This item was cross-posted at The New Republic.
It´s too early to write off the gubernatorial aspirations of Creigh Deeds in Virginia, but if he doesn´t overcome a consistent lead by Republican Bob McDonnell in the next twelve days, you can be sure many pundits will attribute his defeat to Barack Obama.
There´s only one problem with this hypothesis: despite his extraordinary unpopularity in other parts of the South, the President remains relatively popular in the Old Dominion. According to pollster.com, Obama´s average approval/disapproval ratio in recent Virginia polls is 51/46. Even Rasmussen has him in positive territory at 53/47, and the latest Washington Post poll had him at 53/46. This is precisely the same margin by which Obama carried the Commonwealth last November.
Nor does general disdain for the Democratic Party appear to be the culprit. The current governor of Virginia, Tim Kaine, is chairman of the Democratic National Committee. His average approval ratio at pollster.com currently stands at 53/39.
It´s always tempting to interpret state electoral contests as bellwethers for national political trends, particular in odd years like this one. But it´s usually wrong.

Anyone familiar with sentiment in the region is aware that Barack Obama isn´t very popular among white voters in the Deep South. The Obama-Biden ticket did worse than Kerry-Edwards `04 among white voters in much of that area, despite the Democratic breakthroughs in nearby North Carolina and Virginia.
But the scope of the continuing unpopularity of Obama and Democrats in the South is graphically demonstrated in recent analysis from DKos-R2K. Obama´s overall national favorable/unfavorable ratio in its October poll was 55/37. In the South, it was 27/68. The Republican Party´s rating nationally was 21/67. In the South, it was 48/37. The Democratic Party´s national rating was 41/51. In the South, it was 21/72. And on the congressional ¨generic ballot,“ Democrats led nationally 35/29; GOPers led in the South 47/21.
These are regional averages which almost certainly overstate Democrats´ problems in Florida, NC, and Virginia, but may also understate the problem in the Deep South.
Such numbers will undoubtedly reinforce already strong tendencies by non-southern Democrats to “write off“ the region as intractably reactionary if not incurably racist. That would be a major mistake. Most of the congressional districts held by southern Democrats are far friendlier to Obama than the regional averages indicate, and we need to hold as many of them as possible (the same is true of many statewide offices, and in the state legislative contests that will determine control of redistricting). And as the 2008 results in FL, NC and VA showed, there are demographic trends in the region that give Democrats considerable future hope wherever sufficient concentrations of minority voters, upscale professionals, and academic/research centers co-exist.
What the current numbers probably reflect more than anything is the exceptional unhappiness of southerners with the economy, which has reversed decades of sunbelt growth. If high southern unemployment rates begin to turn around by 2010 or 2012, the South´s outlier status may moderate as well.

I´ve been something of a skeptic, perhaps even an alarmist, about the idea of dumping decisions on how to design the health care system on the states via some sort of state opt-in or opt-out of the public option, in part because of the likely impact on the 2010 campaign in states across the country, and the impact of the campaign on health care decisions.
Turns out we may be getting a preview of the latter dynamic:

At the final debate of the race last night, Virginia Democratic gubernatorial nominee Creigh Deeds said he “shared the broad goals” of health care reform, but would “certainly consider opting out” of a public option “if that were available to Virginia.”
“I’m not afraid of going against my fellow Democrats when they’re wrong,” Deeds said. “A public option isn’t required in my view.”

This could become a pretty common line in 2010 if states are indeed asked to figure out the public option and the many related decisions about health care.

As the economy continues to struggle, it´s increasingly obvious that some sort of federal job tax credit may be the only ´´second stimulus package´´ that could gain traction in Congress.
The idea has long attracted conservative support, but lately progressives, including former Labor Secretary Robert Reich and the Economic Policy Institute, have been out in front. It´s popular among some Democrats and economists in part because its costs are dependent on its success (unlike across-the-board tax cuts), and in part because it´s viewed as a way to counteract offshoring of jobs.
EPI has a new job tax credit proposal out, and it´s very focused on designing a credit that is large enough to have an immediate impact, temporary enough to keep its cost relatively low, and efficient enough to avoid corporate freeloading.
If there´s another idea that can serve as the centerpiece of a follow-up to the stimulus legislation, I don´t know what it would be. Waiting for a cyclical economic recovery seems irresponsible, and certainly dangerous to the party controlling the White House and Congress.

One of the most important current conservative political memes is to make George W. Bush a very distant memory, even though he was still Commander in Chief just ten months ago. There are two reasons for this, of course: conservatives want to blame Barack Obama for the policies and conditions he inherited, and they also want to pretend the 43d president’s ideology and policies had nothing to do with what his successors on the Right are promoting today.
Since it it rather difficult to argue on any rational basis that the domestic and international state of the nation was shaped far more by the man who was in the White House for the last eight years than the man who’s barely unpacked, a twist on the “blame card” meme is to suggest that Obama and Democrats are, well, being impolite and cowardly by failiing to suck it up and take responsibility for what they walked into on January 20. A good example is a new column by National Review’s Rich Lowry:

When Obama first burst on the scene, he seemed to respect the other side. That refreshing Obama is long gone. Now, he impugns his immediate predecessor with classless regularity, and attributes the worst of motives – pure partisanship and unrestrained greed – to those who oppose him. Their assigned role is to get the hell out of his way.
The acid test of the White House inevitably exposes a president’s character flaws: Nixon’s corrosive paranoia, Clinton’s self-destructive indiscipline, Bush’s stubborn defensiveness. Obama in the crucible is exhibiting an oddly self-pitying arrogance. It’s unbecoming in anyone, let alone the most powerful man on the planet.

So forget about facts; forget about actual responsibility; forget about justifying a different policy course at home and abroad by explaining why the Bush approach failed so dismally. Obama isn’t a mensch unless he shoulders Bush’s blame, and he must “respect” his opponents by absolving them of responsibility for their own deeds and for the policies of the man they so recently lionized as a world-historical colossus.
There’s little doubt that history will judge the Bush administration as a batch of gambles–from the invasion of Iraq, to the abandonment of ailliances, to the demonization of “enemies” overseas and domestic, to giant regressive tax cuts, to an effort to gut the New Deal legacy, and to a systematic attempt to govern in the most partisan manner possible–that failed. It’s simply wrong to forget all that, even for a moment.

A couple weeks ago I expressed skepticism about a Pew survey suggesting that a majority of Americans were feeling pretty bullish about military action towards Iran to stop its nuclear program, in no small part because the poll didn’t distinguish between different types of military action.
Now there’s a Washington Post/ABC poll finding that’s a bit more nuanced. 42% of respondents favor an air attack on Iranian facilities to prevent acquisition of nuclear weapons, while 54% oppose that step; and 33% favor an invasion of Iran to topple the government, while 62% are opposed.
The Post write-up on the poll notes that partisan differences on these questions aren’t as large as you might expect, though ideological splits are more noticeable (liberals oppose bombing Iran 74/24, while conservatives favor it 56/38, and moderates are positioned exactly half-way between the two). Even Republicans (57/40) and conservatives (51/44) oppose a ground invasion aimed at regime change, perhaps remembering how that went in Iraq.
This poll doesn’t make support for military action contingent on the failure of other options; Americans support direct talks with Iran by 82/18, and international economic sanctions by 78/18.

The crucial nature of the individual mandate for health care reform has drawn some helpful attention to the fact that universal coverage isn’t just a charity measure for the uninsured, but a way of creating a risk pool broad enough to lower costs generally, while also avoiding over-utilization of high-cost care options like emergency rooms. In fact, private insurance companies are among the most avid supporters of the individual mandate because it guarantees them new customers.
But as Peter Harbage explains at The New Republic today, a penalty-based coverage mandate isn’t the only way, or even the best way, to get more people insured:

[F]or all of the attention we’re paying to mandates, we’re not giving nearly enough attention to automatic enrollment and other innovations that can get people insured, rather than penalize them if they’re not. Ideally, we’ll get to a “culture of coverage” where everyone assumes they are supposed to have health insurance, much as everybody now assumes they are supposed to get primary education. The situation is quite similar, actually: We have truancy penalties, but most parents send their kids to school because the education system is affordable to families, easy to access, and social pressure says it is the right thing to do.

Automatic enrollment could not only make sure people are insured, but can also help steer them to the plan best designed for their medical and economic circumstances. They would be free to change coverage, but wouldn’t be forced to navigate the current highly complex system to get covered in the first place. It’s worth thinking about as we near the end-game of the health reform debate.

Now that every committee of jurisdiction in both Houses of Congress has reported health care reform legislation, it’s time for reform advocates to focus obsessively on one formidable “choke point” that could kill legislation: a Republican Senate filibuster supported by Democrats. This is true not only for progressives generally, but specifically for hard-core supporters of a “robust” public option. The odds of getting 60 senators to pre-commit to that kind of bill are roughly zero. The odds of getting 60 senators to allow a vote in which 50 senators support that kind of bill are much, much better.
That’s why I applaud blogger Mike Stark’s fairly successful effort to corner Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas on the very specific question of Pryor’s willingness to support a filibuster. Pryor allowed as how it would take a “crazy” development on the substance of the legislation to convince him to vote against cloture. That’s not an unconditional commitment, but it’s still pretty important. Other reform advocates should emulate Stark, and focus their questions and please to Democratic senators on the sole question of helping Republicans block a vote on the party’s and the Obama administration’s top domestic prioriity. How they vote on the bill itself is strictly secondary at this point, and completely irrelevant if cloture fails.
This issue is becoming even more critical and time-sensitive given Joe Lieberman’s broad hints that there is not any template for health care reform that he can support. You can get upset about that, or you can say you don’t give a damn how Lieberman votes on final passage of a health reform bill so long as he votes for cloture to allow it to come to the floor. When Lieberman was allowed to keep his committee chairmanship after campaigning for the Republican presidential candidate for president in 2008, it was with the implicit understanding that he’d vote with the caucus on procedural votes. Despite many recent efforts to create a 60-vote threshold for passage of legislation by making cloture votes synonymous with final passage votes, cloture is inherently and exclusively a procedural matter. There should be no excuse for “no” votes on cloture for something this important.
I unuderstand that many progressives remain focused on the public option, and fearful that the final congressional product will be unacceptable from their point of view. But that’s an entirely academic issue until such time as 60 votes are secured for cloture. Get that done, and then we can fight over which version of the public option can secure 218 votes in the House and 50 votes in the Senate, and can initiate meaningful and successful health care reform.

For much of this year, one of the surest bets in political circles has been that embattled New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine would go down to defeat at the hands of Republican former U.S. attorney Chris Christie. Aside from Christie’s (now tarnished) goo-goo rep as a corruption fighter, the thinking was that Corzine had a “ceiling” of somewhere in the low forties, thanks to persistently low approval ratings and the likelihood that most NJ voters had fixed opinions of the incumbents. Thus, for the first time in decades, a GOP candidate would get the late breaks in a NJ campaign, and end the party’s long losing streak in the Garden State.
Now the polls are all showing Corzine and Christie running neck-and-neck, with the big wild card being the double-digit support being attracted by independent candidate Chris Daggett.
At Politico today, Jonathan Martin looks at the race from Christie’s perspective, and focuses on the strategic dilemma faced by the GOP candidate in dealing with Daggett:

Christie, who had been running a traditional anti-incumbent campaign against Corzine, must now reckon with a perennial question faced by candidates who are imperiled by a lesser-known, third-party contender: To attack Daggett is to elevate him, effectively acknowledging that he’s a serious candidate and offering him free publicity. But ignoring him could amount to disregarding the most serious threat to Christie’s campaign, leaving Daggett to siphon away a significant amount of voters who are intent on registering their opposition to Corzine.

But Christie really doesn’t control that decision, since his major funding source, the Republican Governors’ Association, has already started going after Daggett with sledge hammers. It appears their theory is that attacks on Daggett as a “tax-and-spend liberal” will either flip Daggett voters to Christie, or perhaps even drive liberal voters who would otherwise support Corzine to the third-party candidate (who already has significant support from environmentalists). Again, the operative assumption is that Corzine’s vote has hit its “ceiling,” so there’s relatively little risk in drawing further attention to Daggett.
But you have to wonder: does Christie’s vote (now that he’s increasingly campaigning like a conventional conservative Republican) also have a “ceiling,” based on the Republican Party’s legendary handicaps in NJ?
This question shows why the outcome in NJ may have national significance, beyond the silly efforts of pundits to make every state race a referendum on Barack Obama, and the undoubtedly positive impact a Corzine win would have on Democrats who had written off the incumbent many months ago. If the Republican party “brand” is enough to sink a challenger against one of the most vulnerable opponents you’ll ever see, then Democrats aren’t the only party with a lot to worry about going into next year’s 2010 midterms.