This item by Ed Kilgore was first published on March 19, 2010.
There’s been some interesting talk going on this week involving assessment (in the wake of the collapse of progressive resistance to the final health reform bill) of “the Left’s” strategy on health reform, particularly in terms of the ultimate emptiness of threats from progressive House Democrats that they would vote against any bill that didn’t include a “robust” public option.
Glenn Greenwald argues that progressives have once again exposed–and possibly even increased–their “powerlessness” within the Democratic Party. Chris Bowers challenges the premise by arguing that progressives did secure significant changes in the Senate bill, most notably the agreement to “fix” it, which certainly wasn’t the path of least resistance.
Meanwhile, Armando of Talk Left has compared the lack of leverage of progressives over items like the public option to the success of the labor movement in forcing concessions on the “Cadillac tax.” And Nate Silver has responded by arguing that progressive threats didn’t work because they weren’t credible in the first place.
I think everyone in this debate would agree that it’s generally a bad idea in politics to make threats you are entirely unwilling to carry out, but the real division of opinion on on whether such threats should be tempered or in fact intensified. But Nate makes one point that bears repeating: the political value of aggressiveness and posturing can and often does get exaggerated.

It feels good to assert that progressives just need to be tougher — perhaps even to the point of feigning irrationality. These arguments are not necessarily wrong — a reputation for being tougher bargainers would help at the margins — but it misdiagnoses the problem on health care. The progressive bloc failed not because of any reputational deficiency on the part of the progressives but because their bluff was too transparent — they claimed to be willing to wager enormous stakes (health care reform) to win a relatively small pot (the public option). That would have been beyond the capacity of any poker player — or activist — to pull off.

I’ve never much liked the strain of progressive analysis that endlessly promotes “fighting” and “spine” and “cojones” as the answers to every Democratic political problem. Sometimes “brains” or “heart” are more important, and moreover, if politics is reduced to a willingness to project brute force, the bad guys are going to win every time; it’s like getting into a selfishness competition with the Right–we’ll never win. But in any event, however you feel about the Will to Power theory of politics, Nate’s right, people aren’t all stupid, and macho posturing by progressives when it doesn’t make sense isn’t going to convince anybody. Poker playing is a relatively small and overrated part of politics. Real conviction and strategies based on conveying those convictions to friends and potential friends are the best building blocks for successful strategy.

This item by Ed Kilgore was first published on March 12, 2010.
One of the fundamental reasons for the kind of strategic analysis that TDS encourages and sponsors is that it’s sometimes easy to conflate strategy and tactics, and more basically, means and ends. Indeed, I’d contend that most of the major disagreements among Democrats are attributable to this problem of arguing past each other because one side or the other is thinking in different terms about where a particular political or policy decision lies on the continuum that extends from day-to-day tactics all the way over to grand strategy. And that has certainly been true in the health care reform debate.
But we should all be able to agree on one thing: the ultimate objective in politics–particularly progressive politics–is to make changes in public policy that have a real, beneficient impact on the real-life experiences of the American people. When that opportunity presents itself on one of the major challenges facing this country, taking advantage of it trumps a lot of otherwise valid considerations.
And so, in all the back-and-forth this week about polling on health reform, and the possible consequences to the Democratic Party this November of enacting or failing to enact legislation, it is important not to forget the big picture here: the responsibility that most Democrats would accept for meeting the challenge of changing the health care system in a positive direction.
Matt Yglesias offers a good analogy to keep in mind in weighing the political risks involved in enacting health care reform this year:

[T]he measure of a political coalition isn’t how long it lasted, but what it achieved. From the tone of a lot of present-day political commentary you’d think that the big mistake Lyndon Johnson made during his tenure in the White House was that by passing the Civil Rights Act he wound up damaging the Democratic Party politically by opening the South up to the GOP. Back on planet normal, that’s the crowning achievement of his presidency.

From that perspective, there are still important short-term political factors for Democrats to keep in mind: the impact of future Republican gains on other important policy goals, and even the possibility that those gains will be so large that the next Congress or the one after that will repeal health reform legislation. Short of that, though, it’s probably a moment for Democrats to keep their eyes on the prize and let the political chips fall where they may. It’s not as though we haven’t faced and overcome political adversity before, when we didn’t necessarily have the chance to make large progress on one of the enduring policy goals of the party going back more than a half-century.

This item by Ed Kilgore was first published on March 10, 2010.
One of the oldest and hoariest debates among pollsters and political scientists is the measurement of public opinion according to likelihood to vote in a particular election. Some polls show results for “all adults,” some for “registered voters,” and some for “likely voters.” This last category is especially useful, if perilous, in projecting election results. It’s useful for the obvious reason that the views of people who don’t wind up voting are irrelevant to actual election results. It’s perilous because determining likelihood to vote is not an exact science, and moreover, can produce some serious distortions. Pollsters typically use two different methods for measuring likelihood to vote: some are subjective, mainly involving poll respondents’ own expressed interest in an election, and some are objective, including past voting behavior, and most controversial, post-survey “adjustments” of raw data to reflect the expected composition of the electorate. “Adjustments,” in fact, are one of those factors (others include question language and question order) the biases of pollsters or their clients can become pretty important, but in general, “tight” likely-voter screens have recently produced results more favorable to Republicans.
Aside from measurement factors, there are two important reasons why going into the November elections, “likely voters” are more likely to lean Republican than “registered voters.” The first is that historically, midterm elections attract an older and whiter electorate than presidential elections; given the weakness of Barack Obama among old white voters even in his 2008 victory, that’s significant. The second is that likelihood to vote measures intensity of political engagement, and right now, there’s little question Republicans are more “energized” than Democrats. So I’m certainly in full agreement that Democrats have what Jonathan Chait recently called (after examining the latest Democracy Corps/Third Way data on “drop-off” voters) a “turnout emergency” in 2010
But it’s a very different matter altogether to use public opinion surveys sifted for likelihood to vote in the next election to measure the current “mood” of the American people on this or that issue–in other words, to treat polls as a sort of plebiscite on the wishes of the electorate as a whole. You see this every day when conservatives argue that “the people” or “America” has rejected health reform because likely 2010 voters in a poll tilt heavily against some formulation of health reform legislation. Such polls may well indicate a possibility that voters in November will react poorly to the enactment of health reform, but do not present a fair representation of public opinion on the subject. No one would seriously argue that only those voting-eligible adults who get through a pollster’s LV screen are “people” or “Americans.” So no one should use LV data to construct some sort of plebiscite. LV’s will have their say in November. Let all Americans have their say when they are asked to express it.

This item by Ed Kilgore is cross-posted from The New Republic, where it first appeared on March 9, 2010.
As we all understand, Republicans are about to have a pretty good election in November. Much of the GOP excitement revolves around congressional races that could unseat “red-state” Democrats who won during the 2006 or 2008 cycles, along with a number of incumbents (some of whom have decided to retire) who have been around much longer. Ground zero for the Republican tsunami is, of course, the Deep South, where in some areas John McCain did better in 2008 than George W. Bush did in 2004, and where every available indicator shows the president to be very unpopular among white voters.
But beneath this storyline, some odd and counterintuitive things are going on. In three Deep South states, Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina, Democrats have a decent chance of retaking long-lost governorships, in part because of infighting among Republican candidates, and in part because Republican rule in those states has not been terribly successful or popular. It’s far too early to make predictions, but it’s possible that we’re in for a repeat of the astounding gubernatorial Trifecta that Democrats pulled off in those same three states in 1998. That event confounded widespread assessments that the South had become a one-party GOP region, and it could happen again, in even more unlikely circumstances.

Read more…

This item by Ed Kilgore was first published on March 5, 2010.
With Republicans beating the drums incessantly for the proposition that “the American people have rejected health care reform,” it’s probably not a bad time to recall the discussion that broke out late last year over evidence that many people saying they oppose specific proposals do so because they want to take reform much farther.
Exhibit A was an Ipsos-McClatchey poll taken in November. Here was Nate Silver’s take on it:

Ipsos/McClatchy put out a health care poll two weeks ago. The topline results were nothing special: 34 percent favored “the health care reform proposals presently being discussed”, versus 46 percent opposed, and 20 percent undecided. The negative-12 net score is roughly in line with the average of other polls, although the Ipsos poll shows a higher number of undecideds than most others.
Ipsos, however, did something that no other pollster has done. They asked the people who opposed the bill why they opposed it: because they are opposed to health care reform and thought the bill went too far? Or because they support health care reform but thought the bill didn’t go far enough?
It turns out that a significant minority of about 25 percent of the people who opposed the plan — or about 12 of the overall sample — did so from the left; they thought the plan didn’t go far enough.

Well, Ipsos-McClatchey is back with another poll, and it’s shows an even stronger percentage of reform “opponents” thinking current bills don’t go far enough: more than a third of the 47% of respondents opposing “the reforms being discussed” say it’s because “they don’t go far enough.” Added to the 41% of respondents who say they support “the reforms being discussed,” that’s a pretty significant majority favoring strong government action to reform the health care system.
If that’s right, then maybe a majority of Americans technically favor a “no” vote on health care reform. But it’s not at all clear that they’ll be any happier with a perpetuation of the status quo, much less the kind of “reforms” Republicans are talking about. It looks like a significant share of the public wants something with a strong public option, or perhaps a full-blown single-payer system. It’s disengenuous to pretend these are people who have linked arms with Rush Limbaugh and congressional Republican leaders to fight against serious reform.
Bill Galston’s correct: Democrats should do what’s right on health reform regardless of the polls. But if they do, it’s worth noting that they really aren’t necessarily sailing into the wind of public opinion.

This item by Ed Kilgore was first published on March 4, 2010.
This week’s big preoccupation in the chattering classes is about White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. Is he in danger of being fired? Should he be? Is he engaged in a death struggle with David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs? Is he leaking his side of the story to the press? And on and on it goes.
Without question, internecine strife in the White House is a perpetual favorite of the beltway media. But the important thing for Democrats is to avoid the mistake of feeding this dangerous beast by making administration personalities proxies in fights over ideology, strategy or tactics, or scapegoats for disappointments and frustrations.
Unfortunately, such proxy wars are in great danger of getting out of control. Some progressives, with honest and sincere objections to various policies and rhetoric of the Obama administration, have seized on Emanuel as a Rasputin figure: he’s the key player in a “centrist” Clintonian clique that’s ruining the promise of Obama’s presidency; he’s an unprincipled tactician who sells out progressive policies; he bears responsibility for recruiting “conservatives” to run for office as Democrats when he chaired the DCCC; his friends are a bunch of corporate whores. Some “centrists” return the favor by creating a distorted caricature of Emanuel as the sole heroic realist in the White House fighting a lonely battle against impractical ideologues who’d prefer Republican victory to any accommodation of public opinion on their pet issues. Republicans themselves, of course, are gleefully piling on, agreeing with every available attack on every figure in the administration, while the political gossip columnists of the media exploit the opportunity to keep the daily debate as lurid and superficial as possible.
Democrats can’t stop the gossip columnists or the Republicans, both of whom have their own distasteful ulterior motives for promoting this divisive narrative, but they can firmly and emphatically refuse to participate in this profoundly destructive game – and they better start doing so right now. Barack Obama is the president, and there’s nothing in his background or present behavior to suggest that he’s the passive tool of his own staff or disengaged from the decisions that bear his name. In this White House as in any other, there is a place for strategists and for tacticians, for visionaries and for pragmatists, for people who are protecting the presidential “brand” and for people who don’t think much beyond this November. This White House, like every other, has made, and will continue to make, mistakes—some big, some little, some whose consequences nobody is in a position to calculate. At this exceptionally complicated moment in political history, there’s rarely any blindingly obvious course of action for the administration that only a fool or a knave would fail to undertake. We all have our opinions about what’s gone right or wrong on issues ranging from the minutiae of health care policy to the broad outlines of the Democratic Party’s message, and second-guessing is inherent to human nature. But converting our necessary disagreements over substantive issues into personality-based political soap opera represents an act of foolish self-indulgence that no successful political enterprise can endure for long.
At some point—at this point—it really is time to stop pointing fingers and focus on the political tasks just ahead. Encouraging “internecine war” narratives in the media is never a good idea, and it’s a particularly bad idea when it tends to make the president look weak and manipulated, and make his advisors look petty and divided. The president is the only one in a position to completely understand how his team functions, and how their strengths and weaknesses can best be managed.
So please, fellow Democrats, let’s not join our opponents in trashing Rahm or Ax or Robert or Valerie or any other satellite in the presidential orbit, and stop projecting our worries and hopes onto people who are invariably more complex than the cartoon caricatures that are imposed on them by observers with personal agendas. The late musician George Harrison once called gossip “the devil’s radio.” Democrats ought to avoid joining in political insider gossip of the type we are hearing right now like it’s the devil himself.

This item by Ed Kilgore is cross-posted from The New Republic, where it was first published on March 2, 2010.
All across the country, Republicans are fantasizing about a gigantic electoral tide that will sweep out deeply entrenched Democratic incumbents this November. In their telling, this deep-red surge will be so forceful as to dislodge even legislators who don’t look vulnerable now, securing GOP control of both houses of Congress.
But could this scenario really come to pass? That will depend, in part, on what type of Republican Party the Democrats are running against in the fall.
Hence the importance of this year’s Republican civil war. In a string of GOP primary elections stretching from now until September, the future ideological composition of the elephant party hangs in the balance. Many of these primaries pit self-consciously hard-core conservatives, often aligned with the Tea Party movement, against “establishment” candidates—some who are incumbents, and some who are simply vulnerable to being labeled “RINOs” or “squishes” for expressing insufficiently ferocious conservative views.
Below is your guide to this year’s most important ideologically-freighted GOP primaries and their consequences. Confining ourselves just to statewide races, let’s take them in chronological order:
TEXAS, MARCH 2: Today’s showdown is in Texas, where “establishment” Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison is challenging conservative incumbent Governor Rick Perry. Perry, who won only 39 percent of the vote in a four-candidate race in 2006, spent much of the last year cozying up to Tea Party activists and occasionally going over the brink into talk of secession. He seemed to have the race against the Washington-tainted Hutchinson well in hand, until a third GOP candidate, libertarian/Tea Party favorite Debra Medina, started to surge in the polls early this year.
Medina’s candidacy once threatened to knock Perry into a runoff or even displace Hutchison from the second spot. But then Medina went on the Glenn Beck Program and expressed openness to the possibility that the federal government was involved in the 9/11 attacks. Still, it’s not clear Perry will clear 50 percent. An expensive and potentially divisive runoff would weaken him against the Democratic candidate, Houston Mayor Bill White, who looks quite competitive in early polling.
INDIANA, MAY 4: In the Hoosier State, right-wingers are flaying each other. Former Senator Dan Coats, a relatively conservative figure with strong “establishment” support, faces three even more conservative rivals in the race to succeed Evan Bayh. Coats is a longtime favorite of religious conservatives and an early member of the evangelical conservative network which author Jeff Sharlet dubs “The Family.” He’s secured early endorsements from D.C.-based conservative leaders Mike Pence and James Bopp (an RNC member who authored both the “Socialist Democrat Party” and “litmus test” resolutions). But his Beltway support has created a backlash in Indiana, and some Second Amendment fans recall that Coats voted for the Brady Bill and the assault-weapons ban. Coats is also smarting from revelations that he’s been registered to vote in Virginia since leaving the Senate, and working in Washington as a lobbyist for banks, equity firms, and even foreign governments (his firm represented—yikes—Yemen).
With the vote coming so soon, hard-core conservatives probably won’t have time to unite behind an alternative; some favor Tea Party-oriented state senator Marlin Stutzman, while others are sticking with a old-timey right-wing warhorse, former Representative John Hostetler. But if they do, and Coats loses, it will probably spur a headlong national panic among “establishment” Republicans, even well-credentialed conservatives who haven’t quite joined the tea partiers. Indiana Democrats have managed to recruit a strong Senate nominee in Congressman Brad Ellsworth, who might hold onto Bayh’s Senate seat.
UTAH, MAY 8: Utah Senator Bob Bennett, the bipartisan dealmaker, is in trouble. He voted for TARP, he has been a high-visibility user of earmarks, and, worse yet, he co-sponsored a universal health-reform bill with Democratic Senator Ron Wyden. So right-wingers want his head. Bennett’s defeat has become an obsession of influential conservative blogger Erick Erickson of Red State, and the Club for Growth, the big bully of economic conservatism, has attacked Newt Gingrich for speaking on his behalf.
Bennett’s first test will come on May 8, when delegates to Utah’s state GOP convention will vote on a Senate nominee. If he fails to get 60 percent, he’ll be pushed into a June 22 primary. Bennett faces three potentially credible right-wing challengers, but the “comer” seems to be Mike Lee, a former law clerk to Justice Samuel Alito, who has been endorsed by Dick Armey’s powerful FreedomWorks organization. Since this is Utah, there is no Democrat in sight who is strong enough to exploit such a right-wing “purge.” Bennett’s defeat would only make the Republican Party more conservative, and provide another object lesson to any GOP-er thinking about cosponsoring major legislation with a Democrat.

Read more…

This item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on February 25, 2010.
I generally agree with J.P. Green’s take on today’s health care summit, but would add a couple of points in an effort to answer his question: will this help pass health care reform?
I doubt too many Americans watched the whole seven-hour show, and it’s unclear yet how it will be covered in the MSM (though I’m afraid the Obama-McCain exchange will soak up more attention that it really merited). But certainly the president and congressional Democrats did a good job of trying to explain the fundamentals of health care reform: why the system’s broken; why an individual mandate, subsidies, and regulation of benefit levels are necessary to fix it; and why Republican panaceas such as interstate insurance sales, association health plans, health savings accounts, and state high-risk pools, won’t help and will probably make things worse. Anyone who did watch big chunks of the summit probably understands by now that you can’t just do the easy, popular stuff like banning exclusions of people with pre-existing conditions and let it go with that. You’d guess that a poll of people watching would rate the Democratic approach to health care reform as far superior to that of Republicans, and perhaps that impression will spread or seep through the media coverage.
The harder question is how the summit affects public opinion on the very key question of what comes next. From the president on down, Democrats frequently said there were many areas of fundamental bipartisan agreement, and Republicans frequently said it’s time to start over and work on a bipartisan plan. You could listen to all that talk and conclude it’s time for a new round of negotiations based on “common ground.” If you listened more closely, you’d more likely conclude that Republicans object to the basic design of any plausible comprehensive health care reform initiative, and that “common ground” is confined to some broad goals that have never been in doubt, and to some details that could theoretically still be addressed, but that aren’t game-changers for anybody. Any time Republicans seemed to sound too agreeable or friendly towards the president, one of their leaders (most notably House Minority Leader John Boehner) would reset the mood with some hammer-headed comments on “government takeover of health care ” or “abortion subsidies,” as though to remind all attendees that this is essentially an exercise in political theater.
The President’s concluding comments indicated that he wanted to let the summitry marinate for a while, and see if some new progress could be made within four or six weeks. But at that point, he made clear, it would be time to act, which means the House passing the Senate bill and then the Senate and House enacting what would normally be a conference committee report via reconciliation (which, as Democrats kept explaining today, is hardly an unusual procedure for major legislation). If, as appears most likely, Republicans simply retreat to their “start over” demand, you can expect Obama to unilaterally endorse a few more of “their” ideas (perhaps a stronger interstate sales provision with stronger federal regulation, or something more tangible on medical malpractice reform than grants to states, or maybe one of Tom Coburn’s fraud prevention or chronic disease management concepts), and then let the public decide who’s been reasonable. Since it would have probably taken that long to work out differences among House and Senate Democrats anyway, nothing much will be lost by this kind of delay, and perhaps the summit will have somewhat disrupted the conservative demonization campaign over the entire legislation.
At the very least, opponents of health care reform can no longer credibly complain that they haven’t been given a fair hearing for their “ideas” and their point of view. And Democrats have been given, and have largely taken advantage of, a fresh opportunity to get back to the basic arguments for health care reform.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic, where it appeared on February 21, 2010.
Because Congress failed to adopt a bipartisan deficit commission on its own, President Obama created one through executive order on Thursday. This comes as a disappointment to members of both parties who had endorsed the Conrad-Gregg bill: that proposal would have forced the Congress to vote on the commission’s recommendations, while the administration’s initiative does not.
The failure of Conrad-Gregg was surprising as well as troubling. By last December, the bill had garnered almost three dozen cosponsors across party lines and seemed to be gaining momentum. Although Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell had not formally signed on, he had made a number of favorable public statements. (Last May, for example, he proclaimed on the Senate floor that the Conrad-Gregg proposal was “the best way to address the crisis” and that it “would provide an expedited pathway for fixing these profound long-term challenges.”) And just days before the vote, President Obama endorsed the bill.
But it wasn’t enough. On January 26, the bill went down to defeat: 53 senators voted in favor, but it needed 60 to pass. Democrats assembled a solid majority of 37 votes, while Republicans could muster only 16. As has been widely reported, seven of the bill’s Republican cosponsors ended up voting against it; had they remained resolute, it would have passed. Reversing his earlier position, the minority leader also voted against the bill.
So what happened between December and January? Put simply, the forces within the conservative movement who oppose any and all tax increases mobilized against legislation that might have produced the long-sought grand bargain—significant entitlement reform coupled with additional revenues.
On December 9, Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform sent a letter to Conrad and Gregg expressing his opposition to their proposal. “Despite the appearance of protection for taxpayers,” he wrote, “this commission would guarantee a net tax increase. … In order to make this commission acceptable from a taxpayer perspective, language must be included that explicitly removes tax increases and/or new taxes from commission consideration.” The substantial anti-tax coalition Norquist leads then swung into action with a steady drumbeat of op-eds and open letters to elected officials.
Even more significant was a lead editorial in The Wall Street Journal on December 29. After issuing a thinly veiled warning to Republicans who might go along with the plan and denouncing past bipartisan efforts–including the 1983 Greenspan Social Security commission and the 1990 Andrews Air Force Base summit–the Journal launched a preemptive strike against the kind of deal it feared a Conrad-Gregg commission would reach: “Democrats would agree to means-test entitlements, which means that middle and upper-middle class (i.e., GOP) voters would get less than they were promised in return for a lifetime of payroll taxes. … In return, Republicans would agree to an increase in the top income tax rate to as high as 49% and in addition to a new energy tax, a stock transaction tax, or value added tax. The Indians got a better deal for selling Manhattan.”
In short, the Journal opposed not only new taxes, but also progressivity in spending cuts. The only remaining alternatives to national bankruptcy (although the editorial writer wasn’t candid enough to say so) are draconian cuts imposed on those Americans who can least endure them.
In the few weeks following the editorial, the intensifying pressure proved too much for many Republicans. The seven Conrad-Gregg deserters included Robert Bennett, Kay Bailey Hutchison, and John McCain, all of whom are embroiled in tough primary campaigns, along with Sam Brownback, who’s running for governor of Kansas, and John Ensign, who’s already in more than enough trouble.
Also of interest is the roster of 16 Republicans who stood up to the pressure and held their ground. In addition to four senators who are retiring and have little to lose, the honor roll includes a dozen who will have to answer to the forces that Norquist and the Journal represent: Lamar Alexander, Saxby Chambliss, Susan Collins, Bob Corker, John Cornyn, Mike Enzi, Lindsey Graham, Johnny Isakson, Mike Johanns, Dick Lugar, David Vitter, and Roger Wicker. (Olympia Snowe is conspicuous by her absence, yet another in a lengthening list of disappointing performances.) Whatever their substantive views on fiscal policy, these are public servants who at least take the responsibility of governance seriously and understand that no single party—whether today’s Democratic majority or a possible future Republican majority—can discharge this responsibility on its own.
And that’s the issue: Will the Republican party remain beholden to the forces that Grover Norquist and The Wall Street Journal represent? Does the party just want to mobilize popular grievances in the effort to regain power, or is it willing to help govern our country and address its mounting problems? Beyond undermining campaign finance legislation, Mitch McConnell is interested in only one thing—winning elections—an outlook apparently shared by two-thirds of his colleagues. The question is whether the minority of the minority party can ever get together with the majority of the majority to find real solutions—and then level with the people about what these solutions will mean. The alternative to a new governing coalition is the intensification both of our problems and of public contempt for its elected representatives.

This item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on February 18, 2010.
When political observers start comparing Republican prospects in 2010 to those of 1994, they really ought to spend more time consulting people who were, you know, sort of there in 1994. TDS Co-Editor Stan Greenberg certainly was, and in a new piece for The New Republic, he provides some important advice on how Democrats can avoid a repeat performance later this year.
Greenberg sees a lot of the same warning signs: a president struggling to get his agenda enacted; Democratic divisions and discouragement; Republican intransigence and excitement. But he also notes there was a lot more going on in 1994 than Clinton’s struggles on the health reform front, the subject of so many 1994-2010 comparisons:

At about this stage in the electoral cycle, in midwinter, we were feeling pretty satisfied with ourselves. The State of the Union address on January 25 hailed the previous year’s passage of the Clinton economic plan, nafta, and the Brady Bill. Health care reform was still supported by half the country. Clinton’s approval rating stood at 58 percent.
Then, it all went tragically and almost comically downhill. The State of the Union glow was blotted out by a media frenzy when a special prosecutor subpoenaed White House officials to testify before a grand jury on the Whitewater land deal–and the president was forced to defend his wife’s honor at a prime time press conference. The president’s job approval plummeted eight points–and support for health care dropped ten. Paula Jones kicked off May with her sexual harassment suit. And, by the June publication of Bob Woodward’s The Agenda–and his characterization of the Clinton White House in a word, “chaos”–the president’s approval had fallen to 45 percent.

Moreover, the health reform debacle was not the abiding reminder of Democratic disarray going into the 1994 elections: it was the omnibus crime bill.

With the Congressional Black Caucus rebelling against the bill’s death-penalty provisions and the conservative Democrats standing against its assault-weapons ban, the popular measure was defeated just before the August recess–only three months before the election. Reporters battled to capture their own astonishment. USA Today called it a “shocking” loss that “plunged” the White House to what could be “its worst political defeat.” In a hoarse voice, the president gathered reporters and upbraided his congressional opponents and vowed to “fight and fight and fight until we win.” After a frantic ten days of campaigning against Congress, followed by high-wire negotiations, he finally won the vote on a Sunday night.
Clinton’s approval fell to 39 percent after this fiasco–which voters interpreted as further evidence of Democratic incompetence and fractiousness. Congress’s approval plunged, and voters warmed to the Republicans, who had moved to about a four-point advantage in party sentiment.

That points up the single largest difference between 1994 and present circumstances, says Greenberg, is that Democratic weakness in the former year led directly to Republican strength. It’s not so clear that’s happening today:

Unlike the party of Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole, which gained standing with each battle with Bill Clinton, today’s Republican Party looks like a cult. During the 2008 campaign, the Republican Party fell to its lowest level in the history of our thermometers measuring the party’s popularity, and it has not improved its standing since Election Day. The Republicans’ widely held conviction that Obama has a hidden “socialist” agenda, and the ascendancy of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck as ideological spokespeople, indelibly defines the party. At the same time, Tea Party candidates are contesting mainstream Republicans in primaries–dividing their base.

This provides a potential opening for Democrats if they get their act together and congressional Democrats behave responsibly. Even in 1994, says Greenberg, he urged the White House to attack the GOP’s Contract With America as promising a return to unpopular Reagan policies. But Clinton, who was by then listening closely to Dick Morris, refused to do so. It doesn’t have to be that way in 2010:

Put aside the rancor and gridlock and show a very different face. Take Paul Krugman’s advice and quickly pass a version of the Senate health care bill. That will raise presidential and congressional approval ratings, just as Clinton bucked up Democrats by passing nafta and tax increases for deficit reduction–neither of which were popular at the time.
They must put the Republicans on the defensive. Make them an offer they can’t refuse on bipartisan legislation they dare not oppose–jobs measures that help small businesses and energy-independence legislation. Then, force Republicans to cast tough and defining votes–on Wall Street bonuses and bailouts and limiting corporate spending on elections….
Most importantly, Democrats must explain this election’s stakes and frame the choice that voters face. This is something we failed to get right in 1994. In the summer before the election, we began to see some power in a populist narrative–“[A] president trying to make a better life for ordinary people against Republicans who favor the wealthy and hurt the middle class.” But we could not define this choice in a way that similarly helped congressional Democrats.

There’s a lot more time in 2010 for Democrats to recover from their troubles, with the important exception that they need at least a little help from economic indicators. Democrats really didn’t know what hit them in 1994. This time around, says Greenberg:

Democrats have already lived through their legislative nightmare. We have already had the benefit of Massachusetts to concentrate the mind. And, just as valuable, we have the lessons of history to guide our course.