At The Plumline, Greg Sargent flags a new Pew poll, (conducted 10/28-11/8), indicating “some potentially ominous signs for Dems, finding that anti-incumbent sentiment is running at levels comparable to the worst in two decades.” Worse, Sargent adds, “Those planning to back a Republican next year are more enthusiastic than those backing Dems — by double digits.”
The outlook for Independent voters is also worrisome, according to the Pew poll overview:

Support for congressional incumbents is particularly low among political independents. Only 42% of independent voters want to see their own representative re-elected and just 25% would like to see most members of Congress re-elected. Both measures are near all-time lows in Pew Research surveys.

Before we go all chicken little over these numbers, consider that they could quickly change when we pass a health care bill, which should give the Obama administration and congressional Democrats a boost in their competence cred. The danger is that the Republicans, smelling Dem blood as a result of recent polls, will harden their opposition. It’s not hard to imagine Olympia Snowe, for example, concluding that a few less Democratic senators in ’10 would increase her personal bargaining leverage considerably.
Among the more encouraging findings of the Pew poll:

Despite the public’s grim mood, overall opinion of Barack Obama has not soured – his job approval rating of 51% is largely unchanged since July, although his approval rating on Afghanistan has declined….Currently, 47% of registered voters say they would vote for the Democratic candidate in their district or lean Democratic, while 42% would vote for the Republican or lean toward the GOP candidate. In August, 45% favored the Democrat in their district and 44% favored the Republican.

But the poll also provides additional cause for concern regarding increasing U.S. troops in Afghanistan:

…40% say the number of troops in Afghanistan should be decreased, 32% say the number should be increased, and 19% favor keeping troop levels as they are now. These numbers are virtually unchanged from January. However, more Republicans now favor increasing the number of troops than did so in January (48% now, 38% then). The proportion of Democrats favoring a troop increase has fallen from 29% to 21% over the same period.

This may account for President Obama’s reconsideration of sending in more troops.
With respect to health care reform, the Pew poll indicates Dems face a daunting challenge in winning the confidence of voters:

While support for the health care bills before Congress ticked up slightly from last month, more Americans continue to oppose than support the overall package by a 47% to 38% margin. And strong opposition continues to outweigh strong support buy a 34% to 24% margin.
Currently, 38% support the health care bills in Congress, up slightly from 34% last month. The shift reflects a rebound in support for health care legislation among independents, particularly independents who lean toward the Democratic Party…Overall, 33% of independents favor the health care legislation being discussed in Congress, up from 26% in October. This is driven by a 16-point rebound in support (from 42% to 58%) among the subset of independents who say they lean Democratic. But overall, just over half of independents (51%) remain opposed to health care overhaul.

The study also notes a strong edge in the enthusiasm of opponents of Democratic health reform proposals, as well as deep and wide pessimism about the economy.
Polls are important. But they are almost always tempered by event. Health care reform is very much alive, there are signs that the economy is beginning to recover and victory in Afghanistan may turn on how the Administration refocuses the definition of the mission. Few Presidents have faced as many overwhelming challenges so early into their presidencies. It may be that in a year from now, even most skeptical voters will have to concede, “President Obama inherited an awful mess, but he came out of it OK.”

Lieberman looks like a lost cause, as far as the public option is concerned. But ActBlue is setting an impressive example of citizen lobbying, via TV ads, to persuade Senator Blanche Lincoln to not filibuster against an up or down vote on the public option.
BlueAmerica’s latest Lincoln ad is very tough, and graphically amusing, depicting Senator Lincoln all gussied up like a NASCAR driver, only the ads pasted all over her jumpsuit are for her many health care contributors. Slide the right-side bar at the link down and view three more ‘Harry and Louise’ style ads depicting a couple at the kitchen table wondering why Sen. Lincoln is so concerned about health insurers, when they can hardly pay their bills. The idea here is to build constituent awareness about her foot-dragging and get them to call her and urge her to get on the side of consumers, who need a public option to have any leverage with private insurers.
Some I guess would argue that these ads may do more harm than good if they alienate Lincoln from her progressive supporters. If she is that petty, however, she would probably vote wrong anyway. So I say it’s time for the full-court press. The ads are honest, both in the facts presented and in depicting the utter bewilderment many of her constituents — especially those Democrats who voted for her — are feeling at her reluctance to even allow a vote on a measure that would let maybe 10 percent of Americans chose government health insurance over private insurance. Will Lincoln be a corporate lackey or champion of the people? Maddow puts the campaign to win Lincoln’s support in perspective right here.
Meanwhile a facebook group has raised over $200,000 in pledges to support Lieberman’s opponent if he votes against allowing an up or down vote on the public option.
(Thanks to commenter pjcamp for correction)

James Oliphant’s Sunday L.A. Times article, “Healthcare Reform Bill Wouldn’t End Higher Premiums Based on Age” raises a touchy issue, which may entail significant political costs for Dems in the mid-terms and ’12, if some adjustment is not made. Oliphant, discussing current health care reform proposals, explains it thusly:

…The far-reaching clampdown on insurers leaves one highly controversial element untouched: the issue of charging higher premiums to older policyholders than to younger, presumably healthier consumers who are less likely to file costly claims…Under the provisions of the bill passed by the House on Saturday, as well as in the probable Senate version, insurers will be able to charge middle-aged consumers at least twice as much as they do younger customers.
…Experts use the arcane-sounding term “age rating,” and they discuss it in terms of ratios — as in a 2-1 formula or a 4-1 formula. Behind the jargon, the issue has huge financial and other implications for millions of Americans and the insurance industry.
For example, according to a recent Urban Institute study, if the age-rating ratio were set at 2 to 1, a typical 58-year-old policyholder would pay about $5,900 a year for health insurance. If the age rating were 4 to 1, the premium could jump to $8,650…Conversely, a 24-year-old would pay about $2,965 under a 2-1 rating system, but the premium could fall to $1,880 if the 4-1 ratio were used.
Advocates for older Americans argue that age rating amounts to discrimination, gives insurers a back-door way to deny coverage to those who need it most, and imposes serious hardship on many middle-aged people who are years away from being eligible for Medicare.
“Age is an immutable characteristic. I can’t make myself younger,” said Natale Zimmer, policy director for OWL, an advocacy group for middle-aged and older women. “To charge someone more simply based on age really amounts to discrimination.”
…Meanwhile, depending on the ratings, older people could have both higher costs and higher out-of-pocket expenses because they are more in need of services.

It’s a difficult challenge, determining fairness in health care premiums. Today’s older health care consumers were told when they were young that they paid relatively high premiums so their costs would be less when they got older. Now they are being told they have to pay more because they are older. Can’t blame them for feeling a little scammed.
The political implications are no less problematic. The importance of young voters in Obama’s election, underscored by the effect of their absence at the polls last Tuesday complicates the political trade-off between making younger voters happy vs. pleasing the older demographic, which turns out on election day at higher rates.
Add to this the fact that older voters are more likely to suffer the ravages of last year’s economic meltdown, in which approximately one-third of pension assets disappeared for most workers who had significant pension holdings. Younger workers will have more time to re-accumulate the missing third, while older workers are more likely to get stuck with the loss. This will not make for happy campers in the older-aged demographic, and unless something is done, incumbents will likely pay the price.
Thus far, Democrats have not been culpable in the rip-off of older workers. It’s been mostly a Republican thing. But if health ‘reform’ that increases costs to older voters is enacted, all bets are off. Conversely, Democrats need a much higher profile as champions of pension reform and moderating health care out-of-pocket costs and premiums paid by older consumers. Assuming they will not react politically to a triple-screwing is wishful thinking, bordering on political suicide.

The announcement of double-digit unemployment is usually an automatic meme-generator for the out-of-office party, so we can expect a lot of Fox News and wingnut jabber about how it’s all President Obama’s fault. It probably won’t matter much to them that most thoughtful voters will connect it to the Bush meltdown.
Alert Dems will respond that this is the 22nd consecutive month of job loss in America, so the trend started at the end of ’07, when the ‘mission accomplished’-‘heckuva job Brownie’ guy was running things. Dems will also remind the commentators that it’s amazing the rate isn’t worse considering we are only a year from the worst economic meltdown since the crash of ’29. More to the point, it would be worse, if not for the Obama/Democratic stimulus, and it would be a lot better, if not for the GOP-led opposition to the stronger stimulus most dems wanted.
As Paul Krugman argues in his New York Times column:

…early this year, President Obama came into office with a strong mandate and proclaimed the need to take bold action on the economy. His actual actions, however, were cautious rather than bold. They were enough to pull the economy back from the brink, but not enough to bring unemployment down.
Thus the stimulus bill fell far short of what many economists — including some in the administration itself — considered appropriate. According to The New Yorker, Christina Romer, the chairwoman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, estimated that a package of more than $1.2 trillion was justified.

Krugman is pessimistic about the president’s prospects for securing a significant cut in unemployment before the mid-terms, a point of view shared by former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich in his Salon.com post earlier this week:

If Obama and the Democrats lose one or both houses of Congress in the midterms, it will be because the president learned only the most superficial lesson of the Clinton years. Healthcare reform is critically important. But when one out of six Americans is unemployed or underemployed, getting the nation back to work is more so.

In today’s L.A. Times, Reich is quoted saying of the jobless rate announcement,

It’s an important political threshold…the 10% is going to give Republicans more ammunition to criticize the [Obama] administration and force the hand of the administration to at least appear to be taking additional steps to remedy the situation.

The one encouraging sign in the unemployment report is that hires of temp workers are up, usuallly a harbinger of hiring for more stable jobs.
Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, declared the “recession is very likely over” in September. If he’s got any leverage left to help make good on his pronouncement, now would be a good time to deploy it.

Democrat Bill Owens won an upset victory in NY-23 over Conservative Douglas L. Hoffman, who had big-name wingnut support. Owens takes a House seat that Republicans owned for 147 years and his win drove a wedge between moderate and wingnut Republicans in NY, and to some extent nationally.
It was a big win, in part because polling analysts expected otherwise. Mark Blumenthal suggested that the data presaged a Dem loss in this one and Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com called Owens’s adversary Hoffman “the favorite.” However, Silver did sound this cautionary note about the Sienna and PPP polls, which indicated a Hoffman victory, and he identifies what may be a pivotal factor in Owens’s upset:

I’m not sure that either poll will fully capture the impact of Scozzafava’s endorsement of Owens — most of PPP’s interviews were conducted before the endorsement took place (although they showed no real difference once they began informing voters of the endorsement), while Siena noted that she had dropped out, but not that she had endorsed her former rival. Plus, the polling was conducted over a holiday weekend.

I mistakenly figured that Scozzafava’s withdrawall iced the deal for Hoffman. But it looks like her endorsement of Owens across party lines just may have flipped the outcome.
Elsewhere, Democratic Lt. Gov. John Garamendi also won, as expected, in CA-10.
With respect to the VA and NJ governorship races, which Blumenthal and Silver accurately called, perhaps the only good news for Dems is that no credible political analysts see these races as referenda on President Obama. As E. J. Dionne, Jr. put it in his ‘Post-Partisan’ blog, “Less Than Fired-Up” at WaPo:

…Substantial majorities of voters in both Virginia and New Jersey said that Obama was not a decisive factor in their decisions today. That will make it easier for the White House to say these contests were decided by local factors. And a majority of voters in both states gave Obama positive approval ratings. This will undermine efforts by the president’s foes to use words like “repudiation” in characterizing what these results tell us about popular attitudes toward Obama.

‘Undermine’ yes, ‘stop’, no.
In Atlanta, the good news is that Republican-who-calls-herself-an-Independent Mary Norwood did not win without a run-off, and Democrat Kasim Reed has an excellent chance to win the Dec. 1 run-off. But Norwood’s 45-37 edge means that Reed will have to energize the African American and white progressive base that has elected Black Mayors in Atlanta for 36+ years.
In Houston openly-Gay City Controller Annise Parker is headed for a December run-off with former City Attorney Gene Locke. Democratic Mayoral candidates also won in Detroit, Pittsburgh and Boston, with Seattle’s mail-in results to be announced later in the week. Republicans battled it out in the Miami Mayoral race, indicating that Dems still haven’t made adequate headway in the Cuban community to have an impact.
In the Big Apple incumbent Independent Mayor Michael Bloomberg won with a fairly-narrow (51-46) margin over Democratic challenger William C. Thompson. One poll showed Mayor Bloomberg with an 18 point lead and political observers were predicting a ‘huge blowout’ for the mayor over his under-funded adversary.
…Now the bad news:
As Charles Franklin observes in his Pollster.com post, “Election Night Recap, NJ and NY-23.”

…Whatever else you say about the race, Corzine lost support across all regions of the state and by relatively constant amounts. This “uniform swing” shows that he didn’t just lose in Rep areas, or Dem areas, or urban centers. The decline in Corzine support was very widespread and quite even. An across the board loss.

In VA, Republicans swept all three state-wide offices that were up for election.
In addition, as Mark Z. Barabak and Faye Fiore explain in their L.A. Times election wrap up:

More significant was the makeup of Tuesday’s electorate in Virginia and New Jersey, states Obama carried a year ago. It was whiter than the electorate that turned out in 2008 to make Obama the first black president in the nation’s history, and suggested the difficulty that Democrats could have attracting minority voters without the president atop the ticket.
Also worrisome for Democrats was the sentiment among independents, the voters who swing between parties and often decide elections. They went overwhelmingly Republican in Virginia and New Jersey; if that dynamic carries over to next year, it could mean serious losses for Obama and Democrats fighting to keep their majorities on Capitol Hill.

Overall, it’s not a completely bleak picture for Dems. As Fiore and Barabak note:

History suggests that off-year elections are far from predictive. In 2001 — at a like point in Republican George W. Bush’s presidency — Democrats won the governorships in New Jersey and Virginia, then lost House and Senate seats a year later.

But there is no denying the McDonnell and Christie victories will hurt with redistricting, and of course, the msm will give them 90 percent of the ink and air time. Although niether win was a referendum on President Obama, they do indicate that his coattails have frayed away with time. More to the point, Democrats have a lot of work to do in figuring out how to mobilize turnout in off-year elections — and wherever they don’t have a charismatic candidate leading the charge.

For a delicious taste of the circularity of political spin, don’t miss Jonathan Chait’s latest post at TNR‘s ‘The Plank.’ Chait’s post, all the more a hoot because it was put up yesterday instead of this morning, unpacks some familiar boilerplate we are now hearing. A sample:

“A Bush Political Adviser Says The Current Campaigns [For Governor In Virginia And New Jersey] Turn On Local Issues, While National Conditions Will Color Next Year’s Results.” The Wall Street Journal reported that, “Republicans say a Democratic sweep of the off-year races for Virginia and New Jersey governors and New York City mayor wouldn’t presage next year’s crucial midterm elections to control Congress. A Bush political adviser says the current campaigns turn on local issues, while national conditions will color next year’s results.” [Wall Street Journal, 11/2/01] …Republicans “Downplayed Any Larger Symbolism In The Races, Insisting They Represented ‘Personal Triumphs,”…But Were Not a Repudiation Of Bush Or Republican Policies.” CQ reported that, “Republicans ‘downplayed any larger symbolism in the races, insisting they represented “personal triumphs” for Mark Warner in Virginia and James E. McGreevey in New Jersey, but were not a repudiation of Bush or Republican policies.’” [CQ, 11/7/01]

And just for good measure:

Washington Times’ Lambro: It’s “Difficult If Not Impossible To Find Any Political Significance In The Off-Year Elections That Involve Only A Couple Of Governorships, Dozens Of Mayoralty Races, And State Legislative Races.” Donald Lambro of the Washington Times wrote that it is, “difficult if not impossible to find any political significance in the off-year elections that involve only a couple of governorships, dozens of mayoralty races and state legislative races.” [Washington Times, 11/7/01]

Chait points out that the pooh-pooh spin moves both ways and that it doesn’t get a lot of cred, since exaggerating the importance of off-year elections serves the needs of news managers to produce less boring coverage. Read his whole post for more grins.

Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com hits on an interesting common denominator of campaigns (especially GOP) leading up to today’s elections — candidates’ reluctance to own their party affiliation. Silver displays a Bob McDonnel VA Gube ad, which super-imposes him on a bright Democratic blue background, and adds:

Go to McDonnell’s website, in fact, and the word “Republican” does not appear anywhere on his homepage. But McDonnell is not alone in this department. Chris Christie’s homepage does not identify his party affiliation, nor does Creigh Deeds’s (although the branding is very Obama-esque), nor does Jon Corzine’s (although he not-so-subtly places an [R] by Chris Christie’s name any time it appears in one of his commercials.) Bill Owens’s homepage does twice identify him as the “Democratic candidate in New York’s 23rd Congressional District”, although both instances are below the fold, and this is a guy who desperately needs to boost his name recognition. Doug Hoffman does refer to himself in passing as a “Conservative Republican” — even though, technically, he’s not a Republican, and scared the Republican nominee out of the race.
The Democratic brand is marginal in about half the country, but the Republican brand is radioactive in about two-thirds of it. The biggest story of the cycle is that a non-Republican conservative, Doug Hoffman, might win. Counterfactual: if Hoffman had in fact been the Republican nominee in NY-23 all along, would he be in the same strong position that he finds himself in today? Methinks not: it would have been easier for Owens — who isn’t much of a Democrat — to identify himself as the moderate in the race.

Silver could have also added Atlanta Mayoral candidate Mary Norwood, who Georgia Democratic Party Chairman Jane Kidd has called a “duplicitous Republican,” who is hiding her party affiliation with exceptional effectiveness, and doing quite well as front-runner in the polls. Silver also wonders if Republicans might profit in future elections by identifying themselves as Conservatives with a “C”, instead of Republicans. The hidden party affiliation thing may be a growing trend in the years ahead. Democrats need to develop some clever ads for ‘outing’ affiliation-hiding Republicans in the 2010 round.

Robert Pear and Sheryl Gay Stolberg provide a fairly balanced assessment of White House leadership on health reform in their Sunday New York Times overview, “Obama Strategy on Health Care Legislation Appears to Be Paying Off.”
As the authors report, the bills have advanced “further than many lawmakers expected” and “five separate measures have been pared down to two” — the farthest advance of major health reform legislation to date. They quote senior White House advisers saying the bills’ advancement “vindicated Mr. Obama’s strategy of leaving the details up to lawmakers.”
Stolberg and Pear describe the White House strategy as calibrated to encourage momentum above spending a lot of time trying to win on specific policy disagreements:

White House officials approached their work like a political campaign, and they said they had learned as much from the 2008 presidential race as from the health care fiasco of 1993-94. They said they learned the importance of pressing on and keeping up momentum, even when cable television commentators — and some fellow Democrats — declared their initiatives dead.
Congressional Democrats said it often seemed as if the top priority for the White House was simply to advance health care bills to the next step in the legislative process…Indeed, that is exactly what White House officials were trying to do. They described their legislative strategy as a very step-by-step process, in which they kept intensely focused on the next specific goal: passing a bill out of this or that committee, resolving the doubts of particular lawmakers, like the liberals who met with Mr. Obama on Thursday.

The article quotes White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel describing the President’s strategy as giving “leeway to legislators to legislate,” but “not leeway to take a policy off track.” But he cautions against overconfidence, adding “you don’t see any shimmying in the end zone…No spiking the ball on the 20-yard line here.”
Pear and Stolberg touch on the critique of the President’s strategy:

The legislative progress has come at a price. In the absence of specific guidance from the White House, it has moved ahead in fits and starts. From here on, the challenges will only grow more difficult…In the Senate, where Democrats will need support from every member of their caucus to reach a critical 60-vote threshold to avoid a potential filibuster, Mr. Obama’s hands-off strategy carries particular risks. ..Without clear direction from the president on the public option, the Democratic leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, moved ahead last week on his own, unveiling a bill that includes a government-run plan, but allows states to opt out.
Even close allies of the White House sometimes questioned its approach…“It felt like it was getting out of control at the end of July and in the beginning of August,” said John D. Podesta, a former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton who informally advises the Obama White House. “People were getting nervous that it was going every which way.” Mr. Podesta said the president risked “giving too much rope to a Congress that is liked a lot less than he is.”

The White House has received a lot of criticism for giving verbal support for the public option, but not fighting for it, Indeed the Administration made a point of saying the public option was not essential. It appears that Team Obama decided that joining in the public option debate more energetically might have endangered the reform package by prolonging debate and attracting more attacks from the right. Instead they will support the Democratic consensus that will be worked out between the House and Senate distillations. Keep it moving forward.
They may be right. If Democrats can keep losses in next year’s mid-term elections to a reasonable minimum, it is possible that economic recovery will kick in more vigorously, placing Obama and the Democrats in good position for ’12. With even modest gains in ’12, they can pass an amendment providing a stronger public option. OK, that’s three big “ifs,” but not an implausible scenario.
Polls indicate a solid majority of the American people want a public option of some kind. For example, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll conducted by the polling organizations of Peter Hart (D) and Bill McInturff (R). Oct. 22-25, 2009, indicated that 72 percent agreed that it was “quite important” (27 percent) or “extremely important” (45 percent) to “give people a choice of both a public plan administered by the federal government and a private plan for their health insurance.”
But Obama and Reid can add, and they don’t yet have 60 votes to support a strong public option, although Open Left‘s Chris Bowers believes a ‘robust’ public option, including “the original vision of a public option, tied to Medicare rates, that is available to everyone in America” is still a possibility.
It appears some of the DINOs and moderate Republicans are bucking the will of their constituencies. That’s where the progressive fight should be going forward: to hold those Senators accountable in their states for dissing their constituents to curry favor with the health insurance industry. Sens. Joe Lieberman (CT), Ben Nelson (NE), Blanche Lincoln (AR), Olympia Snowe (ME) and Susan Collins (ME) should be hammered with reminders that a lot of voters in their respective states want a public option.
A Daily Kos poll, conducted 9/8-10, found that 55 percent of Arkansas respondents supported a public option. Another Daily Kos poll, conducted back on August 17-19, asked Nebraskans “If Ben Nelson joined Republican Senators in filibustering and killing a final health care bill because it had a public health insurance option would that make you more or less likely to vote for him or would it have no real effect on your vote?,” 21 percent said “more likely” with 15 percent chosing “less likely” and 64 percent selecting “no effect.” Not much of an advantage either way there.
Sen. Joe Lieberman’s Connecticut constituency supports the public option by 64-31, according to a Quinnipiac University poll, conducted 9/10-14. Regarding the two Maine Republicans, a poll by Democracy Corps, conducted 9/23-27, found,

…Mainers overwhelmingly support a government sponsored non-profit health insurance option, 63 to 27 percent. And they support this option from the start significantly more strongly than they support a “trigger” (52 to 34 percent) that would create the government sponsored non-profit health insurance option only if private health insurance companies do not make affordable coverage available within several years.

Alternatively, if Reid is unable to cobble together 60 votes for allowing a majority vote on a bill with a public option, Dems could go the ‘budget reconciliation’ route, with 51 votes needed to get one. In that event, there will be even more weeping an gnashing of teeth among conservatives about the lack of bipartisanship, a theme they will try to make into a prevailing meme. Dems can challenge it by emphasizing majority rule — not super majority rule — is the moral standard of democracy and the public option is consistently supported by a majority of Americans.
Despite the assertion of Stolberg and Pear, Obama and Reid can both credibly argue that they have made a sincere effort to recruit Republicans to support the public option voters want, and media coverage has been adequate to back them up. But the GOP has become an ossified, hard-line political party that places a higher value on obstructing change than bringing it about. That’s not a tough sell.
Democratic leaders should fight like hell to get 60 votes to allow a vote on the public option. There’s no getting around the fact that support of 60 percent of the Senate would add credibility to health reform. But if we don’t get it, then anything over 51 votes through budget reconciliation is an acceptable — and defensible — alternative.

Jonathan Wesiman’s “Democrats’ Quiet Changes Pile Up” in The Wall St. Journal takes an insightful look at some of the more impressive ‘below the radar’ progressive reforms President Obama has secured so far, with the support of the Democratic majorities in Congress. Weisman explains:

Last week, Mr. Obama signed defense-policy legislation that included an unrelated measure widening federal hate-crimes laws to cover sexual orientation and gender identification — 12 years after it was first introduced. The same legislation also tightened the rules of admissible evidence for military commissions, an issue that consumed Congress in debate in 2007 but received almost no attention this go-round.
Other new measures signed into law since the administration took office, all of which kicked up controversy in past congresses, make it easier for women to sue for equal pay, set aside land in the West from development, give the government the power to regulate tobacco and raise tobacco taxes to expand health insurance for children. Congress and the White House, in the new defense-policy bill, also killed weapons programs that have survived earlier attempts at termination, among them, the F-22 fighter jet, the VH-71 presidential helicopter and the Army’s Future Combat System.

Not a bad tally for less than 9 months on the job, particularly in comparison the limited positive accomplishments of the previous train-wreck that careened through the White House for 8 years. it’s not hard to imagine conservative defenders of tobacco, insurance and timber companies, along with military contractors, fuming at these achievements. Give the Obama Administration credit for astute management of its broader legislative agenda and outflanking the GOP obstructionist machine. As conservative Republican Tom Price of Georgia is quoted as saying in the article, “The administration is pushing so many things so rapidly it’s difficult to concentrate on all of them.”
Add to these victories President Obama’s appointments and unraveling with executive orders, where possible, the Bush Administration’s institutionalization of incompetence and greed in government. No more Bush family friends and cronies running federal agencies charged with life or death decisions that affect millions — that alone is a quiet, but huge change for the better. The positive changes initiated by President Obama will continue to grow and benefit millions down the road. In terms of tangible reforms, his critics will have a very tough time comparing him unfavorably to post-war Republican presidents — and we’re only 8+ months into this presidency.

Please, all moderate, centrist and conservative Democrats, take a few minutes to read Paul Krugman’s op-ed. “The Defining Moment ” in The New York Times, and then take a few more minutes for honest self-reflection. History is calling, and there may not be another chance to do so much to help so many people, whose very lives are at stake for a long long time. As Krugman explains:

…Everyone in the political class — by which I mean politicians, people in the news media, and so on, basically whoever is in a position to influence the final stage of this legislative marathon — now has to make a choice. The seemingly impossible dream of fundamental health reform is just a few steps away from becoming reality, and each player has to decide whether he or she is going to help it across the finish line or stand in its way.
…The people who really have to make up their minds, then, are those in between, the self-proclaimed centrists….Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut says, “I want to be able to vote for a health bill, but my top concern is the deficit.” That would be a serious objection to the proposals currently on the table if they would, in fact, increase the deficit. But they wouldn’t, at least according to the Congressional Budget Office, which estimates that the House bill, in particular, would actually reduce the deficit by $100 billion over the next decade.
…I won’t try to psychoanalyze the “naysayers,”…I’d just urge them to take a good hard look in the mirror. If they really want to align themselves with the hard-line conservatives, if they just want to kill health reform, so be it. But they shouldn’t hide behind claims that they really, truly would support health care reform if only it were better designed.
For this is the moment of truth. The political environment is as favorable for reform as it’s likely to get. The legislation on the table isn’t perfect, but it’s as good as anyone could reasonably have expected. History is about to be made — and everyone has to decide which side they’re on.

Health care reform legislation, because of its complexity, will never be perfect for anyone. But nothing will pass if moderates insist on having their way about every single aspect of health reform. Legislation to improve on the consensus bill can be passed later on, when problems become evident. It’s a work in progress. History is calling. Who will answer the call?