Michael Gerson has a particularly offensive column in the Washington Post today. Titled “The Most Polarizing President,” it begins:

Who has been the most polarizing new president of recent times? Richard Nixon? Ronald Reagan? George W. Bush?
No, that honor belongs to Barack Obama. According to the Pew Research Center, the gap between Republican and Democratic approval ratings for Bush a few months into his first term was about 51 percentage points. For Obama, this partisan gap stands at 61 points. Obama has been a unifier, of sorts. He has united Democrats and united Republicans — against each other.

Now Gerson does note that this partisan gap is in significant measure a result of increasing partisanship in general:

Ron Brownstein, the author of “The Second Civil War,” cites a variety of structural reasons for intensified division. There has been a “sorting out” of the political parties, making each more ideologically uniform. Long, nasty presidential campaigns stoke our differences. Media outlets have become more partisan. Ideological interest groups have proliferated.

But by a remarkable – and I’m sure totally inadvertent – oversight, Gerson happens to omit another key fact — that Republican identification has also declined dramatically lately, with many former Republicans now calling themselves independents. The self-identified Republicans who are now so dreadfully polarized by Obama today are a much smaller and more ideologically homogenous group than the Americans who called themselves Republicans in previous years.
Despite this rather important omission, Gerson doesn’t hold back on unleashing a rather maudlin “more in sorrow than in anger” conclusion

…it is a sad, unnecessary shame that Barack Obama, the candidate of unity, has so quickly become another source of division.

Well, before we get carried away, let’s all put away our handkerchiefs for a moment and look at the facts.
1. Obama is actually extremely popular with the American people – much more so than Bush I or Bush II at this point in their presidencies.
Here is a wrap-up by Bloomberg News:

April 7 (Bloomberg) — President Barack Obama is winning higher marks from Americans than the last three presidents early in their terms as he takes on a global recession, two wars and domestic fights over government spending, health care and taxes.
Obama’s approval rating climbed to a high of 66 percent in an April 1-5 New York Times/CBS News poll released today. The poll follows recent surveys by the Gallup Poll, Quinnipiac University and the Pew Research Center showing that about six out of 10 Americans approve of the job the president is doing.
A Gallup Poll taken in March gave Obama, a Democrat, a 64 percent approval rating. That compares with 56 percent for Republican George H.W. Bush, 52 percent for Democrat Bill Clinton and 53 percent for Republican George W. Bush at similar points in their presidencies.

2. Obama is winning very strong majority approval from independents – 57-60% in fact.
Here’s Charlie Cook:

President Obama’s job approval rating among Democrats in last month’s Pew polling was 88 percent, with just 27 percent of Republicans approving… He received a 57 percent approval rating among independents… Obama got similar numbers in Gallup polling last week, with a 90 percent approval rating among Democrats, 27 percent among Republicans and 60 percent among independents.

So, let’s add it all up.
• Over 60% of the American people currently approve of Obama – 10% more than approved of either Bush I or Bush II at this point.
• Republican Party identification has shrunk substantially and the Party’s remaining supporters have become more intensely partisan. Nonetheless, even so, over one-quarter – 27% of these hard-core Republicans still approve of Obama.
• And 57-60% – a solid, commanding majority — of independents approve of him.
So, Let’s all send Gerson a message: “Hey, Mike, cut out the histrionics. Blow your nose, put away the silly polka-dot hanky and stop the sanctimonious blubbering about Obama causing partisan division. The Oscars are over.
America isn’t divided – it’s solidly behind Obama.
It’s not his fault some people just can’t handle the truth.

There were two notable improvements in Barack Obama’s press conference last night compared with his first presser several weeks ago.
First, by switching from two teleprompters located on the sides of the podium to one directly in front of him, Obama made much better eye contact with the television audience. Gone was the “looking right then left” head-turning that prevented him from looking directly into the camera. Just compare the YouTube video of his opening statements last night with his presser several weeks ago. It’s subtle, but it matters.
Second, Obama laid out the framework for a more coherent “common sense” narrative about his budget and future deficits – one that working people and small business owners may find more vivid.
Essentially, with his forceful repetition of the twin concepts of “investment” and “growth” to explain his budget Obama suggested an analogy between his economic strategy and the strategy of a typical small businessperson starting a new project. Let’s make the analogy explicit.

Two people decide to open restaurants. The first – more concerned about keeping his borrowing from the bank to an absolute minimum than anything else – borrows only $100,000, and tries to get by using paper plates, rickety furniture, the fewest possible waiters and the cheapest available chefs. As a result, the restaurant gets very few customers and eventually closes because the low revenues are not sufficient to pay even the relatively small monthly debt.
The second businessperson borrows twice as much, invests in decent quality tableware and furniture, more waiters and more highly trained cooks. As a result of these investments, the business attracts more customers and generates enough revenue to not only pay the larger monthly debt but also to turn a healthy profit.

This notion — that smart investments generate growth and allow one to pay even large monthly debts out of the even larger profits – is familiar and compelling to millions of Americans who own and manage small businesses. By emphatically repeating that his main priorities – health care, education, energy independence etc. – are all represent “good investments” that will lower costs and increase economic growth in the future, Obama explicitly invoked this mental model several times during his remarks.
This way of explaining Obama’s economic strategy makes the dry statistics of budgets and deficits something that average Americans can visualize in terms of “common sense.” Republicans can respond by arguing that Obama’s priorities are actually lousy investments that just waste money, but that’s a much more uphill argument than simply being able to attack the budget as just “spending” money and “increasing future debt.” Bobby Jindal’s ham-handed attempt to ridicule spending on volcano monitoring – which literally blew up in his (or more precisely Sarah Palin’s) face — illustrates the point quite nicely.

To put this campaign into context, for a moment just imagine the following scenario. Suppose that John McCain had been elected president last November and by this point in time,

1. A minor Democratic presidential candidate had directly accused him of being a member of a secret Nazi organization. A second Democratic presidential candidate said Hitler and Mussolini would approve his policies.
2. A significant liberal journal of opinion had said that McCain was following Hitler’s political strategy and quoted Hitler to prove it.
3. The leading liberal commentators in the New York Times and Washington Post wrote commentaries about McCain’s program using political expressions with absolutely clear and unmistakable connotations of fascism (e.g. “Aryan superiority”, “racial purity”, “national culture” etc.),

“Why would Obama inflict these destructive policies while the economy is collapsing? Simple. Each step strengthens the role of government in people’s lives…That’s exactly what Lenin sought to do. In a cheery volume called State and Revolution, for example, Lenin explains how:

The dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the organization of the vanguard of the oppressed as the ruling class for the purpose of suppressing the oppressors, cannot result merely in an expansion of democracy….the dictatorship of the proletariat imposes a series of restrictions on the freedom of the oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists.

Lenin, too, wished to “spread the wealth around.” And Obama, like Lenin, has been perfectly frank in recommending that we need to go beyond the “merely formal” rights enunciated in the Constitution in order to “bring about redistributive change” in society.

3. The leading conservative commentators in The New York Times and The Washington Post use buzzwords that any political science graduate or well-read person can recognize as directly rooted in classical Marxist and socialist theory.

Charles Krauthammer describes Obama’s “big bang agenda to federalize or socialize” the “commanding heights of the post industrial economy” and calls it the “most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime.”
Michael Gerson calls the budget “ideologically ambitious, politically ruthless and radical to its core…This is not merely the rejection of “trickle-down economics,” it is a weakening of the theoretical basis for capitalism — that free individuals are generally more rational and efficient in making investment decisions than are government planners”
David Brooks (who has since stepped back from this approach) says America [is] “skeptical of top-down planning” and “has never been a society riven by class resentment.”Obama’s administration, on the other hand, is: “swept up in its own revolutionary fervor”, “caught up in the self-flattering belief that history has called upon it”, is “a social-engineering experiment that is entirely new”, “expands state intervention”, is “predicated on a class divide”

Notice the roundabout way that this process works. On the one hand the columnists can argue with technical accuracy that they are not directly calling Obama a socialist or Marxist-Leninist — and from one point of view they are quite right. The quite evident purpose of their attacks are to not to smear Obama’s personal reputation but rather to demonize the basic ideas of progressive taxation and a robust public sector as policies that should be outside the pale of civilized discourse – ideas that can only be justified by un-American ideologies.
But at the same time, their comments unavoidably and unmistakably tend to imply and reinforce the more extreme accusations. With Rush Limbaugh bellowing that Obama is a “socialist” and Huckabee, Kimball and Keyes calling him a “Leninist” and a “communist”, it is simply impossible not to recognize that politically loaded terms of the kind the leading conservative columnists are using do seem to suggest some degree of sympathy for more extremist claims. The result is that the extremists feel a sense of partial “wink and a nudge” vindication while moderates and middle of the road voters perceive a kind of broad conservative consensus that Obama and his advisors actually are following a secret radical program to which they do not publically admit.
David Brooks realized that his column had contributed to this kind of unacceptable innuendo and, to his very real and substantial credit, the day after his initial column wrote a follow-up piece in which he carefully reformulated his position. As he said:

I had conversations with four senior members of the administration and in the interest of fairness, I thought I’d share their arguments with you today.
In the first place, they do not see themselves as a group of liberal crusaders. They see themselves as pragmatists who inherited a government and an economy that have been thrown out of whack. The budget, they continue, isn’t some grand transformation of America. It raises taxes on energy and offsets them with tax cuts for the middle class. It raises taxes on the rich to a level slightly above where they were in the Clinton years and then uses the money as a down payment on health care reform. That’s what the budget does. It’s not the Russian Revolution.
…I didn’t finish these conversations feeling chastened exactly. ..I’m still convinced the administration is trying to do too much too fast and that the hasty planning and execution of these complex policies will lead to untold problems down the road.
Nonetheless, the White House made a case that was sophisticated and fact-based. These people know how to lead a discussion and set a tone of friendly cooperation. I’m more optimistic that if Senate moderates can get their act together and come up with their own proactive plan, they can help shape a budget that allays their anxieties while meeting the president’s goals.

You should read the whole column. It distinguishes quite well between legitimate conservative disagreements over policy on the one hand and what is simply unjustified innuendo on the other.
Other conservative commentators like Krauthammer and Gerson don’t necessarily have to agree with Brooks’ quite dramatic re-evaluation of his position. But they owe it to their readers to display a basic level of personal intellectual honesty.
Here is the acid test: if they honestly think Barack Obama, along with Larry Summers and Obama’s other advisors are actually using Marxist or socialist doctrine to guide their thinking, they should say so, and provide support for their position. If they don’t really believe that this is true they should stop lending “a wink and a nudge” support to conservative extremists who make those accusations by using politically loaded terms that unavoidably suggest that they believe such accusations might have some element of truth.
That crosses the line from policy disagreement to character assassination and it doesn’t discredit Obama. It discredits them.
And, in addition, it’s bad for America.

It has taken several days for the full implications of Obama’s budget and message to sink in among conservatives and Republicans, but now the surprise has passed and the gloves are coming off.
The conservative hope that Obama might actually be the timid, dithering, “split the difference” centrist that some progressives feared he was has now evaporated. On the contrary, the scope of his ambition to be a solidly progressive Roosevelt-style president makes him appear as a genuine threat — not just for committed Republicans, but to a substantial group beyond. For many, this threat is so grave that insuring the defeat of Obama’s political program now takes priority over what might be best for the economy.
The larger group beyond the usual Republican base that finds Obama’s program threatening is essentially comprised of the substantial number of relatively un-ideological Middle Americans – small businesspeople, managers and office park voters among others — who –deep down – simply don’t accept a Keynesian view of economics or understand the need for significant, ongoing government intervention in the economy. On survey questions they will often support certain specific and appealing government programs but then will simultaneously reject “deficit spending”, “big government” and “regulations” as unambiguous evils. If you asked many of these Americans to choose between, on the one hand, a “lost decade of growth” like Japan suffered as well as continuing crises in health care, energy and the environment and, on the other hand, the unknown long-term political consequences of a wildly successful and deeply progressive Democratic Presidency, many will hem and haw for a moment but finally opt for “the devil they know” – recession and stagnation – rather than the uncharted waters of an energetically progressive future.
The result is that Democrats can’t rely on Obama’s tremendous advantage in personal popularity right now to keep the Republicans on the defensive. On the contrary, Democrats must begin preparing to defend themselves against a massive, well-financed and coordinated, three pronged offensive.
Prong Number 1 — The Official Party Line – The most familiar and visible of the three prongs of this offensive is the official Republican Party — represented by the Congressional Republicans and the Republican National Committee. By now virtually every politically involved American has heard the official Republican position. The battle against Obama is a direct clash between socialism and the free market, between liberalism gone completely berserk and the traditional American Way. Buried in the byzantine twists and turns of Rush Limbaugh’s epic , Fidel Castro- length, pronunciamento to the Conservative Political Action Conference last week lie a collection of virtually every one of his “oldies but goodies” and “greatest hits” drawn from his radio show.
By itself, however, this official Republican message will not be sufficient. It needs to be reinforced by two additional forces to successfully challenge Obama’s coalition. It needs (1) “responsible” apologists to give it intellectual cover with more moderate voters and (2) “Black Ops’ boys” to do the political “wet work” – the stuff too ugly to display in public.
Prong Number 2 — The “Responsible” Apologists — David Brooks’ retreat into the boilerplate anti-Obama rhetoric of the Republican National Committee in his recent New York Times column (misleadingly titled “a Moderate Manifesto”) signals the groveling surrender of the “responsible” and “sophisticated” conservatives to the Republican Party base. As Ed Kilgore has noted, for Brooks,’ “moderation is defined as compromise, any kind of compromise, and “moderates” are invariably urged to pursue a course of action that coincides with the immediate political needs of the Republican Party… you will note that [Brooks’] column essentially urges “moderates” to join Rush Limbaugh in derailing Obama’s agenda.”
In fact, the truth is that, without directly using the word “socialism”, Brooks’ entire column is nothing more than a euphemistic restatement of the Republican Party’s central accusation.
Just look at what Brooks actually says:
America:
• [supports] “relatively limited central government”
• “puts competitiveness and growth first, not redistribution first”
• [is] “skeptical of top-down planning”
• “has never been a society riven by class resentment.”
Obama’s administration, on the other hand, is:
• “swept up in its own revolutionary fervor…
• “caught up in the self-flattering belief that history has called upon it” …
• “a social-engineering experiment that is entirely new” …
• “expands state intervention”…
• “concentrates enormous power in Washington”…
• “is predicated on a class divide…All the costs will be borne by the rich and all benefits redistributed downward”
• [will lead to] “polarizing warfare that is sure to flow from Obama’s über-partisan budget.”
This is not even remotely subtle. It references quite literally every traditional anti-socialist cliché of the previous century except for the use of the actual word “socialism” itself. (Well, OK, the little “uber-partisan” thing hiding in there is a tiny bit subtle — a subliminal hint of Mein Kampf and Nazi jackboots to distract from the near-monotonous recitation of 1950’s anti-“pinko” buzzwords).
In fact, Brooks’ column is for all practical purposes a Frank Luntz-type “words that work” playbook for other editorial and commentary writers. The words above are, in combination, a roundabout, “responsible” way of saying precisely the same things as the Republican National Committee.
Other “responsible” conservatives are also quickly falling in line. In a Wednesday Washington Post commentary Michael Gerson describes Obama’s budget as “ideologically ambitious, politically ruthless and radical to its core… This is not merely the rejection of “trickle-down economics,” it is a weakening of the theoretical basis for capitalism — that free individuals are generally more rational and efficient in making investment decisions than are government planners.” Once again, the basic RNC charge of “socialism” is repeated while carefully avoiding the use of the actual word.
(Note: let’s be clear about this. “Responsible” conservatives actually do know that policies like progressive taxation, government regulation of business and federal protection of the environment are more accurately traced back to Theodore Roosevelt than to Lenin and Mao Tse-tung. They are, however, endowed with a sophistication and nuance of perspective that allows them to see a deeper truth that lies beyond such superficial objections)
As a result, Democrats should look for each and every one of the venerable tropes trotted out by Brooks and Gerson to start showing up in editorial pages, business magazine commentaries and so on all across the country. There are a very large group of moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats who would be embarrassed to turn purple while screaming “socialist” like the red-meat conservatives at a Sarah Palin rally. They will, however, be quite happy to gravely knit their brows and purse their lips in theatrical displays of preoccupation while muttering ominously about their concern over “extreme” and “irresponsible” measures.

Read more…

One major problem Democrats are having in their internal debate regarding Obama’s support for “bipartisanship” as a political strategy results from fact that different political commentators use the word in several distinct senses and at several different levels of analysis. In ordinary Democratic political discourse there is no agreed-upon way to distinguish them.
There is a basic concept from military strategy that may prove helpful in this regard. In military thinking, the term “strategy” itself is usually broken down into three levels – the small scale level of individual battles (often called tactics), the medium-scale level of military campaigns (often called the “operational” level), and the large-scale level (sometimes called strategy proper or “grand strategy”).
This schema is, on the surface, simple. It becomes more complex, however, because the “small-medium-large” distinction repeats itself like a fractal pattern in geometry over and over at many different levels of the military hierarchy, creating a number of overlapping levels of “small-scale”, “medium-scale” and “large-scale” strategies.
This is easier to see in a specific example.

During World War II, from the point of view of the U.S. commander in Bastogne in December, 1944, the holding actions conducted at the junctions on the three main roads leading into the city were small scale battles, the defense of the city proper was the mid-level strategic challenge and the overall struggle in the geographic area around the city (which including managing the airlift of supplies through the blockade, the German outflanking of the city and continuation of their offensive to the West and the eventual relief of the city from the South by Patton’s Third Army) was the large-scale strategic perspective.
On the other hand, from the point of view of General Eisenhower and the allied command, all of Bastogne was a single battle, the entire German winter counter-offensive (The “Battle of the Bulge”) was a mid-level struggle and the entire Western front (including its resupply via the North Atlantic sea routes and the strategic bombing of Germany) represented the large-scale strategic perspective.

It is easier to disentangle these distinct layers of strategy in a military environment because the rigidly hierarchical organization (“squad-platoon-company” etc.) makes the overlapping frameworks more explicit than does politics. But the basic “small-medium-large” way of analyzing strategy can still be of use in political strategy. In the case of the current argument over “bipartisanship” for example, it makes it quickly apparent that different commentators are talking about quite different levels of strategy when they announce that “bipartisanship” has “failed”

Ezra Klein argues that Obama should have begun with a larger figure for the stimulus package as an initial bargaining position rather than seek “bipartisanship”
John Judis argues that mass membership progressive organizations like unions and MoveOn should constitute themselves as a “loyal opposition” in order to leverage legislation in a more progressive direction rather than passively supporting Obama’s “bipartisanship”.
David Broder and other high priests of the commentariat describe Obama’s “bipartisanship” as an admirable but naïve objective, floundering on a “deeply-rooted beltway culture” of Washington.

Set side by side, it is easy to recognize that these commentators are referring to essentially different things. More difficult, however, is to figure out how to clarify the ambiguity.
As a very preliminary first step, consider the following typology:

Tactical bipartisanship – seeking the support of individual Republican congressmen and women for a particular bill or measure.
Operational bipartisanship – Trying to convince a significant group of Republicans to constructively participate in the shaping of a broad legislative agenda, even if such an agenda is inevitably Democratic-dominated
Strategic bipartisanship – attempting to overcome the Republican-fostered partisan division of the electorate during last three decades. Appealing directly to Republican voters as distinct from Republican congressmen. This is the level that Ed Kilgore refers to as “grassroots bipartisanship”.

This is a very preliminary, “seat of the pants” shot at a framework. But it suggests a way of beginning to approach this particular problem – one that also starts to tackle the broader problem of distinguishing the different level of Democratic strategy.
(Note: For clarity, I have oversimplified the actual categorization framework that is used in military strategy. Democrats who want to get a deeper sense of this subject should read the two most influential statements of “Strategy” in the postwar period – Basil Liddell-Hart’s post-war edition of “The Strategy of the Indirect Approach” and Edwin Luttwack’s Strategy – the Logic of War and Peace.)

Last Sunday, Open Left published a critique of an article we ran here at TDS – an article by Andrew Levison titled Obama the Sociologist. The critique, by Paul Rosenberg, is tough and argues its thesis with commendable energy and seriousness, but, at the same time, it also keeps the debate civil and clearly focused on the issues. In the coming months, as greater problems and tensions arise within the Democratic coalition and community, it is going to become more and more vital that Democrats maintain certain standards of respect and civility, even as they passionately debate policies and political strategies.
Specifically, here are three positive things that Rosenberg’s does in the course of his argument:

1. He assumes the writer he is criticizing is intellectually honest and doesn’t attribute ulterior motives. There are several places where Rosenberg explicitly notes that he has the opportunity to take a cheap shot, but chooses to give the author the benefit of the doubt instead.
2. He treats a debate between Democrats over political strategy as an attempt to identify both good ideas and bad ones and not as a contest whose goal is refute everything an opposing author says. At one point (referring to both Levison’s article and a related analysis by Mark Schmitt) Rosenberg says “I want to stress that both pieces are thoughtful and have useful insights. But I believe both are colored by wishful thinking and have some very flawed analysis as well.” A strong disagreement is very clearly and firmly stated, but it avoids being rude or insulting.
3. He avoids criticizing a publication as a whole for the opinions expressed in a particular article. At one point Rosenberg says: “this is not an attempt to pick a fight, much less to position Open Left in opposition to The Democratic Strategist. Indeed, despite some differences with its initial analysis, I completely agree with the main thrust of another recent piece.”

This is an excellent starting point for a set of rules for how Democrats should debate amongst themselves. TDS supports these standards and hopes that the rest of the Democratic community – progressives, centrists, conservatives, whatever — will all follow Rosenberg’s lead.
(Note: The Author of Obama The Sociologist is developing an amplification of his original analysis that will appear in a few days)

There are two places where the “pretend to be crazy” strategy is a pretty standard ploy – in street fights or barroom brawls on the one hand and “big bluff” business negotiations on the other.
Oh, wait a minute. There are actually three places. The third one is in the Republican Party.
In a street fight or barroom brawl the essence of the strategy is to have carefully cultivated a reputation for barely contained psychotic anger and utterly reckless disregard for consequences. The person using this strategy counts on potential challengers begin told by their friends “hey man, you don’t want to mess with that guy, he’s flat-out crazy. He might do anything”
In “big bluff” business negotiations the strategy is to feign an irrational, “over the top” attitude toward some particular contract provision or financial offer. This is usually packaged with a particularly florid or sanguinary metaphor e.g. “I’d rather cut off my right arm and throw it in the nearest garbage can than sign an incredibly stupid contract like that.” Operatic flourishes of this kind tend to derail any attempts to discuss the issue calmly and rationally.
The Republican Party’s version of the “pretend to be crazy” strategy is a mixture of the two approaches – a combination of reckless indifference to the real-world consequences of some stance and a theatrical refusal to seriously discuss realistic solutions.
There’s a long history of the use of this strategy in the Republican Party. Milton Friedman’s original “starve the beast” strategy was essentially to push the American government into bankruptcy by offering tax cut after tax cut without any regard for normal fiscal prudence or responsible management of the economy. This, it was assumed, would finally force government to cut programs that conservative Republicans disliked but that the electorate strongly supported. Later on, in the 1990’s there was Newt Gingrich’s “shutdown” of the federal government to extort his agenda – a mixture of bluff and irresponsibility that backfired when Bill Clinton refused to play along.
Today’s version of this approach is dramatically on display in the total disregard the Republicans are showing for the potentially profound economic damage their legislative brinksmanship can cause and the near-infantile way in which they play with words on the subject – “spending isn’t stimulus”, “this is a spending bill not a economic recovery bill” and so on rather than seriously discussing the realistic economic choices that must be made.
There is no “one-size-fits-all” counter-strategy for dealing with the “pretend you’re crazy” approach, but there is one good rule of thumb — Democrats should explicitly point out the game that is being played. They should say clearly:
“The reason the Republicans feel free to act in such an incredibly irresponsible way in this difficult situation is that they are counting on President Obama and the Democrats to behave responsibly and bail them out. Their behavior resembles the spoiled teen-ager who gets arrested again and again because he knows his father is a judge who will always get him off.”
The essence of this counter-strategy is to redefine what the Republicans want to call a stance based on “principles” as a stance that is instead fundamentally childish and irresponsible. To most Americans, engaging in serious negotiation and seeking reasonable compromise in a difficult situation like the present one represents “adult” or “grown-up” behavior. Politicians who refuse to engage in such activities are therefore, essentially behaving like children.