This item by James Vega was first published on April 20, 2011.
Writing in the April 15th issue of the New York Review of Books, Elizabeth Drew expressed a widely shared progressive criticism regarding Obama’s approach to the deficit and budget battles:

On Wednesday he (Obama) gave a good speech far too late. What if he hadn’t been so dilatory on a subject he inevitably would have to confront?
…if Obama had addressed the fiscal crisis at the outset of this year, rather than deliver a wan and cautious State of the Union address, he would have set the predicate for the current budget battle rather than leaving an opening for Paul Ryan’s radical (and somewhat nonsensical) proposal to fill the vacuum…Ordinarily, such a proposal would have been laughed out of town, but now it’s been transformed into respectability.

Many progressives have expressed similar “why did he wait so long” criticisms of Obama’s actions.
Underlying this attitude is a fundamental disagreement about political strategy – progressives generally want Obama to forcefully champion a clear, solidly liberal program and agenda at all times and in all circumstances. They support this approach on both moral and political grounds and as result do not approve of either compromise as an objective or flexibility as a negotiating tactic except in the most unusual circumstances.
The debate over this basic issue is a perennial staple of intra-Democratic discord and will not be settled any time in the foreseeable future. But it is important to note that the specific application of this view to the “why did he wait so long” discussion ignores a series of basic realities.
First, even on the surface it is hard to see how Obama could have laid out the broad vision he presented last week back in early 2010. At that time it would have directly conflicted with the desperate, all-out push that was going on to pass the health care bill and it would also have appeared to contradict the near-universal Democratic position at that time that any discussion of reducing deficits was premature while the economy was not yet showing even the most minimal signs of recovery – signs that have only begun to appear in the last few months.
More important, the notion that Obama could have “set the predicate” or “filled the vacuum” for the budget/deficit debate back in early 2010 with the proposal he outlined last week is based on a rather dated notion –that the president has a commanding “bully pulpit” at his disposal, a platform from which he can reliably drive the national agenda.
In the modern, fragmented media environment that has developed since the 1990’s this is simply no longer the case. The modern political media environment has three unique and critical communication channels, each of which shapes — and profoundly diminishes– the ability of a president to directly control a national debate. How a Presidential initiative is handled by each of these communication channels has to be evaluated on its own terms.

First, there is the conservative echo chamber – Fox News, talk radio, the conservative blogosphere and so on. This entire conservative media machine is directly connected to the message system of the Republican Party and is primarily designed for bitter, slashing and dishonest attack – the creation of straw men and simplistic caricatures. It is not equally well suited for the defense of conservative proposals or the adjudication of debates between conflicting views
Second, there is the “serious” mainstream political commentariat. In the 1950’s and 1960’s this group of newspaper and TV commentators had substantial influence on the national debate over issues and reflected a mildly liberal “establishment” sensibility. Since the Reagan era, however, liberal or progressive views have come to be viewed with vastly more suspicion than comparable conservative views by mainstream commentators. As a result, proposals that feature liberal or progressive ideas are invariably treated as “partisan politics” rather than “serious proposals.” On subjects that the mainstream media consider inherently conservative – taxes, deficits and budgeting being prime examples — conservative opinions are automatically treated as being more serious, responsible and “adult” than liberal ones. Underlying this notion is a definition of the word “adult” that essentially identifies it with “acceptable to the major business groups”. To most mainstream commentators today any proposal that provokes serious business opposition is, by that fact alone, proven inherently flawed.
Third, there is the superficial “headline” news of local stations and 24 hour cable channels that is designed as quick entertainment for casual viewers. This information source attempts to deliver a quick and breezy overview of major events mixed with a large number of human interest stories. It presents political debates in a rigidly balanced “He said, she said” format that essentially reduces the coverage to battling sound bites. On issues like taxes, budgets and deficits, the newscasters themselves almost invariably take refuge behind vacuous clichés delivered with cheerful smiles – “Well you know, Joe, nobody likes to pay taxes” – “Gee, George, government sure spends lots of money” or “Sooner or later, Ed, ya gotta pay your bills“.

Given this three-channel media environment, how would Obama’s recent speech have been received if he had delivered it in early 2010 instead?

Read more…

This item by J.P. Green was first published on April 19, 2011.
Alan I. Abramowitz and Nate Silver agree that Dems have a good chance to win back a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives next year, which should be cause for some concern among smarter Republicans. Here’s Abramowitz, from his current column at Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball:

Democrats would only need to pick up 25 seats in 2012 to get to the magic number of 218 that would give them control of the House-assuming that all of their members supported the Democratic candidate for Speaker. That’s hardly an insurmountable number. In fact, two of the last three elections, 2006 and 2010, have produced bigger swings, and 2008 came close.
Despite the recent volatility of House elections, some astute political observers are giving the Democrats little or no chance of regaining control of the House in 2012. For example, last December, Republican pollster Glen Bolger went so far as to “guarantee” that the GOP would maintain its House majority even if President Obama were to win a second term. And just last month, respected political handicapper Charlie Cook agreed that a Democratic pickup of 25 or more seats in the House was highly unlikely.
Both Bolger and Cook cited the relatively short coattails that winning presidential incumbents have had in recent years as a major obstacle to big Democratic gains in the 2012 House elections. In the past 40 years, the largest number of House seats gained by the winning incumbent’s party was 16 in 1984, a year in which Ronald Reagan won reelection by a landslide. You have to go all the way back to 1964 to find an election in which the winning incumbent’s party gained at least 25 seats in the House.
Notwithstanding these predictions and the historical record, however, there are three reasons to believe that Democrats have a decent chance of taking back control of the House in 2012. First, as a result of their big gains in 2010, Republicans will be defending a large number of seats in House districts that voted for Barack Obama in 2008; second, many of those districts are likely to vote for Obama again in 2012 because of the difference between the presidential and midterm electorate in the current era; and third, Republican incumbents in these Obama districts will be at high risk of losing their seats if Obama wins because straight-ticket voting is much more prevalent now than it was 30 or 40 years ago.

Further, adds Abramowitz,

…There are 60 Republicans in districts that were carried by Barack Obama in 2008 including 15 in districts that Obama carried by at least 10 points. In contrast, there are only 12 Democrats in districts that were carried by John McCain in 2008 and only six in districts that McCain carried by at least 10 points.

As for the GOP’s supposed edge in redistricting, Abramowitz notes:

Of course before the 2012 congressional elections take place, House districts will be redrawn based on the results of the 2010 Census. In states where Republicans control redistricting-and the number of such states grew considerably as a result of the 2010 midterm elections-GOP legislatures may be able to redraw the lines to protect potentially vulnerable Republican incumbents. However, the ability of Republican legislatures to protect their party’s House incumbents may be limited by the dramatic increase in the past decade in the nonwhite share of the population in many states. For example, while Republicans will control redistricting in Texas, which is gaining four House seats, more than any other state, most of the population growth in Texas has been because of the rapid increase in the Hispanic population. At least one, if not two, of the new Texas House districts are likely to go to Hispanics.

Abramowitz also cites the increased turnout, over the mid terms, of Obama-friendly constituencies in a presidential election, particularly Latino voters, who are growing even faster than expected, according to the latest census data. But he believes the Dems strongest card may be the rising trend toward straight-ticket voting in recent years. Abramowitz stops short of predicting a Dem takeover of the House, but he calls it a “realistic” possibility, especially if Obama wins a “decisive victory” in ’12.
Nate Silver sees the budget fight and the vote on GOP Rep. Ryan’s draconian budget proposals as a potential net plus for Democratic congressional candidates. Silver explains in a recent five thirty eight post,

So far, no polls have been conducted on Mr. Ryan’s budget as a whole. But — although voters will like the deficit reduction it claims to achieve (several outside analysts have questioned the bill’s economic findings) — a couple of its individual elements figure to be quite unpopular. In particular, the bill includes substantial changes to Medicare and Medicaid — changes that many voters tell pollsters are unacceptable. And it would cut the top tax rates, when polls usually find that most Americans want taxes on upper-income Americans to be raised rather than lowered.

Silver also believes that the Republicans’ prospects for a senate takeover next year are overstated. Echoing Abramowitz’s point about the decline in split-ticket voting, he sees the vote on Ryan’s proposals as a potential game-changer for the House:

…One possible consequence of the vote is that it could tie the fate of Mr. Obama and the Democrats in Congress more closely together. In the past, presidents have rarely had substantial coattails when running for a second term; Bill Clinton’s Democrats won just 9 seats in the House in 1996, for instance, even though he beat Bob Dole overwhelmingly. In 2010, however, the share of the vote received by Democrats running for Congress was very strongly correlated with support for Mr. Obama, and today’s vote could deepen that connection, making it less likely that voters will return a divided government again.

When two of the sharpest political data analysts agree that the House may be up for grabs, the DNC and Dem contributors should take note and invest accordingly. Of course there is a difference between Dems having a decent chance to win back a House majority and the probability of it happening. For the moment, however, The President appears to be moving into solid position to leverage the trend toward straight-ticket voting for the benefit of the Party. With a favorable break or two on the economy, the possibility of a Dem takeover of the House could morph into a good bet.

This item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on April 5, 2011.
The wave of conservative hype greeting the release of Rep. Paul Ryan’s draft budget resolution is a pretty clear indication the Republican Party is about to take a deep breath and go over the brink into a direct assault on the programs and commitments that gave the United States a small replica of the modern welfare state common in the rest of the developed world. So excited are they that the New York Times‘ David Brooks, who normally likes to position himself as an eagle soaring above the grubby machinations of both political parties, just can’t contain himself:

Over the past few weeks, a number of groups, including the ex-chairmen of the Council of Economic Advisers and 64 prominent budget experts, have issued letters arguing that the debt situation is so dire that doing nothing is not a survivable option. What they lacked was courageous political leadership — a powerful elected official willing to issue a proposal, willing to take a stand, willing to face the political perils.
The country lacked that leadership until today. Today, Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, is scheduled to release the most comprehensive and most courageous budget reform proposal any of us have seen in our lifetimes. Ryan is expected to leap into the vacuum left by the president’s passivity. The Ryan budget will not be enacted this year, but it will immediately reframe the domestic policy debate….
The Ryan budget will put all future arguments in the proper context: The current welfare state is simply unsustainable and anybody who is serious, on left or right, has to have a new vision of the social contract.

Wow, you can almost hear the soaring music of a Tim Pawlenty ad when you read that passage! As Brooks would have it, Ryan’s assault on “the welfare state” isn’t really debatable; it’s based on Revealed Truth that all honorable people will accept and only scoundrels will deny. Anyone second-guessing this leader who has exposed Barack Obama’s cowardice must come with his or her own six-trillion dollar package of cuts for benefits affecting those people whose aspirations to luxury items like health insurance are now “unsustainable.”
But while Brooks and others praising Ryan’s budget are laughable in lauding the “courage” of a safe-seat congressman throwing red meat to his party’s base while taking on the poor and disabled and delighting private health insurers and anyone paying corporate taxes–they are right about Ryan’s audacity.
The simple way to put it is that Ryan’s budget steers clear of taking on the signature New Deal social program, Social Security, but takes dead aim on the Great Society’s accomplishment of a partial set of guarantees for access to health care.
By any meaningful measurement, Ryan’s proposal would kill Medicare by privatizing it and capping its costs, and kill Medicaid by making it simply a soon-to-be-phased-down grant to states with no obligation to provide a set of minimum benefits for the poor and disabled.
On the first point, Josh Marshall nicely explains why privatizing Medicare destroys its very rationale:

We all know about pre-existing conditions. You’re a cancer survivor so no insurer will cover you. Or you have one of the myriad possible conditions that make you a bad risk. And no insurer wants to issue a policy for someone who odds say is likely to cost a lot of money. Well, guess what, people over 65 all have a preexisting condition: they’re old!
Now, not that people aren’t living longer and longer lives. And plenty of folks in their late 60s are in better health than folks 10 or 20 years younger. But by and large, we all know how this life thing works. When you hit your mid-60s or so, things start breaking down. And eventually, you die. That’s a bald way to put it. But we all understand that this is true. The simple truth is that for all the problems with private health insurance for the young and working age populations, it just doesn’t work for seniors.
We tried it. That’s why we ended up creating Medicare.

We created Medicaid (originally a Republican alternative to universal health coverage) to ensure that people with insufficient funds to purchase health services or insurance or whose health costs outstripped their ability to pay would not, to put it pretty bluntly, get even sicker and/or die. Ryan’s “block grant” proposal would end any personal claim on health services for any American, and would simply subsidize state health care programs for the indigent and the disabled (a subsidy guaranteed to be a fat target in futue federal deficit reduction efforts once the “problem” is thought of as a state responsibility). Here’s a mild estimate of what that would involve from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities:

States would most likely use their additional flexibility to cap Medicaid enrollment and put people on waiting lists once the cap was reached (which they cannot do today), significantly scale back eligibility for millions of low-income children, parents, pregnant women, people with disabilities and seniors — driving many of them into the ranks of the uninsured — or cut services substantially, with the result that many of the nation’s poorest and most vulnerable people could become underinsured.

With respect to Medicaid, the downward spiral of eligibility and benefits contemplated by Ryan’s proposal would occur after the immediate disqualification of an estimated 15 million Americans who would obtain Medicaid coverage under the provisions of last year’s health reform legislation, which Ryan would repeal. That’s quite a giant leap backward for anyone supporting the basic idea of universal health coverage.
Against the background of a budget that will apparently leave defense spending pretty much as it is, while applying any savings from closing tax loopholes to the lowering of top and corporate rates, Ryan’s Medicare/Medicaid proposals are astoundingly unbalanced. For all the talk about his “courage,” it’s also noteworthy that Ryan insulates today’s seniors (who happen to be more heavily Republican in their voting preferences than at any time in recent memory) from any changes in Medicare, while targeting a Medicaid-eligible population with few GOP voters.
To conservative ideologues who think America went fatally wrong in the Great Society years–except, of course, for the establishment of a National Security State supporting a vast array of overseas military commitments that helped our allies afford their own welfare states–Ryan’s budget makes perfect sense. In taking on Ryan, it’s imperative that Democrats begin by making it clear exactly what is at stake.

This TDS Strategy Memo by Andrew Levison was first published on March 16, 2011.

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In a 2007 article in The American Prospect, pollster Stan Greenberg provided a particularly cogent description of the profound political problem that the decline in trust of government poses for the Democratic coalition:

There is a new reality that Democrats must deal with if they are to be successful going forward. In their breathtaking incompetence and comprehensive failure in government, Republicans have undermined Americans’ confidence in the ability of government to play a role in solving America’s problems. Democrats will not make sustainable gains unless they are able to restore the public’s confidence in its capacity to act through government.
…”the scale of damage done to people’s belief in government is enormous… 62% in a Pew study said they believe that whenever something is run by the government it is probably inefficient and wasteful. By 57% to 29% Americans believe that government makes it harder for people to get ahead in life rather than helping people. 85% say that if the government had more money it would waste it rather than spend it well.
Although people may favor government action on critical issues like health care, education and energy their lack of trust in governments capacity to spend money properly means that their first priority is to cut wasteful spending and make government more accountable. People are desperate to see accountability from Washington, not just in the spending of tax dollars with no discernible results but also in politicians’ behavior… To have any chance of getting heard on their agenda, Democrats need to stand up and take on the government–not its size or scope, but its failure to be accountable–and deliver the results that people expect for the taxes they pay.

A more recent strategy memo by Greenberg’s Democracy Corps focuses on the overwhelming distrust and contempt with which Congress in particular is viewed:

Voters are disgusted with ‘business as usual’ in Washington. There is a deep and pervasive belief, particularly among independents, that special interests are running things and Members of Congress listen more to those that fund their campaigns than the voters that they are supposed to be representing. Three quarters believe that special interests hold too much influence over Washington today while fewer than a quarter believe that ordinary citizens can still influence what happens in politics. Similarly, nearly 80 percent say that Members of Congress are trolled by the groups that help fund their political campaigns while fewer than a fifth believe that Members listen more to the voters.

For Democrats the fundamental “take-away” from Greenberg’s analysis is simple. Until this profound distrust is overcome Democrats will be unable to pass any major new social legislation or political reform. Democrats have no alternative. They must reduce the enormous cynicism Americans now feel about government.
In political terms the most important demographic group whose opinions of government Democrats must seek to change is the white working class–people who have less than a college degree and are generally employed in “working class” rather than “middle class” jobs. Their support for Democrats plummeted by 12 percent between 2008 and 2010 in large part because of this issue. Without regaining a substantial part of this lost support in 2012, a Democratic victory will be close to impossible.
What Democrats need is a coherent strategy for addressing the complex mixture of attitudes that lies behind hostility and distrust of government–a strategy that not only addresses the problem in a meaningful way but which can also be presented in a consistent and convincing communications campaign.

Read more…

This item by Ed Kilgore was first published on March 18, 2011.
One of the most effective talking-points of the unions and Democratic legislators battling Gov. Scott Walker in Wisconsin was: “It’s Not About the Money!” This battle-cry drew attention to the fact that Walker’s union-busting agenda had little or nothing to do with the state’s fiscal crisis, which Walker himself had helped engineer by pushing corporate tax cuts.
It’s time to make the same point in terms of the Republican agenda in Congress. Much of the battle between Ds and Rs over non-defense discretionary spending isn’t about the deficit numbers, but about GOP efforts to grind various ideological axes, from defunding EPA and bank regulators and NPR, to crippling abortion and contraceptive services, to repealing last year’s health reform legislation. Indeed, appropriations “riders” that have nothing to do with spending levels are what conservative House members are most adamantly demanding in return for supporting any appropriations bill, temporary or permanent. In effect, alarms about debts and deficits are being used as an excuse to go after government functions that Republicans would object to even if the budget was in surplus.
Now on one level this isn’t surprising or even wrong-minded; the two parties can and should reflect their own sense of priorities in every budget decision, not just those driven by concerns or negotiations over spending reductions. But these priorities need to be acknowledged and discussed openly and directly, and not in the disguise of making “painful but necessary cuts.”
The truth is that most Republican these days would prefer to live in a country with little or no regulation of corporations (environmental or any other sort) or banks; a far more regressive tax code than has been the case historically; workplaces with no collective bargaining rights or even minimum wages; a status quo ante health care system in which private insurers are free to discriminate and rising costs are borne by the sickest and poorer Americans; the social safety net is weaker and not subject to any national minimum norms; and abortion (plus many forms of contraception) is illegal. They’d also prefer to get rid of legal protections against discrimination generally, and a federal government limited to the kind of functions typical of the eighteenth century in which the U.S. Constitution was adopted.
It’s their right to favor this kind of society, but given the abundant evidence that a large majority of Americans would be very unhappy with it, it’s the responsibility of non-Republicans and of the news media to make this agenda as clear as possible, and not just mindlessly accept that conservatives are only worried about the debt burden on future generations.
I made a small effort to do this on a nationally syndicated public radio show today, and am resolved to keep it up at the risk of redundancy. So should you.

This item by J.P. Green was first published on March 11, 2011.
Twenty months out from the 2012 election, the GOP’s voter suppression strategy is taking shape. By crushing public sector unions and expanding felon and student disenfranchisement, they hope to weaken Democratic turnout. While they have always supported these strategies, the margins Republicans gained in state houses in the November elections have empowered them to launch a much stronger voter suppression campaign.
There is reason to hope that their efforts to gut public sector unions will backfire, as evidenced by recent public opinion polls regarding Governor Walker’s union-busting campaign in Wisconsin. The fact that Walker exempted the three unions that supported him is proof enough that his primary objective is to disempower public unions because they have provided significant support for Democratic candidates.
In Florida, Governor Scott and his cohorts on the all-Republican Executive Clemency Board are setting a new standard for shameless partisan sleaze, with a racist twist. Here’s how Peter Wallsten’s Washington Post article explained this bit of political chicanery:

Florida Gov. Rick Scott and other Cabinet-level officials voted unanimously Wednesday to roll back state rules enacted four years ago that made it easier for many ex-felons to regain the right to vote.
Now, under the new rules, even nonviolent offenders would have to wait five years after the conclusion of their sentences to apply for the chance to have their civil rights restored.

In 2007 Florida Governor Charlie Crist initiated a measure to make civil rights restoration “almost automatic” for most ex-felons. Wallsten reports that more than 100,000 ex-felons took advantage of Crists initiative to attempt to register to vote. “Experts say many of those new voters were likely Democratic-leaning African Americans,” reports Wallsten, which likely helped Obama win Florida.
Approximately 54,000 ex-felons in Florida had their civil rights restored since 2007, before which the state restored the rights of only about 8,000 ex-felons annually, according to the ACLU.
The “rationale,” for the initiative according to a spokesperson for the Republican Florida A.G.:

“This issue of civil rights restoration is about principle, not partisanship…Attorney General Bondi is philosophically opposed to the concept of automatic restoration of civil rights and believes not only that felons should apply for their rights, but wait for a period of time in order to attest to their rehabilitation and commitment to living a crime-free life.

Howard Simon, executive director of the Florida chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union sees the Republican measure a little differently. “It clearly has the effect of suppressing the vote as we go into a presidential election cycle.”
Unfortunately, the constitutionality of felon disenfranchisement has been upheld in courts from time to time, even though punishing people beyond the terms of their sentence remains a dubious proposition in a real democracy. Certainly the Florida Republicans have no qualms about making a mockery of the principle of rehabilitation in their criminal justice system. And no fair-minded person could deny that felon disenfranchisement targets African Americans, given their disproportionate incarceration rates, which numerous scholars have attributed to bias in sentencing.
In addition to the Republican efforts to crush public employee unionism and disenfranchise African American voters, Tobin Van Ostern reports at Campus Progress on the escalation of the conservative campaign to disenfranchise another pro-Democratic group, students:

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a conservative organization linked to corporate and right-wing donors, including the billionaire Koch brothers, has drafted and distributed model legislation, obtained by Campus Progress, that appears to be the inspiration for bills proposed by state legislators this year and promoted by Tea Party activists, bills that would limit access of young people to vote.
…Charles Monaco, the press and new media specialist at the Progressive States Network, a state-based organization that has been tracking this issue, says, “ALEC is involved with a vast network of well-funded right wing organizations working to spread voter ID laws in the state legislatures. It is clear what their purpose is with these laws–to reduce progressive turnout and tilt the playing field towards their preferred candidates in elections.”

In Wisconsin and New Hampshire, for example,

Conservative representatives in the state have proposed a law, backed by Walker, that would ban students from using in-state university- or college-issued IDs for proof-of-residency when voting. If this legislation became law, it would become one of the strictest voter registration laws in the country and would provide significant logistical and financial barriers for a variety of groups, including student and minority voters.
Meanwhile, as Campus Progress reported last month, in New Hampshire, state House Speaker William O’Brien (R- Hillsborough 4) says that proposed election legislation will “tighten up the definition of a New Hampshire resident.” O’Brien claims that college towns experience hundreds of same-day voter registrations and that those are the ballots of people who “are kids voting liberal, voting their feelings, with no life experience.”

To repeat, the Speaker of the New Hampshire House says it’s OK to deny a group of predominantly young people voting rights because they are “voting liberal.” If Dems don’t make an ad about that targeting youth voters nationwide, they should be cited for political negligence. In other states,

…According to research by the Fair Elections Legal Network (FELN) and Campus Progress, in the past six years, seven states have enacted laws that disenfranchise students or make it more difficult for them to vote. This year, 18 additional states are considering similar laws, while other states are proposing voter ID laws that would depress turnout among other groups of voters–particularly those who traditionally lean left…These requirements run the gamut from requiring in-state driver’s licenses, to banning school IDs, to prohibiting first-time voters–essentially every college-aged voter–from voting by absentee ballot…

There can be no doubt at this point about the GOP’ political strategy for 2011-12: Crush unions, disenfranchise ex-felons and students — such are the often unintended consequences of voting Republican. For Dems, the challenges couldn’t be more clear: Publicize the GOP’s contempt for voting rights; Reach out to win the support of blue collar workers and energize our base constituencies with bold, populist reforms that create jobs and protect and improve their living standards.

This item by Ed Kilgore is cross-posted from The New Republic, where it was originally published on February 21, 2011.
Many Beltway insiders seem to have convinced themselves that abortion doesn’t matter anymore. Just look at the press clippings from CPAC, where Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels wowed his D.C. cheerleaders with a speech doubling down on his earlier call for a “truce” over culture-war issues like abortion. Chris Christie came into town a few days later, and excited a lot of the same people with a speech focused almost exclusively on the idea that entitlement-spending cuts are the nation’s top priority. Big-time conservative strategists like Michael Barone have opined that a truce over abortion policy–as reflected in a structure of legalized abortion with “reasonable” state restrictions–is already in place. And we are told incessantly that the driving force in Republican politics, the Tea Party movement, is basically libertarian in its orientation and wildly uninterested in cultural issues.
How out of touch could they be? It’s rare to see the Washington zeitgeist so disconnected from the reality of what conservative activists and their representatives are doing and saying on the ground in Iowa, in state capitals across the country, and next door in the House of Representatives. Far from being a sideshow, the Right-to-Life movement’s priorities have been front-and-center for conservatives across the country.
Take the incoming “Tea Party Congress”: This January, House Republicans made restricting abortions an immediate goal, pushing the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act (H.R. 3) as a top priority right after their vote on Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law (H.R. 2). The abortion legislation, which has 209 co-sponsors (199 of them Republicans), is advertised as simply codifying the Hyde Amendment that’s been attached to appropriations bills since 1977; but it would actually go much further, denying employers a tax exemption for private health policies that include coverage of abortion services. Originally, H.R. 3 also sought to redefine “rape”–for purposes of the longstanding “rape and incest” exception to the Hyde Amendment–to include only “forcible” acts, presumably to remove pregnancies resulting from acts of statutory rape from the exception. The House also appears poised to pass appropriations measures that would eliminate funds for the Title X program, which provides contraceptive services for low-income women, and ban any federal funding for Planned Parenthood. And it is working to keep participants in the Affordable Care Act’s health-insurance exchanges from purchasing policies that cover abortions, even with their own money. If there’s a “truce” in place, it’s being violated daily.
At the state level, newly empowered Republicans are also promoting anti-abortion measures. In Texas, Governor Rick Perry has designated a bill to require pre-abortion sonograms an “emergency” measure, giving it legislative priority. In South Carolina, a bill is moving toward passage that would create an unusually broad “conscience clause” to protect health care workers and pharmacists from disciplinary actions prompted by a refusal to administer birth control or emergency contraception, to take part in medical research that destroys an in vitro human embryo, or to halt care of a dying person in a hospital. In Ohio, Republican legislators are pushing a blizzard of anti-abortion bills, including one that would fine doctors for performing abortions when a fetal heartbeat is discerned. A South Dakota legislator just made national headlines by introducing a bill that would classify as “justifiable homicide” a death caused with the aim of protecting the unborn. He withdrew it after critics called it a license to kill abortion providers, but a separate bill in the same state, headed for a floor vote, would require women to attend a lecture at a crisis pregnancy center (code for an anti-abortion advocacy office) before getting an abortion. Even Mr. Focus-on-the-Fiscal-Crisis, Chris Christie, opted to eliminate state contraceptive services in the interest of “fiscal restraint,” and made the cuts stick with a gubernatorial veto. One could go on and on; there’s clearly no “truce” in the state legislatures.
And there will be no truce on the presidential campaign trail. Daniels’s statements about dialing down the culture wars have already been vocally rejected by potential presidential rivals Mike Huckabee, John Thune, and Rick Santorum. Rush Limbaugh has said that Daniels’s position reflects the interests of a Republican “ruling class” that wants to rein in social conservatives and the Tea Party movement. In his CPAC speech, former Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour framed his anti-abortion record as a core element of his conservative credentials, and repudiated his own past remarks urging support for pro-choice Republicans. Mitt Romney, whose previous support for abortion rights is a major problem for him politically, isn’t about to soft-pedal the issue. It’s likely that either Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann, two the Right-to-Life movement’s very favorite pols, will be running for president later this year. In fact, in the vast field of Republicans considering a presidential campaign, there’s not a single figure who is publicly identified as pro-choice; even Donald Trump has gone out of his way to reassure the anti-abortion crowd he’s now on their side.

Read more…

This item by J.P. Green was originally published on February 21, 2011.

Baltimore Sun columnist Thomas Schaller has a post up at Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball, “The Latino Threshold: Where the GOP Needs Latino Votes and Why” mulling over different scenarios for allocation of the Hispanic vote for President in ’12. In assessing Republican prospects with Hispanics in the upcoming presidential election, Schaller cites three key considerations:

First, as the white share of the electorate shrinks, the share of the Latino vote Republicans need to remain competitive will gradually inch higher. It is axiomatic that if one party attracts a minority share of votes from any group or subset, if that subset is growing as a share of the electorate these losses are magnified. Republicans get roughly the same share of the vote from Asian Americans as Latinos. But GOP losses among Asian Americans are less punitive overall because the Asian American vote is smaller and growing less fast as a share of the electorate than are Latino voters.
Second, whatever threshold the GOP needs to maintain–40 percent, 45 percent–will zigzag up and down a bit between midterm and presidential elections. Because midterm electorates trend older, whiter and more affluent, until and unless the Democrats can find ways to mobilize presidential-cycle voters in off years, the GOP’s Latino competitiveness threshold drops slightly in midterms before rising again in presidential years.
Finally, the Latino vote is of course not uniformly distributed across districts and states. So the calculus varies depending upon geography. In states where Latino voters are paired with significant African American populations–such as Florida, New York or Texas–the Republican cutoff is higher; where Latinos represent the bulk of non-white voters–such as Colorado or Nevada–the threshold is easier to reach.

Schaller doesn’t discuss a worrisome scenario for Dems, in which the Republicans nominate Sen. Marco Rubio for vice president, which would likely ice Florida for the GOP presidential candidate and maybe even help them get a bigger bite of the Latino vote elsewhere. Rubio only got 55 percent of the Latino vote in Florida’s Senate contest. I say only, because I would have expected a higher figure. But even assuming he would be a big asset on the GOP ticket, and assuming Dems lose NC and VA, Dems would likely have to win Ohio, or all of the remaining three swing states with large Latino populations, NM, NV and CO.
In terms of public opinion, Schaller explains:

…Is Obama’s Latino support holding steady?
On Monday, impreMedia and Latino Decisions released a new survey showing a strangely bifurcated answer to this question: Although 70 percent of Latinos approve of Obama’s performance as president, only 43 percent say they will for certain vote for him in 2012. Of the poll results, impreMedia pollster Pilar Marrero writes that “doubts about the president and the Democrats are not turning into support for the Republicans.”
To win re-election, President Obama must close the sale again with Latinos during the next two years. But if recent numbers from Public Policy Polling in key swing states are any indication, at least in potential head-to-head matchups against Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich and (most especially) Sarah Palin, Obama is in as good a shape if not better in all four of Latino-pivotal swing states.

Regarding the Latino Decisions poll, Ed Kilgore’s take is a little different:

The president’s job approval rating in this poll is at 70%, up from 57% in the last LD survey in September. The percentage of respondents saying they are “certain” they will vote to re-elect Obama is at a relatively soft 43%; but with “probables” and leaners, his “re-elect” number rises to 61%. Meanwhile, the total percentage of Latinos inclined to vote for a Republican candidate in 2012 is at 21%, with only 9% certain to vote that way. It’s worth noting that in most polls, a “generic” Republican presidential candidate has been doing a lot better than named candidates in trial heats against Obama. And the 61-21 margin he enjoys among Latinos in this survey compares favorably with the 67-31 margin he won in 2008 against John McCain.
With the Republican presidential nominating process more than likely pushing the candidates towards immigrant-baiting statements, and with Latinos having relatively positive attitudes towards the kind of federal health care and education policies the GOP will be going after with big clawhammers, it’s hard to see exactly how the GOP makes gains among Latinos between now and Election Day…

Democrats received 64 percent of the Latino vote in the mid-terms, with Republican candidates winning 34 percent. After crunching all of the numbers, Schaller concludes “Republicans don’t need to carry the Latino vote–yet–but in the near term, and particularly in presidential cycles, they need to stay reasonably competitive, whereas Kilgore concludes of GOP hopes for ’12, in light of Hispanic opinion trends, “They’d better hope their 2010 margins among white voters hold up.”
In between those two perspectives, there are lots of variables that can influence Hispanic turnout and voter choices in different directions. But it’s certain that Democrats stand to benefit, perhaps decisively, from a greater investment in Latino naturalization, voter education and turnout.

This item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on February 7, 2011.
I’m coming a bit late to the 100th birthday party of Ronald Reagan. But the amazing extent to which he serves as the sole secular saint of Republican and conservative-movement politics these days demands some comment.
As J.P. Green documented last Friday, the mythology of St. Ronald ignores an awful lot of inconvenient facts about the man and his actual presidency. And as Jonathan Chait explained today, the conservative refutation of these facts is a bit threadbare.
But I’m interested in why conservatives still hold so fiercely to Reaganolatry 22 years after he left office. I’d offer three reasons:
First and most important, particularly to older conservatives, was his status as de facto leader of the conservative movement long before his presidency. From the moment he was elected governor of California in 1966, he displaced Barry Goldwater as the conservative movement’s political leader, and sustained its hopes through the craziness and ultimate disaster of the Nixon administration. Indeed, Reagan’s only momentary rival for the affection of conservatives, Spiro T. Agnew, resigned in disgrace, making the Californian more than ever the True Leader as the Right washed its hands of complicity in the presidency that launched wage and price controls, recognized China, pursued detente, and signed the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts. Later Reagan fulfilled a generation of conservative fantasies by challenging a “moderate Republican” incumbent president, and nearly pulled it off. Said “moderate” proceded to lose against a relatively conservative Democrat, reinforcing the “A Choice Not An Echo” prescriptions of the Goldwater insurgency.
Second and equally important, Reagan won in 1980 as an outspokenly conservative Republican nominee–the first time, ever, that had happened, after a long series of defeats that dated back to the Taft candidacy of 1940, which was crushed, as was his 1952 candidacy, at the Republican National Convention. Remember that as of 1980, the last three elected Republican presidents had been Richard Nixon, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Herbert Hoover. Reagan killed off the assumption, which was very powerful in Republican Establishment circles, that you could not move Right and win. This is an empirical data point that is particularly important to today’s right-bent Republicans, who have successfully defeated the argument that after 2006 and 2008, the GOP needed to moderate its conservative ideology to reclaim power. The Republican nominees after Reagan–Bush, Bush, Bush, Bush and McCain–were either heretics or losers, from the conservative ideological point of view.
Third and finally, Reagan’s talking points have more historical resonance than his governing record. He was the president who proclaimed that “government isn’t the solution to our problems; government is the problem,” a line that defines today’s conservatives better than anything they are saying. He was the president who first suggested that cutting taxes was compatible with fiscal discipline, another contemporary GOP axiom. He was the president who seriously tried to slash domestic programs, even if he soon gave up on the project.
Until such time as Republicans find another idol (and we should remember that George W. Bush briefly auditioned for the role, particularly when the initial invasion of Iraq succeeded and he was hailed as a world-historical figure), Reagan remains the only available icon.
And so they continue to worship at his altar, until such time as a new leader emerges who can cleanse them of the failures of the Bush administration much as Reagan seemed to cleanse them of Nixon’s.

This item by Ed Kilgore is cross-posted from The New Republic, where it was first published on January 26, 2009.
The ideas and policy proposals in Barack Obama’s 2011 State of the Union Address were anything but fresh and original. Much of it could easily have been harvested from any number of interchangeable speeches given during the last 20 years–not just by presidents by members of Congress, governors, mayors, and CEOs–from both parties. Yet that may have been exactly the point. By staking his claim to decades of well-worn political detritus, I think Obama has set a cunning political trap for his enemies.
A crash program for economic competitiveness? We’ve heard it dozens of times, and Obama’s speech mainly substituted new global rivals for old ones. Harrumphing about how education and a skilled workforce are they key to national prosperity? Obviously an old theme. Reorganizing major federal departments was one of Jimmy Carter’s signature initiatives. Tax simplification was one of Ronald Reagan’s. Making government a lean, mean efficiency machine has been promised many times, most notably by Bill Clinton. Across-the-board spending freezes, support for small business entrepreneurs, growing green jobs, better infrastructure, boosting exports (without, presumably, those pesky imports)–we’ve heard it all. One conceit–the “Sputnik Moment”–was so old that you wonder if the president’s young speechwriters just found out about it.
And that’s the beauty of Obama’s address. He basically put together every modest, centrist, reasonable-sounding idea for public investment aimed at job creation and economic growth that anyone has ever uttered; and he did so at the exact moment that the GOP has abandoned the very concept of public investment altogether. He’s thrown into relief the fact that Republicans no longer seem interested in any government efforts to boost the economy, except where they offer an excuse to reduce the size and power of government.
Paul Ryan’s deficit-maniac response played right into Obama’s trap: Ryan barely mentioned the economy other to imply that every dollar taken away from the public sector will somehow create jobs in the private sector economy (a private sector economy wherein, as Obama cleverly noted, corporate profits are setting records). For those who buy the idea that government is the only obstacle to an economic boom, this makes sense. But for everybody else, the contrast between a Democratic president with a lot of small, familiar ideas for creating jobs and growth, and a Republican Party with just one big idea, is inescapable. It’s a vehicle for the “two alternate futures” choice which Obama will try to offer voters in 2012.
Moreover, Obama’s tone–the constant invocation of bipartisanship at a time when Republicans are certain to oppose most of what he’s called for, while going after the progressive programs and policies of the past–should sound familiar as well. It was Bill Clinton’s constant refrain, which he called “progress over partisanship,” during his second-term struggle with the Republican Congress. During that period, the Republicans being asked to transcend “partisanship” were trying to remove Clinton from office. And Clinton wasn’t really extending his hand in a gesture of cooperation with the GOP but, by creating a contrast with their ideological fury, indicating that he himself embodied the bipartisan aspirations of the American people and the best ideas of both parties. It was quite effective.
By playing this rope-a-dope, Obama has positioned himself well to push back hard against the conservative agenda. Having refused to offer Republicans the cover they crave for “entitlement reform,” while offering his own modest, reasonable-sounding deficit reduction measures, he’s forcing the GOP to either go after Social Security and Medicare on their own–which is very perilous to a party whose base has become older voters–or demand unprecedented cuts for those popular public investments that were the centerpiece of his speech. Either way, in a reversal of positions from the last two years, Obama looks like he is focused on doing practical things to boost the economy, while it’s Republicans who are talking about everything else. Boring it may have been, but as a positioning device for the next two years, Obama’s speech was a masterpiece.