One of the fundamental reasons for the kind of strategic analysis that TDS encourages and sponsors is that it’s sometimes easy to conflate strategy and tactics, and more basically, means and ends. Indeed, I’d contend that most of the major disagreements among Democrats are attributable to this problem of arguing past each other because one side or the other is thinking in different terms about where a particular political or policy decision lies on the continuum that extends from day-to-day tactics all the way over to grand strategy. And that has certainly been true in the health care reform debate.
But we should all be able to agree on one thing: the ultimate objective in politics–particularly progressive politics–is to make changes in public policy that have a real, beneficient impact on the real-life experiences of the American people. When that opportunity presents itself on one of the major challenges facing this country, taking advantage of it trumps a lot of otherwise valid considerations.
And so, in all the back-and-forth this week about polling on health reform, and the possible consequences to the Democratic Party this November of enacting or failing to enact legislation, it is important not to forget the big picture here: the responsibility that most Democrats would accept for meeting the challenge of changing the health care system in a positive direction.
Matt Yglesias offers a good analogy to keep in mind in weighing the political risks involved in enacting health care reform this year:

[T]he measure of a political coalition isn’t how long it lasted, but what it achieved. From the tone of a lot of present-day political commentary you’d think that the big mistake Lyndon Johnson made during his tenure in the White House was that by passing the Civil Rights Act he wound up damaging the Democratic Party politically by opening the South up to the GOP. Back on planet normal, that’s the crowning achievement of his presidency.

From that perspective, there are still important short-term political factors for Democrats to keep in mind: the impact of future Republican gains on other important policy goals, and even the possibility that those gains will be so large that the next Congress or the one after that will repeal health reform legislation. Short of that, though, it’s probably a moment for Democrats to keep their eyes on the prize and let the political chips fall where they may. It’s not as though we haven’t faced and overcome political adversity before, when we didn’t necessarily have the chance to make large progress on one of the enduring policy goals of the party going back more than a half-century.

Today’s big whoop in the manic conservative drive to kill health care reform is a Washington Post op-ed by Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen urging Democrats to abandon reform and work with Republicans on “bipartisan” proposals like “purchasing insurance across state lines, malpractice reform, incrementally increasing coverage,” and so on and so forth.
Now normally I don’t like to get into the motives or personality of people making political arguments, but in this case it’s inavoidable. The only reason anyone on earth is paying any attention to the views of Caddell and Schoen on this subject is that, as they note prominently in the WaPo piece, they used to work as pollsters for Democratic presidents (Schoen for Clinton, though it was really his business partner, Mark Penn, who had the White House account, and Cadell way back in the Carter administration). But the impression they give of being good Democrats who have finally spoken out in exasperation at the folly of health care reform is completely false. Schoen has never been much of a loyal Democrat; his latest enthusiasm has been encouraging a third party. And Caddell has a history of cranky eccentricity dating back at least a few decades. As Jon Chait points out, both of them have become fixtures on Fox News recently.
They are entitled to their opinion like anyone else, but Schoen and Caddell should check their worn-out Party Cards at the door before they write a piece repeating Republican talking points on health care reform.

When we last checked in on the Texas textbook wars, the craziest advocate on the state School Board for rewriting American history was a dentist named Don McLeroy, who had become so embarassing that he faced a Republican primary challenge from a more conventional conservative. The good news is that McLeroy lost, albeit very narrowly. The bad news is that he remains on the Board for ten more months, and as James McKinley explains in the New York Times today, McLemore and the conservative bloc he leads on the Board is going for the gold in imposing its revisionist views on the school children of the Lone Star State (and many other states, given Texas’ outsized clout in the textbook market).
Check this out:

Dr. McLeroy still has 10 months to serve and he, along with rest of the religious conservatives on the board, have vowed to put their mark on the guidelines for social studies texts.
For instance, one guideline requires publishers to include a section on “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract with America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association.”
There have also been efforts among conservatives on the board to tweak the history of the civil rights movement. One amendment states that the movement created “unrealistic expectations of equal outcomes” among minorities. Another proposed change removes any reference to race, sex or religion in talking about how different groups have contributed to the national identity.

Don’t know if the instruction on the important role of the NRA will include in-class Eddie Eagle appearances, but it wouldn’t surprise me. The revisionism does not, of course, only pertain to relatively current events:

References to Ralph Nader and Ross Perot are proposed to be removed, while Stonewall Jackson, the Confederate general, is to be listed as a role model for effective leadership, and the ideas in Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address are to be laid side by side with Abraham Lincoln’s speeches.
Early in the hearing on Wednesday, Mr. McLeroy and other conservatives on the board made it clear they would offer still more planks to highlight what they see as the Christian roots of the Constitution and other founding documents.
“To deny the Judeo-Christian values of our founding fathers is just a lie to our kids,” said Ken Mercer, a San Antonio Republican.
The new guidelines, when finally approved, will influence textbooks for elementary, middle school and high school. They will be written next year and will be in effect for 10 years.

It’s long been a common ploy for Christian Right advocates to insist on the “Christian roots of the Constitution” as a way to marginalize the church-state-separatist legacy of Jefferson and Madison, and limit the protection of religious liberty to Christians (and we are talking about people with a rather rigid view of what constitutes a “Christian,” with the President of the United States or pro-choice Catholics often not qualifying). The elevation of Confederate leaders into a position of moral equivalency with Lincoln also has an old and unsavory history, as anyone who grew up in the Jim Crow South (as I did) can tell you. But it’s arguably not surprising to see such travesties gain ground in a state whose current governor has been known to flirt with antebellum theories of nullification and absolute state sovereignty.

Today’s strange quasi-political news is that Tiger Woods has turned to former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer to help manage public relations for his comeback to the professional golf tour. Fleischer last made national news by becoming the spokesman for college football’s Bowl Championship Series, and earlier represented Mark Maguire and (as they were getting rid of quarterback Brett Favre) the Green Bay Packers, powerfully unpopular clients all.
Ari’s rise to become the hottest ticket in toxic waste management ranks right up there with AIG’s bonuses as a talking point for those who argue that the world is ruled is operated by a malevolent demiurge rather than a just God. But perhaps, as he showed in the White House, he does have a unique talent for combining mediocrity with mendacity, and can protect his embattled clients by boring the news media into submission by repeating lies in a manner designed to induce a trance-like stupor.

I was reading Spencer Ackerman’s scathing summary of the foreign policy/national security sections of Mitt Romney’s new book, No Apology, and had to laugh out loud at this brief aside:

Romney himself never served, and his unfamiliarity with military issues is evident in “No Apology.” He proposes adding “at least 100,000 soldiers to the army and the marines” (Marines are not soldiers)….

You don’t have to have served, but need simply to have known a Marine (and they never, by the way, become “ex-Marines”), to be aware that Marines strongly object to being lumped in with Army folk as “soldiers.” How that reference made it past the ghostwriter and various editors, in a book heavily focused on boosting Romney’s national security street cred in anticipation of another presidential run, is beyond me.
Ackerman’s broader indictment of the book is well worth a careful read. He covers Mitt’s weird tyopology of America’s enemies and “rivals;” his indifference to diplomacy, alliances and international institutions; and his shirking of any real analysis of what we should do in Afghanistan. His summation:

[A] glance through the remarkable conflation of conservative shibboleths, paranoid global fantasies and deterministic myopia in “No Apology” makes it difficult to avoid the conclusion that the perennial GOP candidate might have been better off saying nothing at all.

If, of course, you can’t talk about, say, health care policy without getting into deep trouble, maybe even bad prose on national security is preferable. But Mitt does need to avoid insulting Marines.

One of the oldest and hoariest debates among pollsters and political scientists is the measurement of public opinion according to likelihood to vote in a particular election. Some polls show results for “all adults,” some for “registered voters,” and some for “likely voters.” This last category is especially useful, if perilous, in projecting election results. It’s useful for the obvious reason that the views of people who don’t wind up voting are irrelevant to actual election results. It’s perilous because determining likelihood to vote is not an exact science, and moreover, can produce some serious distortions. Pollsters typically use two different methods for measuring likelihood to vote: some are subjective, mainly involving poll respondents’ own expressed interest in an election, and some are objective, including past voting behavior, and most controversial, post-survey “adjustments” of raw data to reflect the expected composition of the electorate. “Adjustments,” in fact, are one of those factors (others include question language and question order) the biases of pollsters or their clients can become pretty important, but in general, “tight” likely-voter screens have recently produced results more favorable to Republicans.
Aside from measurement factors, there are two important reasons why going into the November elections, “likely voters” are more likely to lean Republican than “registered voters.” The first is that historically, midterm elections attract an older and whiter electorate than presidential elections; given the weakness of Barack Obama among old white voters even in his 2008 victory, that’s significant. The second is that likelihood to vote measures intensity of political engagement, and right now, there’s little question Republicans are more “energized” than Democrats. So I’m certainly in full agreement that Democrats have what Jonathan Chait recently called (after examining the latest Democracy Corps/Third Way data on “drop-off” voters) a “turnout emergency” in 2010
But it’s a very different matter altogether to use public opinion surveys sifted for likelihood to vote in the next election to measure the current “mood” of the American people on this or that issue–in other words, to treat polls as a sort of plebiscite on the wishes of the electorate as a whole. You see this every day when conservatives argue that “the people” or “America” has rejected health reform because likely 2010 voters in a poll tilt heavily against some formulation of health reform legislation. Such polls may well indicate a possibility that voters in November will react poorly to the enactment of health reform, but do not present a fair representation of public opinion on the subject. No one would seriously argue that only those voting-eligible adults who get through a pollster’s LV screen are “people” or “Americans.” So no one should use LV data to construct some sort of plebiscite. LV’s will have their say in November. Let all Americans have their say when they are asked to express it.

In a period of great conflict and confusion over health reform, one of the most promising signs is the general refusal of Senate “centrist” Democrats to fish into a particularly devious Republican gambit: an effort by Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) to recreate the bipartisan Gang of 14 that notoriously headed off the “nuclear option” of a permanent elimination of judicial filibusters in 2005.
According to Politico‘s Carrie Budoff Brown and Chris Frates, Graham’s been targeting former Democratic members of the Gang of 14 to suggest they stop the use of reconciliation for helath reform and force a start-over based on a smaller bill.
But so far “centrist” Democrats aren’t buying it, and in fact, are making something of a mockery of Graham’s effort to treat the use of reconciliation for an eleven-page set of “fix” amendments to bills already passed by both Houses to the 2005 GOP threat to kill judicial filibusters forever. Check out this embedded quote from Gang of 14 member Ben Nelson:

The Gang of 14 averted a plan in 2005 by Republican Senate leaders to abolish the filibuster for judicial nominees. The group, which included 10 members still serving in the Senate, agreed that nominees should be filibustered only in “extraordinary circumstances.” Otherwise, they should receive an up-or-down vote.
Nelson said the two situations are not the same.
“It is different to say judges get up-or-down votes except in extraordinary circumstances,” Nelson said. “The Gang of 14 was directed at getting up-or-down votes. This is aimed at stopping an up-or-down vote.”

Bingo.

One of the more interesting ongoing spectacles this year has been the crashing and burning of Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, the once invincible political titan who now appears destined to lose, perhaps badly, a U.S. Senate primary to conservative Tea Party favorite Marco Rubio. Initially, Rubio was considered more or less a nuisance candidate who would keep Crist from straying too far off the conservative reservation. Now, according to a new PPP poll of Florida Republicans, Rubio is trouncing Crist 60-28.
Echoing earlier complaints among Florida Republicans that Crist should have just run for re-election, there’s been talk that the heavily tanned incumbent might switch to the governor’s race (qualifying doesn’t end until April 30). Others have suggested he should get some revenge on conservatives by staying in the Senate race but running as an independent. At 538.com today, Nate Silver explores these alternatives, and concludes that Crist should probably either hang it up or run for the Senate as an indie, assuming he’s not interested in a future in the GOP. Turns out switching to the governor’s race isn’t promising:

The same PPP poll that found Crist trailing Rubio by 32 points also found him trailing Bill McCollum, the leading Republican candidate for governor, by 14. That’s not quite as bad a deficit to overcome, but it doesn’t account for the additional annoyance voters might feel if Crist switched races, which could come across as entitled and presumptuous. In addition, the general election could get tricky, as Crist’s approval ratings are tepid and as Democratic candidate Alex Sink — although now trailing McCollum in most polls — is considered a decent candidate.

On the other hand, says Nate, some polls have shown Crist running reasonably well as an indie against Rubio and likely Democratic Senate candidate Kendrick Meek, essentially creating a three-way tie.
Either “switch” by Crist, it’s clear, would be good news for Florida Democrats, giving them a better chance in November while promoting GOP ideological warfare.
But Charlie probably owns it to his dwindling band of friends in the GOP to make up his mind soon. In neighboring Georgia, the news that U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss and Gov. Sonny Perdue are hosting an Atlanta fundraiser for Crist has not gone over very well in Georgia Republican circles. If Crist is perceived as double-crossing Florida Republicans, he will become truly radioactive for all who have touched him.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
As we all understand, Republicans are about to have a pretty good election in November. Much of the GOP excitement revolves around congressional races that could unseat “red-state” Democrats who won during the 2006 or 2008 cycles, along with a number of incumbents (some of whom have decided to retire) who have been around much longer. Ground zero for the Republican tsunami is, of course, the Deep South, where in some areas John McCain did better in 2008 than George W. Bush did in 2004, and where every available indicator shows the president to be very unpopular among white voters.
But beneath this storyline, some odd and counterintuitive things are going on. In three Deep South states, Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina, Democrats have a decent chance of retaking long-lost governorships, in part because of infighting among Republican candidates, and in part because Republican rule in those states has not been terribly successful or popular. It’s far too early to make predictions, but it’s possible that we’re in for a repeat of the astounding gubernatorial Trifecta that Democrats pulled off in those same three states in 1998. That event confounded widespread assessments that the South had become a one-party GOP region, and it could happen again, in even more unlikely circumstances.
Our own appraisal begins in Georgia, with one of the surprise winners of 1998, former Governor Roy Barnes. Barnes lost his reelection bid in 2002 to Sonny Perdue, a party-switching state senator, despite the power of incumbency and a huge financial advantage. Since then, Barnes has regularly admitted his mistakes. And, amazingly enough, in the latest Georgia gubernatorial poll, he’s running ahead of every single Republican candidate.
Meanwhile, Georgia Republicans, who have dominated state politics since 2002, are having some serious problems with their own gubernatorial bench. The consistent frontrunner in the polls, longtime insurance commissioner John Oxendine, is awash in ethics allegations about contributions from the insurance companies that he is responsible for regulating. His record is so blatantly bad that none other than Erick Erickson, the Georgia-based proprietor of the nationally influential, hard-core conservative web site RedState, has said he’d vote for Barnes if Oxendine is the GOP nominee.
Rather pathetically, the alternative to Oxendine and the favorite of some party insiders is Representative Nathan Deal of Georgia’s Ninth District (like Perdue, a party-switcher), who recently said he would resign his congressional seat after a health care vote to concentrate on his gubernatorial campaign. As it happens, Deal’s resignation managed to short-circuit a House Ethics Committee investigation into a no-bid state auto-salvage contract that was awarded to a company which Deal controls. The insider buzz in Atlanta is that Deal was motivated to resign, in part, because of panic among Georgia Republican pooh-bahs who worried that Oxendine would walk away with the gubernatorial nomination on name id alone.
The rest of the Republican gubernatorial hopefuls are struggling as well. The entire party, and several of the gubernatorial candidates, were tainted by association with disgraced former House Speaker Glenn Richardson, who was forced to resign after a lurid sex-and-lobbying scandal. The one candidate who seems ethically starchy, Secretary of State Karen Handel, has struggled to raise the money necessary to win, and also suffers from the perception that she’s the unpopular Sonny Perdue’s chosen successor.
All these Republican problems could eventually fade, and Roy Barnes must also navigate a Democratic primary against Attorney General Thurbert Baker, a law-‘n-order conservative who is one of the nation’s longest-serving African American statewide elected officials (as well as two other lesser but credible opponents). Nevertheless at present, Barnes—or Baker, if he could somehow upset Barnes—looks entirely viable for November.
Next door in Alabama, you’d think that the Democratic gubernatorial frontrunner, Congressman Artur Davis, wouldn’t stand a chance. He’s a member of the much-hated United States Congress; he’s African American; he’s a close personal friend of Barack Obama; and he’s frequently been tagged, like the president, as an Ivy League-educated, twenty-first-century–style black politician. But the sparse public polling available shows Davis in a very strong position for the general election, assuming that he dispenses with a primary challenge from state agriculture commissioner Ron Sparks, who’s been struggling to raise money. Davis, who has long nursed gubernatorial ambitions, carefully tailored his congressional record to Alabama public opinion: He voted against health care reform in the House, and he was also the first Congressional Black Caucus member (and, for that matter, the first one on the Ways and Means Committee) to call for Charlie Rangel to step aside from his powerful chairmanship.
Meanwhile, there is no real frontrunner in the Republican gubernatorial primary, which bids fair to become an ideological flame war. Back in 2002, the “establishment” candidate, state Senator Bradley Byrne, made the fatal mistake of voting for a-tax reform initiative that was soundly defeated in an emphatic expression of Alabamians’ mistrust of government. Tim James, son of former conservative Democratic and Republican Governor Fob James, was one of the main opponents of that initiative, and he will bring it up constantly. Meanwhile Christian Right warhorse Roy Moore, the famous “Ten Commandments Judge,” is actually running second to Byrne in early polls. All of the dynamics in the race will pull the GOP candidates to the hard-right, while Artur Davis continues to occupy the political center; and his candidacy will almost certainly boost African American turnout to near-2008 levels. That means anything could happen in November.
South Carolina is often thought of as the most Republican of Southern states. But Mark Sanford, the disgraced incumbent governor, has complicated his party’s prospects. Meanwhile, an ideological civil war is brewing that reflects the growing tension between the state’s two Republican senators, right-wing bomb thrower Jim DeMint and the more moderate Lindsey Graham (Graham, long suspect among home-state conservatives for his friendship with John McCain and his occasional bipartisanship, has recently been formally censured by two of South Carolina’s county GOP organizations for a variety of sins). As in Georgia and Alabama, the Republican gubernatorial field is a mess: Nobody is a frontrunner and all the candidates are stampeding to the hard right. And I do mean hard right. In a sign of the times, Lieutenant Governor Andre Bauer, who has few friends in the state’s Republican establishment, delivered a speech comparing recipients of subsidized school lunches to “stray animals” who should no longer be fed unconditionally. While he took a few shots from fellow Republicans for his indiscreet language, nobody disputed, and some praised, his basic premise that any form of public assistance corrupts its recipients and should come with some sort of reciprocal obligation.
The frontrunners in early polls are Bauer and Attorney General Henry McMaster. Upstate Congressman Gresham Barrett, who must overcome the opprobrium of voting for TARP, is close behind. Meanwhile, Sanford’s protégé, state Representative Nikki Haley (who was even endorsed by the governor’s ex-wife), is trying to push the campaign hard right by opposing any expenditure of federal stimulus dollars in this high-unemployment state. At a recent candidate forum, when the rivals were pushed to call themselves “DeMint Republicans” or “Graham Republicans,” Bauer and Haley flatly identified with DeMint, while McMasters and Barrett dodged the question.
On the Democratic side, a Rasmussen poll in December showed the front-running Democrat, State School Superintendent Jim Rex, actually beating Bauer and running within single digits against other GOP candidates. (State Representative Vincent Sheheen is also a credible Democratic candidate). Again, anything could happen, but the assumption that Republicans have a lock on this state’s elections is as dubious as the same assumption back in 1998.
So, at a time when Democrats are despairing of good news, it’s important to understand that the donkey isn’t quite dead, even in the Deep South. There are consequences to Republican extremism and malfeasance in office. And, when GOP candidates battle for first place on the crazy train of contemporary conservatism, it’s Democrats who stand to benefit.

I have no idea whether the sexual harrassment allegations against Rep. Eric Massa (whose resignation takes effect today) are true or false, and do believe in a presumption of innocence, along with some sympathy for the apparent condition of his health. But there’s no way around the fact that this once-proud progressive Democrat is now flipping over to the Other Side at warp speed.
After owning up to vaguely described misbehavior initially, he’s suddenly alleging a grand conspiracy by the House Democratic Leadership to cook up sexual harrassment charges in order to force him out of office and get a tad closer to passing final health reform legislation. And tomorrow he’s going to spend an entire hour telling this lurid tale on Glenn Beck’s show.
So before you can blink, among conservatives Massa has gone from being a much-derided symbol of Democratic corruption, and/or “the Democrat Mark Foley,” to being a victim of vicious socialists, or even perhaps of a gay cabal.
Something tells me Massa is not much going to like his new friends. One old friend, the ever-honest Chris Bowers of OpenLeft, had this to say about Massa’s flip-out:

Act Blue pages which I co-managed supported Eric Massa in 2006 and 2008 to the tune of nearly $100,000. Further, before these charges, I was going to help him win re-election no matter his vote on health care. However, there are good reasons to be suspicious of his actions since Friday. And frankly, while I was very proud of it until Friday of last week, I don’t feel very good about my past activism for Eric Massa now. No matter the veracity of his contradictory charges, he is not coming across very well right now.

I doubt an hour with Glenn Beck is going to help.