At first glance, it’s odd that the decision of a single United States senator not to run for re-election is getting the kind of saturation coverage that Evan Bayh is now receiving. It’s not as though Bayh is Jim Jeffords, whose party switch in 2001 instantly changed partisan control of the Senate. He’s not a member of the Senate leadership, and does not chair a major committee. There was once a time when he was considered presidential timber, but having now been passed over at least twice for the vice presidential nomination, his career seems to have already peaked. And his profile in the Senate as someone who generally votes with his party while constantly complaining about it is not designed to win many friends or admirers. Yes, his retirement denies Democrats a well-heeled and popular incumbent candidate for 2010 in a difficult state, but it now appears Indiana Democrats will be able to hand-pick a successor, and it’s Republicans who will have a potentially ruinous primary.
Bayh, however, is seen as a symbol of different things to different observers in the chattering classes, and so his debankment yesterday has set them to chattering about it. “Centrist” media pundits who are obsessed with fiscal issues and believe Democrats have to move towards Republicans to create “bipartisanship” obviously viewed him as an important congressional ally, and now tend to think of his retirement as a brave Cassandra gesture in protest of a “broken” system. Republicans even more obviously are making Bayh the latest and most important example of congressional Democrats “heading for the exits” in anticipation of a 2010 GOP landslide. And on the Left, where Bayh was beginning to rival Joe Lieberman as the Least Favorite Senator, his retirement is being treated as a characteristic abandonment of party by a gutless no-account DINO, and a welcome step towards a more cohesive Democratic Party.
As always, the vagaries of the news cycle boosted the perceived significance of Bayh’s announcement, coming as it did when Washington snowstorms and then the President’s Day/Olympics recess cut off the mother’s milk of national political news. Some observers really had to reach to find something historic about Bayh’s departure; Peter Beinart’s Daily Beast column on the subject suggested that it “matters” because it dashes a dream of Democratic Hoosier success traceable to Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 presidential primary victory there.
You’d figure that when real news arrives–say, today’s revelation that a joint U.S./Pakistani intelligence operation captured the Taliban’s military commander–the political commentariat can begin to put Bayh’s retirement into better perspective. Let’s hope so.

In his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot‘ TDS Co-editor Ruy Teixeira presents compelling statistical evidence that the American public supports President Obama’s call to repeal the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy and permit Lesbian and Gay people to serve openly in our armed forces. According to a new Quinnipiac poll, notes Teixeira:

…A strong 57-36 margin, said the federal law prohibiting openly gay men and women from serving in the military should be repealed…Moreover, by more than a 2-to-1 ratio—66 percent to 31 percent—the public agrees that not allowing openly gay men and women to serve in the military is discriminatory.

As for the argument that allowing openly gay men and women in the armed forces would be divisive for the troops and impair their ability to fight, the public is not buying it by a 65-30 margin. “In the court of public opinion, this looks like an open-and-shut case,” concludes Teixeira. “Congress, take note.”

While much of the political world is focused on the health care summit called for February 25 by President Obama, there’s an earlier summit worth watching that will happen tomorrow when RNC chairman Michael Steele meets with about 50 Tea Party leaders from a dozen or so states. Here’s how Kenneth Vogel of Politico describes it:

Steele’s planned Tuesday meeting with tea party leaders from at least a dozen states — a meeting organized by Karin Hoffman, founder of a South Florida tea party group called DC Works For Us — represents something of a breakthrough in the GOP’s courting of the tea party. Though Steele and other GOP leaders have occasionally scored meetings with individual leaders of national groups involved in the tea party movement, Tuesday will mark the first large-scale get-together between the national party and grass-roots activists from a wide array of regional tea party groups.

The meeting will further galvanize disagreements between those Tea Party activists who want to keep their distance from the GOP (many of them Ron Paul disciples and many of them affiliated with the Tea Party Patriots group that was so critical of the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville earlier this month), and those who want to work closely with Republicans to defeat GOP “moderates” in primaries and Democrats in the general election.
What makes the intra-Tea Party arguments on this subject potentially misleading is that many of these “independent” activists really want to take over the GOP in conjunction with hard-core Republican conservatives. The proportion of tea partiers who want to remain permanently independent is probably quite small. The disagreement is largely over terms for a Tea Party/Republican fusion, which makes many activists touchy about how it’s described. It’s clear now, for example, that Sarah Palin made a major mistake in Nashville by urging the Republican Party to “absorb” the Tea Party movement. “Surrender to” would have been a much more popular formulation for the crowd at Opryland.
Underlying the tension over “fusion” is the unhappiness of some Tea Party activists–understandably concentrated among self-conscious libertarians and Ron Paul “revolutionaries”–with the cultural conservatism and foreign policy militarism of “movement conservatives” in the GOP. But again, it’s unclear how many activists actually disagree with such conservative views, and how many simply support a focus on fiscal issues for tactical reasons.
in other words, you may need a decoder ring to understand reactions to tomorrow’s Steele-Tea Party summit.

The problems faced by Democrats in Senate elections this fall just got bigger, as Sen. Evan Bayh shocked the political world by announcing he isn’t running for re-election. He claims to be sick of partisanship in the Senate, though if Republicans win his seat in November, partisanship will simply get worse.
The challenge this poses for Democrats in Indiana and nationally isn’t simply that a popular incumbent in a marginal and traditionally conservative state who was sitting on $13 million in campaign cash is hanging it up. It’s timing: Bayh chose to take this step just four days before qualifying ends for 2010 candidates. (Two Republicans who are former members of Congress are already in the race). Since he appears to have kept his equivocation on running for re-election entirely to himself, there’s no Democratic successor waiting eagerly in the wings.
Early speculation revolves around U.S. Reps. Brad Ellsworth and Baron Hill as potential Democratic candidates. But with so little time to make up their minds, nobody knows if a top-tier Democratic candidate will become available.
Expect Republican hyping of their chances (objectively still limited) of taking over the Senate this year to get amped up to a feral roar.

It’s been obvious for a while that in forcing congressional Republicans to attend a presidential summit on health care reform on February 25, the president is trying to place them on the horns of a dilemma: they must either admit they don’t have their own “plan,” or must advance a “plan” that could be very unpopular (viz. vouchering Medicare). More generally, Obama is trying to create a broader political context in which Americans compare the agendas of the two parties, instead of treating the November elections as an up-or-down referendum on the administration’s policies or, worse yet, on feelings about the political and economic condition of the country. The president is also seeking the deepen the growing sentiment that he’s been a lot more “bipartisan” than the opposition.
But it’s also likely that Obama is using the summit to push congressional Democrats to get their own act together before it’s too late. The formal announcement of the summit indicates that the White House will in advance post on the internet a plan that meets the administration’s criteria for reform. Here’s how Jonathan Cohn analyzes the implications of that statement:

That passage seems to suggest one of the following is true:
1) House and Senate leadership have nearly finished negotiating a new compromise version of their legislation. The text the administration plans to post will reflect that compromise.
2) House and Senate leadership are still struggling to come to an agreement, if not over what to pass then in what sequence to pass it. The administration hopes this promise will force them to wrap things up.

In other words, Obama could be engaging in a two-front offensive: forcing action by Democrats to complete or revive their own health reform negotiations, on pain of looking like fools on February 25, while compelling Republicans to choose the path of open obstruction or of perilous conservative ideology.
With the summit being just ten days away, the White House isn’t affording either party a whole lot of time to make these fateful choices. But one thing seems to be sure: by February 25, there will finally be a plan on the table that merits the much-abused term “ObamaCare.”

Well, OK, it’s not like major traction. But J.P. Green’s post title “G.O.P. = Gridlock, Obstruction & Paralysis” did win a coveted Upper Left Blogspot “Acronym of the Day” designation, which gives us enough of an excuse to re-post the equation. Green’s post title did get some other play, including fleeting mentions in a couple dozen web pages, including WSJ and USAToday search pages. The larger point is “gridlock,” “obstruction” and “paralysis” are three words that are being mentioned with increasing frequency in the same sentence with “G.O.P,” along with phrases like “The Party of No” and “The Party of Obstruction.” Worthy designations all. If anyone has a more apt short description for what the Republican Party of the 21st century stands for, we welcome your suggestions.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is crossposted from The New Republic.
One of the few benefits of being snowed in is the chance to read long documents more carefully than the normal pace of work allows. The 462-page economic report that the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) released today is worth the time it takes.
On one level, it paints a clear and cogent picture of the path that economic recovery and growth over the next decade will have to take. The principal drivers of growth in the decade prior to 2007—construction and personal consumption—will both lag between now and 2020. Savings and investment will rise, as will net exports. This is more than national accounting arithmetic: Savings had fallen to unsustainably low levels in response to misleading economic cues (more on this a bit later), and investment sagged below trendline for much of the past decade. For their part, exports tend to decline more rapidly than GDP during recessions and to grow more rapidly during recoveries. So the story makes sense, at least qualitatively.
The CEA report offers an illuminating account of the savings rate. It turns out that three factors—the wealth/income ratio, credit availability, and the unemployment rate—explain most of the variation. Much of the decline in the savings rate since the early 1980s is attributable to the proliferation of credit; the near-collapse of saving during 2005 and 2006 is correlated with what turned out to be illusory increases in household wealth. Looking forward, it seems likely that the wealth/income ratio will stabilize below its peak, that credit will remain tight for quite some time, and that unemployment will decline only slowly.
Indeed, the labor market outlook over the next decade is not especially bright. The CEA is projecting above-trendline growth in GDP over the next eight years. Nonetheless, the unemployment rate will decline only slowly. It is projected to average 10.0 percent this year, 9.2 percent in 2011, 8.2 percent in the year President Obama will run for reelection, and 6.5 percent during the midterm election year of 2014. This is not the formula for a contented electorate.
The underlying math shows why it will take the job market so long to climb out of its hole. Recent estimates revealed that the economy has lost a staggering 8.4 million jobs since the Great Recession started in December 2007. In addition, the economy needs to generate about 100,000 jobs per month just to stay even with the natural growth of the labor force. In short, we are nearly 11 million jobs short of where we need to be. But the CEA estimates job growth for 2010 at 95,000 per month—just about enough to keep the hole from getting even deeper, but not enough to begin digging out. My calculations based on the CEA projections show that we will not recover the missing 8.4 million jobs until the spring of 2013, more than five years after the recession began. And we won’t reach full employment (defined as 5 percent unemployment) until nearly the end of the decade.
Suppose you have only five minutes to spend on this report. What are the five most illuminating pages? Here are my nominees, back to front:

•Figure 8-7, p. 225, which dramatically illustrates how we have lost our leadership in post-secondary education attainment. We still have the greatest research universities in the world, but our workforce is treading water while the rest of the developed world is moving ahead. We won’t be the world’s economic leader in 30 years if we don’t do something to end our stagnation.
•Figure 8-4, p. 219, which charts the unbelievable rise, over the past four decades, in the share of pretax income going to the wealthiest 10 percent of all families. Bottom line: Welcome to the 1920s.
•Figure 7-4, p. 192: From 2000 until 2008, the percentage of non-elderly adults with private insurance coverage fell from 75.5 percent to 69.5 percent. What are the chances that this trend will halt if the Democrats let health reform die.
•Figure 7-2, p. 184: During the past decade, health insurance has consumed all the growth in total compensation … and then some. If we do nothing over the next 30 years, health care will constitute fully half of total compensation, and workers’ income net of health care costs—i.e., the amount remaining for everything else—will barely budge.
•Figure 5-3, p. 141: The previous administration’s refusal to pay for two tax cuts, two wars, and prescription drug coverage has increased the budget deficit by more than 4 percent of GDP. How long will it take the Republicans to acknowledge that they bear some responsibility for the fiscal mess we’re in?

The late lamented Daniel Patrick Moynihan once remarked to the effect that, while every man is entitled to his own opinions, he’s not entitled to his own facts. How quaint that sounds today. But we can’t have a serious discussion of our problems—especially across party lines—if we don’t jointly acknowledge a common base of evidence. I’m not holding my breath.

Finally, someone has taken a public opinion survey that provides something better than a vague, distant glimpse of the Tea Party Movement. A new CBS/Times poll drills down below the surface and reveals that the Movement is not exactly the vastly popular political behemoth we have been led to believe it is. And it’s mostly composed of conservative Republicans and conservative independents who never liked Barack Obama to begin with, who dislike him now with an unusual intensity, and who have policy views that are well to the right of national public opinion.
The poll shows 18% of Americans identifying themselves as Tea Party supporters, with fully 43% saying they don’t know enough about it to have an opinion, or have never heard of it at all. (In a separate question, 55% of respondents say they know “nothing” or “not much” about the movement). There’s no straightforward report of party ID among tea partiers, but the composition of the various partisan components indicates they are roughly two-thirds Republicans, one-third independents, with a very small smattering of Democrats. For all the talk of tea partiers being equally hostile to both major parties, 62% of them have a favorable view of the GOP, while only 9% have a favorable view of the Democratic Party. 80% have an unfavorable opinion of President Obama.
Are tea party enthusiasts anti-corporate “populists” who could theoretically be attracted to a more left-bent, populist Democratic Party? Doesn’t look like it, since tea partiers are much more likely than Americans as a whole to oppose increased bank regulations, and nearly twice as likely to think Obama is prejudiced in favor of poor folks (not a compliment, given their general hostility to him). They are also much, much less likely to attribute the federal budget deficits they hate so much to the Bush administration. Nearly half of them erroneously believe the Obama administration has already raised taxes (again, not a good thing in their eyes).
There’s a lot more we could learn about tea partiers from a more detailed survey of their opinions on economic and cultural issues, and for that matter, on foreign policy. Since the activist-leadership of the movement includes both Ron Paul veterans and Christian Right culture-warriors, there may be less unanimity on some subjects.
But the more I learn empirically about these folk, the more I’m inclined to my original feeling that they are mostly very conservative 2008 McCain-Palin voters who have been radicalized by various events of the last two years. They are not anything new under the political sun, aside from the intensity of their beliefs, including counter-factual beliefs such as the conviction that Barack Obama has raised their taxes. As such, they mainly represent a force pushing the Republican Party to the right, which is where the Republican Party was headed anyway.

This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
One mini-saga of the past decade in American politics has been the flirtation—with talk of a deeper partnership—between progressives and libertarians. These two groups were driven together, in the main, by common hostility to huge chunks of the Bush administration’s agenda: endless, pointless wars; assaults on civil liberties; cynical vote-buying with federal dollars; and statist panders to the Christian right.
This cooperation reached its height during the 2006 election, in which, according to a new study by David Kirby and David Boaz, nearly half of libertarian voters supported Democratic congressional candidates—more than doubling the support levels from the previous midterm election in 2002. (As Jonathan Chait noted after the first Kirby/Boaz study of libertarian voting, their definition is overly broad, encompassing 14 percent of the electorate.) At the time, left-wing blogger Markos Moulitsas hailed the influx of “libertarian democrats” into the Democratic coalition. Soon, even the Cato Institute’s Brink Lindsey was proposing a permanent alliance of what he called “liberaltarians.”
Well, you can say goodbye to all that. The new Kirby/Boaz study reports that libertarian support for Democrats collapsed in 2008, despite many early favorable assessments of Barack Obama by libertarian commentators. Meanwhile, the economic crisis has raised the salience of issues on which libertarians and Dems most disagree. And there’s no question that during Obama’s first year—with the rise of the Tea Party movement and national debate over bailouts, deficits, and health care—libertarian hostility to the new administration has grown adamant and virtually universal. But what progressives need to understand is that the end of this affair is actually a good thing.
The progressive-libertarian alliance may have provided tactical benefits in 2006, augmenting the Democratic “wave” election of that year. But 2008 showed that libertarian support is hardly crucial: Obama still won “libertarian” states such as Colorado and New Hampshire handily, even without their backing, and he generally performed better in the “libertarian West” than any Democratic nominee since LBJ.
In terms of a deeper bond based on philosophical congruence, it’s true that modern liberals and libertarians share common ideological roots in eighteenth and nineteenth century Anglo-American liberalism. Both believe in a world of rational actors, and both consider the promotion of individual autonomy to be a positive good. With the emergence of the “neo-liberal” and “New Democrat” movements of the 1980s and 1990s—which lauded capitalism, technological progress, and free trade—the potential for overlap only increased.
What’s more, these groups have a sociocultural affinity. Secularism, prevalent in both liberal and libertarian circles, makes them more comfortable with each other in an era of culture wars. (In my own Washington think tank years, the two camps often coexisted on panels and over lunch or drinks—the sort of professional and social interaction that rarely if ever occurred with the Christian warrior wonks of the Family Research Council.) Plus, people on both sides of the “alliance” undoubtedly enjoyed the psychic rush of breaking bread with someone from “the enemy camp” who could quote Thomas Jefferson and rage against the Iraq war and corporate welfare.
Yet this liberal-libertarian lovefest was doomed. As Jonathan Chait argued in his 2006 essay, true “liberaltarianism” would require progressives to give up their core goals of smoothing capitalism’s rough edges and delivering economic security. Amid the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, that ain’t happening.
Moreover, with the arrival of the Tea Party movement, libertarians have acquired a kind of mass political cachet that they’ve never before enjoyed. As Nate Silver estimated last year, the early tea parties were “two parts Ron Paul/libertarian conservative–with its strength out West and in New Hampshire–and one part Sarah Palin/red-meat conservative–with its strength in rural areas, particularly in the South.” This phenomenon has pulled libertarianism rightward: Despite some expressed concerns about the crudeness and cultural conservatism of many Tea Party activists, it has become clear that most self-conscious libertarians are willing to participate in, and cheerlead for, the Tea Party movement as though their political futures depend on it.
That, in turn, has torn open cultural rifts between libertarians and liberals. Progressives who previously fawned over the libertarians’ Jeffersonian modesty are now exposed to the unattractive aspect of libertarianism that is familiar to readers of Ayn Rand: a Nietzschean disdain for the poor and minorities that tends to dovetail with the atavistic and semi-racist habits of reactionary cultural traditionalists. After all, it is only a few steps from the Tea Party movement’s founding “rant”—in which self-described Randian business commentator Rick Santelli blasted “losers” who couldn’t pay their mortgages—to populist backlash against all transfer payments of any type, complaints about people “voting for a living” instead of “working for a living,” and paranoid conspiracy theories about groups like ACORN.
Certainly, few self-conscious libertarians have much tolerance for racism, but they are encouraging a point of view about “welfare” that has long been catnip to racists. And that’s a problem for liberals. How can an alliance last in a climate where a progressive think tanker has to look down the rostrum at that nice Cato Institute colleague and wonder if he or she privately thinks the poor are “looter scum”; or if he’s willing to get behind the Sarah Palin presidential candidacy that’s so wildly popular in Tea Party circles?
The gap is wide enough that even liberals who are frustrated with the president have trouble mustering any sympathy for the Obama-bashing of contemporary libertarians—a sign that the earlier alliance really was an ephemeral product of the Bush administration’s many sins. For example, most progressives reacted angrily to the very latest proposal for a left-libertarian convergence, in which activist and blogger Jane Hamsher touted a coalition between Tea Party activists and the left against health care reform and corporate bailouts.
So could “liberaltarianism” make a comeback in a not-too-distant future, when today’s passions have abated? You never know for sure, but the next major obstacle to cooperation may well be the Supreme Court’s decision on corporate political spending in Citizens United v. FEC, which libertarians celebrated as a victory for free speech, and most liberals denounced as a travesty if not a national disaster.
Cancel the Valentine’s Day hearts and flowers; this romance is dead.

Thanks to the recent Supremes Citizens United decision, Dems can expect record-level spending on attack ads targeting Democratic policy from GOP supporters. The worst response would be to crouch down in a defensive posture and not initiate an aggressive counter-offensive.
For a hint of how nasty GOP attacks on Dems are going to be, read the recent editorial, “The Politics of Fear” in The New York Times supporting the Obama Administration’s adherence to the principle of civilian trials for most accused terrorists. The editorial notes that “Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, suggested — without any evidence — that vital intelligence was lost by that approach.” The objective here is to ‘slime’ Democrats as soft on national security — and Collins is one of the least conservative Republicans. Of course Collins and other Republicans said not a peep when the Bush Administration prosecuted over 300 accused terrorists in federal courts. This is just a preview of slimes to come.
Dems should fight back more aggressively on all fronts, with an emphasis on soundbite-sized attack memes that call out Republican candidates where they are vulnerable, and their party as a whole when the critique fits.
The headline for this post is one example. It fits nicely on a bumper sticker, picket sign or in a 10-second TV ad, and it does accurately describe GOP’ “leadership,” particularly during the last year. It’s a good political argument-starter because it puts the adversary on the defensive immediately. The Republicans have no bite-size slogan that so accurately describes what some voters may believe to be the worst impulses of the Democrats. It is not an ad hominem attack in that it criticizes organizational policy, not personalities, so no demerits for being mean-spirited.
The “GOP = Gridlock, Obstruction and Paralysis” meme is just one of many possible hard-hitting attacks Dems could launch in the months ahead. The Republicans have formidable advantages in attack messaging, including discipline, FoxTV, right-wing radio and money. But they also have a serious vulnerability — weak policy. Thus far they have been able to steer media coverage away from policy.
Dems need a strategy to better educate undecided voters about policy differences. But it’s more important to take the offensive and stop allowing them to monopolize media coverage of policy debates with fear-mongering cliches about Democratic policy being ‘socialistic’ or leading America to economic armageddon. Through sheer repetition in the media, Republican cliche-memes have taken root, even with some voters who, when asked, say they support the Democratic policies being slimed.
Democrats have to attack and hit a lot harder in the months ahead to correct the imbalance. One excellent example of how it’s done in the media can be found in Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC report last night on the utterly shameless Republican hypocrites who trashed the Obama stimulus package and voted against it, but who now are so eager to pose for pictures with “big goofy fake stimulus checks,” as Maddow terms them — checks that are now being spent in their districts. If Democratic opponents of these Republicans don’t use these images and nail them with ‘windmill’ ads and the like, they will be guilty of political negligence. Maddow’s interview with The Nation‘s Washington editor Chris Hayes in the segment also features an interesting discussion of requirements for hard-hitting political attacks.
At TPM, Christina Bellantoni reports on another example of an effective hard-hitting Democratic attack strategy, in this instance the DSCC compelling four Republican Senate candidates to take a stand on Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan to privatize Social Security and slash Medicare benefits to create a voucher system. The DSCC publicity cites the jobs and economic impact of the Ryan scheme in each of the four states. Another good example of fierce attack strategy. Force them to diss long-standing wingnut policy or alienate senior voters in their state. Dems need more of the same.