The New York Times has an interesting excerpt from Jonathan Haidt’s book, “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion,” arguing that much of the current political polarization is rooted in tribal conceptions of “sacredness.” As Haidt says:

Self-interest, political scientists have found, is a surprisingly weak predictor of people’s views on specific issues. Parents of children in public school are not more supportive of government aid to schools than other citizens. People without health insurance are not more likely to favor government-provided health insurance than are people who are fully insured.
Despite what you might have learned in Economics 101, people aren’t always selfish. In politics, they’re more often groupish. When people feel that a group they value — be it racial, religious, regional or ideological — is under attack, they rally to its defense, even at some cost to themselves. We evolved to be tribal, and politics is a competition among coalitions of tribes.
The key to understanding tribal behavior is not money, it’s sacredness. The great trick that humans developed at some point in the last few hundred thousand years is the ability to circle around a tree, rock, ancestor, flag, book or god, and then treat that thing as sacred. People who worship the same idol can trust one another, work as a team and prevail over less cohesive groups. So if you want to understand politics, and especially our divisive culture wars, you must follow the sacredness.

Haidt goes on to provide compelling examples on the left and right, and observes,

This is why we’ve seen the sudden re-emergence of the older culture war — the one between the religious right and the secular left that raged for so many years before the financial crisis and the rise of the Tea Party. When sacred objects are threatened, we can expect a ferocious tribal response. The right perceives a “war on Christianity” and gears up for a holy war. The left perceives a “war on women” and gears up for, well, a holy war.

it’s a useful model, as long as it’s not leveraged in service to false equivalence. As Haidt concludes: “The timing could hardly be worse. America faces multiple threats and challenges, many of which will require each side to accept a “grand bargain” that imposes, at the very least, painful compromises on core economic values. But when your opponent is the devil, bargaining and compromise are themselves forms of sacrilege.”

National Journal’s Ronald Brownstein reports on a new Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor poll, indicating that President Obama’s approval rating rose to 51 percent, up 7 from December — “Obama’s highest approval rating in the Heartland Monitor since the survey taken immediately after the killing of Osama bin Laden in May.” Brownstein notes further:

…Obama’s support is strengthening but hardly yet secure, and the country remains divided closely enough on his performance and agenda to virtually ensure a competitive general election against the Republican nominee. Indeed, just 44 percent of registered voters surveyed said they intend to vote for the president’s reelection, while 49 percent said they will likely or definitely vote for someone else. A series of economic measures also shows that Obama is continuing to receive equivocal ratings, especially from whites.

But Brownstein sees considerable cause for White House optimism: “…The new poll found his approval rating rising by 11 percentage points among independents; 8 among nonwhites; 6 among all whites; 7 among both college-educated white men and women; and 9 among the so-called waitress moms–white women without a college degree. Only among noncollege-educated white men did Obama remain stuck in neutral with virtually no gain from December.”
Brownstein adds that the President’s approval rating “is approaching his actual share of the 2008 vote overall and among key voting blocs, including whites, Independents, white women. His current numbers “have surpassed his 2008 vote among Hispanics (72 percent versus 67 percent) and college-educated white men (44 percent versus 42 percent).” However, he is still “well below” his ’08 percentages with younger whites and white Independents.
The President’s approval ratings appear to be linked to “expanding optimism about the economy,” with 60 percent of Americans now saying they expect improvement over the next year, compared to 50 percent in October. A total of 56 percent now say that President Obama’s policies are moving the country in the right direction (45 percent) or that America is “significantly better off” (11 percent).
Brownstein notes that “Those numbers have remained remarkably stable through Obama’s presidency, and they suggest that through all the turbulence of the times, a majority of Americans has never entirely lost faith in him.” He concludes, “Judging by these latest survey results, the economy is slowly giving the president more ammunition to argue that such faith was not misplaced.”

Jon Bernstein makes an important point about the Republican “information bubble”

“…Want to see a great example of the closed GOP information feedback loop, and why it may prove dangerous for the Republican candidates?
Think about the two Barack Obamas that Republicans are running against. One of them is basically a fraud; he’s never held a job before he somehow wound up the Democratic nominee in 2008. Or, as Mitt Romney asserted today: “It’s hard to create a job if you never had one.”…The other Obama is the scheming, nefarious, stealth left-winger who any day now is going to unleash his radical socialist agenda.
…neither version builds a convincing case against supporting Obama in 2012. No one is going to buy that Obama is too inexperienced to be president; no one is going to buy that he has some secret agenda that remained secret during four years in the White House.
But Mitt Romney and the rest of the GOP field has have spent three years now speaking only to confirmed Republican voters. And those voters live in the world where reality is defined by Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, in which all of that stuff makes perfect sense.
Even worse, the candidates and their operatives themselves live in that world, or at least spend an awful lot of time there. It wouldn’t be surprising if the Romney campaign believes (on some level) that Obama never held a job in his life before mysteriously winding up as president, or that he can’t get through a debate without a teleprompter.”

This morning it was announced that state Sen. Pam Galloway, one of the four Republican state senators facing recall, will resign her seat. Since Democrats had already winnowed the Republican majority to 17-16 with their two recall victories last summer, this now makes the Wisconsin state senate a 16-16 tie.
The recall election against Galloway will still move forward, although her name will not appear on the ballot. Republicans will nominate a different candidate, while state Rep. Donna Seidel, who was already challenging Galloway in the recall election, will be the Democratic candidate.
If we act fast, we can give Seidel a big head start in this election, and make sure Scott Walker never has a Republican majority to work with again.
Please, chip in $6 to Donna Seidel on Act Blue

At Politico, Kenneth P. Vogel posts on “Santorum’s Secretive Fundraisers,” a group which includes “some of the right’s richest and most powerful players.” Vogel explains:

…Its members have been credited with solidifying the rise of George W. Bush’s Republican presidential campaign in 2000 and working to undercut the 2008 bids of Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani…And, last weekend, when conservative bigwigs gathered in Houston for a meeting of the Council for National Policy, they helped raise $1.8 million in pledged donations for Santorum’s cash-strapped campaign and the super PAC supporting it…
…”Hopefully, this will just be the first of a number of these types of events where the conservative movement leaders are coming together and saying ‘this is our man,'” said Richard Viguerie, a founding member of the Council for National Policy and an organizer of the main fundraiser for Santorum, on the sidelines of the Houston meeting.
…”These people have large networks out there,” said Viguerie. “They have members, they have donors, they have supporters, subscribers, listeners, readers, and if they get engaged,” he said, it will mean “many, many, many seven figures” worth of contributions to Santorum and the super PAC devoted to him.
The council meets in secret three times a year under tight security. And while it bills itself as “a nonpartisan, educational foundation” that does not “lobby Congress, support candidates, or issue public policy statements on controversial issues,” gatherings of its members have played key roles in presidential politics.

Vogel adds that “The group’s rules forbid members from discussing it, and the media is barred from covering its meetings, even when top government officials speak…The secrecy has led to scrutiny and conspiracy theories from the left, with liberals demanding that Bush release audio of his 1999 address (he didn’t), and the lefty website DailyKos dubbing the group the “Sith Lords of the Ultra-Right.”
Not everyone is convinced of the groups effectiveness, as Vogel notes. But no one should be surprised if Santorum is soon rolling in dough from anonomous contributions.

Michael Tomasky has a well-argued post up at The Daily Beast about the Republicans’ stake in a worsening economy. As Tomasky puts it, “the GOP has more invested in economic failure than any out-party I can remember in my lifetime.” Further, Tomasky adds:

…The GOP is starting to run out of time to think up new ways to ruin the economy so that Barack Obama doesn’t get reelected. The Republicans have to do this delicately, of course; they can’t be open about it lest it become too obvious that harming the economy is their goal. But they have to be aggressive enough about it for their efforts to bear some actual (rotten) fruit. There are three fronts–gas prices, jobs, and the budget–on which we should keep our eyes open for signs that the Republicans are trying to achieve Mitch McConnell’s No. 1 goal for America.

Tomasky notes that the Republicans are especially heartened by the hike in prices at the pump:

…The gas situation is perfect for the GOP for two reasons. First, there’s very little a president can actually do about gas prices. Second, even though those prices don’t really tell us much about the more general economy, most people have the impression that they do, so for the out-party, it’s just a free whack.
No one can blame Republicans for using Obama as a piñata on the issue. But here’s what they can be blamed for. What is causing these high prices? Not low supply and high demand, which is what they teach you in school. In fact, supply is high–domestic oil production is at its highest point in years, higher under this allegedly business-hating president than under oilmen Bush and Cheney. And demand has been low because of the economy, although it’s now picking up.

Tomasky explains that the heavy layoffs of public sector workers last year have slowed considerably, leading to increasing talk about Boehner and the GOP reneging on the budget deal and calling for deeper cuts in spending and public employment. All of which puts the GOP in a morally indefensible position. As Tomasky concludes:

Every out-party does a little discreet cheering for the economy to be weak. But the GOP has put itself in a unique position. By opposing everything Obama wanted with such ferocity; by saying all those thousands of times that he had no clue about the economy; by sending out a parade of presidential candidates, from the semi-serious to the clown posse, all of whose central criticism of Obama is that he killed the economy–in all of these ways the party has more invested in economic failure than any out-party I can remember in my lifetime. Its best hope for now is gas prices, but even they eventually get lower, usually by late summer. Beyond that, all the GOP has to rely on is Mitt Romney’s unstoppable charisma.

Saber-rattling to jack up gas prices and pushing for lay-offs to slow the recovery — it’s a sad legacy for a once-great political party.

Jonathan Chait’s insightful post “The Obama Poll Drop Mystery: Explained!” at New York Magazine makes an important point about the recent drop in the President’s approval rating Dems should consider. Chait explains the problem:

…Some significant chunk of the population has turned sour on Obama over the last few days…The mystery is why. The Post attributed the drop to a rise in gasoline prices. But the evidence suggests this isn’t a major factor. (See Brad Plumer’s persuasive take.) The Times just threw up its hands. There are no apparent causes of such a drop — no economic catastrophe, no scandal, no foreign policy fiasco, no gaffe. Indeed the news seems to have been smooth and positive for Obama.

Chait cites a recent DCorps survey indicating that “the America is back” section of the President’s SOTU was overstated and premature:

“America is back” is by far the weakest operative message and produces disastrous results. It is weaker than even the weakest Republican message and is 10 points weaker in intensity than either Republican message. Overall, less than a third of all voters said this message makes them more likely to support the President and a third said this message made them less likely to support Barack Obama. Alarmingly, this message barely receives majority support among self-identified Democrats — and even less support among all other groups. Less than a quarter of independents say this message would make them more likely to support the President and no independents said that it would make them much more likely to support him.

Noting that the President trumpeted the favorable jobs report, Chait adds that “Respondents, according to the survey, still felt enormous economic pain and insecurity, and interpreted any positive statements as a sign of complacency and detachment.” Chait’s theory makes sense in light of the timing of the poll drop, and he concludes “The public is ready to credit him [the President] for trying, they really hate the Republicans, but they do not think that it’s morning in America and respond badly to any suggestion that they ought to feel cheerful.”

There’s a lot of saber-rattling toward Iran going on among conservative leaders in both the U.S. and Israel, much of it in the U.S. by those who have never served in the military. Yet public opinion polls indicate scant support for war against Iran in either country.
As TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira puts it in his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot,’: “The possibility of a nuclear-armed Iran needs to be taken very seriously, of course, but war is also very serious and not to be rushed into. That measured-but-firm approach is shared by the majority of Americans and Israelis.’ In the U.S., Teixeira adds:

In the United States a recent CNN poll found that when the public is given a choice between immediate military action, economic and diplomatic efforts to get Iran to shut down its nuclear program, and no action, the dominant choice is economic and diplomatic efforts (60 percent). Just 17 percent want military action now. Only 22 percent prefer to take no action.

In Israel, support for a pre-emptive strike is equally unpopular, says Teixeira:

Similarly, in Israel a recent collaborative poll between the Sadat Chair at the University of Maryland and Israel’s Dahaf Institute finds that only 19 percent of Israelis want to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities unilaterally while 42 percent believe such a strike needs U.S. support. Thirty-four percent of Israelis are opposed to a strike.

As Teixeira concludes, “These Americans and Israelis understand, even if conservatives do not, that military action against Iran should not be pursued unilaterally and without exploration of alternatives.”

Noam Scheiber has a New Republic article that calls attention to a misunderstanding that could spell trouble for the White House. Scheiber cites Washington Post and New York Times polls showing that President Obama is losing support among “Independents” and one major cause is rising gas prices.
Scheiber says “I don’t disagree with this, but I’d argue that the results underscore something broader: the way the White House has misunderstood independents for much of Obama’s first term.” He adds that the confusion first surfaced in White House advisers’ “impression that independents were most concerned about deficits” and a related delusion “that independents were exercised about out-of-control government spending.” Sheiber continues:

The problem with this is that it reflected a fundamental confusion about who independents were. In the book, I summarize some existing work showing that most people who call themselves independents are pretty similar to traditional partisan voters: They reliably vote Democrat or Republican and simply prefer not to state their party affiliation. The independents actually up for grabs tend to be working class whites, who base their vote first and foremost on their personal economic situation. Though many of these independents did tell pollsters they were upset about the deficit in 2010 and 2011, a slightly closer reading of the data suggested they weren’t upset about spending per se. They were upset that the spending–on the stimulus and health care–didn’t appear to have helped the economy, since unemployment was still extremely high. (I happen to disagree with them–I think the stimulus helped quite a bit–but that was undeniably their view.)
Which is to say, by focusing on deficit-reduction rather than job-creation, the White House was ignoring the problem independents were most exercised about.

Scheiber argues that the White House emphasis on solid job growth in recent months “has largely bombed among independents,” and,

…Longtime Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg found that the riff in the State of the Union about recent job growth appealed to a mere 26 percent of independents. The reason, Greenberg explained, is both that such voters “have not seen these jobs or felt the effects of job creation” and that “they are also deeply concerned that these jobs are not permanent.”
Greenberg went on to note that, absent a genuine improvement in their personal bottom lines, the only reliable way to excite independents was to tout policies aimed at strengthening the middle class, which at least has the benefit of speaking to their anxieties. Given the likelihood that the economy and the unemployment rate stay about where they are between now and November–and the ever-present risk of still higher energy prices–the White House would be wise to heed his advice. That means no idle talk about deficits or the recent economic uptick, its favorite topics of the last twelve months…

As Scheiber noted above, most ‘Independents’ reliably vote Democratic or Republican, according to their leanings. But the important subset of the so-called “Independents” is the white working class, one of the largest groups of actual swing voters. As Scheiber concludes of Greenberg’s advice to focus on their concerns about economic security, “Will the White House have the presence of mind to hold that line? As I say, probably only if it’s finally thinking straight about independents.”

As part of a New Republic roundtable on what Obama’s agenda should be for a second term, Mark Schmitt argues as follows:

…If Obama wins re-election, he should tackle the challenge of political reform directly, aggressively, and creatively.
The political dysfunction in Washington is now its own crisis–one to be addressed on its own terms. If the economy recovery remains on solid ground–a big if, of course–Obama should reclaim, both on the campaign trail and upon re-election, his original mission and passion: Reform of the political process. Pollster Stanley Greenberg concluded in July 2011 that voters are more open than ever before to thinking about economic inequality and stress as connected to political inequality and a sense that the “the game is rigged” and people “do not think their voices matter.”
….Congressional obstruction has now crossed the line into what James Fallows of The Atlantic calls “nullification,” including blocking the implementation of existing laws. All the barriers of law and custom that had put a modest check on the influence of money on elections and legislation have fallen–most of them not directly because of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision but more because of a cultural sense that anything goes, combined with lack of enforcement. Rather than moving to open the electoral process, eleven states have enacted or tightened voter I.D. requirements since Obama took office.

Among his suggestions, Schmitt notes some proposals TDS also discussed in a Strategy Memo “A Common Sense Populist Communications Strategy for Rebuilding Trust in Government”. For example:

….While Obama’s dreams of a warm deliberative conversation with congressional Republicans were evidently naïve, the broader public, beyond the angriest activists and partisans, has shown itself open to a real conversation. When Obama inevitably moves back to thinking about long-term federal deficit reduction, rather than appoint yet another blue-ribbon panel of Washington grandees and CEOs, he should instead launch a process that would engage tens of thousands of Americans in a guided, deliberative discussion of the choices on taxes, health spending, and retirement.

And also:

…There are also small steps that Obama can take to make government more accessible to citizens. Consider, for example, the statement most of us now receive annually from the Social Security Administration detailing our lifetime earnings and expected benefits. That’s an innovation from the mid-1990s, and it helps dampen Social Security demagoguery by showing that the program is real and its benefits predictable. While open databases of information such as recovery.gov, which tracks spending from the 2009 economic stimulus, are great resources for specialists or people with time on their hands, they are no substitute for more tangible gestures that can make government visible to ordinary, busy people.

Be sure to check out Schmitt’s piece and also the TDS Strategy Memo.