Next week President Obama is due to make a “big speech” in Cairo that, among other things, will likely set the tone for U.S. attitudes towards authoritarian regimes like, well, Egypt’s. And given the unsavory reputation of “democracy promotion” as part of the Bush administration’s foreign policies, it’s not clear exactly what direction the president will give on this subject.
At The New Republic yesterday, TDS co-editor William Galston assesses the challenges the president faces in formulating his Cairo speech, particularly in view of the legitimate preeminence of economic and security concerns at present. Galston asks four specific questions:

* Consistent with the overall case he presents, will the president discuss democracy and human rights during his formal address to the Muslim world?
* Will he also bring up these concerns during private meetings with President Mubarak, and if he does, will his entourage take steps to publicize this fact?
* Will he meet with well-known dissidents, opposition leaders such as Ayman Nour, and representatives of beleaguered independent groups?
* Will he insist on the right of the United States to fund whatever Egyptian groups it chooses, whether or not the Egyptian government has officially recognized and certified them?

How Obama answers these questions will largely determine whether democracy and human rights continue to be viewed as a significant part of the administration’s policy towards the Middle East, and of its efforts to rebuild U.S. diplomatic strength and moral capital after years of sporadic neglect.

The first public opinion poll on Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor is out, from Gallup, and it shows the initial reaction to her as on balance positive, predictably stratified on partisan lines, and pretty similar to the favorable reaction that met the nomination of Chief Justice John Roberts in 2005.
Telescoping these factors, Gallup’s analysis says this:

Americans’ first reactions to the news of President Obama’s nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court are decidedly more positive than negative, with 47% rating the nomination as “excellent” or “good,” 20% rating it “only fair,” and 13% rating it “poor”….
Comparing ratings of Sotomayor to those of the three previous nominees (all chosen by the Republican President Bush) suggests that the current partisan reaction to Sotomayor follows a fairly standard pattern. Between 72% and 79% of those identifying with the party of the president making the nomination react positively to the candidates. There is a slightly larger range in positive ratings among those identifying with the party not controlling the White House at the time of the nomination: from a high of 31% of Democrats who supported Roberts and 29% of Republicans who support Sotomayor, to a low of 18% of Democrats who supported Alito.

There’s a pretty noticeable gender gap in perceptions of Sotomayor, with 54% of women deeming her excellent/good, as opposed to 42% of men. Interestingly, there was virtually no gender gap in initial reactions to the ill-fated nomination of Harriet Miers.
No word from this first poll on Hispanic reactions to Sotomayor, but we’ll see those eventually.

RealClearPolitics has a useful roundup today of newspaper editorial reaction to the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court. Most of them were positive (New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald, San Francisco Chronicle). One (USAToday) was worded in a positive fashion, but touted as legitimate every dumb and dishonest question about the judge.
What was most interesting about the negative editorials (Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, Investor’s Business Daily) was their heavy and even angry focus on the “identity politics” and “activist” arguments against Sotomayor, each totally dependent on one out-of-context quote from one speech she delivered. Sure, editorials the day after a Supreme Court appointment tend to rely on the material at hand, but still, if the opposition to Sotomayor continues to sustain itself on this thin gruel, it probably won’t last long.

Editor’s Note: this is a guest post by Progressive Policy Institute president Will Marshall, which we are publishing as part of the intra-Democratic debate over President Obama’s national security policies, and the recent Democracy Corps analysis of the popularity of those policies.
When Democrats splintered over an unpopular war a half-century ago, Republicans became by default the national-security party. According to a new Democracy Corps poll, however, Democrats have pulled even with their rivals on matters of defense and foreign policy. This closing of the national-security confidence gap is the strongest sign yet that America is entering a new progressive era.
After all, Democrats’ “soft on defense” image played a key role in driving millions of blue collar voters (as well as a small but influential band of Cold War liberals later called neoconservatives) into the GOP’s arms. With the possible exception of race, no issue did more to perpetuate the Republican near-stranglehold on the White House—which began in 1968 and seems to have ended in 2008.
The new poll finds that the public strongly approves of how President Obama is managing the security dilemmas he inherited – so much so, in fact, as to erase many (though not all) of the public’s lingering doubts about his party. If that trend holds, it will be the political equivalent of dismantling the last megaton warhead in the GOP’s once fearsome arsenal. The only catch, of course, is that the president’s policies must actually succeed.
Still, Americans clearly welcome Obama’s thoughtful and nuanced approach to challenges of enormous complexity. According to Democracy Corps, 64 percent of the public approves of the President’s handling of security issues. Apparently, Vice President Dick Cheney’s campaign to convince Americans that Obama is making them more vulnerable to terrorism isn’t getting much traction. Not only do voters believe Obama is making the country safer, but (by a whopping 22-point margin) they give him higher marks on national security than President Bush.
More worrisome for the president than the GOP’s boilerplate attacks, however, is growing restiveness on his left. The White House could hardly ask for a better foil than Cheney. But anti-war activists and civil libertarians are part of Obama’s political base, and many feel disappointment or even betrayal by decisions he’s made that seem to continue the main thrust of Bush’s policies.
In characteristic fashion, Obama confronted such criticism head-on this week in a major speech at the National Archives. While affirming his constitutional responsibility to keep Americans safe, Obama was at pains to describe the ways his policy differs from Bush’s – banning torture, closing Guantanamo, strengthening military commissions, and seeking new legal authority to detain terrorists. He described his approach as a via media between the “anything goes” policy of Bush and Cheney and the absolutist claims of civil-liberties groups demanding totally transparent legal procedures and due-process rights for terrorist suspects.
The speech underscored Obama’s political challenge: convincing independent and moderate voters that he and his party can keep Americans safe while at the same time mollifying liberal critics of Bush’s “war on terror.” To this end, the policies he outlined were carefully calibrated to combine pragmatism and principles of democratic accountability. But in a sense, Obama’s progressive critics are right: in some respects, he is winning the wider public’s trust not by radically changing his predecessor’s policies, but by promising to execute them more deftly and with greater awareness of the big picture of American values and interests.

Read more…

Editor’s note: this is a guest post by Alan Abramowitz, who is Alben W. Barkley Professor of Political Science at Emory University, and a member of the TDS Advisory Board.
Is support for abortion rights hurting Democratic candidates at the polls and, if so, would abandoning the Party’s traditional pro-choice position help Democrats win over pro-life voters? These questions are being raised with increasing urgency following the release of new Gallup and Pew polls that supposedly show a substantial decrease in support for the pro-choice position among the American public.
The findings of the Gallup and Pew polls are rather surprising given the stability of public attitudes on the abortion issue over several decades. Moreover, a number of other polls conducted before and after the 2008 election found no dramatic change in public opinion on this issue. For example, the two most respected academic surveys of the American public, the General Social Survey and the National Election Study, found no decline in support for abortion rights between 2004 and 2008. More importantly, the evidence from the 2008 National Election Study indicates that Barack Obama’s support for abortion rights was a net plus for his candidacy and that attempts by Democrats to win over pro-life voters by abandoning the Party’s support for abortion rights would probably do more harm than good.
Every four years since 1980, the American National Election Study has asked a sample of eligible voters to choose one of four positions on the issue of abortion: abortion should “never be permitted,” abortion should be permitted “only in case of rape, incest, or when the woman’s life is in danger,” abortion should be permitted “for reasons other than rape, incest, or danger to the woman’s life, but only after the need for the abortion has been clearly established,” or “a woman should always be able to obtain an abortion as a matter of choice.”
The results in 2008 were very similar to those in other recent election years: 13 percent of voters supported a total ban on abortion, 26 percent supported allowing abortion only under highly restrictive conditions (rape, incest or danger to the woman’s life), 19 percent supported allowing abortion under less restrictive conditions but only if a there was a clearly established need, and 42 percent supported allowing abortion as a matter of choice. For analytical purposes, I combined the first two options, banning abortion completely and allowing it only under highly restrictive conditions, into a single pro-life category. I left the rather vague third option, allowing abortion only if a need had been clearly established, as a middle category, and I used the fourth option, allowing abortion as a matter of choice, as the pro-choice category. This resulted in 39 percent of voters being classified as pro-life, 19 percent being classified in the middle position, and 42 percent being classified as pro-choice.
There was a strong relationship between abortion position and presidential vote in 2008. Pro-life voters supported John McCain over Barack Obama by decisive 62 percent to 38 percent margin. But pro-choice voters supported Obama over McCain by an even more decisive margin of 73 percent to 27 percent. Those in the relatively small moderate group favored McCain over Obama by a fairly narrow 55 percent to 45 percent margin.
According to the NES data, pro-choice voters supporting Obama made up 30 percent of the electorate while pro-life voters supporting McCain made up only 24 percent of the electorate. These results suggest that Barack Obama’s support for abortion rights helped him more than it hurt him in 2008. Before accepting this conclusion, however, we need to control for the influence of partisanship because opinions on abortion are strongly correlated with party identification and 90 percent of Democratic and Republican identifiers voted for their own party’s presidential candidate in 2008.
In order to evaluate the impact of the abortion issue on the performance of the presidential candidates, we need to know whether partisan defection rates were affected by opinions on abortion. Table 1 displays the relationship between abortion opinion and partisan defection among Democratic and Republican identifiers (including leaning independents) who had a clear abortion position. About one-fourth of each party’s voters were cross-pressured on the issue of abortion: 27 percent of Democratic voters took the pro-life position and 25 percent of Republican voters took the pro-choice position. However, the results in Table 1 show that pro-choice Republicans were more than twice as likely to defect as pro-life Democrats. Pro-life Democrats were only slightly more likely to defect than pro-choice Democrats but pro-choice Republicans were much more likely to defect than pro-life Republicans. In fact, the relationship between abortion opinion and defection was statistically significant only for Republicans.

Based on these results, the abortion issue appears to have produced a small net gain in support for Obama in 2008. Pro-choice Republicans who voted for Obama made up 2.6 percent of the electorate while pro-life Democrats who voted for McCain made up 1.4 percent of the electorate, resulting in a net gain of 1.2 percent of the vote for Obama.
Some critics of the Democratic Party’s current position on abortion have suggested that the Party could make substantial inroads among pro-life voters who now support the GOP by abandoning its support for abortion rights. The evidence from the 2008 NES displayed in Table 2 raises serious doubts about the viability of such a strategy, however. Republican voters who were pro-life on abortion tended to take conservative positions on many other issues: the overwhelming majority described themselves as conservative, opposed marriage or civil unions for same sex couples, opposed a larger government role in providing health insurance, supported the war in Iraq and approved of President Bush’s job performance.

Based on their ideological identification and other issue positions, there appears to be little likelihood that pro-life Republicans would respond positively to appeals from Democratic candidates on the issue of abortion. Moreover, in addition to alienating the pro-choice majority of Democrats, such a shift would also alienate the pro-choice minority of Republicans who appear to be much more open to appeals from Democratic candidates on a wide range of issues. These findings suggest that rather than abandoning the Democratic Party’s traditional support for abortion rights in a futile pursuit of pro-life Republican voters, Democratic candidates would be better off focusing their efforts on appealing to Republicans who support the Democratic Party’s traditional position on abortion.

In an important new survey, Democracy Corps shows that the Republican advantage on trust in handling national security issues, which has been a staple of American politics since the Vietnam War era, has vanished, at least for the moment, in no small part due to strong approval of President Obama’s policies.
The shift has been dramatic, particularly in certain key demographic groups:

Less than six years ago, in August 2003, Democrats lagged by 29 points on this key metric, effectively ruling them out as a credible alternative on national security for many voters. The shift has been especially dramatic for key likely voter segments:
* Moderates. Self-described moderates favored the GOP on national security by 25 points in 2003, but now favor Democrats by a decisive 23 points, 54 to 31 percent.
* Women, especially unmarried women. Women trusted the GOP more on national security by 20 points in 2003; now they trust the Democrats more by 17 points. The shift is the strongest among unmarried women.
* Younger voters. Voters under age 30 trusted Republicans more on national security by a 27 point margin in 2003; now they trust Democrats more by 18 points, 50 to 32 percent. This strong margin of trust among younger voters could signal the start of a lasting generational shift on this set of issues.

Barack Obama’s role in eliminating the “national security gap” is pretty clear. As the DCorps analysis shows, the President’ job approval rating on national security (64% favorable) is actually higher than his overall job approval rating (58%). And given efforts by Republicans led by Dick Cheney to claim that the new administration has already made Americans less safe, it’s striking that “by a strong 48 to 26 percent margin, likely voters believe that President Obama is doing better, rather than worse, than President George W. Bush when it comes to national security policy.”
Obama is earning high approval marks on an array of specific policies as well, including his handling of Afghanistan (68%), Iraq (67%), “leading America’s military” (65%) and “fighting terrorism” (61%).
There are some significant areas where public skepticism of the administration holds, most notably towards his stated goal of eliminating nuclear weapons. As is well known from other survey, a slight majority of Americans are also unsure about categorically ruling out torture of terrorism suspects in certain circumstances.
All in all, the survey is very good news for Democrats, and also provides yet another chunk of evidence undermining Republican claims that George W. Bush’s spending policies are the only source of their current political problems. Bush and company managed to turn national security from an enormous source of strength to a handicap in a few short years. President Obama and Democrats generally are taking advantage of that opportunity.

Florida Gov. Charlie Crist’s decision to take his high approval ratings and moderate image into the contest to succeed retiring GOP Sen. Mel Martinez has been greeted with excitement and relief by Beltway Republicans, who feel they now have one less vulnerable seat to worry about next year (though Crist’s conservative primary opponent, former FL House Speaker Marco Rubio, is resisting this pro-Crist tide).
But totally aside from Crist’s irritating habit of defying conservative talking points now and then (most notably in supporting President Obama’s economic stimulus package), his decision could prove to be a headache for Florida Republicans, threatening the grip on the Governor’s Office that they have held since 1998.
Don’t take our word for it; take conservative activist Patrick Ruffini’s:

[W]ith Crist out of state politics, it’s open season on the Florida Governor’s mansion. And holding on there is far from a sure thing, with old warhorse Bill McCullom the likely GOP nominee going up against much buzzed about Dem CFO Alex Sink.
We might say that the Governorship of Florida is not Washington’s problem — except this is the same sort of short-term DC-centered thinking that gives us establishment favorites inimical to the grassroots. The GOP’s revival will not come from Washington or from the Senate. It will come from the states. From an overarching party balance sheet perspective, we need to evaluate the potential loss of the Florida statehouse before stating whether Crist’s move is a good thing.

Ruffini could have added that a Democratic victory in the governor’s race could break GOP control of the decennial redistricting process. Florida was thoroughly gerrymandered on partisan lines during the last redistricting cycle, and a more evenhanded map could produce siginificant Democratic gains in both the U.S. House and in the state legislature, for years to come.

Michael Steele’s chairmanship of the Republican National Committee continues to lurch from disaster to disaster. Even though he’s scaled back his media appearances, the ones he’s making aren’t helping matters. Late last week, he was on Bill Bennett’s radio show, and offered the following thoughts when asked by a caller if Mitt Romney had been denied the 2008 GOP presidential nomination by “liberals” and “the media” who were pulling wires for John McCain:

“Remember, it was the base that rejected Mitt because of his switch on pro-life, from pro-choice to pro-life,” Steele told the caller. “It was the base that rejected Mitt because it had issues with Mormonism. It was the base that rejected Mitt because they thought he was back and forth and waffling on those very economic issues you’re talking about.”
“So, I mean, I hear what you’re saying, but before we even got to a primary vote, the base had made very clear they had issues with Mitt because if they didn’t, he would have defeated John McCain in those primaries in which he lost,” Steele concluded.

As Michelle Cottle of TNR’s The Plank observed today:

[B]y trying to make a simple, completely accurate observation about last year’s presidential primary, he managed simultaneously to pick a fight with Mitt Romney and tar the party’s base as a bunch of anti-Mormon bigots.
When oh when will someone put this man out of his misery?

Yep, Steele’s comments were something of a two-cushion scratch shot. But the maddening thing for Republicans is that they can’t dump him as chairman without courting the impression that they are bigots or small-tent types themselves. The chairman-in-waiting, South Carolina’s Katon Dawson (he of the recent memebership in a segregated country club) wouldn’t help much. One conservative blogger has suggested a very different name for
Steele’s replacement: a guy named Norm Coleman. If that idea has legs, it’s no wonder that Steele said “No, hell no!” to the suggestion that Coleman give up his guerilla legal challenge to his retirement from the U.S. Senate.

In the run-up to an expected confirmation fight over President Obama’s first Supreme Court appointment, Republicans are already warming up their tired old rhetoric attacking “judicial activism” as an unacceptable quality for judges. A perfect dissection of the emptiness of this term has been offered up at Politico by Keenan Kmiec, a former law clerk to Chief Justice Roberts, and thus presumably not a wild-eyed liberal:

Complaints about judicial activism have plagued Supreme Court confirmation hearings for decades. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor fielded dozens of questions on judicial activism in 1981. Justice Stephen Breyer was urged to “resist the siren calls of judicial activism” in 1994. The term appears 56 times in the record of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s confirmation hearings, and it seemed omnipresent at the Roberts and Alito hearings.
But what does “judicial activism” mean? To borrow from Justice Antonin Scalia, it often “doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t say whether you’re going to adopt the incorporation doctrine, whether you believe in substantive due process. It’s totally imprecise. It’s just nothing but fluff.”
Without context or a clear definition, a charge of judicial activism is an empty epithet, the legal equivalent of calling someone a jerk.

Kmiec goes on to look at several issues that lurk below the surface of charges of “judicial activism,” including deference to legislative decisions, respect for judicial precedent, and various approaches to the interpretation of both constitutional and statutory texts. But the fundamental issue of a putative Justice’s judicial philosophy is not often captured by talk of “activism:”

There are about as many theories of constitutional interpretation as there are judges. The current Supreme Court includes self-described “originalists,” “minimalists” and proponents of “active liberty,” to name a few….
Understanding a nominee’s judicial philosophy is hard work, but it should be the goal of the confirmation process. Amorphous charges of “judicial activism” score cheap political points, but they have no place in a serious confirmation debate. Let’s banish the term or at least use it carefully.

Sounds like a very good idea, but don’t hold your breath for Republicans to agree.
Meanwhile, MSNBC’s First Read has come up with what it calls a “working short-list” of six for Obama’s SCOTUS pick:

The co-frontrunners (in no particular order): Diane Wood of the 7th Circuit, Solicitor General Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor of the 2nd Circuit, Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Merrick Garland of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.

Granholm and Napolitano are a bit of a surprise for so narrow a “short-list,” but it should be noted that they both served as Attorney General of their states. Napolitano knows a little about confirmation fights, too. As Dana Goldstein has pointed out, Napolitano was an attorney representing Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas confirmation saga.

Well, it’s an eyebrow-raiser if nothing else:

President Barack Obama has praised health industry groups for coming forward with an offer to reduce the growth of spending by $2 trillion a year to overhaul the system.
Obama appeared at the White House with an array of industry figures, including union representatives, and called it the occasion “historic.”
Industry figures pledged that they would voluntarily slow their rate increases over the next 10 years.
Obama said the step the industry took Monday must be carried out as part of “a broader effort” to change the health care system, keep costs under control and provide health insurance for the some 46 million Americans who do not now have it.

In an acute analysis of this event, Jonathan Cohn of TNR’s The Treatment blog suggests that it may represent a sea change in health industry strategy for coping with pressure for health care reform:

[T]he industry groups aren’t promising to control costs as an alternative to reform. They’re promising to control costs as part of reform. In fact, some of the efficiency steps they are proposing wouldn’t even be possible without the sorts of changes now under discussion in Washington, because they require changes in legislation.

That’s important, because it creates an opening wedge against what happened in 1994: a combined health industry/Republican campaign to attack universal health care as worse than the status quo. As a hand-wringing Wall Street Journal op-ed column last week by Kimberly Strassel conceded, a status quo-oriented attack on Obama’s health reform proposals probably won’t work in any event: