With another Democratic candidate debate on tap in Nevada later today, you can bet Barack Obama is going to get questions about his proposal for modifying the cap on income subject to Social Security payroll taxes. But it’s important to understand why this is such a big deal for a lot of progressive Democrats. His proposal isn’t the controversial thing (though it certainly would be in a general election campaign, where it would be hammered by Republicans as a tax increase); it’s his decision to raise the subject at all, and particularly his use of the word “crisis” to describe the status of the Social Security system.
The immediate reason for this reaction is obvious enough; by the well-earned end of Bush’s 2005 drive to divert payroll tax funds to create private retirement accounts, Democratic critics of his plan were devoting just as much time denying there was a Social Security solvency problem as they were attacking the plan’s baleful consequences. So ironically, a proposal by Obama that’s “Left” in terms of its specifics (avoiding any benefit changes while making the payroll tax burden more progressive) is drawing fire from the Left itself as a heretical concession to the rationale for Bush’s proposal, and to those much-derided “Centrist” media types who like to talk about entitlement reform. And for that reason, the reaction among left-bent Democrats to Obama’s Social Security rap provides a microcosm of the exquisite ambivalence they are experiencing over the Obama candidacy in its entirety.
For an idea of the significance invested in this issue by many progressive netroots activists, check out this person-to-person grilling that Obama received from MyDD’s Jonathan Singer:

Barack Obama: I think the point you’re making is why talk about it right now. Is that right?
Jonathan Singer: Yeah. And why use the term “crisis”?
Obama: It is a long-term problem. I know that people, including you, are very sensitive to the concern that we repeat anything that sounds like George Bush. But I have been very clear in fighting privatization. I have been adamant about the fact that I am opposed to it. What I believe is that it is a long-term problem that we should deal with now. And the sooner the deal with it then the better off it’s going to be.
So the notion that somehow because George Bush was trying to drum up fear in order to execute [his] agenda means that Democrats shouldn’t talk about it at all I think is a mistake. This is part of what I meant when I said we’re constantly reacting to the other side instead of setting our own terms for the debate, but also making sure we are honest and straight forward about the issues that we’re concerned about.

Singer’s take on this conversation?

In all it’s not everything that I wanted to hear. But perhaps more importantly, Obama had the opportunity to hear that folks don’t want him talking about a non-existent “crisis” in Social Security. And hopefully, he will pay heed to that sentiment.

There, in a nutshell, is the lingering concern a lot of folks on the Left have with Barack Obama: his policies are suitably progressive, but his framing of those policies, from his constant invocation of bipartisanship to his occasional violation of progressive taboos (e.g., lecturing teachers about their opposition to merit pay, and bloggers about their “incivility”, and consorting with anti-gay gospel singers), makes them suspect he’s really talking past them in order to appeal to the David Broders of the political world.
The recent buzz surrounding the possibility that Obama’s on course to provide a real challenge to Hillary Clinton has brought these conflicted feelings about Obama on the Left to a head once again. And the “crisis” over Obama is heightened by the fact that John Edwards is simultaneously offering, not just the progressive “steak” but all the netroots-style “sizzle” any Broder-hating blogger could ever ask for, line for line and word for word.
As we get closer to actual voting, the Left’s “Obama Problem” is becoming acute. At one site alone, OpenLeft, and on one day, you have Matt Stoller citing the candidate’s new package of technology proposals as the reason he’s now leaning towards support for Obama, and Chris Bowers hoping against hope that Obama, despite himself, could marshal the creative class/minority working class coalition that Chris considers the future of progressive politics. Both these gents have strongly criticized and (in Chris’ case) written off Obama in the very recent past, mainly for the heresies cited above.
I’m discussing this phenomenon mainly to crystallize the subtext of much of the netroots debate on Obama, Edwards, and the entire Democratic nominating contest. Does it really matter in terms of actual voters? You’d have to guess John Edwards thinks so, given his ever-more-faithful channeling of netroots-approved rhetoric these days. And to the extent that everyone agrees media coverage of the campaign does move votes, it’s not so strange that New Media coverage would have an impact as well.
But votes will move media, too. If Edwards wins in Iowa, it will inevitably be viewed as an ideological as well as organizational triumph, and even if Obama survives to fight again, his support on the Left will rapidly dissipate. If Obama wins Iowa, and gets the desired one-on-one with HRC, the Left’s Obama Problem may be resolved in the opposite direction, though the agony inflicted by Obama’s “centrist” rhetorical tendencies could grow with the realization that the Left has nowhere else to go.
In the meantime, this “primary within the primary” will continue. And so, too, will the quieter but still very interesting internal debate among Democratic “centrists” about Obama and his rivals, a topic I’ll write about in the near future.

Thomas Friedman’s New York Times op-ed column on the benefits of raising gasoline taxes makes elegant moral and economic sense. Friedman makes a tight case that raising gas prices would (a) reduce our dependency on mid-east oil and (b) actually save consumers money in the long run, especially if linked to a cut in the payroll tax. It would also encourage faster development of hybrid cars and alternative technologies leading to a cleaner environment and help prevent future oil wars.
Friedman is hitting on all cylinders here and he probably has many of his readers believing that a gas tax increase would be a thing of logical beauty. He even writes a compelling script for politicians defending a hike in gas taxes, while under attack from their opponents:

Yes, my opponent is right. I do favor a gasoline tax phased in over 12 months. But let’s get one thing straight: My opponent and I are both for a tax. I just prefer that my taxes go to the U.S. Treasury, and he’s ready to see his go to the Russian, Venezuelan, Saudi and Iranian treasuries. His tax finances people who hate us. Mine would offset some of our payroll taxes, pay down our deficit, strengthen our dollar, stimulate energy efficiency and shore up Social Security. It’s called win-win-win-win-win for America. My opponent’s strategy is sit back, let the market work and watch America lose-lose-lose-lose-lose.”

“If you can’t win that debate, you don’t belong in politics,” argues Friedman. It’s an interesting tactic, making opponents of a gas tax take some responsibility for rising gas prices and revenues going to other nations. But it’s not an argument most candidates would want to try out in an election year. it might work better, say, in the first year of a new congress and a new President. And it’s going to take some big guns to actually get it done.
We do need some political leaders who have the gonads to take up this cause. But it’s a tricky political minefield, and it’s going to require a lot of time and work to win the hearts and minds of voters before the politicians are willing to get on it. Certainly we know that gas price hikes are politically-toxic, as this chart from Polkatz depicting an extremely close relationship between gas prices and presidential approval ratings makes abundantly clear. Voters already get it that a gas price hike is like a tax increase, as far as their wallets are concerned. Getting voters to appreciate that a gas tax hike can be a good deal for consumers when linked to a cut in payroll taxes for working people is a more complicated challenge, but one worth addressing — in ’09.

It’s been an interesting week for Fred Thompson. New polls have shown him declining towards fringe status in Iowa and New Hampshire. But yesterday he got a big boost from a National Right to Life Committee endorsement. And today he received a blessing from the Osservatore Romano of U.S. conservatism, the Editors of National Review.
Interestingly enough, the National Review editorial ranks Fred’s views on abortion as the least compelling aspect of his candidacy, instead lauding him for his positions on Social Security, immigration and defense spending.
It will be interesting to see over the next few weeks whether Thompson’s elite supporters can attach enough helium balloons to his candidacy to lift it from its rank-and-file lethargy.

There have been two reactions to my earlier post on “Partisan Differentiation on National Security” that are well worth noting and discussing.
The first, by Matt Yglesias at the Atlantic site, agrees with my basic framework but suggests that only those Democrats who opposed the Iraq War are positioned to make what he calls the “strategic focus” argument, which is my Option #5 (“Find ways to compete with Republicans on national security without supporting their policies and positions.”). He uses the Kerry campaign as an example of the difficulty of reconciling a pro-war vote–even if it’s now rationalized as justified by false intelligence and other lies from the Bush administration–with an argument that Iraq and the policies behind it reflected a dangerous diversion from real national security needs.
I obviously agree that a candidate like Obama–who opposed the war–or even one like Edwards–who now says he was just flatly wrong in supporting it–will have an easier time here. But to the extent that the national debate now is more about what to do in Iraq and elsewhere going forward, than about the original Iraq decision, I don’t think candidates like HRC and Biden are incapable of making a successful argument that the Republicans are fatally mired in a series of delusions about our actual security needs that must be abandoned. Yes, they will be vulnerable to the flip-flop attack that damaged Kerry so much, but the rejoinder that Kerry adopted after (unfortunately) the election isn’t bad: it’s better to flip-flop than to flop, and continue to flop.
On a smaller point, Matt thinks my option #3–conveying “strength” by acting “tough” in opposition to the war–is a straw man. I disagree. It was over and over again cited in the runup to 2006 by countless bloggers as an argument for making an end to the war the sole Democratic message item on national security. Sure, a lot of them went on to say that Iraq was getting in the way of capturing Osama or securing Afghanistan, but the basic thrust was that the main vulnerability of Democrats was looking “weak” towards Bush rather than “weak” towards terrorists or other real threats.
Meanwhile, Ezra Klein makes an excellent point by suggesting that Democrats may never succeed in fully shaking the “weak on national security” label until a Democrat successfully deals with a foreign policy crisis as commander-in-chief. This comports with my strong belief that Bush’s hole-card in 2004 was the simple fact that there had not been another 9/11 on his watch, leading a lot of voters to conclude “he must be doing something right.” Recall that Bill Clinton went a long way towards defusing long-standing perceptions of Democrats as a “big government” party while in office–indeed, perceptions of government itself improved significantly. Likewise, a Democratic president who keeps America relatively safe–while restoring our much-damaged prestige in the world–will do more than any candidate or Congress could ever do to dispel negative perceptions of Democrats on national security.

So, faithful readers, if you did your homework about the extraordinary perils of polling Iowa, you’re ready to digest today’s big public opinion news, a new poll of Iowa and New Hampshire by CBS and the New York Times.
There’s another bit of threshold info necessary here: this is the first CBS/NYT poll of these two states, so given the methodological variations between polling outfits, it’s not very useful in terms of establishing trend lines with any precision. Thus, the finding that the Big Three Dems are essentially tied in Iowa, while some polls have shown a big HRC lead, or a relatively poor third-place Edwards position, isn’t particularly illuminating, other than by reinforcing what pretty much everyone actually believes. Similarly, the poll shows John Edwards at 9% in NH, while other polls have shown him in the low-to-mid teens. This won’t much matter until we see another poll from the same source.
But even in a “first poll” like this, some big trends may have real value. They are all basically on the GOP side. Mike Huckabee’s 21% standing in Iowa represents a large enough shift to reflect something happening on the ground, particularly since the poll’s internals show that his support levels are “harder” than those of front-runner Mitt Romney. And Fred Thompson’s dismal sixth-place position in NH, well below Ron Paul, along with his single-digit showing in Iowa, isn’t a good sign for the Big Fred Machine.
Poll internals from IA on the Democratic side are pretty interesting, since many published polls don’t go into the deeper dynamics of candidate preference that particularly matter in that state’s Caucuses. For example, the poll tests secondary preferences among voters supporting the lower-tier candidates (who presumably will struggle to meet the 15% threshold for winning delegates in any particular precinct), and both Edwards (30%) and Obama (27%) are winning more than double the percentage of such voters as compared to HRC (14%). Another set of interesting internals have to do with Caucus composition. Obama and Edwards are basically mirror images, with Obama’s strength among the categories of voters (e.g., younger voters and self-identified independents) likely to matter the most if overall turnout is high, and Edwards doing especially well (though not much better than HRC) with the likeliest participants in a lower-turnout scenario: seniors, self-identified Democrats, and prior Caucus-attenders.
None of these IA Dem findings directly challenge the CW, though HRC’s apparent second-choice weakness could pose a challenge to her Caucus-night tactics, where candidate-driven or spontaneous alliances with “nonviable” candidates are always a big deal in a large field. But such speculation depends on the accuracy of the poll in the first place, and to come full circle, we won’t really know whether this or other IA polls are on mark until the results are in.

David Brooks’ New York Times column about presidential candidate Reagan’s speech in Philadelphia, MS in 1980 has been widely discredited as just another GOP whitewash. There is one more post, however that merits a read, Joseph Crespino’s article at the History News Network. Crespino, an Emory History proff and author of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution, has a few more points to make on the subject, including a report that Reagan was endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan newspaper and rejected it only after a Carter Administration cabinet official publicized it. Other academics respond to Crespino’s article in the comments.

CNN has a useful story buried on its web page about presidential candidate expeditures on television ads. It’s pretty much a matter of Mitt Romney and then everyone else. Romney has spent over 8 .million smackers on TV so far; the next leading TV spender on the GOP side is John McCain, at a paltry $300,000.
Among Democrats, Obama leads in TV expenditures with $3.9 milliion, trailed by both Hillary Clinton and Bill Richardson (who “went up” very early) at $2.2 million.
But three candidates are about to go airborne in a big way: Rudy Giuliani, John Edwards and Ron Paul. Get ready for saturation ads, Iowa and New Hampshire.

You have to wonder if the closing weeks leading up to the Democratic primary season is the best time to promote a new book about George McGovern’s campaign. Nonetheless, Alternet is running an excerpt from Bruce Miroff’s new book The Liberals’ Moment, pondering the legacy of McGovern’s 1972 — there’s no other word for it — debacle. Yet the McGovern campaign was an important training school for Dems who were more successful in the future, and Miroff has much to say about the future of the Democratic Party. There’s a lot for Dems across the Party spectrum to argue with here, and that’s just in this excerpt.

Jay Cost at RealClearPolitics methodically goes through the aspects of the Iowa Caucus system that show the unreliability of polling in advance of the event, particularly with respect to the tight three-way Democratic race.
It’s probably a good thing to read and think about before the next batch of Iowa polls, particularly since one’s coming out tonight that apparently shows the Big Three Dems in Iowa within three points of each other.

There’s been an interesting kerfuffle over the last day in the Democratic presidential contest, after the New York Times The Caucus blog reported that John Edwards had in an interview twice refused “at this time” to answer a question about supporting Hillary Clinton if she wins the Democratic nomination.
The story got picked up in various places in the blogosphere. Kevin Drum called Edwards’ behavior “very mysterious.” Jason Zengerle at The Plank begs to differ: “As the Democratic candidate who’s been most unsparing in his criticism of Clinton, Edwards would look like a total hypocrite if, in the midst of offering his whithering Clinton critiques, he pledged his future support to her.”
I’m with Kevin on the basic issues here. “Will you support the Democratic nominee if you lose?” is an incredibly standard question for presidential candidates, sort of on the order of “Why do you want to be president?” It’s been asked of Republican candidates in debates this year, in terms of a hypothetical Giulani nomination (disguised as “a pro-choice nominee”). Probably no one has asked Democrats before because nobody thought there was any question about it, given the similarity of most of their policy views and their common hostiilty towards Republicans.
But Jason is correct that the vectors of Edwards’ criticism of HRC have been heading in a direction that would make his support for her as the nominee questionable. That’s what I was worried about back in August when I drew attention to the first Edwards speech that implicitly said a Clinton nomination would continue the corrupt Washington politics of the Bush administration. The Bush Lite/Corporate Stooge line of attack from Edwards has only gotten more intense since then.
In any event, in a press availability today, Edwards “clarified” his no-comment by saying: “I fully expect to support the Democratic nominee, and I fully expect to be the Democratic nominee.”
One wag (named franklyO) commenting on this news at TPMElectionCentral said: “For the logically minded, this could be interpreted as saying nothing more than that Edwards will support himself as Democratic nominee.”
For some of us old-timers, the Edwards formulation was evocative of the highly calculated mantra repeated endlessly by Ted Kennedy in 1980, before he decided to challenge Jimmy Carter for the Democratic presidential nomination: “I expect President Carter to be renominated, and I intend to support him.”
Any way you look at it, Edwards has guaranteed he’s going to get asked this question again until he specifically says he’ll support the nominee no matter who it is, much as Obama has already done–and perhaps until he gets into the habit of saying that much as he dislikes HRC, she’s far preferable to anyone the opposition can nominate.