There was a point yesterday when it sure looked like Scott Brown had managed to kill federal health care reform without setting foot in Washington. Senate Democrats were busily disclaiming any interest in further action on a potential House-Senate conference committee report before Brown could arrive to joyfully join a filibuster and impose the will of the minority. House Democrats were refusing to consider passage of the Senate bill (which could avoid the necessity of a conference committee report and another Senate vote) without iron-clad assurances of future action to change objectionable features (e.g., the “Cadillac tax” which unions hate, and language restricting abortion). Such assurances did not seem to be forthcoming from Senate Democrats. And no one knew where the White House was, though rumors abounded that the president had told a reporter it was time to go back to the drawing board and try to enact something less ambitious.
All this was happening as conservatives in effect snaked-danced through the streets hailing Brown’s victory as the largest political event since, maybe, World War II, and the effective end of the Obama presidency.
The general malaise among health-care-reform-minded progressives was probably best expressed by The New Republic‘s Jonathan Cohn, who has been an eternal optimist about prospects for eventually getting legislation done. He published a piece late yesterday bewailing the White House’s apparent drift, with the bitter title: “Where’s the Obama I voted for?”
As often happens, though, the panic subsided, and things look more hopeful today. Turns out the president’s comments were vague but resolute about pressing forward on health reform. Senate Democrats are not walking away from health reform, and House Democrats have stopped making angry comments about the impossibility of getting acceptable assurances from the Senate about future action in order to facilitate passage of the Senate bill. It still will be complicated to put together a “deal” that both progressives and moderates in both Houses can live with, but it seems to be sinking in that failure to enact anything, after so many Democrats have already cast votes for reform and made themselves targets for conservative attacks, is just not an acceptable outcome.
So the conservative exultation over “the death of ObamaCare” may be a bit premature. We’ll know soon enough.
UPDATE: Another big scare went though the progressive community today when Nancy Pelosi made remarks that were interepreted by some, most notably Josh Marshall, as “pulling the plug” on House action on health care reform. Josh later walked back this conclusion a bit, and there’s some sentiment behind the scenes in Washington that Pelosi is simply trying to convince Senate Democrats (and the White House) that they need to get serious about the “fix” part of the “pass-it-and-fix-it” formula for House passage of the Senate health reform bill. Meanwhile, the White House seems to be moving on to the more promising political ground of bank reform, perhaps hoping to eliminate the public glare on congressional health reform discussions.

This item is crossposted from ProgressiveFix.
Progressives looking at yesterday’s results from Massachusetts would be wise to avoid over-interpretation. Republicans naturally are spinning Scott Brown’s victory as one of the most epochal events in political history, and as a “message” to President Obama that he needs to abandon pretty much everything he is trying to do. And just as naturally, Democrats with varying grievances about the way that the administration or the congressional leadership are comporting themselves will find vindication in so visible and startling a party defeat.
Scott Winship’s post notwithstanding, the reality remains that the segment of Massachusetts voters who went to the polls yesterday were not setting themselves up as a national focus group on the Obama administration generally or a specific issue like health care reform. They chose between two candidates. As Nate Silver reminded readers last night, the desire to find a single explanation for Brown’s victory is almost certainly misguided. Yes, the national political environment (itself heavily affected by the struggling economy as much as or more than anything the president or his party have or haven’t done) undoubtedly contributed to the outcome; but so, too, did the vast disparity between the quality of the two campaigns; and so, too, did factors unique to Massachusetts, most notably long-simmering resentment of a dominant but complacent state Democratic Party (reflected almost perfectly by Martha Coakley’s complacent campaign), and the existence of a health care system that enabled Scott Brown to promise to shoot down almost identical national reforms with impunity.
I’d add to Nate’s analysis the point that timing made a lot of difference to the outcome. Had the election been held a week later, it’s likely that the “wake-up call” to Democrats provided by radically worsening poll numbers would have bestirred the Coakley campaign to get moving earlier; a Rasmussen exit poll suggested that she actually gained ground in the last few days. And without question, the fact that this special election occurred at an especially late and sensitive moment in the national health reform debate made Brown’s campaign a source of intense excitement for Republicans nationally and in Massachusetts, which helped him raise vast sums of money quickly, and pre-energized GOP voters.
So this really was in many respects a “perfect storm” for the Republican candidate, and no one pointing that out should be accused of rationalizing a painful defeat for Democrats. Still, part of the outcome was attributable to the national political environment. But it’s not clear that Brown’s election added a whole lot to our understanding of that dynamic. As John Judis pointed out this morning, we already knew that Barack Obama has a persistent problem connecting with non-college-educated older white voters, who happen to turn out disproportionately in non-presidential elections. We also knew that the approval ratings of presidents tend to be affected in ways that are difficult to overcome by high levels of unemployment. We already knew that we were in an environment of toxic hostility to the political status quo. And we knew that a majority of Americans don’t much like the pending federal health care reform legislation, though nothing like a majority supports the Republican proposition that the status quo in health care is acceptable.
In other words, the Massachusetts results confirmed much of what we already knew about the tough but negotiable road ahead for the administration and its agenda. And even though the GOP has a bright new star in Scott Brown (who nonetheless probably won’t be reelected to a full term in 2012 given a normal presidential turnout in Massachusetts), it didn’t change the fact that the Republican Party itself is in greater disrepute than any other political institution in the country.
Brown’s election does, of course, create an immediate and difficult challenge to the final enactment of health care reform in Congress. But it’s surmountable if progressives keep their eyes on the prize and refuse to panic or point fingers at each other. I couldn’t agree more with Will Marshall’s point about the perversity of letting the Massachusetts results deny the country the same reforms that Massachusetts voters, not to mention their new senator, seem to like. And I hope congressional Democrats think about Jonathan Chait’s argument that they’ve already taken the risk of voting for health care reform, and would be monumentally foolish to abandon their efforts now.
Sure, yesterday’s results were significant and worth analyzing. But let’s wait a while before adjudging them as an event with huge consequences beyond Massachusetts.

Yesterday I asked the question, “Where’s Mitt?”, noting the absence of the former Massachusetts governor and supposed 2012 presidential front-runner from any recent involvement in Scott Brown’s campaign.
Then last night, right after the polls closed, Mitt was very visible, doing serial interviews and joining Brown on the victory platform. Accounts of the Brown campaign also began to emphasize the involvement of former Romney staff.
At that point, Mitt’s low standing in Massachusetts couldn’t hurt Brown, and given the great excitement of Republicans around the country about the victory, Romney probably stopped worrying about complicity in Brown’s defense of the Massachusetts health plan. Besides, there’s probably not a GOP pol in the country who didn’t wish he or she was in Boston last night, rubbing shoulders with the party’s new star.
It will be interesting to see if Brown helps rehabilitate Romney from his near-fatal association with health care “socialism”–or indeed, begins to displace him as the country’s favorite Bay State GOPer.

The only thing that made Scott Brown’s victory in the Massachusetts Senate race a matter of great suspense was the high turnout today. It appears he will win by somewhere between 3 and 6 percent, riding a very good showing in the Boston suburbs.
There’s no suspense at all, of course, about the apocalyptic spin that Republicans will give this special election, because they’ve already been at it for the last week. Aside from the rather premature implications they are drawing for the elections this November, there’s massive talk about the need for President Obama to, well, surrender on his entire policy agenda, and focus, I suppose, on doing a lot of nothing, since that is the preferred conservative path at present.
On one issue, health care reform, the Brown victory will obviously create an immediate problem in the Senate. But the idea that the Massachusetts results represent some sort of nationally-significant referendum on the pending bill in Congress is ludicrous, given Scott Brown’s own argument that federal reform is unnecessary because the state has already enacted pretty much the same reforms.
In any event, Democrats should make a real effort not to exploit the results to grind intra-party axes. Yes, it’s obvious that both the Democratic message and the party’s voter mobilization efforts need to be ramped up significantly. The same is true of efforts to explain to voters exactly what sort of craziness they are asking for if Republicans actually win back either branch of Congress in November. But those Democrats who are tempted to demand that the Obama administration make a dramatic turn to the Left or Center in response to tonight’s results would be better advised to turn to their intra-party adversaries and express some solidarity. We are going to need it going forward, and the alternative could prove to be a national turn to the Right that the public shows no real signs, in Massachusetts or elsewhere, of wanting. We lost a single special election under very difficult circumstances. It’s only a harbinger of very bad things to come if we let it become one.
UPDATE: Jonathan Chait uses a very apt metaphor in urging Democrats not to over-react to electoral setbacks like the one tonight:

Remember the classic scene in It’s a Wonderful Life? Facing a run on his building and loan, George Bailey tries to explain to his frantic customers how to look after their self-interest. “Don’t you see what’s happening?” he pleads, “Potter isn’t selling. Potter’s buying! And why? Because we’re panicking and he’s not.” President Obama’s great challenge right now is to be his party’s George Bailey.

And the President could use some help, beginning with Democrats who understand this is absolutely the worst time to give up on health care reform.

This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
As Jonathan Chait has noted, the deadly serious politics of abortion intruded into the playful world of college football when a conservative Catholic magazine recently attacked the University of Notre Dame for hiring a coach who is friendly with pro-choice Democratic politicians. (A similar incident occurred in 2008 when St. Louis University basketball coach Rick Majerus made a pro-choice comment at a Hillary Clinton campaign event).
But we are about to witness a major escalation of right-to-life opinion-mongering in the sporting world, via an ad by football idol Tim Tebow for James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. It will air during the Super Bowl.
According to an AP sports article:

The former Florida quarterback and his mother will appear in a 30-second commercial during the Super Bowl next month. The Christian group Focus on the Family says the Tebows will share a personal story centering on the theme “Celebrate Family, Celebrate Life.”
The group isn’t releasing details, but the commercial is likely to be an anti-abortion message chronicling Pam Tebow’s 1987 pregnancy. After getting sick during a mission trip to the Philippines, she ignored a recommendation by doctors to abort her fifth child and gave birth to Tim.

Super Bowl ads, as you probably know, are a very, very big deal, generally costing a couple of mil even for a 30-second item. But Tebow’s appearance could get more attention than the usual soft drink ads.
You have to wonder if James Dobson is aware of the strong possibility of a backlash. Tebow received fawning media attention during his four-year college career at the University of Florida–not just because of his gridiron skills, but also because of his “character” and especially his piety, underscored last year when he etched citations of Bible verses in the “eyeblack” strips players wear in games. Unsurprisingly, fans of other teams and people uncomfortable with public religious displays by celebrities got rather annoyed by it all. When Tebow’s Florida Gators lost a conference championship and a shot at a second straight national championship in December, cameras showed him on the bench weeping copiously, and a large national demonstration of schadenfreude ensued. (The video of the moment instantly shot to the top of the charts on YouTube).
Now Tebow will come crashing into football’s Holy Night with a partisan pronouncement on one of the most controversial issues in American life. I somehow doubt it will persuade too many watchers to change their views on abortion, but it may change some views about Tim Tebow, which could undermine his value to The Cause.
You do have to give Tebow credit for self-sacrifice. The Super Bowl will precede the NFL draft, and the former Heisman Trophy winner is already facing skepticism that he can succeed as a pro quarterback. Undercutting the game’s image as a matter of pure, clean, violent but nonpartisan fun will not endear him to team owners or fan bases. If furor does break out, Tebow may try to protest that he is just expressing his religious faith as he’s always done. If so, he didn’t do himself any favors by choosing as his sponsor Focus on the Family (naively referred to simply as a “Christian group” in the AP story above), with its mile-wide partisan political agenda and the America-as-Nazi-Germany undertones of many of Dobson’s jeremiads against abortion, feminism, and gay rights.
All in all, maybe Tim Tebow should have followed the apocryphal advice Yogi Berra is said to have given baseball players who crossed themselves before each at-bat: “Leave God alone and let Him enjoy the game.”

As the entire political world looks to Massachusetts today to see what its voters (or at least those willing to vote in a special election) do about an open Senate seat, Republicans, of course, are excited by the possibility that they can kill health care reform by denying Democrats the 60th vote they need for final passage of the reform plan in the upper chamber. But it kinda makes you wonder why in all the obsessive coverage of the MA race, we aren’t seeing the last Republican to win a major statewide office in the Bay State: you know, Mitt Romney, supposedly the front-runner for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination.
Politico‘s Alex Isenstadt raises that question today, and the bottom line is that, well, Romney’s just not that popular in Massachusetts:

Romney’s White House run, said Jeffrey Berry, a Tufts University political scientist, left a sour taste in the mouths of state voters.
“Mitt Romney is an unpopular former governor. He left the state to run for president and people feel he was insincere when he ran for governor in the first place,” said Berry. “He hasn’t really been a part of Massachusetts political culture since he left office. I think people thought he ran for office merely to run for president.”
Andrew Smith, director of the University of New Hampshire Survey Center, explained that voters in Massachusetts had recoiled after Romney took a sharp right turn on social issues during the presidential campaign — and the former Massachusetts governor went so far as to criticize his home state over its legalization of gay marriage.
“He sort of lost credibility among voters in the state,” said Smith.

This certainly helps explain why Republican candidate Scott Brown hasn’t been anxious to recruit Romney to run around the state with him, but there may be something else going on that is keeping Romney out of the picture: Brown’s support for the Massachusetts health system, which is by all accounts a major albatross for Mitt in his future presidential aspirations.
After all, Brown’s number one talking point in recent days has been that his state doesn’t need federal health care reform because it’s already enacted a strikingly similar set of reforms on its own. National action, he argues, will just mean Massachusetts taxpayers will have to help other states get up to speed in covering the uninsured.
This may be an effective argument in Massachusetts, but it’s not terribly appealing to Republicans elsewhere, who typically view the kind of reforms enacted under Romney’s leadership in the Bay State as rampant socialism. The last thing Romney needs is to put himself in the middle of that particular debate.
And so, irony of ironies, the most famous Massachusetts Republican is out of public sight on the day when Massachusetts could give the GOP a very famous victory. That doesn’t bode well for Mitt’s 2012 prospects, and for that matter, for Republican claims that a Brown victory can be exported elswewhere–say, to the 49 states who haven’t enacted a health care reform initiative much like the one they are trying to kill in Congress.

I don’t really have much of anything to add to what I wrote about the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a year ago. So I’ll just repost it with a reiterated hope that all readers find some time today to actually read some of what Dr. King said and wrote.

There will be a natural tendency this year to conflate the annual commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., with the inauguration of Barack Obama. Without question, Obama’s election represented a milestone in the racial saga of the United States, and had he lived until now, no one would have been more pleased, and perhaps astonished, by this development than King himself. (It is a bit startling to realize that Martin Luther King was born just 80 years ago, and might today still be an active and respected voice–perhaps an Inaugural prayer-leader?–had he been permitted to live).
But it’s important to maintain the integrity of King’s legacy, which was reflected in Obama’s election, but hardly fulfilled.
King represented, after all, a perpetual challenge to the people of the United States that is always necessary, but can never be fully met: to live up completely to the civic and religious values nearly all of us claim to cherish.
He held up a mirror to the Americans of his time, and demanded they take a close look at themselves according to their own professed standards. Many refused, and some never forgave him for the audacity of the demand itself. But although Jim Crow finally died, and we now have an African-American president, the demand remains as provocative and essential as ever.
So take some time today, if you can, to read or re-read Letter From a Birmingham Jail, or, if you are a Christian, Paul’s Letter to American Christians. They haven’t lost their power despite the passage of years. And they still serve as a reminder of the fundamental radicalism of the Declaration of Independence, and of the Gospels.
All too many people think of MLK as merely a historical figure, and of his commemorative day as a tribute to the Civil Rights movement that culminated before King’s death. For such people, the inauguration of Barack Obama tomorrow will become just another reason to consign King and his mission to the history books. But if you actually read him or listen to him, it becomes clear that his message is as fresh and relevant–and radical–as ever.

So with polls showing a very close Senate race in Massachusetts, the President’s decided to go campaign for Democrat Martha Coakley this Sunday, two days before the special election.
He will be second-guessed for this decision, on grounds that he will now “own” the results. But I don’t think he really has any choice.
Special elections are “about” turnout, and there’s zero question that only a highly disproportionate turnout rate between Ds and Rs can produce a win by Republican Scott Brown. There’s nothing quite like presidential involvement to raise the stakes of an election for voters, and I doubt seriously Bay State GOPers can get any more motivated than they already are.
Sure, you can say that Coakley’s languid campaign got her into this position, and that Democrats nationally, including the President, don’t deserve any of the blame if she loses. But anyone who doesn’t acknowledge that a Brown victory would be widely interpreted as a personal setback for Obama–not to mention an immediate problem in terms of enacting legislation in the Senate–isn’t really thinking this through.
We’re getting to the point where the president is no longer in a position to hoard political capital; he needs to create some. And Massachusetts is one place where he could and should be able to do that.

Yesterday I posted some thoughts on the relationship between the Tea Party Movement and the Republican Party, suggesting the latter was probably in the process of swallowing the former.
At about the same time, the ever-excellent David Weigel of the Washington Independent provided another, and very detailed, perspective on the Tea Party/GOP relationship in the context of the controversy over next month’s National Tea Party Convention in Nashvillle.
Weigel reports that while some of the grumbling over the convention among Tea Party activists has been published in the context of an alleged “takeover” or “hijacking” of the Movement by Republican pols. But at the same time, there’s not much interest in any other political direction:

Nine months ago, [American Liberty Alliance chairman Eric] Odom got national headlines for pre-emptively denying RNC Chairman Michael Steele a speaking slot at the Chicago Tea Party. “We prefer to limit stage time to those who are not elected officials, both in government as well as political parties,” he said at the time. Today, Steele is winning a Tea Party Nation web poll on whether he should speak the convention, and Odom is gearing up for a trip to Massachusetts to help the Republican candidate, Scott Brown, take the state’s open Senate seat. The Tea Party Express, an operation of the GOP-supporting Our Country Deserves Better PAC which has been utterly rejected by some Tea Party activists, is rolling into the convention and catching hardly any flack for it. The presence of Palin, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) at the convention is seen, universally, as a coup with import that will outlive the controversy over the event itself.

So for all the protests by Tea Party activists about their hostility to the Republican “establishment” and their independence from both parties, it appears their short-term political objectives, and their heroes, are so closely aligned with the GOP’s dominant conservative wing that you can barely tell them apart.
UPDATE: Two other new pieces of note have appeared on this subject: a New York Times report by Kate Zernike on the growing determination of Tea Party activists to take over the GOP at the grassroots level and move it sharply to the Right; and a piece by Michelle Goldberg at TAP about Christian Right involvement in the Tea Party Movement, which calls into question its supposed libertarian character.

This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
Recent polls show their movement is thought of more favorably by Americans than either the Democratic or Republican Parties. Political independents are said to be attracted more each day. Progressive dissenters against the “pro-corporate” policies of the Obama administration pine for alliances with them.
But at the same time, Republican politicians constantly ape their rhetoric and seek to deploy them against their Democratic, and sometimes intraparty, enemies.
So the question persists: Is the Tea Party Movement an independent “third force” in American politics? Or is it essentially a right-wing faction aimed at the conquest of the Republican Party?
There are no snap answers to these questions. Tea Party activists unsurprisingly stress their independence from both parties, and their hostility towards the “Republican establishment.” The grassroots and citizen-based nature of the movement is constantly promoted as a bedrock principle. And even when tea-partiers operate in the conventional electoral setting of Republican primaries, their candidates are billed as insurgents, not as intraparty warriors.
But the fact remains that these candidates are almost invariably self-identified Republicans, campaigning on traditional conservative Republican themes, and cooperating with Republican politicians tactically and strategically on major issues. There is zero visible outreach to Democrats of any stripe. And to the extent there is a consensus Tea Party ideology, it is indistinguishable in any significant way from the longstanding agenda of the right wing of the GOP—particular the agenda of the most recent past, when conservatives have sought conspicuously to disassociate themselves from the record of the Bush administration.
Republican politicians are already very active in the movement itself. Former Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio, who appears to have a better than even chance of toppling popular Republican governor Charlie Crist in a Senate primary this year, is a major figure in both the Tea Party Movement and more traditional conservative GOP circles. South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, generally known as the most conservative Republican U.S. senator, has said: “We need to stop looking at the tea parties as separate from the Republican Party.” (For a look at the rise of Tea Partiers in the House, read Lydia DePillis’s excellent piece.)
What makes this sort of talk especially relevant politically is that it serves a very deep psychological need among contemporary conservative Republicans. They’ve largely succeeded in subduing those few voices in the GOP urging a old-fashioned “big tent” party that’s tolerant of ideological moderates. Now the Tea Party phenomenon offers conservative Republicans a talking point they badly need: evidence that there is a previously hidden conservative majority in the country that only a more sharply consistent conservative message can reach. In other words, electoral gold is to be found on the right, not in the center, of the ideological spectrum. But aside from a shared antipathy towards Barack Obama, “liberals,” taxes, and various other bugaboos, sealing the deal between a “reformed” GOP and Tea Party activists is a complicated proposition.
This much has been made clear by the calling of a National Tea Party Convention in Nashville next month, by a for-profit group called Tea Party Nation. Aside from the questionable right of anyone in particular to “convene” this highly decentralized movement, a $549 registration fee has raised hackles in many circles, and it’s not clear how legitimate the Nashville gathering—denounced this week by the highly influential RedState founder Erick Erickson as “scammy”—will turn out to be.
But interestingly enough, no one seems to be complaining about the speakers list put together for the National Tea Party Convention. The big keynote speaker is Sarah Palin; other featured speakers include Republican House members Michelle Bachmann and Marsha Blackburn (the latter a member of the House GOP leadership). Aside from illustrating an unusual and admirable commitment to gender equity in speaking gigs, this lineup does not exactly show uneasiness about alliances with Republican pols.
The Nashville linup also would appear to rebut another commonly held argument that the Tea Party Movement’s independence is guaranteed by its fundamentally libertarian character, so incompatible with the GOP’s heavy reliance on cultural conservatives and foreign-policy neocons. Palin is, of course, the maximum heroine of cultural conservatives. Bachmann is famous for questioning the patriotism of any and all Democrats. Beyond that, Tea Party Convention panelists include the Christian Right warhorse Rick Scarborough of Vision America (notable, among other things, for his advocacy of global conflict with Muslims) and Judge Roy Moore, the famous “Ten Commandments Judge” who’s a favorite of theocrats everywhere. No genuine libertarian would embrace this crew.
Indeed, for all the talk about the Tea Party Movement as a potential “third force” in American politics, it’s just as easy to argue that it’s mainly composed of right-wing Republican activists who have been radicalized by the political and economic events of the last couple of years, and particularly by the election of Barack Obama.
The usefulness of the Tea Party Movement in a full right-wing takeover of the Republican Party is obvious. What’s less obvious is why a close relationship with Republican politicians serves the purposes of truly independent citizen-activists disgusted by the political status quo. Republicans have swallowed a lot of Tea Party rhetoric, but they may be in the process of swallowing up the Tea Party Movement.