There’s a bit of a buzz going on in Cultural Right circles about a new Pew survey that shows the percentage of Americans who want to outlaw “all” or “most” abortions has recently increased. Actually, to the extent that there’s a shift, it’s from the percentage that want to keep “most” abortions legal to those who want to make “most” illegal–Pew’s only allowable range of views for those in the “mushy middle” of abortion policy. This produces a shift from a 54-41 margin for “legal” versus “illegal” on abortion in August of 2008 to a 46-44 margin today.
Now you can take this seriously as a “shift” in public opinion on abortion, treat it as an outlier, or reflect on the small gap that may separate those “mostly” respondents who are consigned to opposed camps.
But I’d make a very different argument: all these categorical classifications of voter attitudes towards legalized abortion ignore what could be the trumping argument: the “why” issue.
Voters care a lot about “why” a woman seeks an abortion, and much of the evidence suggests that many people who disapprove of abortion as an abstract proposition become pretty pro-choice when actual abortions involving actual women are at issue. The most important finding in relatively recent polling on abortion was a 2003 ABC survey, during the height of the congressional fight over so-called “partial-birth abortion,” that showed over 60% of Americans favoring a “health exception” to a ban on even these much-hyped and demonized procedures. More anecdotally, the public reaction to John McCain’s mocking reference to the “health exception” in a 2008 debate with Barack Obama was quite negative.
McCain was simply reflecting the commonly-held belief in anti-abortion circles that the “health exception” makes any putative abortion bans irrelevant. If they are right, and if the evidence that a significant majority of Americans favor a “health exception” is right, then it may not much matter what people tell pollsters about their bedrock convictions on abortion. If those who want to make “most abortions” illegal in the abstract are willing to make “most abortions” legal if there’s a plausible reason for them, then the presumed “conservative shift” on abortion may be almost completely illusory.

Like a lot of non-Rush-Limbaugh listeners, when I first heard that a large faction of Republican National Committee members was pushing for a formal resolution calling on GOPers to start referring to the Democratic Party as the “Democrat Socialist Party,” I thought it was a puerile joke that the adults in the Republican Party would quash.
Apparently not. According to sources speaking to Politico‘s Roger Simon, the Republican National Committee will approve the resolution at a special meeting of the RNC called for that very purpose.
Here’s how the sponsor of the resolution, Jeff Kent from Washington State, explained its rationale a few weeks ago:

There is nothing more important for our party than bringing the truth to bear on the Democrats’ march to socialism. Just like Ronald Reagan identifying the U.S.S.R. as the evil empire was the beginning of the end to Soviet domination, we believe the American people will reject socialism when they hear the truth about how the Democrats are bankrupting our country and destroying our freedom and liberties.

I don’t know what’s more offensive: the idea of identifying the Democratic Party, which the American people elected to run Congress and the executive branch just six months ago, with the Soviet Union, or the idea that Ronald Reagan brought about the collapse of the Soviet bloc through a magic spell. All in all, the highly adolescent nature of Kent’s thinking is illustrated not only by this comic-book historical revisionism, but by his insistence on retaining in his version of the “Evil Empire” the little-boy-taunt of dropping the last syllable from the adjective “Democratic.”
The St. Paul of the “Democrat Socialist” rebranding, Indiana RNC member James Bopp, Jr., sent an encyclical around further explaining its purpose. Here’s a pertinent passage:

The threat to our country from the Obama administration cannot be underestimated. They are proceeding pell mell to nationalize major industries, to exponentially increase the size, power and intrusiveness of the federal government, to undermine free enterprise and free markets, to raise taxes to a confiscatory level, to strap future generations with enormous unsustainable debt, to debase our currency, to destroy traditional values and embrace a culture of death, and to weaken our national defense and retreat from the war on terror. Unless stopped, we will not recognize our country in a few short years.

Yeah, I think the 60-plus-percent of Americans who approve of the job President Obama is doing are pretty happy with the plan to “destroy traditional values and embrace a culture of death.” Or perhaps they don’t understand that returning the top marginal tax rate to where it was ten years ago, and at a far lower level than in those fine days when Ronald Reagan abolished the Soviet Union, represents “confiscatory” taxes. Who knows, maybe they even think that we don’t need to deploy barbaric torture methods to fight terrorists.
It’s easy to mock this stuff, but it’s actually pretty significant: we are not talking about some radio blowhard or self-promoting Fox “personality” in this case, but the Republican National Committee. If, as Simon predicts, it approves this resolution, Republicans who like to think of themselves as serious people need to feel some real shame. Comparing the Democratic Party to the leadership of a totalitarian society, and treating it as an enemy of the country, isn’t just ridiculous: it’s an incitement to crazy people to act crazy or worse.

In a brief but fascinating column for The American Prospect yesterday, Mark Schmitt meditates on the relationship between reliance on ideology, and reliance on “experts,” in resolving public policy challenges. As he notes, Barack Obama has often been credited with, or blamed for, a “pragmatic” attitude about public policy that is reminiscent of John F. Kennedy; and it’s worth remembering that JFK’s technocratic approach to many issues led pretty quickly to a backlash from the ideological left and right.
As Schmitt also notes, the perils of rejecting expertise as illusory or as inherently harboring ideological biases has been amply illustrated by the era of conservative ascendancy:

We are still recovering from eight years of an administration governed by contempt for experts and facts, in which every problem could be solved with a political solution.
George W. Bush left us with a staggering set of questions for which political answers are elusive at best. Like Kennedy at Yale, Barack Obama has had to make the case that many long-held political truths, such as that the deficit shouldn’t get too high and that government shouldn’t intervene in the private sector, are actually ideological myths. In his March 24 press conference, he reiterated that his mission is not ideological but is marked by “knotty problems” such as how to “improve liquidity in the financial markets, create jobs, get businesses to reopen, keep America safe.” Despite the fact that he is building what may turn out to be the most progressive presidency since Lyndon Johnson, Obama eschews ideology not just for tactical reasons but because it provides little guidance on bank bailouts, reviving the auto industry, dealing with international currency account imbalances, or shifting the whole economy to a lower level of consumption.

But at the same time, the financial meltdown didn’t particularly inspire confidence in “the experts” on a host of economic policy issues, and some of the same “experts” are helping guide policy under Obama. And thus, a conservative “populist” assault on Obama policies in areas like health care or climate change, where a little expertise is long overdue, has been joined by many voices from the left when it comes to financial policies, where perhaps we’ve had too much input from “experts.”
Here are the “two lessons” Schmitt ” derives from the Kennedy experience:

One is that the experts had better get it right. There is a huge political price to be paid for getting these technical questions wrong. The second is that, complicated as these questions are, “trust us” isn’t a good enough answer. The Obama administration must find a way to bring the public in, to let it feel a sense of participation and ownership. Ideology, in a measured dosage, can help people understand where we’re headed and why.

I’d add a third lesson implicit in the first: “expertise” is not just a matter of credentialing or prestige or peer approval; it’s ultimately established and then verified by correspondence to objective reality. When “experts” get something big wrong, it’s not time to abandon the whole idea of “expertise” or technical competence; it’s time either to get a new batch of “experts,” or to ensure that those who got things wrong understand their mistakes and adjust their views accordingly. Much of the intra-progressive debate about Obama’s economic policy team really revolves around the extent to which you believe some of its key members got very big things wrong, and/or have since adjusted their views.
As for ideology, I’m with Jonathan Chait: progressives do typically distinguish themselves from conservatives by being a “reality-based community” that can adapt its ideological predispositions to empirical results. And that’s true not just of economic or environmental or health care policy, but of politics itself–which is, after all, one of the founding principles of The Democratic Strategist.

Back when the economic stimulus bill was being debated, and reshaped, in the U.S. Senate, a few of us drew attention to the fairly radical cutbacks in “flexible” state money being demanded by the Nelson-Collins group that held the fate of the legislation in their hands. The idea for the flexible funds was to keep states from undercutting the national stimulus effort by cutting back services and laying off employees.
In the end, the overall “state fiscal stabilization fund” in the stimulus legislation was cut from the $79 billion (over two years) in the House bill to $53 billion; but the truly flexible portion of the fund that could be used by states for non-education as well as education purposes dropped from $25 billion to $8 billion. (If you want to understand the complicated math and confusing terminology of these developments, check out my posts here and here.)
So: now the other shoe is dropping, and as a report in the Washington Post today shows, states are indeed cutting back services and employees, in some cases drastically.
When asked if “centrist” senators regretted the cutbacks in flexible state money, a spokesman for Ben Nelson told the Post:
“This is a stimulus bill, not a state bailout bill,” he said. “While the economic recovery bill will undoubtedly help states with their budgets and employment, the primary intent was to stimulate the economy.”
You’d think that Nelson, a former governor, would understand how state cutbacks and layoffs would negatively effect efforts to “stimulate the economy,” but I guess not.
Perhaps the best defense that can be made of the flexible funding cutbacks is that some states are not exactly showing very good judgment in using what little money they got outside Medicaid. In Missouri, Republican legislators are trying to use a big chunk of stimulus money for a highly regressive tax cut. One of these solons told the Associated Press: “This is real stimulus. This is what will make our country turn around — give the dollars back to the taxpayers, give the power to the people.” Since the latest tax shenanigans in Missouri are part of a broader GOP effort there to repeal the income tax and impose higher sales taxes, it’s pretty clear which “people” they want to empower.

The chattering classes have been engaged over the last couple weeks in one of those debates over hypotheticals that only political junkies–and perhaps fans of “alternative history”–could care about: what would have happened in the presidential nominating process if John Edwards had gone the other way on running for president under the threat of exposure of his extramarital affair?
Unsurprisingly, Hillary Clinton’s 2008 pollster and “strategist,” Mark Penn, has looked for evidence that his candidate would have benefited from a one-on-one competition with Barack Obama, particularly in Iowa. As Mark Blumenthal has established by looking at polling data from Iowa, that’s not terribly plausible, since Obama was decisively the second-choice candidate among Iowa Edwards supporters. There was some pretty strong data early on suggesting that HRC and Edwards were both drawing from similar demographic categories–particularly older and more blue-collar voters–and Penn seems to think that the demographic-driven nature of the Obama-Clinton competition might have taken hold earlier without Edwards in the race. But it must be remembered that Obama’s difficulties in attracting “traditional” Democratic voters never really materialized in the upper midwest.
I do have to disagree for once with the excellent Mr. Blumenthal about one thing: his contention that the “least plausible” Edwards withdrawal scenario was between Iowa and New Hampshire. Makes perfect sense to me that Edwards might have gambled on keeping his secret until his very best state had voted, and then packed it once he lost, eliminating any realistic chance that he’d win the nomination. In any event, as Blumenthal shows, this scenario would have almost definitely produced an Obama win in NH, and quite possibly, an early end to the nomination contest. Would that have been good for Obama? The conventional wisdom is that an early win is always better, and for all the talk about Obama benefiting from the publicity and competition associated with the long struggle against HRC, that’s probably true. In retrospect, the largest advantage derived by Barack Obama from the nomination battle may well have been the obstinate belief of Republicans that he was very vulnerable in the general election–not to mention the really strange conviction that putting Sarah Palin on the GOP ticket would pull all those Clinton supporters across the line.

One of the hardiest of conservative attack lines on progressives is that they are elitists who dislike middle-class values and lifestyles, and seek political power to change them. In the most lurid versions of this fantasy, progressives are part of some international or even supernatural conspiracy to destroy the Great American Middle Class (listening to such rants, you would think that there’s no middle class in, say, Europe, or that Democratic voting behavior is unknown outside the upper or lower economic classes).
Laughable as this talk may seem to be to progressives, it keeps recurring, most strikingly in a recent column by the political-analyst-turned-right-wing-pundit Michael Barone that singles out gun policy and climate change as examples of “elitist” contempt and hostility towards the wretched middle class:

For liberal elites, belief in gun control and global warming has taken on the character of religious faith. We have sinned (by hoarding guns or driving SUVs); we must atone (by turning in our guns or recycling); we must repent (by supporting gun control or cap and trade schemes). You may notice that the “we” in question is usually the great mass of ordinary American citizens.
The liberal elite is less interested in giving up its luxuries (Al Gore purchases carbon offsets to compensate for his huge mansion and private jet travel) than in changing the lifestyle of the masses, who selfishly insist on living in suburbs and keeping guns for recreation or protection. Ordinary Americans are seen not as responsible fellow citizens building stable communities but as greedy masses, who must be disciplined to live according to the elite’s religious dogmas.

This is an amazing passage, eh? It asserts without evidence that the “liberal elite’s” attitudes on these two issues are not only universal, but have the character of religious faith–i.e., they are not based on empirical factors or values shared with “ordinary Americans”–and then suggests that they are motivated not by a desire to achieve any public policy goals (such as lower crime or a non-catastrophic economic future) but by a lust for control of the “sinful.”
By attributing these motives to the “liberal elite,” Barone creates a closed loop of dogma that can’t be refuted, and that makes any debate impossible. On firearms, the real goal of the liberal elite–“usually unstated,” Barone conveniently says–is to ban handgun possesion. Never mind that no leading “liberal,” much less all “liberals,” have actually proposed a total handgun ban. Never mind that the last two Democratic platforms have flatly pledged support for the “constitutional right to bear arms,” or that the most radical gun control measure ever proposed by a Democratic presidential candidate (Al Gore in 2000) was to license gun owners.
Worse yet, on climate change, the introduction of the religious metaphor for support for a cap-and-trade system detracts attention from the more fundamental issue of whether man-made-global-warming does or does not threaten to create a calamity–economic as well as ecological–that we would be wise to avoid. This is a factual question, not one of values or attitudes, and the most reliable scientific authorities on the subject conclude almost unanimously that climate change is real, potentially catastrophic, and increasingly difficult to mitigate. If the experts are right, then anyone who cared exclusively about the ability of Americans to maintain a traditional middle-class, suburban lifestyle, would be more agitated than an “elitist” who is fine with a radically scaled-back way of living.
Insofar as resistance to climate change legislation happens to be consistent with the interests not of “ordinary Americans,” but of a handful of industries whose share of the energy economy would be reduced by a shift towards non-fossil-fuel sources, not to mention the introduction of efficiency measures, Barone’s efforts to stir up middle-class hatred of the “liberal elite” is a classic example of the elitist demagoguery that Tom Frank so eloquently outlined several years ago in What’s the Matter With Kansas? Since few “ordinary Americans” have much reason to read Michael Barone, you don’t have to do much armchair psychology of the sort that Barone himself so confidently engages in towards the “liberal elite” to guess that his main object is to give malefactors of great wealth the warm glow of feeling an unearned solidarity with the masses.

As we await the President’s announcement of a Supreme Court nominee, there’s already lots of anticipatory threats by conservatives absorbed with this sort of thing to make life hell for any red-state Democrats who vote with the President for some godless liberal activist, which of course means anyone Obama names. These threats are in turn the sum and substance of conservative claims that they could actually win a confirmation fight.
But as Terence Samuel points out today in The American Prospect,
the political landscape for the 2010 elections doesn’t offer up too many ripe targets for conservative threats:

Only two Senate Democrats — Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota — will seek re-election in 2010 in states lost by Obama, and both currently have solid re-elect numbers and plenty of money to suppress any serious challenges. Among the 16 Democratic Senate seats up next year, the issue may potentially cause trouble for only two — Harry Reid the majority leader from Nevada and, now, Arlen Specter, whose changeling tendencies can make enemies in surprising places. But both of those guys are people who know how to finesse and fight back.
With so few strategic options available to them, Republicans will have no choice but to make this Court fight as controversial as possible, simply as a way to remind people of their existence.

That sounds about right. The upcoming confirmation fight will be largely an intra-Republican affair aimed at keeping their own senators in line, and in demonstrating the GOP’s continuing fidelity to what has often been called a “marriage” with the Cultural Right, which treats Supreme Court nominations as vastly more important than mere trifles like economic policy.