A close companion of the “Obama’s abandoned bipartisanship!” story-line among center-right gabbers is the “Obama’s shifted to the left!” argument. Two especially prominent journalists, the New York Times’ David Brooks and The Atlantic/FT‘s Clive Crook, have offered museum-piece-quality takes on the latter proposition this week. And they make little or no sense except as fine examples of how ideological definitions of “left,” “center” and “right” are constantly changed to comport with daily agitprop needs.
Brooks’ column, modestly entitled “Liberal Suicide March,” reflects one of David’s signature tactics: establishing moral and political equivalence between “the left” and “the right” without any reflection on, well, reality, or any sense of proportion. Because a majority of Democrats favor a course of action on, say, health reform, they are precisely as extreme and as worthy of dismissal as the looniest let’s-save-Terry-Schiavo conservatives of the Bush era. Good government is to be inherently identified with “the center,” as David Brooks happens to define it at any given moment.
At this given moment, Brooks defines “the center” as those Blue Dog Democrats who have heartburn over this or that feature of the House Democratic version of health reform, which in turn defines “the left,” which in turn defines Barack Obama because he hasn’t attacked said House version. The Blue Dogs are “brave moderates” because (like Barack Obama, but David can’t bring himself to admit that) they are concerned about health care cost containment. Many of them are also concerned, as it happens, about forcing higher reimbursement for rural doctors under Medicare, and many would just as soon boost costs even more by junking a “public option” that could force price competition among health plans. But apparently, Obama is participating in a “leftward surge” by failing to identify himself with the Blue Dogs on health care.
But Brooks is moving the goal-posts in a way that essentially means Obama can only stay in “the center” by moving “right.” Obama’s entire approach to health reform is a rejection of “the left’s” advocacy of a single-payer system–which isn’t even being debated–and a firm embrace of the “managed competition” model that used to define “the center”–and particularly the Blue Dog Democratic center–on health reform. More fundamentally, what Obama is advocating, far from representing a “leftward surge,” has been settled policy among mainstream Democrats since at least the 2004 campaign cycle, and is precisely what he promised to implement on the trail last year. His only notable “shift” has been to express an openness to an individual mandate, which has very much been a “centrist” idea within the Democratic Party.
Meanwhile, Clive Crook stipulates Brooks’ characterization of Obama’s positioning as obviously correct, and then plaintively asks why, why, why Obama doesn’t “pick fights” with “the left” and thereby get right with God and the American people.
I don’t know exactly how Crook has missed the many fights that Obama’s picked with “the left” since taking office, but to be helpful, I’d refer him to a fairly long list of progressive grievances with the administration that I made in a TNR article earlier this week about “the left’s” relative lack of leverage with Obama.
But let’s talk about “the center,” which is where Crook, like Brooks, thinks Obama should “move.” When it comes to health care policy, Clive Crook seems to define “the center” on health care as what Clive Crook thinks we should do:

I am for comprehensive health reform with a guarantee of universal coverage but favor broad-based taxes to pay for it, including limits to the tax deductibility of employer-provided insurance

Is “the left” the big obstacle to this approach? Yes, elements of the labor movement don’t like limits on tax deductibility of employer-provided insurance, but neither does much of anyone else outside the chattering classes (most emphatically a big majority of the American people). Crook very much wants Obama the President to emulate Obama the Candidate, but he is surely aware that the latter spent months attacking the idea of taxing employer-based benefits, and probably understands that Republicans, even though their presidential candidate embraced the idea (in the context of an amazingly reactionary health care proposal), would now violently oppose it as a forbidden “tax increase during a recession.” Indeed, Obama’s remarks at his press conference earlier this week opening the door to modest limitations on tax deductibility constituted something of a profile in courage, and probably displeased his political advisors.
So in the end, Barack Obama probably can’t satisfy Clive Crook on health reform, and probably can’t satisfy David Brooks by satisfying the self-contradictory desires of the Blue Dogs. For all the time that people like Crook and Brooks spend wringing their hands over Obama’s failure to ignore his own party and his own campaign platform to “lead” the country towards some ever-shifting concept of “the center,” he’d be better advised to forget about the labels and the positioning and get the closest thing possible to his original vision of health reform done.

This item is was originally published in The New Republic.
In recent news coverage of congressional action on health care reform, we’re back to one of Washington’s favorite games: the bipartisan trashing of the idea that Barack Obama cares about bipartisanship. Here’s a nice distillation of the CW from the New York Times’ Robert Pear and Michael Herszenhorn:

White House officials said they had a new standard for bipartisanship: the number of Republican ideas incorporated in the legislation, rather than the number of Republican votes for a Democratic bill. Mr. Obama said the health committee bill “includes 160 Republican amendments,” and he said that was “a hopeful sign of bipartisan support for the final product.”

Slate‘s John Dickerson sees this as the administration “replacing the traditional definition of bipartisanship with their version in the hopes that people don’t notice but still like the result.”
This bait-and-switch interpretation of the White House’s m.o., is, of course, political gold to Republicans, since it simultaneously absolves them of any responsibility the breakdown in bipartisanship while labeling the president as both partisan and deceitful. As has been the case throughout this year when Obama’s commitment to bipartisanship has been called into question, it is broadly assumed that the “traditional” definition of bipartisanship–pols getting together in Washington and cutting deals–is what candidate Obama was talking about on the campaign trail.
But there’s actually not much evidence of that. Obama eschewed Washington’s aisle-crossing metric in many of his campaign speeches, including his famous speech announcing his candidacy in February of 2007, his speech the night he clinched the Democratic nomination, and even on an occasion that screamed for the clubby bipartisanship of Washington, a bipartisan dinner on the eve of his nomination in which he shared the stage with his John McCain.
Obama made the same point over and over again in his rhetoric about bipartisanship: It’s about focusing on big national challenges without letting minor details get in the way of progress, and it’s about forcing the parties in Washington to deal with those challenges in the first place. It’s certainly not about the president of the United States going to Mitch McConnell and John Boener and saying: “Okay, boys, what do you want to do now?” In the past, I’ve called it “grassroots bipartisanship,” since it’s aimed more at disgruntled rank-and-file Republicans and Republican-leaning independents than at Republican elected officials. But whether that’s right or not, it’s clearly a conditional bipartisanship that depends on the willingness of the opposition to share the agenda on which Obama was elected.
Do congressional Republicans today share Obama’s goals, and simply disagree with Democrats on some details of implementation? With a very few exceptions, no, they don’t. On climate change, the range of opinion among congressional Republicans and conservative interest groups ranges from outright denial of global warming, to rejection of climate change as the top energy priority (viz. Sarah Palin’s recent op-ed refusing to acknowledge any issue other than “energy independence”), to rejection of any immediate action as impossible under current conditions. This refusal to cooperate is all the more remarkable since Democrats have themselves unilaterally compromised by embracing a market-oriented approach to regulating carbon emissions–the same approach once championed by the GOP’s 2008 presidential nominee–called “cap-and-trade,” which Republicans have now branded “cap-and-tax.”
And are congressional Republicans and conservative elites committed to universal health coverage? Maybe a few are, but the GOP’s opposition to Democratic health reform efforts has increasingly involved a defense of the status quo in health care (aside than their bizarre insistence that “frivolous lawsuits” are the main problem). Their violent rhetoric about the costs associated with universal health care is matched only by their violent opposition to any measures that would reduce those costs.
So you really can’t blame the White House for citing outreach to Republicans and adoption of Republican amendments as evidence of about the most bipartisanship they can reasonably achieve. If, like Dickerson, and many commentators from both ends of the political spectrum, you define bipartisanship in a way that excludes anything that doesn’t involve the sacrifice of basic principles or the abandonment of key policy goals, then to be sure, Barack Obama is not pursuing bipartisanship in that manner. But then he never was.

Regarding the concerns in Dem circles about President Obama’s recent approval ratings, Brendan Nyhan has a calm-headed analysis. As Nyhan explains:

…Coverage of presidential approval suffers from a bizarre ahistoricism. Reporters typically have almost no understanding of the forces that drive presidential approval or the patterns it tends to follow during the course of a president’s time in office…That’s why it’s amusing to see so many people acting like it’s news that approval of President Obama’s handling of health care and overall job performance numbers are trending downward (particularly among independents and Republicans). Of course his numbers are going down! It’s been a virtual certainty that this transition would take place since the day Obama took office. The only question was when it would happen and how far down they would go.
The reason is simple. Presidential approval tends to decline after the honeymoon period as the opposition party begins to be more critical of the president…This decline was likely to be especially significant in Obama’s case because his initial Gallup approval levels were the highest for any president since JFK.

Regarding approval of Obama’s handling of health care, Nyhan notes:

…At first, Obama benefitted from what the political scientist John Zaller calls a one-message environment in which Congressional Republicans offered platitudes about their desire to work with him on health care. However, as the legislative process has moved forward, the GOP and its allies in the press have begun to aggressively attack his approach to the issue. As such, Republicans and sympathetic independents in the electorate are now more likely to tell pollsters that they don’t approve of Obama’s handling of the issue.
The upside for Obama is that these numbers don’t seem to indicate anything specific about the prospects for his health care plan. It would be surprising if the public didn’t start to split along partisan lines at this point given the nature of the proposal. There isn’t much information here that the two parties couldn’t have anticipated (though it would be helpful to put the numbers in context — how do Obama’s health care approval numbers compare to, say, Clinton’s in July 1993?)

Nyhan believes that we are not likely to see much of an uptick in Obama’s approval numbers in the near future as a result of his efforts in behalf of health reform, given the intensity of the approaching battle, even though it’s rarely the case that one factor trumps all others in swaying presidential approval ratings. In addition, as chart data Nyhan provides indicates, “the aggregate preference of the electorate for more or less government — what the political scientist James Stimson calls public mood — tends to move in the opposite direction of a dominant governing party.”
So we can give the hand-wringing about approval ratings a rest. It would be more surprising if Obama’s approval numbers didn’t go down. Let the opposition do the chicken little dance, while Dems keep our eyes on the big prize, which is enacting meaningful health care reform. When that historic struggle is won, we can expect an uptick in the president’s approval ratings — and Democratic fortunes in general.

Perhaps it’s a mistake to take seriously anything Bill Kristol says on a subject remotely connected with health reform, given his eagerness to reprise the partisan thug routine he played in 1993 and 1994, which pretty much created his later career. But his snarky reaction today to President Obama’s press conference last night, entitled “Obama Attacks Docs and Cops,” is hard to ignore, and will probably inspire other conservatives to equally ridiculous talking points.
Kristol expresses contemptuous credulity at Obama’s idea that doctors don’t always pursue the best diagnosis or treatment regimens, and suggests it’s all a ploy to justify “a government panel that will save money by restricting care.”
For a health care “expert,” Kristol sure isn’t paying much attention if he thinks docs today don’t have to tailor their every action to private health care plan rules, primary care “gatekeepers,” hospital managers, managed care organizations, and a host of other players. And given past GOP reliance on various strategies for “restricting care” to hold down costs (e.g., the Medicare Payment Advisory Committee, created by congressional Republicans, that Obama wants to beef up), it’s more than a bit disingenuous for Kristol to play the demagogue in defending the absolute sovereignty of physicians or suggesting they don’t make errors that risk lives and cost a lot of money.
(For a brief assessment of what Obama actually said on encouraging “good medicine,” and why it was important, see my post for the Progressive Policy Institute today).
As for Obama’s “attack on cops,” please give me a break. Obama explicitly conditioned his remarks about the Gates incident on his understanding of the facts. Anyone who isn’t sympathetic with someone who’s been arrested in his or her own house for “disturbing the peace” in the midst of a false allegation of breaking and entering said house must be one of those “elitists” that Obama’s always being accused of consorting with. No, the President shouldn’t have used the word “stupidly,” and if it turns out he’s wrong about the facts, he should say so and apologize. But I suspect Kristol’s solidarity with the Cambridge Police is about as genuine as his championship of doctors’ privileges.

This item 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.”
Earlier this week the New York Times offered a bewildering story about the current state of political thought about health care among House Democrats.
First comes word that Nancy Pelosi wants to raise the possible surtax on wealthy Americans to $500,000 for individuals and $1 million for joint filers, “so the new levy could be described as a tax on millionaires.”
Next come some reasons why the millionaire’s tax may not see the light of day:

The Senate, however, has shown little interest in such a tax to pay for the legislation. And House Democrats, especially more junior members elected in 2006 and 2008 from Republican-leaning districts, are reluctant to vote for a big tax increase if it is unlikely to be included in the final bill.
Such a vote, they argue, would provide easy fodder for opponents seeking to paint them as tax-and-spend liberals. Those concerns prompted Ms. Pelosi over the weekend to warn the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, that she might have to delay the House vote on the bill until September unless she had a clearer idea of the Senate’s plans.

At the same time prominent Blue Dog Democrats are demanding that Obama slow down the health care train and are demanding a ‘bipartisan’ solution even though Republicans have shown little indication that thy are interested in a compromise bill.
But in a number of key ways, Democrats seem to be missing the political forest for the trees, focusing on all that could go wrong with health care and ignoring the opportunities for political gain.
First of all, Jim Demint is right: health care reform could represent a Waterloo moment for Obama . . . and for Democrats. If it doesn’t pass, not only will the Democratic brand lie in tatters, but one would imagine that voters would really start to question whether the federal government can accomplish anything. And if that happens every Democrat – whether they voted for a tax increase to pay for health care reform or against it – will pay the price. So if moderate Democrats think they’ve found some political high ground; think again. If health care reform fails and you’re going to get swept away with the same tide as your Democratic brethren. And the more vulnerable a seat you are in the worse the wave will be.
Second if health care reform passes, that’s a very good thing for Democrats. This is sort of stating the obvious, but it’s a fact that seems to elude many congressional Democrats. Yes, they might get branded as tax and spenders, but you know what the retort is, ‘I passed a health care reform that expanded care to millions of Americans.’ There is a reason, after all, that Republicans are fighting this bill tooth and nail. They understand that if Democrats get credit for passing a new entitlement that provides health care security for millions of Americans a) Democrats will get the credit and b) any hope they might have of unwinding the welfare state will be dashed. For the foreseeable future, Republicans will be playing politics on Democratic turf.
In fact, one of the most fascinating and depressing elements of the current health care debate for Democrats is failure even refusal to place any political benefit on passage of major health care reform – an issue that polls as among the most important domestic priorities for Americans. Barack Obama and the current Democratic Congress was elected to bring “change” to Washington – they weren’t elected to maintain the status quo or even worse, serve as an impediment to reform. Passage of health care legislation will bring with it real political benefits and will go a long way toward improving the image of the party as a whole.
And when it comes to the tax and spend issue if individual Democrats can’t find a way to win an election in which they’ve raised taxes on the wealthiest American to pay for health care for millions of working-class Americans – against a candidate of the deeply unpopular Republican Party – then they have no business being in politics in the first place.
Third, health care reform will please rank and file Democrats. Now I understand that for a lot of moderate House Democrats, their focus is on independents. But one would think that at a time when the Democratic brand is particularly strong, when significantly more Americans self-identify as Democrats than Republicans (35% to 21% according to an April Washington Post poll) and when Barack Obama has brought a significant number of new people into the party that keeping them happy would be high on a Congressional Democrats priority list. In 1994 one of the developments that did the most damage to Democratic incumbents in mid-term elections was diminished turnout from the party’s base of supporters. Do you think if Democrats pass a major health care bill that those same base voters – who are of particular importance in a generally low turnout mid-term election – will come out to the polls in significant numbers? Instead of worrying about GOP attacks maybe Democrats in tough seats should be worrying about how to keep their most loyal supporters happy.
Ed recently linked to Nathan Newman’s analysis of the 1994 congressional elections and one of his key conclusions is worth quoting in full here:

Clinton’s failure to deliver on health care and a real improvement in the economy for such lower-paid workers disillusioned them. The Democrats demonstrated how limited their party is in delivering benefits to working Americans, so they saw little difference in the parties and voted on cultural divisions rather than economic divisions.

Might be a lesson there for Democrats today.
Fourth, passing health care will benefit their constituents directly. This is actually what I would call a Blue Dog special. As Nate Silver pointed out a few days ago, 31 of the 48 House districts in which the seat is held by a Democrat – but McCain carried in the general election – have an above average number of uninsured Americans. Take for example Dan Boren, who has been one of the most prominent Blue Dogs calling for a delay in reform. Nearly 26% of his constituents don’t have coverage. Mike Ross is another prominent centrist Dem and in his district 22% of the population is uninsured. Again, if a Democrat can’t find a way to finesse a vote that expands coverage for more than 20% of their constituents into a good campaign narrative perhaps its time to find another line of work.
Finally, if the economy stinks in 2010, Democrats are going to be in trouble so they might as well pass a big health care bill that gives them a political chit to play. This one sort of speaks for itself. If the economy is in the toilet would Democrats rather go to voters and say ‘I held the line on taxes’ or ‘I made sure the deficit didn’t grow any bigger’ but vote for me? Or would they prefer to say ‘the economy stinks, but now for the first time in history every American has access to health care coverage . . . and my opponent voted against it.’
But also consider the flip side; if the economy is showing improvement by the Fall of 2010 then Democrats will not only enjoy a political advantage but they’ll be able to run for re-election on having passed health care as well. The political windfall could be enormous.
In the end, the political calculus on health care isn’t even close – passage of a health care reform package that improves access to care will bring far more political benefit for Democrats than if such a bill defeated. And to some extent Jim Demint and Bill Kristol’s ill-timed comments this week made clear the stakes for Democrats – and the opportunity. Pass health care and reap the benefits.

The big buzz today is rightly about the President’ health care reform press conference. Harold Meyerson, however, has an instructive column in today’s La. Times, “GOP: Going Over the Precipice,” showing how Republicans in the California state legislature undermine health care and education. In one nut graph. Meyerson succinctly nails the outcome of their manipulation of the state constitution, which requires 2/3 majority in the legislature to enact the budget and tax hikes. Republicans, who are about a third of the state legislature, are refusing to pass a budget unless the $26 billion shortfall is paid for with deep spending cuts, and some Democratic leaders have apparently caved to their threat. Meyerson says:

The consequences of those demands are stark. Hundreds of thousands of children will lose their healthcare and tens of thousands of aged and disabled California will lose their in-home support services. Public K-12 schools will continue to lay off teachers and cut class offerings, and both the University of California and the state university system will have their state funding cut by roughly 20%. At a time when state business leaders are crying out for a better-educated workforce, the Republicans in the Legislature have pushed through policies that will make the state both sicker and dumber.

But that’s not all. Meyerson explains how the adverse effects of draconian spending cuts the Republicans are demanding will reverberate through the state economy:

The cutbacks also will deepen the state’s already deep recession. Public employees will have less money to spend. City and country redevelopment agencies, their funds impounded by Sacramento, will suspend their construction projects — and there are precious few construction projects in the state today besides those that redevelopment agencies are funding.
Indeed, the cutbacks may trigger a vicious cycle: By worsening the recession, they further reduce state revenues, which will lead to even more cutbacks as long as the Republicans continue to cling to one-third of the Legislature and to their distinctive brand of concern for the welfare of the state. (They are concerned about California like the Visigoths were concerned about Rome.)

Meyerson is here talking about California. But progressive reform advocates take note that a change of the state and a few words, and you have a well-stated argument, focusing on diminished services, against Republican spending cut philosophy in most other states.
Meyerson attributes part of the problem to state Democrats’ lack of a “well-known leader” to make their case to the state legislature and to the public, and he challenges CA Attorney-General and former Governor Jerry Brown and/or San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom to step up and provide the needed leadership. But the most important reason Meyerson cites is that the state Constitution gives the GOP the power to hold the state budget — and services — hostage to the views of Republican ideologues who run CA GOP.
Meyerson urges CA Dems to pick a compelling spokesman and “consider calling the GOP’s bluff” and vote against the Republican deal. He also urges Californians to amend their state Constitution “to end the practice of minority rule.” No doubt the Republicans would respond by trying to slam Dems as the new obstructionists, so Meyerson’s challenge will require a more assertive public education campaign to reveal the devastation of CA services that would result. It’s a combative strategy Meyerson suggests, but it appears the combination of the state constitution’s 2/3 vote requirement and domination of ideologues in the Republican ranks of the state legislature leave little alternative.
Most of the commenters following Meyerson’s article are advocates of spending cuts. But one saw it this way:

It is even worse than reported here. Yesterday our Doctor informed us that MediCal/MediCare was cutting back every patients by up to 2/3s to save money. My wife, who is terminal, is going to have her pain med cut by 50% in the next couple months. Our Dr., the director of a large County Clinic, was no the verge of tears as he tried to explain there was nothing he could do but follow the new rules that were made to save money with no regard of the extreme suffering this will cause. This will impact at least a couple hundred thousand people in Ca.

The stakes are clearly high, and how effectively the Democrats respond is literally a life or death issue for many Californians.

As the debate over health reform becomes more and more focused on issues of “health care cost containment,” Mark Blumenthal at Pollster.com raises a crucial and much-ignored question: whose costs are we talking about here?

When Americans tell pollsters they want health care reform to focus on “costs” they usually mean their actual, out-of-pocket health care expenses: insurance premiums, deductibles, co-pays, the costs of prescription drugs and any other medical bills not covered by health insurance.

That’s not the same, of course, as what CBO or health policy wonks mean by “costs,” which is typically either the federal government’s outlays or the overall rate of inflation in the health care sector.
Blumenthal also notes that a rare poll focused on the kind of cost containment regular folks want shows some pretty amazing levels of support from Ds and Rs alike:

The survey…sponsored by the labor-business coalition known as America’s Agenda, included a test of measures to “reduce costs” that speaks directly to these kinds of out-of-pocket expenses:
Now I would like to read you a proposal that is being considered to reform health care. This proposal aims to reduce costs and improve quality of health care in the following ways: make health coverage more affordable and accessible for all Americans; eliminate co-pays and deductibles for recommended chronic disease treatment prescribed by your doctor; eliminate co- pays and deductibles for recommended preventive services and emphasize disease prevention including reducing obesity and smoking; ensure that doctors have accurate and updated information on the most effective treatments; and ensure that patients receive highly-coordinated, personalized treatment plans based on the latest medical evidence.
While the America’s Agenda poll did not test this proposal against alternatives, I would not be surprised to see Americans with health insurance react more positively to it than anything else we could dream up, especially if the alternative is framed in terms of providing “access” to those presently uninsured (in other words, to somebody else).

All these elements–particularly an emphasis on prevention, chronic disease management, electronic medical records, and research on effective treatments–have been part of what Barack Obama has meant by “cost containment” in the past, even if they haven’t much appeared in congressional plans. Looks like it would be a very good time for Obama to shift attention back to these highly popular forms of cost containment right now.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Only six months into the Obama presidency, the new administration has already experienced an unusually robust assortment of criticism from fellow Democrats, at least at the elite opinion-leading and activist level. The extended progressive “honeymoon” that John Judis warned against back in February has largely faded.
Obama has been faulted in large swaths of the blogosphere and op-ed pages for a wide array of missteps, if not downright heresies. Here are just a few:
*Undertaking expensive and questionably effective “bailouts” of the financial sector instead of simply regulating and/or nationalizing it.
*Using vast political capital to promote a fiscal stimulus package that was too small to work, and allowing Senate “centrists” to water it down even further.
*Refusing to reverse major elements of the Bush program for surveillance, detention, and interrogation of terrorism suspects, and obstructing efforts to hold Bush officials accountable for violations of civil liberties.
*Moving too slowly to end American military involvement in Iraq, and moving too fast to make new commitments for military action in Afghanistan.
*Deferring to “centrists” and even Republicans in Congress on crucial climate change and health reform legislation at the palpable risk of destroying the progressive nature of these initiatives.
*Failing to honor commitments for immediate action to promote GLBT equality, particularly with respect to the military.
Aside from these specific issues, there’s been a pervasive feeling in many progressive circles that Obama is too cautious, too “pragmatic,” too subservient to Democratic “centrists,” too worried about bipartisanship, too interested in outreach to people who will never support him, and too unwilling to utilize the bully pulpit to articulate and defend progressive principles.
But lefty unhappiness with Obama has another, and very poignant, dimension: a recognition that, despite helping to elect one of the most liberal presidents in recent memory, self-conscious progressives have less leverage with the administration than their “centrist” Democratic counterparts, and maybe no more than Republicans (or at least those few Republicans in the Senate willing to even consider cooperation with Obama’s agenda).
The reason is that efforts to create a “loyal opposition” to Obama from the left tend to be more “loyal” than “oppositional.” In a characteristically acerbic column about the Campaign for America’s Future annual meeting last month, the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank made these observations about the gap between progressive criticism of Obama and the willingness to take him on in meaningful (i.e., threatening) ways:

[S]peakers at the closing session exhorted the liberals to take back America–from Obama. “The president of the most powerful country in the world is doing all right, but there are a lot of people in this country who are not doing all right,” writer Naomi Klein told the crowd. “Obama is making us stupid,” she added. “Love can make you stupid.”
… But many in the audience had warmer feelings toward the Obama administration. A straw poll taken by pollster Stan Greenberg found that 90 percent of those in attendance approve of the job the president is doing, and that they have no consensus about whether to help Obama or fight him.

More interesting than Milbank’s mockery was the fact that influential progressive blogger Jane Hamsher agreed with it, saying that leading progressive groups are “little more than arms of the White House now playing a zero sum game with Republicans who really don’t matter.”
The same dynamic is evident with grassroots elements of the “Democratic base.” Even as Obama’s job approval rating has bounced around, with Republicans hardening their opposition and (according to a few polls) independents becoming skeptical, self-identified Democrats have remained solidly in his corner. And then there’s this stunning detail: According to Gallup’s weekly tracking poll, Obama’s job approval rating among self-identified “liberal Democrats” has risen from 90 percent on the week of his inauguration to 96 percent in the latest (the week ending July 12) survey. So while progressive criticism of Obama is hitting a fever pitch, it doesn’t seem to have affected their love affair with him.
The frustration of the progressive left was perfectly expressed last week by Chris Bowers, co-founder of OpenLeft, a web site specifically created to push the progressive blogosphere from a purely partisan to a more explicitly ideological posture. The post is a pretty remarkable admission of futility, arguing that progressives can’t credibly threaten to derail Obama’s agenda, since an Obama failure will be seen as their failure as well:

Whether or not the Democratic trifecta actually passes progressive legislation, the legislation that is passed and the policies that are followed will still be perceived as progressive. We simply can’t avoid that.
For example, right now the stimulus package pretty much equals left-wing economic philosophy in the eyes of the American people. If it doesn’t produce results, we are all going to see our ideas become discredited in the eyes of the American public, even if we thought policies of the Democratic trifecta did not go nearly far enough. The country is never going to say “well, that idea didn’t work, so let’s try a more extreme version of it.” People just don’t think that way in America.
Many conservatives felt the same way under the Republican trifecta, and are now roundly mocked for arguing that conservatism can’t fail, but people can fail conservatism. I imagine that if the economy doesn’t turn around, many progressives will sound quite similar in their critiques of the Obama administration. Problem is, we will sound just as silly as they will. Whether we like it or not, progressivism is on the hook for the success or failure of the policies passed under the Obama administration and the Democratic trifecta.

With this realization comes the equally frustrated feeling that Blue Dogs and other Democratic “centrists” have superior leverage over the administration and the Democratic congressional leadership, precisely because they (or at least those in their ranks from districts and states either carried by John McCain or narrowly carried by Obama) don’t view their political viability as inseparable from the president and the party. Thus they can make credible threats to take a dive on key elements of the Democratic agenda if their demands are not met.
Some liberal groups have been tentatively moving towards a more aggressive posture, most notably in the context of a campaign to push back against “centrist” Democratic and Republican demands for abandonment or significant modification of a strong “public option” in a competitive universal health care system. After being targeted by MoveOn for her opposition to the public option, Senator Kay Hagan came around promptly. And progressives are reasonably optimistic about similar efforts aimed at Dianne Feinstein, Mary Landrieu and Blanche Lincoln. Moreover, broader threats from Democratic senators to defect from support for the administration were credited by some with causing Harry Reid’s recent instruction to Max Baucus to stop screwing around with the public option in health care reform in order to pursue Republican support.
Still, it’s not clear how far any progressive Democrats will go in bucking the White House. Despite significant pressure to vote against the final House version of the Waxman-Markey climate change legislation, which had been significantly modified to gain the votes of rural (and often Blue Dog) members, a revolt from the left on the floor fizzled out (with Al Gore reportedly whipping the Progressive Caucus). A similar revolt on the vote to appropriate funds for Iraq and Afghanistan also failed to strike paydirt.
The left’s leverage with the White House and the congressional Democratic leadership is thus limited both by loyalty and by the possibility of being held accountable for the failure of Obama’s agenda. This “loyal opposition” to Obama is being forced to watch more-or-less helplessly as the game of chicken between Obama and the “centrists” plays out.
The abiding reality for all Democrats is that the power of the President of the United States to define his own party in this day and age may well be nearly limitless. This doesn’t mean intra-party criticism ought to end. But it does mean that this president’s success will largely define the success of the Democratic Party for years to come.

The continuing Republican criticisms of Obama as being “weak” and “apologizing to everybody” instead of being “strong” and “resolute” present these kinds of dichotomies as if they were abstract moral options between which Obama – and America – were completely free to choose. But the reality is that behind the abstract political rhetoric of terms like “strength” and “weakness” there is always the more practical level of military reality and the military strategies that can be based on it.
All of George Bush’s goals, threats, promises, language and rhetoric regarding the Arab-Persian world, for example, were not simply expressions of certain abstract moral values in which he just happened to believe but were firmly rooted in a very specific military analysis and strategy – a strategy that had been developed in the 1990s after the first invasion of Iraq. The basic premise of this strategy was that with the extraordinary military technology America had developed – known under the general rubric of the “Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA)” — America – in alliance with Israel — could militarily dominate the Middle East.
Looking at maps after the 1991 invasion of Iraq and considering the weak defense Saddam had mounted (US tanks had come within 70 miles of Bagdad, after all) these strategists concluded that by invading Iraq, converting it into a pro-US ally and setting up major military bases there we could obtain a central and decisive strategic position in the region. An invasion and pacification of Iraq would allow us to establish major American air, armor and infantry forces directly on Iran’s border and simultaneously threaten Syria and Jordan from the rear. This would severely weaken the main lines of communication and supply from Iran to the Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the occupied territories. In a domino effect, Israel would then find both Hezbollah and Hamas much more isolated and easier to control. Taken together, this would result in a combined US-Israeli military dominance of the region so powerful that it would allow us to then profoundly intimidate Iran and any other anti-US forces.
Two major corollaries followed from this basic military strategy. First, America had no real need for European or international allies (other than as window dressing) and second, America did not need to seek popular support in Muslim world. Military force by itself would be sufficient to achieve all our objectives. A massive network of U.S. air and land force bases in Iraq would serve as a permanent staging area for the fast and overwhelming projection of US military power and influence across the region while the dramatic success of the political and economic system we would install in Iraq would inspire Muslims to follow the U.S. example.
9/11 provided the opportunity to put this strategy into effect. From that time all of the rhetorical and political stances Bush took – and which Republicans continue to advocate today – were based on this underlying military analysis and military strategy.
Unfortunately, as all Americans are now painfully aware, from a purely military point of view, this strategy simply did not work.

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This item by Mike Lux is a cross-post from OpenLeft, representing an important point of view on health care reform and party loyalty.
It was good to see President Obama shifting toward a more directly confrontational tone with the insurance industry today in his weekly radio/YouTube address on health care. One of the biggest mistakes Clinton made in the last fight was shying away from directly taking on the insurance companies standing in the way until it was too late. It is only this kind of directly populist message that will carry us home.
It was also very exciting to see Obama be very clear and the strongest yet about how much he wants the public option.
We have reached a crucial moment, perhaps the crucial moment. All those folks pushing for delay (with the possible exception of Ron Wyden) are pushing for delay because they don’t want to take on the insurance industry, and they want to slow the momentum of the Obama approach, especially the public option. Now is when Democrats and all of us progressive activists on the outside need to get very tough and very specific. Conservative Democratic Senators need to understand that they need to vote for cloture even if they can’t bring themselves to vote for the bill itself, that to break with Obama and the party on this is the ultimate disloyalty. They need to understand that the White House, and Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi will cut them off at the knees on all future requests. They need to understand that progressives will recruit primary candidates against anyone who stops health care reform, and that progressive donors will stop giving to anyone who helps the Republicans on a filibuster fight.
This is the biggest issue for Barack Obama, and his ability to get anything else significant done will die if health care dies. This is the ultimate measure of whether you are part of the team, and the consequences of defeat on health care need to be made clear- yes, crystal clear- to everyone. All of us in this fight- from Obama, Reid, and Pelosi, to all of us who are progressive activists- need to ratchet up the pressure even more than the insurance company lobbyists. This is our hill to die on.