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TDS staff

In his latest article at The New Republic, TDS Co-Editor William Galston surveys the chaotic political realities of the moment, warns of serious hazards ahead and charts a path for Dems looking toward the 2010 elections. Here’s Galston on the daunting challenges of this political moment:

When the history of the Obama administration is written, this week may well be regarded as the moment when Democrats’ anxieties crystallized into genuine alarm. Factional fights within the party exploded into public view. Howard Dean—regarded by many progressives as a leader on health reform—denounced the Senate bill, declaring that it “would do more harm than good to the future of America.” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi made it clear that the Obama administration would be left on its own to make the case for its Afghanistan policy; odds are that a large number of House Democrats—perhaps even a majority—will oppose funding it. Thirty-eight House Democrats, many facing tough races, joined forces with the Republicans to turn the vote on a new jobs bill into a cliff-hanger that forced the Speaker to spend an hour on the House floor personally lobbying wavering members. Even E. J. Dionne Jr., an ardent liberal and congenital optimist, worried publicly that while “[a]n increasingly bitter and negative Republican Party may not be able to win the midterm elections … Democrats definitely can lose them.” The reason: Democrats’ “turmoil and backstabbing are making what is a rather good [health care] plan look like a failure while persuading political independents that they are a feuding gang rather than a governing party.”

Galston goes on to cite discouraging poll figures regarding the country’s direction, confidence in President Obama’s goals and policies, ratings of congress and feelings about the Democratic Party, among other concerns. He notes parenthetically, however that the “Democrat’s only consolation is that Republican leaders receive even lower ratings.”
Galston then offers some specific strategy suggestions, including:

Get health care done as quickly as possible. The House should recognize that any Senate bill that can garner 60 votes is likely the only bill that can do so. Logic suggests that the best course would simply be for the House to pass the Senate bill, avoiding a useless and time wasting conference.
Pivot hard toward the economy and jobs, and keep the focus there throughout 2010. That means keeping divisive issues—such as immigration and cap-and-trade—off next year’s legislative agenda. It also means more action—such as expanding the flow of credit to small business—to promote job creation in the private sector.
Acknowledge that public concern about spending, deficits, and debt is high and rising. That doesn’t mean turning toward fiscal restraint next year, while the economy remains fragile. It does mean endorsing the creation of a bipartisan fiscal commission—along the lines of the Base Realignment and Closure Commission—with the power to make recommendations after the mid-term elections to which Congress would be required to respond early in 2011.

“Beyond these specifics, ” Galston adds, “Democrats will have to shift their mindset and recalibrate the balance between stability and change. He adds that what Americans wanted most in ’08 was “getting rid of the Bush-Cheney administration. (The NBC/WSJ poll shows that they remain the two least respected public officials of the past decade.)” Now, however, “They want their government to be a rock of security in uncertain times…They want reassurance, jobs, and temporary assistance until they can find them, not a new New Deal. They will accept sensible change in measured increments, but not pell-mell and all at once.”
Tough advice from an experienced Democratic warrior — and it merits serious consideration from Party strategists.

Former DNC head Howard Dean may have ample support for his opposition to the latest Senate version of health care reform, but there are plenty of progressive bloggers and columnists who see it differently. Some examples:
At The New York Times, Paul Krugman’s “Pass the Bill” makes a tightly-crafted case for progressives supporting the latest compromise:

But let’s all take a deep breath, and consider just how much good this bill would do, if passed — and how much better it would be than anything that seemed possible just a few years ago. With all its flaws, the Senate health bill would be the biggest expansion of the social safety net since Medicare, greatly improving the lives of millions. Getting this bill would be much, much better than watching health care reform fail.
At its core, the bill would do two things. First, it would prohibit discrimination by insurance companies on the basis of medical condition or history: Americans could no longer be denied health insurance because of a pre-existing condition, or have their insurance canceled when they get sick. Second, the bill would provide substantial financial aid to those who don’t get insurance through their employers, as well as tax breaks for small employers that do provide insurance.

Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic also believes the bill is a significant improvement, “…light years better than what we have now.” In his MyDD post on former President Clinton’s support of the bill, Jonathan Singer explains “This bill isn’t perfect, but it may be the best chance at reforming the system that there will be for a long, long time. .” WaPo columnist
WaPo columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. agrees, noting,

…There is one thing that must be done fast: Democrats need to agree on a health bill and sell it with enthusiasm and conviction. Their own turmoil and back-stabbing are making what is a rather good plan look like a failure while convincing political independents that they are a feuding gang rather than a governing party.

At TPM Cafe Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, supports voting for the current version as the second step in a 3-part effort :

Here’s my position. In these final days of the health care fight, progressives should work hard to improve the health reform bill in the Senate and in the conference with the (better) House bill. But we should support the passage of the best bill we can get – and then keep fighting for more and better reform.

Ezra Klein sees it this way at his WaPo blog:

But now we’re talking about killing the Senate health-care bill — with its $900 billion in subsidies and its delivery system reforms and its Medicare Commission and its Medicaid expansion and its exchanges and its regulations on insurers — unless we make the exchanges slightly stronger prudent purchasers, when they’re already strong enough to “thrill” the original sponsor of the prudent purchaser amendment?
I guess this is the logical outcome of a system in which the greatest gains accrue to those making the most credible and severe threats. But it’s not healthy.

At FiveThirtyEight.com, Nate Silver’s “Health Care:The Elevator Pitch” takes a more persuasive tone than his previous post on the topic, “Why Progressives Are Batshit Crazy to Oppose the Senate Bill .” Says Silver:

…The bill is not “real reform” in the sense of something that fundamentally alters the structure of the current, predominately private, predominately employer-based insurance system. The only solutions that I’m aware of that might do that are single payer and Wyden-Bennett, either of which I’d prefer to what’s on the table now — but neither of which are liable to be politically viable any time soon. By the way, I don’t think a bill with a public option would constitute fundamental reform either — it would be better, but it’s still tinkering around the edges of a flawed system.
…Fundamental reform like single-payer or Wyden-Bennett was never really on the table. The bill comes very close, indeed, to establishing what might be thought of as a right to access to health care: once it’s been determined that people with pre-existing conditions cannot be denied health care coverage, and that working class people ought to receive assistance so that they can afford health care coverage, it will be very hard to remove those benefits. It’s the sort of opportunity that comes around rarely — and one that liberals will greatly regret if they turn down.

In his article, “Deal or Die on Health Care: Why progressives should support a Democratic compromise,” at The American Prospect, Paul Starr argues:

Liberals in Congress should also recognize that with either a 2013 or 2014 date for implementation, there will be time enough to revise the program before it goes into effect (indeed, time enough for the opponents to roll it back). Many of the specifics, such as the level of subsidies, almost certainly will be changed in the intervening years. And many of those specifics can be changed through budget reconciliation, which requires only 51 votes to pass the Senate.
Sen. Lieberman’s influence is at its maximum in passing health-care legislation now, and some of those provisions will be hard to change. But if Democrats succeed in getting a bill through Congress in the next several weeks, they can return to some of the issues in the reconciliation process next year. And at that point they won’t necessarily need to have Lieberman on board…If progressives in Congress can see that far ahead, they’ll see their way to vote for a compromise.

Whether to support or oppose the current Senate version of health care reform bill is a tough call for many progressive Democrats, and all of the aforementioned commentators have expressed their concerns about some measures of the Senate bill. But clearly many are ready to sign on and get something they feel is substantial passed soon — and carry the fight for amendments advancing comprehensive, universal coverage with some form of public option to another day.

A new survey of Israeli public opinion conducted by Gerstein-Agne Strategic Communications for the New America Foundation offers a far more nuanced view of opinions about Obama and efforts to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict then the standard American media narrative. Here’s the summary:

Despite repeated media reports touting a “4 percent Obama approval rating” and arguments that the United States has lost the Israeli public’s support for renewed peace efforts, Israelis actually demonstrate a much more supportive and nuanced view of President Obama, and there is solid backing for an American-sponsored final status agreement along the lines of where the parties left off nine years ago at Taba and in the recent Olmert-Abbas negotiations.
The survey also shows that Prime Minister Netanyahu has a great deal of political space to sign a peace agreement with the Palestinians, including within his own Likud party.

The survey examines Israeli opinion in unique detail, with an extensive battery of questions and in-depth “paragraph A vs. Paragraph B” policy choices like those used in many Democracy Corps studies.

TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira’s latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ at the Center for American Progress web pages makes a good companion piece to our staff post yesterday on Lee Fang’s expose of the right wing’s campaign to “swift boat” scientists concerned about global warming. Teixeira reports on a new poll, by WorldPublicOpinion.org, which indicates that a very healthy majority of the Amerian public supports “taking action to stop climate change.”:

…In the U.S. component of this survey, conducted in late September, 58 percent of the public said we had not done enough to deal with the problem of climate change, compared to 28 percent who thought we’d done the right amount and just 13 percent who thought we’d done too much.
Moreover, an overwhelming 82 percent said our country has a responsibility to take steps to deal with climate change.

Even more impressive:

The public’s sense of America’s responsibility in this area includes supporting a U.S. commitment to limit greenhouse gas emissions as part of the Copenhagen agreement, if other countries are willing to do the same. An identical 82 percent support such a commitment, compared to just 15 percent who don’t.

Looks like the climate-change denying swift-boaters have flunked, and badly. As Teixeira concludes, “Conservatives who urge slow or no action on climate change are fond of saying they represent the true voice of America on this issue, not progressives. As usual, they’re wrong.”

If you know anyone who is buying the wingnut snake oil being termed “climategate,’ direct them post-haste to Lee Fang’s post, “A Case Of Classic SwiftBoating: How The Right-Wing Noise Machine Manufactured ‘Climategate’ ” in ‘The Wonk Room’ at Think Progress web pages. Fang not only demolishes the allegation that global warming is a myth; he also shows quite clearly how the wingnuts distort and manipulate facts to smear scientists and policy makers who are raising concerns about global warming. An excerpt:

…Polluter-funded climate skeptics, along with their allies in conservative media and the Republican Party, sifted through the e-mails, and quickly cherry picked quotes to falsely accuse climate scientists of concocting climate change science out of whole cloth. The skeptics also propelled the story, dubbed “Climategate,” to the cover of the New York Times and newspapers across the globe. According to a Nexis news search, the Climategate story has been reported at least 325 times in the American press alone.
…As the right attempts to use the Climategate story to derail the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference this week, arctic sea ice is still at historically low levels, Australia is still on fire, the northern United Kingdom is still underwater, the world’s glaciers are still disappearing and today NOAA confirmed that not only is it the hottest decade in history, but 2009 was one of the hottest years in history. But how did the right-wing noise machine hijack the debate?

Fang then describes how the media was manipulated to serve the wingnut scam:

The methods for the right-wing political hit machine were honed during the Clinton years. Columnist and language-guru William Safire, a former aide to actual Watergate crook President Nixon, attached “-gate” to any minor post-Nixon incident as a “rhetorical legerdemain” intended “to establish moral equivalence.” (See phony manufactured scandals “Travelgate,” “Whitewatergate,” etc.) A right-wing echo chamber — including the Rev. Moon-funded Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, talk radio, and the constellation of various conservative front groups and think tanks — would then blare the scandal incessantly, regardless of the truth. But the more troubling aspect of this gimmick is the increasing willingness for traditional media outlets, from the Evening News to the Washington Post, to largely reprint unfounded right-wing smears without context or critical reporting.
One of the most successful coups for right-wing hit men was the “SwiftBoat” campaign, a well financed effort orchestrated by lobbyists and Bush allies to smear Sen. John Kerry’s (D-MA) war record. But “Climategate” is no different, with many of the same conservatives actors playing their respective roles…

The rest of Fang’s post is a richly-linked, detailed chronology of the media campaign to puff up “climategate” and discredit scientists who are doing serious work on the issue — required reading for anyone who cares about the crisis of global warming.

Following up on Ed’s post on the Ipsos-McClatchey poll below, Jonathan Chait’s “More Polling On Health Care Reform’s Popularity” at The New Republic, flags Mark Blumenthal’s analysis of a new CNN/ORC poll. As Blumenthal explains:

Immediately after their favor-or-oppose question about the recently passed health reform bill, CNN’s pollsters asked a new follow-up question that others have not. They found that while a third of all adults (34 percent) say they oppose the bill because “its approach toward health care is too liberal,” 10 percent oppose it because it is “not liberal enough.”

With 46 percent supporting the House health care reform bill, that 10 percent means 56 percent of Americans now “favor either the House-passed version of health care reform or something further to the left,” according to Texas Tech professor Alan Reifman, quoted in Chait’s post. Hopefully the Senate ‘Group of Ten’ now negotiating a consensus is paying attention.

Alan I. Abramowitz has a post at Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball that should be required reading for Democratic Senate Leadership. Abramowitz, senior editor at the Crystal Ball and a TDS contributor, makes a tight case that the time has come for Democrats to change Senate rules, so America will no longer be held hostage by the filibuster. First, he sets the stage, reviewing Democratic prospects for overcoming the filibuster under current rules

…While Democrats have a good chance of retaining control of the Senate in the next two election cycles, their majority is almost certain to be reduced.
In 2010 Republicans will be defending 19 of the 38 seats that are up for election so their opportunities for gains will be limited. In 2012, however, Republicans will have a much better chance to recoup some of the losses that they suffered in the 2006 and 2008 elections because Democrats will have to defend 24 of the 33 seats that will be up for election.
The results of the 2010 and 2012 Senate elections will depend on the national political climate when those elections take place. In the long run, however, Democrats will probably find it very difficult to maintain anything close to a 60-seat majority in the Senate. Since the end of World War II, Senate majorities of 60 or larger have been unusual and the current 60-seat Democratic majority represents a sharp break with the recent pattern of relatively small majorities. While Democrats now enjoy an edge in party identification in the electorate, their advantage among regular voters is fairly small. Moreover, at least 22 of the 60 Democratic Senate seats would appear to be highly vulnerable. Democrats currently hold 11 Senate seats in states that were carried by the Republican Party in all three presidential elections since 2000 as well as 11 seats in states that were carried by the Republicans in two of these three elections. In contrast, Republicans hold only two seats in states that were carried by the Democratic Party in all three presidential elections and only two additional seats in states that were carried by the Democrats in two of these elections.

Abramowitz explains further that the “small state bias” favors Republicans since Dems are disproportionately concentrated in major urban areas in the large states. Dems do currently hold 11 of 24 seats of the 12 small states, Abramowitz notes, but this is likely to diminish in the next elections. He then concludes:

A reduced Democratic majority will make it almost impossible to invoke cloture. This leaves progressive Democrats with two options: try to build bipartisan coalitions or change the Senate’s rules. Bipartisanship is very popular with many Washington political insiders. However, given the deep ideological divide that separates the two parties, bipartisanship is simply not a viable option in today’s Senate. In a Senate with a narrow Democratic majority, the swing vote on cloture would not be moderate Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe. It would be someone like conservative Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback. In order to gain enough Republican votes to invoke cloture, progressive Democrats would have to abandon many of their key policy commitments.
A reduced Democratic majority would leave only one viable option for progressives to save their policy agenda: change the Senate’s rules to end the filibuster. Short of a constitutional amendment, nothing can be done about the small state, Republican bias of the Senate. But the Senate’s rules can be changed by a simple majority vote. All it takes is the political will to drag the Senate kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

Clearly this is a challenge that must be met by reform-minded Democrats sooner, than later — or we may not get another chance for decades.