyance, given the context of a federal executive branch that was all but running itself for much of the last four years.
To be clear, I found fault with Biden’s presidential candidacy early and often. I didn’t vote for him in California’s 2020 primary. I worried a lot about Biden’s fetish for bipartisanship. I support a $15 minimum wage, and as a former Senate employee, have minimal respect for the upper chamber’s self-important traditions. But c’mon: what, specifically, is the alternative path he could have pursued the last 43 days? Republican criticism is not worthy of any serious attention: the GOP is playing the same old tapes it recorded in 2009 when Barack Obama (and his sidekick Biden) spent far too much time chasing Republican senators around Washington in search of compromises they never intended to make. While they are entitled to oppose Biden’s agenda, they are not entitled to kill it.
Progressive criticism of Biden feels formulaic. Years and years of investment in the rhetoric of the eternal “fight” and the belief that outrage shapes outcomes in politics and government have led to the habit of seeing anything other than total subscription to the left’s views as a sell-out. Yes, Kamala Harris could theoretically overrule the Senate parliamentarian on the minimum wage issue, but to what end? So long as Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema oppose the $15 minimum wage, any Harris power play could easily be countered by a successful Republican amendment to strike the language in question, and perhaps other items as well. And if the idea is to play chicken with dissident Democrats over the fate of the entire reconciliation bill, is a $15 minimum wage really worth risking a $1.9 trillion package absolutely stuffed with subsidies for struggling low-income Americans? Are Fight for 15 hardliners perhaps conflating ends and means here?
Media carping about Biden’s legislative record so far is frankly just ridiculous. Presumably writing about the obscure and complicated details of reconciliation bills is hard and unexciting work that readers may find uninteresting, while treating Tanden’s travails as an existential crisis for the Biden administration provides drama, but isn’t at all true. The reality is that Biden’s Cabinet nominees are rolling through the Senate with strong confirmation votes (all but one received at least 64 votes), despite a steadily more partisan atmosphere for confirmations in recent presidencies. The COVID-19 bill is actually getting through Congress at a breakneck pace despite its unprecedented size and complexity. Trump’s first reconciliation bill (which was principally aimed at repealing Obamacare) didn’t pass the House until May 4, 2017, and never got through the Senate. Yes, Obama got a stimulus bill through Congress in February 2009, but it was less than half the size, much simpler, and more to the point, there were 59 Senate Democrats in office when it passed, which meant he didn’t even have to use reconciliation.
There’s really no exact precedent for Biden’s situation, particularly given the atmosphere of partisanship in Washington and the whole country right now, and the narrow window he and his party possess – in terms of political capital and time – to get important things done. He should not be judged on any one legislative provision or any one Cabinet nomination. So far the wins far outweigh the losses and omissions. Give the 46th president a break.
Sorry, the link didn’t work. Here’s the URL for the Globe article. (Also in the url field below – click on my name).
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2004/09/05/poll/
I meant to post this earlier, but this is a better place for it. The Economist and Zogby are examples of internet polling, which has been criticized by some. But this article in the Boston Globe seems to suggest that internet polling is the way of the future. Very interesting.
Excerpt:
Most political pollsters regard online polling as an inherently unreliable way to measure public opinion. For one thing, they say, only between two-thirds and three-quarters of Americans have Internet access. Internet polling “starts out ignoring one of the fundamentals of scientific survey research, which is that everybody in the population under study needs to have a chance to fall under the sample,” says Nancy Belden, president of the National Association for Public Opinion Research. Says Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of Gallup, “We at Gallup do not believe you can generalize to the general population using Internet samplings.”
But results, say the believers, speak for themselves. Three years before the California poll, a Harris online poll outperformed most of its telephone rivals in predicting almost exactly the outcome of the 2000 presidential election. And in Britain, online polling outfit YouGov has in four years gone from startup to one of the country’s most prominent polling organizations. (The firm’s first US poll, which began running in The Economist in July, currently shows George W. Bush and John Kerry in a dead heat.)
As Bush awaits the news on his post-convention bounce, 2004 is shaping up to be a pivotal year for the online polling industry. In the United States several major publications, including the Wall Street Journal, are experimenting with online polls. If Internet-based pollsters match their earlier success, or if beleaguered telephone pollsters misjudge the closely fought presidential race, some say, this year could be the beginning of the end for traditional polling.
But that’s NOT the headline my local paper – the Hartford Courant is trumpeting – we are getting “Bush Takes Big Lead” – from the WP poll. Hidden in the article is the important info on battleground stats. (Of course another article talks about fund raising efforts for our disgraced ex-Governor) And Ct is suposedly Kerry territory…
Great news.
I’m going to plant this here, because it relates to the polls, the Economist, London oil speculators, and what we have been discussing here the past week.
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I read something online at democrats.com today which raised a good point regarding oil:
What is with the conflicting reports of oversupply, undersupply, etc.?
One day we have a report that there will be plenty of oil, then the next, shortages of US reserves. The current US reserves are lower than they have been in 6 months, and this is cause for concern, which creates an uptick in demand for oil, resulting in a slight increase in price.
Why are there all these competing headlines?
Think of the world’s oil interests as 527s that have a stake in the election. They are getting their stories out, and each has some side to pitch. The Saudis are clearly delivering on their promise to help Bush at election time as a reward for helping Saudis, including the bin Ladens, leave on September 13th, 2001, but they can only increase short term production so much, and that can be offset by either speculators who buy more product, or producing countries which reduce production short term.
Is this part of a Bush plan?
Yes. The speculators who sold off Monday were Saudis (and probably connected groups) who were delivering exactly when requested by Bush. The post convention poll play by the right and the Saudi oil promise were both intended to steamroll Kerry. The past 7 days they’ve been trying to deliver a knockout punch to Kerry. The polls, the Monday speculators selling off to drop oil for the Tuesday opening bell, the Tuesday Saudi announcement to further drive price concerns down, the Fox pep rally on Monday exhorting Wall Street it should be UP – all orchestrated to create an illusion of stampede for Bush.
Fox News was pushing the polls and their expectations of a good market reaction big time. Looking back at this past 7 days, we can say that media manipulation is an epidemic to which Fox is merely Typhoid Mary.
What about the other countries and other stakeholders?
Everyone has a stake in this election, and the oil consuming and producing worlds are most interested. Perception drives market price, and speculation is adding to the cost of a barrel of crude. The Iraq instability is also adding to the price. Energy supplies must be viewed as a stream, like a huge river flowing through the country. If the snow in the mountains is less in winter, we know we’re in for a hard spring and summer. Likewise, when there are saboteurs in Iraq and other places targeting oil production facilities, it raises the prospect of interruption.
Where is the price of oil going?
The current price barrel of oil is at least $8-12 a barrel higher than it should be, and the difference is speculation driven by fear of interruption due to terror and/or the war in Iraq and the instability it portends. If Bush gets a second term, oil will go up, up, up. If Kerry wins, it is coming down.
How can I say that?
Because the average price of a barrel of oil for the four years prior to 2004 was barely $28 a barrel. See here http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/chron.html While demand is definitely contributing to the increase in price this year, much of the current price is directly related to the Bush debacle in Iraq.
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Later troops. I have things to do, but I want this out here for whoever needs it and can use it.