The President held a press conference today to announce that yes, indeed, he will press Congress to act on health care reform this month. There’s was nothing immensely new about that development, but it’s interesting that Obama used the occasion to lay out, quite succinctly, the three key points he made in his health care summit with Republicans: why comprehensive reform is essential, why the time for “negotiations” is over, and why there’s nothing that unusual about the use of reconciliation (though he did not use the word, a very unfamiliar term to most people outside Washington) to get the job done. He essentially took another bite at the apple of responding to the most effective Republican lines of attack, and will apparently do so some more in appearances on the road this month.
On the other hand, the presidential press conference may get demoted on the nightly news if a possible scandal involving Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY) continues to develop. Massa, a freshman from a highly marginal district, abruptly let it be known he was retiring. Some sources say he’s suffering from a recurrence of cancer, but Politico is reporting that he was about to come under investigation by the Ethics Committee for allegedly sexually harrassing a male staffer. If the latter story has a basis in reality, it will be big news tonight.

Texas governor Rick Perry is not what you’d call a statesman, but as the old saying goes, if you can’t be good, be lucky. Perry’s been a very lucky–and opportunistic–politician. He was first elected to the Texas legislature as a Democrat (hard to believe, given his current behavior), and switched parties just in time to take advantage of the rise of the GOP in Texas. In his first statewide race, in 1990, he squeaked by the famous left-populist Jim Hightower to become Agriculture Commissioner; Hightower had not exactly made life easier for himself in Texas by becoming deeply involved in Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign.
In 1998, Perry hitched a ride to the top of Texas politics as George W. Bush’s running-mate, again very narrowly winning the general election (this time over John Sharp) with a lot of help from Bush associates who were getting ready for W.’s presidential run and didn’t want a Democrat wreaking havoc in Austin when the candidate was out of state. Perry inherited the governorship two years later. His two re-elections haven’t been terribly impressive: in 2002, he beat Rick Sanchez, a political neophyte widely perceived as running a very bad campaign, and in 2006, survived with just 39% of the vote in a crazy four-candidate general election.
Perry’s great stroke of luck this year was to run against Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, a formidable politician in the past, in absolutely the worst climate imaginable for a United States Senator. Hutchison also obliged Perry by running an unfocused campaign with virtually no message (she joined Sanchez on the Houston Chronicle’s list of the ten worst campaigns in Texas history). Moreover, a third candidate, Tea Party activist Debra Medina, self-destructed by going on Glenn Beck’s show and sounding like a 9/11 “truther.” Perry manged to win yesterday with few votes to spare, garnering 51% of the vote against Hutchison’s 30% and Medina’s 19%.
We’ll see if Perry’s luck holds one more time in November; his Democratic opponent, former Houston mayor Bill White, is a respected politician who will not roll over and play dead. It’s says a lot about the incumbent’s residual weakness that he’s not a prohibitive favorite in a state like Texas in a year like 2010.
Perry gets mentioned now and then as a potential presidential candidate in 2012. He would definitely be stretching his luck by taking his act the national level, but don’t rule it out for a guy who had the opportunity to watch George W. Bush up close and personal when he turned privilege and perfect timing into an unlikely rise to the presidency.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
In a superb speech at the Brookings Institution on Monday, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer called on the United States—elected representatives and average citizens alike—to “rededicate ourselves to the painful, unglamorous, and indispensible work of fiscal discipline.” Drawing on the studies of leading economists and historians, he warned that failing to do so would be committing ourselves to national decline. What is happening in Greece, he declared, can happen here: “If we don’t change course, it will happen here.”
While rejecting the ideologically-driven belief that “our budget deficit snapped into existence at noon on January 20, 2009,” he was ecumenical in his criticism:

When it comes to budgeting, what is politically easy is often fiscally deadly. It is easier to pay for tax cuts with borrowed money than with lower spending; easier to hide the true costs of war than to lay those costs before the people; easier to promise special cost-of-living adjustments than explain why an increase is not justified under the formula in law; easier to promise 95% of Americans that we won’t consider raising their taxes than to ask all Americans to contribute for the common good.

These words will evoke heartburn among the leaders of both political parties, and at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. They happen to be true.
As the earliest leader of either party to endorse a bipartisan fiscal commission, Hoyer had no difficulty endorsing the commission President Obama created by executive order after the effort to create one through legislation collapsed (regrettably, in Hoyer’s view). But he went on to do something much more difficult than calling for bipartisanship—namely, putting some concrete options on the table:

On the side of entitlement spending, an agreement might recognize that Americans are living longer lives and raise the retirement age over a period of years, or even peg the retirement age to lifespan. Another option is to make Social Security and Medicare benefits more progressive, while strengthening the safety net for low-income Americans. That could preserve those programs as a central part of our social compact, while protecting their ability to help those of us in the greatest need.
On the side of revenues, President Obama was correct in refusing to take any options off of the commission’s table. No one likes raising revenue, and understandably so. But if you’re going to buy, you need to pay. In 1993, President Clinton proposed an economic plan aimed at accomplishing fiscal balance, and he paved the way for the greatest American prosperity in a generation. The bipartisan tax compromise in 1986 also showed the importance of a simplified, more efficient tax code. If need be, and I hopeful that both parties will agree to look at revenues as part of the solution—not as a gateway to higher spending, but as part of a compromise that cuts spending and balances the budget.

Hoyer praised Republican Paul Ryan’s program as an honest effort to tell the public exactly what he’d cut to restore fiscal discipline without raising taxes. Indeed, Hoyer commented, “As much as his party’s leadership tries to distance itself from his plan, Paul Ryan’s program, or something very much like it, is the logical outcome of the Republican rhetoric of cutting taxes and deficits at the same time.” Indeed it is, unless Republicans are serious about cutting taxes but unserious about cutting deficits—a proposition for which it is easy to mobilize three decades of evidence, unfortunately.
In the end, Hoyer argued, Congress and the American people will prefer a balanced approach to one that either tries to stabilize taxes while gutting Medicare or that tries to preserve the Medicare status quo at the cost of huge tax increases. I think he’s right about that. Still, as he conceded, there’s no guarantee that our badly polarized system can reach a reasonable result. The only certainty is that our failure to do so will be a self-inflicted disaster.
This is, Hoyer concluded, much more than a policy issue. It is a measure, and test, of our character: “If we are unable to raise our heads even for a moment above the daily partisan fight, if the collapse comes—we will deserve it.” Amen.

Yesterday I wrote about the conservative effort to convince the news media and others that crazy people were being kept under control by the Tea Party Movement and the Republican Party. There’s an even less credible media narrative kicking around that was pursued the same day by Janet Hook of the Los Angeles Times: Republican moderates are making a comeback!
If you understandably missed this development, here’s how Hook puts it:

With healthcare legislation mired in partisanship, “tea party” activists on the march and GOP leadership dominated by conservatives, Capitol Hill looks like a parched landscape for the withered moderate wing of the Republican Party.
But green shoots are sprouting in Washington and on the campaign trail. A small band of Republican moderates in the Senate broke a logjam on jobs legislation. They added to their ranks with the arrival of another New England Republican, Scott Brown. And several moderate Republicans are in a good position to win Senate seats in November.

The article is loaded with qualifiers of this dubious proposition, but not enough of them. The jobs bill where “Republican moderates”–including Tea Party favorite Scott Brown–offered a few votes for cloture was a vastly watered-down $15 billion measure that included a payroll tax credit for employers long beloved of Republicans (indeed, that’s why it was in the bill). Once cloture was invoked, 13 GOPers voted for the bill, including such decidedly non-moderate senators as Inhofe, Burr and Hatch. Indeed, the only reason the bill was even controvrsial for Republicans is that it was offered by the Democratic leadership in lieu of a much more expensive and tax-cut laden bill worked out between Sens. Max Baucus and Chuck Grassley that most Democrats intensely disliked. Anyone expecting this development to lead to an outbreak of bipartisanship or a breakdown of Republican obstruction is smoking crack.
Hook’s optimistic spin on “moderate Republican” prospects for election to the Senate is equally off-base. She cites Mark Kirk, Mike Castle, Charlie Crist, Tom Campbell and Rob Simmons as potential additions to the “moderate” ranks. Kirk moved hard right to win his primary, and is running even with his Democratic opponent. Campbell is best known at present as the object of primary opponent Carly Fiorina’s cult favorite “demon sheep” web ad; I’d bet serious money he doesn’t win his primary, and the winner likely won’t beat Democrat Barbara Boxer, either. Simmons is struggling against a well-financed primary opponent, and is trailing Democrat Richard Blumenthal by double digits. Crist is political toast. I’ll grant that Castle is in good shape, and has a quite moderate record (so far). But even if Castle and Kirk win, their election would no more than offset the retirements of George Voinovich and Judd Gregg in the less-than-loudly-conservative ranks. And Hook also doesn’t mention that at least two GOP senators who occasionally cooperate with Democrats, Bob Bennett and John McCain, could get purged in primaries.
As for the forward-looking optimism of Hooks’ “green shoots” metaphor, it should be noted that Castle is 70 years old; Simmons is 67; Campbell is 56; Crist is 53; and Kirk is 50. Even by the geriatric standards of the Senate, this group ain’t exactly the wave of the future. They also don’t look much like America.
Sure, if the Republlican caucus in the Senate expands significantly this November, it is going to include a handful of members who don’t regularly howl at the moon about “socialism.” But any suggestion that the ancient tribe of moderate Republicans is much more than an anthropological curiosity these days is just not credible. It says a lot of the direction of the GOP that the early 2012 presidential favorite of “moderates” appears to be Mitt Romney, who spent the entire 2008 cycle campaigning as the “true conservative” in the race.
If words like “moderate” have any real meaning, it’s not a word that should be applied to any major faction in today’s Republican Party.

‘Tis a shame that no photograph of Jim Bunning’s flipped bird has yet emerged, although the photo on this web page captures the spirit of his attitude, and should do adequately for his legacy and Wikipedia page, where you can also read about his ‘foundation.’ Somewhere, however, in the darker corners of the G.O.P., where strategy is made, Frank Luntz, Ed Rollins and the smarter Republicans should be offering prayers of gratitude that Bunning’s bird escaped the cameras, for it would be hard to imagine a better symbolic representation of G.O.P. obstructionism.
That, however, shouldn’t stop cartoonists from doing their job. Have at it, guys. (They’re just getting started: See here, here and, best so far, here.)
Common sense suggests that Republicans should feel a little uneasy about Bunning punishing unemployed Americans with obstructionist theatrics. But this is not a good year for common sense in the G.O.P., where principled opposition to childish behavior is pretty-much non-existent. Michael Kieschnick puts it well in his HuiffPo post, “Republicans Use Jim Bunning to Say Tough S**t to America“:

…It is one thing to act in such a despicable manner, and quite another to be backed up by one’s colleagues. Surely one of the Republican leaders would have escorted Sen. Bunning off the floor so that a vote could be held. Surely a senior Senator of the same party might have made clear that such behavior is simply unacceptable in the Senate.
But no. No Republican has condemned Sen. Bunning. Indeed, Sen. Cornyn of Texas, in charge of electing more Republicans to the Senate, went out of his way to praise his colleague and said he understood.
Perhaps Sen. Bunning is just a bitter, deluded, old man, who used to be a great baseball pitcher. But he is also the public face of the Republican Senators. The party of no has now simply become the cruder party of tough shit and a raised middle finger.

Perhaps Bunning is running for president of tea party America, where expressions of mindless contempt are celebrated — even when directed toward the working people they claim to represent.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
All across the country, Republicans are fantasizing about a gigantic electoral tide that will sweep out deeply entrenched Democratic incumbents this November. In their telling, this deep-red surge will be so forceful as to dislodge even legislators who don’t look vulnerable now, securing GOP control of both houses of Congress.
But could this scenario really come to pass? That will depend, in part, on what type of Republican Party the Democrats are running against in the fall.
Hence the importance of this year’s Republican civil war. In a string of GOP primary elections stretching from now until September, the future ideological composition of the elephant party hangs in the balance. Many of these primaries pit self-consciously hard-core conservatives, often aligned with the Tea Party movement, against “establishment” candidates—some who are incumbents, and some who are simply vulnerable to being labeled “RINOs” or “squishes” for expressing insufficiently ferocious conservative views.
Below is your guide to this year’s most important ideologically-freighted GOP primaries and their consequences. Confining ourselves just to statewide races, let’s take them in chronological order:
TEXAS, MARCH 2: Today’s showdown is in Texas, where “establishment” Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison is challenging conservative incumbent Governor Rick Perry. Perry, who won only 39 percent of the vote in a four-candidate race in 2006, spent much of the last year cozying up to Tea Party activists and occasionally going over the brink into talk of secession. He seemed to have the race against the Washington-tainted Hutchinson well in hand, until a third GOP candidate, libertarian/Tea Party favorite Debra Medina, started to surge in the polls early this year.
Medina’s candidacy once threatened to knock Perry into a runoff or even displace Hutchison from the second spot. But then Medina went on the Glenn Beck Program and expressed openness to the possibility that the federal government was involved in the 9/11 attacks. Still, it’s not clear Perry will clear 50 percent. An expensive and potentially divisive runoff would weaken him against the Democratic candidate, Houston Mayor Bill White, who looks quite competitive in early polling.
INDIANA, MAY 4: In the Hoosier State, right-wingers are flaying each other. Former Senator Dan Coats, a relatively conservative figure with strong “establishment” support, faces three even more conservative rivals in the race to succeed Evan Bayh. Coats is a longtime favorite of religious conservatives and an early member of the evangelical conservative network which author Jeff Sharlet dubs “The Family.” He’s secured early endorsements from D.C.-based conservative leaders Mike Pence and James Bopp (an RNC member who authored both the “Socialist Democrat Party” and “litmus test” resolutions). But his Beltway support has created a backlash in Indiana, and some Second Amendment fans recall that Coats voted for the Brady Bill and the assault-weapons ban. Coats is also smarting from revelations that he’s been registered to vote in Virginia since leaving the Senate, and working in Washington as a lobbyist for banks, equity firms, and even foreign governments (his firm represented—yikes—Yemen).
With the vote coming so soon, hard-core conservatives probably won’t have time to unite behind an alternative; some favor Tea Party-oriented state senator Marlin Stutzman, while others are sticking with a old-timey right-wing warhorse, former Representative John Hostetler. But if they do, and Coats loses, it will probably spur a headlong national panic among “establishment” Republicans, even well-credentialed conservatives who haven’t quite joined the tea partiers. Indiana Democrats have managed to recruit a strong Senate nominee in Congressman Brad Ellsworth, who might hold onto Bayh’s Senate seat.
UTAH, MAY 8: Utah Senator Bob Bennett, the bipartisan dealmaker, is in trouble. He voted for TARP, he has been a high-visibility user of earmarks, and, worse yet, he co-sponsored a universal health-reform bill with Democratic Senator Ron Wyden. So right-wingers want his head. Bennett’s defeat has become an obsession of influential conservative blogger Erick Erickson of Red State, and the Club for Growth, the big bully of economic conservatism, has attacked Newt Gingrich for speaking on his behalf.
Bennett’s first test will come on May 8, when delegates to Utah’s state GOP convention will vote on a Senate nominee. If he fails to get 60 percent, he’ll be pushed into a June 22 primary. Bennett faces three potentially credible right-wing challengers, but the “comer” seems to be Mike Lee, a former law clerk to Justice Samuel Alito, who has been endorsed by Dick Armey’s powerful FreedomWorks organization. Since this is Utah, there is no Democrat in sight who is strong enough to exploit such a right-wing “purge.” Bennett’s defeat would only make the Republican Party more conservative, and provide another object lesson to any GOP-er thinking about cosponsoring major legislation with a Democrat.

Read more…

I don’t quite know exactly where this is coming from, but there’s clearly a media effort underway to show that the conservative movement and the Republican Party are reining in “the extremists” in their ranks, presumably in order to look all ready to govern.
Today’s Politico features a long piece by Kennth Vogel detailing claims by various conservative and Tea Party spokesmen that the influence of “the fringe” has been grossly exaggerated by “the Left,” and that in fact unruly elements are being ignored or excluded by the Right’s grownups.
“Birthers,” Birchers and militia types, we are told, are being shown the door, and haven’t been that important to begin with, except in the propaganda of the Left.
The door-keepers in Vogel’s account, however, are not a group that would normally strike you as moderately-tempered unless the bar for political sanity is set very low. One is none other than Judson Phillips of Tea Party Nation, who told Vogel that activists needed “to control the message and to prevent the tea party movement from being hijacked.” That’s interesting, since Phillips’ recent National Tea Party Convention featured a race-baiting keynote address by Tom Tancredo, another speech by “birther” advocate Joseph Farrah of WorldNetDaily, and a breakout panel headed by Christian Right extremist Roy Moore. Another is dirty-trickster and ACORN conspiracy theorist Andrew Breitbart, who is credited with disrepecting Farrah at Phillips’ event. Still another is Erick Erickson of RedState, that ferocious advocate of strife against “squishes” and moderates of every variety.
If these folk want to keep “the Left” from talking about crazy people on the Right, they might want to make their policing a bit more rigorous than the occasional tip from the coach to stay on the political sidelines. “The Left” did not invent the cosponsorship of the recent Conservative Political Action Conference by the John Birch Society and the militia-friendly Oathkeepers. But more to the point, it’s a disturbing sign in intself that people like Phillips, Breitbart and Erickson are being treated as some sort of “mainstream,” where it’s perfectly normal to call President Obama a socialist, treat Democrats as presumptive traitors, and advocate an array of radical economic and social policies. All the “self-policing of the Right” narrative really shows is how far and fast conservatives have recently moved to what used to be thought of as “the fringe.” It’s cold comfort to learn there is ample frontier territory on the Right that’s well beyond that.

The House Ethics Committee investigation of Rep. (and Ways & Means Committee chairman) Charlie Rangel has gotten a lot of attention recently. But there’s a new development on the House ethics front that merits a closer look than it will probably receive, at least nationally.
Georgia Rep. Nathan Deal resigned his seat today, supposedly so he could concentrate on his gubernatorial campaign. But as a conservative blogger in the Peach State immediately noted, this makes zero political sense except as a way to short-circuit an ethics investigation of a state contract held by Deal that was about to get underway:

Deal is giving up the turnout advantage for being the sitting Congressman while the vote for his replacement takes place. GA law calls for a special election to replace Deal, and assuming the special election clears the field for the general election, having an unopposed incumbent running in the 9th when the primary vote for Governor takes place is a major campaign disadvantage for Deal.
So why would Deal take the hit on turnout?
The House Ethics Committee came down hard on Charlie Rangel last week. The next case up was to look at Deal’s use of his Congressional staff to protect a no-bid State contract here in Georgia. The House ethics committee was due to release their findings in this case any day. Deal’s resignation probably makes this go away.
So, Deal can campaign full time after tomorrow. If he’s no longer a member of Congress, he can’t be on the list of CREW’s most unethical Congressmen anymore.

This is interesting in no small part because Georgia’s crowded Republican gubernatorial primary has become something of a quagmire of ethics issues. State insurance commissioner John Oxendine, who has been the front-runner in the polls for many months, is battling a variety of ethics charges relating to his fundraising efforts among the insurance companies he is responsible for regulating. And several other candidates are struggling to overcome the perception of a cover-up of a recent sex-with-a-utility-lobbyist scandal that ultimately forced state House Speaker Glenn Richardson from office.
It probably doesn’t help that Richardson was replaced in the legislature in a special election last week by another Christian Right activist who has admitted an affair with his mother-in-law during his first wife’s pregnancy.
The broader lesson is that Republicans are not exempt from the ongoing anti-government, anti-incumbent popular mood. While they certainly want to promote the idea that voters are only interested in punishing politicians who support economic stimulus funds or health care reform, there are other sins that do not bear exposure in the current climate. And wherever GOPers are entrenched in office, as they are in much of the Deep South, ethics problems are rarely too far beneath the surface.
UPDATE: Deal’s resignation, currently slated to take effect on March 8, could affect the outcome of the expected razor-thin vote on health care reform, due to occur early in April. If nothing else, Deal’s action should offset the decision last week by Democratic Rep. Neil Abercrombie’s to resign his House seat for a gubernatorial campaign in Hawaii.

In his ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ posted today at the Center for American Progress web pages, TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira shows clearly that President Obama was right in saying that the major elements of comprehensive health care reform legislation he is advocating are popular with the public and that the bills in Congress would fare better if the public actually knew what was in them. As Teixeira explains:

…It turns out the president’s claim is well founded. The latest evidence is in a recent Newsweek poll that first asked respondents whether they supported or opposed Obama’s health care reform plan, then gave them a list of key provisions in the plan, and then asked them again whether they supported Obama’s plan.
…Six of the eight provisions get majority support with the highest favorability for the health insurance exchanges (81 percent), requiring health insurance companies to cover those with pre-existing conditions (76 percent), and requiring most businesses to offer health insurance to their employees (75 percent). But the poll also asked about two provisions the public did not like: taxing “Cadillac” health plans and fining individuals who refuse to get health insurance. So Newsweek cannot be accused of cherry picking the plan for only those provisions the public would likely favor.
Before respondents heard the list of provisions, they opposed Obama’s health care plan 49-40. After respondents heard the list they switched to 48-43 support. Obama was right: If the public knew what was actually in the comprehensive health care plans being proposed, they would feel more favorably about them.

And, interestingly, those who keep saying that the public wants to abandon health care reform and move on to other legislation are dead wrong, as Teixeira explains:

…In an early February ABC/Washington Post poll, the public said, by an overwhelming 63-34 margin, that lawmakers in Washington should keep trying to pass a comprehensive health care reform plan instead of giving up.

As Teixeira concludes, ” Amen to that.”

A new DCORPS study, “Turnout and the New American Majority” (PDF) sheds fresh light on the opportunity and challenge presented to progressives by three key groups of the ‘Rising American Electorate’ (RAE), unmarried women, people of color and youth. Subtitled “A Year-Long Project Tracking Voter Participation and Vote Preference Among the Rising American Electorate,” the study includes a survey commissioned by Women’s Voices. Women Vote, conducted between 1/7 and 1/12 designed to track engagement of RAE voters.
DCORPS notes that declining turnout among key segments of the U.S. electorate suggests “a looming problem heading into the 2010 elections” because “turnout collapsed” among RAE groups in the 2009 elections in NJ, VA and the 2010 MA special. In addition, “much of the polling in the summer and into the fall last year, as well as early polling in 2010, suggests a disproportionate problem among these specific voting blocs.”
RAE voters account for a majority of the voting-age population in the U.S. “Because they do not vote at the same levels as other voters, their voices are not always heard by policy-makers.” But the authors conclude that “popular assumptions about dismal turnout among these voters are wrong. It is not inevitable, and it is not tied primarily to the economy. It can change with the right programs and due attention.” Other key findings include:

· As others in the participation community have been warning, turnout among these groups is at risk; this comes after record turnout in the 2008 election.
· It is a mistake to assume that this is all about the economy and disappointment with the slow pace of recovery. Those in the Rising American Electorate least likely to vote are the most optimistic about economic turnaround. Moreover, regression analysis suggests little, if any, predictive value in economic perceptions on enthusiasm for voting.
· This is important because it suggests that turnout is not captive to economic performance. The programs that worked to increase turnout in 2008 and 2006 can still increase turnout among these voters in 2010.
· Democrats face another problem, too; declining levels of support, particularly among youth and unmarried women. The economy likely plays a more significant role in vote preference than in turnout.
· What is key for both parties is getting the economic narrative right. This means speaking to this issue in their terms and focusing on tangible relief efforts they can see and touch, like unemployment benefits and health care reform. But it also means speaking to their hope and desire for change, which has not died since the 2008 election cycle. If anything, these voters want more change, not less.

While the interests of the RAE groups clearly fit within the Democratic Party, the worst thing would be for Dems to assume they will show up in adequate numbers to prevent a rout in November. If we want to hold the House and Senate, motivating and turning out the RAE must be a top priority.