There’s naturally an obsession among political folk about monitoring the President’s approval ratings, with some recent national and state surveys showing a sag. But it’s worth remembering that politics is not necessarily a zero-sum game in which weaknesses automatically create strength for the opposition, particularly in a period of public unhappiness, and particularly when memories are fresh of how people felt when the opposition was in power.
Moreover, at the state level anti-incumbency feelings don’t always hit the party in power in Washington.
There’s a good example of this phenomenon in a new PPP poll from Minnesota. It shows the President’s approval/disapproval rating deteriorating from 60/30 in April to 54/39 now. But that hasn’t translated into any measurable Republican gains. MN’s own Republican governor, Tim Pawlenty, one of the most-cited possibilities for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012, has suffered his own slide in approval ratings, down into negative territory, from 46/44 to 44/48. And more to the point, a 2012 trial heat shows Obama thumping Pawlenty in his own state 51-40.
Is Pawlenty’s weakness a function of the “Republican brand” or of his own incumbency? Hard to say. But the same poll shows Sarah Palin, who recently decided to get rid of the handicap of governing, with a 39/53 approval ratio, and losing to Obama in a 2012 trial heat by 56-35.
So if you’re into polls, it pays to keep an eye on everyone’s approval ratings, and on actual electoral matchups, not just Barack Obama’s numbers.

In the course of his column today on the politics and economics of a second economic stimulus bill, Paul Krugman offers a useful analogy:
When there’s an ordinary, garden-variety recession, the job of fighting that recession is assigned to the Federal Reserve. The Fed responds by cutting interest rates in an incremental fashion. Reducing rates a bit at a time, it keeps cutting until the economy turns around. At times it pauses to assess the effects of its work; if the economy is still weak, the cutting resumes.

During the last recession, the Fed repeatedly cut rates as the slump deepened — 11 times over the course of 2001. Then, amid early signs of recovery, it paused, giving the rate cuts time to work. When it became clear that the economy still wasn’t growing fast enough to create jobs, more rate cuts followed.
Normally, then, we expect policy makers to respond to bad job numbers with a combination of patience and resolve. They should give existing policies time to work, but they should also consider making those policies stronger.

Monetary policy adjustments, of course, are reasonably simple, and don’t involve the lumbering machinery of House and Senate committees and floor action, or the ambitions of 435 politicians. Still, if the Obama adminstration does come back to the well for a second cup of fiscal stimulus, howling critics should be reminded that this course would be a no-brainer if we were talking about interest rate cuts.

If you follow politics somewhat impressionistically, you’d probably think that Barack Obama has had a terrible time getting anything through Congress. After all, Republicans hate him, “centrist” Democrats are perpetually off the reservation, it takes 60 votes to get anything through the Senate, and the President’s too genteel to crack heads.
That’s why it’s of interest that Rachel Bloom and John Cranford have published a study showing that Obama’s early success rate with legislative positions he has taken is the highest of any president since CQ started measuring this in 1953.
Specifically, the White House has taken a clear position on 26 votes in the House and 37 in the Senate (the higher Senate number mainly being the product of 20 confirmation votes). The House has voted with him 24 times and the Senate 36 times, for a combined success rate of 95%.
LBJ’s success rate (albeit over his first full year) was 93% in what is generally considered one of the most productive congressional sessions in history, and Eisenhower came in at 89%.
Obama’s lost one meaningless symbolic vote two days after he took office, so he’s really lost two: the famous Senate vote on Gitmo in May, and the House defense authorization vote in June.
Sure, there’s a long time to go this year, with Senate action on climate change and House-Senate action on health care still to happen. But the picture so often painted of Obama as the helpless victim of a fractious Congress is not really accurate so far.

If there’s a “must-read” online today, it’s probably Tim Fernholz’s article for The American Prospect on the ever-increasing need for the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress to start setting out realistic benchmarks for accomplishments between now and November 2010.
Improving on the incompetence of the Bush administration isn’t that hard. But at some point, Democrats must point to new expectations and meet them. Fernholz suggests three areas where new benchmarks are particularly urgent: “economic stimulus” measures, foreclosure prevention initiatives, and the war in Afghanistan. In the first area, measurements for success are hazy; in the second, accomplishments don’t meet the administration’s own goals; and in the third, what we are measuring in terms of strategic objectives has changed.
Here’s Fernholz’s cautionary conclusion:

All three of these cases demonstrate the challenge of translating simple policy goals — fight the recession, prevent foreclosures, and win a war — into complex government programs. The fact that solving these public problems is difficult doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be tackled; the government is the only institution capable of tackling them. But walking the fine line between measures that mean something and numbers that mean votes can be a difficult one. If the president and Democrats in Congress want to keep being the Party of Government and not just the party that likes government, they need to figure out how to be good executives as well as good legislators, and prove it.

The big political news yesterday was a unanimous decision of the Minnesota Supreme Court that Al Franken had indeed won a U.S. Senate seat last year (unsurprising), followed by Norm Coleman’s concession (more surprising, since many expected him to pursue a federal court challenge to delay Franken’s seating).
So Democrats now hold 60 seats in the U.S. Senate. As Ezra Klein points out today, neither party has held that many Senate seats since 1975, after the Watergate Landslide of 1974.
Most Democrats by now have figured out that 60 isn’t quite the magic number it is sometimes described as being in the Senate. Yes, it theoretically makes it possible to stop or even preempt filibusters and control the floor, but only with unanimity (or near-unanimity), which is hard to come by. But it will have a certain psychological impact, particularly going into an election cycle where Republican will be hard pressed to maintain their own numbers in the Senate.
Let’s hope, at least, that Al Franken really enjoys being a Senator. He certainly earned his seat.

For all but four of the 50 states, the 2009 fiscal year ends today. And as P.J. Huffstutter and Nicholas Riccardi explain in the LA Times this morning, 32 of those states didn’t have a budget in place for the new fiscal year as of yesterday:

Although the majority of those are expected to pass eleventh-hour budgets, the fiscal futures of a handful remain uncertain, said Todd Haggerty, a [National Conference of State Legislatures] research analyst.
“It’s a lot of states that are coming down to the wire,” Haggerty said. “It’s far more than we’ve seen in the past, and it’s because of the state of the economy.”
Since 2002, only five states have been forced to shut down their governments. Some of the closures were brief: In 2007, Michigan’s doors were closed for four hours before lawmakers passed emergency measures that bought them time to close a $1.75-billion deficit.
“What’s different now is that the recession has eroded tax revenues across the country,” Haggerty said. Collectively, he said, states are wrestling with budget deficits totaling $121 billion.

The article identifies Arizona, California, Indiana, Mississippi and Pennsylvania as states that appear likely to undergo some sort of shutdown of government services tomorrow.
Most states have already cut services. According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities:

At least 39 states already have cut key services that are important to vulnerable residents. Cutbacks have affected health care (21 states); services for the elderly and disabled (23); K-12 schools (24 states); and higher education (32). Some 41 states have made cuts to their workforces, through furloughs, layoffs, cuts in benefits or other steps. These counts exclude still deeper cuts that have been proposed in many of the states still working on their 2010 budgets.

CPBB estimates that total state budget shortfalls through fiscal year 2011 exceed $350 billion–a lot of money by anyone’s standards. And the situation would be a lot worse if the federal economic stimulus package–even with significantly reduced levels of flexible assistance to state and local governments–had not been enacted. “States, on average, are using the money to fill about 40 percent of the gap between available funds and what they need to balance their budgets.”
So there won’t be any party-hats or champagne on tap tonight in state capitols. The fiscal situation for most is bad and getting worse.

Democracy Corps is out with a new analysis of public opinion on health care reform, based on extensive polling and focus group work. Much of it reflects the advice that TDS Co-Editor Stan Greenberg has been offering on how to succeed where President Clinton failed in securing universal health coverage.
But the new DCorps memo provides an interesting focus on the “swing vote” for health care reform:

Proponents and opponents of reform will be battling for the 35 percent of the electorate
who are not satisfied with the health insurance system but satisfied with their personal insurance.
Conservatives and some in the media think these voters are not serious about change, but that
misreads them, as we realize from our focus groups last week. They are “satisfied” with their
choice of doctors, that their employer is picking up most of the cost and that they may have
better insurance than others. But, they are not happy about having traded off wages or gotten
locked into a job because of health care or about the fate of a child with a chronic ailment who
may not be able to get insurance in the future. So, they are nervous about change, but they want
it.

The DCorps team goes on to identify five key strategies for appealing to these key voters:
1. Voters need to hear clearly what changes health care reform will bring.
2. Build a narrative around taking power away from the insurance companies and giving it
to people.
3. The president and reform advocates have to explain concretely the changes that will mean
lower costs.
4. Show all voters and seniors that there are benefits for them, including prescription drugs.
5. All of these points should be made with the dominant framework that continuing the status
quo is unacceptable and unsustainable.
This analysis leads to a overarching narrative that DCorps recommends:

Continuing the status quo in health care is not acceptable and not sustainable. Keeping the status quo means the insurance companies are still in charge, jacking up rates and denying coverage. It means more people losing insurance or enslaved to their job, prices skyrocketing for families and businesses and our companies less
competitive. We need change so that people no longer lose coverage or get dropped for a pre-existing condition, and see lower costs.

“Safe change” is always a tricky message to convey, even when people are open to or eager for change. But if DCorps is right, then it will be the key to navigating health care reform through many obstacles.

Note: This is a guest post from Michael A. Cohen, Senior Research Fellow at the New America Foundation and author of “Live From the Campaign Trail: The Greatest Presidential Campaign Speeches of the 20th Century and How They Shaped Modern America.” We welcome it as part of a continuing effort to enlist diverse voices in discussions of Democratic strategy.
Last week Ed highlighted a post over at TNR by William Galston raising a number of red flags about public opinion and growing doubts about the President’s domestic agenda. One of the points Galston made jumped out at me – and has been further crystallized by Mark Sanford’s painful press conference yesterday:

The best thing Democrats have going for them right now is the public’s near-total withdrawal of confidence from the Republican Party, which now “enjoys” its lowest rating ever recorded in the NYT/CBS survey–a finding that Pew confirms.

Yet even with this good news and additionally positive approval ratings for President Obama, Galston offered some rather timid recommendations for Democrats, arguing that they need to focus on “major legislative initiatives . . . that the public can accept” and to make a priority “their ability to persuade the public that something real is being done to rein in spending and debt.”
But I wonder if Bill is making this a bit too complicated and overemphasizing temporary concerns over spending, the deficit and traditional voter suspicion toward government. Right now it seems the most important two factors in public opinion are that the country trusts Barack Obama to do the right thing and they don’t trust Republicans . . . at all.
Right on cue, this week’s new poll from the Washington Post provides compelling evidence of this phenomenon. At the same time that confidence in the President’s stimulus package is softening his approval ratings remains sky high – at 65%. In addition, Obama is far more trusted that his Republican opponents on a host of issues.
Obama maintains leverage because of the continuing weakness of his opposition. The survey found the favorability ratings of congressional Republicans at their lowest point in more than a decade. Obama also has significant advantages over GOP lawmakers in terms of public trust on dealing with the economy, health care, the deficit and the threat of terrorism, despite broad-based Republican criticism of his early actions on these fronts.
The GOP’s approval rating is at 36% with disapproval at 56% and only 22 percent self-identify as Republicans. After watching Mark Sanford yesterday and considering the public spectacle of another prominent Republican publicly confessing private infidelity, it’s hard to imagine that these numbers are going to see much bump in the near future.
Even on the deficit, an issue that both Republicans and Democrats have trumpeted as being of great concern, the President has a twenty-point advantage over the GOP. Recent polls on health care reform show strong support for a so-called public option even though the idea has near unanimous opposition from Republicans. While it can be dangerous to draw too overly broad conclusion from a handful of polls, it’s hard to see any evidence at all that GOP attacks on the President are having much of an impact. In fact, outside their narrow base of supporters, Republicans seem to have almost no credibility, notwithstanding Jim Vandehei and Jonathan Martin’s threadbare effort to find a sliver of hope for the GOP.
The President – even in the face of worsening economic news – has not only enormous credibility, but is widely trusted. Again, according the Post, a majority of voters see the President as someone “”who will be careful with the public’s money” rather than a tax-and-spend Democrat. Quite simply, with strong majorities in the House and Senate, it’s been a long time since the country has seen a political leader with this type of political capital (whatever George Bush might have said in 2005).
So the time has come to use it. Galston’s advice is an argument for playing defense rather than the right course of action for Democrats: going on the offensive. While Obama obviously should not ignore the deficit, he and the Democrats must avoid overreacting to an issue that is generally a stalking horse for a lousy economy. If the economy shows signs of improvement, as it likely will when the stimulus package begins to kick in, I would be willing to make a small wager today that concerns over the deficit will decline. In the end, Democrats will live or die by not only the strength of the economy, but also by the ambition of their policy goals.
As for the notion that Obama should be tied down by perceptions of what he thinks the country “can accept,” frankly this is even worse advice. As Galston notes, voters “have little confidence in government as an effective instrument of public purpose. Trust in government remains near an historic low and has not improved significantly since the beginning of Obama’s presidency.”
But the way to change that perception is not to nibble around the edges, but instead move forward a piece of legislation that changes the entire political equation for Democrats: something like passing a sweeping health care package. The negative perception that voters continue to have toward government is because, as Obama suggested during the campaign, they don’t see it being responsive to their needs.
Forget the polls for just a second. In November 2008, the electorate voted not only for change, but they voted to send someone to Washington who would change the tone, bring new ideas and get things done. Passing comprehensive health care reform is the best way I can think of to not only fulfill the promise of Obama’s campaign, but also expose the rigidity of Republican opposition. If Democrats are dealing with a down economy in 2010 they will likely pay a price at the polls, but the best response to bad economic news is evidence that Congress and the President have worked to fulfill their campaign promises. As I asked a few days ago at Politico: “Would Democrats prefer to go to the voters and say, ‘I shrunk the deficit’ or would they rather say, ‘I passed health care legislation that improves access and care for 50 million people — and, by the way, my opponent voted against it?”
I can already imagine the likely response to my confidence: 1993 and 1994. The political path I’m advocating, of course, bears striking similarities to President Clinton’s ambitious domestic policy agenda. The critical difference, however, is the lack of confidence voters have not only in the Republican Party, but for conservatism in general. In addition, there is simply no question that the electorate trusts Obama far more than it did Clinton. I understand, Galston’s pleas for caution and no one who lived through 1993 and 1994 would ever question the dangers of overreaching. But if ever there were a time for overreaching it would be right now