The following item by Alan I. Abramowitz, author of The Polarized Public, is cross-posted from HuffPost, where it was originally published on July 27, 2012.
According to the Gallup Poll, there is a fairly large enthusiasm gap between Democrats and Republicans when it comes to voting this year. In an article just published on their website, Gallup’s Jeff Jones reports on the findings of a USA Today/Gallup poll conducted from July 19-22 in which Americans were asked whether, compared with previous elections, they were more or less enthusiastic about voting this year. Fifty-one percent of Republican identifiers and leaners said that they were more enthusiastic than usual versus only 39 percent of Democratic identifiers and leaners.
The 39 percent of Democrats who were more enthusiastic than usual about voting this year represents a sharp decline from four years ago when 61 percent of Democrats reported that they were more enthusiastic than usual. On the other hand, the 51 percent of Republicans who are more enthusiastic than usual this year represents a significant increase from the 35 percent of Republicans who were more enthusiastic than usual four years ago.
According to Gallup’s Jones, the 12 point enthusiasm gap between Democrats and Republicans, which was up from 8 points in February, would pose a serious threat to President Obama’s chances of reelection if it continues into the fall and results in a Republican turnout advantage. But before speculating about how the enthusiasm gap might affect turnout of party supporters in November, there is an important question that needs to be asked. Is the enthusiasm gap real or is it an artifact of the way this particular question was worded?
A potential issue with the wording of this question is that it asks about enthusiasm compared with previous elections which would appear to cue respondents to think about their feelings during the most recent presidential election in 2008. Thus, Democrats might be comparing their level of enthusiasm this year with their very high level of enthusiasm four years ago while Republicans might be comparing their level of enthusiasm this year with their relatively low level of enthusiasm four years ago.
The fact that Democrats feel less enthusiastic than four years ago and Republicans feel more enthusiastic than four years ago does not necessarily mean that Democrats are now less enthusiastic than Republicans in any absolute sense. To determine whether that is the case, we would need to ask a question that focuses on respondents’ absolute level of enthusiasm, not their enthusiasm compared with 2008. Fortunately, the Gallup poll asked just such a question one month ago and the results present a very different picture of the relative enthusiasm of Democrats and Republicans.
In a national survey conducted on June 25-26, Gallup asked Americans to rate their enthusiasm about voting this year on a five-point scale. The choices offered were extremely enthusiastic, very enthusiastic, somewhat enthusiastic, not too enthusiastic or not at all enthusiastic. On this question there was almost no difference between the responses of Democratic identifiers and leaners and those of Republican identifiers and leaners: 43 percent of Republicans were extremely or very enthusiastic compared with 39 percent of Democrats. On the other hand, 34 percent of Republicans were not too enthusiastic or not at all enthusiastic compared with 32 percent of Democrats. On a 1 to 5 scale, where 1 is the highest enthusiasm score and 5 is the lowest, the average score was 2.87 for Democrats and 2.88 for Republicans.
These results indicate that Democrats are just as enthusiastic about voting this year as Republicans. And other evidence from Gallup’s national tracking poll suggests that there is unlikely to be an unusually large Republican turnout advantage in November. In Gallup’s most recent three-week compilation of their tracking poll results from July 3-22, 83 percent of registered Democrats said that they would definitely vote in November compared with 87 percent of registered Republicans.
One important point to bear in mind when it comes to turnout is that Republicans almost always turn out at a higher rate than Democrats, regardless of enthusiasm. So the 4 point gap in the Gallup tracking poll is nothing unusual. In fact, according to evidence from the highly respected American National Election Study surveys, Republicans turned out at a higher rate than Democrats in both 2004 and 2008 despite the supposed Democratic advantage in enthusiasm in those elections.
Republicans will almost certainly enjoy an advantage in turnout this year but it won’t be because of their greater enthusiasm. It will be because Republicans identifiers are disproportionately white and affluent and find it easier to overcome numerous obstacles that make it difficult for many lower income and minority citizens to register and vote including, increasingly, voter identification laws enacted by Republican legislatures.
Ed Kilgore
This item by James Vega was originally published on July 26, 2012.
A recent profile of Colin Powell described his growing concern about Romney’s disturbingly narrow range of foreign policy advisors. As the article noted:
Romney’s team of about 40 foreign policy advisers includes many who hail from the neoconservative wing of the party…Many were enthusiastic supporters of the Iraq War, and many are proponents of a U.S. or Israeli attack on Iran.
This group includes a number of well-known Neo-con figures like John Bolton, Elliot Cohen and Robert Kagan but it also includes a variety of lesser-known individuals who were intimately connected with the botched planning and execution of the war in Iraq. As a Nation review of Romney’s advisors noted:
Romney’s team is notable for including Bush aides tarnished by the Iraq fiasco: Robert Joseph, the National Security Council official who inserted the infamous “sixteen words” in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union message claiming that Iraq had tried to buy enriched uranium from Niger; Dan Senor, former spokesman for the hapless Coalition Provisional Authority under Paul Bremer in Iraq; and Eric Edelman, a top official at the Pentagon under Bush. “I can’t name a single Romney foreign policy adviser who believes the Iraq War was a mistake,” says the Cato Institute’s Christopher Preble.
Given Romney’s very narrow set of pro-invasion advisors, it becomes particularly important to review what the invasion of Iraq actually accomplished in strategic terms. Dan Froomkin, who wrote penetrating commentary about Iraq for the Washington Post during the period of the Iraq War, recently wrote a very useful review of that history and an overview of the situation today. He began his review as follows:
In the run-up to the war in Iraq, neoconservative hawks in and out of the Bush administration promised that the U.S. invasion would quickly transform that country into a strong ally, a model Arab democracy and a major oil producer that would lower world prices, even while paying for its own reconstruction.
“A new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region,” President George W. Bush told a crowd at the American Enterprise Institute in 2003, a few weeks before he launched the attack.
In fact, the Neo-con promises for what the invasion of Iraq would produce were actually even more flamboyantly manic and — in retrospect — patently delusional then even this summary suggests. The Neo-con’s actually promised that the invasion would achieve two objectives of absolutely breathtaking scope.
This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
The holy crusade that movement conservatives undertook against Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst concluded with Tuesday’s Senate runoff, producing his once-unlikely defeat at the hands of his much-celebrated Tea Party challenger, former state solicitor general Ted Cruz. What makes the election so interesting is that Dewhurst, who has been denounced from one end of the conservative blogosphere to the other as a “RINO” and as “Dewcrist,” can’t really be accused of any specific ideological heresies. Unlike Indiana’s Dick Lugar, he hasn’t supported any arms control treaties or gun control measures or “earmarks.” Unlike many of 2010’s Tea Party targets, he can’t be accused of social-issues moderation; he was staunchly supported by Texas’ main anti-abortion groups. And unlike Orrin Hatch of Utah, he hasn’t thumbed his nose at ultra-conservatives; he calls himself a “constitutional conservative,” says he supported Tea Party policies before there was a Tea Party, and heavily identifies himself with his most important backer, Gov. Rick Perry, who can snarl and rant at godless liberals with the best of them.
This did not keep Cruz’s backers from calling Dewhurst names, of course. But when challenged, they always seemed to find some objection to Dewhurst that did not involve any actual issues. RedState’s Erick Erickson scoffed at the very idea that Dewhurst was a real conservative, but relied mainly on the two candidates’ lists of supporters to establish some distinction between them. National Review‘s editors focused on Dewhurst’s negative ads against Cruz, another non-ideological factor.
In explaining this odd “purge,” Slate‘s David Weigel believes it’s all pretty simple: Texas is a safe state for an intra-party bloodbath (the Democratic Senate nominee is virtually unknown and penniless) and Cruz is young and Hispanic at a time when conservatives are battening down the hatches for a long-term struggle against demographic tides that doom any party relying on today’s old-white-people GOP “base.” They’re naturally very interested in building a bench of younger minority pols who show not an ounce of ideological moderation. Cruz quite possibly represents a Hispanic insurance policy in case his better-established fellow Cuban-American conservative, Marco Rubio, falters (as he well might thanks to his questionable associations in South Florida and his own shaky personal financial history.) Just as importantly, the uprising against Dewhurst became something of an end in itself: a test of the power of movement-conservative elements of the GOP that failed to unite behind a presidential candidate, and are determined to surround Mitt Romney–if he is elected president–with as many ideological commissars as possible.
But regardless of the inner motives of the vast array of right-wing groups and celebrities backing Cruz (and he’s got just about all of them, from Palin and DeMint to the Club for Growth to Eagle Forum to the major Tea Party organizations), a Cruz victory will have an independent impact on perceptions of the future direction of the GOP and the conservative movement. And since the closest thing to “moderation” Dewhurst can be accused of is the occasional willingness to negotiate with Democrats in the Texas legislature, a Cruz win, particularly if it’s big, will be widely interpreted as a warning to congressional Republicans against anything other than hard-core, no-compromise, let-the-economy-go-to-hell positioning on all the upcoming fiscal battles–and, in the event Barack Obama is re-elected, a continuation or even intensification of the war to end all partisan wars in Washington.
It’s true that Cruz (like Rubio, a Florida House speaker and protégé of Jeb Bush before he was adopted by the Tea Party and deposed Charlie Crist) has his own “Washington Establishment” background, as a Justice Department attorney during the Bush administration. But it’s hard to imagine him defying the powerful ideologues that validated him as a viable challenger (with some inadvertent assistance from the Texas legislature’s decision–driven by uncertainty over judicial review of its redistricting plan–to create an unusually long runoff campaign between the May primary and the July runoff) and kept him financially competitive with Dewhurst’s deep pockets. The Club for Growth alone poured more than five million dollars into Cruz’s campaign. He is very unlikely to bite the hands that fed him, and those hands have been significantly strengthened by his victory.
This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
The most fascinating aspect of the 2012 presidential campaign has become Mitt Romney’s incredible shrinking campaign-relevant biography. Seriously, think about it: his entire strategy is to keep the focus on unhappiness with the performance of the economy under Barack Obama’s stewardship, and then glide to victory after easily crossing the invisible threshold of acceptability that challengers to struggling incumbents supposedly need to navigate.
Yet the number of items from his resume that he is willing and able to talk about in order to cross that threshold is close to the vanishing point. His governorship of Massachusetts? No way; it’s loaded with base-angering heresy and flip-flops. His Bain Capital tenure? Not any more, particularly now that he can’t even establish when he left that company. His “success” as measured by his fabulous wealth? Not so long as he won’t release his taxes. His clear, lifelong identification with a coherent ideology? Not applicable! His party’s agenda, as presented most comprehensively in the Ryan Budget? Don’t wanna go there! His values as expressed in his strong personal faith? You gotta be kidding!
What was left until this week as the one untarnished moment of Mitt Romney’s adult life was, of course, his triumphant stewardship of the 2002 Olympic Games. And now, having been talked by his staff into coordinating his obligatory pre-election international trip with the opening of the 2012 Games in London, that decision is looking hourly like less and less of a good idea. And we haven’t even gotten to the dressage competition.
This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
Republicans have been the first to assert, without shame, the parallels between their own “Swift-boating” of John Kerry in 2004 and the Obama campaign’s alleged “Swiss-boating” of Mitt Romney over Bain Capital’s business practices. But they have been less inclined to explore a deeper parallel that’s more about political strategy than ethics: How the Romney campaign, like the Kerry campaign before it, has set itself up for this adversity by placing undue weight on a sunny and largely unchallenged representation of the candidate’s biography.
When John Kerry began running for president in 2003, Democratic elites were acutely aware of the impact of 9/11 on swing voters in 2002–an atypical midterm victory for the party in power–and of the Bush White House’s skillful exploitation of old stereotypes about Democratic weakness on national security. Many supported Kerry–particularly against the frankly anti-war Howard Dean–for that reason alone, holding up his war record like a charm against the Rovian evil eye. By the time the general election campaign began, however, John Kerry, War Hero was by design the main voter impression of the nominee (as opposed to John Kerry, U.S. Senator or John Kerry, wealthy liberal). This backfired, in part, because the campaign had not anticipated and neutralized a massive airing of old grudges against Kerry as the public face of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and in part because so little else positive remained of the candidate’s public persona. Inside and beyond the Kerry campaign, and from the very beginning, many Democrats believed a broader message of “new American patriotism” or “common national purpose,” linked to but transcending the candidate’s biography would have been far more powerful and less vulnerable. But they were brushed aside.
In Romney’s case, the emphasis on biography had a different genesis but was equally powerful. His record as governor of Massachusetts was a minefield of problems in securing conservative votes in the primaries and conservative loyalties in the general election. His own policy agenda as a presidential candidate had few distinctive features, and mostly looked like a series of forced accommodations to conservative demands. Just as importantly, an agenda mainly composed of the Ryan Budget, the economic ideology of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, and the social-issues ideology of the Christian Right did not look like an electoral winner. What was left to campaign on? Romney’s “character,” competence and private-sector bona fides (a tangible advantage in the primaries in comparisons with career pols like Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum). Just as John Kerry’s Vietnam War-and-anti-War record was never tested in the Democratic nominating contest in 2004–his main problem was that he had voted for the Iraq War in the Senate–the underside of Romney’s Bain experience wasn’t seriously tested in the 2008 Republican nominating contest. When his rivals (most notably Newt Gingrich) tried to “go there,” they were shouted down by Republican elites as anti-capitalist.
If Romney is seriously “Swiss-boated,” there are two significant differences between his situation and that of Kerry during the stretch run in 2004. The first, to Romney’s great benefit, is that he may have a lower credibility threshold for the simple reason that the economy is so much worse than it was (or at least appeared to be) when Bush was running for a second term. But the second is that Kerry, once forced to abandon biography as the heart of his message, was able to fall back on a broad Democratic message and policy agenda that was competitive with Bush’s, with the support of a united party. Romney is caught between the realization that his own party’s agenda is not so popular, and the immense pressure he will face from the dominant conservatives of the GOP to prove himself by making his message as ideologically sharp and specific as possible the moment he abandons the biographical approach. Once Kerry won the nomination in 2004, the primaries were over for him. Once Mitt Romney is forced to articulate a broad message and a specific policy agenda, the primaries will begin all over again, and his party won’t let him avoid their demands unless he’s in deep trouble in the polls. And then it could be too late, and what would Romney do then anyway? Campaign strictly on his Winter Olympics record?
John Kerry may have had an exotic wife, a pricy education, and decidedly elite hobbies like wind-surfing. But when push came to shove among the blue-collar voters of Ohio, he could and did hoist a beer and get down and dirty with the Democratic base whose agenda he generally and demonstrably shared. And he did not have to deal with the equivalent of those Olympics videos where the 2012 Republican nominee cheerfully says: “Bonjour, je m’appelle Mitt Romney!”
Some Democrats are excited about the most recent controversies over Mitt Romney’s background at Bain Capital because they think it could represent a “silver bullet” in a difficult campaign year, or at least make a significant dent in Romney’s levels of support among “persuadable” non-college educated white voters in the midwest. Personally, I think it’s a bit early to assume it has had any impact so far, or will be particularly well internalized by swing voters between now and Election Day. Maybe that will happen, but we haven’t seen much empirical evidence of it just yet.
But what we do know is that the potential toxification of Romney’s business background represents an extraordinary strategic challenge for a Republican nominee that has chosen–or more accurately, been forced–to rely on that background to an extraordinary degree. This is a topic I’ve been writing about extensively over at the Washington Monthly, particularly in a post yesterday that sought to sum up how Romney got into this position:
First, there was the fateful decision to make Romney’s success (the money he made plus the jobs the firm supposedly helped create) at Bain the centerpiece of his own campaign. This decision appears to have been the product of several calculations: it reinforced the simplistic economic monomania of their chosen campaign message; it avoided the kind of detailed policy-based message that might be dangerous for any Republican; they didn’t want to campaign on his Massachusetts record because of RomneyCare and other major flip-flops; and they figured an atmosphere of unprecedented hostility to government and politics was the best possible time to campaign as a technocratic businessman….
‘
[I]t’s important to understand that if anyone manufactured the furor over Bain, and largely directed the development of the “story,” it was the Romney campaign, from the very beginning. It remains to be seen if they knew what they were doing, have outsmarted themselves, or simply had no better options.
In a Daily Beast post this morning on Romney’s very limited options in choosing a running-mate or shaping a convention, Mike Tomasky makes a strong case that Romney’s where he is for reasons largely outside his control:
Who, in this context, is Mitt Romney? An ex-governor who can’t discuss his record, and an ex-capitalist who … is getting close to the point where he can’t discuss his record. And who has been afraid for two years, or more, lest he offend Rush Limbaugh and Fox. This is not his Republican Party. It’s theirs. And Romney has given us no reason to think that will change.
It is more likely than ever that Romney’s main hopes for victory lie in keeping the focus on Obama (with the help of his Super PAC friends, if he can keep them more or less in harness) and making the election as strict a referendum on the status quo as is humanly possible. If he can do that without any positive message or even any clear personal identity, that will be quite an accomplishment. The “Bain moment” indicates that may well be how he has to proceed.
This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
In all the puzzlement over the irrationality of Republican governors vowing to turn down the bonanza of federal dollars provided for expanding Medicaid, there’s a reason hiding in plain sight: pure ambition.
It’s no accident that several of the fire-breathers on this subject–notably Rick Perry, Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley–have exhibited interest in (or have been reported to covet) higher office.
I don’t know if Rick Perry still wants to be president, or can overcome the impression of buffoonery and incompetence that helped sink his once-formidable 2012 campaign. But I do know that his one big policy mistake involved letting rivals get to the right of him on an emotionally important issue, immigration, and he would not likely make that miscalculation again. Perennial smartest-guy-in-the-room Jindal would almost have to consider running for president at some point as a member of a party that is crazy for minority wingnuts (as Herman Cain’s improbable campaign showed). And the same factor may be motivating Haley, who has the additional challenge of staying in the very good graces of Jim DeMint, who publicly urged governors to do everything within their power to obstruct implementation of the Affordable Care Act.
This doesn’t explain all the Medicaid rejectionists, of course. I doubt Terry Branstad is foolish enough to see a future President of the United States in his bathroom mirror each morning, though he does govern a state with a generous enough Medicaid program that rejecting the expansion is not as big a deal as it is in a place like Texas. As for Rick Scott–who knows? He probably has as good a chance of landing on a 2016 national ticket as he does of getting re-elected governor of Florida. But then he’s a guy whose whole political career began with public opposition to ObamaCare, so he may just be dancing with the one that brung him.
In any event, observers mulling this situation do not seem to have sufficiently absorbed the central reality of Republican politics at this particular moment, which is that it’s well-nigh impossible to move too far to the right. You say you’re a conservative, bubba? Then I’m a true conservative! And if you’re a true conservative, I’m a constitutional conservative! Anyone even distantly dreaming of a Republican presidential or vice presidential nomination understands this dynamic implicitly.
A subject I’ve been writing about at Washington Monthly that hasn’t gotten the national attention it deserves is in the area of education policy, where Mitt Romney’s little-noticed proposal to convert all federal K-12 education money into vouchers is getting a test run down in Louisiana, where his close ally and short-list running-mate prospect Gov. Bobby Jindal is turning over large sums of public money to private, largely religious schools with next to no accountability for educational standards or outcomes. As I noted in one post:
[The Louisiana program is using state funds to prop up marginal church-based schools with zero vetting of their curriculum, facilities, instructional credentials or standards. “The market,” or, I suppose, the Good Lord will sort them out eventually.
A separate piece on the Louisiana program by Alternet’s Bruce Wilson (published at Salon) notes that a number of beneficiary schools use textbooks that explicitly preach anti-evolution and anti-gay nostrums as science, along with revisionist history and political preferences.
Is this where Mitt Romney wants to push American education? And if he suggests (in the unlikely event he has to clarify his proposal anytime soon) schools will be vetted for quality or competence, how long will it be before that idea collides with the belief of Romney’s evangelical and conservative-Catholic allies that any regulation of religious bodies for use of public dollars is an assault on “religious freedom?”
Note this latest post for an update, where Jindal’s staff is scrambling to “vet” schools already receiving vouchers after bad publicity about what sure looks like a blatant effort to reward Republican religious constituencies with taxpayers’ dollars.
This item by J.P. Green was originally published on July 3, 2012.
Greg Sargent reports on the decision of five Republican governors to screw impoverished and working people out of the health care they are supposed to get from Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. As Sargent explains:
Iowa governor Terry Branstad has now become the fifth GOP governor to vow that his state will not opt in to the Medicaid expansion in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling. He joins the ranks of Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, Florida’s Rick Scott, South Carolina’s Nikki Haley, and Wisconsin’s Scott Walker.
It’s worth keeping a running tally of how many people could go without insurance that would otherwise be covered under Obamacare if these GOP governors make good on their threat.
The latest rough total: Nearly one and a half million people.
…And counting. Sargent rolls out the breakdown estimates for the five states, with Florida leading the pack with more than 683,000 citizens at risk by Governor Scott’s threat. Sargent adds,
Of course, it’s still unclear whether these governors will go through with their threats. David Dayen and Ed Kilgore have both been making good cases that they will. As Dayen and Kilgore both note, some of these GOP governors are relying on objections to the cost of the program to the states — even though the federal government covers 100% of the program for the first three years and it remains a good deal beyond — to mask ideological reasons for opting out…Dayen rightly notes that the media will probably fail to sufficiently untangle the cover stories these governors are using.
if there is a silver lining behind the shameful threats of the five Republican governors, it is that there is a good chance that their actions will provoke mass demonstrations in at least some of their states, hopefully right in front of the gubernatorial mansions, where possible. And wouldn’t it be justice, if those demonstrations were lead by people with serious health problems, bringing along their oxygen tanks, wheelchairs, dialysis machines and other health care devices, joined by nurses and hospital workers in uniforms for exactly the kind of photo ops these governors don’t want?
Perhaps the key player in mobilizing mass demonstrations against the Republican Medicaid-bashers would be the nurses unions, which did such an outstanding job of making former Governor Schwarzenegger eat crow in CA over staffing ratios in hospitals.
In a way, the five governors are daring sick and needy people to protest against being targeted for health hardships. Given the large numbers of those threatened in these states, it’s an arrogant dare they may regret very soon — as well as on November 6.
This item by TDS Contributor and Democratic political strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPost, where it was originally published on June 29, 2012.
The most important thing about today’s Supreme Court health care decision is the victory for the millions of Americans who will live longer, happier, healthier lives because of the new health care law.
It is also an historic day for the thousands of health care warriors who have fought to make health care a right in America for decades and have finally seen their struggle rewarded with success.
But the Supreme Court’s decision has massive political implications as well:
First, this victory will send another bolt of electricity through Obama’s base. Nothing succeeds better than a hard-fought victory at pumping people up — and firing them up for the next great battle. The victory will send thousands of volunteers streaming into Obama campaign offices — and millions of dollars into its coffers. It will invigorate Obama’s army of volunteers.
It is particularly important when coupled with the president’s decision two weeks ago, protecting Dream Students from deportation. That decision already had a major impact on enthusiasm among Obama supporters — and particularly Latinos.
Their Supreme Court defeat will also dispirit the right-wing — particularly because they were abandoned by their own iconic, conservative Chief Justice who wrote the opinion finding the law constitutional.
Enthusiasm is a huge factor in electoral politics.
Second, the Romney campaign — and Republican candidates across the board — have now been forced to double down on repealing the entire bill. They will argue that now, the only way to get rid of the bill is to elect a new president and a Republican House and Senate.
Opponents of health care for all can no longer rely on arguing that the bill is an “unconstitutional usurpation” of government authority. No less a conservative icon than Chief Justice John Roberts found the law constitutional.
Since Obama Care is now a reality, Democrats can now move from defense to offense on health care.
By supporting repeal of the entire law, Republicans also support taking away the law’s protections against discrimination because of pre-existing conditions.
They support taking away access to free preventive health care for seniors.
They support taking away health care from millions of young people who can now stay on their parent’s insurance policies until they are 26 years old.
They support taking away access to contraception for women.
They support taking away enhanced prescription drug coverage for seniors.
They support taking away provisions that no longer allow discrimination against women.
They support taking away provisions that prevent people from being just one serious illness away from bankruptcy.
The support ending provisions that require that insurance companies can must spend 80 percent of their premium dollars on medical care — not on administrative costs and profits.
People may be afraid of things they don’t know much about. That helps explain some of the past opposition to the health care law by people who would benefit from it. But people are furious when you try to take something away from them. Romney will lose that argument over the months ahead.
Third, ironically, the past unpopularity of the law now positions the president as a strong, resolute leader, who does things because they are right — not because they are politically popular.
Passing health care reform was incredibly difficult and politically risky. Barack Obama is a leader that is a committed to principle — the mirror opposite to Mitt Romney, who has no core values whatsoever. Most voters want leaders who stand up for what they believe. That is a huge advantage for Barack Obama’s candidacy for re-election.
Finally, the Supreme Court victory creates political momentum. In politics as in sports, momentum — the bandwagon — is absolutely critical to the outcome. People like winners — they like to be with winners. Today Barack Obama — and the people of the United States — were winners.
That fact will give the president a major boost — a long-term boost — among swing voters over the months ahead.
This is a very, very big day for the lives of ordinary Americans.
It is also a very, very big day for the critical November battle that will chart our nation’s future.
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