Ron Brownstein’s weekly column on Thursday looked closely at the contours of the President’s approval ratings (as measured by the Allstate/National Journal “Heartland Monitor”). And it confirmed what Alan Abramowitz was saying here at TDS back on July 14: Barack Obama’s support levels in various demographic groups largely reflects where they were the day he was elected president.
Looking at six groups that backed Obama in 2008, and five that did not, Brownstein shows that some groups in both categories continue to give Obama a positive job rating at levels higher than last November: college-educated white women (+6), Latinos (+6), non-college educated white women (+8) and seniors (+7). The only category with whom he has significantly less support than on election day is African-Americans, but there support levels have declined from 95% to 88%, hardly a catastrophe.
Brownstein does see some peril for Obama in trends among white men, where tepid support levels coincide with “pessimism about the country’s direction bordering on alienation,” and an upsurge of anti-government attitudes.
He quotes TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira as warning that the condition of the economy is central to non-college-educated white voters. If it doesn’t show improvement soon, “the potential for an anti-government backlash is very real. You could see his support really crater out among these non-college whites.” But to those who predict a 1994-style conservative surge fed by these voters, Brownstein reminds us:

Working-class white voters still represented just over half of all voters in the early 1990s. Now they constitute just below 40 percent of voters, while minority voters, who still back Obama overwhelmingly, have doubled their share of the electorate to about one-fourth. (College-educated whites have held steady at about one-third of all voters.)

In any event, it’s reasonably clear that Obama’s 2008 coalition is intact. It remains to be seen if that will be enough, along with Democratic majorities in Congress, to enable him to show some legislative successes by the end of his first year in office.

Oscar Wilde said that “the best thing to do with advice is to pass it on; it is never of any use to oneself.” And pass it on we do, hoping that it will be of some use in the struggle for health care reform. And, judging by the surfeit of health care reform strategy advice from all points of the political spectrum, few advocates can fairly complain that their views are not being heard. Here follows some of the more interesting nuggets from recent editorials, articles and blogs:
The Editors of The New York Times forum on”Selling Health Care Reform to Voters” included contributions from seven diverse opinion leaders. In one article, Julian E. Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, voices an oft-heard concern these days:

President Obama has allowed Congress to work out the details of the legislation…The problem is that he has neglected to keep working on the message. As Congress deliberates, reports inevitably emerged about the potential costs of the program and the limitations of the expected impact. Opponents of reform have steadily gained ground by warning of a government takeover. Support for reform has diminished. A coalition of centrist Democrats and Republicans are pushing legislation that falls far short of President Obama’s promise.
During the most successful struggle for health care reform — the passage of Medicare and Medicaid — Presidents Kennedy and Johnson were never shy in talking to the public about what they hoped to accomplish…Both of these presidents delivered speeches about what health care reform could accomplish. This was an era when liberals were comfortable talking to Americans about why government worked. At a rally at Madison Square Garden in May 1962, Kennedy rebutted every argument of his opponents and said, “This bill serves the public interest. It involves the Government because it involves the public welfare. The Constitution of the United States did not make the President or the Congress powerless. It gave them definite responsibilities to advance the general welfare, and that is what we are attempting to do.”

Most Dems will disagree with the forum contribution of GOP strategist Michael Murphy, but he may have a point or two worth mulling over nestled in his predictably partisan screed:

…When you do anything in Washington of such size that it directly touches the lives of most Americans, you had better be authentically bipartisan. Big changes are scary and difficult. Their fragile nature can only survive politics if both parties are chained together in a lifeboat of mutual survival. Otherwise one party will certainly torpedo the other.
True bipartisanship is difficult. It demands real compromise, an anathema to the drunk with victory ideological partisans who lead the Democrats in the House and Senate. Unfortunately, these are the people that President Obama has outsourced his health care plan to…Measures that only make broken things bigger and more complicated, without fixing or reforming core problems are an easy kill in Washington.

Harold Pollack, faculty chairman of the Center for Health Administration Studies at the University of Chicago, says of President Obama

…He should puncture complacency about an unsustainable status quo. You may believe that you have good insurance. Absent effective regulation, you have no real way to know. You certainly can’t know that it will remain affordable for you or your employer. As costs escalate and financial insecurity moves up the economic ladder, this really matters.

Robert Blendon, professor of health policy and political analysis at the Harvard University JFK School of Government and the School of Public Health, adds

…For about half of Americans, the critical issue is ensuring that their health premiums go down, not up. At the moment, people are worried that the trend is up. The president has to stop talking about the national problem of “bending the curve” — and instead talk specifically about how he will lower insurance premiums for average families.
…The president has continually talked about cutting back on Medicare to save money for health reform. He has to reassure seniors that the cutbacks won’t affect the benefits they are currently getting. Some of the problem is how people absorb the message. When they hear President Obama talking about “cutting back Medicare,” they think “benefits” when he means to aim his savings at paying physician, hospitals, and nursing homes less money.

Also in the New York Times, Carl Hulse has a revealing article about the difficulties involved in Dems using the ‘reconciliation’ process to pass health care reform by a simple majority vote. Hulse sees a possibility of a sort of hybrid strategy for Dems:

…Democrats are envisioning an unusual two-track approach. Under this strategy, some of the most contentious elements of the health plan — new taxes and fees as well as savings from Medicare, Medicaid and other federal programs — would be packaged in one bill that could be passed by a simple majority.
A second measure would contain the policy changes and program expansions and would be treated like an ordinary bill, subject to filibuster and amendment. But the thinking is that this legislative sidecar would contain enough popular programs to attract the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster. Voilà — a health care bill.

In the Sunday L.A. Times, Doyle McManus joins the chorus of pundits decrying President Obama’s “bend the curve” (slow the rate of increase) on health care spending as a yawner unlikely to excite popular support. McManus offers an alternative strategy:

Obama and his aides know they need to win this debate; they’ve known that all along. So what can they do?
First, reframe the issue — not as an arid fiscal question of “bending the curve” but as a moral and economic imperative to provide reliable coverage to those who have insurance as well as those who don’t. Obama began to do this last week when he unveiled an eight-point “bill of rights” for health insurance consumers and promised “stability and security.”
Second, endorse a specific plan — even though that means making someone unhappy. Obama hamstrung himself by allowing centrists in the Senate to attempt to fashion a genuinely bipartisan proposal… The goal was to see whether an earnest show of bipartisanship could win a few Republican votes. As long as Montana Democrat Max Baucus and Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley were negotiating — and it has been a very long time — Obama didn’t want to get too specific with his own “red lines,” lest he drive Grassley away. The time to jettison Grassley is near.
Third, mobilize Obama’s Democratic supporters. That won’t be as easy as it sounds. Many liberal Democrats would prefer the single-payer model that was never seriously debated in Congress this year. Many more will find fault with parts of whatever plan Obama finally settles on — for example, if he accedes to the Senate centrists’ proposal for health cooperatives instead of a single federally administered “public option” insurance plan. But the president can explain to the faithful that the Republicans would love to “break him” and that liberals shouldn’t make the perfect the enemy of the good.

Read more…

The sight of major conservative commentators ranging from Bill O’Reilly to Ann Coulter and top Republican officials Like Michael Steele directly attacking the “Birther” narrative — that Obama was actually born in Kenya and is thus ineligible to be president — marks an extraordinary moment in recent political history. For the first time leading conservatives and Republicans are explicitly attacking a widespread grass-roots extremist narrative.
In the past, this has always been absolutely unacceptable. Among movement conservatives there is even a specific slogan that explicitly rejects ever splitting the conservative movement with attacks on extremist views – “There are no enemies on the right.”
Just consider the following:

• In the Clinton years, videotapes, pamphlets and books by conservative publishers accused Clinton not only of infidelity and theft, but of murdering his business partner and smuggling drugs for the Colombian cartels. Democrats were accused of planning a UN invasion of the U.S. and mass roundups of patriotic Americans. Neither the leading conservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh nor the Republican political leaders like Newt Gingrich ever publically challenged any of these clinically delusional accusations.
• During the 2004 elections leading conservatives and the Republican Party not only refused to disavow the patently dishonest “swift boat” attacks on the military service and military records of candidate John Kerry and Georgia senator Max Cleland, but tacitly endorsed them.
• During the 2008 campaign, slanders against Obama – as being a “Muslim”, “terrorist sympathizer” or even the “anti-Christ” were widely circulated in a parallel underground internet based campaign. These slanders became so virulent that John McCain himself was finally moved to deny them during one memorable campaign rally. Sarah Palin, however, immediately picked up the gauntlet and, in her rallies, continued encouraging the expression of “tin-foil hat” views.
• After the election, the “Muslim” and “terrorist” accusations faded into the background as they were replaced by swirling charges of impending “socialism”, “communism” , “fascism” or all three at the same time — culminating in the Teabag protests on April 15th.

Why then, with this consistent history of allowing extreme right-wing myths to go unchallenged have major conservative commentators and top Republicans suddenly begun to challenge the “Birther” narrative? What’s so special about this particular view?
The answer — speaking metaphorically — is that the creature the official conservative/Republican movement has nurtured all these years has broken out of the laboratory and is beginning to ravish the countryside.
The first indication of a serious problem was the catcalls and booing of Republican politicians during the teabag protests. But the issue suddenly became critical in recent weeks as opinion polls began to suggest that support for Obama’s health care plan was starting to decline among moderate voters. This raised the possibility that Republicans might have a chance to derail Obama’s key initiative, inflicting a major political setback on his entire agenda.
To have a chance to achieve this major objective, Republicans now desperately want to avoid being identified with the birth certificate issue because the notion is overwhelmingly rejected by moderates. In fact, to most moderates, any Republican politician who flirts with this notion looks like an irresponsible panderer to irrational extremists – hardly someone to be trusted with reforming health care.
Hence the sudden desperation in official conservative and Republican circles to drive the creature they have created back into the lab where it can be restrained. The problem, however — as every horror movie since the classic 1931 version of Frankenstein depicts — is that the creature never actually does get recaptured. With the uncontrollable nature of the internet and the desperate struggle for ratings among conservative TV commentators, there are now simply too many independent forces providing support for “tin-foil-hat” extremist views for either the Republican Party or the official conservative commentators to regain control.
All one has to do is remember the movies. The lab-coated mad scientist who creates the creature always ends up getting thrown off the windmill, blown up in the laboratory explosion or gobbled up by the flesh-eating zombies he was in the process of creating as his personal army. Republicans are starting to feel an uncomfortable resemblance to those movie characters these days when they come face to face with their “tin-foil-hat” conservative constituents.
Hey, I wonder if George Romero is available to take a meeting…….