The marquee off-year political contest of 2009 is very likely to be Virginia’s gubernatorial race. Yes, New Jersey will also have a gubernatorial contest in which incumbent Democrat Jon Corzine could get a serious challenge, probably from former U.S. Attorney Chris Christie, generally considered the strongest Republican in the race. But Virginia’s proximity to the chattering classes of Washington; the Democratic national party chairmanship of outgoing Gov. Tim Kaine; the intense scrutiny of VA last year as the classic purple-to-blue state; and media fascination with Terry McAuliffe’s gubernatorial bid; will probably combine to make the Commonwealth race a big national political obsession.
At RealClearPolitics today, Sean Trende offers a decent primer on the VA race, with lots of historical detail on the state’s politics going back to the nineteenth century. My main quibble with Trende’s analysis is his implicit assumption that discontent over the economy or the state’s fiscal condition will hurt the incumbent party in Washington and Richmond. It’s entirely possible, even in conservative but hard-hit parts of the state like the Southside, that voters will not warm to a national or state GOP that seems to be telling them that pleas for government assistance represent attempted robbery or a desire for welfare dependency. And that’s why I am also less certain than Trende that GOP candidate Bob McDonnell will be able to largely ignore his party’s rural base and aggressively pursue suburban votes elsewhere.
This is another way of saying that we don’t know yet whether the national repudiation of Republicans in 2006 and 2008 represented a temporary “throw-the-bums-out” reaction or the beginnings of a pro-Democratic realignment. But I wouldn’t be real confident about assuming that recent history tells you everything you need to know about the standing of the two parties in various parts of Virginia today.
Trende’s assessment of the candidates is well-informed, including his suggestion that the likely-to-get-nasty competition between the two Democratic candidates from NoVa, McAuliffe and Brian Moran, could either create an opening for the third candidate, Creigh Deeds, or force him from the race altogether. His assessment of the sole Republican candidate, McDonnell, is also interesting:

McDonnell avoids many of the problems that have beset previous Republican nominees. But there is one potential problem – he is a bona fide social conservative. McDonnell will likely be attacked for his law degree from Regent University (founded by Pat Robertson), and comments he made while he was a Delegate to the effect that anyone engaging in oral or anal sex could be found in violation of Virginia’s “crimes against nature” law (he also claimed not to remember whether he had ever violated the law)…
The comment about the crimes against nature law could affect him much as Allen’s macaca comment or Kilgore’s death penalty ad affected them – by becoming wedges between the Republicans and their Northern Virginia base.

Yeah, I don’t think it will be too long before every late-night comic in the world has some high-profile fun with McDonnell’s 2003 comment that he doesn’t really recall whether he’s ever violated the state’s sodomy laws. And he’s not well positioned ideologically to claim that this is a “private” or “family” matter.
Unless McDonnell tries or is forced to make the campaign about cultural issues, the economic and fiscal situation, and the condition of the two parties in VA at present, will likely determine the race, against any of the Democrats currently running. Yes, the national media will try to make it all a referendum on Barack Obama, and that idea could cut in different directions among different Virginia voters. But as Trende concludes, the race begins as a toss-up, and the positive omen for Virginia Democrats is that they’ve won all but a few of the very close statewide races in Virginia in recent years.

I’ve been reading TDS Co-Editor Stan Greenberg’s remarkable new book, Dispatches From the War Room, detailing his dealings with five remarkable heads of state (Bill Clinton, Nelson Mandela, Tony Blair, Ehud Barak, and Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada). And his second of two chapters on Bill Clinton, which focuses on the early days of his presidency, raises some interesting comparisons and constrasts with the initial steps taken by Barack Obama, particularly on the economy.
Clinton didn’t unveil his own economic plan (including his stimulus package) until the State of the Union Address on February 17. That happens to be the same calendar day on which Obama signed his stimulus package into law. Clinton’s stimulus package was pared down from $30 billion to $16 billion before it was even submitted to Congress (it ultimately fell below $1 billion). Obama’s came in at just under $800 billion. Clinton had to abandon the centerpiece of his campaign’s economic plan, a middle-class tax cut, again before it was submitted to Congress. Obama’s centerpiece tax cut was pared down in the stimulus package somewhat, but largely survived. Clinton’s approval ratings for his approach to the economy started high, fell quickly, rose again, and then fell again during his first few months in office. Obama’s have fluctuated somewhat, but have been largely steady.
Most notably, as Greenberg reminds us, the Clinton White House’s handling of his economic and budget plan–which, after all, wound up being the cornerstone of his administration’s extremely impressive economic record–was universally described, by friends and enemies alike, as “chaotic.” It certainly exceeded in uncertainty and actual confusion the “rookie mistakes” and occasional missteps that the Obama White House staff and economic team, which have barely had time to find their offices, are so often accused of.
Yes, the stakes facing Obama right now on the economy are significantly higher than those facing Clinton sixteen years ago, but not quite on the order of magnitude that many observers assume. The unemployment rate in January of 1993 was 7.3 percent, as compared to 7.6 percent in January of 2009. And Clinton, even more than Obama, had campaigned on reviving the economy and improving middle-class economic prospects.
In any event, some historical perspective is always helpful, and Stan’s book, which explicitly focuses on leaders in times demanding change, provides such perspective in rich and varying detail.

Well, I’m happy to report a very prominent convert to the theory that President Obama is engaging in a strategy of “grassroots bipartisanship” whose success is best measured by public opinion trends, not near-term support from Republicans in Congress. Mike Tomasky of the Guardian has a post up today that not only embraces the much-derided B-word, but cites TDS and New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg as the only folks who seem to completely “get it.”

I believe that Barack Obama is right to talk about bipartisanship, and I do not think that he should drop it because of the congressional voting pattern on one piece of legislation. I think his critics – and on the broadly construed left, among bloggers and pundits and whatnot, they are legion to the point of near unanimity, with only two exceptions I can think of – are missing an important point.
The standard criticism of Obama’s bipartisan outreach goes like this. He met with Republicans on Capitol Hill. They stiffed him. They showed that they’re impossibly troglodytic. Why should he waste any more time on these people? Just crush them.
But here’s the thing. This criticism, and this entire debate about the efficacy of his bipartisan overtures, presumes that Obama’s audience for his bipartisan talk is the Republicans in Congress and the conservatives in Washington.
But that is not his intended audience. His audience is the country.

You should read the whole thing. And you should also check out Hertzberg’s typically fine column, which coins a wonderful phrase for Obama’s political strategy: “Gandhian hardball.”

There are currently two separate pieces available on The New Republic’s site providing some serious perspectives on the direction of political journalism these days. The first is a straightforward but poignant lament for the radical downsizing of The Los Angeles Times by a former reporter there, Joe Mathews. And the second is an analysis by Gabriel Sherman of Politico, that largely web-based chronicler of the daily news and talk of Washington.
The decline of the high-quality daily newspaper offering world, national, state and local coverage is hardly a new story: declining readerships, high fixed costs, corporate consolidation, vast new online competition, shrinking ad revenues, and now, for some papers, huge investment losses by their parent companies, have all taken a major toll. The current economy seems to be simply accelerating a process that was well under way, in some respects many decades ago.
It’s a lot less clear whether Politico represents any sort of wave of the future. Yes, it’s been successful, not only in generating a lot of buzz and (at least during the presidential election) high readership, but even in making a profit. Yes, it’s also scored quite a few “scoops.” But Politico may be a Beltway sui generis; where else could a periodical largely read online successfully support itself with ad revenue from a print edition that’s given away on the streets of a relatively small area? That’s a unique function of Washington’s peculiar climate for lobbying competition at present, and also of the fact that it’s one of the few places in the country where the economy’s doing well. It’s also worth noting that Politico was very nearly born as a project of the Washington Post, where its two co-editors, John Harris and Jim VandeHei were previously political reporters. Thus, it may better reflect where a few big surviving newspapers are headed in an online-dominated future, than representing any sort of successor to the newspaper itself.
In any event, the two pieces are well worth a careful read.

At pretty much any point during the last four or five years, you could count on two public opinion survey measurements looking really, really bad: approval ratings of Congress, and assessments of the direction of the country.
So it’s interesting to note that both these numbers seem to be gradually moving up.
According to a new Gallup survey, Congress’ job approval rating jumped from 19% a month ago to 31% from February 9-12, or about the time that Congress was finalizing the economic stimulus package. As Gallup notes:

Gallup has been measuring public approval of Congress on a monthly basis since January 2001. During that time, there have been only two month-to-month increases larger than the 12-point jump observed this month.
The largest single-month increase was a 42-point rally in congressional support after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, from 42% in a Sept. 7-10, 2001, poll to 84% in mid-October 2001. Gallup found similar increases in ratings of other government institutions around that time.
The next-largest jump of 14 points occurred after Democrats took party control of both the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate in early 2007.

And if the 31% approval rating for Congress sounds pretty low, check this out:

In general, Congress’ approval ratings tend to be low. In fact, the current 31% score is very near the historical average of 35% in Gallup Polls since 1974.

The “direction of the country” (or right track/wrong track) numbers are gradually improving as well, even though most of the economic indicators continue to deteriorate. Look at pollster.com’s chart on these numbers, and you can see “right track” sloping up and “wrong track” sloping down since October at a pretty steady pace.
Meanwhile, President Obama’s job approval rating seems relatively stable in the low 60s, depending on the poll you follow.
At some point, maybe sooner, maybe later, the Obama approval ratings and the “right track” number should begin to converge. When and where they converge will probably tell you everything you need to know about the political direction of the country in 2010 and 2012.

Since it’s President’s Day, and also the official commemoration of Lincoln’s bicentennial (he was actually born on February 12, 1809), it’s as good a time as any to reflect on Honest Abe and what his legacy tells us about presidential legacies generally.
As you may know, CSPAN just published a ranking of all 42 American presidents prior to Barack Obama (yes, 42, because Grover Cleveland served twice) based on a survey of 65 presidential historians. Lincoln ranked first, just ahead of George Washington and FDR.
And while no one this side of neo-Confederates would doubt Lincoln’s greatness, the bicentennial has revived some revisionist talk, most notably an article in The Root by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., entitled “Was Lincoln A Racist?”
Gates offers mainly a reexamination (much more positive in the end than the title might suggest) of well-known facts about the Great Emancipator’s attitudes on race: while always hating slavery, he also frequently disavowed any support for civic or social equality for African-Americans; was a longtime advocate of “colonization” (voluntary resettlement of black Americans in Africa) as the “solution” for the country’s race problems; was slow and halting in his steps towards abolition of slavery; was open to gradual emancipation in southern and border states to the very end of the Civil War; and expressed only partial support for voting rights–and then mainly for Union veterans–for freedmen (although one of his few such statements did convince John Wilkes Booth to execute his assassination plan).
What makes this controversy, and its first cousin, the question of Lincoln’s Reconstruction policies, so perennial is, of course, the premature termination of his presidency and his life. While the great Reconstruction historian Eric Foner in his own Lincoln bicentennial piece for The Nation stresses the steady evolution of Lincoln’s racial views in the direction of what we would today consider an enlightened position for a white politician of his time, some troubling facts remain. Before the Civil War ended, Lincoln fought hard for the readmission to the Union of Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee and Virginia with relatively few conditions; deployed much rhetoric (and advice to his generals Grant and Sherman) in favor of quick reconciliation and light treatment of former Rebels; and did, after all, at a minimum acquiesce in the nomination of Andrew Johnson as his second vice president, even though he had better reason than most to doubt Johnson’s racial views, having exempted Tennessee from the Emancipation Proclamation on Johnson’s private advice.
In his chapter on Lincoln in The Reconstuction Presidents, historian Brooks Simpson has this to say:

It is fascinating but futile to ponder what Lincoln might have done had he lived, in part because Lincoln himself did not know what he was going to do.

While Lincoln did not suffer from Johnson’s debilitating belief that “there is no such thing as Reconstruction” because no constitutional secession had actually occurred, there’s no question he was on a collision course with Radical Republicans in Congress over Reconstruction, and might well have, thanks to his incredible wartime prestige, prevailed in that battle and let the defeated South replace slavery with Jim Crow a decade earlier than was ultimately the case. (Without Congressional Reconstruction, moreover, Democrats would have almost certainly regained national power much earlier as well).
As Simpson notes, we’ll never know. But the one thing we do know is that Lincoln’s untimely death preserved his legacy intact. And it’s probably no coincidence that the most highly esteemed president in the CSPAN ranking was preceded by the lowest ranking, James Buchanan, and succeeded by next-lowest-ranking, Andrew Johnson.

As Friday’s staff post on a new Democracy Corps survey illustrated, Barack Obama’s general leadership as president continues to enjoy robust public support, despite the reams of MSM, conservative, and sometimes progressive opinion suggesting that his first days in office have been characterized by a steady fall from grace.
This reality has even penetrated one of Washington’s most important bullhorns for self-referential beltway buzz, Politico. In an article today entitled “Public Still Sky-High on Obama “Brand,” Ben Smith notes in some detailt that all the screaming over the stimulus bill, Daschle, Gregg, Obama’s various “missteps,” and the supposed re-energization of the GOP, doesn’t seem to be resonating that well around the country:

With Barack Obama’s victory in passing a massive stimulus package marred by days of bad press — as not a single House Republican backed the bill, his health czar went down in flames and his second pick for commerce secretary walked away — the administration has been cut down to size, and lost some of its bipartisan sheen.
Such, at least, has been the beltway chatter, but so far the numbers don’t back it up.
Obama’s approval rating remains well above 60 percent in tracking polls. A range of state pollsters said they’d seen no diminution in the president’s sky-high approval ratings, and no improvement in congressional Republicans’ dismal numbers.
And that’s before the stimulus creates billions of dollars in spending on popular programs, which could, at least temporarily, further boost Obama’s popularity.
“It’s eerie — I read the news from the Beltway, and there’s this disconnect with the polls from the Midwest that I see all around me,” said Ann Seltzer, the authoritative Iowa pollster who works throughout the Midwest.

Now this is hardly the first time in recent history that daily news cycle wars in Washington have been erroneously conflated–particularly by Republicans–with national political perceptions, as anyone who remembers the monomaniacal GOP effort to drive Bill Clinton from office will attest. But no matter what your partisan allegiences happen to be, it is good to be reminded that the universe doesn’t revolve around Washington scorecards of who is up and who is down. Americans, for all their foibles, don’t have the long-term memory capacity of a flea, and on same occasions have a better understanding of broad historical trends, philosophical differences between the parties, and empircal reality than the smart but self-absorbed denizens of the Emerald City.

The hot read in the progressive chattering classes today is an article for The New Republic by the always-estimable John Judis arguing that Barack Obama can’t achieve his goals without vibrant and popularly-based pressure from the Left to raise his progressive game.
His argument has predictably unleashed a lot of pent-up progressive angst about Obama’s “centrism” and “bipartisanship.” Some of it is very specific, like Ezra Klein’s suggestion, which galvanizes a very large number of scattered lefty blogospheric views, that Obama should have come into the “stimulus” debate with a much bigger figure, like maybe a trillion-and-a-half, anticipating the “centrist” reductions necessary to get the legislation through Congress and raising the final figure.
Other commentors on Judis’ hypothesis, like Glenn Greenwald, argue for a broader opposition to Obama, because, they think, he has little but contempt for progressive views:

Part of the political shrewdness of Obama has been that he’s been able to actually convince huge numbers of liberals that it’s a good thing when he ignores and even stomps on their political ideals, that it’s something they should celebrate and even be grateful for. Hordes of Obama-loving liberals are still marching around paying homage to the empty mantras of “pragmatism” and “post-partisan harmony” — the terms used to justify and even glorify Obama’s repudiation of their own political values.

To get back to Judis’ own argument, it’s important that he doesn’t seem to value the progressive-gabber allies that have found his article most attractive:

I think the main reason that Obama is having trouble is that there is not a popular left movement that is agitating for him to go well beyond where he would even ideally like to go. Sure, there are leftwing intellectuals like Paul Krugman who are beating the drums for nationalizing the banks and for a $1 trillion-plus stimulus. But I am not referring to intellectuals, but to movements that stir up trouble among voters and get people really angry.

Judis goes on to critique the unions and Moveon.org as the progressive forces that need to support a Loyal Opposition From the Left, and to offer the immensely radical and (according to some interpretations) proto-fascist Share the Wealth and Townsend movements of the 1930s as historical precedents for the kind of constructive Left alternative that can keep Obama’s feet on the path of righteousness.
There’s not much doubt that Judis’ hypothesis is closely related to his fear that Obama, particularly on the internatioal finance front, simply isn’t getting the job done. As he said back in early January:

Obama is certainly right to abandon the “anything goes” mentality of the Bush administration and to promote an $800 billion stimulus program. But to reverse to current economic collapse, the new administration may have to go even farther than this in the direction of a fiscal equivalent of war and a new Bretton Woods.

In many respects, Judis is calling for a moblization of progressives to push Obama “to the Left” based on his assumption that Obama, like FDR in his first year, is going to fail in generating a major turnaround in the economy.
And I’d have to say that Judis’ prescription will only make sense if Obama indeed fails. You can’t really mobilize anything like a Huey Long or Francis Townsend “left opposition” to Obama short of a catastrophic economic failure that challenges the basic presumptions of American democracy.
Moreoever, the most viable left-populist opposition to Obama agenda is going to be about the financial bailouts, and the relative ability of Obama-Geithner to distinguish their efforts from those of their Republican predecessors. John Juds may have already decided they simply can’t do that; if they can, then the grassroots pro-Obama campaign that Judis implicitly abhors may actually make sense.
The broadest issue raised by Judis is the idea that Barack Obama needs a Left Opposition to position himself as the new “center.” I will mention without further commentary the rich irony of the idea that the liberals who so resented Bill Clinton’s alleged “triangulation” strategy are now begging Obama to triangulate them.
My own feeling is that Obama should continue to focus on commanding a majority of Americans in support of his presidency and his general agenda, and at the same time seek to lead and represent progressives, even if they don’t like every element of his strategy or policies. His whole political persona up until now has been to depict himself as a progressive who also reprents the “center” in American politics. The “left” can support him or (selectively) oppose him. But the idea that he can’t succeed without an obdurate Left Opposition that forces him, and the debate, to the Left, strikes me as both an extrapoliation of congressional politics into public opinion, and as an underestimation of Obama’s own political abilty to move national policy to “the left” on his own terms.

Today’s surprise announcement by Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) that he is withdrawing his nomination as Commerce Secretary has a lot of implications, large and small. But one thing is very clear: his withdrawal removes a potential threat to a well-conducted decennial Census in 2010.
Whatever his merits and demerits generally as a senator, Gregg has been a consistent enemy of efforts to let the Census Bureau conduct a count using anything like aggressive efforts to, well, count Americans. As a New York Times editorial observed when Gregg was first nominated:

The Census Bureau is a major agency within the Commerce Department, and the decennial census — the next one is in 2010 — is a mammoth undertaking. After years of mismanagement and underfinancing by the Bush administration, the bureau is so ill prepared to conduct next year’s count that Congressional investigators have warned that it is at high risk of failure unless corrective action is taken immediately.
Mr. Gregg was never a friend of the census. As chairman of the Senate committee that oversees the Commerce Department’s budget, he frequently tried to cut the bureau’s financing. In 1999, he opposed emergency funds for the 2000 census requested by President Bill Clinton and the Republican-controlled House.

An accurate census obviously has a big political impact, given its impact on reapportionment of Congress and the fifty state legislatures. But it also has an enormous effect on all sorts of federal programs that distribute dollars based on census figures concerning the concentration of various population groups in various states and localities. And beyond government, the census is the most critical database for virtually every measurement of American society, in business, in the social sciences, and in journalism.
It’s not totally clear when the Obama administration decided to pair the Gregg nomination with a proposal to make the census director report directly to the White House. But Gregg’s own statement of withdrawal called the census issue one of the two problems–the other being the economic stimulus legislation–that kept him from moving forward with this nomination.
There will be plenty of time later to analyze why Obama made this flawed appointment. It doesn’t really matter, ultimately. But its withdrawal is good news for anyone who wants a fair and complete Census.

Via ThinkProgress, we learn today that the office of House GOP poohbah Eric Cantor has issued a statement dismissing President Obama’s commitment to “bipartisanship” as nothing more than a marketing ploy:

“Though the administration’s marketing of its bipartisan hard work has been outstanding, the actual work has been almost nonexistent,” said Brad Dayspring, spokesman for House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.).

This is because, presumably, Obama and House Democrats did not give a whole lot of thought to accomodating the arguments of Cantor and other House Republicans that the entire thrust of the economic stimulus legislation was a terrible idea, involving “welfare” and “socialism,” that should be rejected in favor Bush-style across-the-board and corporate tax cuts, along with deregulation.
As one of the more consistent defenders of Obama’s brand of “bipartisanship” in the progressive blogosphere, I’d beg leave to make it clear that it has nothing whatsoever to do with the Eric Cantors of the political world. Obama’s “grassroots bipartisanship” means reaching out to the millions of Republicans (and Republican-leaning independents) around the country who may not particularly like or trust Democrats, but who generally accept the idea of direct government action to revive the economy and to deal with long-overdue national challenges like health care reform, climate change, regulation of the financial sector, and ridding Washington of the death-grip of pay-for-play special pleading by corporate interests. Some of them also don’t like a foreign policy that engages in unnecessary wars at the expense of our national interests. These are the people who have been fundamentally misrepresented–literally and figuratively–by congressional Republicans for years, a misrepresentation that looks likely to grow worse as GOPers convince themselves that Bush’s main sin was excessive “moderation.”
So in reaching out to these essentially disenfranchised Americans, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for Obama to recognize the GOP pols who have disenfranchised them as their exclusive bargaining agents. I don’t fault him for going throgh the motions of “reaching out” to the Cantors of the world, because their predictable rejection of his overtures helps make his broader point. And in any event, anyone who thinks Eric Cantor gives a damn about “bipartisanship”–short of some sort of corrupt Washington power-sharing arrangement that repudiates the results of the last two national elections and the real-life results of Republican rule–hasn’t been paying much attention to the events of the last eight years.