As the administration’s Nuclear Security Summit takes place in Washington this week, CNN has a new look at public opinion on a variety of issues related to nuclear weapons policy. And it’s safe to say that there is strong public support for what the President’s is proposing, if not always for the utopian-sounding goals he has articulated.
The latter problem is not new. In a May 2009 Democracy Corps survey that found remarkably strong support for Obama’s foreign policy and national security leadership–strong enough, in fact, to all but erase the traditional “national security gap” between Democrats and Republicans–Obama’s stated goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons got a decidedly lukewarm reaction, with 60% of Americans agreeing that “eliminating all nuclear weapons in the world is not realistic or good for America’s security.”
The DCorps question on this subject combined skepticism about a nuclear-weapons-free world with opposition to the idea on national security grounds. But CNN separates the two issues, and while respondents split right down the middle (with significant differences based on age, as over-50s who remember the Cold War tend to be negative) on the desirability of eliminating nuclear weapons, the percentage thinking this can actually happen has dropped from one-third in 1988 to one-fourth today.
But the big difference between May 2009 and today in terms of nuclear weapons policy is that the President is now taking concrete steps to address the “loose nukes” issue, to build-down nuclear weapons in conjunction with Russia, and to strengthen the international non-proliferation regime (in conjunction with efforts to isolate Iran’s defense of its nuclear program). And CNN finds strong support for Obama in every tangible area, even if his long-range goals still produce skepticism.
Most importantly, 70% of Americans–including 68% of independents and even 49% of Republicans–think the Senate should ratify the START Treaty with Russia, despite the predictable charges of “weakness” towards Obama that have been emanating from many conservative circles since the treaty was signed. With a two-thirds Senate vote being required for ratification of the treaty, that’s probably just enough public support to keep Republican defense hard-liners (and/or obdurate Obama-haters) from launching a big Senate fight.
Moreover, by giving high-profile attention to the “loose nukes” issue, Obama is tapping a deep well of public anxiety about the possibility of nuclear terrorism. By a 7 to 1 margin, respondents to the CNN poll said “preventing terrorists from getting nuclear weapons” should be a high priority than “reducing nuclear weapons controlled by unfriendly countries.” One of the great ironies of the Bush years was that his administration constantly promoted fears about nuclear terrorism while making nuclear security a very low priority, even in bilateral relations with Russia. Dick Cheney in particular treated truculent and unilateral behavior towards potential adversaries as the sole means of preventing nuclear terrorism. By unpacking nuclear security from other issues and making it a focus of bilateral and multilateral initiatives, Obama is linking diplomacy with a national security concern that Americans care about passionately.
Public support for the president’s nuclear weapons policies will get its strongest test beginning next month with the beginning of a scheduled review of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. As Steven Clemons notes in an excellent overview of Obama’s “nuclear wizardry” at Politico today, that’s where the rubber will need to start meeting the road in terms of the administration’s efforts to round up the world community for an effective united front towards Iran’s nuclear program. But it’s clear the president’s nuclear initiatives are off to a very good start despite generic conservative carping.

As I am sure you have noticed, one of the big talking points of conservatives in recent months has been that the Obama administration and congressional Democrats despise democracy, because they have (sic!) used “revolutionary methods” to (sic!) “cram down” health reform against the manifest wishes of the American people, who wisely oppose socialism. Fortunately, Republicans are determined to help Americans “take back their country” in November.
But at the very same time, bless them, conservatives can’t help but express some long-held negative feelings about this small-d-democratic claptrap. One sign is their great hostility to any efforts to encourage higher levels of voting (though this is typically framed as opposition to “voter fraud,” evidence for which is completely lacking). Another is the Tea Party theory that there are absolute limits on the size and cost of government that either are or should be enshrined in the Constitution or enforced by the states, regardless of the results of national elections. And still another involves period bursts of outrage over people who don’t pay income taxes being allowed to vote.
This last meme got a boost very recently when estimates emerged that 47% of U.S. households won’t have any 2009 federal income tax liability.
“We have 50 percent of people who are getting something for nothing,” sneered Curtis Dubay, senior tax policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation.
Sean Hannity chipped in with alarums about the implications of “half of Americans not paying taxes.”
One conservative site took the AP story on this data and added this helpful subtitle: “Tax Day Is Just Christmas For Many.”
Another had an even more suggestive title: “Let’s Make You Spend More on Me,” along with a chart showing upward federal spending trends. This interpretation is clearly just a hop, skip and jump from the “cultural of dependency” rhetoric most famously expressed by SC Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer in his speech comparing subsidized school lunch beneficiaries with stray animals who shouldn’t be encouraged with free food. And in retrospect, Bauer showed some unorthodox brilliance in directing conservative anger about socialist “free lunch” redistribution towards kids who are literally receiving free lunches.
Now the various conservative “analysts” of the free-lunch, free-rider phenomenon rarely go to the trouble of acknowledging that most of that lucky 47% not owing federal income taxes (which represent less than half of federal revenues) pay high and very regressive federal payroll taxes, not to mention even more regressive state and local sales and property taxes. Nor do they note that most non-federal-income-tax-paying households are either retirees living on savings and retirement benefits or working poor families with kids (the beneficiaries of those child tax credits that conservatives are always promoting as “pro-family” policies). And I’ve yet to see even one concede that the 47% figure is a temporary spike attributable to the recession and to short-term tax credits that will expire with the economic stimulus program.
While the reverse-class-warfare subtext of some of the conservative angst about alleged tax-and-benefit freeloaders is pretty clear, there are those who would link it to an even more lurid, culture-war theme. Check out this remarkable weekend post from National Review’s Mark Steyn, who compared our system of “representation without taxation to”–no, I’m not making this up!–Muslim oppression of non-Muslims. Gaze in awe:

United States income tax is becoming the 21st-century equivalent of the “jizya” — the punitive tax levied by Muslim states on their non-Muslim citizens: In return for funding the Islamic imperium, the infidels were permitted to carry on practicing their faith. Likewise, under the American jizya, in return for funding Big Government, the non-believers are permitted to carry on practicing their faith in capitalism, small business, economic activity, and the other primitive belief systems to which they cling so touchingly.

So there you have it: socialism and Islamofascism nicely bound up in the policies of that madrasa-attending elitist, Barack Obama.
However you slice it, the conservative commitment to democracy sometimes seems limited to those “real Americans” who think right and vote right. At a minimum, progressives should not let them combine such attitudes with pious invocations of the Popular Will.

As the 2010 political cycle kicks into high gear, it’s as good a time as any to stipulate some basic, but often misunderstood, facts about U.S. House elections.
For one thing, some of the adjectives being applied to possible GOP gains in the House this November–you know, “massive,” “overwhelming” or even “big”–can be misleading, in that they imply some sort of landslide or popular uprising. It’s important to remember that the entire U.S. House faces re-election every two years. And while it’s natural to focus on the fact that Democrats “picked up” 21 seats in the very good election year of 2008 (after gaining 31 net seats in 2006), and inferring that a Republican “pick-up” of 35 or 40 seats this year would represent a “massive” swing, gains and losses are cumulative. Democrats won a 79-seat margin in 2008. A Republican pickup of 40 votes would represent a relatively even election producing a dead-even House, not a “landslide.” A true Republican “landslide” would be defined as one in which the GOP picked up something more on the order of 70-80 seats, which would probably reflect a popular vote margin of around 10%–usually the most expansive definition of an electoral “landslide.”
Secondly, in terms of early predictions of what will happen in November House elections, the numbers usually touted are “generic congressional ballot” poll results. Right now Gallup shows the congressional ballot as even-steven. But there’s a widespread assumption that the generic ballot always, always overstates Democratic performance. While there is a slight bias factor (as pointed out by Nate Silver last week), probably attributable to less “efficient” Democratic vote distribution (or, to put it another way, to pro-Republican gerrymandering in the last redistricting cycle), much of the “overestimation” of Democratic strength in past generic polls has involved early tests with no “likely voter” screen. As we get closer to Election Day, the Gallup generic ballot is usually quite accurate (as shown some years ago by TDS contributor Alan Abramowitz of Emory). So it’s not a good idea to just mentally add a few points to Gallup’s number for the GOP and assume that’s close to reality.
Mark Blumenthal has a learned column up at National Journal on the whole subject of generic ballots; give that a look if you are interested.

So it’s official: Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens is retiring, effective at the end of the current Court term, which means a new Justice needs to be confirmed before the October term convenes.
As I noted when Stevens’ retirement became likely, there are two ways Democrats can react to this news.
We can go through the certain Court fight ahead in a half-hearted and distracted way, hoping to get back to “real” issues like financial reform. Or we can take advantage of the opportunity a Court fight presents to expose the extraordinary radicalism of the contemporary conservative movement and its captives in the GOP, best illustrated by its views on the Constitution.
An aggressive and proactive strategy for this fight is in my opinion the right way to go; it will help raise the stakes for the midterm elections for lukewarm Democratic voters, while also casting the choice in November as one between two futures rather than a referendum on a very unpopular status quo in Washington.
So let’s get the game on!

There’s an interesting feature article by Michael Calderone up at Politico today about the gradual revolution in political journalism going on at some of the mainsteam media’s major institutions. Its point of departure is the success enjoyed by my friend Ezra Klein at the Washington Post:

When Washingtonian magazine recently profiled The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein, the story contained a tidbit that ricocheted around the Post newsroom: Klein has his own assistant.
An assistant? For that new guy with the blog?
Turns out to be true. Nothing more vividly highlights the changing times at legacy news organizations — or the bilious feelings those times have caused among the assistant-less masses in the depleted ranks of traditional reporters — than the instant status achieved by a newcomer like Klein.
Hired last year at age 24 from The American Prospect, the liberal monthy, Klein was given a prized platform — the invitation to hold forth with commentary and analysis about domestic policy — that not long ago would have gone only to someone with years of experience and achievement.
Klein is hardly alone. Reflecting a mix of desperation and determination to reinvent themselves for a new media era, legacy publications are recruiting and lavishly rewarding a new breed of journalists. They offer an edgy style and expertise in a particular field, but have never spent a day covering cops or courts or county boards — traditionally the rungs of the ladder all reporters had to climb.

Calderone goes on the examine other examples of the New Journalistic Kids on the Block, and the backlash against them among old-school reporters who view them as unprofessional interlopers who mistake bloviating for journalism.
Meanwhile, in his take on the Calderone piece, Jonathan Chait identifies the main weakness in the old-school argument: there are different skills involved in “pure reporting” and the synthesis and interpretation of facts. And that’s not changed by the journalism profession’s tradition of treating success at the former as the precondition for the opportunity to do the latter.
I vividly recall from my days in Georgia politics and government a friend who was a very good statehouse reporter. She was ultimately offered a rare spot on the editorial board of her paper, and given a weekly column. Soon afterwards she called me to complain of the difficulty of finding something to write about once a week. She hated her new gig, and it didn’t last very long.
Not long thereafter, I tried to make a lateral transfer from government and policy work, with a heavy side order of speechwriting, into a job on the editorial board of a Georgia paper. The pay was horrendous; the work-load was brutal; and although I was reasonably sure I was totally qualified, I was told I could forget about it because I didn’t have a journalism degree and hadn’t done any “pure” reporting. A reporter friend explained to me patiently that editorial jobs were the rabbit that kept underpaid reporters running around the track for decades, and that hiring someone like me would represent a disruption of the journalistic career path.
I finally “got it,” and didn’t try journalism any more. Eventually, I got a job with a Washington think tank that ultimately involved writing op-ed length institutional opinion pieces every single day for years. It dawned on me that I had become a “journalist” in all but name. But only the advent of “blogging” made it possible to perform that skill under a byline.
I know it’s fashionable in many journalistic and political circles to think of “bloggers” as ignorant bloviators who have destroyed the ancient standards of opinion journalism and driven politics into a perpetual hate-frenzy. And without a doubt, there’s a lot of crap out there for anyone to read. But as people like Klein and many others have demonstrated, there are also bloggers with much higher standards of research and fact-verification, and much more intelligent levels of reasoned discourse, than their counterparts in the MSM. And that’s why the MSM, forced increasingly to live “online,” is snapping up some of the best of them.
Sure, I have some sympathy for the ink-stained wretches of the Fourth Estate who are embittered by this revolution, which has been driven by the same economic realities that would be threatening their jobs even if the Internet didn’t exist. But they should have some sympathy for the many very talented policy wonks and political analysts who were shut out of their profession for the sin of wanting substantive training or practical experience in politics or government instead of J-School. I’m certainly old enough to remember the days when the very best of what would now be called “blogging” was available only through the extraordinarily narrow window of “Letters to the Editor” that almost no one read. We’re only now as a society beginning to understand that some of the best potential teachers are people who would not have for a moment considered taking many hours of Education classes in college in order to become professionally certified. The journalism profession has benefited from opening up the guild as well.

As we inch closer to the November 2010 elections, some of the early indicia affecting turnout are showing remarkable numbers predictive of an unusually high turnout for a midterm election.
Now it should come as no great surprise that when asked by USA Today/Gallup if they are “more enthusiastic than usual” about voting in November, 69% of Republicans respond affirmatively. This comports with the general sense that Republicans are getting ready to joyfully snake dance to the polls in November to get rid of the socialist usurpers in Washington and restore the natural order of things. But as Nate Silver has pointed out, the same survey shows 57% of Democrats expressing unusual enthusiasm as well–a higher percentage than ever registered before a midterm by voters in either party, until now.
At pollster.com, turnout guru Michael McDonald of George Mason University stares at the data and suggests we could be seeing a historic turnout rates this November, since overall enthusiasm levels are about where they were two years ago. He’s pretty sure turnout will exceed that of the last midterm election, in 2006, which was considered a very good turnout year by historic standards.
Normally high overall turnout in a midterm election would be good news for Democrats, but turnout predictions based on voter enthusiasm must note the advantage GOPers have on that measurement. We’ll see if conservative excitement about November can be sustained at its current high-pitch chattering whine, and if Democrats can maintain or increase their own level of engagement.

There’s been a theory running around that Republicans, concerned about the craziness surrounding conservative reactions to health reform, would rein in the extremists and steam towards November in a state of calm and moderation.
The first shots fired from the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans don’t sound very moderate. Here’s what tonight”s speaker Newt Gingrich had to say in a press release about his speech:

“To win in 2010 and 2012, it’s not enough to say no to the radical agenda of Obama, Pelosi, and Reid,” Gingrich said in a released statement. “Tonight’s speech will explain why real leadership requires Republicans to offer a compelling vision of safety, prosperity, and freedom that stands in vivid contrast to Obama’s secular, socialist, machine now running Washington.”

Secular, socialist machine? One can only imagine the reaction if a major Democrat referred to the GOP as a “Christian Right, corporatist machine.” And it would have the added benefit of being largely true.

This item by Ed Kilgore is cross-posted from The New Republic.
As most readers have probably heard, Virginia’s Republican Governor Bob McDonnell got himself into hot water by declaring April “Confederate History Month,” in a proclamation that did not mention the rather pertinent fact that the Confederacy was a revolutionary (and by definition, treasonous) effort to maintain slavery against even the possibility of abolition.
After the predictable firestorm of criticism, McDonnell allowed that it must have been a mistake not to mention slavery in his proclamation. And then he repeated his rationale for the whole idea, which was, he claimed, simply a matter of promoting tourism in anticipation of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War’s outbreak. Tourism!
I’m sure most conservatives will consider McDonnell’s act of contrition sufficient, while many liberals will cynically conclude the whole thing was a dog whistle to the far Right, much like his earlier and less notorious commemoration of March 7-13 as Christian Heritage Week, in honor of the Christian Right’s revisionist theory that the Founders were theocrats at heart.
But as a white southerner old enough to remember the final years of Jim Crow, when every month was Confederate History Month, I have a better idea for McDonnell: Let’s have a Neo-Confederate History Month that draws attention to the endless commemorations of the Lost Cause that have wrought nearly as much damage as the Confederacy itself.
It would be immensely useful for Virginians and southerners generally to spend some time reflecting on the century or so of grinding poverty and cultural isolation that fidelity to the Romance in Gray earned for the entire region, regardless of race. Few Americans from any region know much about the actual history of Reconstruction, capped by the shameful consignment of African Americans to the tender mercies of their former masters, or about the systematic disenfranchisement of black citizens (and in some places, particularly McDonnell’s Virginia, of poor whites) that immediately followed.
A Neo-Confederate History Month could be thoroughly bipartisan. Republicans could enjoy greater exposure to the virulent racism of such progressive icons as William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson, not to mention Democratic New Deal crusaders in the South like Mississippi’s Theodore Bilbo. The capture of the political machinery of Republican and Democratic parties in a number of states, inside and beyond the South, by the revived Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, would be an interesting subject for further study as well.
Most of all, a Neo-Confederate History Month could remind us of the last great effusion of enthusiasm for Davis and Lee and Jackson and all the other avatars of the Confederacy: the white southern fight to maintain racial segregation in the 1950s and 1960s. That’s when “Dixie” was played as often as the national anthem at most white high school football games in the South; when Confederate regalia were attached to state flags across the region; and when the vast constitutional and political edifice of pre-secession agitprop was brought back to life in the last-ditch effort to make the Second Reconstruction fail like the first.
Bob McDonnell should be particularly responsible, as a former Attorney General of his state, for reminding us all of the “massive resistance” doctrine preached by Virginia Senator Harry Byrd in response to federal judicial rulings and pending civil rights laws, and of the “interposition” theory of nullification spread most notably by Richmond News Leader editor James Jackson Kilpatrick.
Any Neo-Confederate History Month would be incomplete, of course, without reference to the contemporary conservative revival of states’ rights and nullification theories redolent of proto-Confederates, Confederates, and neo-Confederates.
Having flirted with such theories himself, Bob McDonnell probably wouldn’t be interested in discussing them in the context of Civil War history. But that’s okay: A greater public understanding of the exceptionally unsavory tradition that conservative Republicans are following in claiming that states can refuse to accept health care reform would be valuable without an explicit discussion of current politics.
So give it up, governor: If you are going to have a Confederate History Month, at least be honest enough to acknowledge that the legacy of the Confederacy didn’t die at Appomattox.

Query: is it possible for a political candidate to spend too much money on too many television ads? California Republican gubernatorial hopeful Meg Whitman seems determined to find out.
Those who read my recent piece on the California governor’s race may recall the amazement with which Golden State cognoscenti are viewing eMeg’s barrage of early ads. It’s not just the size of her ad buys that’s impressive–you can’t, after all, exceed saturation levels–but it’s the timing. Her “introductory bio” ad started running night and day all across California during the Winter Olympics, long before the June primary, and very long before the November general election. If possible, her attack ads on primary opponent Steve Poizner have been even more ubiquitous, and she’s just put up a new “positive” ad that’s very hard to miss.
As political reporting site Calbuzz noted this week, no one really knows if Whitman’s strategy will work:

Two months before the primary election for governor, Meg Whitman’s unprecedented campaign spending — including another cool $20 million tossed in late Monday — has hit the standard quantum limit of politics: its effect on the governor’s race has moved into unknowable territory.
To any would-be prognosticator, seer or soothsayer Calbuzz offers this verbum sapienti: Like scientists mulling data from the Large Hadron Collider, we have no idea what the effect of $100-150 million in campaign spending will do in a California statewide election, because we’ve never seen anything like it.

That’s saying a lot, since California was the scene of the 1998 campaign of former airline executive Al Checchi, which broke all the previous spending records. In the end, the Checchi campaign’s torrent of attack ads on Democratic rival Jane Harman appear to have backfired, becoming the main issue in a campaign eventually won by a third candidate, Gray Davis (Davis strategist Gary South memorably described Checchi’s attacks on Harman as a “murder-suicide”).
It’s unclear whether a similar fate could befall Whitman, since she has the luxury of just one significant opponent in each cycle: Poizner in the primary, and Jerry Brown in the general. But if she keeps up her current pace of appearances on the tube, her name ID will soon approach 100%, and at that point an undefined but real set of otherwise persuadable voters may get tired of her act, and perhaps wonder if someone so excessive in the spending of campaign dollars is really a good bet to cut state spending, which is her main campaign promise.
You don’t have to have a stake in this campaign to watch Whitman’s experiment in sheer dollar power with a sort of fascinated horror.