This item by J.P. Green was originally published on September 5, 2011.
It’s not fun, but it is time to wrap your head around the fact that the presidential nomination front-runner of one of America’s leading political parties is also its most rabid climate-change denier. As the lead editorial in today’s New York Times reflects:

The Republican presidential contenders regard global warming as a hoax or, at best, underplay its importance. The most vocal denier is Rick Perry, the Texas governor and longtime friend of the oil industry, who insists that climate change is an unproven theory created by “a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects.”
Never mind that nearly all the world’s scientists regard global warming as a serious threat to the planet, with human activities like the burning of fossil fuels a major cause. Never mind that multiple investigations have found no evidence of scientific manipulation. Never mind that America needs a national policy. Mr. Perry has a big soapbox, and what he says, however fallacious, reaches a bigger audience than any scientist can command.

The editorial goes on to point out that the rest of the GOP presidential aspirants, save the Hapless Huntsman, have also voiced considerable skepticism about climate change as a major problem. When pressed, Romney goes all mush-mouth, suggesting that he probably knows better. Newt has done a 180 towards denial, but integrity was never his thing.
I know Republicans who are neither climate-change skeptics nor evolution-deniers, but they don’t have much to say about it. I guess they are either intimidated by the tea party fanatics, or maybe they believe, wink wink, that their candidate is just making appropriate noises to get through the primaries and will heed the top scientists once elected. It’s a risky proposition with candidates like Perry and Paul, who would have an awful lot to repudiate.
Conservatives like Huntsman won’t find much support for their concerns about global warming from the intellectual right. Organs like the National Review address pollution-related issues with bland paeans to ‘market-based’ solutions as the panacea or articles ridiculing bizarre examples of environmentalism, such as “Gaia vs. the Big Death” in the current on-line issue.
If the GOP deniers win the presidency and congress, breathing organisms could be screwed for generations. But cheer up, at least it will provide a promising premise for a sci-fi flick: What would happen if a cult of science-denying ignoramuses achieve global domination? Dawn of the Deniers, maybe.
Cynicism aside, Democrats do have an opportunity here. Asked “Do you think the federal government should or should not regulate the release of greenhouse gases from sources like power plants, cars and factories in an effort to reduce global warming?,” 71 percent of respondents in a Washington Post/ABC News poll taken in June last year supported regulation. The same percentage responded affirmatively to a question about supporting funding to continue enforcing greenhouse gas regulation in a CNN/Opinion Research Poll taken in April of this year.
Thus far, however, no Democratic presidential candidate has taken full advantage of the Republicans’ bull-headed stupidity on this issue. President Obama’s strategists should prepare a debate module, punctuated with a memorable one-liner to expose the dangerous idiocy of the climate-change deniers. The Democratic echo-chamber, such as it is, should parrot the one-liner ad nauseum until most reasonable voters are embarrassed to vote for the Republican.
Progressive writers have been very good on exposing Republicans pandering to ignorance about global warming and climate change. For our political leaders, however, it’s been limited to occasional jabs in speeches. But the time is now ripe to do more. We can’t give the Republicans another pass on this one. Too much is at stake.

This item by J.P. Green was originally published on September 2, 2011.
Ari Berman’s Rolling Stone article “The GOP War on Voting” should help alert a lot of young voters in particular about how they are being targeted for political disempowerment by the Republicans. But Berman’s piece is not only about young voters; it’s about the GOP effort to smother the electoral power of all pro-Democratic constituencies. Berman explains:

…Just as Dixiecrats once used poll taxes and literacy tests to bar black Southerners from voting, a new crop of GOP governors and state legislators has passed a series of seemingly disconnected measures that could prevent millions of students, minorities, immigrants, ex-convicts and the elderly from casting ballots. “What has happened this year is the most significant setback to voting rights in this country in a century,” says Judith Browne-Dianis, who monitors barriers to voting as co-director of the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization based in Washington, D.C.
Republicans have long tried to drive Democratic voters away from the polls. “I don’t want everybody to vote,” the influential conservative activist Paul Weyrich told a gathering of evangelical leaders in 1980. “As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” But since the 2010 election, thanks to a conservative advocacy group founded by Weyrich, the GOP’s effort to disrupt voting rights has been more widespread and effective than ever. In a systematic campaign orchestrated by the American Legislative Exchange Council – and funded in part by David and Charles Koch, the billionaire brothers who bankrolled the Tea Party – 38 states introduced legislation this year designed to impede voters at every step of the electoral process.
All told, a dozen states have approved new obstacles to voting. Kansas and Alabama now require would-be voters to provide proof of citizenship before registering. Florida and Texas made it harder for groups like the League of Women Voters to register new voters. Maine repealed Election Day voter registration, which had been on the books since 1973. Five states – Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee and West Virginia – cut short their early voting periods. Florida and Iowa barred all ex-felons from the polls, disenfranchising thousands of previously eligible voters. And six states controlled by Republican governors and legislatures – Alabama, Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin – will require voters to produce a government-issued ID before casting ballots. More than 10 percent of U.S. citizens lack such identification, and the numbers are even higher among constituencies that traditionally lean Democratic – including 18 percent of young voters and 25 percent of African-Americans.
Taken together, such measures could significantly dampen the Democratic turnout next year – perhaps enough to shift the outcome in favor of the GOP. “One of the most pervasive political movements going on outside Washington today is the disciplined, passionate, determined effort of Republican governors and legislators to keep most of you from voting next time,” Bill Clinton told a group of student activists in July. “Why is all of this going on? This is not rocket science. They are trying to make the 2012 electorate look more like the 2010 electorate than the 2008 electorate” – a reference to the dominance of the Tea Party last year, compared to the millions of students and minorities who turned out for Obama. “There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today.”

Berman reviews the Republican’s bogus claims of voter fraud as a major electoral problem to justify burdensome identification requirements, encapsulated in Stephen Colbert’s warning that “Our democracy is under siege from an enemy so small it could be hiding anywhere.”
Berman rolls out the tally of voter obstruction in recent state-wide legislation in four areas:

Barriers to Registration Since January, six states have introduced legislation to impose new restrictions on voter registration drives run by groups like Rock the Vote and the League of Women Voters. In May, the GOP-controlled legislature in Florida passed a law requiring anyone who signs up new voters to hand in registration forms to the state board of elections within 48 hours of collecting them, and to comply with a barrage of onerous, bureaucratic requirements. Those found to have submitted late forms would face a $1,000 fine, as well as possible felony prosecution.
As a result, the law threatens to turn civic-minded volunteers into inadvertent criminals. Denouncing the legislation as “good old-fashioned voter suppression,” the League of Women Voters announced that it was ending its registration efforts in Florida, where it has been signing up new voters for the past 70 years. Rock the Vote, which helped 2.5 million voters to register in 2008, could soon follow suit. “We’re hoping not to shut down,” says Heather Smith, president of Rock the Vote, “but I can’t say with any certainty that we’ll be able to continue the work we’re doing.”
The registration law took effect one day after it passed, under an emergency statute designed for “an immediate danger to the public health, safety or welfare.” In reality, though, there’s no evidence that registering fake voters is a significant problem in the state. Over the past three years, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement has received just 31 cases of suspected voter fraud, resulting in only three arrests statewide. “No one could give me an example of all this fraud they speak about,” said Mike Fasano, a Republican state senator who bucked his party and voted against the registration law. What’s more, the law serves no useful purpose: Under the Help America Vote Act passed by Congress in 2002, all new voters must show identity before registering to vote.
Cuts to Early Voting After the recount debacle in Florida in 2000, allowing voters to cast their ballots early emerged as a popular bipartisan reform. Early voting not only meant shorter lines on Election Day, it has helped boost turnout in a number of states – the true measure of a successful democracy. “I think it’s great,” Jeb Bush said in 2004. “It’s another reform we added that has helped provide access to the polls and provide a convenience. And we’re going to have a high voter turnout here, and I think that’s wonderful.”
But Republican support for early voting vanished after Obama utilized it as a key part of his strategy in 2008. Nearly 30 percent of the electorate voted early that year, and they favored Obama over McCain by 10 points. The strategy proved especially effective in Florida, where blacks outnumbered whites by two to one among early voters, and in Ohio, where Obama received fewer votes than McCain on Election Day but ended up winning by 263,000 ballots, thanks to his advantage among early voters in urban areas like Cleveland and Columbus.
That may explain why both Florida and Ohio – which now have conservative Republican governors – have dramatically curtailed early voting for 2012. Next year, early voting will be cut from 14 to eight days in Florida and from 35 to 11 days in Ohio, with limited hours on weekends. In addition, both states banned voting on the Sunday before the election – a day when black churches historically mobilize their constituents. Once again, there appears to be nothing to justify the changes other than pure politics. “There is no evidence that any form of convenience voting has led to higher levels of fraud,” reports the Early Voting Information Center at Reed College.
Photo IDs By far the biggest change in election rules for 2012 is the number of states requiring a government-issued photo ID, the most important tactic in the Republican war on voting. In April 2008, the Supreme Court upheld a photo-ID law in Indiana, even though state GOP officials couldn’t provide a single instance of a voter committing the type of fraud the new ID law was supposed to stop. Emboldened by the ruling, Republicans launched a nationwide effort to implement similar barriers to voting in dozens of states.
The campaign was coordinated by the American Legislative Exchange Council, which provided GOP legislators with draft legislation based on Indiana’s ID requirement. In five states that passed such laws in the past year – Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin – the measures were sponsored by legislators who are members of ALEC. “We’re seeing the same legislation being proposed state by state by state,” says Smith of Rock the Vote. “And they’re not being shy in any of these places about clearly and blatantly targeting specific demographic groups, including students.”
In Texas, under “emergency” legislation passed by the GOP-dominated legislature and signed by Gov. Rick Perry, a concealed-weapon permit is considered an acceptable ID but a student ID is not. Republicans in Wisconsin, meanwhile, mandated that students can only vote if their IDs include a current address, birth date, signature and two-year expiration date – requirements that no college or university ID in the state currently meets. As a result, 242,000 students in Wisconsin may lack the documentation required to vote next year. “It’s like creating a second class of citizens in terms of who gets to vote,” says Analiese Eicher, a Dane County board supervisor.
The barriers erected in Texas and Wisconsin go beyond what the Supreme Court upheld in Indiana, where 99 percent of state voters possess the requisite IDs and can turn to full-time DMVs in every county to obtain the proper documentation. By contrast, roughly half of all black and Hispanic residents in Wisconsin do not have a driver’s license, and the state staffs barely half as many DMVs as Indiana – a quarter of which are open less than one day a month. To make matters worse, Gov. Scott Walker tried to shut down 16 more DMVs – many of them located in Democratic-leaning areas. In one case, Walker planned to close a DMV in Fort Atkinson, a liberal stronghold, while opening a new office 30 minutes away in the conservative district of Watertown.
Although new ID laws have been approved in seven states, the battle over such barriers to voting has been far more widespread. Since January, Democratic governors in Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire and North Carolina have all vetoed ID laws. Voters in Mississippi and Missouri are slated to consider ballot initiatives requiring voter IDs, and legislation is currently pending in Pennsylvania.
One of the most restrictive laws requiring voter IDs was passed in South Carolina. To obtain the free state ID now required to vote, the 178,000 South Carolinians who currently lack one must pay for a passport or a birth certificate. “It’s the stepsister of the poll tax,” says Browne-Dianis of the Advancement Project. Under the new law, many elderly black residents – who were born at home in the segregated South and never had a birth certificate – must now go to family court to prove their identity. Given that obtaining fake birth certificates is one of the country’s biggest sources of fraud, the new law may actually prompt some voters to illegally procure a birth certificate in order to legally vote – all in the name of combating voter fraud.
For those voters who manage to get a legitimate birth certificate, obtaining a voter ID from the DMV is likely to be hellishly time-consuming. A reporter for the Tri-State Defender in Memphis, Tennessee – another state now mandating voter IDs – recently waited for four hours on a sweltering July day just to see a DMV clerk. The paper found that the longest lines occur in urban precincts, a clear violation of the Voting Rights Act, which bars states from erecting hurdles to voting in minority jurisdictions.
Disenfranchising Ex-Felons The most sweeping tactic in the GOP campaign against voting is simply to make it illegal for certain voters to cast ballots in any election. As the Republican governor of Florida, Charlie Crist restored the voting rights of 154,000 former prisoners who had been convicted of nonviolent crimes. But in March, after only 30 minutes of public debate, Gov. Rick Scott overturned his predecessor’s decision, instantly disenfranchising 97,491 ex-felons and prohibiting another 1.1 million prisoners from being allowed to vote after serving their time.
“Why should we disenfranchise people forever once they’ve paid their price?” Bill Clinton asked during his speech in July. “Because most of them in Florida were African-Americans and Hispanics and would tend to vote for Democrats – that’s why.”
A similar reversal by a Republican governor recently took place in Iowa, where Gov. Terry Branstad overturned his predecessor’s decision to restore voting rights to 100,000 ex-felons. The move threatens to return Iowa to the recent past, when more than five percent of all residents were denied the right to vote – including a third of the state’s black residents. In addition, Florida and Iowa join Kentucky and Virginia as the only states that require all former felons to apply for the right to vote after finishing their prison sentences.

Berman notes that the ACLU and other groups are challenging the GOP-lead disenfranchisement campaign, calling on the Justice Department to be more assertive in fighting the racially-discriminatory ‘reforms.’ Berman cites a 2008 MIT study indicating that less than two-thirds of eligible citizens voted and “9 million voters were denied an opportunity to cast ballots…because of problems with their voter registration (13 percent), long lines at the polls (11 percent), uncertainty about the location of their polling place (nine percent) or lack of proper ID (seven percent).”
Berman believes “…Such problems will only be exacerbated by the flood of new laws implemented by Republicans. Instead of a single fiasco in Florida, experts warn, there could be chaos in a dozen states as voters find themselves barred from the polls.”
Clearly Democrats should not entertain any complacency regarding voter suppression the 2012 election, just because things went well enough in 2008. The 2000 election may have been the ugliest presidential election in U.S. history, with the ‘Brooks Bothers Riot,’ abuse of felon disenfranchisement laws and the shameless politicization of the U.S. Supreme Court. But the stage is now being set for massive disenfranchisement of targeted constituencies next year, and this time Dems should plan accordingly.

This item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on August 22, 2011.
In analyzing the actual and potential Republican presidential field for 2012, Nate Silver has frequently deployed a chart that plots candidates along axes dividing them by ideology and by perceptions of their relationship to the GOP Establishment. Thus, in his latest installment, he suggests there is more “room” for additional candidates in the “moderate/Establishment” quadrant dominated by Mitt Romney, than in, say, the “conservative/Insurgent” quadrant where Bachmann, Cain, and to a considerable extent Rick Perry are competing.
Political scientist Jonathan Bernstein objects that Nate’s typology relies on broad characterizations of candidates at the expense of how specific and tangible GOP constituencies view them:

On the ideological side, it’s not clear how many important individuals and groups within the party are thinking in terms of left/right (or, I suppose, right/very right) rather than about specific policy areas of concern. That is, what really matters isn’t so much whether a candidate is too moderate, but whether the abortion people, the tax people, and so on find the candidate acceptable or not.
I’m also not convinced that an establishment/insurgent vocabulary really captures the relationship of the various groups within the GOP, or the appeal of the candidates. What exactly is an establishment-friendly or insurgent candidacy? If it’s just rhetoric, then we’re probably talking about appeal to larger electorates in next year’s primaries, but no candidate is going to get there without considerable support from organized groups within the party. If it’s appeal to particular groups, I don’t think the groups really exist on an establishment/insurgent spectrum. Indeed, if you’re talking about groups, it’s probably just better to think about groups, specifically and in general, without worrying about whether they are “establishment” or their ideological placement.

This is an interesting dispute, beyond the fact that it involves two of the best analysts of the contemporary political scene. The argument is obscured a bit by Jonathan’s distinct view of “the Establishment” as including right-wing issue-activist groups who are capable of exercising a veto over presidential candidates they don’t like.
I’m also skeptical of Nate’s ideological rating of candidates for a reason Jonathan does not articulate: it distracts attention from the unmistakable overall rightward shift of the GOP since 2008. After all, the “moderate/Establishment” candidate Romney has by any measurement moved to the right since his 2008 campaign as the “true conservative” alternative to Rudy Giuliani and John McCain, when he received no significant guff for his Massachusetts health care plan; embraced nothing so radical as the “cut-cap-balance” fiscal plan; was under no particular pressure to support the most extreme measures available to permanently outlaw abortion and gay marriage from sea to shining sea; and was defending his hawkishness on the old war with Iraq rather than agitating for a new war with Iran.
But on the other hand, perceptions within the GOP of the candidates, strange as they may seem to outsiders, really do matter. The main reason the GOP has moved to the right since 2008 is that a revisionist view of the recent history of that party has taken hold with a tremendous degree of unanimity. Lest we forget, George W. Bush won the 2000 Republican presidential nomination as the overwhelming favorite of “movement conservatives.” The congressional Republican leadership of the early Bush years, with Tom DeLay in the driver’s seat, was at the time considered the most conservative in history. Yes, there was some right-wing opposition to No Child Left Behind and the Medicare Rx Drug benefit and Bush’s rhetoric on immigration, and a bit more on overall domestic spending levels. But for the most part conservatives accepted such heresies as strategic measures engineered by Karl Rove to create a “conservative base-centered” long-term conservative majority in the electorate without significant ideological concessions. Stan Greenberg memorably referred to Rove’s novel approach as a “51% strategy” that represented the best conservatives could do given an inherently unpopular policy agenda.
At the time of the 2004 elections, Bush was being widely touted in serious conservative circles as a great world-historical figure. In early 2005, when he began his campaign for partial privatization of Social Security, estimation of W. on the right reached perhaps an all-time high.
Then Bush 43 and the congressional Republican Party committed the unforgivable sin of becoming very, very unpopular, and by 2008, conservatives were mainly absorbed with figuring out how to absolve themselves from any responsibility for that political disaster–a task that became even more urgent when the economic calamity of 2008 hit. And so, with remarkable speed, the idea spread that Bush and Cheney and DeLay and the whole push of ’em were never really conservatives to begin with. This historically unprecedented “move right and win” argument gained enormous impetus from the 2010 midterm election results, which leads us to where we are today.
I’m covering this familiar territory in order to make it clear that even though “movement conservatives” and their various issue and constituency groups have in most important respects become the GOP “Establishment,” their own mythology requires them to keep finding and demonizing “RINOs” and “sell-outs,” and presenting themselves as a party undergoing some sort of populist revolution. Moreover, in this new GOP there are newly powerful factions–the repeal-the-New Deal “constitutional conservatives” and quasi-dominionists in particular–who really are committed to driving their party in directions that would have been considered well outside even the “movement conservative” mainstream just a few years ago. Hence the strength and respectability of Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul, whom virtually no one took seriously in the recent past, and the broader popularity of extremist rhetoric throughout the GOP.
From the perspective of these intra-party dynamics, perceptions of ideology and Establishment-status like those Nate illustrates really do matter in the struggle for control of the party. And they are often wielded as weapons by the specific “Establishment” groups Jonathan accurately describes as major players in the nomination battle. To be sure, it’s a dangerous game that Republicans are playing, but to the extent they have bought their own spin about the rightward drift of the electorate, and/or think Barack Obama is doomed to defeat due to objective economic conditions, it’s one a lot of them are willing to play.

This item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on August 19, 2011.
The basic measurement of a president’s popularity we are all used to examining is the job approval rating. By that yardstick, Barack Obama has hit a very rough patch of late; last week he registered his first sub-40% rating in the daily Gallup tracking poll of presidential job approval.
But as Reid Wilson points out in an important National Journal article, an equally important index is the president’s personal favorability, separated from specific questions of job performance. And so far, Obama has done much better on that scale:

Polling consistently shows that the majority of Americans view Obama favorably, even while they increasingly disagree with his job performance. There is a nuance to voter sentiment, pollsters say, one that provides Obama with a path to reelection. But the disconnect between the two numbers, if it ever shrinks, could also become a leading indicator that the president’s chances for a second term are headed south.

Wilson cites Bill Clinton as a president whose relatively high personal favorability ratings during his first term showed a resilience that was eventually reflected in job approval ratings and then re-election:

[I]n 1994, Clinton’s approval rating dropped to a low of 38 percent, as measured by the Pew Research Center. Clinton endured a period, from March 1994 to October 1995, during which his approval rating hit 50 percent only once. And yet, during that same period, his favorability rating stayed strong, starting around 58 percent and ending, after only a single dip below the 50 percent mark, at 56 percent in January 1996. Beginning with that January poll, Clinton’s approval rating rebounded; by November, when he asked voters for a second term, his job-approval rate stood at 57 percent.

But during his second term, George W. Bush provided an example of a president whose poor job performance assessments eroded his personal favorability, and once that happened, he never really recovered:

A July 2005 Pew survey showed 51 percent of Americans had a favorable impression of the president. By late October, that number had sunk to 46 percent, then stayed in the high 30s for most of the rest of his term. Voters had had enough; Bush’s job-approval rating led the way down, and once the favorable ratings followed, there was no way to recover politically.

So which dynamic is more relevant to Obama’s situation today? It’s hard to say for sure. Pollsters do not measure personal favorability as often as job performance. As you can see from PollingReport, the last national surveys testing Obama’s general favorability were in June, when he came in at 50% or more in polls taken by McClatchey-Marist and AP-GfK. That, however, was after Obama’s job approval rating temporarily shot up in the wake of the killing of Osama bin Laden, so perhaps it’s more relevant that polls in April and May from ABC, NBC and Fox also showed a majority smiling upon Obama personally.
As Wilson notes, the very latest measurement of favorability (though done in slightly different terms from the standard polls) is GQRR/Democracy Corps’ early August survey showing “warm” feelings towards Obama holding up despite a plunge in favorable feelings towards both Democrats and (especially) Republicans in Congress.
This data point indicates that Obama’s efforts to benefit in a bad economic and political context from comparisons to the opposition are still alive and well. And 2012 general election horse-race polling, showing Obama still typically running ahead of all named Republican presidential candidates despite flagging job approval ratings, point in the same direction. It’s worth noting that Bill Clinton’s personal popularity in his first term also benefited by comparison to an unpopular Republican Party and Republican politicians.
So it’s likely Obama still has a personal favorability cushion that could sustain him through tough sledding going into 2012. But it’s a thin cushion that could use some bolstering via improved real-life conditions and/or demonstrations of presidential leadership.

This item by James Vega was originally published on August 11, 2011.
As progressive frustration with Obama has mounted, the plaintive assertion that “If Obama had just used the “bully pulpit” of the presidency he could have transformed the national debate” has become one of the most widely repeated criticisms of his administration. In hundreds of op-ed pieces, articles, blog posts, comment threads and e-mail letters to the editor his failure to use the bully pulpit to dominate the airwaves with a full-throated progressive position on issue after issue is cited as the major and indeed single most important reason for the increased influence of Republican views.
The issue goes far beyond Obama or 2010 or 2012. If the bully pulpit view is correct, an uncompromising progressive should be able to dramatically shift the national debate once he or she is elected. If it is not, he or she will find that the bully pulpit is a relatively limited tool that cannot dramatically shift public attitudes. The issue is whether the bully pulpit actually “works” as described or if it doesn’t. This is just as critical a question for a future president Krugman or Olbermann as it is for the present occupant of the oval office.
What is particularly striking about the “the bully pulpit can transform the national debate” notion is the way it is stated as if it were an entirely self-evident truth, one whose validity is so obvious that it does not need any empirical support or confirmation. In virtually every case, it is presented as a proposition whose certainty is simply beyond any serious question.
In fact, however, there is actually very little evidence in either the historical record or public opinion research to support this view. Even such famous examples of presidential rhetoric as Lyndon Johnson’s “We shall overcome” speech supporting the Civil Rights Bill or Ronald Reagan’s often quoted speech asserting that “government is the problem not the solution” did not produce any major epiphany-like transformations of attitudes that opinion polls could detect. Observation suggests that the bully pulpit has a real and to some degree quantifiable but very clearly limited influence on public opinion. It cannot, by itself, produce major attitude change.
The tremendous appeal of the “bully pulpit” notion is rooted in the fact that it provides an all-purpose, entirely irrefutable argument against Obama’s (or any politician’s) political strategy and tactics without requiring any evidence.
To be sure, presidential rhetoric does indeed have a specific, identifiable degree of influence on public opinion. In recent months there have been two relatively clear examples of this – Obama’s speech criticizing Paul Ryan’s Medicare proposal and his call last week for public pressure on Congress in support of a compromise on the debt ceiling. In the first case Obama’s remarks clearly served as a focal point that helped crystallized public opposition to the Ryan plan and his call for pressure on congress last week produced a wave of phone calls that overloaded the congressional switchboard.
But these same two examples also suggest the very clear limitations that exist on the influence of presidential rhetoric. Such rhetoric can help to focus and rally public opinion around a position that already commands strong and widespread popular support or it can mobilize action among dedicated partisans. But there are no solid examples – either recently or in the last several decades — of presidential speeches ever actually producing major transformations of deeply held public attitudes.
When this is suggested to proponents of the “If only Obama had used the bully pulpit he could have transformed the national debate” view, however, they will emphatically deny that it is true. On the contrary, proponents generally launch into what a skeptical listener cannot help but perceive as a series of ex-post-facto rationalizations designed to protect the notion that any Democratic president who genuinely wants to can indeed use the bully pulpit to dominate and control the national debate on any issue.

Read more…

This item by TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira is cross-posted from The New Republic, where it was originally published on August 2, 2011.

The debt ceiling deal has been struck and the score looks to be in the neighborhood of Republicans: a zillion, Democrats: zero. It is perhaps the inevitable outcome of a process in which Obama treated GOP default-threatening tactics as legitimate and accepted the GOP framework that cutting debt, not creating jobs, was the country’s central problem. As a result, we have a deal that severely undercuts Democratic policy priorities and cuts government spending just as the economic recovery is showing signs of tanking. Just how, exactly, did it come to this? The most plausible explanation is that Obama and his political advisors are convinced that striking a bipartisan compromise on debt reduction is the way to the hearts of America’s political independents, who famously abandoned the Democrats in 2010.
Following this logic, Obama’s actions–treating the Republicans’ extraordinary threat not as an illegitimate bargaining tactic but as an opportunity–begin to make a measure of sense. Since independents are supposedly fixated on a bipartisan compromise to reduce spending and cut the debt, Obama would use the leverage provided by the Republicans’ threat, in a judo-like fashion, to enlist both parties in a grand bargain to restore long-run fiscal health. As a result, independents would reward Obama for being, in that tired phrase, “the adult in the room” who stood up for their fiscal priorities.
But it hasn’t worked out that way. As Obama has talked endlessly about a “balanced” approach to getting the country’s fiscal house in order, the economy has continued to stagger and that support from independents is nowhere in sight. Pew data show his approval rating among independents down 16 points in the last few months to an abysmal 36 percent. As for Obama’s re-elect numbers, they have also tumbled, with just 31 percent of independents now saying they would vote to re-elect him, compared to 39 percent for a generic Republican.
To understand how very unlikely it is that Obama’s long sought-after deal is going to magically turn around his numbers, we must visit one of the most robust but amazingly underappreciated findings in American political science: independents are not independent. That is, the overwhelming majority of Americans who say there are “independent” lean toward one party or the other. Call them IINOs (Independents In Name Only). IINOs who say they lean toward the Republicans think and vote just like regular Republicans. IINOs who say they lean toward the Democrats think and vote just like regular Democrats.
Right now, according to Pew data, IINOs are 68 percent of independents, split 36/32 between Republican-leaners and Democratic-leaners, respectively. That leaves less than a third of independents who might really qualify as independent. This figure, in turn, translates into just 13 to 14 percent of adults, and inevitably a lower percentage of actual voters, since pure independents have notoriously low turnout. In 2008, according to the University of Michigan National Election Study, pure independents were only 7 percent of voters.
So how’s the debt deal going to go over with these different flavors of independents? Well, Democratic IINOs and pure independents both are concerned about the job situation over the deficit by a margin of two to one, according to Pew data. In fact, the only part of the “independent” pool that actually thinks the deficit is more important than the job situation are Republican IINOs, who right now give Obama a 15 percent approval rating, the same as regular Republicans. Good luck winning that group over.
But maybe pure independents only say they’re concerned with the economy when their real passion is bipartisan compromises on the debt, and so they’ll ignore the bad jobs situation and turn out in droves for Obama. That’s not likely to happen either. As John Sides has pointed out, voting preferences among pure independents are more influenced, not less, by the state of the economy.
These are the facts, but politicians, and Obama especially, seem to have a hard time grasping them. Perhaps that’s because independents are the Rorschach test of U.S. politics–you see in them what your beliefs and preferences incline you to see. Obama and his team want to see teeming hordes of voters who are above the partisan allure of party, untroubled by the bad economy (or, at least, not planning to vote on that basis), and pining for a Washington where the parties, darn it, just work together. So that’s what they see.
The administration’s chimerical search for the independents of their dreams has not served the country, nor the president, well. Obama has stumbled ever further into a political heart of darkness, hemmed in on all sides by radical GOP views on government and governance. And he can’t expect independents to bail him out.

This item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on August 1, 2011.
So there is finally a “deal” to increase the public debt limit, agreed to, at least, by the president, Harry Reid, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner (Nancy Pelosi is assumed to be selling it to unhappy House Democrats behind the scenes). There is no guarantee it will be approved by the House, where both progressive Democrats and Tea Party Republicans would like to vote “no” for very different reasons. The pressure to approve it, though, was underscored by the positive response to news of a “deal” by financial markets, first overseas and then on Wall Street. Defeat of a deal now, on the eve of the supposed August 2 deadline, and at the hands of House Members with diametrically opposed reasons for killing it, would probably produce a pretty bad, interest-rate-boosting, 401(k)-melting, reaction, and leave no obvious course open (assuming the president continues to categorically reject the “14th Amendment option”).
Signatories to the deal are unsurprisingly spinning it their own way, but Ezra Klein’s assessment seems pretty sensible:

[Here is] the truth of this deal, and perhaps of Washington in this age: it’s all about lowest-common denominator lawmaking. There are no taxes. No entitlement cuts. No stimulus. No infrastructure. Less in actual, specific deficit reduction than there was in the Simpson-Bowles, Ryan, or Obama plans, and even than there was in the Biden/Cantor or Obama/Boehner talks. The two sides didn’t concede more in order to get more. They conceded almost nothing in order to get a trigger and a process, not to mention avoid a financial catastrophe.
There’s reason to be skeptical that a trigger and a process will do much to change these basic dynamics. We’ve now attempted to get a deficit-reducing grand bargain by yoking it to both a near-shutdown and a near-default, not to mention a series of negotiations, commissions, and senatorial gangs. None of it has been enough. And that’s because bipartisan commissions and terrible consequences have not been enough to convince Republicans to agree to revenues, and revenues are fundamental to large deficit-reduction compromise.

Aside from this “trigger and a process,” the deal includes pretty much the same immediate domestic discretionary spending cuts (half from domestic programs, half from “security spending”) negotiated by Biden and McConnell weeks ago, that were assumed to be baked into any agreement. The main last-minute wrinkles, which the White House is treating as significant wins, are that defense spending joins non-defense discretionary spending in the new “hostage room” of the automatic cuts that would be triggered by the failure to reach a second deficit reduction agreement by December, while Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare benefits (as opposed to provider reimbursements) would be exempted from such automatic cuts. Lingering in the background, of course, is the scheduled expiration of the Bush tax cuts at the end of 2012, which will keep revenues on the table in broader budget discussions even if they are not part of the current deal itself.
I think it’s safe to say that progressive hostility to this deal (which is pervasive, and varies mainly only in temperature) is more about the process that led up to it than the specific details worked out at the final minute. Some think the president fatally erred by even getting into a discussion of deficit reduction ( way back when he appointed the Simpson-Bowles Commission) so long as the economy was struggling. Many think he should have negotiated a debt limit increase as part of the deal at the end of last year that temporarily extended the Bush tax cuts. Still others think he should have threatened from the very beginning to use the “14th amendment option” if Republicans didn’t agree to a “balanced approach” (e.g, one including new revenues) to long-term deficit reduction. If you read what is likely to be the most influential progressive condemnation of Obama, Paul Krugman’s column today, it’s notable that virtually every false step he excoriates happened weeks or months ago, not during the end-game.
Some progressives obviously still believe, and will put votes behind the proposition in the House, that the potential consequences of a debt default are exaggerated, or in any event cannot justify the sort of damage an all-cuts, no-taxes deficit reduction agreement will inflict on the economy (via virtually certain big cuts in “investment” programs that most affect growth, and additional, perhaps massive, reductions in federal employment levels) and on diverse beneficiaries of federal programs, from K-12 school children to people who prefer to drink safe water and breathe clean air.
Any way you look at it, the aftermath of this depressing series of events will require some pretty serious rethinking of Democratic strategy, tactics and messaging for 2012. If the deal is defeated in the House, all bets are off and we’ll just have to see what happens both economically and politically. If it is approved, we’ll be looking at a Democratic Party that is not much in the mood to celebrate any theoretical improvement in the president’s approval ratings or 2012 prospects, and is forced to reconsider how it talks about its plans for a federal government that will be operating under new constraints beyond anything conservatives were proposing as recently as last year’s election campaigns.

This item by J.P. Green was originally published on July 27, 2011.
Katrina vanden Heuval’s recent WaPo op-ed sketches a disturbing picture of Republican voter suppression in a number of state legislatures, an important story that has been bounced to the back pages of the MSM by the debt ceiling controversy. From her op-ed:

In states across the country, Republican legislatures are pushing through laws that make it more difficult for Americans to vote. The most popular include new laws requiring voters to bring official identification to the polls. Estimates suggest that more than 1 in 10 Americans lack an eligible form of ID, and thus would be turned away at their polling location. Most are minorities and young people, the most loyal constituencies of the Democratic Party.

The i.d. campaigns are based on a particularly flimsy excuse, the myth of “voter fraud” as a significant problem in the U.S. As vanden Heuval explains,

…Voter fraud, in truth, is essentially nonexistent. A report from the Brennan Center for Justice found the incidence of voter fraud at rates such as 0.0003 percent in Missouri and 0.000009 percent in New York. “Voter impersonation is an illusion,” said Michael Waldman, executive director of the Brennan Center. “It almost never happens, and when it does, it is in numbers far too small to effect the outcome of even a close election.”
Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R) disagrees. He argues that voter fraud is a serious problem that requires serious action. But as proof, Kobach cites just “221 incidents of voter fraud” in Kansas since 1997, for an average of just 17 a year. As a Bloomberg editorial points out, “During that same period, Kansans cast more than 10 million votes in 16 statewide elections. Even if the fraud allegation were legitimate . . . the rate of fraud would be miniscule.”

The suppression initiatives appear tweaked to fit demographics of different states. As vanden Heuval notes,

In Ohio, for example, a recently signed law to curb early voting won’t prevent voter impersonation; it will only make it more difficult for citizens to cast their ballot. Or take Florida’s new voter registration law, which is so burdensome that the non-partisan League of Women Voters is pulling out of Florida entirely, convinced that it cannot possibly register voters without facing legal liability. Volunteers would need to have “a secretary on one hand and a lawyer on the other hand as they registered voters,” said Deirdre MacNabb, president of the Florida League of Women Voters…This year Texas passed a voter ID law, but wrote in a provision that explicitly exempts the elderly from complying with the law. The law also considers a concealed handgun license as an acceptable form of ID, but a university ID as insufficient.

At the annual NAACP convention in Los Angeles, President Benjamin Jealous underscored concerns about the deliberate disenfranchisement of people of color leading up to the 2012 elections, reports Alexandra Zavis in the Los Angeles Times:

He cited new laws in 30 states that require voters to present approved photo identification at the polls. “Simply put, people who are too poor to own a car tend not to have a driver’s license,” he said…In Wisconsin alone, he said, half of black adults and half of Latino adults are now ineligible to vote because of this requirement.
Jealous also took issue with laws in Georgia and Arizona that require voters to attach a copy of their driver’s license, birth certificate or passport to their registration forms. And in Florida, he said, the establishment of a five-to-seven-year waiting period before felons can vote would disqualify more than 500,000 voters, including 250,000 blacks.

In addition to the i.d. requirements, shrinking of early voting periods and felon disenfranchisement expansion, the GOP is also suppressing voting power of people of color through redistricting. In North Carolina, for example, the Republicans are twisting the intent of the Voting Rights Act to dilute minority voting, as WRAL’s Laura Leslie explains:

According to Republicans, the VRA and resulting case law require lawmakers to create districts with majority populations of minority voters that can elect the candidate of their choice. They argue the creation of such districts will protect the state from potentially costly civil-rights lawsuits.
But Democrats disagree. They say the VRA does not require lawmakers to create such districts, except in truly exceptional cases. They’re accusing the GOP of using the VRA to justify “packing” minority voters into a handful of districts to reduce their influence elsewhere.
In the Senate, where the Senate and congressional map votes were strictly partisan, Democrats accused Republican mapmakers of drilling down to precinct-level caucus data to separate black voters from white ones…Senator Josh Stein, D-Wake, asked why the GOP Senate map splits 40 voting precincts in Wake County alone. “The only possible explanation is that you want to reach out and grab every black person you can find and put them in Dan Blue’s district. And for what purpose?”

The Republican voter suppression initiatives are not unconnected in purpose or timing, as vanden Heuval points out:

What’s worse is that these aren’t a series of independent actions being coincidentally taken throughout the country. This is very much a coordinated effort. The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a corporate-funded organization that works with state legislators to draft model legislation. According to The Nation’s John Nichols, “Enacting burdensome photo ID or proof of citizenship requirements has long been an ALEC priority.” It’s not surprise then, that the Wisconsin state legislator who pushed for one of the strictest voter ID laws in the nation is also ALEC’s Wisconsin chair.

Vanden Heuval quotes Alexander Keyssar, a top voting rights scholar and author of “The Right to Vote”:

…”What is so striking about the wave of legislation for ID laws is that we are witnessing for the first time in more than a century, a concerted, multi-state effort to make it more difficult for people to exercise their democratic rights…It is very reminiscent of what occurred in the North between 1875 and 1910 — the era of Jim Crow in the South — when a host of procedural obstacles were put in the way of immigrants trying to vote.”

This is the first part of what will almost certainly be a three-stage voter suppression program. Call it the pre-election suppression campaign, likely to be followed by election-day shenanigans at the polls and then ballot-counting “irregularities” in Florida and Ohio, among other states.
It’s tough to challenge voter suppression campaigns in Republican-controlled state legislatures and state and federal courts. But Democrats should keep demanding that the Justice Department review these laws for compliance with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and have legal teams in place to monitor election-day suppression and ballot counting.

This item by J.P. Green was originally published on July 19, 2011.
A couple of paragraphs from former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich’s blog jump out to underscore a huge gap in public awareness that must be addressed:

A recent paper by Cornell political scientist Suzanne Mettler surveyed how many recipients of government benefits don’t really believe they have received any benefits. She found that over 44 percent of Social Security recipients say they “have not used a government social program.” More than half of families receiving government-backed student loans said the same thing, as did 60 percent of those who get the home mortgage interest deduction, 43 percent of unemployment insurance beneficiaries, and almost 30 percent of recipients of Social Security Disability.
…One would have thought the last few years of mine disasters, exploding oil rigs, nuclear meltdowns, malfeasance on Wall Street, wildly-escalating costs of health insurance, rip-roaring CEO pay, and mass layoffs would have offered a singular opportunity to explain why the nation’s collective well-being requires a strong and effective government representing the interests of average people.

Andrew Levison and others have advocated government reform and getting people more involved in decision-making to challenge the GOP’s “government is the problem” meme. No doubt this is correct. But I think the federal government has an additional problem — lousy public relations. It’s as if even Democratic administrations have been hustled to believe that promoting the effectiveness of government programs is somehow an unacceptably partisan activity.
The selection above from Reich’s blog indicates that it’s not safe to assume that citizens have an adequate awareness of what government does for them. Citizens do need to be expressly reminded from time to time about what they get for their taxes. It’s not a panacea for government-bashing. Government certainly needs reforms to improve public attitudes toward it. But not educating the public about what government does for them makes the Republicans’ anti-government propaganda a lot easier.
I think there should be a permanent public education campaign, using every facet of the mass media to remind people of the important things that government does for them. It should be creative, use humorous skits — whatever it takes to get the public’s attention.
When corporate America wants to sell a product, they promote the hell out of it. Government should do the same, if it wants people to know that they are getting value for their money.
Government funding of such a campaign could certainly be justified. In fact not doing it is more of an indefensible failure, something that is understandable only when it happens during Republican administrations. Progressive groups should also participate in a major public education campaign. Doing no p.r. is a gift to the Republicans.
The website, governmentisgood.com, one of the best internet-based antidotes to government-bashing, has an interesting post “Publicizing What Government Does for Us,” which argues,

We also need to become more aware of what government is doing for us. Many of us rarely think about what we get for our tax dollars – the kinds of services that our local, state and federal governments are providing for us every day. Remarkably, when asked if government has had a positive effect on their lives, 45% of Americans insisted that it has not. But it is revealing that when these same people were asked about specific government programs, a majority said that they had benefited from programs on food and drug safety, consumer protection, workplace regulations, public universities, public schools, roads and highways, parks and recreation, environmental laws, medical research, police and the courts, and social security. So when people stop thinking about government in the abstract, and are made to think of particular government programs, they are more apt to recognize their beneficial effects on their own lives.
Pollsters have found that if they first remind people of the various government programs and services provided for them, and then ask them to rate government, the results improve. “After people consider different government activities and programs, they are more likely to report that government has a positive effect on their lives.” Hardly surprising.
…Governments could also learn from non-profit organizations and charities, which send out annual letters to their donors explaining all the good works that have come from their donations. Our state and local governments should be sending out “annual reports” that inform citizens of all the good their tax dollars are doing. For example, our local government should tell us how many criminals it has arrested, how many supermarket scanners and gas pumps it has checked, how many fires it has put out, how many parks it has been maintaining, how many construction sites it has inspected, how many miles of roads it has cleaned and plowed, how many gallons of clean water it has provided, how many drunk drivers it has gotten off the roads, how many restaurants it has inspected, how many people have used the public libraries, how many children it has educated, and so on. As the old saying goes, “It ain’t bragging if you can do it” – and government is “doing it” for citizens every day.

Nothing is going to stop the Republicans from wholesale government-bashing. But a strong, well-crafted response from Democrats and progressives can help limit their effectiveness.

This item by J.P. Green was originally published on July 16, 2011.
Political correspondent Bill Boyarsky makes a good point in his Truthdig post “Entitlement Is a Republican Word.”

At his news conference this week, President Barack Obama seized on a misleading Washington word–“entitlements”–to describe the badly needed aid programs that are likely to be cut because of his compromises with the Republicans.
“Entitlement” is a misleading word because it masks the ugly reality of reducing medical aid for the poor, the disabled and anyone over 65 as well as cutting Social Security. Calling such programs entitlements is much more comfortable than describing them as what they are–Medicare, Social Security and money for good schools, unemployment insurance, medical research and public works construction that would put many thousands to work.
It’s also a Republican word. It implies that those receiving government aid have a sense of entitlement, that they’re getting something for nothing. And now it’s an Obama word as he moves toward the center and away from the progressives who powered his 2008 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination over centrist Hillary Clinton.
“There is, frankly, resistance on my side to do anything on entitlements,” he said before heading into another negotiating session over raising the debt limit and cutting the budget. “There is strong resistance on the Republican side to do anything on revenues. But if each side takes a maximalist position, if each side wants 100 percent of what its ideological predispositions are, then we can’t get anything done.”

Having been guilty of using ‘entitlements’ on many occasions, I now realize Boyarsky is right. It is a convenient catch-all term, but it is freighted with negative overtones and plays right into the Republican scam of making programs working people have paid for sound a little like privileges provided to slackers.
Boyarksky goes on to fault the President for caving on social program cuts and adds “To stop them, Obama has to be honest, forthright and progressive–and stop using “entitlements” to refer to worthwhile government programs. He’s a writer. He must know what negative nuances the word carries.”
I’m not so sure as Boyarksy that President Obama used the term with full awareness of its more nuanced implications. The term has creeped into mainstream reportage and common parlance, even among liberals. But Boyarksy is dead right that the President and all progressives need to stop using it, because every time we use it, we reinforce the GOP meme that needed — and hard-earned — social programs are extravagant give-aways.