One of the things you hear often from conservatives these days is that President Obama is stubbornly pursuing his “liberal” or “socialist” agenda despite the large and growing opposition of the American people.
Nate Silver of 538.com quite naturally wants to know if that’s really true, and he’s conducted an analysis of public opinion on twenty-five issues where the administration has taken a position, usually against a majority of congressional Republicans.
Here’s his conclusion:

Of these 25 issues, Obama’s position appears to be on the right side of public opinion on 14: the bank tax, repealing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, campaign finance, the credit card bill, D.C. voting rights, fair pay, financial regulation, gays in the military, hate crimes, the jobs bill, mortgage relief, PAYGO, SCHIP, and Sotomayor. It would appear to be on the wrong side of public opinion on five issues: the GM/Chrysler bailout, Guantanamo Bay, health care, the extension of the TARP program, and terrorist trials. On the other six issues, the polling is probably too ambiguous to render a clear verdict.
Republicans, on the other hand, have been overwhelmingly opposed to almost all of these measures with the exception of Ben Bernanke and Afghanistan troops, both of which poll ambiguously, and the credit card bill, which polled well.

Health care, TARP and the auto company bailout have, of course, gotten a lot more publicity than the rest of these issues. But much of politics revolves around focusing attention on things that don’t immediately get publicity. And Democrats would be well advised to continue their recent effort to focus some attention on the GOP’s own agenda, which really does tend to defy public opinion, just as it did prior to the 2006 and 2008 elections.

Much of the nation is looking happily at New Orleans today in celebration of the Saints’ Super Bowl victory, in no small part as a vindication of that battered city’s spirit in the long wake of Hurricane Katrina. But New Orleans experienced another amazing event over the weekend: the landslide victory of Louisiana Lt. Governor Mitch Landrieu in his third bid to become mayor of the Crescent City.
After months of speculation about who, exactly, would face Landrieu in a pre-ordained runoff (Louisiana’s “jungle primary” system requires a rare majority vote in a “first primary” of candidates from all parties to avoid a runoff), Mitch, the son of former mayor Moon Landrieu and the brother of Sen. Mary Landrieu, won with two-thirds of the vote (against five serious challengers) and nearly that high a percentage of the African-American vote in this majority African-American city. That’s remarkable, given the 2006 mayoral election in which Ray Nagin beat Landrieu in a race-saturated campaign.
Landrieu’s huge victory margin and cross-racial voting appeal represent a unity sign for New Orleans that can’t match the universal adulation of the Saints, but is nonetheless pretty impressive. He will need the good will in one of the country’s toughest jobs.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is crossposted from The New Republic.
Our political debates, our public discourse—on current economic and domestic issues—too often bear little or no relation to the actual problems the United States faces.
What is at stake in our economic decisions today is not some grand warfare of rival ideologies which will sweep the country with passion, but the practical management of a modern economy. What we need is not labels and clichés but more basic discussion of the sophisticated and technical questions involved in keeping a great economic machinery moving ahead.
The national interest lies in high employment and steady expansion of output, in stable prices and a strong dollar. The declaration of such an objective is easy; their attainment in an intricate and interdependent economy and world is a little more difficult. To attain them, we require not some automatic response but hard thought
–John F. Kennedy, Commencement Address at Yale University, June 11, 1962
We deliberate, not about ends, but about means.
–Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics III. iii
Harvey Mansfield, the well-known conservative professor of political philosophy (and—full disclosure—a longtime friend) has penned a serious and civil critique of what he takes to be the animating impulse of the Obama administration. The nub of his argument is that Obama is a “progressive” whose purported non- (or post-) partisanship is designed to put certain issues “beyond political dispute” so that arguments are about means, not ends. And once the argument is about means, the door is opened wide to “rational administration” and the rule of experts.
Take health care. Mansfield interprets Obama’s statement that “I am not the first president to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last” as an effort to take the issue out of politics once and for all—to decide, by side-stepping, the fundamental issue of principle. In his view, that issue is: “Should the government take over health care or should it be left to the private sphere?” The question precedes, and trumps, the myriad technical issues that transform the reform impulse into impenetrable, trust-destroying 2,000-page bills. By pursuing reform without dwelling on that question, he writes, Obama’s worldview “wants to put an end to politics. It considers its measures to be progressive, and progress to be irreversible.” The problem with progress, so understood, is that it is at war with political liberty, rightly understood. One cannot seek to place matters of principle beyond politics without wanting “an imposed political solution.” Some human beings—and by implication, political parties—love progress more than they love liberty; others reverse the hierarchy. Mansfield stands with the party of liberty, the republican principle, against the party of progress, the party of rational administration, which is “more suited to monarchy than to republics.”
Where to begin? Mansfield offers an elaborate argument in defense of the proposition that Obamacare represents a government takeover. I disagree and could offer an equally elaborate rebuttal. I could argue, as well, that Obama’s appeal to transcend the division between red and blue America reflects not a desire to end partisan argument, but rather most Americans’ disgust with the contemporary hyper-partisanship that thwarts effective governance and allows problems to fester indefinitely. These are hardly trivial matters. But because they would divert us from the questions Mansfield raises, I shall pursue them no farther.
As Mansfield knows very well, he does Democrats no favor by framing current disputes as conflicts between progress and liberty. In American politics, the defenders of liberty always occupy the rhetorical high ground. If there really were a contradiction between progress and liberty, progress would surely lose—and so would the party of progress. So there are two questions. First, is there such a contradiction? And second, if there isn’t—if what we really have is a dispute between two competing understandings of liberty—which should we prefer?
I can dispose of the first question quickly: There is no inherent contradiction between progress and liberty. Simply put, removing issues from the political agenda—placing them beyond dispute—often promotes liberty. After political contestation and a bloody war, we decided that slavery was impermissible, and we reordered our laws and institutions accordingly. A century later, we made a parallel decision about racial discrimination, with similar consequences.
I suppose we could view these questions as permanently open to debate. But we don’t, and rightly so. In that sense, there is a “progressive” component to our political history: While some questions remain open, others don’t. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Settling questions neither ends politics nor denies liberty.
Mansfield might reply that, while some disputes raise such fundamental issues, most don’t, and it disserves political liberty to place the latter beyond the bounds of ordinary political contestation. Fair enough. So what is Obama actually saying—about health care, for example?
As I understand the president’s argument, it goes something like this: Our current health care system’s costs are rising at an unsustainable rate, threatening businesses, households, and our public finances. At the same time, nearly 50 million people go without health insurance—some by choice, to be sure, but most out of necessity. The only way to deal with all these problems effectively is to get nearly everyone into the insurance system, with a mix of subsidies and mandates, while creating a more competitive market among insurance plans. He may be right about this, or he may be wrong. But the key point for my purposes is that he is putting forth his plan as the means to an ensemble of ends—universal insurance coverage in a system that reduces the rate of cost increases—that he takes to be both desirable and essential to the long-term common good.
This is a political argument, pure and simple. The president never intended to side-step politics, and he certainly did not succeed in doing so. He hoped that his articulation of the good to be achieved through his plan would outweigh the objections—such as cost and complexity—that he knew would be arrayed against it.
There are several ways to disagree with the president’s proposal. One is to say that while his ends are defensible, his means are defective. This is the line that Representative Paul Ryan takes, as the president has acknowledged. But note that this debate lies squarely within the arena of deliberation as Aristotle defines it. Nothing apolitical or liberty-denying about that–unless deliberation itself suffers from these defects, which would be an odd contention.
Another way of disagreeing with the president is to say that his ends are less important than he thinks—otherwise put, that we can better serve the public interest by giving priority to competing ends. In this vein, many Republicans contend that because even people without insurance get care when they need it, through emergency rooms or charitable organizations, it is unnecessary to use either legal coercion or public funds to universalize insurance coverage. And many fiscal hawks argue that the mechanisms the president uses to fund his proposal—tax increases and Medicare cuts—should be used instead to reduce the long-term federal budget deficit, which is projected to soar unsustainably. Again, a classic political debate, of the sort Aristotle analyzed in the Rhetoric, and the president has done nothing to short-circuit it.
Mansfield gives short shrift to both these sorts of disagreements, focusing instead on a third, which is (to repeat) whether government or the private sphere should take the lead. He describes this as a question of “principle.” Is it? No doubt this question frames a major disagreement between the two political parties, and among Americans. And, as I’ve argued repeatedly, public mistrust of government has done more than anything else to weaken the president’s health reform effort.
The deeper question concerns not public sentiment, but, rather, the basis on which government may legitimately act under the Constitution. In 1933, FDR argued that that only the powers of government could be adequate to the exigencies of the moment. If so, he said, it could not be the case that our Constitution had disabled us from meeting a grave threat to the general welfare, and potentially to constitutional government itself. He won that argument: We live today in the legacy of his victory, and (I say this at the risk of sounding “progressive”), we’re not going back.
The alternative formulation of the dispute–Mansfield’s, I think–is that the issue isn’t the relation of means and ends, but rather the right of government to act in certain ways. If government doesn’t have the right, then considerations of efficacy are irrelevant. Even if government could bring about a good result by acting ultra vires, doing so would be an invasion of liberty, which is the most fundamental good. Rather than invade liberty, we should be prepared to live with the consequences of government forbearance. (I note for the record that if Abraham Lincoln had accepted this view, we’d probably be presenting passports at the Virginia/Maryland border.)
This brings me to the second question: If the issue is liberty, what is the nature of liberty, rightly understood? And does the Obama health care plan invade liberty, so understood?
To begin, experience gives us no reason to conclude that government is the only, or always the gravest, threat to freedom; clerical institutions and concentrations of unchecked economic power have often vied for that dubious honor. The unchecked market, moreover, regularly produces social outcomes at odds with the moral conditions of a free society. Capitalism does not reliably produce, or reward, the good character a free society needs: Perceptive observers from Charles Dickens to Tom Wolfe have given us ample evidence to the contrary. And, while it may be that long-term dependence on government saps the spirit of self-reliance that liberty requires, there are other forms of dependence—economic, social, and even familial—that often damage character in much the same way.
At the heart of the conservative misunderstanding of liberty is the presumption that government and individual freedom are fundamentally at odds. At the heart of any liberal understanding of freedom is the proposition that public power can advance freedom as well as undermine it.

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Those who are interested in, and/or alarmed by, the Tea Party phenomenon often struggle to understand the welter of groups and individuals who seem to be influencing this movement. This has been particularly true during the controversy over the National Tea Party Convention that’s getting underway today in Nashville, which has been characterized by lots of insults thrown back and forth and by shifting alliances of various organizations. Who are all these guys?
Fortunately, TNR’s Lydia DePillis has put together a handy-dandy guide of key dates, individuals and organizations in the Tea Party Movement. Aside from improving your knowledge-base, her guide also implicitly shows the close and intimate links between the movement and all sorts of previously-disreputable right wing organizations.

Yesterday’s Illinois primary produced intense competition in both parties, but no huge surprises. In the gubernatorial contest, photo finishes are occurring in both parties, with incumbent Pat Quinn holding a 5,000 vote lead over Dan Hynes (Quinn has declared victory, but Hynes has not yet conceded) among Democrats, and downstate conservative state senator Bill Brady leading his colleague Kirk Dillard by less than a percentage point.
The Senate races were less dramatic. The long-time Democratic front-runner, state treasurer Alexi Giannoulias, won by a comfortable margin over David Hoffmann, and Republican Rep. Mark Kirk won with a majority over three conservative rivals. For all the hype about Kirk nationally, Giannoulias actually leads him in the polls, and Kirk could still face a right-wing third party candidate.
There was one surprise in House races: Ethan Hastert, son of former House Speaker Denny Hastert, got waxed by conservative state senator Randy Hultgren for the GOP nomination in Denny’s old district. The seat is now held by Democrat Bill Foster. In a sign of the times, the more conservative candidate also won the GOP nod for the seat being vacated by Kirk, with Bob Dold beating Beth Coulson.

Yes, sports fans, the 2010 election cycle begins today, with primaries in Illinois, including selection of candidates for governor and U.S. Senator.
The gubernatorial race on the Democratic side features a close battle between incumbent Pat Quinn, who succeeded to the post from the lieutenant governorship when Rod Blagojevich was forced out of office, and state comptroller Dan Hynes. The Democratic senate primary has front-runner and state treasurer Alexi Giannoulias trying to hold off former Chicago Inspector General David Hoffman, with Chicago Urban League chief Cheryle Jackson also a factor.
Ideology isn’t much of a factor in these Democratic primaries, but negative campaigning is, with Hynes using an ad with negative comments about Quin from the late, revered Chicago mayor Harold Washington, and Giannoulias’ rivals blasting him for the financial collapse of a bank in which his family has been heavily involved.
GOP primaries, by contrast, are mostly about ideology, with even well-documented “moderates” racing to the right and the Tea Party/conservative Republican coalition fighting stiff odds to defeat RINO candidates. In the gubernatorial primary, the designated right-wing candidate is Andrew Andrzejewski, though most observers think former state Attorney General Pat Ryan and former state party chair Andy McKenna are the front runners.
And in the GOP senate primary, U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk has had a big bulls-eye on his back from conservatives throughout this race, but after a campaign in which he has constantly tried to make himself acceptable to the Right, he is strongly favored to prevail over developer Patrick Hughes.
There are also a number of U.S. House primaries (notably the Kirk open seat, and GOP challenges to vulnerable Democratic Reps. Melissa Bean and Debbie Halvorson).
We’ll have full analysis of the results as they come in, for those of you not riveted to the Tube for the Lost Final Season Premiere.

In the fog of commentary that will come out on the release of the president’s FY 2011 budget today, you can look for two simple optics. The administration and its allies will argue that this budget combines short-term job creation and demand stimulus with the first steps towards long-term deficit reduction. Republicans will shriek about every spending and deficit number. Their biggest challenge is to figure out how long to pause between demands for balanced budgets and demands for deficit-boosting lower taxes.
All in all, it’s a spectacle you can safely ignore.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
In his State of the Union address, President Obama executed his well-advertised double pivot toward job generation and fiscal restraint. Almost lost in the pundits’ babble was the release of a CBO report, “The Budget and Economic Outlook: Fiscal Years 2010 to 2020,” coupled with CBO director Doug Elmendorf’s testimony to the House and Senate budget committees. CBO’s analysis makes it clear just how daunting the employment and fiscal challenges are over the next decade . . . and how perilous the political terrain will be for the Democratic Party.
Let’s start with jobs. For a variety of structural reasons, despite the severity of the recession, CBO predicts a slower-than-average recovery, with fourth-quarter to fourth-quarter GDP growth of only 2.1 percent in 2010 and 2.4 percent in 2011. This means that unemployment this November is likely to be about where it is right now—namely, 10 percent. At the end of 2011, it will stand at 9.1 percent. As growth accelerates in 2012, unemployment will decline more quickly, but it will still be high by historical standards—between 7.5 and 8 percent—on the eve of the next presidential election. Assuming no new recession, we won’t return to full employment until 2016.
These projections are very bad news for middle-class Americans—and for politicians as well. A midterm election conducted in these circumstances is likely to go poorly for the majority party, all the more so because no one thinks that the short-term measures the president proposed will make much of a difference over the next ten months. And no president wants to begin his campaign for reelection with unemployment over 9 percent.
What about the fiscal situation? Using the legally required baseline assumptions, the budget deficit is expected to average about $600 billion a year between 2011 and 2020, and the debt-to-GDP ratio would rise from 53 percent to 67 percent. Using more realistic assumptions, the annual deficits would be much larger, and the debt would reach nearly 100 percent of GDP. Almost no one thinks that our economy could sustain this level of borrowing and debt accumulation without severe damage, including soaring interest payments that would crowd out needed public and private investment.
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that, while Obama has accurately identified the economic challenges we face, the responses he has proposed thus far are woefully inadequate. Last week, he told Diane Sawyer that he’d rather be a successful one-term president than a mediocre two-term president. Unfortunately, there’s a third possibility. To avoid it and become the transformational president he clearly wants to be, he must challenge his administration, his party, and the entire political system to acknowledge the true scope of our ills and embrace solutions commensurate with the problems.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic. It appeared before the president delivered his State of the Union address.
“The problems we inherited were far worse than most inside and out of government had expected; the recession was deeper that most inside and out of government had predicted. Curing these problems has taken more time and a higher toll than any of us wanted. Unemployment is far too high. Projected federal spending—if government refuses to tighten its own belt—will also be far too high and could weaken and shorten the economic recovery now underway.
“We’re witnessing an upsurge of productivity and impressive evidence that American industry will once again become competitive in markets at home and abroad, ensuring more jobs and better incomes for the nation’s work force. But our confidence must also be tempered by realism and patience. Quick fixes and artificial stimulants repeatedly applied over decades are what brought us the … disorders that we’ve now paid such a heavy price to cure.
“The permanent recovery in employment, production, and investment we seek won’t come in a sharp, short spurt. It’ll build carefully and steadily in the months and years ahead. In the meantime, the challenge of government is to identify the things that we can do now to ease the massive economic transition for the American people.”
A sneak preview of Barack Obama’s forthcoming State of the Union address? Nope. It’s part of the address Ronald Reagan delivered in January 1983, when unemployment stood at 10.8 percent. If today’s Republicans heard these very words coming out of Obama’s mouth, would they applaud him or denounce him? And what if the president were to recommend a comprehensive deficit reduction strategy that included a standby tax increase, contingent on spending cuts? That’s what Reagan, who had already signed a significant tax increase in August 1982, proposed in his address. Was he a RINO?
Yes, Obama needs to focus and clarify his agenda. But Republicans have a responsibility as well—to reconsider their anti-tax theology, to reengage with the governance process, to address the country’s real problems, not just the politics of those problems. If they don’t, they may make some tactical gains this November, but they won’t be selling any durable goods the American people will want to buy. Right now the Republicans are thinking too much about 1994 and not nearly enough about 1996.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
In the wake of Massachusetts, President Obama faces two urgent decisions. One concerns his agenda for 2010 and beyond. I offered my advice on this last week, have not changed my mind, and won’t repeat myself.
The president must also decide how to proceed with health care legislation. Here I find myself in a paradoxical position. In this publication and elsewhere, I have argued since October of 2008 against beginning the new administration with an ambitious agenda that included comprehensive health reform. Nonetheless, I believe that the president and congressional Democrats would be ill-advised to shelve the effort at this point. Here are my reasons.
First: At the most basic political level, turning tail and running for the tall grass is bound to fail. Democrats who have already voted for health reform (and that’s most of them) can’t take their votes back. Whatever they do between now and November, they’ll be called on to defend what they’ve done. Are they going to say that they’ve changed their minds? Who would believe them?
Second: The American people won’t support representatives they don’t respect. The people respect sincerity, consistency, and strength of purpose. It is often the case that constituents will respect positions with which they disagree—if they think their representatives really mean it. One thing is clear: They won’t respect vacillation and weakness. Does anyone?
Third: The president and congressional Democrats have spent the past year arguing that health reform is in the national interest—that it will broaden coverage, begin to contain costs, increase disposable income, and help improve the government’s long-term fiscal outlook. Which of those arguments ceased to be true between Monday and today?
Fourth: The Founders designed a representative republic, not a plebiscitary democracy. Officials are elected to make judgments on behalf of the people, and the people get to judge those judgments. Large changes are always more uncertain than is the status quo, which is why change is so hard. At some point, elected officials have to tell their constituents, “I’ve done my best to think this issue through, and this is the conclusion I’ve reached. Now it’s your turn.”
There are two cogent arguments against the position I’m defending. The first is that there’s not nearly enough trust in government to sustain comprehensive health reform, and ramming it through in the face of public disapproval will only intensify mistrust and make matters worse. The shortage of trust was a compelling reason not to go down this road in the first place–especially in the context of necessary but expensive and unpopular measures needed to ward off a second Great Depression–but it doesn’t resolve the question of what to do now. It’s a judgment call: Are you more likely to begin rebuilding trust by sticking to your guns–or by in effect saying that you weren’t really that serious about the most important piece of social legislation in decades?
The second counterargument is that elected officials have involved the people in a year-long discussion about health reform, and the people have rendered their judgment, first in public opinion surveys, then in Massachusetts. Proceeding in the face of this judgment, the argument goes, is a gross violation of small-d democratic norms. This brings us back to the issue of the nature of our political system and the principles of conduct it embodies. One might argue that by the fall of 2006, the American people had rendered a negative judgment on the Iraq war and that George W. Bush’s decision to double down with the troop surge was undemocratic. Well, speaking as someone who publicly opposed that war well before we entered it, I have to say that I respect President Bush for making the decision he did … and that it was probably right on the merits. Yes, it’s one thing to be the chief executive, another to be a member of the House. But that difference doesn’t mean that it’s always wrong, or undemocratic, for Congress to exercise independent judgment.
So what is to be done? President Obama’s opening post-Massachusetts gambit–his interview with George Stephanopoulos–was not helpful. Consider the following statement: “I would advise that we try to move quickly to coalesce around those elements of the package that people agree on.” Which people? If he means the American people as a whole, I’m not sure what that proposal amounts to. Sure, everyone would like restraints on insurance companies and constraints on costs increases (the two areas the president cited), but you can’t get them without other things that many people don’t like, such as costly coverage expansion and increased regulatory bureaucracy. If he means Democrats and Republicans in Congress, the zone of agreement is near zero and likely to remain there until November. Given the success of their obstructionism so far, why would Republican leaders change course? And after the failed negotiations in the Senate Finance Committee last year, who believes that Republican moderates would break ranks now? As for focusing on areas of agreement between House and Senate Democrats, I thought that’s what the discussion up until Monday was all about.
If the president sounds such an uncertain trumpet, who will follow? If he still wants legislation, he should invest the full authority of his office to persuade the House to endorse the Senate bill, accompanied by a package of amendments to be considered separately under the reconciliation process. If he has concluded that he has no choice but to take the issue off the table, he should say so. If he continues to utter hopeful banalities devoid of concrete meaning, the fragile reform coalition will collapse within days, with consequences that will endure for decades.