New York Times columnist Ross Douthat penned a thumb-sucker yesterday about the terrrible disappointment, occasionally spilling over into rage and despair, with Barack Obama among liberals. Here’s the nut graph:

American liberalism has always had a reputation for fractiousness and frantic self-critique. But even by those standards, the current bout of anguish over the Obama presidency seems bizarrely disproportionate.

Sure, Douthat has some scattered examples of said anguish. But when you are characterizing the attitudes of those sharing a major ideological self-identification, a bit more precision is in order. And a look at Gallup’s tracking poll at Obama’s approval ratings among liberals and Liberal Democrats makes Douthat’s dark meditation on liberal angst look a bit ridiculous.
According to the latest Gallup survey, 79% of “liberals” approve of Obama’s job performance, compared to 78% month ago, 78% two months ago, 76% three months ago, and a bit over 80% during 2009. If his liberal support has collapsed in “angst,” it’s pretty much hidden in the numbers. And since Douthat’s hinting at some terrible intraparty struggle-for-the-soul-of-the-donkey, it’s worth noting that a reasonably robust 90% of “liberal Democrats” currently approve of the job Obama’s doing, which is well above his average for 2010 and exactly where he stood last Labor Day.
Sure, you can find elite opinion on the Left that’s been souring on Obama steadily as we head towards the midterm elections. But it’s a useful reality check to note that when it comes to actual voting Americans of the liberal persuasion, if there’s any “agony” over Obama, it is mostly derived from anger at the president’s opponents.

As we slog through the shank of 2010 primary season, it should be reasonably obvious to anyone thinking about it that the two major political parties have limited control over the candidate slates they will offer to voters in November. Aside from the anti-establishment mood that is making many GOP (and some Democratic) primary voters react to the Party Label like a red flag, all sorts of factors of ideology, candidate attractiveness, and most of all, money come into crucial play.
But the habit of treating political parties as omipotent agents of their own destiny can be strong, viz. this comment nestled in an ABC story on the campaigns of California Republicans Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina:

“The national GOP wants to make California competitive again, and I think they have decided it’s not just a state they should cede to the Democrats,” says Lara Brown, an assistant professor of political science at Villanova University in Pennsylvania . “Under Howard Dean, the Democratic party adopted a 50-state strategy saying the way to build the party back was to get great candidates no matter what,” she says. “Meg and Carly are part of the same idea by the GOP and are helping even more because they have their own money and the party doesn’t have to invest in them.”

Not to single out Brown for a Copernican Revolution, but she’s got it backwards: Whitman and Fiorina picked the GOP, not vice versa. Meg Whitman’s 80 million smackers in pre-primary spending would have almost certainly won her the GOP gubernatorial nomination even if she had been someone totally different in gender, background and (within the narrow bounds of GOP acceptability) ideology. And if “the national GOP” were truly focused on the “idea” of being as competitive as possible in California, “it” would have probably been wearing a Tom Campbell button on June 8, not backing Carly Fiorina, whose positions on abortion and immigration (not to mention her record as CEO of Hewlett-Packard) could be problematic in the general election campaign.
The essence of party strategy is to develop an infrastructure and a message that is compatible with a broad swath of candidates. That does not include pretending the party chose them from the get-go.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Earth to House Democrats: It’s time to push the panic button. But don’t take my word for it; consider the evidence.
Exhibit A: One of the country’s savviest political scientists, Emory’s Alan Abramowitz, has just published an analysis that says the GOP will pick up 39 seats in the House this November. On the good news side for Democrats, Abramowitz finds more safe seats this year than in 1994 (145 versus 114) and fewer that are marginal (42 versus 55) or that lean Republican (69 versus 87). And there are only 15 open seats this year in Republican-leaning districts, versus 24 in 1994. On this basis he concludes that a Republican tide as strong as it was in 1994 would yield fewer losses for Democrats, but still enough to lose their majority by the narrowest of margins.
Exhibit B: Another of the country’s most experienced survey researchers, Stan Greenberg, who’s hardly unsympathetic to the Democratic cause, has just come out with the most discouraging survey Democrats have seen since, well, his 1994 surveys. He surveyed 1,200 likely voters in the 60 most competitive Democrat-held districts and ten most competitive Republican-held districts. In Tier 1 (the 30 most vulnerable Democratic districts), Democrats trailed by 48 to 39 overall. In Tier 2 (the 30 next most vulnerable districts), they trailed by 47 to 45. And in the contestable Republican districts, they trailed 53 to 39.
A closer look at the data helps explain these results. In the 70 battleground districts, likely voters are much more likely to believe that the country is on the wrong track than are voters nationally. Fully 49 percent in Tier 1 and 46 percent in Tier 2 self-identify as conservatives, and Obama’s approval stands at only 40 percent in both tiers. By 59 to 35 in Tier 1 and 56 to 39 in Tier 2, voters endorse the proposition that “President Obama’s economic policies have run up a record federal deficit while failing to end the recession or slow the record pace of job losses.” (They still blame Bush more than Obama for the state of the economy, however.) In the 60 Democratic districts, only 37 percent of Democrats say that they are very enthusiastic about voting in this year’s election, versus 62 percent for Republicans. While a surge among independents boosted Democrats in 2006 and 2008, this year that key group is breaking for Republicans 50 to 29 in Tier 1 and 51 to 34 in Tier 2. And most discouraging of all for Democrats: Greenberg tested a number of different themes and arguments Democrats might use against Republicans this fall, and not one worked well enough to turn the tide.
Exhibit C: In a survey out earlier this week, Gallup researchers looked at the voters’ broad assessment of the major political parties. They asked (as they have done from time to time), “In general, do you think the political views of the Democratic Party are too conservative, too liberal, or about right?” In 2008, 50 percent said “about right” versus 39 percent “too liberal.” Today, the reverse is the case: 49 percent say “too liberal” and only 38 percent “about right.” During that same period, the share of the electorate assessing Republicans as too conservative has fallen from 43 to 40 percent, while the share seeing them as about right has risen from 38 to 41 percent. Among independents, the share seeing Democrats as too liberal has risen from 40 to 52 percent, versus a decrease from 43 to only 33 percent seeing them as about right.
Democrats must face the fact that much of the legislation that seems both necessary and proper to them looks quite different to the portion of the electorate that holds the balance of political power. And they must face a choice as well–between (to be blunt) the politics of conviction and the politics of self-preservation. They can continue on as they have been going since January 2009, or they can adopt a concerted strategy designed to take the edge off public anger and reduce their losses. They can spend the summer arguing about matters like immigration, climate change, and the war in Afghanistan, all of which are valid and important but way down on the public’s list of the most urgent problems–or they can refocus on jobs and the economy, reinforcing the “Recovery Summer” theme the White House unveiled on Thursday.
It’s too late to enact legislation that will actually affect the economy’s performance between now and November, but it may not be too late for Democrats to better align their agenda with the public’s economic concerns. And they could get lucky: The four remaining employment reports between now and the election might show accelerating job creation in the private sector and a more rapid decline in unemployment than we have seen thus far. That would give embattled incumbents the chance to argue–more credibly than they can now–that we’re on the right track and shouldn’t turn back.
On the other hand, it’s entirely possible that none of this matters now, that the voters likely to turn out this fall have already concluded that with one-party control of the legislative and executive branches, Democrats will continue to take the country further to the left than the majority of the electorate would like. If so, Democrats should probably prepare themselves for the two words they dread the most–“Speaker Boehner.”

If Rep. Joe Barton was entertaining any fantasies that his apology to BP for the government “shakedown” of the oil company in the form of the $20 billion compensation fund had any support among the public, he will be sorely disappointed by the most recent public opinion data. According to TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira’s latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot” at the Center for American Progress web pages, the compensation fund is extremely popular:

…That’s not the way the public feels about this new fund. They approve of it by an overwhelming 82-18 margin in a new CNN poll.

By an even larger margin, notes Teixeira, the public wants BP to fund and carry out corrective action to end the spill as the company’s highest priority:

Nor does the public seem very conflicted about how compensation funds and cleanup efforts may interfere with BP’s profitability–a concern that has been raised by many conservatives. In the same poll, 92 percent think BP’s top priority should be cleaning up the oil spill and paying for the damage it has caused rather than protecting the interests of its investors and employees by continuing to make profits.

The data ought to convince even BP CEO Tony Hayward and Rep. Barton that they have one course of action, as Teixeira says: it’s “Time for BP to pay up, clean up, and quit complaining.”

The bumper sticker above says it well, Big Oil’s Republican toady in the House of Reps could well become the next chairman of the House Committee charged with preventing horrific oil spills. Rep. Barton’s groveling was disgusting enough, punctuated as it was by his ridiculous retraction, which should indicate to his alert constituents that his principles are somewhat flaccid, to put it charitably. According to OpenSecrets.org, Barton received more dough from Oil and gas companies during the entire 1989-2010 election cycle than all other members of the House of Reps. (For an amusing graphic take on the sorry episode, check out Mike Luckovitch’s cartoon here).
In my decades of watching party politics, I don’t recall a more emblematic moment for the GOP. This is who they too often are — groveling lackeys for Big Oil in particular and Big Business in general, even though it insults the families of the workers who were killed in the Deepwater Horizon tragedy, the thousands who have lost their livelihood and turns a blind eye toward the massive destruction of wildlife and our natural heritage. That they tried to wash it away with a half-assed apology was predictable. Most Republicans are pretty clever about hiding their worst impulses, when corporate abuse becomes a major controversy — we don’t hear much from Dick Cheney, for example, on this topic. But every now and then the cover is inadvertently lifted.
Barton may get re-elected despite his screw-up, and he may or may not be removed from his ranking position as chair-in-waiting of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. But If thoughtful voters, not just in Barton’s district, but in every House district in the U.S., needed a clinching argument to vote Democratic in November, Barton has provided it.

A debate among Republican gubernatorial candidates in Georgia this week illustrated just how far the GOP (particularly in the South) has drifted from the impulse that led George W. Bush and John McCain to support comprehensive immigration reform back in the day. Now it’s all about deporting the undocumented pronto, and the only difference of opinion is over how many public employees need to spend their time in the dragnet for illegals.
According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Jim Galloway, Candidate Eric Johnson, who’s struggling to land a runoff spot, came out for requring both teachers and hospital employees to verify the citizenship status of their patrons. Candidate Nathal Deal professed frustration that few cops in Georgia viewed themselves as immigration enforcement officers, but did draw the line at teachers being enrolled in the chore.
All the GOP candidates, of course, supported the idea of Georgia enacting a law like Arizona’s; this is a position that’s becoming as much a litmus test for southern Republicans as attacking unions. That will become significant nationally in 2012 when the Republican presidential nomination contest moves south.

As the bumper sticker up in the Noteworthy box indicates, something pretty remarkable happened yesterday: the House GOP’s leader on energy policy, Rep. Joe Barton of Texas, publicly apologized to BP’s CEO for the terrible treatment he’s been receiving from the Obama administration. Barton was particularly aggrieved by the “shakedown” that convinced BP to devote so much of its hard-earned profits to relief and restitution for affected Gulf residents.
Jonathan Allen and Jake Sherman of Politico summed up the political impact of Barton’s act of fealty to Big Oil quite well:

It would have been bad enough for the GOP if a backbencher had accidentally strayed wildly off message, but Barton, the top Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, is the face of the party on energy policy — and his comments were intentional. So rather than talking about BP’s culpability and the Obama administration’s response, Washington was fixated on a Texas Republican’s seemingly tone-deaf comments.

It appears that Barton was literally dragged into a back room and ordered to retract his apology to BP by House GOP leaders, which, of course, ensured that people who hadn’t heard about the original brouhaha were informed of it. What would be really interesting, however, is to know how many GOP solons privately agreed with Barton’s original comments, and symphathize with BP’s plight as it is demonized by the socialist bully Barack Obama.

If, as appears likely, cap-and-trade legislation is not going to be enacted this year or any other time soon, it represents more than a setback for the Obama administration (or for the environment). It’s also another blow to the high concept of using market mechanisms rather than direct government control to address major public policy challenges.
Cap-and-trade was originally designed, after all, as an alternative to command-and-control environmental regulations, which is why it was once championed by Republicans, particularly during and after its successful use in reducing acid rain in the 1990s.
But as the New York Times‘ David Leonhardt (with an exclamation point from Jonathan Chait) explained this week, Republicans have abandoned cap-and-trade just when it might be most useful, with some former advocates, ironically, embracing command-and-control:

[T]he great economic strength of market systems like cap and trade also happens to be their political weakness. They set prices and allow people to react. In the process, market systems acknowledge that reducing pollution may actually cost a little bit of money.
Politicians don’t like to admit this, because voters don’t like it. Accepting higher costs is especially hard when the economy is weak. So Congressional Democrats have been repackaging their energy bills to make them look less and less market-oriented. Senator John McCain, who supported a permit system for carbon as the Republican presidential nominee, no longer does. Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, has reversed his position as well.
What does Mr. Graham now favor? A series of command-and-control regulations. He has introduced a bill with Senator Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican, that would mandate specific standards for cars, trucks, homes and offices. It would also give the energy secretary the power to award loans to companies he thought could do a good job of setting up programs to retrofit buildings. State officials would do the same for factories. The bill, in short, puts more faith in government than the market.

Leonhardt clearly believes that the transparency of cap-and-trade when it comes to costs is its major political flaw. That’s definitely a factor, but I’d argue that something more fundamental is going on. Once Democrats embraced cap-and-trade, Republicans began retreating from it as a simple matter of politics. And this distancing effort has been immensely reinforced by the rightward trend in the GOP during the last few years, in which leaders who simply denied there was any climate change problem, and/or that government had any useful role to play on the issue, have been in the ascendancy. So “cap-and-tax” was demonized and essentially placed off limits for Republican politicians, to the point where those like Lindsay Graham and Dick Lugar who weren’t quite in the “denialist” camp found it easier to just support direct federal regulation.
We saw a similar dynamic play out on health reform, where a market-based managed competition model long supported by Republicans, and championed quite recently by Mitt Romney, became toxic the moment it was fully advanced by Barack Obama. And even as they savaged ObamaCare as “socialized medicine,” Republicans saw little irony in posing as last-ditch defenders of Medicare, a relic of an earlier Democratic drive for a government-run single-payer system.
On both health care and climate change, it’s not surprising that many progressives are impatient with Obama’s determination to promote market-based approaches that the supposed party of market-based policy, the GOP, will no longer support. But nobody should for a moment mistake the identity of the prime mover in shifting the political ground away from the once-promising “centrist” convergence on using market mechanisms to address public sector challenges. The GOP could have declared partial victory and celebrated the Democratic Party’s abandonment of big government solutions, and then fought it out over the details. Instead, Republicans have burned down every structure on the potential common ground that Americans seem to crave. They may be able to succeed for a while in opportunistically deploring the inability of Democrats to get anything done. But if and when Republicans regain power, they may well discover that the GOP policy arsenal has been emptied by their own hands.

As President Obama struggles though a host of problems, from the Gulf oil spill to the refusal of the Senate to support a new jobs bill or a cap-and-trade system, you can hear Republicans repeating a strange refrain that first became prominent in their rhetoric during the health reform fight: this president is arrogant and perhaps even tyrannical for trying to enact the policy agenda that he campaigned on in 2008 in the teeth of Republican and (in some cases) popular opposition.
Jay Cost of RealClearPolitics has been particularly insistent on this line of argument, with “bully” being the latest unlikely epithet employed to attack this embattled president:

For somebody who seems detached from the details of policy and largely uninterested in legislative wrangling, Barack Obama sure does come across sometimes like a political bully. But this is not bullying some obstinate backbench legislator. Instead, this is bullying the American people. With health care reform, he basically told the country that he didn’t care what it thought. The fact that people opposed the bill was proof they didn’t know what they were talking about. Now, apparently, the evolving strategy on energy is the same. Don’t like cap-and-trade? That’s your problem, not his. Plan to vote out Democrats in favor of the idea? Like he cares. He’ll pass it anyway….
Instead of passing unpopular bills through questionable methods over the opposition of the people, maybe the President should get behind proposals that can actually sustain popular support.

Okay, fine, let’s say that Obama should ignore the fact that he was elected on a platform to do all these outrageous things that Jay Cost objects to, and go with the polls which make 2010 “likely voters” the arbiters of what he should do right now. What are those “proposals” the president should “get behind” that “can actually sustain popular support?”
Should he, as he has often been urged by Republicans, forget about “irrelevant” issues like health care costs or climate change and focus strictly on the economy? Let’s say he should; what, specifically, can he do that Republicans in Congress won’t fight tooth and nail? Best I can tell, the GOP’s “strategy” for improving the economy is to slash upper-end taxes while eliminating deficits and debts. This cannot, unfortunately, be done without radical reductions in defense spending Republicans do not, by and large, support, or alternatively, big changes in Social Security and Medicare that the public is certain to reject by much bigger margins than health reform or cap-and-trade.
The dirty little secret of Washington right now is that the policies Republicans would follow if they were running things are considerably less popular than those being promoted by Democrats, and as the events of the last year have graphically demonstrated, there is no “half-loaf” compromise approach on major issues that Obama can take that Republicans will accept. So Obama can do what he’s doing, or do nothing. If he’s a “bully” for rejecting complete inaction, then bully for him.

As we await the next step on energy legislation in the Senate, Ezra Klein makes an extremely important if fairly obvious point about the Obama administration’s apparent determination to get something passed even if it doesn’t include a cap-and-trade system or some equivalent carbon pricing mechanism. If the Senate won’t pass such provisions now, it won’t pass them later, either:

There’s nothing magic about [a House-Senate] conference that allows controversial policies that couldn’t pass the Senate the first time around to pass on the second go. The advantage of a conference report is that it can’t be amended, which means you might be able to sneak in some small concessions to the House that aren’t important enough for anyone to sink the whole bill over. But it can be filibustered. So if you add anything major to the bill that would’ve killed it on the pre-conference vote, it’s a good bet that it’ll kill it on the post-conference vote as well.
Carbon pricing almost certainly falls into that category. It’s not a side policy or a bit of pork. It’s the core of a climate bill. If it doesn’t pass in the original Senate bill, that’s because it can’t pass the Senate. Adding it in during conference won’t change that. It’ll just mean the conference report can’t pass the Senate, either. I can’t see any permutation of this in which a conference strategy for carbon pricing makes any sense.

This doesn’t, of course, mean that Congress can’t pass worthwhile energy legislation this year. But it’s not going to magically become a real climate change bill somewhere down the road, particularly with Republicans now monolithically opposing a cap-and-trade approach they once championed.
It’s fine to wheel and deal on legislation, but sometimes the only deal available is one that turns the wheel to an entirely different outcome. That’s probably where things are headed on energy this year.