At Open Left, Chris Bowers makes a small but important point about the stability of public opinion polling, and the continuing narrow Democratic advantage in the generic congressional ballot, that we’ve recently seen despite the turbulence of events in Washington:

The continuing Democratic advantage is significant since polls of “all adults” have almost entirely washed out of the system. CNN, Daily Kos, and the Economist are among the many organizations that have moved away from polls of all adults in favor of polls of registered voters. In theory, such a polling shift should have been beneficial to Republicans, since Republican voting groups have a higher voter registration rate than Democratic voting groups.
It remains to be seen if Democrats will be able to maintain their narrow advantage when polls inevitably shift from “registered voters” to “likely voters.”

Some pollsters, of course, most notably Rasmussen, have been employing “likely voter” screens all along, which helps account for their relatively high showings for Republicans across the board. But Chris is absolutely right: the longer polls remain stable, the more likely they are relatively accurate predictors of what will happen in November.

In mid-February most of the chattering classes, left and right, lost interest in Sarah Palin after an ABC/WaPo poll that showed rank-and-file Republicans souring on her, or at least concluding she wasn’t qualified to be president. (I personally suspect that poll was an outlier, but that’s a subject for another day, when fresh evidence is available).
But now, in the wake of her twin appearances at a Tea Party Express event in Nevada, and on the campaign trail with John McCain in Arizona, Palin has become impossible to ignore again, and there’s now an interesting effort underway among conservative elites to denounce any dissing of St. Joan of the Tundra from their own ranks.
Today neoconservative patriarch Norman Podheretz appeared on that estimable right-wing bulletin board, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, to smite unnamed conservative critics of Palin, utilizing the Big Bertha of latter-day Republican rhetoric, the memory of Ronald Reagan:

Now I knew Ronald Reagan, and Sarah Palin is no Ronald Reagan. Then again, the first time I met Reagan all he talked about was the money he had saved the taxpayers as governor of California by changing the size of the folders used for storing the state’s files. So nonplussed was I by the delight he showed at this great achievement that I came close to thinking that my friends were right and that I had made a mistake in supporting him. Ultimately, of course, we all wound up regarding him as a great man, but in 1979 none of us would have dreamed that this would be how we would feel only a few years later.

Podhoretz goes on to suggest that liberal contempt for Palin is of a piece with liberal contempt for Reagan, and thus should never be echoed on the Right. This is all interesting because it’s the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party–heavily focused on foreign policy, disproportionately led by people who are secular, Jewish, or both, and suspicious of the influence of the Christian Right and of right-wing “populism” generally–where disdain for Palin is most visible. Podhoretz is trying to rein that tendency in.
And it looks like his argument is already getting traction. In its “Arena” feature, Politico asked a bunch of prominent gabbers, most of them conservatives, to react to Podhoretz’s piece, and they generally said he was right (with the occasional condescending reference to Palin’s need for a little more seasoning).
This doesn’t mean that neoconservatives are on the brink of shouting “Run, Sarah, Run!” or emulating the adulation she arouses among Tea Party folk or Right-to-Lifers, but it does represent a disciplinary reminder that the conservative coalition can’t brook any friendly fire. Podhoretz cites William F. Buckley’s famous quip that he’d rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculties of Harvard and MIT, and implies that the prospect of being governed by Sarah Palin rather than Barack Obama represents an equivalent choice (certainly the most back-handed of compliments to Palin; she might as well be named “Alice Aardvark” to qualify for the first page of that phne book).
But the choice, he says, is clear and must be made:

[A]fter more than a year of seeing how [Obama’s] “prodigious oratorical and intellectual gifts” have worked themselves out in action, I remain more convinced than ever of the soundness of Buckley’s quip, in the spirit of which I hereby declare that I would rather be ruled by the Tea Party than by the Democratic Party, and I would rather have Sarah Palin sitting in the Oval Office than Barack Obama.

So on behalf of neoconservatives, Podhoretz is taking the coalition oath anew, and inverting the old Popular Front slogan of “Pas d’ennemis a gauche, pas d’amis a droit.” (No enemies to the Left, no friends to the Right). That’s not terribly surprising in the current Total War atmosphere of American politics, but it’s amusing that Palin is being treated as the acid test of conservative solidarity, and perhaps alarming that she passes.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
It’s obvious that the Golden State isn’t golden anymore. As a new transplant here, the first state political event I watched up close was a May 2009 special election, featuring six ballot initiatives designed to avert a titanic budget crisis. California’s voters responded with what can best be described as snarling apathy. Turnout was 20 percent, which beat the previous California record for low turnout in a statewide election. The five initiatives that dealt with spending and revenue—which needed to pass in order to implement a major fiscal comprom ise—all went down, hard. (Most of them lost by two-to-one margins; a sixth initiative, denying legislators pay raises when the budget’s not balanced, passed.) Californians weren’t just experiencing a momentary fit of pique, either: In 2005, a similar package of eight budget deal-related ballot initiatives met the same fate.
As of March 21, the approval rating for Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger stood at 23 percent, which was where his Democratic predecessor, Gray Davis, was when he was recalled and booted out of office in 2003. But that level of support looks robust compared to that of the state legislature (controlled, if that’s not too strong a word, by Democrats), which stands at nine percent, not far from statistical zero.
California’s bad case of political self-loathing goes beyond a terrible economy, the state’s chronic monstrous state budget deficits, and the endless gridlock over virtually all major decisions in Sacramento. On the structural level, California’s permissive ballot initiative system has inserted voters—or, to be cynical about it, the special interests backing initiatives—into matters normally left to governors and legislators, resulting in constitutional limits on property taxes; excessive reliance on recession-sensitive income taxes; a crippling two-thirds vote requirement for legislative enactment of a state budget or for increasing taxes at any level of government; and a variety of spending mandates. Polls consistently show that a majority of citizens oppose tax increases and most spending cuts (they do favor cutting spending on prisons, which are operating under court rules and stuffed with inmates who have run afoul of the state’s many mandatory sentencing laws, some imposed by initiative). “Waste” is where Californians seem to want lawmakers to look for the massive savings necessary to balance the budget. Too bad California already ranks near the bottom among states in per capita state employees and infrastructure investment, and below average in per-pupil spending on education.
The obvious question is why anyone would want to be the next governor of California. But three viable candidates—two Republicans and one Democrat—are defying logic by offering themselves for this post. One Republican, state insurance commissioner and former tech executive Steve Poizner, is running on a systematic right-wing platform of massive spending cuts, new personal and business tax cuts, and, for dessert, another effort to ban access to public benefits for undocumented workers and their families. The second GOP candidate, former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, is running far ahead of Poizner, floating her campaign on an extraordinary sea of early money. Three months before the June primary, and eight months before the general election, Whitman (or eMeg, as local political journalists often call her) has already spent $46 million, mostly from personal funds on her campaign, and has threatened to spend up to $150 million if necessary. She has launched an astoundingly early series of saturation media ads, becoming ubiquitous on the California airwaves, as recently explained by David Crane of the influential political blog Calbuzz:

The campaign’s Gross Rating Point report, measuring total delivery of the current week’s broadcast ad schedule in 11 markets in California, shows that eMeg’s buy is comparable to what a fully-loaded campaign might ordinarily deliver in the closing weeks of a heated race—not three months before a primary that she’s prohibitively leading.
“These are some big f****n’ numbers,” said Bill Carrick, the veteran Democratic media consultant after reviewing the report. “She’s buying the whole shebang.”

Whitman’s ads mainly convey, with numbing repetition, her claim to offer a fresh start for the state, delivered by a rock-star business executive committed to cuts in spending, tax cuts, and education reform. But she recently launched another batch aimed at primary opponent Poizner—whom she leads in the most recent Field Poll by 49 points—depicting the hyper-conservative as, believe it or not, a liberal who thinks just like Nancy Pelosi. (Poizner is reportedly planning to fire back using $19 million of his own Silicon Valley fortune, which may force Whitman to tack in a conservative direction on issues that she’d just as soon avoid, such as immigration.)
These assaults have raised some old concerns about her reputation in corporate circles for being ruthless in the pursuit of her goals, and a bit deranged—exhibiting an “evil Meg” alongside the “good Meg” of her press clippings—if denied her wishes. She’s also bought herself grief by refusing, until very recently, to answer press questions or elaborate beyond the happy talk of her biographical ads about her positions on various issues. All in all, she’s in danger of earning the reputation of being something of a robo-pol like her political mentor, Mitt Romney.
Indeed, Whitman’s overall strategy appears to be to clear the primary field by bludgeoning Poizner out of the picture with attack ads, and then to run as a can-do moderate conservative who’s worth a gamble for the relatively few voters who bother to show up at the polls. And she is reportedly spending hundreds of thousands of dollars building a library of negative information to use against her general election opponent, a guy named Jerry Brown.
That’s right, Edmund Gerald “Jerry” Brown Jr., who is, on paper, the least likely person imaginable to become the frontrunner for governor of a state that is so passionately disillusioned with politicians. The son of an old-style liberal Democratic governor who served two terms before being bounced from office by Ronald Reagan, Brown was first elected to statewide office 40—yes, 40—years ago. After a term as secretary of state, he was governor for eight years, and later state party chair, mayor of Oakland, and currently attorney general of California. He also ran unsuccessfully, and somewhat fecklessly, for the U.S. Senate once and for president three times. (Coming second to Bill Clinton in 1992.) Not many Californians can remember a time when Brown or his father wasn’t in office or pursuing office, and most can remember more than one occasion when Brown Jr. did something quirky, embarrassing, or controversial. Indeed, Whitman may be wasting her money reminding them.
But that’s the funny thing about Jerry Brown’s candidacy. Instead of being the fattest target in America for a Republican opponent, Brown is even with or slightly trailing Whitman in recent polls, despite her massive unopposed spending on TV ads—and, given California’s Democratic registration advantage, he’s a good bet to win unless the effectiveness of Whitman’s spending significantly outstrips the likely backlash against it.

Read more…

The more I think about it, the fight over a Supreme Court nomination that we are likely to see beginning in a month or so could be a major teachable moment for progressives about the underlying belief system of contemporary conservatives and of Republicans who have let themselves get radicalized to an extraordinary degreee since the latter stages of the 2008 presidential contest.
As we speak, conservatives all over the country are demanding legal action by states to challenge the constitutionality of health reform legislation (in my home state of Georgia, there’s even talk of impeaching the Democratic Attorney General, Thurbert Baker, for refusing to waste taxpayer dollars by launching a suit). Yet the basis for such suits-typically a denial of the power of Congress to legislative economic matters under the Commerce and Spending Clauses of the U.S. Constitution–is a collateral attack on the constitutionality of a vast array of past legislation, including the New Deal and Great Society initiatives, not to mention most civil rights laws.
And that questionable proposition is completely aside from other conservative efforts, many of them backed by major Republican officeholders, to “interpose” (to use the term for this strategy when it was deployed by segregationists in the 1950s) state sovereignty to block the implementation of health reform and other federal laws. And beyond that we have the even more radical nullification and secession gestures that have become standard features of conservative Republican rhetoric over the last year or so.
In other words, a debate that revolves around constitutional interpretation is not necessarily one that will help the conservative movement at this particular moment. Indeed, it could actually help progressives raise suspicions that Republicans are contemplating a very radical agenda if they return to power, one that could include (particularly given the stridency of their fiscal rhetoric lately) a direct assault on very popular programs like Social Security and Medicare.
Moreover, we can anticipate that a Court nomination fight will renew noisy efforts by the Christian Right, which has good reason right now to remind the news media and Republican politicians alike of its continuing power in the GOP, to advance its own eccentric views on America as a “Christian Nation” whose founders never intended to promote church-state separation, not to mention their demands for an overthrow of legalized abortion and same-sex unions. At a time when many conservatives are trying very hard to submerge divisive cultural issues and create a monomaniacal message on limited government, a Court fight will unleash cultural furies beyond control.
And finally, if it really gets vicious, a Court fight could cast a harsh spotlight on the drift of the conservative movement towards a general attitude of defiance towards the rule of law. As I noted in a post yesterday, the downside of the libertarian energy given conservatives by the Tea Party movement is its tendency to treat every major government institution, the presidency, the Congress, and the judiciary alike, with contempt as threats to liberty and “natural rights.” As much as Americans love liberty, they also love order and stability. They aren’t likely to react well to the spectacle of conservatives screaming for a virtual revolution against a popularly elected government, the social safety net, and constitutional doctrines that have been in place for 75 years.
So: bring on the Court fight, and bring it on with all the rhetoric Tea Party folk and other radicalized conservatives have been using about Obama’s “socialism” and the Nazi-like tyranny of universal health coverage! Before it’s over, Republicans may wish they had just picked a different fight.

Congress wrapped up action on health reform with considerable dispatch in the wee hours last night. It’s generally assumed that financial regulation will be the next big issue, and one that many Democrats will relish given the likelihood that the stiff winds of public opinion will be at their backs for a change.
But it appears a very different fight may be thrust upon them pretty soon, with reports that Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens may retire as early as next month (when he turns 90). If that’s the case, a confirmation fight will inevitably coincide with the runup to the November elections.
Now Stevens (though appointed by Republican president Gerald Ford) is considered one of the Court’s staunchest liberals, so the confirmation process normally wouldn’t touch off the sort of frenzy on the Right you’d see if Obama were in a position to replace a conservative. But given the timing–not just the proximity to the midterms, but to the health care battle–none of that may matter. You can certainly expect the Tea Party movement and its Republican allies to use a Court fight to dramatize their claims that the Constitution is being shredded. And it’s particularly likely that the Christian Right (important to both the Tea Party movement and the GOP, but not very visible in the news media) would use the opportunity to remind everyone they’re still around, loud and proud.
The New York Times story on the probable Stevens retirement runs through the most prominent candidate for the next Court opening, with Cass Sunstein and Hongju Koh the possibilities most likely to set off a major ideological war, though the odds of either getting the nod are slim.
Given the current environment, though, the president would probably have a big fight on his hands even if he appointed a card-carrying member of the Federalist Society to the Court. After health reform, virtually anything he does will by definition be treated by much of the Right as part of his nefarious plot to turn America into Sweden, if not Venezuela. So get ready for a major rumble.

John Sides of The Monkey Cage flags a recent study, “If Only They’d Ask: Gender, Recruitment and Political Ambition” by Jennifer Lawless and Richard Fox. Sides quotes from the study:

Highly qualified and politically well-connected women from both major political parties are less likely than similarly situated men to be recruited to run for public office by all types of political actors. They are less likely than men to be recruited intensely. And they are less likely than men to be recruited by multiple sources. Although we paint a picture of a political recruitment process that seems to suppress women’s inclusion, we also offer the first evidence of the significant headway women’s organizations are making in their efforts to mitigate the recruitment gap, especially among Democrats. These findings are critically important because women’s recruitment disadvantage depresses their political ambition and ultimately hinders their emergence as candidates.

Sides adds that the discrimination in recruitment is “not because men are more likely to win: there is little evidence that women candidates suffer at the ballot box.” While the study gives an edge to Democrats in recruiting women, there is plenty of room for improvement, with nothing to lose and much to gain by making a more energetic commitment to recruiting women candidates.

As James Vega pointed out in a post last night, threats or even acts of violence by right-wing fringe groups are entirely predictable–and even rational from the point of view of their perpetrators–in an atmosphere where even “respectable” conservatives often indulge themselves in charges that the country is sliding into some sort of totalitarian system.
I’d add that the problem goes even deeper than overheated rhetoric about the alleged “government takeover” of the health care system or the economy, or claims that an individual mandate to purchase health insurance (which, as progressives should mention as often as possible, has been supported in the very recent past by a large number of Republicans, among them 2012 presidential front-runner Mitt Romney) represents some sort of enslavement. More fundamentally, conservatives have sought to delegitimize the authority of the president and Democratic majorities in Congress by suggesting that they were not properly elected in the first place. That’s the obvious thrust of the “birther” argument, which Republicans continue to flirt with. And it’s the even more obvious implication of the “ACORN stole the 2008 election” meme, to which a significant share of rank-and-file Republicans appear to subscribe.
Moreover, the massive upsurge of militant constitutional “originalism” (a signature principle of the Tea Party Movement) is a new and alarming development, insofar as it implies that generations of Supreme Court rulings, by justices nominated by presidents of both parties, have consciously conspired to destroy the Founders’ design along with basic American liberties. To put it another way, if signficant numbers of citizens come to believe that elected officials aren’t legitimately holding power, and that the justice system has failed to exercise any restraints on “tyranny,” what forms of civil authority are left? The armed forces? “Militias” exercising their Second Amendment rights to bear arms in self-defense?
Back in 1996, an obscure but significant dispute broke out among conservative intellectuals in the pages of First Things, a conservative ecumenical politics-and-religion journal edited by the late Rev. Richard John Neuhaus. To make a long (and controversial) story short, a number of Neuhaus’ colleagues argued that the “judicial usurpation” of democratic decisionmaking over abortion and same-sex relationships denied “the current regime” any genuine authority, or any loyalty from citizens. A number of other conservative intellectuals–many of them Jewish members of the “neoconservative” camp–recoiled in horror at this potentially revolutionary line of reasoning.
We’ve come a long way since then, it appears. Now similar arguments, aimed at all three branches of the federal government, are endemic on the Right, and have, for the first time since southern resistance to civil rights for African-Americans, a mass base in the population.
Thoughtful conservatives need to reflect on this development, and its implications, which go far beyond who wins or loses in 2010 and 2012. We are edging ever closer to the situation described by George Dangerfield in his famous study of pre-World War I British politics, The Strange Death of Liberal England, when Tory politicians opportunistically embraced revolutionary rhetoric against Home Rule for Ireland and nearly brought the United Kingdom to the brink of civil war.
It’s a trend that no American of any political persuasion should welcome.

So you can definitively take David Petraeus off that 2012 Republican presidential list:

I thought I’d said no about as many ways as I could. I really do mean no. We have all these artful ways of doing it. I’ve tried Shermanesque responses, which everybody goes and finds out what Sherman said was pretty unequivocally no. I’ve done several different ways. I’ve tried quoting the country song, ‘What Part of No Don’t You Understand?’ I mean, I really do mean that. I feel very privileged to be able to serve our country. I’m honored to continue to do that as long as I can contribute, but I will not, ever, run for political office, I can assure you.

The idea of another Eisenhower scenario had been tempting some Republicans (particularly Iraq-focused neocon types) to talk about a Petraeus candidacy. Or maybe the buzz simply reflected an honest look at the GOP’s 2012 field, which is less than impressive at present.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Sunday night’s House vote on health reform clarified the contours of the mid-term elections. The contest has been nationalized, with two dominant issues—the economy and health care—and one overriding theme: the proper role of government.
The administration and Democratic congressional leaders should not believe that the new health care legislation will speak for itself. In fact, the debate over the next eight months may well be as robust and consequential as was the debate during the past eight months. If the public can be persuaded to modulate its doubts about the wisdom of health reform, House Democrats may be able to minimize their losses, as the Republicans did in 1982. If not, the results could resemble the catastrophe of 1994.
Three recent surveys define the challenge Democrats face between now and November. In a Pew Research Center survey released last Thursday, only 38 percent of the respondents said that they favored the health care bills currently in Congress, while 48 percent were opposed. A CNN survey made public on March 22 showed an even more negative reaction: 39 percent in favor and 59 percent opposed. Although the March Kaiser Health Tracking poll found somewhat more support for the pending congressional legislation, it showed that only 42 percent of the people wanted an up-or-down vote on that legislation; 36 percent said Congress should go back to the drawing board, and 20 percent wanted Congress to drop the topic entirely. A plurality of 45 percent favored a bipartisan approach over a Democrats-only bill. Forty-one percent believed that the proposed bill would force them to change their existing health care arrangements. Only 35 percent thought it would make them and their family better off; 32 percent said worse off, and 28 percent said no difference. (Again, the CNN survey was even more negative: 47 percent of respondents thought it would make them and their families worse off, and only 19 percent expected to be better off.) Fifty-five percent of the Kaiser respondents and 70 percent of the CNN respondents thought the bill would increase the budget deficit—a significant finding in light of rising public concern about our fiscal future.
A Gallup survey released this Tuesday, after the bill’s passage, paints a somewhat rosier picture for Democrats: 49 percent said it was a “good thing” the bill passed, with 40 percent calling it a “bad thing.” Democrats were overwhelmingly satisfied (82 to 11), Republicans dissatisfied (79 to 16), while independents were split down the middle, 45 satisfied to 47 not. Nonetheless, there were signs of a continuing gap in motivation between the bill’s proponents and detractors. Only 29 percent of Democrats described themselves as “enthusiastic” about the bill’s passage, versus 41 percent of Republicans who said they were “angry.” Among independents, 20 percent were angry, versus 10 percent enthusiastic.
So where is the opening for the Democratic counterargument? There are four areas of opportunity. First, the Kaiser poll has long shown a strong plurality (often a majority) supporting the proposition that the country as a whole would be better off if Congress passed health reform, and voters often ask “How are we doing?” not just “How am I doing?”
Second, both surveys suggest that the public regards the congressional legislation as superior overall to the status quo. Pew reports that while 51 percent think that health care costs would increase if the proposal passed, 63 percent think costs would increase if it didn’t. And according to Kaiser, far more think that key areas—health care costs, access to insurance, and quality of care—would improve with reform than with the status quo.
Third, there are appealing features of health reform that begin quickly and will make a tangible difference in the lives of individuals and families—among them, allowing young adults to remain on parents’ policies until age 26 and eliminating preexisting conditions as grounds for denying coverage to children.
And finally, despite their current adverse judgment about the health reform bill, Americans continue to trust President Obama and the Democrats on this issue more than they do the Republicans. Even the CNN survey, while strongly negative about the politics of the bill overall, found President Obama more trusted than congressional Republicans by a margin of 51 to 39 percent, and congressional Democrats more trusted than congressional Republicans by 45 to 39 percent.
Half a century ago, political scientists Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril observed that while Americans are ideologically conservative, they are operationally liberal. If the debate between now and November is generic—about the role of government—Democrats will probably lose. If the debate is more specific—comparing the bill to the status quo and pointing out its concrete advantages—the public’s view may well become much more favorable.
One thing is clear: Democrats will have to be more focused and effective in the next eight months than they were in the past eight months. Their wobbly, ever-changing rationale for health care reform nearly undermined the entire effort. To raise their game, the White House and congressional Democratic leadership would be well advised to take a page from the standard Republican playbook: decide on the key points to emphasize, agree on punchy language to describe them, and stick to that script between now and November. In electoral politics, repetition is a necessary condition of persuasion.

In his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ at the Center for American Progress web pages, TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira reports that “the public appears to be warming” to “President Barack Obama’s decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan but start withdrawing forces in 2011.” Teixeira elaborates:

Prior to the announcement back in November, just 36 percent thought the military effort in Afghanistan was going very or fairly well and 57 percent thought the effort was not going too well or not at all well. This month, a new Pew poll shows these figures almost reversed: Fifty-two percent now think the effort is going very or fairly well, while those with a negative judgment are down to 35 percent.

The even better news for the President is that the uptick carries over into his approval rating for his Afghanistan policy, as Teixeira notes:

Reflecting this more positive assessment, Obama’s approval rating on handling the Afghanistan situation has also improved over the time period. Before the decision to send troops was made, 36 percent approved of his handling of Afghanistan, compared to 49 percent who disapproved. In the new Pew poll, his approval ratings have flipped to 51 percent approval and 35 percent disapproval.

An impressive turn-around for the President and his Afghanistan policy, contributing to a very good week at the white house.