You may not have heard about it, but they’re having an election in California today, with some local contests, but also with a statewide batch of ballot propositions designed to implement the budget agreement reached in February, after much yelling and screaming, between Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Democratic legislators (with a few key votes from Republicans).
Pretty much everybody concedes that all but one of the propositions–one that freezes legislators’ salaries when the state budget is out of balance–are very likely to go down when the ballots are counted (and given the very low turnout, that won’t take long).
The central proposition–titled 1A–sought to solidify the budget deal by extending a tax increase for two years while imposing a limit on state spending and strengthening the state’s “rainy’day” fund. It was advertised, in reasonably heavy TV ads financed mainly by the two major teachers unions, as representing an end to California’s perpetual budget crisis. Instead, it’s being perceived as a symbol of the budget crisis, as most Republicans, some Democrats, and notably two public employee unions (SEIU and AFSCME) are opposing it.
For all the talk about 1A and the closely related proposition 1B (which deals specifically with ensuring future education spending), the biggest immediate budget impact would come from proposition 1C, which authorizes an immediate $5 billion loan to the state from future lottery earnings. But 1C is faring even worse in the polls than its better-known companion measures.
Meanwhile, state revenue collections are going even more poorly than was expected when the budget deal “fixed” the budget shortfall, so when all’s said and done, tomorrow California will likely face a cumulative budget shortfall of $21 billion, according to Schwarzenegger’s estimates. While the Governator has spent the last week issuing dire predictions of massive layoffs and untended fires, he’s actually in Washington today to join President Obama for the announcement of new federal tailpipe emissions standards similar to California’s.
Ah-nold’s trip out of town is being greeted with horselaughs from across the political spectrum (his own approval ratings are down to 33%), but especially from Republicans.
You get the feeling listening to California conservatives right now that they think of the budget revolt as an extension of “tea party” sentiment, and that after they get rid of their (term-limited) RINO governor they will reclaim power in Sacramento on a hard-core platform of massive reductions in state spending and employment. This is already playing out in the runup to the 2010 governor’s race: just last week, former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, considered something of a “moderate” in GOP circles, promised to lay off 30,000 to 40,000 state employees. And that was before the much darker fiscal picture that will emerge if the budget propositions go down.
I suspect Republicans tend to underestimate the extent to which unhappiness with the status quo in California is a matter of poor services and not just high taxes; cutbacks and tuition increases in the higher education system have been particularly unpopular. But anytime GOPers these days think they have an opportunity to win elections while making cooing noises at their “base,” they’ll go for it every time.

Note: this item is cross-posted from The Huffington Post
It’s understandable that progressive listeners heard different things in President Obama’s remarkable commencement address yesterday at Notre Dame. Martha Burk heard a disturbing mushiness and evasion on abortion rights. James Fallows heard an “eloquence of thought” that transcended the “pretiness” of more famous orators. E.J. Dionne heard Obama strengthen “moderate and liberal forces inside the [Catholic] church itself.”
But as a Christian progressive, I heard Obama directly challenge religious fundamentalism of every sort by associating the fear of God with “doubt” and “humility,” and offering that as a “common ground” for debates within and beyond the ranks of the faithful.
After decades of listening to conservative Christian politicians–echoed by some progressives as well–speak of their faith as an absolute assurance of absolute positions on public policies ranging from abortion to war, these lines at Notre Dame were incredibly refreshing:

[T]he ultimate irony of faith is that it necessarily admits doubt. It is the belief in things not seen. It is beyond our capacity as human beings to know with certainty what God has planned for us or what He asks of us, and those of us who believe must trust that His wisdom is greater than our own.
This doubt should not push us away from our faith. But it should humble us. It should temper our passions, and cause us to be wary of self-righteousness. It should compel us to remain open, and curious, and eager to continue the moral and spiritual debate that began for so many of you within the walls of Notre Dame.

Fundamentalism, particularly in its political application, is typically based on the redefinition of “humility” as a rejection of civility and mutual respect as an act of obedience to God, whose revelation of His will, through scripture, teaching or tradition, is so clear that only selfishness and rebellion could explain the persistence of doubt. This inversion of the “fear of God” as requiring aggressive and repressive self-righteousness has been responsible for endless scandals of faith over the centuries, quite often in conjunction with the divinization of culturally conservative causes from slavery to nationalism to patriarchy.
By insisting on the spiritual validity–indeed, necessity–of doubt, Obama is repudiating on religious grounds the very idea that appeals to Revelation should have presumptive value in political debates. As he forthrightly says, those who truly fear God have particular reason to confine their arguments to the “common ground” of reason where all believers, along with unbelievers, can speak:

[W]ithin our vast democracy, this doubt should remind us to persuade through reason, through an appeal whenever we can to universal rather than parochial principles, and most of all through an abiding example of good works, charity, kindness, and service that moves hearts and minds.
For if there is one law that we can be most certain of, it is the law that binds people of all faiths and no faith together. It is no coincidence that it exists in Christianity and Judaism; in Islam and Hinduism; in Buddhism and humanism. It is, of course, the Golden Rule – the call to treat one another as we wish to be treated. The call to love. To serve. To do what we can to make a difference in the lives of those with whom we share the same brief moment on this Earth.

It’s safe to say that many progressives cringe whenever Barack Obama talks about “common ground” with anti-abortionists, theocrats, or in general, with Republicans, because they view it as an offer to compromise or even betray their rights and values. But in the religious context, what he was talking about at Notre Dame is a “common ground” that is inherently secular, empirically based, and respectful of individual rights in a way that is antithetical to the thinking of the Christian Right.
Viewed from this perspective, it’s no contradiction at all that the President spoke of “common ground” on abortion even as he directly acknowleged that pro-choice and pro-life views can’t be compromised:

I do not suggest that the debate surrounding abortion can or should go away. No matter how much we may want to fudge it – indeed, while we know that the views of most Americans on the subject are complex and even contradictory – the fact is that at some level, the views of the two camps are irreconcilable.

This strikes me as a pretty plain admonition to those of his own “religious advisers” who talk of achieving some sort of “compromise” on abortion rights that will make the issue–or indeed, the “cultural wars”–simply “go away.”
Now it’s true that Obama’s pledge to respect and not vilify those who are on the other side of the barricades on abortion remains offensive to those abortion rights advocates who for good reason resent any “debate”–particularly among men–about what should be regarded as fundamental reproductive rights. And such “debate” really is phony (as has been brilliantly explained by Linda Hirshman) if it is conducted on the “common ground” that abortion is evil, and that women who seek them are either perpetrators or victims of a tragedy if not a crime.
But I don’t hear Obama saying that, and moreover, abortion rights in this country will never be safe if they depend on the presumption that discussion of the subject is a priori illegitimate.
In the end, as Obama himself suggests, what unites secular liberalism with non-fundamentalist religious beliefs is the conviction that we live in a world governed by universal laws that cannot be reliably deduced in many particulars. That is why mutual respect, including respect for individual rights, and a commitment to pluralism and rational discourse, are so critical to both traditions, and why many of us subscribe to both. If religious fundamentalists or cultural conservatives generally choose to reject that “common ground,” as many will, then they are willfully abandoning any path to the achievement of their own objectives that does not depend on raw power and repression. And large majorities of Americans–including many God-fearing Americans–will reject them in turn.

One of the enduring discussion-points in the ongoing debate over Old and New Media is the online convergence of both in the web versions of major newspapers. That’s why it’s interesting that today one of the earliest Major Progressive Bloggers, who has also done a lot to foster discussion among MSM journalists, bloggers, and policy wonks, made his debut with the online version of the Washington Post.
That would be Ezra Klein, who at the ripe old age of 25 has achieved what many professional journalists aspire for fruitlessly though entire careers: a bylined perch at WaPo.
Ezra’s new WaPo blog is here, and he will reportedly be making appearances on the op-ed page as well.
For those who are not familiar with Ezra’s work, he’s among the wonkiest of bloggers, with particular expertise in health care policy and everything related to food. While he’s a partisan and not at all immune to the blogospheric tendency to suspect “moderation,” he’s also relentlessly civil, and not afraid to apologize or reverse himself on the rare occasions when he’s shown to be wrong.
I have to admit that I have a personal affection for Ezra that dates back to the Netroots Nation conference in Chicago in 2007, when he went to the trouble of escorting me through several sessions where my long association with the DLC might have gotten me seriously dissed (Joan McCarter of DailyKos did so as well). Ezra also included me in the now-famous JournoList, that much-misunderstood water cooler of the progressive center.
But you don’t need to know Ezra Klein to understand that the man can think and write impressively well, on deadline, and with all due preparation for reader comment and adverse reactions. He’s the perfect “convergence” figure between the blogosphere and the MSM, and his fate at WaPo may tell us a lot about the fate of this convergence generally.
And hey, if Ezra’s new gig doesn’t do that well, it’s quite a while before he’s even pushing thirty.

Note: this item is cross-posted from FiveThirtyEight.com
As I noted on Friday, there’s been quite a brouhaha over new polls from Pew and from Gallup that suggest a sudden shift towards anti-abortion sentiment in America. The timing of these polls, on the very eve of anti-abortion protests against President Obama’s commencement address at Notre Dame, and in the run-up to a probable culture war over the President’s Supreme Court appointment, has guaranteed a lot of hype. Most of it has focused on Gallup’s findings, since (1) the Pew poll, while showing a shift from the “mushy middle” position leaning pro-choice to the one leaning pro-life, still documented a pro-choice majority, while (2) Gallup trumpeted this headline: “More Americans “Pro-Life” Than “Pro-Choice” for First Time.” Them’s fightin’ words.
Even as anti-abortionists celebrated that headline, some informed criticism of the Gallup findings has pretty clearly shown them to be an almost certain outlier, and highly misleading to boot.
First up, the partisan composition of the Gallup poll sample drew some attention–not surprisingly, since Gallup itself suggested that the “big shift” on abortion was occurring almost entirely among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents.
Charles Franklin at pollster.com made this discovery and observation:

The latest Gallup (5/7-10/09) poll has party identification tied at 32-32 and caused an immediate howl of “outlier!” in the comments at Pollster.com. In this case, the howl is justified. Compared to all recent Gallup polls (so we compare apples to apples) this latest stands out quite a bit from the rest.

Franklin also deals with the theory that polls which ask lots of questions on “values” issues tend to push the party ID numbers. In polling parlance, this is known as the “question order” effect. In the current case, a significant “question order” effect would imply that the abortion numbers are valid, while the party ID numbers may be emphemeral. But looking at similar Gallup surveys in the past, Franklin deduces that it’s never been a factor before, and thus there’s no reason to believe it’s a factor now.
Thus Franklin concludes:

It is easier to be confident about the outlier status of this poll than to account for why it is so clearly out of line with previous Gallup results. At least we can address the outlier status empirically and with some statistical confidence. They “why” of that status must remain the always true maxim: “Outliers Happen.”

So Gallup has published an outlier. But even if you disagree, what does the poll actually show, given the big broad strokes of “pro-choice” and “pro-life” opinions?
At the always-valuable academic site The Monkey Cage, John Sides takes a look at attitudes on abortion policy as indicated in the exceptionally long-range National Election Studies and General Social Survey. The former reinforces Nate Silver’s post from last week emphasizing the stable pro-choice majority of abortion polling for a long, long time. And the latter underlines my own argument that all the top-line findings on abortion attitudes disguise high levels of support for exceptions to abortion restrictions that closely track the pro-choice position and the constitutional status quo.
In particular, GSS shows an exceptionally durable 80%-plus level of support for a “health exception,” which happens to be the actual flash-point separating pro-life activists from the rest of the population. In other words, lots of “pro-life” Americans consistently, and over decades, favor an exception that pro-life activists adamantly consider a complete repudiation of the pro-life point of view.
So even if the Gallup folks are right (and they almost certainly aren’t), that there’s now a “pro-life” majority among Americans, it’s meaningless in terms of support for a change in abortion policy. That may not get any headlines, but it’s worth knowing.

Sometimes in politics people choose a tactical maneuver that makes a lot of short-term sense, and then get so obsessed with executing it that they forget long-range strategic objectives altogether. This could be the case with the current conservative focus on what Speaker Nancy Pelosi was told back in 2002 about the Bush administration’s torture policies, and what she’s saying about it all today.
You can certainly understand why the initial focus on Pelosi developed: it helped reinforce the idea that contemporary demands for a full accounting of torture policies and practices represent an ex post facto scrutiny of administration behavior that was less controversial–or at least more bipartisan–at the time of adoption, while shifting attention from Bush, Cheney, Yoo and company to a leading Democrat. But lord-a-mercy, to read conservative blogs during the last couple of weeks, you’d think Pelosi was the central figure in the whole torture scandal, not a marginal figure who didn’t much have any power to influence administration policy back in 2002. One leading conservative site, Redstate.com, published seven posts on the subject on a single day last week.
So where’s it all going, assuming that conservatives haven’t deluded themselves into thinking that Pelosi’s actually going to be forced to resign?
Matt Yglesias poses this question in a Daily Beast column today, and concludes that conservative torture-fans may be defeating their own purpose here:

[I]n their zeal to score a tactical win, the right has made a truth commission more likely not less likely. Obama wanted to avoid a backward-looking focus on torture in part because it distracted from his legislative agenda. But if we’re going to be looking backward anyway, thanks to conservatives’ insistence on complaining about Pelosi, then the move forward strategy lacks a rationale. And far from forcing a standoff in which Pelosi will abandon her support for an investigation, the right has forced her into a corner from which she can’t give in to moderate Democrats’ opposition to such a move without looking like she’s cravenly attempting to save her own skin.
There’s no sign that Pelosi or anyone else is backing off the truth-commission idea. And, indeed, by suggesting that Pelosi could be a target of an investigation, conservatives have helped cleanse the idea of the odor of victor’s justice.

Sounds about right to me. I know these media frenzies tend to assume a life of their own, but still, you have to wonder if conservatives are really thinking through where a continuing obsession with the Bush torture policies–regardless of their specific target–will take them.

Note: this item is cross-posted from FiveThirtyEight.com

When Pew released a poll earlier this week suggesting that there had been a significant shift in public opinion on abortion in recent months, Nate Silver did a fine post exploring the long-term trends on the subject, and expressing considerable doubt that Pew had discovered anything of great moment.
Well, today Gallup released another survey that seems to parallel the Pew findings, such as they are. And since (1) Nate’s on vacation, and (2) the two polls together are sure to get tons of play in conjunction with the anti-abortion protests at Notre Dame, not to mention Supreme Court speculation, I’ll do a brief post raising a few questions to help tide us over for a while, with particular emphasis on the key questions that pollsters rarely ask on this subject.
First of all, the headline-grabbing finding by Gallup involves its efforts to split Americans into two camps self-identifying as either “pro-choice” or “pro-life.” Aside from all the issues with how these two terms are perceived, this methodology also forces asunder and thus distorts the views of the vast “mushy middle” on abortion policy, which Gallup itself measures at 53%, in a secondary question that divides respondents into three camps (“illegal in all circumstances,” “legal in any circumstances,” and “legal only in some circumstances.”)
Second of all, the purported shift that Gallup reports, showing “more Americans ‘pro-life’ than ‘pro-choice’ for the first time,” is explained in Gallup’s analysis as a phenomenon produced almost solely by Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (e.g., roughly those voters willing to actually vote Republican). Given what’s been happening to support for Republicans in recent months, this finding raises some questions about the sampling techniques, but could also reflect a shift in the perceived threat to the abortion status quo once George W. Bush left office. After eight years of constant excitement among right-to-lifers about getting that fifth vote on the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, that prospect is now pretty distant. And instead, Americans have been exposed to a constant wailing of alarms about Obama being “the most pro-abortion president in history,” determined, somehow, to expand abortion rights. That Republicans and Republican-leaning independents might polarize on the subject isn’t terribly surprising or necessarily significant.
But more important than any of these reservations about the Pew and Gallup surveys on abortion is a perpetual problem with public opinion research generally on this topic: it rarely deals with the nuances that matter most in setting public policy or assessing the actual political impact of each party’s positioning.
The nuance that I’ve written about recently deals with the simple fact that Americans seem to care quite a bit why a woman seeks an abortion. And once they are aware of a plausible rationale, anti-abortion attitudes appear to relax.
The best example comes from 2003, at the very height of one of the congressional battles over so-called “partial-birth” abortions. The very same ABC poll that showed 62% of Americans favoring a ban on these much-demonized procedures also showed that 61% favored a “health of the mother” exception, even in these cases.
It’s an article of faith among right-to-lifers, of course, that a “health exception” makes a mockery of any abortion restrictions. And that’s why in a famous moment in one of the presidential debates last year, John McCain sneered and held up “quote marks” when referring to a “health exception.” The public reaction was not positive, indicating that abstract hostility towards abortion may well disguise a more sympathetic attitude when it comes to actual women making actual decisions about a pregnancy. To put it another way, who cares if there’s a shift towards self-reported “pro-life” sentiments, if consistent majorities basically approve of the constitutional and legal status quo?
In any event, it’s maddening that so few polls on abortion get into these sorts of questions. Until they do, we are all entitled to dismiss the big headlines, and rely on hard data like election results to determine which basic direction in abortion policy Americans tend to support. Based on that data, the anti-abortion cause is not doing very well.

By now you may have heard about the verbal self-immolation being undertaken by Arkansas state senator Kim Hendren, the sole announced 2010 Republican opponent for U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln. First off, he went on a rant in front of a GOP audience in Little Rock against U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, referring to the senior senator from New York as “that Jew.” Allowing as how he shouldn’t have done that, he explained that what he really wanted to convey was his distaste for people (presumably of all faiths) who didn’t share the values he learned from watching the Andy Griffith Show back in the day (an admittedly goyish show).
Now we learn from veteran Arkansas reporter John Brummett that Hendren (whose nickname should become “Digger”) called him up to explain further, and reflected on his feelings about Jews:

He said he remembered saying “the Jew” or “that Jew,” and didn’t know why in the world it came out, but that he did go on seconds later to say there was a Jewish person he did admire, and that would be Jesus. And then he told me that, for that matter, he rather liked Joe Lieberman.

Well, it’s nice that Kendren can think of an admirable Jew every couple thousand years or so, but it’s a pretty odd couple when you think about it, unless you are of the fixed opinion that Jesus was in John McCain’s corner in 2008 (a disturbing thought for believers in both the divinity of Jesus and divine omnipotence). It reminds me of an anecdote from Lieberman’s ill-fated 2004 presidential campaign, when he attended an African-American church in South Carolina one Sunday. The choir was rocking, and the choir leader was working the congregation pretty well, coming up to various worshipers, thrusting a microphone into their faces, and asking: “Do you love Jesus!” Then finally, he got to the candidate, and asked: “Senator Lieberman! Do you love Jesus?” Lieberman just smiled.
In any event, it’s a good example of how Democrats like Blanche Lincoln can survive in the Deep South.

Well, it’s been an interesting week for optics of the two parties. Even as the Republican National Committee gets ready to formally label the Democratic Party as the “Socialist Democrat Party,” key elements of the business community have been sitting down to work with the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats on two of the agenda items which Republicans have pointed to as especially lurid examples of Marxist thought, universal health care and carbon emissions reduction.
There’s controversy aplenty among progressives as to how genuine business compromise overtures actually are, and whether the price they will demand for cooperation is excessive. But the bigger picture is that the business community is deeply undercutting Republican efforts to paint Democrats as hellbent on “socializing medicine” through universal health care or destroying the economy through tree-hugging paganism.
As Ron Brownstein notes in his National Journal column today:

These maneuvers on health care and energy could signal a crucial shift in Washington’s tectonic plates of power. Although disagreements remain on both fronts, each move suggests that key business interests have decided to cut deals with a dominant Democratic Party rather than bet on a weakened Republican Party that is hoping to ride uncompromising opposition to Obama back to power….
That could leave congressional Republicans alone at the station. To the extent that Obama can shear off support from businesses usually allied with the GOP, he will make it more difficult for Republicans to portray his agenda as a lurch to the left.

Now logic might dictate that Republicans begin blasting business leaders as Kerensky-like dupes who are selling the Socialist Democrats the rope needed to hang them in the march to a dictatorship of the proletariat, but I doubt they really want to draw attention to the number of regular Wall Street Journal readers who’d rather deal with the Obama administration and its congressional allies than with the “party of no.”
As for us Socialist Democrats, business community cooperation could, at least in theory, help overcome GOP burnt-ground tactics in Congress. As Brownstein concludes:

[T]hese early steps show that Obama’s instinct for inclusion could allow him to expand his political coalition even while advancing two of his party’s top priorities. That’s how lasting majorities are built.