I am flattered that Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics devoted a long column to a point-by-point response to my recent piece on all the predictions that 2010 is shaping up into a reprise of the 1994 “Republican Revolution.” I won’t conduct a point-by-point response to his response, because in many important respects, that misses the whole point I was trying to make.
The meme I was trying to refute was the idea that Democrats are doomed to disaster in 2010 because Barack Obama has “overreached” his barely-existing mandate by trying to implement his campaign platform, inviting a massive rebuke from the electorate that will confirm the country’s enduring “center-right” political character, and retroactively confim that the 2006 and 2008 Democratic victories were an ephemeral response to the incompetence (or according to some Republicans, liberalism) of George W. Bush and his congressional allies. I won’t attribute that pattern of thinking to Sean Trende, but it’s unquestionably at the heart of much of the GOP confidence about 2010, much more so than any close analysis of the PVI of specific House districts.
Given my motives, I should not, in retrospect, have succumbed to the temptation of making my own predictions, suggesting that House losses for Democrats might well come it at about ten. The truth is that I don’t know what’s going to happen in 2010, and nor does anyone else (as Trende admits). And that’s in part because I have no real clue what will happen to the U.S. and global economies between now and then–which, as Trende notes, I didn’t discuss in my own piece–or, of equal importance, the extent to which the Democratic Party will be blamed for bad economic conditions that palpably began during the Bush administration, driven largely by forces closely aligned with the GOP.
But that observation leads to a disconnect between 1994 and 2010 which I did mention, and Trende did not comment on: the exceptional weakness of the Republican Party right now. In 1994, Democrats were the eternal party of the congressional status quo. Anyone seriously desiring “change” in Congress had to seriously hope for a Republican victory, if only to shake things up. Voters today have a very recent experience with GOP rule at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, and it’s doubtful that the corruption, extremism and partisanship of the Republican Party at the height of the Bush-DeLay era will be forgotten very soon. That’s why the declining popularity of the Democratic Party this year has largely translated into dealignment, not realignment. And while you can make a credible case that an energized Republican base will dominate a low-turnout election in which the “dealigned” refuse to participate, it’s by no means certain or even probable at this point.
“Wave” elections, much less “revolutions,” depend heavily on these sort of national dynamics. District-by-district analysis of likely outcomes don’t produce “revolutionary” expectations, which is why most of the serious number-crunchers, from David Wasserman to Michael Barone, aren’t predicting a 1994-type result.
There is one specific point Trende makes that I want to talk about: his argument that the relatively high number of Democratic House members in districts with a pro-Republican PVI means that the “ideological sorting out” of the two parties in the 1980s and 1990s, which I cited as a big and nonrecurring factor in the 1994 results, was temporarily “reversed” in 2006 and 2008 by “pro-life, pro-gun” Democrats beating “corrupt or incompetent” Republican incumbents. These Democrats, argues Trende, are now ripe targets for the GOP.
Keep in mind that PVI measures the presidential performance of each party as compared to national percentages. So of the 66 Democratic House members in districts with a pro-Republican PVI, a significantly lower number, 49, are in districts actually won by John McCain (as compared to 34 Republicans representing districts carried by Barack Obama).
While the comparable 1994 numbers were in the same ballpark, they were in fact higher (79 Democratic incumbents in districts with a pro-Republican PVI, and 52 in districts carried by Bush 41, a number that is probably misleadingly low because of Ross Perot’s third-party candidacy). That matters when you are talking about major losses and “revolutions.” But the bigger factor, particularly in the South, in 1994 was the combination of open seats via retirement and redistricting (Trende dismisses the former factor because it’s too early to know if today’s tiny number of Democratic retirements won’t rise, and doesn’t mention the latter). And the “ideological sorting-out” I discussed refers to the irrefutable fact that 1994 marked the end of a decades-long situation where entrenched conservative Democratic incumbents benefitted from habitual ticket-splitting. That era is long gone, which is why I say that today’s Democrats in pro-Republican PVI districts seem to have gained some advantage that their 1994 predecessors (or at least those who didn’t retire or get gerrymandered out of office) didn’t have.
Consider a perpetually targeted southern Democrat, Jim Marshall of Georgia. Marshall’s district carries a pro-Republican PVI of +10, yet he won with 57% of the vote in 2008, and back in 2004, when there was no pro-Democratic “wave,” won with 63% of the vote (as Bush 43 carried the district with 58%) against a celebrated and lavishly financed Republican opponent making his second race against Marshall. Is he an exceptionally large bet to lose in 2010? I don’t think so. At this point, the Cook Political Report does not list his race as competitive. That could change, but then again, so could everything else that analysts are pointiing to as indicating a big Republican year.
One final point: Trende suggests that my notes on the invulnerability of the Senate Democratic majority is “knocking down a straw man,” since no one is specifically predicting a Republican takeover. That’s true, but that’s also why the 1994 analogies need to be tempered considerably. It was the top-to-bottom landslide nature of the 1994 results that made them constitute a “revolution,” however short-lived. Whatever happens in 2010, it’s not likely to constitute a “revolution,” and all the partisan and ideological freight carried by that term–the “center-right nation” meme, the Clinton analogies, and the constant mockery of Obama’s “over-reaching”–should be put back on the agitprop shelf where it belongs.

A week ago I reported that famed right-wing agitator Richard Viguerie was extremely upset with House Minority Leader John Boehner for conceding on Meet the Press that he didn’t believe President Obama was a “socialist.” So Viguerie polled his own readership on the question of the president’s ideology, and got this response:

An online poll conducted by the Web site ConservativeHQ.com found that a near-unanimous 95 percent of respondents disagreed with House Republican Leader John Boehner’s recent statement that he did not consider President Obama to be a socialist….
Only 4 percent agreed with Boehner, with 1 percent undecided.
The poll then asked to evaluate Obama’s political philosophy. Of the 975 respondents, the results were:
Centrist–1%
Traditional Liberal–1%
Socialist–37%
Marxist–59%
Other–2%
Undecided–0%

Now granted, the kind of people who look to Viguerie for leadership tend to come from the hard-core conservative fringe. And I can only guess how they would define the word “Marxist.” But the fact that well over five hundred people, offered the alternative of “socialist,” insisted on the “Marxist” label is pretty bizarre, since it implies they think the President of the United States is determined to seize the means of production on behalf of the industrial proletariat (not, BTW, the most pro-Democratic of demographic groups these days).
No wonder a Newsmax columnist has just published a piece suggesting that the U.S. military might need to launch a coup d’etat to overthrow the U.S. government. With secessionist and nullification views making a big comeback, and plenty of people still believing the president is some sort of foreign Muslim “plant,” it’s no surprise the completely hallucinatory idea of Barack Obama as a Marxist has some purchase in the same precincts of the Right.

Now that the Senate Finance Committee has voted down two versions of a public option for health care reform, many progressives will undoubtedly start focusing on the possible use of the budget reconciliation process for this legislation to reduce the threshold for passage (in theory, at least) to 51 votes.
Anyone tempted to say “Reconciliation or Bust!” should give a gander to a post by Mark Schmitt at The American Prospect that reviews the history and purpose of the reconciliation process in some detail.

This wasn’t originally meant to be a grand process for big policy changes. Rather, it was designed to “reconcile” the modern budget process with the arcane congressional process. In 1981, Ronald Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, figured out that the process could be used to package together and force a vote on the big budget cuts they envisioned. Later that decade, Sen. Byrd created the rule that bears his name to put some boundaries around the process, although it has still been used for both bipartisan (1990 and 1997 budget deals) and single-party bills, including welfare reform and tax cuts. But even in those cases, legislation has been sharply trimmed to accomodate the constraints of the process — for example, that’s why the Bush tax cuts had to be set to expire.
The reason this history is important is because it is a reminder that reconciliation was not designed to create a “50-vote Senate.” It was really a limited scheme intended to connect the old spending process with the new.

In other words, any health reform bill enacted via reconciliation would almost certainly have to be “sharply trimmed to accomodate the constraints of the process.” It’s not just a convenient way to brush aside filibusters.
And for the same reason, as I’ve argued myself on occasion, the decision whether or not to utilize reconciliation for health reform is not just a matter of how bold or audacious or progressive you are. It’s a question of risks and tradoffs.
Schmitt’s even more impatient than I am with the “damn the torpedos” approach to reconciliation, using a rather arresting analogy:

In the lead-up to the Iraq War, there was a saying among neoconservatives: “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.” Now, among progressives, one might say, “Everyone wants to do health reform. Real men want to use reconciliation” to cut out all Republicans and a few Democrats. But legislative strategy, like foreign policy, is not a test of manhood. It’s a very arcane and limited process that will leave many key provisions behind, and a weak and limited health plan.
One way or another, we’ll have to compromise. We’ll either compromise with the most conservative Democrats and one or two Republicans, or we’ll compromise with the limits of a process that was designed for a totally different purpose. The political question is simply going to be which compromise is worse.

To put it more positively, health reform supporters have several strategic options remaining for getting acceptable legislation through this Congress and onto President Obama’s desk. The reconciliation process is but one of them, and the fact that it would theoretically make it possible to bypass “centrist” opinion, while perhaps emotionally satisfying, doesn’t necessarily recommend it as the best way forward.

As you may have heard by now, the Senate Finance Committee voted down two different amendments adding a public option to its health care reform bill. The first, offered by Jay Rockefeller, was a so-called “robust” public option linked closely to Medicare. It went down 8 to 15, with all the Republicans and five Democrats voting nay. The second, offered by Chuck Schumer, was the “level-playing-field” public option, which would compete with private plans but without forcing down provider payments to Medicare levels. It picked up two senators, Tom Carper and Bill Nelson, who voted against the Rockefeller amendment, but lost 10 to 13 as Democratic senators Baucus, Lincoln and Conrad still voted no.
After the second vote, Schumer concluded rather obviously that there weren’t 60 votes in the Senate for the public option. That’s not the same, of course, as saying there are 60 votes to filibuster a bill with the public option (which could still reach the floor after the Finance and HELP bills are merged) , and should Senate leaders decide to pursue the budget reconciliation route, 60 votes aren’t necessary anyway. And ultimately, 60 votes for a bill with the public option in the Senate isn’t the same as 60 votes for a conference committee report including the public option, if the alternative is to kill health reform entirely. On top of everything else, a “triggered” public option, for those who consider that acceptable, remains a very live possibility.
So there’s a long way to go on this issue. But today’s votes, predictable as they were, may represent a shock to progressives who thought that public opinion polls and activist pressure would make Democratic opposition to the public option melt away.

One of the longest-running themes in a certain sort of mainstream journalism is the claim that the internet has enabled a vast rise in unregulated hate speech, particularly of the antisemitic variety. Almost invariably, such claims focus on comment threads in which crazy people lurk in obnoxious obscurity.
Last week Washington Post columnist (and former George W. Bush speechwriter) Mike Gerson penned a particularly strange and sweeping version of this claim, suggesting that “cyber-bigots” pose a threat similar to that of–yes, you guessed it–the Nazis, whose pioneering use of radio for hate speech is supposedly the precedent and analog for today’s comment-thread lurkers.
When fellow Post-man Ezra Klein posted a pretty obvious response noting that a more reasonable analog for yesterday’s radio-enabled hate talk is today’s radio-(and cable TV-)enabled hate talk, Gerson had a public meltdown. Writing in a Post blog, Gerson went directly after Klein as an a member of the President’s “unpaid policy staff” (a strange complaint coming from someone who became famous as a paid presidential staffer), called his observations “ignorant,” and then insulted his ethical sensibilities. But as Jonathan Chait notes today in a tart smackdown, Gerson’s big trump card was the fatuous claim that Holocaust Museum shooter James Van Brunn was a creature of the internet.
On a separate front, Spencer Ackerman performed his own smackdown of Gerson for the man’s audacity in lecturing liberal Jews about how to deal with antisemitism.
Since Gerson is a Christian, and so am I, allow me to offer my own advice: it would be more seemly, and for that matter, ethical, if you didn’t dismiss the obvious, huge-audience haters in your own political community, and your own more conventional media, before going all Confessing Church on the incredibly marginal internet ranters that you apparently associate with the Left. You know, Matthew 7:3: “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”

A lot of progressives are focused on today’s events in the Senate Finance Committee as a sort of Battle of Armageddon on health care reform, since the Committee will formally vote on a Rockefeller-Schumer amendment to add a public option to the Baucus proposal, which currently lacks one. You can follow the action via Tim Noah’s liveblog at Slate.
But as Chris Bowers keeps pointing out at OpenLeft, the Finance markup isn’t the last, or even the best, opportunity for a public option to emerge in the Senate debate. That will happen when the Finance and HELP Committee versions of health care reform are merged under the direction of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, with our without the benefit of budget reconciliation rules. There’s another possible shot at a public option in a House-Senate conference committee, but it’s unlikely the Senate will be any friendlier to the idea later rather than sooner.
Now that’s all she wrote to a lot of progressives; either the public option is attached to the bill, or health care reform legislation has failed and isn’t worth pursuing, since it merely represents gigantic subsidies to private health insurers. If you are in that camp, you might want to force yourself to read Jonathan Cohn’s piece today on health reform without a public option in The Netherlands.
Cohn’s basic point is that aggressive government regulation of private health insurers can accomplish a lot of the same things as competition from a public option, particularly in terms of limiting out-of-pocket consumer costs and preventing discriminatory treatment of the sick and/or poor. Moreover, such regulations are often politically popular, even among rank-and-file Republicans. So it might be a good idea, during the Senate Finance Committee and later in the process, to focus a bit on the regulatory questions that will determine the ground rules for any new competitive system of health insurance, whether or not a “robust” public option is one of the players.

A lot of the political implications of the health care reform fight depend heavily on what happens between now and the end of this congressional session. But one “victim,” as Andy Barr puts it in Politico today, is pretty clear regardless of the ultimate outcome: Mitt Romney.

Three years ago, Romney was heralded for his innovative effort to institute near-universal health care in his state. But now that the issue has emerged as a partisan fault line and the Massachusetts plan has provided some guidance for Democratic reform efforts, Romney finds himself bruised and on the defensive as the GOP rallies around opposition to President Barack Obama’s plans.

Some of the flack aimed at Romney has to do with the perceived consequences of the Massachusetts health reform initiative, particularly in terms of costs. Here’s Mike Huckabee’s vicious little swipe on that point:

“It’s going to bankrupt their entire budget,” former Arkansas GOP Gov. Mike Huckabee said of Romney’s health care program in his address to the [Values Voters] summit. “The only thing inexpensive about the Massachusetts health care bill is that there you can get a $50 abortion.”

Nice, eh? But the broader problem for Romney is that it’s hard to attack current health reform plans as a “government takeover of health care,” and individual or employer mandates as the extinction of freedom, without applying similar rhetoric to Romney’s initiative. And while Romney didn’t talk much about his health care record during his 2008 presidential run, he hasn’t repudiated it, either–if for no other reason, because he’s trying to shake a reputation as an opportunistic flip-flopper. With Republicans treating health care reform as an outrage similar in audacity to the Sack of Rome, there’s just no way a good bit of this hate won’t rub off on the Mittster, particularly in the crucible of another presidential campaign.
You have to figure many Republicans are privately unhappy with this situation. Ever since the last election day, the CW in Washington has been that Romney is the best option the GOP has for 2012, particularly after Jon Huntsman all but took himself out of the running by joining the Obama administration as ambassador to China. Romney ran a reasonably viable if flawed campaign in 2008, and wound up as the candidate of most conservatives leery of John McCain. He was a good do-be party man during the general election campaign, and according to one leading account, might have become the Veep nominee and kept Sarah Palin in obscurity had not John McCain forgotten how many houses he owned and made a Richie Rich ticket impracticable. He’s got endless money, a credible record as a blue-state governor, and the intangible advantage of being considered competent and sane even by most Democrats.
But it’s difficult to see how he overcomes responsibility for a state health care initiative that in important ways looks and sounds a lot like what Democrats are trying to enact nationally, now that hard-core shrieking opposition to health care reform has become an absolute litmus test for conservative orthodoxy.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
In political circles, Republicans and Democrats alike have begun comparing the 2010 election with the “revolution” that handed both the House and the Senate to the GOP in 1994. But how applicable is that analogy, really?
On the surface, the comparison is plausible. In 1994, as now, a charismatic outsider took office amid general unhappiness with the record of his Republican predecessor. Then, as now, the president decided to make health care reform a signature issue despite widespread concerns about the economy, taxes, and federal budget deficits. And, as now, Republicans responded with an abrasive political strategy that energized their conservative base, at a time when Democrats were seemingly divided between centrists and liberals discouraged by the new president’s perceived centrist path.
It’s impossible, however, to draw concrete conclusions from such superficial observations. A more disconcerting parallel for Democrats might be the scope of their recent winning streak. In the elections leading up to both 1994 and 2010, Democratic victories, particularly in the House, left the party somewhat over-exposed. In 1994, 46 of the 258 House Democrats were in districts carried by President George H.W. Bush in 1992. The numbers are comparable today, where 49 of the 257 House Democrats are in districts carried by John McCain, with only 34 Republicans in districts carried by Barack Obama. Similarly, if you apply the Partisan Voting Index, (PVI), which compares a district’s prior presidential results to national averages, you find that there are 66 Democrats in districts with a Republican PVI and only 15 Republicans in districts with a Democratic PVI–a similar situation to the 79 Democrats in Republican districts in 1994. Clearly, two straight “wave” elections have eliminated most of the low-hanging fruit for Democrats in the House, and created some ripe targets for the GOP.
But that’s where the fear-inducing similarities end. The Republicans’ 1994 victory in the House was also enabled by a large number of Democratic retirements: Twenty-two of the 54 seats the GOP picked up that year were open. By comparison, the authoritative (and subscription-only) Cook Political Report counts only four open, Democrat-held House seats in territory that is even vaguely competitive. That low number of open seats is significant because it limits the number of seats Republicans can win; if there is a similar wave of retirements in the offing for 2010, the signs have yet to materialize.
The 1994 parallels appear even more tendentious in the Senate. In 1994, Democrats lost eight of the 22 seats they defended, six of which were open. Republicans had only 13 seats to defend, and three of them were open. In 2010, however, the situation lopsidedly favors Democrats. Republicans have to defend 19 of their seats, seven of which are open. Meanwhile, Democrats have to defend 19 seats, only three of which are open. For Republicans to take the Senate, Democrats would have to lose eleven seats without picking off a single Republican. There’s no modern precedent for a tsunami that large.
Another disconnect between 1994 and 2010 involves patterns of demography and ideology. The 1994 election was the high-water mark of the great ideological sorting that occurred between the two parties. That made the environment particularly harsh for southern Democrats, as well as those in the Midwest and Rocky Mountain West, where many ancestral attachments to the Donkey Party came unmoored.
In the South, this sorting-out was reinforced by the decennial reapportionment and redistricting process, during which both Republicans and civil rights activists promoted a regime of “packing” and “bleaching” districts–that is, the electoral consolidation of African-American voters. While this had a salutary effect on African-American representation in the House of Representatives, the overall effect was to weaken Democrats. This dynamic was best illustrated by my home state of Georgia, whose House delegation changed from 9-1 Democratic going into the 1992 election to 8-3 Republican after 1994.
Nothing similar to those handicaps exists today. The ideological filtering of the parties is long over; any genuine conservative Democrats or liberal Republicans left in the electorate clearly have reasons for retaining their loyalties, which will be difficult to erode. Moreover, whether or not you buy the “realignment” theories that Democrats were excited about after the 2008 elections, there is not a single discernible long-term trend that favors the Republican Party. Bush-era Republican hopes of making permanent inroads among Hispanics and women were thoroughly dashed in 2006 and 2008. Moreover, as Alan Abramowitz recently pointed out, the percentage of the electorate that is nonwhite–which is rejecting Republicans by overwhelming margins–has roughly doubled since 1994.
Still, there is one short-term demographic factor that Democrats should be alarmed about in 2010. Older voters almost always make up a larger percentage of those who go to the polls during midterm elections than they do in presidential election years. And older white voters, who contributed mightily to the Democrats’ midterm victory in 2006, are famously skeptical of Barack Obama. Indeed, they skewed away from him in 2008, even before Republicans devoted so many resources turning them against health care reform with tales of big Medicare cuts and death panels. So the Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman may have been correct when he predicted that, “[e]ven if Obama and Democrats are just as popular next November as they were last November, they might stand to lose five to ten seats in the House based on the altered composition of the midterm electorate alone.”
That’s bad, but it’s certainly not political reversal on the scale of 1994. Unlike Bill Clinton at the same time in his presidency, Obama’s approval ratings seem to have recently stabilized in the low-fifties; not great, but not that bad in a polarized country, either. And as both Abramowitz and Ron Brownstein have pointed out, in group after group of the electorate, he remains as popular as he was when he was elected. A cyclical turnover of ten House seats, which seems to be the most likely scenario in 2010, would not a revolution make.

Even as Republicans crow about perceptions of the Obama administration running aground, and look forward with growing conviction to big, 1994-style gains in 2010, an interesting thing is happening in the two big statewide races that are actually being conducted right now, in VA and NJ. After months in which Republican gubernatorial candidates Bob McDonnell (VA) and Chris Christie (NJ) held commanding leads over their Democratic rivals, both races appear to be tightening up considerably.
In VA, the last couple of major polls, from the Washington Post and Insider Advantage, showed Creigh Deeds shrinking McDonnell’s lead to four percentage points. As Margie Omero explains at Pollster.com, Deeds’ improved standing reflects ads he’s recently run in Northern Virginia linking McDonnell’s abrasively right-wing master’s thesis to his record as a public official, particularly in terms of hostility to legalized abortion. Omero goes on to suggest that Deeds can make even more hay in NoVa by focusing more on McDonnell’s expressed hostility to working women. In any event, McDonnell no longer has momentum in his favor.
In NJ, Christie’s favorability ratings have steadily worsened as he became better known, and now Democracy Corps has a new poll out showing his lead over incumbent Gov. Jon Corzine down to a single point (40%-39%, with indie candidate Chris Daggett at 11%). Republicans are probably also nervous about the general pattern of NJ statewide races in recent years, where the increasingly Democratic partisan leanings of the state seem to eventually erase early GOP leads.