Steven Hill’s TomPaine.com article “10 Steps to Better Elections: Our electoral system is in tatters. Here’s what we can do to fix it,” offers a 10-point agenda for electoral reform that would not only make America’s elections more fair and just, but also produce more Democratic victories. Most of Hill’s proposals have been suggested before, such as automatic registration, free air time for candidates, weekend voting and abolishing the electoral college. Hill, author of Fixing Elections: The Failure of America’s Winner-Take-All Politics, also calls for nonpartisan administration of elections, a verified paper trail behind every ballot and a constitutional amendment guaranteeing full voting rights to every citizen (including prisoners and residents of the District of Columbia). Hill’s more controversial reforms include having voters rank their choices, instead of picking one and creating multi-member districts, both of which have been successful in some localities.
It looks doubtful that any reforms requiring action by Congress could be passed before ’06, given the reluctance of the Republican majorities to do anything to expand voting rights. However, some of Hill’s proposals could be enacted at the state and local level, in places where where Republicans don’t have the strength to stop needed reforms. For example, reforms to enfranchise felons, or at least those who have served their time and/or those who have only one felony conviction, have recently attracted some bipartisan support and could possibly be passed in some states before ’06. Had such a law been in place in Florida in 2000, for example, America would have almost certainly been spared the current Bush presidency.

Did Bush thrill the nation with his bold proposals in last Thursday’s press conference and thereby turn around his flagging political fortunes?
Not on the evidence of the two public polls that have been released since the press conference. Consider first the results of the latest Gallup poll.
1. The poll found Bush’s overall approval rating unchanged from Gallup’s previous poll at 48 percent approval/49 percent disapproval. His rating on Social Security was also essentially unchannged at 35/58. His rating on the economy was up slightly to 43/53 and his rating on Iraq was down slightly to 42/55.
His ratings on energy policy (34/52) and gas prices (27/67) brought up the rear.
2. On Social Security, the Gallup data show that people are still not chafing at the bit for immediate action of Social Security. A majority (52 percent) feel that major changes are necessary only within ten years (36 percent) or not at all (16 percent), rather than in the next year or two (45 percent). Moreover, only 27 percent say that Congress should pass the Social Security plan this year most Republicans support, compared to 66 percent who say Congress should either pass a Democratic plan (22 percent) or not pass a plan at all this year (46 percent).
A generic question about private accounts that neither mentions Bush nor any possible tradeoffs of such accounts–thereby tending to produce a relatively positive response–nevertheless generates 52-45 opposition, worse than the 47-45 opposition in the middle of March, near the beginning of Bush’s 60 day Social Security tour.
And Bush’s specific proposal for cutting benefits for the middle and upper class, but not the poor, receives 54-38 opposition, similar to the 53-38 majority that believes Bush’s Social Security proposals will but cut, rather than protect, their Social Security benefits.
Finally, at end of Bush’s 60 day tour, the public continues to trust the Democratic party over the Republican party on the issue of Social Security retirement benefits. A 10 point gap in favor of the Democrats has not budged over that time period.
3. On Iraq, as noted below, 57 percent now believe going to war was not worth it, compared to 41 percent who believe it was. That’s the most negative response Gallup has yet received on this indicator.
4. On the filibuster issue, the public backs the the use of the filibuster in the Senate by 52-40. And they say they back the Democrats over the Republicans in the Senate by 45-36 on this issue.
The news for Bush in the new Hotline/Westhill Partners poll is, if anything, even worse.
1. Bush’s overall approval rating (48/48) is up slightly, as is his rating on Social Security (all the way to 34/56!); his rating on the economy is down slightly (to 38/57) and his rating on Iraq (41/52) is essentially unchanged.
2. On Social Security, the poll asked respondents how Bush’s proposed changes to Social Security made them feel about their financial security after retirement. Only 9 percent say they feel more secure than a year ago, compared to 39 percent who say they feel less secure and 28 percent who report no change.
I suppose that’s not quite the reaction Bush was looking for.
3. On the economy, there is some particularly bad news for Bush and the GOP. Just 9 percent think most American families are better off financially now than they were a year ago, while half–more than five times as many–believe American families are not as well off. As for their own family, only 19 percent think their family is better off today than it was a year ago, compared to 28 percent who think their family is not as well off and about half (51 percent) who think there’s been no change.
Moreover, over half (51 percent) say they will hold Bush (37 percent) or the Republicans in Congress (14 percent) responsible, rather than the Democrats (14 percent), if the economy remains shaky.
4. On the filibuster, by 53-32, voters say they disapprove of changing Senate rules to take away the filibuster and allow Bush’s judicial nominees to be voted on. And, by 46-35, voters approve of the proposed Senate Democratic slowdown if the filibuster is taken away.
Turning the corner? Sounds more like running into a brick wall to me.

“How Low Can He Go?”, our post asked about President Bush’s poll numbers on April 21st. Lower and lower, apparently, according to a new CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll on Bush’s Iraq policy, conducted April 29th-May 1st. The percentage of Americans who disapprove of “the way George Bush is handling the situation in Iraq” increased one point over the previous CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll to 55. Those who think “it was not worth going to war in Iraq”? Now 57 percent, up 4 percent from the previous poll. How about those who think the war in Iraq is going “moderately badly or very badly”? Now 56 percent, up a whopping 11 percent over the 45 percent who chose these two options in the previous poll.

One of the hardest things to do is to change. That’s why people–and parties–frequently try to avoid it.
That’s a problem because Democrats need to change to take advantage of both their long-term opportunities (as laid out in The Emerging Democratic Majority) and the considerable opening that has been provided in the short-term by Bush’s and the GOP’s recent political missteps. As a number of recent surveys have documented, despite these missteps, Democrats have not generated commensurate political gains and remain bedeviled by public perception that they stand for little and lack clear ideas to deal with the nation’s problems.
Rather than pursue the changes necessary to address this failure, however, much of the Democratic party seems in thrall to one or another of a series of myths about how the Democrats can renew their popular appeal.
The Framing Myth. Associated with Berkeley linguistics professor George Lakoff, the framing approach assures Democrats they need not change what they say, but how they say it–how they “frame” their message. As Josh Green pointed out in his devastating Atlantic piece on Lakoff, this framing is typically a reshuffling of tired old rhetorical cliches and shows no signs of being any more politically effective than the Democrats’ previous unframed appeals.
The Inoculation Myth. One reason John Kerry got the Democratic nomination was that many Democrats thought his Vietnam service would inoculate him against the charge that Democrats were not sufficiently tough to conduct the war on terror. It didn’t work. But many Democrats appear to have concluded in the aftermath of the 2004 election that the solution to the party’s problems is to have more and better inoculation. Let’s act even tougher on national security! And let’s inoculate ourselves on values! And on religion! And on culture!
This seems no more likely to work in 2005 and beyond than it did in 2004. Voters still want to know what Democrats stand for and inoculation, pretty much by definition, cannot provide that.
The Unity Myth. Another approach among Democrats is to insist that little needs to be re-thought–the key is for Democrats to unite around what they already believe. As Mark Schmitt pointed out recently, this approach confuses a desirable kind of unity (partisan unity in action) with an undesirable kind of unity (agreement on program and ideas without vigorous debate and discussion). Democrats need far more debate and discussion about ideas, not far less.
The Mobilization Myth. A hardy perennial in Democratic circles, the mobilization approach insists that Democrats’ problems can be overcome by a sufficiently high level of mobilization among Democrats and Democratic-leaning groups. The fact of the matter is, however, that the Democratic coalition was pretty highly-mobilized in the 2004 election, especially in the battleground states. The fatal problem was that they couldn’t convert the considerable dissatisfaction with Bush among independents and moderates into large enough margins among these groups to win the election. That’s basically the same problem facing Democrats today: how to turn the “Revolt of the Middle” into solid support in the center of the electorate. Mobilization, by definition, can’t solve this problem.
Sorry, Democrats, there’s just no substitute for good ideas and fresh approaches. It’s time to jettison these myths and buckle down to the real work of change–serious change–in what Democrats say to voters.
OK, what should those changes be? Here are some guidelines. Ed Kilgore argues that:

….[W]e need a Reform message and agenda that (a) meshes with our negative critique of GOP misrule; (b) reminds voters who’s in charge in Washington; and (c) reassures voters we aren’t just itching to get back into power and substitute our form of special-interest pandering and fiscal indiscipline for theirs.
….James Carville and Stan Greenberg of Democracy Corps agree with this argument, and in their latest strategy memo, lay out the evidence for it. A Democratic agenda that includes budget reform, lobbying reform, ethics reform, and tax reform, they say, could begin to connect the dots for voters skeptical of both parties and help Democrats finally get some tangible benefits from Republican misery.

Harold Meyerson observes:

….[T]he Democrats have been losing the white working class since 1968. In the eyes of many of those voters, the Democrats became the party of racial preferences, as government became the entity that taxed them in order to give money to blacks. To be sure, Bill Clinton repositioned the party by ending welfare, and won back some of that white working class. And John Kerry did nothing to indicate that he would reverse Clinton’s changes.
But still-running 16 points behind Bush on the economy, among [white] working-class voters? Something-not just Kerry or national security or the values gap or even racial politics-is badly wrong.
What’s disquieting about the Democratic quiet is that it signals a failure to grapple with this most crippling of conundrums. We are all talking about how to inoculate ourselves on cultural and security concerns. But we are not talking about how better to exploit our advantage on the economy. To a considerable degree, that’s because we’ve lost our advantage on the economy, and we don’t know how to get it back or even what to advocate to get it back.

And Noam Scheiber reminds us:

….[W]hat voters mean when they claim that a politician or a party lacks ideas isn’t that they lack specific proposals; it’s that they lack a larger, animating philosophy. John Edwards, for example, leveled a comprehensive critique of this administration–that it was shifting society’s burdens from people who made their living from capital to people who made their living working–that gave individual proposals meaning. Tellingly, most of these proposals lost their resonance once the Kerry campaign appropriated them into its wonkish miasma.

How to put all this together? Tricky! It’ll take some doing and some change on the part of the Democratic party. But, in the end, it’ll be a hell of a lot more rewarding than better framing, more inoculation, unity at all costs and redoubling mobilization efforts. Those may be easier and more familiar paths to take–but they lead to defeat, not victory. Personally, I’m ready to win.

If you haven’t already encountered it, I urge you to take a look at a new study about the values and politics of Generation Y, which may be loosely defined as those born between 1980 and 2000 (though the report really only covers only the adult members of this generation, those currently 18-25 years of age). The report, with the somewhat gimmicky title of “OMG: How Generation Y is Redefining Faith in the iPod Era“, was written by Anna Greenberg and is based on a large-scale survey with oversamples among Jews, blacks, Asians, Hispanics and Muslims, as well as supplementary analyses of Census and other data, all conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner.
Much of the report focuses on the detailed religious and civic attitudes of Gen Y adults and I won’t go into those findings here–read the instructive report to get the full picture. But there are some broader findings in the report that are worth highlighting.
Generation Y is extraordinarily diverse in a race-ethnic sense. Only 61 percent of Geb Y adults are white; 15 percent are black, 4 percent are Asian and 17 percent are Hispanic.
Generation Y is more secular and less Christian. Almost a quarter (23 percent) have no religious preference or are agnostic/atheist, 4 percent are Jewish or Muslim and another 7 percent are other non-Christian; only 62 percent identify themselves with some Christian faith.
Gen Y is at the leading edge of what Chris Bowers has pointed out is an extremely fast-growing demographic: the non-Christian coalition. Between 1990 and 2001, according to CUNY’s American Religious Identification Survey, non-Christians grew by 84 percent (from 20 to 37 million adults), including an astonishing increase of 106 percent (from 14 to 29 million) among seculars.
Generation Y is very liberal on social issues. A majority (53 percent) flat-out support allowing gay marriage. And 63 percent say women shoudl have the legal right to choose an abortion.
Generation Y is unusually liberal in an ideological sense. More Gen Y adults say they are liberal (31 percent) than say they are conservative (30 percent).
Generation Y leans strongly Democratic. Gen Y adults give Democrats an 11 point edge on party ID (39-28).
Of course, there’s no guarantee Gen Y adults will stay as Democratic and liberal as they are now–change is possible (but much less likely after the age of 30 which is not so far away for the leading edge of this generation).
But they’re off to a good start! If Gen Y is the future of American politics, their relatively diverse, secular, liberal and Democratic character can only make those on the center-left smile. And the conservative Establishment in Washington scowl.

A little bit before Bush told everyone that, yes indeed, he did want to cut their guaranteed Social Security benefits, Americans United to Protect Social Security released a Hart Research poll that showed how little progress–negative progress–his 60 day tour to promote privatization had made. How anyone could look at these and similar data and conclude that Bush can turn things around by specifying how much he wants to cut benefits is beyond me.
Here are the key findings from the Hart Research poll:
1. Bush’s approval rating on handling Social Security is now 32 percent, down from 43 percent on February 6.
2. In January, voters opposed Bush’s Social Security proposals by 46-39; today, they oppose them 52-41.
3. The more voters hear about Bush’s Social Security plan, the less (52 percent), rather than more (27 percent), they like it.
4. By 43-19, voters say that, if their Congressional representative voted for Bush’s plan, it would make them less likely, not more likely, to vote for them in the next election.
5. By 51-34, voters believe Bush’s plan would make the Social Security system weaker.
6. By 58-26, they believe Bush has been misleading about his plan, rather than providing a full and accurate description.
7. By 58-32, voters say Democrats are raising legitimate concerns about Bush’s plan, rather than engaging in unfair political attacks.
8. Only 18 percent believe Bush’s plan would mean higher overall Social Security benefits.
9. In January, voters thought Congress should develop a new plan (64 percent), rather than pass the Bush plan (20 percent). Today, they believe the same thing by a bigger margin: 73-16.
10. By 82-16, voters say Congress should wait on changing Social Security and educate the public, rather than make it a priority to change the system this year.
Sounds like good advice. We’ll see if Congress and, especially, George “I’m going to cut your benefits” Bush take it.

That question is explored in depth in an excellent new article by Farhad Manjoo in Salon. Here’s an excerpt, but the whole article is worth reading:

Bush’s second-term agenda was so unapologetically bold — he wanted to privatize Social Security, flatten federal taxes, remake the courts and, on the side, democratize the world — it bordered on the revolutionary. In November, as liberals were sunk in the delirium of defeat, their in boxes buzzing with comic maps dividing North America into the United States of Canada and Jesusland, it seemed that nothing could rein the Republican president in.
Six months later, Bush is the dog that didn’t bite. He approaches the end of the first 100 days of his second term with approval ratings that fall below those of all other reelected presidents in the modern era. Americans aren’t happy with the direction in which the country is heading. They don’t like the economy, and they don’t like the war. They also don’t like Bush’s plans for the nation. If it isn’t already dead, Bush’s signature domestic-policy effort, the plan to privatize Social Security, is in a persistent vegetative state; hated by Democrats, independents and even Republicans, only divine intervention can save it.
Now the question is whether Bush’s sinking popularity — and his desire to stick with the unpopular Social Security plan — will hurt the Republican Party’s agenda over the next two years and beyond. The GOP continues to advocate world-changing plans. Conservatives want to amend the Constitution, alter the Senate’s rules on judicial nominees, and disrupt long-standing fiscal, environmental, global and social norms. At the same time, Bush looks boxed in. There’s no money in the federal till to implement his tax cuts. The military’s stretched too thin for him to invade another country (such as Iran). And the federal courts are holding his social agenda in check.
Some key Republicans are beginning to balk at Bush’s extremism. On questions involving the Social Security plan, or the details of the federal budget, or the confirmation of Bush’s nominees, a few moderate Republicans have begun to go against White House plans. If the American public continues to turn away from Bush, political strategists say, it’s only logical to expect more defections from their Republican representatives on Capitol Hill.

New Gallup data show that the public’s negative views about the economy are only becoming more negative. Here’s the lead paragraph from their report on these data:

The latest Gallup survey finds Americans to be the most pessimistic they have been in two years about where the economy is headed. Today, 61% say the economy is getting worse, while just 31% say better — a net negative 30 percentage points. That is the worst rating since early March 2003 — just prior to the beginning of the war in Iraq — when Americans gave the economy a net negative rating of 44 points, with 67% saying the economy was getting worse and only 23% saying better.

The data in the report also show that independents are particularly pessimistic about economic conditions. Among independents, 78 percent say the economic conditions are only fair or poor, compared to 68 percent among the public as a whole. And independents believe by an incredible 69-22 margin–a net negative 47 points–that the economy is getting worse rather than better.
More raw material for the “revolt of the middle“.

In E.J. Dionne’s column yesterday, “Revolt of the Middle“, he remarked:

…[S]omething important has happened since President Bush’s inauguration. America’s moderates may not be screaming, but they’re in revolt. Many who reluctantly supported the president and the Republicans in 2004 are turning away. The party’s agenda on Social Security, judges and the Terri Schiavo case is out of touch with where moderate voters stand. Worse for Bush and his party, most moderates have a practical, problem-solving view of government and think these issues are far less important than shoring up a shaky economy and improving living standards.
The moderates have rebelled before. This period in American politics is beginning to take on the contours of the years leading up to the 1992 election. That’s when Ross Perot led an uprising of the angry middle and Bill Clinton waged war on the “brain-dead politics of both parties.” Bush’s decision to read the 2004 election as a broad mandate for whatever policies he chose to put forward now looks like a major mistake. In fact, Bush won narrowly in 2004, and he won almost entirely because just enough middle-of-the-road voters decided they trusted him more than they did John Kerry to deal with terrorism.

That seems entirely correct to me. Bush is losing the center of American politics which, as Alan Abramowitz points out in his post on “The New Independent Voter“, leans Democratic to begin with. Bush’s actions seem designed to accentuate those leanings, rather than counter them, and have contributed mightily to his declining political fortunes.
The new Washington Post/ABC News (WP/ABC) poll provides exceptionally clear evidence of these declining fortunes. Bush’s approval rating is now 47 percent approval/50 percent disapproval, as low as it’s even been in this poll. His ratings on the economy and Iraq are, respectively, 40/56 (his second-lowest ever) and 42/57. On energy policy, his rating is 35/54. And on Social Security, his approval rating has sunk to 31/64, by far his worst rating ever.
Other results in the poll underscore how Bush is losing the political fight on Social Security. The WP/ABC poll has asked the following question since 2000:

Would you support or oppose a plan in which people who chose to could invest some of their Social Security contributions in the stock market?

Note how the question does not mention any tradeoffs and does not associate the plan with Bush–both of which tend to depress support for privatization. Indeed, this question has about as favorable a wording for privatization as you are likely to see and has never returned a negative response….until now. But now it yields 51-45 opposition. And when combined with a followup to supporters on whether they would suppport the plan if it “reduced the rate of growth of guaranteed Social Security benefits for future retirees”, opposition skies to an overwhelming 70 percent.
On who the public trusts to do a better job on Social Security, less than a third (32 percent) now say they trust Bush, compared to half who pick the Democrats in Congress. That 18 point gap in trust is by far Bush’s worst performance ever on this indicator.
On Iraq, the public continues to regard the situation with little enthusiasm. By 54-44, they say the war was not worth fighting and, by 58-39, they say the US is bogged down in Iraq.
As for the current brouhaha on ending the filibuster for judicial nominees, the public is overwhelmingly opposed (66-26) to “changing Senate rules to make it easier for the Republicans to confirm Bush’s judicial appointments.” That includes 80 percent opposition among Democrats and 70 percent opposition among independents, demonstrating once again how the GOP’s actions are activating the political center against them.
The poll also demonstrates that Bush and the GOP are not faring well on the values front, supposedly a critical underpinning of their hold on power. Consider these data from the poll:
1. By 63-28, the public supports embryonic stem cell research.
2. By 56-40, the public supports some legal recognition of gay relationships and, by 56-39, they oppose a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, preferring that states make their own laws on gay marriage.
3. By 56-42, the public says abortion should be legal in most or all cases.
4. By 51-47, the public thinks Bush does not share their values and, by 58-40, believes Bush does not “understand the problems of people like you”.
5. And how about this one: by 47-38, the public says that Democrats, not Republicans, better represent their own personal values.
6. Does the public actually believe political leaders should rely on their religious beliefs in making policy decisions? No: by 57-40, they reject that proposition, including by 65-27 among Democrats, by 59-38 among independents and by 58-36 among moderates–once again showing how today’s political center leans very close to the Democrats. Along the same lines, independents (46 percent) and moderates (45 percent) are almost as likely as Democrats (52 percent) to think religious conservatives have too much influence over the Republican party.
The center is there for the taking. When these voters lean Democratic to begin with and are edging close to outright revolt against the way Republicans are currently running the country, Democrats would be foolish to ignore this opportunity. Mobilization is great, but without the center it’s defeatable. With the center, it’s not. Need I say more?

The current debate regarding whether individual pharmacists should have a “right of conscience” to refuse to sell birth control medications has been almost entirely composed of either straightforward arguments in support or opposition to the proposed “right” or the discussion of some compromise position that attempts to bridge the gap between customers’ rights to buy legally prescribed medication and pharmacists’ personal ethical views.
Yet, when one steps back for a moment to look beyond these limited terms of debate, an extraordinary fact quickly becomes apparent — the proposed extensions of earlier “conscience” laws to cover pharmacists are profoundly and, in fact, grotesquely elitist. They actually propose nothing less then endowing a small group of Americans with a special class of new legal rights and privileges regarding moral/religious issues — based essentially on their education — while denying those same rights to everyone else. As a result, the proposed laws are not only basically unconstitutional in intent but also un-American in spirit and contrary to the egalitarian tenets of sincere Christian faith.
To see why this is so, it is only necessary to compare the proposed extension of the “right of conscience” to pharmacists with the purpose of the original “conscience” laws which were designed with doctors and operating room nurses in mind. It was not because doctors or nurses had advanced medical education or knowledge that special provisions were enacted for them, but because the nature of their work might obligate them to personally perform medical procedures they considered immoral, such as abortions or sterilizations, or to personally prescribe and administer abortion-inducing drugs. Granting a doctor or nurse with moral objections to these procedures the legal right to refuse to personally perform them was, as Ellen Goodman noted in a Boston Globe column, both “common decency” and “common sense”.
Pharmacists in contrast, do not personally select medications, prescribe them or administer them. They dispense them in accordance with a doctor’s instructions. Drug store pharmacists may have more specialized education and greater responsibilities then other retail salespeople, but when they package and sell a customer a product they personally consider ethically objectionable their individual moral involvement and responsibility – which is what we are talking about here — is in absolutely no way greater or more direct then that of a ordinary convenience store cashier who sells condoms of which he or she morally disapproves or a supermarket, gas station or 7-11 cashier who sells cigarettes that he or she personally considers addictive and poisonous and therefore deeply immoral on ethical and religious grounds.
This is not an abstract issue. There are tens of thousands of retail sales workers who have lost husbands, wives and parents to lung cancer and who are deeply and sincerely disturbed and saddened every single day of their working lives by the moral implications of selling a product whose destructive long-term effects they know all too well. They feel serious moral guilt about selling cigarettes, but do it simply because it is part of their job.
Thus, any proposed individual “right of conscience” for retail sales employees cannot fairly or reasonably be limited to only the men and women behind the pharmacy counter. The people operating the cash register in the drug store may have less formal education then pharmacists and asking for age ID may be less complex then reviewing dosages and double-checking for allergies or incompatible drugs, but as human beings with personal moral and ethical standards, the cashier and the pharmacist are exactly and precisely equal and any new legal rights of conscience extended to one cannot properly be denied the other without violating the fundamental principle of every Americans’ right to equality before the law.
In order to disguise this uncomfortable fact — one which clearly makes the proposed laws constitutionally flawed — the conservative activists managing the current campaign have resorted to elitist arguments that express a snobbery and contempt for ordinary Americans that can only be described as appalling.
Here, for example, is a statement published in USA Today by the legal council to the Health Care Right of Conscience Project of the Center for Law and Religious Freedom:

Forcing pharmacists to function like supermarket cashiers .will result only in fewer pharmacists for everyone as bright and talented young people decide against entering a profession that treats them like automated medicine dispensers.

The last time I checked my license, the Commonwealth of Virginia stated that I am a professional. That means I have choices.

Some people seem to say that a pharmacist is nothing more then a garbage man, and that’s not what the average pharmacist wants to hear.