There’s quite a boom market right now for theories about what Barack Obama’s done wrong, and/or what he could or should have done right but didn’t. The most impressive of those, as noted here the other day, was by John Judis, who makes the case that a “populist” approach could have positioned Obama and the Democratic Party much better for the midterms and for 2012.
Matt Bai of The New York Times also penned an influential piece arguing that Obama’s focus on legislative accomplishments has fatally interfered with his ability to project big national political messages.
Now comes Ezra Klein with a succinct rejoinder to anyone trying to essay some single-bullet theory explanation of Obama’s political standing, or where it might be if he had adopted a different strategy.
Ezra begins by tartly noting that we’ll never know what might have happened in some parallel universe where Obama did what Judis or Bai think he should have done. But using objective measurements against the only recent presidents who took office in similar circumstances–Carter, Reagan and Clinton–Obama’s approval ratings look reasonably good:

Obama’s current approval rating of 44 percent beats Clinton, Carter and Reagan. All of them were between 39 percent and 41 percent at this point in their presidencies. And all of them were former governors who accomplished less legislatively than Obama has at this point in his presidency. That seems like a problem for Bai’s thesis. At least two of them are remembered as great communicators with a deft populist touch. That seems like a problem for Judis’s thesis.

Indeed. But Ezra goes on to make a point about the midterm results we are anticipating that’s become something of an obsession for me: the Democratic “losses” in the House everyone’s talking about are from the base of a strong Democratic majority. With the sole exception of 1934, the first midterm after the beginning of the Great Depression, and 2002, the first election after 9/11, every new president since Theodore Roosevelt has seen his party lose House seats in the first ensuing midterm.
But “gains” and “losses” are always relative. All 435 Members of the House are up for re-election. If Democrats lose 37 seats, they will have won the midterms, albeit by a reduced margin from 2006 and 2008.
All in all, while theories of what Obama woulda shoulda coulda done are interesting and sometimes informative, context is still essential in understanding the extent to which his actual conduct in office has or hasn’t damaged his political status. As Ezra concludes:

There’s plenty to criticize in Obama’s policies and plenty to lament in his politics. But when it comes to grand theories explaining how his strategic decisions led him to this horrible — but historically, slightly-better-than-average — political position, I’m skeptical. There are enormously powerful structural forces in American politics that seem to drag down first-term presidents. There is the simple mathematical reality that large majorities are always likely to lose a lot of seats. There is a terrible and ongoing economic slump — weekly jobless claims hit 500,000 today — that is causing Americans immense pain and suffering. Any explanations for the current political mood that don’t put those front and center is, at the least, not doing enough to challenge the counterfactual.

Selah.

It was pretty alarming when Pew released a poll earlier this week showing that the percentage of Americans who believe the president is a Muslim has actually increased in recent months from 11% to 18%. But then came a Time Magazine poll actually conducted this week in the midst of the Muslim-bashing frenzy involving the “Ground Zero Mosque,” showing 24% of Americans–and 46% of Republicans–beleving the president is a Muslim. It’s about time to conclude this phenomenon has transcended the Americans-believe-funny-things meme that dismisses findings of this nature as simply a reflection of the gullibility or suggestibility of low-information voters.
But the really maddening thing is that Obama–who in my own opinion is one of the most profoundly Christian politicians in memory–is getting blamed for this belief on grounds that he hasn’t made a sufficient display of his faith. Here’s Josh Gerstein at Politico:

When he came to Washington as president, many expected Obama would select a new church or sample many different ones. But in more than 19 months he’s been in office, he has been seen heading to the golf course more than to church.

No one, of course, doubted Ronald Reagan’s religiosity even though he never affiliated with a church in Washington. And the famously pious George W. Bush wasn’t much seen in churches as president, either.
As for playing golf on the Sabbath, I’m reminded again of the time when the wife of “Mr. Republican,” Sen. Robert Taft, was asked where her husband worshipped on Sunday mornings. “Burning Tree,” she blurted out, referring to the congressional golf course.
In this as in many other respects, Barack Obama is being held to a different standard than most politicians, but I guess that’s just his cross to bear.

I don’t know what Jonathan Chait (who has undertaken what he calls the Boss Hogg Oppo Research Project) will do with today’s big sloppy wet kiss of an article about Haley Barbour in today’s Politico, penned by Jim VandeHei, Andy Barr and Kenneth Vogel. Personally, the adoring prose about Barbour’s ability to shake down corporations for campaign dollars made me alternatively chuckle and shudder. Check out this passage:

Barbour, who runs the Republican Governors Association, has more money to spend on the 2010 elections — $40 million — than any other GOP leader around. And in private, numerous Republicans describe Barbour as the de facto chairman of the party.
It’s not just because he controls the RGA kitty but, rather, because he has close relationships with everyone who matters in national GOP politics — operatives like Karl Rove, Ed Gillespie and other top Republicans running or raising cash for a network of outside political groups. Together, these groups are essential to Republican hopes of regaining power because Democrats are cleaning their clocks through more traditional fundraising efforts.
The political class, in particular, is consumed with Barbour’s behind-the-scenes endeavors — this week, with the $1 million he got from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.
Yet the reality is that Barbour has been uniquely adept at leveraging concerns about President Barack Obama into huge contributions from many others. Bob Perry, the Texas businessman who funded the Swift boat attacks in the 2004 campaigns, has given more than twice as much as News Corp…..
“He’s clearly the top political strategist and political operative of his generation,” said Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), a former RNC chief of staff. “He is without peer when he is raising money.”

Barbour’s Mammon-power is so awesome, in this account, that it’s almost inevitable he will run for president in 2012, his fame spread across the land by the likely harvest of GOP gubernatorial wins in November, fueled by the RGA. On that note, I was particularly amused by the testimony to Barbour’s greatness offered by hapless Colorado GOP chairman Dick Wadhams, saddled with a disaster of a gubernatorial nominee and a right-wing third party revolt. He sure does need a heapin’ helping of Haley’s money.
The article does include what’s known in the trade as a “to be sure” graph, briefly acknowledging the counter-argument to the writers’ hypothesis before going on to brush it aside:

[T]he obstacles to a Barbour candidacy are substantial. A portly Southern conservative who represented tobacco firms and made millions building a lobbying firm isn’t the ideal profile for a Republican nominee in this or any political environment. In recent polls, Barbour is stuck in low single digits, way behind Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin.

Instead of meditating on those rather formidable problems, the Politicos return to still more admiring details about Barbour’s rules-bending fundraising techniques.
Now I used to look at the prospect of a politician like Haley Barbour gaining real political power as follows: “Well, could be worse. Yes, he’s venal and mean-spirited, but at least he’s smart. How bad could it be?”
Then Dick Cheney became vice president, and the limits of brainpower became rather obvious.
If, as appears likely, Barbour does move towards a serious presidential run, his background will offer an extraordinary opportunity for dumpster-diving. It’s not just the ethics stuff, either, or Barbour’s devotion to the interests of the very rich. Long before he moved to Washington and became a mover-and-shaker, Barbour was the leader of the right wing of the Mississippi Republican Party. That requires some serious wingnuttery, and as Chait observes, a long paper-trail of associations that will not look good in the twenty-first century.
I realize that the Republican field for 2012 is not terribly impressive, and that many GOPers long for a candidate who is both a hard-core conservative and a demonstrated party loyalist. But it may take even more money than Haley Barbour can raise to make Americans want this man to become president.

One of those political topics that definitely need more careful analysis is the idea that tough primaries full of negative attacks can “soften up” winners for the general election. There’s actually a counter-notion that primary competition “tempers” campaigns for November, and it’s obvious that primaries can boost name ID. But by and large, surviving a good, vicious primary battle is not considered the best prescription for success in highly competitive general elections. Time spent “healing” one’s own party is time that’s not available for reaching out to swing voters, and sometimes wounds just won’t heal at all.
This subject is relevant today because of the unusually large number of competitive Republican primaries this year, a number of which have gotten pretty nasty, and/or branded winners either as right-wing kooks or as unreliable RINOs little better than Democrats. As we get closer to November, polls will give some evidence of the net impact of primary divisions. But for now, the one thing that can be said with some certainty is that primary lines of attack on candidates can carry over into general elections and help opponents reinforce negative perceptions, even if the party holding the nasty primary “reunites.”
Let’s say Rick Scott wins the Florida GOP gubernatorial primary next week (not a great bet at the moment, but you never know). In his desperate effort to overcome Scott’s vast personal resources, primary opponent Bill McCollum has gone to great lengths to publicize the Medicare fraud scandal that afflicted the Columbia-HCA hospital chain under Scott’s direction. Should Scott win, Democrat Alex Sink will have to spend a lot less time and money raising this issue than would have been the case had McCollum left it alone. This will help Sink with independents and “soft-partisan” Democratic and Republican voters even if Republican politicians close ranks after the primary and McCollum starts praising Scott as a combinaton of Solomon, Ronald Reagan, and St. Francis of Assisi.
For a less hypothetical scenario, consider the situation in Georgia immediately after Nathan Deal’s extremely narrow gubernatorial runoff win over Karen Handel. At Southern Political Report this week, the distinguished University of Georgia political scientist (and runoff expert nonpareil) Charles Bullock suggests that Handel went overboard in tarring not only Deal but all her GOP enemies, including much of the Republican membership of the state legislature, as corrupt yahoos. This creates an immediate “unity” problem for Georgia Republicans, one that Handel herself tried to address by quickly conceding defeat in the runoff and endorsing Deal. But she can’t take back the many months she spent pounding away at the “corrupt yahoo” message, and there is no question Democrat Roy Barnes will pick up exactly where she left off, since nothing is more valuable to him than the idea that Georgia’s unaffiliated voters should be angry at Republicans in Atlanta as much as Democrats in Washington.
You can’t always count on primary candidates in the other party to do you these kinds of favors. In the California Republican gubernatorial primary campaign that concluded in June, Steve Poizner appeared to have gotten considerable traction with attacks on Meg Whitman’s questionable ties to the Goldman Sachs investment firm. But Poizner soon switched to a focus on immigration policy, and got crushed. I am sure that Jerry Brown and his allies were deeply disappointed by Poizner’s strategic decision, which meant they’d have to spend that much more time and money raising the Goldman Sachs issue all over again.
So it’s worth examining contests with difficult primaries from the limited point of view of discerning whether general election opponents quickly pick up on weaknesses exposed in the primaries. To deliberately mix metaphors here, there’s much to be said for striking while the underbelly is soft.

If you are a billionaire candidate for office running in a primary that’s going to be held in six days, you might well have mixed feelings about looking at Politico today and seeing an image of your BFF Mike Tyson above the headline: “I Never Did Drugs on the Boat.”
Yes, it’s probably helpful to Jeff Greene that Tyson is backing up his claim that he had a “zero tolerance for drugs” policy on the yacht that the ex-champ lived on during an extended tour of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. But beyond that, reminders of Greene’s rather sketchy background as a rich playboy are not exactly what the political doctor ordered right now. The voluble Tyson didn’t help much when he went beyond his immediate talking points and offered some details from his cruise itinerary:

Tyson also voluntarily described an incident in Sardinia, where the yacht docked at what point that August, in which he was charged – and later cleared – of a sex assault in which the woman making the accusation claimed he’d wanted her to do drugs.
“I got into a problem with a young lady that came on the boat,” he said. “Jeff and everyone was sleeping…She said I had beat her or something. The cops came over she said we had drugs on the boat, we had guns on the boat.”
He said, “Cops came and searched the boat and they found nothing.”

Nothing to see here, folks.
On another front, Mark Blumenthal of Pollster.com has published a column addressing the contradiction between several polls showing Kendrick Meek moving ahead of Greene in the Florida Democratic Senate primary, and an Ipsos survey showing Greene still ahead despite his recent troubles. Ipsos, says Blumenthal, is testing the opinions of a lot of Democrats who probably aren’t going to turn out for an August primary:

Their survey was focused mostly on the general election and they appear to have included the primary voter question almost as an afterthought. Nevertheless, the looser likely voter screen they used helps explain why their Democratic primary subgroup is so much friendlier to Greene than the samples drawn by the other pollsters. It probably includes many voters who rarely vote in Democratic primaries and have less knowledge of or affinity for Meek, whose campaign has been touting endorsements from mainline Democrats like Bill Clinton.

It’s looking more and more like Jeff Greene will be able to return to luxurious obscurity after next Tuesday, and stop worrying about what anyone other than law enforcement personnel think about acceptable leisure-time activities on his yacht.

As it happens, I was in the eastern time zone yesterday, and thus following the primary returns from Wyoming and Washington involved some serious sleep deprivation. Newcomers to the West Coast like me complain a lot about having to get up early in the morning to deal with East Coast people and news, but it sure is nice to have those three extra hours when sluggish machines and poll workers are slowly churning out election returns.
The Wyoming GOP gubernatorial primary created the only cliffhanger of the night, with former U.S. Attorney Matt Mead leading State Auditor Rita by just over 700 votes. Right-wing crusader Ron Micheli finished a strong third, and political scion Colin Simpson a relatively poor fourth. Mead self-funded to the tune of $900,000, and had to overcome RINO accusations, particularly from Micheli. Myer’s loss denies Wyoming the certainty of a female governor, since state party chair Leslie Peterson won the Democratic nomination by a 48-39 margin over Pete Gosar.
In Washington, which uses the “Top 2 Blanket Primary” system that voters in California are soon to encounter, the primary was mostly a positioning test for the general election. The one outcome thought to be in doubt going into yesterday was in the 3d congressional district, where national Republican party favorite Jaime Herrera burnished the GOP’s diversity image by winning a general election spot alongside Democrat Denny Heck for the seat held by retiring Democrat Brian Baird. Would-be conservative spoiler David Castillo finished far back.
In the U.S. Senate race, two-time gubernatorial nominee Dino Rossi did himself some good by winning 34%, while Tea Partyish former NFL player Clint Didier came in at a disappointing 12%. Incumbent Patty Murry has 46%, though that percentage is likely to rise a bit when late mail ballots from the Democratic bastion of King County trickle in.
Over at RealClearPolitics, Sean Trende has collected data from previous “blanket primary” results in Washington that show a very close relationship between primary and general election performance for major-party candidates. He suggests yesterday’s results show Murray to be very vulnerable; Herrera a virtual lead-pipe cinch to win; and a couple of Democratic incumbent congressman in some peril. I do wonder if Sean is paying attention to when Washington primaries have been held in the past; some were in September, when you’d guess turnout would be higher than in August, and public opinion a bit closer to where it would wind up in November. But he’s got the datasets, so his conclusions are worth considering.
Finally, there was one other notable contest out west last night: a special “general election” in California to choose a successor in the state senate to Abel Maldonado, who was appointed Lt. Gov. earlier this year. Republican Sam Blakeslee defeated Democrat John Laird (confirming the order of finish in the special primary held in June), mainly based on strong performance by Blakeslee in his House district. But what’s interesting about this result is that about 158,000 votes were cast in this obscure state legislative election. The total two-party vote in Wyoming’s primary was just over 127,000. Wyoming has two seats in the United States Senate. Think about that next time you wonder if the ability of 41 Senators to control the national agenda via the filibuster might be a tad undemocratic.

Sometimes media coverage of the midterm elections comes across as a sort of undifferentiated Visigothic raid on Democrats by Republicans everywhere. But it’s a little more subtle than that, as indicated by Politico‘s Alex Isenstadt in a survey of the two parties’ strategies for controlling the House in November.
Interestingly, the DCCC has a two-to-one financial advantage over the NRCC, at $34 million to $17 million. That’s reflected in the targeted TV ad time the two committees are reserving for the stretch run, with the DCCC planning $49 million in total ad expenditures, and the NRCC $22 million.
The DCCC’s money, unsurprisingly, will be overwhelmingly focused on defending vulnerable incumbents, with 54 of its 60 targeted races in seats held by Democrats. The NRCC is currently reserving ad time in a more limited 40 districts, all now held by Democrats, with a mix of targets:

The bulk of the Democrats in the crosshairs are vulnerable first-term legislators sitting in Republican-oriented seats. Many are clustered in the South, including Rep. Bobby Bright (D-Ala.), Rep. Suzanne Kosmas (D-Fla.), Rep. Travis Childers (D-Miss.), Rep. Tom Perriello (D-Va.) and Rep. Glenn Nye (D-Va.).
Republicans are also looking toward a handful of Republican-leaning seats that have been left vacant by Democratic retirements. Among them: Arkansas’s 1st District, Indiana’s 8th District, Kansas’s 3rd District, and Tennessee’s 8th District.
A number of seasoned Capitol Hill veterans are being singled out for rough treatment. Rep. Ben Chandler (D-Ky.), Rep. Ciro Rodriguez (D-Texas), Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-N.D.), Rep. Allen Boyd (D-Fla.), Edwards, and Spratt – all of whom face their most difficult reelection campaigns in years – are on the GOP fall hit list.
In a nod to the perilous election environment, Republicans are also probing for fresh pickup opportunities in Republican-friendly districts that until recently looked to be locked down by savvy Democrats. Rep. Jim Marshall (D-Ga.), Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-Calif.), and Rep. Baron Hill (D-Ind.)- all of whom hold wide cash on hand advantages over their opponents and won by comfortable margins in 2008-will have ads run against them.

At present Republicans aren’t planning to spend anything defending their own vulnerable incumbents in Hawaii and Louisiana.
But in general, their strategy indicates that some of the wilder estimates of Republican House gains this year really do depend on a “wave” that operates independently of individual campaigs in individual districts. Republican money is focused on a much narrower range of possibilities. In all the discussions about high GOP expectations this year, we should take a moment to hear money talk.

The most buzzworthy progressive commentary out there right now is without a doubt John Judis’ New Republic piece on the “Unnecessary Fall” of Barack Obama.
It’s essentially a summary of what Judis has been writing since the Obama inauguration, with growing urgency, and also the most impressive presentation of the “populist critique” of Obama as a politician who has missed crucial opportunities to mobilize middle-class support for policies aimed at curbing corporate power, instead becoming the symbol of corporate “bailouts” that have fed right-wing populism.
But while much of what Judis writes–particularly his examination of the political consequences of steps Obama took on TARP before even taking office–is very compelling, he goes too far, in my opinion, by comparing Obama’s “fall” to that of Jimmy Carter, another would-be “outsider reformer” who lost the allegiance of middle-class voters.
I suspect in using the Carter analogy Judis is encouraging Democrats to avoid the optimism associated with the most commonly cited Obama doppelganger, Bill Clinton, who, after all, was comfortably re-elected after the electoral disaster of 1994.
But the differences between Carter and Obama just can’t be ignored:
(1) Carter’s initial mistep, by most accounts, was ignoring the views and needs of congressional Democrats. Obama, by most accounts, has gone (if anything) overboard in consulting with and deferring to congressional Democrats.
(2) Carter was elected by a coalition that began to disappear the very day after the 1976 elections, thanks to his dependence on very conservative southern Democrats who supported him as a regional gesture but who truly belonged to, and soon migrated towards, the GOP. The main problem with Obama’s 2008 coalition is that it was disproportionately composed of demographic groups who rarely participate that much in midterm elections. But they aren’t going away in future presidential elections, and show no present signs of moving back towards the GOP.
(3) Despite his occasional efforts to place himself “above politics,” Jimmy Carter actually ran a 1980 general election campaign for a second term that was highly partisan and populist. Indeed, it was so abrasive that it helped Ronald Reagan, the veteran of nearly twenty years of right-wing politics, come across as a unifying figure. It’s not clear yet how Obama is going to present himself in 2012, but he certainly still has every approach available, including those that folks like Judis have been urging on him all along.
You should read Judis’ full account carefully, and make your own judgment as to whether Obama’s approach to Wall Street was dictated by the realities of a capitalist economy in which propitiation of financial markets by the White House is the only way to avoid complete economic catastrophe, or instead the by-product of a non-confrontational politician advised by people too close to the problem.
But I personally think Judis is judging the political trajectory of the Obama presidency far too hastily, and projecting a Carter-like “fall” that could look very different not far down the road, when right-wing populists are exposed for their anti-middle-class agenda, and Democrats regain their authentic voice.