Not one but two of the scenarios predicted by pundits as possible outcomes of yesterday’s national elections in Canada turned out to be accurate. Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives did win a majority after two consecutive minority governments. And the leftish New Democratic Party will constitute the Official Opposition, displacing the long-dominant Liberals. Additionally, the Bloc Quebecois had a horrendous election, and the Greens finally won a seat in the House of Commons.
In theory, the Liberals could go the way of their British namesake, becoming a centrist third party while ceding pride of place to the NDP. Harper could overreach or screw something up and usher in a coalition government of the Center-Left in the next elections. And for that matter, the Grits (the Liberals’ nickname) could stage a comeback. It hasn’t been that long ago (1993, to be exact) that the Tories–or technically, their forebears the Progressive Conservatives–were reduced to just two seats in parliament, leading to the joke they had finally achieved gender parity in their delegation (one man, one woman).
In any event, the Canadian results can be interpreted as good news from both Right and Left perspectives. Time will tell which perspective really matters.
Ed Kilgore
Assuming there’s no major immediate blowback in the Middle East from the operation that killed Osama bin Laden, what, realistically, can the White House expect in the way of better feelings about the president here at home?
Unsurprisingly, Mark Blumenthal at HuffPollster is all over the question with historical precedents and one very important distinct feature of the current atmosphere: Americans had largely given up on the prospect of a capture or killing of OBL, when it finally happened. This made it a “welcome surprise.”
Still, as Blumenthal notes, foreign-policy-related “bumps” in presidential approval ratings are rarely long-lived. As for the size of the one on the way, he suggests the 7-point boost George W. Bush got when Saddam Hussein was captured is the best analogy (though I doubt most Americans’ hatred of Saddam ever reached the levels earned by Osama).
All I’d add is that “welcome surprises” like Osama’s death may have a greater residual effect when they cut against common criticisms of the president involved. As I suggested in an earlier post today, certain attack lines on Barack Obama may never be as effective as they were the day before yesterday. But the most important factor is how the White House builds on this “surprise.” And I’m with J.P. Green on this: a brisk drawdown of troop levels in Afghanistan would be exactly what the political doctor ordered heading towards November of 2012.
This is not a foreign affairs site, so I won’t venture any guesses about the impact of the killing of Osama bin Laden on Pakistan, Afghanistan, or the Middle East–or for that matter, on the lethal capacity or intentions of al Qaeda and its imitators.
The event will probably produce a very short-lived boost for economic indicators, including stock markets, while slightly reducing the upward pressure on oil prices being caused by instability among oil-producing states.
The President will probably get an approval ratings bounce, even if reaction to bin Laden’s demise turns out to be very negative in the greater Middle East. But as Nate Silver cautioned early this morning, the bounce is almost certain to be short-lived, and the 2012 presidential election will almost certainly revolve around domestic rather than international issues.
Still, from a strategic point of view, the death of Osama on the direct orders of Barack Obama is going to complicate life a bit for the Republicans who want to replace him in the White House, and for the vast army of conservative gabbers who have spent the last three years depicting Obama as an enemy of Americanism at worst, and at best as a liberal naif who doesn’t understand the dangers of the world and is constitutionally incapable of acting forcefully to defend the country.
In particular, the idea that Obama is hopelessly addled by multilateralism and fear of offending friends and foes will be difficult to promote in the face of this dramatic action taken on his direct orders deep within Pakistan (very near the Pakistani Military Academy, as a matter of fact) and apparently without specific advance notice to Pakistani authorities. This aspect of the operation may or may not have been advisable in terms of U.S.-Pakistani relations, but it will definitely be a problem for the attack dogs of American conservatism.
In case you’ve missed it (and their campaigns are so blessedly short it’s likely you did), the Canadians are holding a national election on Monday, and there’s a rare degree of intrigue as to what might happen. Until very recently, it appeared that Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, who have been operating a minority government (one without an actual majority in the House of Common–not that unusual a situation in Canada) since 2006, would finally gain a narrow majority of parliamentary seats. In Canada’s multi-party, first-past-the-post system, that would normally require about 40% of the popular vote. But now, another minority Tory government seems more likely, with the outside possibility of Harper losing power to a coalition of all the other parties.
The really interesting dynamic involves Canada’s New Democratic Party (NDP), a social democratic party with close ties to the labor movement, which in some recent polls has surged into second place, past the center-left Liberals, long considered the country’s “natural” governing party. NDP chieftain Jack Layton (who is suffering from prostate cancer) seems to be the most popular of the party leaders, and the winner of both English- and French-language leader debates. NDP has been gaining strength in several parts of Canada, most notably in Quebec (usually dominated by the Liberals and the quasi-separatist Bloc Quebecois). If NDP’s surge holds up, Layton could become the official Leader of the Opposition, and under an unlikely but tantalizing scenario, Prime Minister in a coalition government involving NDP, the Liberals and the Bloc (the Green Party pulls a substantial vote in Canada–9% in 2008–but hold no seats in Parliament).
The issues in this election wouldn’t seem unfamiliar to Americans, but the context is quite different. The Canadian economy is in better shape than that of the U.S. (unemployment is 7.7%, not that bad by historical standards), and the fiscal situation much better: all the major parties promise a balanced federal budget within the next few years. The most remarkable difference is that no one serious would propose any sort of privatization of Canada’s single-payer health care system. Some have feared a majority Tory government might try to undermine legalized same-sex marriage, but Harper declared the matter “closed” after a solid vote confirming the policy in the House of Commons in 2006.
Early voting for this election has been up sharply, and the variety of possible outcomes should make for an interesting election day on Monday.
Even as the struggle over the federal budget intensifies, and the Obama administration tries to avoid catastrophic damage to the economy if a debt limit increase is not approved, it’s important to note that a combination of Federal Reserve policy and Republican control of the U.S. House has completely ended any hope of short-term action to speed the recovery or help the unemployed. Here’s Ezra Klein’s sad summary after watching Ben Bernanke’s press conference yesterday:
This, then, is what the economic policymaking world looks like today: Congress has long since given up on further stimulus, and is arguing over how big its spending cuts should be in 2012 (in one of his most interesting answers, Bernanke said the long-term deficit was a top priority, but large, short-term spending cuts by Congress would force compensatory action from the Fed to protect the economy). The Federal Reserve has given up on doing more, and in June, will pull back to doing slightly less. And the recovery remains shaky, with first quarter GDP growth expected to come in under two percent and few signs that some dam of pent-up demand for workers is about to burst forth. In short? Sucks to be you, unemployed Americans.
Hard to argue with that.
This item by James Vega was first published on April 20, 2011.
Writing in the April 15th issue of the New York Review of Books, Elizabeth Drew expressed a widely shared progressive criticism regarding Obama’s approach to the deficit and budget battles:
On Wednesday he (Obama) gave a good speech far too late. What if he hadn’t been so dilatory on a subject he inevitably would have to confront?
…if Obama had addressed the fiscal crisis at the outset of this year, rather than deliver a wan and cautious State of the Union address, he would have set the predicate for the current budget battle rather than leaving an opening for Paul Ryan’s radical (and somewhat nonsensical) proposal to fill the vacuum…Ordinarily, such a proposal would have been laughed out of town, but now it’s been transformed into respectability.
Many progressives have expressed similar “why did he wait so long” criticisms of Obama’s actions.
Underlying this attitude is a fundamental disagreement about political strategy – progressives generally want Obama to forcefully champion a clear, solidly liberal program and agenda at all times and in all circumstances. They support this approach on both moral and political grounds and as result do not approve of either compromise as an objective or flexibility as a negotiating tactic except in the most unusual circumstances.
The debate over this basic issue is a perennial staple of intra-Democratic discord and will not be settled any time in the foreseeable future. But it is important to note that the specific application of this view to the “why did he wait so long” discussion ignores a series of basic realities.
First, even on the surface it is hard to see how Obama could have laid out the broad vision he presented last week back in early 2010. At that time it would have directly conflicted with the desperate, all-out push that was going on to pass the health care bill and it would also have appeared to contradict the near-universal Democratic position at that time that any discussion of reducing deficits was premature while the economy was not yet showing even the most minimal signs of recovery – signs that have only begun to appear in the last few months.
More important, the notion that Obama could have “set the predicate” or “filled the vacuum” for the budget/deficit debate back in early 2010 with the proposal he outlined last week is based on a rather dated notion –that the president has a commanding “bully pulpit” at his disposal, a platform from which he can reliably drive the national agenda.
In the modern, fragmented media environment that has developed since the 1990’s this is simply no longer the case. The modern political media environment has three unique and critical communication channels, each of which shapes — and profoundly diminishes– the ability of a president to directly control a national debate. How a Presidential initiative is handled by each of these communication channels has to be evaluated on its own terms.
First, there is the conservative echo chamber – Fox News, talk radio, the conservative blogosphere and so on. This entire conservative media machine is directly connected to the message system of the Republican Party and is primarily designed for bitter, slashing and dishonest attack – the creation of straw men and simplistic caricatures. It is not equally well suited for the defense of conservative proposals or the adjudication of debates between conflicting views
Second, there is the “serious” mainstream political commentariat. In the 1950’s and 1960’s this group of newspaper and TV commentators had substantial influence on the national debate over issues and reflected a mildly liberal “establishment” sensibility. Since the Reagan era, however, liberal or progressive views have come to be viewed with vastly more suspicion than comparable conservative views by mainstream commentators. As a result, proposals that feature liberal or progressive ideas are invariably treated as “partisan politics” rather than “serious proposals.” On subjects that the mainstream media consider inherently conservative – taxes, deficits and budgeting being prime examples — conservative opinions are automatically treated as being more serious, responsible and “adult” than liberal ones. Underlying this notion is a definition of the word “adult” that essentially identifies it with “acceptable to the major business groups”. To most mainstream commentators today any proposal that provokes serious business opposition is, by that fact alone, proven inherently flawed.
Third, there is the superficial “headline” news of local stations and 24 hour cable channels that is designed as quick entertainment for casual viewers. This information source attempts to deliver a quick and breezy overview of major events mixed with a large number of human interest stories. It presents political debates in a rigidly balanced “He said, she said” format that essentially reduces the coverage to battling sound bites. On issues like taxes, budgets and deficits, the newscasters themselves almost invariably take refuge behind vacuous clichés delivered with cheerful smiles – “Well you know, Joe, nobody likes to pay taxes” – “Gee, George, government sure spends lots of money” or “Sooner or later, Ed, ya gotta pay your bills“.
Given this three-channel media environment, how would Obama’s recent speech have been received if he had delivered it in early 2010 instead?
This item by J.P. Green was first published on April 19, 2011.
Alan I. Abramowitz and Nate Silver agree that Dems have a good chance to win back a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives next year, which should be cause for some concern among smarter Republicans. Here’s Abramowitz, from his current column at Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball:
Democrats would only need to pick up 25 seats in 2012 to get to the magic number of 218 that would give them control of the House-assuming that all of their members supported the Democratic candidate for Speaker. That’s hardly an insurmountable number. In fact, two of the last three elections, 2006 and 2010, have produced bigger swings, and 2008 came close.
Despite the recent volatility of House elections, some astute political observers are giving the Democrats little or no chance of regaining control of the House in 2012. For example, last December, Republican pollster Glen Bolger went so far as to “guarantee” that the GOP would maintain its House majority even if President Obama were to win a second term. And just last month, respected political handicapper Charlie Cook agreed that a Democratic pickup of 25 or more seats in the House was highly unlikely.
Both Bolger and Cook cited the relatively short coattails that winning presidential incumbents have had in recent years as a major obstacle to big Democratic gains in the 2012 House elections. In the past 40 years, the largest number of House seats gained by the winning incumbent’s party was 16 in 1984, a year in which Ronald Reagan won reelection by a landslide. You have to go all the way back to 1964 to find an election in which the winning incumbent’s party gained at least 25 seats in the House.
Notwithstanding these predictions and the historical record, however, there are three reasons to believe that Democrats have a decent chance of taking back control of the House in 2012. First, as a result of their big gains in 2010, Republicans will be defending a large number of seats in House districts that voted for Barack Obama in 2008; second, many of those districts are likely to vote for Obama again in 2012 because of the difference between the presidential and midterm electorate in the current era; and third, Republican incumbents in these Obama districts will be at high risk of losing their seats if Obama wins because straight-ticket voting is much more prevalent now than it was 30 or 40 years ago.
Further, adds Abramowitz,
…There are 60 Republicans in districts that were carried by Barack Obama in 2008 including 15 in districts that Obama carried by at least 10 points. In contrast, there are only 12 Democrats in districts that were carried by John McCain in 2008 and only six in districts that McCain carried by at least 10 points.
As for the GOP’s supposed edge in redistricting, Abramowitz notes:
Of course before the 2012 congressional elections take place, House districts will be redrawn based on the results of the 2010 Census. In states where Republicans control redistricting-and the number of such states grew considerably as a result of the 2010 midterm elections-GOP legislatures may be able to redraw the lines to protect potentially vulnerable Republican incumbents. However, the ability of Republican legislatures to protect their party’s House incumbents may be limited by the dramatic increase in the past decade in the nonwhite share of the population in many states. For example, while Republicans will control redistricting in Texas, which is gaining four House seats, more than any other state, most of the population growth in Texas has been because of the rapid increase in the Hispanic population. At least one, if not two, of the new Texas House districts are likely to go to Hispanics.
Abramowitz also cites the increased turnout, over the mid terms, of Obama-friendly constituencies in a presidential election, particularly Latino voters, who are growing even faster than expected, according to the latest census data. But he believes the Dems strongest card may be the rising trend toward straight-ticket voting in recent years. Abramowitz stops short of predicting a Dem takeover of the House, but he calls it a “realistic” possibility, especially if Obama wins a “decisive victory” in ’12.
Nate Silver sees the budget fight and the vote on GOP Rep. Ryan’s draconian budget proposals as a potential net plus for Democratic congressional candidates. Silver explains in a recent five thirty eight post,
So far, no polls have been conducted on Mr. Ryan’s budget as a whole. But — although voters will like the deficit reduction it claims to achieve (several outside analysts have questioned the bill’s economic findings) — a couple of its individual elements figure to be quite unpopular. In particular, the bill includes substantial changes to Medicare and Medicaid — changes that many voters tell pollsters are unacceptable. And it would cut the top tax rates, when polls usually find that most Americans want taxes on upper-income Americans to be raised rather than lowered.
Silver also believes that the Republicans’ prospects for a senate takeover next year are overstated. Echoing Abramowitz’s point about the decline in split-ticket voting, he sees the vote on Ryan’s proposals as a potential game-changer for the House:
…One possible consequence of the vote is that it could tie the fate of Mr. Obama and the Democrats in Congress more closely together. In the past, presidents have rarely had substantial coattails when running for a second term; Bill Clinton’s Democrats won just 9 seats in the House in 1996, for instance, even though he beat Bob Dole overwhelmingly. In 2010, however, the share of the vote received by Democrats running for Congress was very strongly correlated with support for Mr. Obama, and today’s vote could deepen that connection, making it less likely that voters will return a divided government again.
When two of the sharpest political data analysts agree that the House may be up for grabs, the DNC and Dem contributors should take note and invest accordingly. Of course there is a difference between Dems having a decent chance to win back a House majority and the probability of it happening. For the moment, however, The President appears to be moving into solid position to leverage the trend toward straight-ticket voting for the benefit of the Party. With a favorable break or two on the economy, the possibility of a Dem takeover of the House could morph into a good bet.
A lot of conservatives are jubilant about a Gallup Poll finding that Americans are evenly split on whether they support the “the Republican plan put forth by Congressman Paul Ryan” or “the Democratic plan put forth by President Obama” when it comes to a long-term deficit reduction measure. And some are particularly happy that a plurality of respondents aged 50 and over prefer Ryan to Obama. Hey, maybe seniors and near-seniors understand they’ll be “grandfathered” by Ryan’s Medicare proposals and don’t give a damn about anyone else! How exciting!
Or maybe not. As Jon Walker of Firedoglake tartly notes, the Gallup poll provides no description whatsoever of the “Ryan” or “Obama” plans, but does helpfully provide a party identification (useful to the vast numbers of non-Beltway-focused Americans who probably can’t tell Paul Ryan from Private Ryan at this point). The age breakouts in this poll nicely reflect the inverse relationship that has existed since before the 2008 elections between age and support for the president and the Democratic Party.
Perhaps the grandfathering in Ryan’s plan will reassure some seniors, but it’s worth remembering that it didn’t work for George W. Bush in 2005 when he proposed a Social Security privatization scheme with precisely the same buy-off-the-old-folks feature. For now, all we really know is that the Medicare cuts in Ryan’s plan poll terribly across the age groups and even partisan and ideological groupings. As always, Republicans do better in measurements of abstract support for spending cuts, and worse when they have to get specific. The Gallup poll probably represents the absolute high point in support for Private–er, I mean Privatizing–Ryan.
The devolution of the latest bout of birther hysteria, culminating in the White House release today of the president’s “long form” birth certificate (long the document birthers have demanded), is a pretty good indication of how thoroughly fringe conspiracy theories have saturated conservative politics and media.
The birther nonsense was a minor crazy-person “issue” in the 2008 presidential campaign. Afterwards, for no apparent reason other than constant repetition by right-wing blogs and web sites (notably WorldNetDaily) who influenced more conventional media like Fox, it grew and grew, eventually capturing a major segment of the Republican rank-and-file. Inevitably, a demagogue thinking about a presidential campaign seized on it, shot to the top of the GOP polls, and legitimized birtherism even more.
Now that the manufactured controversy has been definitively answered, Donald Trump is taking credit for “solving” the great puzzle of the president’s origins, but has already moved on to other contrived sets of “questions,” demanding Obama’s school records, and even more obnoxiously, reviving the Bill-Ayers-Wrote-Obama’s-book crap that surfaced during the presidential campaign.
And it’s not just Trump. On Fox last night, when commenting on (and defending) birtherism, Sarah Palin also made an offhand reference to Ayers perhaps writing Dreams From My Father.
You can certainly understand the evil utility of the Ayers “story,” which not only makes the president the terrorist-lover that Palin liked to talk about on the campaign trail in 2008, but also feeds all sorts of racist memes about Obama’s intelligence (as do the “questions” about his academic record).
What it all really illustrates is the endless game of “whack-a-mole” required when responding to “allegations” about the president involving conspiracy theories and invented “facts” that start with disreputable sources and invariably bleed over into conservative-activist email chatter, right-wing blogs, and eventually to Fox and actual Republican politicians.
Serious conservatives need to repudiate this idiocy once and for all, but they also need to meditate a bit on their own demonization of Obama and his policies, which has made it very easy for rank-and-file Republicans to believe the man wears horns. As it stands now, there’s every reason to assume many opinion-leaders on the right get a kick out of it, or at least find it useful so long as it doesn’t elevate Donald Trump or Sarah Palin to the White House.
This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour’s surprise announcement that he is not, after all, running for president in 2012 is sparking an incipient sense of panic in the self-confident ranks of Republican insiders. Ol’ Haley was so their type: solidly conservative without getting too carried away with it, innately at home with money and those who made lots of it, and always ready to cut a shrewd deal. But now, for whatever reason, Haley’s out. And from the corridors of lobbying firms in DC and corporate headquarters in Atlanta, Dallas, Chicago and elsewhere, the discerning ear can detect a high-pitched wail of distress aimed at a calm, small man in Indianapolis: “Save us, Mitch Daniels!”
With Barbour out, the conservative establishment is likely to double down on its effort to draft Daniels, who is in many ways a more perfect embodiment of their ideal than Barbour himself. But even with the encouragement and the resources of the Republican elite at his back, Daniels is right to remain cautious. The very qualities that have made him so popular among Republicans in Washington seem unlikely to win him a great deal of support among the party faithful.
Daniels, who is currently serving his second term as governor of Indiana, is reportedly Barbour’s best friend in politics–if he were to run, he’d likely get the Mississippian’s formidable help in fundraising and organizing. But beyond that, Daniels is best suited to fill the psychological void currently besetting GOP insiders. By his resume alone, he fits the bill even better than his former Reagan White House boss Barbour: a long-time Senate staffer and then White House political operative, before going back to Indiana to run a nationally prominent conservative think tank, then make his bones as a corporate exec at a pharmaceutical giant. Daniels returned to Washington to serve as OMB director, and came home again to become a famously tight-fisted and politically popular two-term governor. He’s a known quantity who is attractive to the Very Serious People in the GOP–otherwise known as “economic conservatives” or “fiscal hawks”–who want their party to return the birthers and the bible thumpers to the back-room phone banks and get on with the serious work of shaping government to serve the tangible interests of people like themselves.
Moreover, Daniels embodies the fiscal conservative creed with an unusual intensity. In his rapturously received speech at this year’s CPAC conference, the most closely watched venue for potential Republican presidential candidates, he vividly compared the “Red Menace” of fiscal indiscipline to the twentieth-century communist threat–a clever metaphor, since anti-communism is universally remembered as the glue that kept together the various wings of the conservative movement during its decades-long rise. Last year Daniels made waves by telling The Weekly Standard‘s Andrew Ferguson–who penned a lavish puff piece advertising its subject as exactly what the political doctor ordered–that the country needed a “truce” on divisive cultural issues until such time as the fiscal/economic crisis was resolved. This is exactly what Republican insiders tend to think; some, indeed, would like to make the “truce” permanent so as not to discomfit swing voters.
Best of all, and in contrast to Barbour, Daniels does not exude the constant scent of big money. Though a firm ally of GOP plutocrats, Daniels nestles his fiscal conservatism in the traditions of thrifty Hoosier folk virtues. As the Ferguson profile demonstrated with its admiring tales of the governor roaring around Indiana on his Harley and dropping into truck stops and diners unannounced to pour coffee for startled citizens, Mitch Daniels can add a populist touch to the Club for Growth agenda.
But just because conservatives in Washington love him doesn’t mean Daniels is likely to storm the field and charge to victory. In fact, Daniels has at least three glaring problems he would need to quickly solve in order to make a serious presidential bid.
The first is of his own making: The “truce” pledge, while music to the ears of many fiscal hawks, is perceived as a deadly insult by social conservatives, who are already angry about decades of being taken for granted by the party. These people matter a great deal during the Republican nominating process, particularly in Iowa, where an ongoing effort to overturn the state supreme court’s 2009 decision legalizing same-sex marriage is the single hottest topic for conservative activists. During early candidate events in Iowa, virtually everyone other than Barbour has taken a veiled shot or two at Daniels and his “truce” proposal. Unless he decides to campaign as an open opponent of the Christian Right’s agenda–a proposition that has never worked for any Republican candidate, as John McCain demonstrated in 2000–Daniels will have to spend a great deal of time kissing the posteriors of social conservative activists. And in Iowa, it will have to be done one posterior at a time.
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