In his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot‘ at the Center for American Progress web pages, TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira demolishes the Republican myth that President Obama has somehow been repudiated by the MA election for the U.S. Senate:

…In a Lake Research poll of voters in that election, Obama actually received a higher favorability rating than the victorious conservative candidate. And in the same poll voters said by 51-43 that Obama is taking the country in the right direction. By 52-41, they also said that “change takes time and things are beginning to move in the right direction” rather than “I am disappointed with the pace of change in this country since the 2008 election.”

Teixeira also points out that the poll indicates the ‘blame Obama for our economic troubles’ meme of the GOP is not being taken too seriously by voters. As Teixeira explains:

…Voters still recognize, despite their serious economic discontent, that current conditions are more the Bush administration’s fault than the Obama administration’s. In the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll, 67 percent assign a great deal or a good amount of blame to the Bush administration for the economic situation compared to just 36 percent who feel that way about the Obama administration’s efforts.
Indeed, consistent with the Massachusetts polling, the public generally believes either Obama’s policies have already made the country significantly better off or are beginning to move the country in the right direction. In a recent Allstate/National Journal poll, 65 percent thought either that his policies had made the country significantly better off (13 percent) or were beginning to move in that direction (52 percent), compared to 31 percent who thought his policies had made the country significantly worse off.

It seems that the “conservative hyperventilating” about Tuesday’s election as a referendum on President Obama cited by Teixeira provides yet another example of failed GOP myth-mongering.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
In the wake of Massachusetts, President Obama faces two urgent decisions. One concerns his agenda for 2010 and beyond. I offered my advice on this last week, have not changed my mind, and won’t repeat myself.
The president must also decide how to proceed with health care legislation. Here I find myself in a paradoxical position. In this publication and elsewhere, I have argued since October of 2008 against beginning the new administration with an ambitious agenda that included comprehensive health reform. Nonetheless, I believe that the president and congressional Democrats would be ill-advised to shelve the effort at this point. Here are my reasons.
First: At the most basic political level, turning tail and running for the tall grass is bound to fail. Democrats who have already voted for health reform (and that’s most of them) can’t take their votes back. Whatever they do between now and November, they’ll be called on to defend what they’ve done. Are they going to say that they’ve changed their minds? Who would believe them?
Second: The American people won’t support representatives they don’t respect. The people respect sincerity, consistency, and strength of purpose. It is often the case that constituents will respect positions with which they disagree—if they think their representatives really mean it. One thing is clear: They won’t respect vacillation and weakness. Does anyone?
Third: The president and congressional Democrats have spent the past year arguing that health reform is in the national interest—that it will broaden coverage, begin to contain costs, increase disposable income, and help improve the government’s long-term fiscal outlook. Which of those arguments ceased to be true between Monday and today?
Fourth: The Founders designed a representative republic, not a plebiscitary democracy. Officials are elected to make judgments on behalf of the people, and the people get to judge those judgments. Large changes are always more uncertain than is the status quo, which is why change is so hard. At some point, elected officials have to tell their constituents, “I’ve done my best to think this issue through, and this is the conclusion I’ve reached. Now it’s your turn.”
There are two cogent arguments against the position I’m defending. The first is that there’s not nearly enough trust in government to sustain comprehensive health reform, and ramming it through in the face of public disapproval will only intensify mistrust and make matters worse. The shortage of trust was a compelling reason not to go down this road in the first place–especially in the context of necessary but expensive and unpopular measures needed to ward off a second Great Depression–but it doesn’t resolve the question of what to do now. It’s a judgment call: Are you more likely to begin rebuilding trust by sticking to your guns–or by in effect saying that you weren’t really that serious about the most important piece of social legislation in decades?
The second counterargument is that elected officials have involved the people in a year-long discussion about health reform, and the people have rendered their judgment, first in public opinion surveys, then in Massachusetts. Proceeding in the face of this judgment, the argument goes, is a gross violation of small-d democratic norms. This brings us back to the issue of the nature of our political system and the principles of conduct it embodies. One might argue that by the fall of 2006, the American people had rendered a negative judgment on the Iraq war and that George W. Bush’s decision to double down with the troop surge was undemocratic. Well, speaking as someone who publicly opposed that war well before we entered it, I have to say that I respect President Bush for making the decision he did … and that it was probably right on the merits. Yes, it’s one thing to be the chief executive, another to be a member of the House. But that difference doesn’t mean that it’s always wrong, or undemocratic, for Congress to exercise independent judgment.
So what is to be done? President Obama’s opening post-Massachusetts gambit–his interview with George Stephanopoulos–was not helpful. Consider the following statement: “I would advise that we try to move quickly to coalesce around those elements of the package that people agree on.” Which people? If he means the American people as a whole, I’m not sure what that proposal amounts to. Sure, everyone would like restraints on insurance companies and constraints on costs increases (the two areas the president cited), but you can’t get them without other things that many people don’t like, such as costly coverage expansion and increased regulatory bureaucracy. If he means Democrats and Republicans in Congress, the zone of agreement is near zero and likely to remain there until November. Given the success of their obstructionism so far, why would Republican leaders change course? And after the failed negotiations in the Senate Finance Committee last year, who believes that Republican moderates would break ranks now? As for focusing on areas of agreement between House and Senate Democrats, I thought that’s what the discussion up until Monday was all about.
If the president sounds such an uncertain trumpet, who will follow? If he still wants legislation, he should invest the full authority of his office to persuade the House to endorse the Senate bill, accompanied by a package of amendments to be considered separately under the reconciliation process. If he has concluded that he has no choice but to take the issue off the table, he should say so. If he continues to utter hopeful banalities devoid of concrete meaning, the fragile reform coalition will collapse within days, with consequences that will endure for decades.

As uncertainty continues to shroud action, or inaction, in health care reform in Congress, Matt Yglesias makes a really important point today about perceptions of this legislation outside the beltway:

To try to put something I’ve said before in another way, folks working on the Hill need to try to step for a moment outside their little circle of Hilliness. Those of us who follow this stuff professional are aware that there is not and has never been a bill called “the Obama health care plan” nor is there any such thing as “Obamacare.” There are, rather, separate pieces of legislation. A House bill, a Senate bill, a Senate Finance Committee draft. And to professionals, there are important differences between these bills. House members voted for the House bill, but the Senate bill is something else entirely. Senate members voted for the Senate bill, but some amendments to make the tax provisions less-unfavorable to union members would be a whole separate bill. I understand all that. I write blog posts about it all the time.
But no normal people care about that even a little. The public has views on the “Obama health care plan.” And 59 out of 59 Democratic incumbent Senators voted for the Obama health care plan. And 218 Democratic House incumbents voted for the Obama health care plan.

Whatever is ultimately enacted, or defeated, is, to most Americans, the “Obama health care plan.” The votes are already in, the Republican target lists and attack ads are already–well, if not in the can, then pretty clear. Unless Democrats really think whatever bill they can pass will be bad for the country, they might as well get it done.

A problem that seems to be getting lost in the current confusion over the fate of health reform legislation is something that has little to do with party or ideology, much less with the details of health policy. It’s cameralism. To put it simply, members of the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate have very different perspectives, mistrust each other’s motives, and rarely communicate. In general, they don’t much like each other. They live and work in two very different institutional cultures, and with the exception of House veterans serving in the Senate, they don’t go to much trouble to find out how the other chamber functions.
Much of the time this “cameralism” is background noise in the legislative process. But when it comes to the kind of highly complex, trust-based maneuvers that health care reformers are talking about this week–you know, House passes Senate bill with assurance that Senate passes bill “fixing” their own bill via budget reconciliation, somewhere down the road–it’s a real problem that can’t just be wished away. And that’s particularly true in an environment requiring almost total agreement among Democrats in both Houses. Maybe that’s one reason the White House is talking about a “cooling off” period on health care reform.

In her Wall St. Journal article, “Union Households Gave Boost to GOP’s Brown,” Melanie Trottman reports on a new Hart Research Poll:

A poll conducted on behalf of the AFL-CIO found that 49% of Massachusetts union households supported Mr. Brown in Tuesday’s voting, while 46% supported Democrat Martha Coakley…The poll showed Ms. Coakley drew more support among voters with a college education, by a five-point margin, while she lost by a 20-point margin among voters without a college degree.

Tula Connell puts it this way in her FiredogLake post, “The Working Class Has Spoken. Will Democrats Listen?” at the AFL-CIO Now Blog:

The poll, conducted by Hart Research Associates among 810 voters for the AFL-CIO on the night of the election, also found that although voters without a college degree favored Barack Obama by 21 percentage points in the 2008 election, Democratic candidate Martha Coakley lost that same group by a 20-point margin.

Read more…

Now that all of the theories about why Dems lost Kennedy’s senate seat have been vented, we turn to the more challenging ‘where do we go from here? question.’ It’s really a two-parter, with long range and short-term responses needed. Breaking the short term down, the most immediate question at hand is ‘what do we do about health care reform?’
I’m against the suggestion that HCR be back-burnered to bring jobs and financial system reform to the fore. That may have been the best approach months ago, but it’s too late for that now. It would reek of defeatism, rally the GOP and make Democrats look ineffectual. We have to finish this battle, lest we be branded by swing voters as dithering blowhards.
One of the more interesting proposals in the wake of losing our 60th vote is to repackage health care reform into smaller units. Two approaches have thus far been proposed. Here’s William Greider’s suggestion, from his post at The Nation:

If comprehensive healthcare reform is out of the question, Obama Democrats can break it down into smaller pieces and try to pass worthy measures one by one. A bill to prohibit insurance companies from banning people with pre-existing ailments? Pass it the House and try to pass it in the Senate. If Republicans want to filibuster, make them filibuster. A measure to allow cheaper drug imports from Canada? Let Republicans vote against that. Repealing the antitrust exemption for insurance companies — Democrats support it. Democrats need to start a fight on taxes too. Do Republicans want to tax Wall Street banks or not? Obama has proposed it, let’s have a roll call. The attack strategy will focus on all the reforms people want and need and create a new political dynamic.

Robert Creamer, writing at The HuffPo, argues that HCR could be repackaged into two bills, but via a different route:

One option under consideration involves the House passing the Senate version of the bill as well as a second bill that includes the agreements negotiated in the conference between the Senate and House. The second bill would then be considered under the “budget reconciliation” rules that would not be subject to a Senate filibuster and could therefore become law with the support of a majority vote.
…In the short term, unless a Republican agrees to join with Democrats to cut off debate and bring the health care compromise to a vote in the Senate, the bill negotiated between the House and Senate leadership should be passed using the budget reconciliation rules.
The use of this procedure is not at all unprecedented. The States’ Children’s Health Insurance program (SCHIP) was originally passed using reconciliation rules. The Bush tax cuts were all passed with a simple majority vote using budget reconciliation rules. Nobody argued these measures were being “jammed through” because they did not require 60 votes.

Creamer also offers a response to the Republican whinefest that would follow this strategy:

…To hear some the Republicans, a few conservative Democrats, and portions of the media, you’d think that the idea of passing something with a majority in the Senate is a grave perversion of the Rule of Law — and would involve “jamming” the legislation through Congress. That formulation could well have come from the Mad Hatter. In democracies, the majorities get to make laws. In a democracy, the Minority tail should not be allowed to wag the Majority dog.
What is undemocratic is the idea that a minority — that also happens to represent the insurance industry and other wealthy, vested interests — can block the will of the majority.
During the last few years we’ve gotten so used to the idea that all major legislation requires 60 votes to pass the Senate that it now sounds “natural.” Some people even believe it is in the Constitution. But of course that’s not true. The Constitution assumes that both the House and Senate require a majority to conduct business and pass laws.
…And as we consider major legislation over the next year, we need to remember history. Voters don’t remember the the procedures used to pass major pieces of legislation. How many everyday Americans know — or care — that the Bush tax cuts, or SCHIP were passed using reconciliation procedures? Does anyone remember the procedure used to pass Social Security or Medicare? How many remember that the House Republicans kept the roll call open for an unprecedented three hours to round up the votes necessary to pass their prescription drug plan, Medicare Part D? Talk about jamming something through!
A month after something is passed, no one remembers or cares about the procedure used to pass major legislation. Major programs are judged by the voters based on their actual effect — not the procedure that was used to pass them…Scott Brown was not elected to be the 51st Republican in the Senate. He was elected to be the 41st Republican. That should not entitle Republicans to block every significant piece of legislation — to block fundamental change.
If we allow them to, shame on us.

Creamer is making good sense here. The budget reconciliation route is a more palatable option now, especially since our available choices have narrowed. He is clearly right that the GOP’s ’60 percent is the only real majority’ argument is a loser that invites ridicule, and Dems should not hesitate to provide it.
Both of these approaches have merit, because they guarantee Dems at least one, and likely more major victories. Elimination of “prior condition” as a disqualifying criteria is as close to a sure thing as is possible. Other measures in the current package also have a good chance of passing. It could certainly be said Democrats, and Democrats alone, provided the leadership that got these urgently-needed reforms passed.

This item is crossposted from ProgressiveFix.
In the wake of Tuesday’s Republican victory in Massachusetts, Scott Winship wrote a post at ProgressiveFix that expressed hope that “liberal pundits” would finally get out of “denial” about the unpopularity of health care reform.
Now as Scott knows, there’s always peril involved in making generalizations about the views of large classes of people. I don’t know which “liberal pundits” he’s thinking about in making the suggestion that there’s a general unwillingness to accept public opinion data on health reform; the links he offers don’t really support the claim. But most of the “liberal pundits” I’ve read in recent months don’t dispute the fact that public support for the particular legislation being discussed in Congress at any given moment has been flagging (though given the very fluid nature of the legislative process, it’s difficult to identify which version the public is reacting to, which is why the variations in the wording of polling questions on health reform so often produce different results).
Scott goes on to mock particular arguments that he views as rationalizations for this alleged unwillingness to accept reality: voters are uninformed, Republicans have misled them, and in any event, a significant part of the opposition to health reform bills is “from the left.”
Are these really just rationalizations? I don’t think so. Poor public information on health reform and Republican lies about “ObamaCare” are germane for the simple reason that public opinion may well change if health reform is enacted, and lo and behold “death panels” aren’t convened, Medicare benefit cuts don’t happen, and “government” does not in fact “take over” health care. And the “opposition from the left” data point is relevant to nervous Democrats in Congress because voters unhappy with the absence of a public option, for example, are not terribly likely to vote for Republican candidates who favor voucherization of Medicare or oppose regulation of health insurers.
Scott also seems to assume that “liberals” who talk about the “will of the majority” being frustrated by the de facto 60-vote requirement in the Senate are talking about public opinion. But all the examples he cites are in fact discussing the “will of the majority” of senators, and the majority of the population they represent. The rules of the Senate, after all, cannot be adjusted daily based on tracking polls of the relative popularity of this or that piece of legislation.
Finally, there’s the apparent motivator of Scott’s post: the Massachusetts results. Should the strong opposition of Scott Brown voters to health care reform (at the federal level, at least) represent an “aha” moment for those with any doubts about public opinion on this issue? Again, I see no atmosphere of denial on the subject; yes, many observers, myself included, have noted that a lot of different things were going on in Massachusetts, and have argued that it was not all just one vast referendum on health reform in Congress. But more to the immediate point, the relevance of the Massachusetts results to public opinion nationally is significantly damaged by its unique status as a state that has already enacted reforms almost identical to those attempted by the pending legislation in Congress. And this, in fact, was Scott Brown’s number one talking point on health care reform: why should Bay State citizens pay taxes to give Nebraska the benefits Massachusetts already enjoys? That’s a pretty compelling argument, on the surface at least, but it’s not one that can be made elsewhere.
Ironically, Scott closes his piece by suggesting that perhaps congressional Democrats should put aside fears about public opinion and enact health reform legislation anyway. In doing so, he reflects the real debate I’ve been hearing among “liberal pundits” for many months now: when given a historic opportunity to achieve a long-held progressive goal which happens to represent an immediate national challenge, should Democrats defer action until public opinion is completely on their side? What’s the point of running for office as a progressive if you aren’t determined to achieve progressive policy goals when you can? Is there any other approach to health reform that might be more popular? Is there any time like the present for action?
These questions don’t automatically answer themselves, but I don’t think it’s fair to suggest that health reform advocates are in denial about the political risks involved in health care reform, particularly at a time when Republicans are absolutely refusing to cooperate, and when much of the beltway commentariat has been telling the president for months that he should abandon all goals other than agitating the air for more jobs and lower deficits.
Progressives need data-driven critics like Scott Winship who are willing to contribute to our debates with sometimes troubling information. But in this case, I suspect, to use an old southern expression, he’s just goosing a ghost.

It was not entirely unexpected, but is still dramatic and depressing news: in a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has overturned a century-old ban on direct corporate political spending, potentially opening a very large spigot of special-interest money into our airwaves just in time for the 2010 elections.
The decision did not immediately affect federal limitations on contributions to candidates, or “soft money” contributions to party committees. But it did strike down the ancient prohibition of direct corporate sponsorship of “issue ads.” The decision also kills state-level corporate political spending bans.
It will take awhile to fully digest the impact of this decision, which is the most tangible consequence yet of George W. Bush’s Court appointments (Roberts and Alito joined the majority). And it’s not an unambiguous victory for corporations, since labor unions and progressive non-profit corporations are also “liberated” by the ruling.
But this does represent one of the hard-core Right’s long-term agenda items, and obviously strengthens the Court’s “money equals speech” formulation of First Amendment rights, which has long frustrated campaign reform advocates and puzzled observers from other countries. It also may feed the trend among reformers to focus on public financing of campaigns as an alternative to private political money, instead of increasingly futile efforts to regulate private political money.
All in all, though, the Supremes made sure this will go down as an especially bad week in progressive politics.

There was a point yesterday when it sure looked like Scott Brown had managed to kill federal health care reform without setting foot in Washington. Senate Democrats were busily disclaiming any interest in further action on a potential House-Senate conference committee report before Brown could arrive to joyfully join a filibuster and impose the will of the minority. House Democrats were refusing to consider passage of the Senate bill (which could avoid the necessity of a conference committee report and another Senate vote) without iron-clad assurances of future action to change objectionable features (e.g., the “Cadillac tax” which unions hate, and language restricting abortion). Such assurances did not seem to be forthcoming from Senate Democrats. And no one knew where the White House was, though rumors abounded that the president had told a reporter it was time to go back to the drawing board and try to enact something less ambitious.
All this was happening as conservatives in effect snaked-danced through the streets hailing Brown’s victory as the largest political event since, maybe, World War II, and the effective end of the Obama presidency.
The general malaise among health-care-reform-minded progressives was probably best expressed by The New Republic‘s Jonathan Cohn, who has been an eternal optimist about prospects for eventually getting legislation done. He published a piece late yesterday bewailing the White House’s apparent drift, with the bitter title: “Where’s the Obama I voted for?”
As often happens, though, the panic subsided, and things look more hopeful today. Turns out the president’s comments were vague but resolute about pressing forward on health reform. Senate Democrats are not walking away from health reform, and House Democrats have stopped making angry comments about the impossibility of getting acceptable assurances from the Senate about future action in order to facilitate passage of the Senate bill. It still will be complicated to put together a “deal” that both progressives and moderates in both Houses can live with, but it seems to be sinking in that failure to enact anything, after so many Democrats have already cast votes for reform and made themselves targets for conservative attacks, is just not an acceptable outcome.
So the conservative exultation over “the death of ObamaCare” may be a bit premature. We’ll know soon enough.
UPDATE: Another big scare went though the progressive community today when Nancy Pelosi made remarks that were interepreted by some, most notably Josh Marshall, as “pulling the plug” on House action on health care reform. Josh later walked back this conclusion a bit, and there’s some sentiment behind the scenes in Washington that Pelosi is simply trying to convince Senate Democrats (and the White House) that they need to get serious about the “fix” part of the “pass-it-and-fix-it” formula for House passage of the Senate health reform bill. Meanwhile, the White House seems to be moving on to the more promising political ground of bank reform, perhaps hoping to eliminate the public glare on congressional health reform discussions.

This item is crossposted from ProgressiveFix.
Progressives looking at yesterday’s results from Massachusetts would be wise to avoid over-interpretation. Republicans naturally are spinning Scott Brown’s victory as one of the most epochal events in political history, and as a “message” to President Obama that he needs to abandon pretty much everything he is trying to do. And just as naturally, Democrats with varying grievances about the way that the administration or the congressional leadership are comporting themselves will find vindication in so visible and startling a party defeat.
Scott Winship’s post notwithstanding, the reality remains that the segment of Massachusetts voters who went to the polls yesterday were not setting themselves up as a national focus group on the Obama administration generally or a specific issue like health care reform. They chose between two candidates. As Nate Silver reminded readers last night, the desire to find a single explanation for Brown’s victory is almost certainly misguided. Yes, the national political environment (itself heavily affected by the struggling economy as much as or more than anything the president or his party have or haven’t done) undoubtedly contributed to the outcome; but so, too, did the vast disparity between the quality of the two campaigns; and so, too, did factors unique to Massachusetts, most notably long-simmering resentment of a dominant but complacent state Democratic Party (reflected almost perfectly by Martha Coakley’s complacent campaign), and the existence of a health care system that enabled Scott Brown to promise to shoot down almost identical national reforms with impunity.
I’d add to Nate’s analysis the point that timing made a lot of difference to the outcome. Had the election been held a week later, it’s likely that the “wake-up call” to Democrats provided by radically worsening poll numbers would have bestirred the Coakley campaign to get moving earlier; a Rasmussen exit poll suggested that she actually gained ground in the last few days. And without question, the fact that this special election occurred at an especially late and sensitive moment in the national health reform debate made Brown’s campaign a source of intense excitement for Republicans nationally and in Massachusetts, which helped him raise vast sums of money quickly, and pre-energized GOP voters.
So this really was in many respects a “perfect storm” for the Republican candidate, and no one pointing that out should be accused of rationalizing a painful defeat for Democrats. Still, part of the outcome was attributable to the national political environment. But it’s not clear that Brown’s election added a whole lot to our understanding of that dynamic. As John Judis pointed out this morning, we already knew that Barack Obama has a persistent problem connecting with non-college-educated older white voters, who happen to turn out disproportionately in non-presidential elections. We also knew that the approval ratings of presidents tend to be affected in ways that are difficult to overcome by high levels of unemployment. We already knew that we were in an environment of toxic hostility to the political status quo. And we knew that a majority of Americans don’t much like the pending federal health care reform legislation, though nothing like a majority supports the Republican proposition that the status quo in health care is acceptable.
In other words, the Massachusetts results confirmed much of what we already knew about the tough but negotiable road ahead for the administration and its agenda. And even though the GOP has a bright new star in Scott Brown (who nonetheless probably won’t be reelected to a full term in 2012 given a normal presidential turnout in Massachusetts), it didn’t change the fact that the Republican Party itself is in greater disrepute than any other political institution in the country.
Brown’s election does, of course, create an immediate and difficult challenge to the final enactment of health care reform in Congress. But it’s surmountable if progressives keep their eyes on the prize and refuse to panic or point fingers at each other. I couldn’t agree more with Will Marshall’s point about the perversity of letting the Massachusetts results deny the country the same reforms that Massachusetts voters, not to mention their new senator, seem to like. And I hope congressional Democrats think about Jonathan Chait’s argument that they’ve already taken the risk of voting for health care reform, and would be monumentally foolish to abandon their efforts now.
Sure, yesterday’s results were significant and worth analyzing. But let’s wait a while before adjudging them as an event with huge consequences beyond Massachusetts.