The ‘liberal Dems vs. Obama’ storyline has been getting a lot of play lately in punditland, likened to the neocon-tea party split in the GOP. But it’s a simplistic interpretation of what’s really going on in the relationship between the President and progressives in the Democratic Party. Katrina vanden Heuval, editor of The Nation, has a more nuanced explanation in her weekly column in the Washington Post:

There’s a tension between the Obama administration and the progressive movement, but it’s not the one mainstream media have been describing or that the White House seems to perceive….What’s happening on the left isn’t the equivalent of the anti-incumbent anger on the right. Most progressives support Obama and want his agenda to succeed…
At the same time, progressives have come to a realization. What we see, some 500 days into the Obama administration, is a president obstructed by a partisan Republican opposition, powerful entrenched corporate interests, and a minority of corrupt or conservative Democrats. The thinking is that if progressives organize independently and forge smart coalitions, building a mass movement for reform with a moral compass that can transcend left-right divisions, we may be able to push Obama beyond the limits of his own politics, overcome the timid incrementalism of the establishment Democratic Party and counter the forces of money and power that are true obstacles to change. As Arianna Huffington has said, “Hope is not enough. . . . We need a ‘Hope 2.0’ that depends not on what President Obama or other politicians say or do but on what we as progressives do.”

Vanden Heuval goes on to describe the white house overreaction to progressive groups’ support of Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s primary opponent and she offers this clarification:

Actually, the point of the exercise was that those opposing Obama’s reform agenda will not get a free pass. And there will be more efforts like it…This agitating role isn’t a new one for the progressive movement. Progressives organized a remarkable mass movement seeking to stop the Iraq war before it began. They built a counterweight in the blogosphere to challenge the mainstream media and the right. They created the coalition that beat Bush on Social Security. They gave Democrats their voice on Iraq, energy and health care that helped to take back Congress. And they inspired a junior senator from Illinois to think that something was moving with such strength that he might run and win the presidency.

This is what real progressives do. It’s not about sniping at the white house or whining about the President being too cautious. It’s about shifting the debate fulcrum leftward to give the President and Democratic leaders courage and room to move forward toward a more progressive agenda. Astute progressives understand that the President has to contend with powerful conservative forces and institutions that come with the job, just as an astute president understands that the job of the progressives in his base is, paraphrasing FDR, to “make me do it.”
As vanden Heuval says, “It doesn’t matter whether you think Obama has done the best that he can or that he has compromised too easily. What’s important is to alter the balance of power. And that means recruiting and mobilizing to unleash new energy into the debate.”
It’s much like the “creative tension” Martin Luther King, Jr. said was needed to break through the obstructionist status quo and energize the Civil Rights Movement. As vanden Heuval concludes,

…Progressives can help Democrats find the voice they need to avoid debilitating losses this fall…by challenging limits of the current debate…to show working Americans that Democrats are fighting for them…The tension between Obama and the progressive movement isn’t a threat to the president. Rather, it may be needed to save him.

A renewed commitment to this understanding will strengthen the Democratic Party, help cut losses in November and set the stage for victory in 2012.

In my preview of the president’s Oval Office speech on the Gulf oil spill, I ran through the many complex points he needed to make, and then sarcastically mentioned that he had twenty whole minutes to make them all.
Well, he didn’t quite use all twenty minutes, and while he made gestures in the direction of the many points he needed to make, he didn’t seal the deal on most of them. Most particularly, he was very vague about the responsibility of conservatives (most notably the Bush/Cheney administration) for encouraging reckless behavior by oil companies like BP; wasn’t very forthcoming about missteps his own administration might have made in the immediate wake of the disaster; and perfunctory about what he was asking Congress to do on climate change legislation.
In other words, it was one of those performances that probably just confirmed preexisting feelings about the president rather than changing any minds or creating any immediate challenges to his enemies. It did serve as a reminder that even on a bad night Barack Obama is ten times more articulate than his predecessor, but that’s a bar too low, just as the bar set for this particular speech was much too high.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Are the basic premises of our current policy in Afghanistan fatally flawed?
The fact that I feel compelled to pose this question so soon after the completion of President Obama’s painstaking review reflects the mounting evidence that the results of that policy have fallen far short of expectations.
Let’s begin at the beginning, with Marja. The holy trinity of modern counterinsurgency is clear, hold, and build. Coalition forces are stalled at step one. After the initial military thrust, many Taliban fighters, including mid-level commanders, swooped back in to the area to intimidate local inhabitants who might otherwise be inclined to cooperate with the coalition and Afghan government. Many other Afghanis sympathize with the core Taliban message that we intend to occupy their country for the long-term with the aim of imposing alien cultural, religious, and political values. It is hard to see what will tip this stalemate in our favor, even harder to see how we can hand over governance and security function to the Afghans in Marja any time soon. Brigadier General Frederick Hodges, one of the leading commanders in southern Afghanistan, puts it this way: “You’ve got to have the governance part ready to go. We talked about doing that in Marja but didn’t realize how hard it was to do. Ultimately, it’s up to the Afghans to step forward.” It’s clear that Hodges is not holding his breath.
The next shoe to drop was Kandahar. Ever since this Taliban stronghold was identified as a key target, the tension between the U.S. and Afghan governments on this issue has been palpable–so much so that the coalition is now hesitant to call what it has in mind an “offensive.” Just last week, we learned that the operation scheduled to begin in the spring would fall even farther behind schedule. As The New York Times reports, “The Afghan government has not produced the civilian leadership and trained security forces it was to contribute to the effort, U.S. officials said, and the support from Kandaharis that the United States was counting on Karzai to deliver has not materialized.” Stanley McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, has been admirably frank about a core difficulty: the residents of Kandahar are far from sure that they want the protection we claim to be offering them.
On to Kabul, where President Karzai has reportedly lost faith in the coalition’s ability (and that of his own government) to defeat the Taliban and is secretly maneuvering to strike a separate deal with them. If these reports are correct–and Susan Rice, our UN ambassador, disputed them on Sunday (though, notably, she offered no new evidence in support of her assertion that Karzai remains a committed partner)–two events appear to be fueling his growing disenchantment: senior American officials’ claims that his reelection lacked legitimacy, and President Obama’s December announcement that he intended to begin reducing the number of American troops by July 2011.
One might be tempted to chalk up the extent of our difficulties in Afghanistan to tendentious reporting. I was skeptical myself–that is, until I stumbled across a stunning NATO/ISAF report completed in March. This report summarizes the results of an in-depth survey conducted in nine of the 16 districts in Kandahar Province to which researchers could safely gain access. Here are some of the findings:
· Security is viewed everywhere as a major problem. When asked to name the top dangers experienced while traveling on the roads, far more respondents named Afghan National Army and Police checkpoints than roadside bombs, Taliban checkpoints, or criminals. And the Taliban were rated better than ISAF convoys and checkpoints as well.
· Corruption is viewed as a widespread problem and is experienced by respondents on a regular basis. In fact, 84 percent say that corruption is the main reason for the current conflict. Corruption erodes confidence in the Afghan government, and fully two-thirds of respondents believe that this corruption forces them to seek alternatives to government services and authority. Chillingly, 53 percent regard the Taliban as “incorruptible.”
· The residents of Kandahar overwhelmingly prefer a process of reconciliation to the prospect of continued conflict. Ninety-four percent say that it is better to negotiate with the Taliban than to fight with them, and they see grounds for believing that these negotiations will succeed. Eighty-five percent regard the Taliban as “our Afghan brothers” (a phrase President Karzai repeated word for word in his address to the recent jirga), and 81 percent say that the Taliban would lay down their arms if given jobs.
Our military commanders in Afghanistan talk incessantly about the need to “shape” the political context in a given area before beginning activities with a significant military component–but if their own research is correct, our chances of “shaping” Kandahar any time soon range from slim to none. Based on General McChrystal’s own logic, then, we cannot proceed there because a key requirement for success is not fulfilled. And if we can’t prevail in Kandahar, then we’re stuck with the Taliban as a long-term military presence and political force in Afghanistan.
And finally, on to Pakistan. Despite skeptical reports from our own intelligence services, U.S. government officials have taken recently to praising the authorities in Islamabad for their stepped-up cooperation in the fight against the Taliban. But a report from the London School of Economics made public over the past weekend questions the basis for this optimism. Based on interviews with nine current Taliban field commanders and ten former senior Taliban officials as well as dozens of Afghan leaders, the report argues that relations between the Taliban and the Pakistani intelligence (the ISI) are dense and ongoing. One senior southern Taliban leader said: “Every group commander knows the reality–which is obvious to all of us–that the ISI is behind the Taliban, they formed and are supporting the Taliban. … Everyone sees the sun in the sky but cannot say it is the sun.”
Worse, the report offers credible though not conclusive evidence that Pakistani President Zadari has been personally involved in the release of numerous Taliban prisoners from Pakistani jails, reportedly telling them that they had been arrested only because of American pressure. Surveying the evidence, Matt Waldman, the report’s author, concludes that “Pakistan appears to be playing a double-game of astonishing magnitude” and that “without a change in Pakistani behaviour it will be difficult if not impossible for international forces and the Afghan government to make progress against the insurgency.”

Read more…

It’s one thing to read the many polls showing Republicans with an advantage in the so-called “generic congressional ballot.” It’s another thing altogether to see that advantage reflected in data on specific congressional districts. That’s why the new NPR Battleground survey, jointly conducted by the Democratic firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner and the Republican firm Public Opinion Strategies, is worth a worried look by Democrats.
This poll, as its name suggests, focuses on marginal House districts. Given the two consecutive pro-Democratic “wave” elections of 2006 and 2008, it’s not surprising that 60 of these 70 districts are currently held by Democrats. But as a group they are Republican-leaning (the likely voters polled overall gave a plurality to John McCain in 2008), in part because of their basic nature and in part because of a notable “enthusiasm gap” between voters of the two parties.
In any event, Republicans currently hold a 49-41 advantage in the “battleground” districts overall, and more alarmingly, a 47-42 advantage in the Democratic-held districts. Moreover, President Obama’s approval-disapproval ratio in the battleground districts is a terrible 40-54.
The “enthusiasm gap” strongly reinforces an already-strong upward skewing of the age demographics of likely voters. 38% of the respondents to this poll are over 60; only 9% are under 30.
Greenberg expressed hopes that this poll will convince Democrats from the White House on down to articulate a forward-looking economicthat sharply contrasts their values with those of Republicans:

“What I’m hoping that this poll brings about is that the Democrats are running with a much more effective economic message, which talks about who they fought for, and what they are engaged in now,” Greenberg said. “And that may also come out of the president’s speech this week, where I think as well he will be talking about not so much a grade for past performance but what he intends to do on energy and the Gulf.”

Developing and articulating that message won’t be easy. The NPR survey shows Republican messages on federal spending, the stimulus package, “bailouts,” and even financial regulation, as attracting majority support in the battleground districts.
It’s time to get deadly serious about giving potential Democratic voters good reasons to turn out and vote Democratic this November.

Conservative political leaders remain in denial regarding global warming. But the public is clearly not buying their efforts to discredit the growing evidence to the contrary. As TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira reports in his June 14 ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’::

Conservatives…have been pointing to some polls that purport to show increasing public skepticism about global warming. But new Roper data released by Stanford University show that the public, when asked a straightforward question about whether global warming “has probably been happening,” endorses the idea that global warming is real by an overwhelming 74-24 margin.

And the public is equally-convinced that it’s time to do something about it, reports Teixeira:

…In the same poll, a query about whether the government should “limit the amount of greenhouse gases that U.S. businesses put out” yielded a thumping 76-20 majority in favor of such limits.

Nor is the conservative myth-mongering about action against global warming being a job-killer getting any traction, says Teixeira:

…Just 18 percent accept that argument, while 50 percent think such action will actually produce more jobs (another 31 percent say no effect).

This one is clearly a winner for Democratic candidates, as Republican global-warming deniers bury their heads deeper in the sand, while the public calls for action.

I wrote last week about the fouled-up legal and political situation in Alabama, where the third-place finisher in the June 1 Republican gubernatorial primary, Tim James, is trying to erase a 167-vote lead for Robert Bentley via a recount, despite an Attorney General’s ruling that challenges to primary results can’t be done until an actual nomination has been made–after the runoff in which James is trying to secure a spot!
So now James is plunging ahead with the recount–done county-by-county by Republican volunteers, with James picking up the tab–and Alabama Republican officials are trying to figure out what to do if he prevails, according to the Birmingham News:

At that point, James could contest the primary vote to the Republican Party senior state leadership. If the party found for James, then it would have to set a second runoff — this one between James and the winner of the Byrne-Bentley July 13 show­down.
That scenario is keeping Republican Party state Chairman Mike Hubbard from getting a good night’s sleep.
“It’s a potential mess,” said Hubbard. “All we can do at this point is follow what the attorney general says is the law and the rec­ommendations of the secre­tary of state and then see what we see. If the recount shows Bentley still in the lead, then I guess this is all over. If the recount shows James pulling ahead, then all I can say is, hold on.”
Bentley’s campaign man­ager, Bryan Sanders, crit­icized the recount but stopped short of saying Bentley planned any legal action to stop it.

So there’s every prospect for a good, mean intraparty political battle, perhaps drifting into litigation (always fun when it involves those trial-lawyer-hating Republicans), and then maybe culminating in a round-robin second runoff.
It’s got to make Democratic gubernatorial nominee Ronnie Sparks feel all warm and cuddly inside.

In his Oval Office address tonight, President Obama has a sadly familiar task: to apportion responsibility for errors he had little to do with without himself looking like a buck-passer, and to connect discrete events and policies to the bigger picture.
It’s reasonably clear by now that by sheer repetition, the claim that the president has fumbled the BP oil spill in some significant way has sunk into media and public perceptions. Some of this, of course, is coming from people who are lifelong cheerleaders for offshore oil drilling, and who idolize Dick Cheney, who is probably more responsible for the policies that enabled this disaster than anyone else. But presidents do get blamed for things they didn’t do, so appearing large and in charge in the present and future must accompany any Obama effort to assign responsibility for why this happened in the first place.
Aside from that difficult task, the president must also connect the dots between the disaster and the path he wants the country to take on energy policy. While it may seem obvious to some of us why a carbon cap or tax of some sort is an appropriate response to yet another calamity associated with fossil fuel production, it’s not at all obvious to the public generally. And this is the same public, moreover, that never much bought the president’s arguments that health care reform was essential to the country’s economic future. So while it might not be that hard for Obama to rally support for tougher regulation of offshore drilling, it will be a much heavier lift to connect the disaster to the need for climate change legislation.
Fortunately, Obama has a booming twenty minutes to pull off this complex task, all the while appearing as “presidential” as possible. He will have no time to waste.

It is often argued that the contemporary conservative movement possesses a laser-like focus on a “smaller government” agenda at the expense of the Cultural Right’s longstanding support for government intervention in private sexual and reproductive matters. You might even think the Cultural Right is in retreat, and on a few issues, like DADT, it certainly is.
But on core issues of reproductive rights, social conservatives are as aggressive as ever, and in some respects, more radical. A good example of that little-discussed phenomenon is the renewed drive of the Right-to-Life movement to go beyond tactical efforts to impose marginal limits on late-term abortions or harrass abortion providers, or even to reverse Roe v. Wade, and instead demand legal recognition of its conviction that protection of human life should begin at the moment of fertilization.
This is the conviction that has always been at the root of hostility to embryonic stem cell research, nothwithstanding scare-talk about human cloning. But more recently, many right-to-life activists have taken the logical next step by pursuing restrictions on in vitro fertilization insofar is it involves creation of “surplus” embryos (echoing developments in Europe, notably Italy).
The shift towards what might be called “zygote politics”–which extends anti-abortion politics into the politically treacherous area of infertility treatments and even efforts to ban oral contraceptives (on grounds that they are actually abortifacients), has popped up this year in the highly competitive Republican gubernatorial primary in Georgia. Georgia RTL, the state’s premier anti-abortion group and a major player in GOP politics, endorsed all but one of the Republican gubernatorial candidates, and then went out of its way to attack the exception, Secretary of State Karen Handel. Here’s how Handel’s campaign described the conflict:

GRTL’s real problem with Karen is twofold: First, they disagree with her stance regarding exceptions to an abortion ban in cases of rape and incest.
Secondly, Karen opposes the group’s push to ban invitro fertilization, which has helped so many couples realize their dream of having children. The group has proposed legislation to virtually eliminate invitro.
In a meeting with Karen, the group’s leadership told her directly that fertility treatments are immoral and that their goal is to completely ban the procedure.

This was a rather pointed and potentially counter-productive personal rebuke, since Handel and her husband are childless, and might have some natural allies among couples resorting to IV clinics to have children.
What makes this contretemps especially interesting is that Handel occupies very much the same ideological turf as Nikki Haley in next-door SC: a “conservative reformer” determined to take on the “good ol’ boys” whose power lust has overriden their alleged right-wing principles. Handel hasn’t been endorsed by Sarah Palin yet, but she’s a natural Mama Grizzly, or at least was until she got cross-ways with the right-to-life movement, which is Palin’s original base in the GOP. Palin has already made some of her old allies mad by endorsing Terry Branstad over Bob Vander Plaats in Iowa; a second gesture against RTL orthodoxy would really raise eyebrows.
But conversely, anti-abortion activists are in serious danger of getting cross-ways with middle-class conservative voters who don’t mind shutting down abortion clinics but are likely to be less than enthusiastic about doing the same with IV clinics, much less banning the Pill. It’s all well worth watching in the future.

One of the more pernicious if deeply entrenched constitutional doctrines in this country is the idea that spending money on political campaigns is inherently an exercise of first amendment free speech rights whose regulation requires the strictest judicial scrutiny. It’s why we do not have any effective national system for campaign finance limitations, and indirectly why at any given time about half the country thinks our politicians have been bought and sold for campaign contributions. Most fundamentally, self-funding candidates can pretty much do whatever they want, and despite the hard economic times, we are seeing self-funders arise this year in extraordinary numbers, particularly on the GOP side of the battlelines.
Unfortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court seems determined to undo every effort to provide candidates who face self-funders with anything like an equalizer. In 2007, in Davis v.F.E.C., a 5-4 majority of the Court struck down the so-called “Millionaire’s Amendment” to the Feingold-McCain campaign finance law on grounds, basically, that it discriminated against millionaires by allowing the opponents of self-funders higher contribution and spending limits.
By the same dubious logic, as National Journal‘s Eliza Newlin Carney explains, the Court may be about to strike down “equalizer” provisions in six state public financing systems (Arizona, Connecticut, Maine, New Mexico, North Carolina and Wisconsin). In a case involving Arizona, the Court has issued a stay on the collection of “extra” public money from candidates facing self-funders until it can hear a constitutional challege to the system. Given the Davis precedent, campaign reform advocates are bracing for a bad result.

At a time when the Gulf Oil Spill is becoming a virtually unprecendented environmental disaster, while the main point of contention about the Great Recession is whether it’s about to recur or hasn’t yet ended, it’s worth wondering if the apocalyptic tone of American politics these days isn’t in large part just a reaction to extended trauma.
Mark Schmitt of The American Prospect makes that case:

In the 12 years since the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, being interested in politics or lucky enough to write about it has been an endless, often terrifying thrill. We’ve witnessed a series of high-stakes gambles, all-or-nothing showdowns, frauds, and schemes for total power that look a lot like some of Wall Street’s more hare-brained high-flying plays. There was Bush v. Gore, Karl Rove’s plan for 30 years of Republican rule, Dick Cheney’s hidden government, and the “nuclear option” — not to mention the deceptions of the rush to war in Iraq, the endless state of emergency, and the wiretapping and other abuses of civil liberties after September 11. These schemes, like those of the bankers’, created huge systemic risks to democratic government.
All those moves were by Republicans, but in response, progressives and Democrats developed their own sense of urgency and total commitment to victory in the 2006 congressional elections, and then again in the huge crusade that elected Barack Obama by a wide margin, the most fascinating electoral drama of my lifetime. Since the election, we’ve returned to winner-take-all battles: Legislative fights — notably on health care — quickly become showdowns over the very legitimacy of the administration and the Democratic majority. The Tea Party movement demands, “Give us our country back.” Arthur Brooks, the mild-mannered academic who runs the American Enterprise Institute, recently wrote a book called The Battle in which he invites a “culture war” between the 70 percent of the country that loves free enterprise and the 30 percent that is socialist, hates free enterprise, and yet has somehow usurped power.

Now Mark seems to think these ferocious outbreaks of total-war politics are in part cyclical, and he believes a disappointing GOP performance in the fall elections and the natural ebbing of the Tea Party will help create a politics that is refreshingly boring. And he points to the period between Bill Clinton’s re-election and his impeachment as the last model era of undramatic but productive governance.
If so, that’s pretty sad, since the Lewinsky scandal first broke just one year and one day after the beginning of Clinton’s second term. If and when the next era of good feelings arrives, we’d better enjoy it while it lasts.