Another day, another angry right-wing challenge to “establishment” Republicans once thought to be very conservative. In Colorado, the two parties held precinct caucuses accompanied, as always, by a straw poll among candidates for statewide office. On the Republican side, prohibitive front-runner for the Senate and former Lt. Gov. Jane Norton ran almost exactly even with self-styled Insurgent from the Right Ken Buck, a district attorney who’s an ally of famed immigrant-baiter Tom Tancredo.
Other than her backing of a controversial ballot measure to relax Colorado’s draconian tax limitation law, Norton’s main sin seems to be her friendship with John McCain, also under attack from the Right.
Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, former state House Speaker Andrew Romanoff actually beat appointed Sen. Michael Bennet in the caucus straw poll. This, however, was no surprise; Bennet is a political newcomer while Romanoff has deep roots among the party activists who attend these events.
Neither straw poll is necessarily predictive of what will happen in the primaries for the Senate that will be held in August. On the Democratic side, it’s noteworthy than the senator whose term is being filled this year, current Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, didn’t win the caucus straw poll in 2006, and still went on to win the primary handily.
But if nothing else, the Colorado results kept underdogs alive, and on the Republican side, confirmed that this will be a difficult year for anyone with the dreaded “E for Establishment” label.

One of the best ways to lose your mind is to track the whip counts measuring the line-up of House member votes on health care reform. Right after you read a convincingly optimistic projection that the Democratic package is a done deal, you will find an equally persuasive case that it is doomed. After going round and round with this game for a few days, I have to conclude that nobody in journalism, msm or otherwise, can make a reliable call.
It would not surprise me, however, if Speaker Pelosi or Rep. Clyburn had the real skinny, such as it is. But I wouldn’t read too much into their confident public pronouncements, which could be true or just an effort to crank up a bandwagon psychology. What seems fairly certain, however, is that it is going to be a very close vote. And what’s important to health care reform supporters is that we have work to do — in generating constituent pressure on House members, specifically those who have been called ‘undecided’ — in the broadest sense of the term.
So where do you go? Reid Wilson’s Hotline post, “Advice To Dems: Sell The Bill,” has a useful insight,

A survey conducted across vulnerable Dem districts shows most voters warm to the proposal once they learn more about it, according to a copy of a memo obtained from Capitol Hill and political sources. Included in the poll were 92 districts held by Frontline Dems and Blue Dogs, districts where Dem incumbents would feel the most heat for supporting the legislation.
Dems will target white middle-aged voters, white women under 65 and white married women. Those groups respond most positively when Dems explain what is in the bill, pollsters found.
The poll, conducted by prominent Dem pollster John Anzalone, who conducted some polling for Pres. Obama during the ’08 campaign, shows a plurality of voters currently oppose the health care bill; just 35% of swing voters favor the bill based on what they know about it. But when they hear more about it, 51% of all voters, and 50% of swing voters support the measure…when they hear more about it, 51% of all voters, and 50% of swing voters support the measure.

We knew that the HCR package polls better after respondents actually understand its key provisions. But it does help to know which white voters are most open to it, and pro-reform activists should take note. In terms of messaging, Wilson explains John Anzalone’s observation about his poll:

Dems should focus on provisions of the bill that require coverage even if someone has a pre-existing condition, and on a provision that requires members of Congress to have the same coverage as other Americans, Anzalone writes in the polling memo.
“Not only are they the most popular components of reform among voters overall, but also among key audiences, including seniors. Based on these results, any messaging in support of reform — to any audience — should prominently highlight these components,” Anzalone and pollster Matt Hogan wrote.
And though Dems have taken heat for the process by which health care legislation has progressed this year, expect the party to argue that their efforts to allow a majority vote on the bill were justified. Those who back reform “should avoid process debates,” the pollsters write, but they say Dems can use the argument that no 60-vote requirement is in the Constitution effectively.

It may be late in the game for mass mobilization of constituents. But calls to leaders and activists of the aforementioned constituencies, urging them to more vigorously lobby uncomitted House members, might do some good.
Apropos of my TDS post yesterday on the influence of African American voters in Blue Dog districts, Peter Wallsten and Jean Spencer note in their Wall St. Journal article “Opinions Harden on Health,” that a new WSJ/NBC survey indicates that “majorities of African-Americans and liberal Democrats, as well as a plurality of Latinos, would be less likely to vote for their representative in Congress if he or she voted against the health-care plan.” In this regard it’s encouraging that Dems are reportedly running pro-reform radio ads on Tom Joyner’s nationally syndicated programs in key cities.
Tomorrow will bring more optimistic and pessimistic prognoses for the fate of Democratic HCR. The important challenge for pro-reform Dems is to shrug off positive and negative predictions and do something to generate phone calls, emails and visits to the offices of uncommitted House members.

One of the important sideshows in the 2010 campaign cycle is the intervention of potential 2012 Republican presidential candidates in current GOP primaries.
Sarah Palin has received considerable attention for endorsing Tea Party favorite and libertarian scion Rand Paul for the Senate in Kentucky over Mitch McConnell’s buddy Trey Grayson, and also for endorsing her old running-mate, John McCain, in his fight with right-wing talk show host and former U.S. Rep. J.D. Hayworth.
Mike Huckabee has been more aggressive in his endorsements, mainly by supporting candidates who endorsed him in 2008. Huck struck gold by getting out early in support of Tea Party/conservative icon Marco Rubio’s challenge to Charlie Crist in Florida–long before Rubio began crushing Crist in the polls. Beyond that, Huck has endorsed controversial gubernatorial candidates in two early 2012 caucus/primary states: Lt. Gov. Andre (Stray Animals) Bauer, and Iowa social conservative Bob Vander Plaats. The latter is an especially interesting endorsement; if Vander Plaats upsets former Gov. Terry Branstad (who is closely affiliated with Mitt Romney supporters in that state) in the Iowa gubernatorial primary in June, Huck will be in good shape to repeat his 2008 victory in the Iowa Caucuses.
Like Huckabee, Mitt Romney has kept his endorsements so far limited to 2008 allies (with the exception of John McCain). Those include front-running California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman and longshot Alabama gubernatorial candidate Kay Ivy. But two recent Romney endorsements (again, of people who endorsed Mitt in 2008) have drawn national attention: embattled incumbent Sen. Bob Bennett of Utah (a Romney hotbed, for obvious reasons), for whom conservatives have long knives out, and then state Rep. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, a big favorite of the right-wing blogosphere.
Meanwhile, Tim Pawlenty, after doing the Right thing by endorsing conservative Doug Hoffmann in a red-hot New York special election last year, announced he would eschew further interventions in competitive Republican primaries. But he made an exception for John McCain, presumably after ensuring he would receive cover for this step from Palin and Romney.
If Hayworth manages to beat McCain, he won’t owe any 2012 candidates a thing. But there are plenty of other competitive primaries later this year where the presidentials haven’t weighed in, and the chess game of endorsements will be very interesting.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Two analyses released late last week underscore the rising importance of debt, both private and public, to average Americans. On Thursday, the Fed reported that after nearly doubling to $13.7 trillion between 2000 and 2008, household debt fell in 2009 for the first time since record-keeping began in 1945. Because household debt rose so much faster than disposable income during that period, debt soared from 90 percent of disposable income to a stunning 130.6 percent before falling back to 122.5 percent at the end of 2009. Much of the decline results from the forced liquidation of debt through housing foreclosures and credit card terminations; the rest reflects the use of higher household savings to pay down debt.
While this is a good start, households have a long way to go before reaching a sustainable balance between debt and income. With normal interest rates, many economists believe, the average household can afford debt totaling about 100 percent of disposable income. If so, the household sector has worked off only one quarter of the excess debt it accumulated during the past decade, and the economy faces another few years of foreclosures, stringent credit, and higher household savings. While laying the basis for renewed growth down the road, these trends suggest the continuation of a below-average recovery for some time to come.
As citizens begin to recover from their own debt binge, they are becoming increasingly concerned about the government’s. A Gallup survey out Friday showed that 31 percent of Americans think unemployment is “the most important problem facing the country today,” with the economy in general in second place at 24 percent and health care at 20 percent. The federal budget deficit was a distant fifth, at 8 percent. But when Americans were asked what they think will be “the most important problem facing our nation 25 years from now,” more (14 percent) named the federal budget deficit than any other issue. Gallup notes that “[t]his is the first time the federal budget deficit has topped the list of future problems, and indeed the first time it has exceeded 5 percent.”
For decades, the conventional wisdom has been that concern over public-sector budget deficits and debt was confined to a handful of elected officials and policy wonks. Although Ross Perot challenged that belief in the early 1990s, the consequences of his insurgency soon faded. But now, the massive spending and debt accumulation the government has used to save the financial system and stabilize the economy are in the process of effecting a sea-change in public attitudes. While President Obama’s fiscal commission may well deadlock, the problem that called it into being isn’t going away, and neither are the public’s concerns. The party that masters the emerging new politics of deficits and debt will seize the mantle of national leadership.

I know, I know, paying attention to anything Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) says is a bit lazy, since she offers up irrational outrages on a near daily basis. But her remarks suggesting that Americans don’t have to comply with health care legislation if it’s enacted via procedures she doesn’t like really do blaze some new trails for the American Right–or at least trails not pursued since the early 1960s, when segregationists urged noncompliance with Supreme Court decisions and civil rights laws.
Here’s Bachmann flirting with jail-time in defense of the great American principle of unregulated private health insurance, or whatever it is she’s standing for:

If they pass the bill legitimately, then yes, we have to follow the law — until we repeal it. But if they pass it illegitimately, then the bill is illegitimate, and we don’t have to lay down for this. It’s not difficult to figure out. So if for some reason they’re able to get their votes this week and pass this 2,700-page Senate bill — if they get it, trillions of dollars is what it’s gonna cost, when we didn’t vote on it, we need to tell them a message: That if they get away with this, they will be able to get away with anything — with anything. And you can’t say you voted on a bill when you didn’t, because it’s fraud. But we are not helpless here. We are not helpless, there are things that we can do.

What Bachmann is thundering about here specifically are reports that the House may vote on a reconciliation bill to “fix” the Senate bill, and then by a Rules Committee provision “deem” the Senate bill itself as having passed the House via efforts to amend it. Turns out the “deem and pass” strategy was used by Republicans during the Bush administration to enact a debt limit increase–never a popular vote–so there is, ahem, some bipartisan precedent for the procedure. And for all the talk about its sneakiness, it should be remembered that it is being considered not because of some substantive concerns about a “fixed” Senate bill, but because House members fear the Senate will just celebrate House passage of their bill and not bother to get around to the “fix.” In other words, it’s all procedural mumbo jumbo that’s unrelated to real health care reform. Any House member voting for the “fix” is, in fact, going to be held responsible by Republicans for supporting “ObamaCare,” so conservatives are being more than a little disingenous in claiming that “deem and pass” is some sort of devilish trick to avoid accountability.
In any event, the courts are where such matters should be thrashed out, not the streets. And by suggesting that her own view of “deem and pass” as representing “tyranny” should trump the law of the land, Bachmann is taking a fateful step towards the revolutionary posture that her Tea Party allies have been hinting at all along.
I’m reminded of an incident back in Georgia some time ago when Congress had enacted a tax bill that imposed a state-by-state volume limitation on the use of tax-exempt financing for private development projects. I was part of a state government team that designed Georgia’s system for implementing this law, and after a public briefing on the new rules in one locale, a local development official replied: “We appreciate y’all coming down here to explain all this, but we think we’ll just use the old system.” We decided not to humiliate the guy by pointing out that the IRS wouldn’t exactly let him “use the old system,” but instead informed him of that privately.
I hope someone informs Michele Bachmann and her listeners that she doesn’t get to pick and choose which laws are “valid.” And if she’s willing to go to the hoosegow to resist ObamaCare, there are quite a few other Americans who think the supremacy of law is a rather important principle who will be happy to accomodate her.

We’ll soon know the fate of health care reform legislation in Congress. But win or lose, the retrospective analysis of the health reform fight, and particularly the Obama administration’s overall strategy, will go on for years. That’s why I think it’s important to refute some questionable interpretations right now, before they are incorporated into the unofficial history of the debate.
Today Peter Beinart posted an article for The Daily Beast that treats the last-minute skirmishing among Democrats over health reform as the final stage in a two-decade-long battle between Clintonians and progressives, which Barack Obama brought to a conclusion by choosing to move ahead despite Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts. This decision, Beinart says, changed Democrats “forever.”
Beinart’s piece is something of a pinata: it can be whacked from any number of directions. Most obviously, he mischaracterizes the current, and actually very limited, conflict among Democrats about what Obama should have done after the Brown victory. Yes, you can find a few self-described Democratic pundits (and he names virtually all of them) who have argued that Obama should have folded his tent or (somehow) pursued a bipartisan, incremental health reform proposal in the wake of Massachusetts. But the idea that the polling pair of Doug Schoen and Mark Penn, or longtime eccentric Pat Caddell, speak for the entire “Clintonian” tendency in the party is completely absurd. More typical and certainly more relevant are TDS Co-Editor William Galston (whom Beinart treats as a major foundational thinker for what he calls the “DLC types” in the party) and Progressive Policy Institute (the DLC’s think tank during all the battles Beinart describes) president Will Marshall, who have avidly backed Obama’s decision on both philosophical and practical grounds (here and here).
If you look at the actual conflict among Democrats in Congress, “no” or possible “no” votes in the House nearly all fall into two categories: nervous Democrats from very tough districts, who do not neatly fit on one side of some intraparty ideologicial spectrum, and more importantly, the “Stupak Democrats” who are focused on abortion policy. By and large, “Stupak Democrats” aren’t “Clintonian” in any meaningful sense of the term; many are very liberal voters on economic issues, and some, in fact, profess to be upset by the absence of a public option in the Senate bill and/or the presence of an insurance premium tax which many unions don’t like. To the extent that they reflect any intra-party conflict of an enduring nature, the “Stupak Democrats” represent the losing side of a debate over abortion that pre-dated the DLC/progressive battles and has little or nothing to do with them.
At least a few actual or potential Democratic defectors on health reform do so strictly from a progressive point-of-view, on grounds that the Senate bill, even if it’s “fixed” via reconciliation, merely ratifies the tainted health care status quo.
And so long as the Clinton brand is going to be thrown around in this discussion, it’s worth noting that the single most crucial modification of Obama’s campaign proposal on health care reform was adoption of an individual mandate, which Hillary Clinton championed. The idea that Mark Penn rather than Obama’s Secretary of State speaks for Clintonism is more than dubious.
Equally implausible is Beinart’s claim that Obama’s decision to move ahead on health reform represented the vindication of the Democratic “left” as opposed to the “center.” Yes, most self-conscious Democratic progressives (like most Democratic “centrists”) are pleased that Obama is pressing ahead on health reform absent any Republican support. That’s because they consider the status quo intolerable from a moral and substantive point of view, and surrender as politically calamitous as well. But as anyone who has been paying attention should know, many, perhaps most, on the Democratic Left are unhappy with Obama for pursuing Republican support as long as he did, and sacrificing important features of health reform in the process.
And this leads me to my most fundamental objection to Beinart’s analysis: his assumption that “partisanship” and “bipartisanship”–or as it puts it elsewhere, a Rovian “base mobilization” strategy as opposed to a Dick-Morris-style “crossover” strategy–are and have always been the essential differentiators between the progressive and Clintonian factions in the party, leading to the conclusion that Obama has now, once and forever, chosen the former over the latter. For anyone seriously engaged in intraparty debates over the years, the picture painted by Beinart is a very crude cartoon that should be offensive to both sides of those debates (as crude, in fact, as his characterization of the seminal Galston-Kamarck essay “The Politics of Evasion” as urging Democrats to “move to the right”).
It should be reasonably obvious after the last year that Obama and congressional Democrats didn’t “choose” partisanship after the Scott Brown victory; they were forced into a purely partisan stance on health reform by Republican instransigence. And it should be equally obvious that Obama’s many gestures towards bipartisanship were motivated not by naivete, but by a conviction that he could best achieve “crossover appeal” in the electorate by exposing the radicalism and intransigence of the GOP. It’s not clear this strategy will work in 2010, but it might well work in 2012 and beyond, thus building a more durable Democratic majority and/or creating incentives for the GOP to correct its current crazy course. In any event, he has not for all time chosen for Democrats a permanent posture of maximum partisanship and “base mobilization,” and his position on the literally hundreds of other policy and political issues that Democrats have internally debated can’t be shoehorned into Beinart’s scheme.
Maybe the decision to go for the gold on health reform will prove to have been momentous. But it wasn’t really a hard choice given the circumstances, and it certainly didn’t resolve every strategic decision Democrats will make “forever.”

Given the G.O.P.’s oft-stated intention to “destroy” or otherwise end President Obama’s re-election chances by killing health care reform, you have to wonder if some undecided Democratic House members with a substantial African American population in their districts could be encouraged to vote for HCR. The following House members who have been identified as undecided on HCR by The Hill (see our TDS post here) and other sources have double-digit, or near double-digit percentages of African American constituents:
John Barrow (D-GA) 44.5
Steve Driehaus (Ohio) 36.5
John Spratt (S.C.) 32.3
Tom Perriello (Va.) 24.1
Mike Doyle (Pa.) 22.7
John Tanner (Tenn.) 22.4
Marion Berry (Ark.) 16.6
Russ Carnahan (Mo.) 9.1
Mary Jo Kilroy (Ohio) 8.7
(percentages come from nationalatlas.gov, via Wikipedia demographic figures for congressional districts)
Democratic candidates for congress count on receiving upwards of 80 percent of votes cast by African Americans in their districts, and in some cases they would be in trouble if this percentage were to significantly decline or if Black voter turnout in their districts were to tank dramatically. Clearly, African American organizations and media in their districts could be an influential force, using some form of the following pitch to their Reps: “If you vote to help the G.O.P. try to end President Obama’s re-election chances, we will do everything we can to substantially reduce your support among African American voters.”
Yes, this is serious hardball. But the damage done by the potential failure of HCR would be very damaging to Dem chances, not only this year, but in ’12 as well.

As the political world prepares for what appears to be Last Stop Week on health reform, conservatives seem astonished that the president and congressional Democrats are pushing ahead for final enactment of legislation passed by both Houses last year, intead of folding their hands and fleeing in terror. They are particularly incensed that Democrats aren’t being shamed or frightened by the prospect of–gasp!–a poisoned partisan atmosphere in Washington. Here’s how Julie Mason of the conservative Washington Examiner presents the threat:

The White House claims it’s above worrying about the politics of health care — they just want a bill passed this week.
Good thing, because politics in Washington could become a lot more ferocious and partisan, whether their plan flies or not.
“If they pull off this crazy scenario they are putting together, they are going to destroy a lot of the comity in the House,” said Brian Darling, a congressional expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “Even in the current, highly partisan atmosphere, it can get a lot worse.”

Sorry, Brian & Julie, you are wrong. It really can’t get much worse. And for that, conservatives have no one but themselves to blame, if they actually even care.
Just to cite the most obvious example, there were many moments over the last year when the White House and congressional Democrats might well have significantly changed health reform legislation in exchange for just a few Republican votes (in fact, they made unilateral concessions in the Senate again and again simply to keep the possibility open). And after the loss of the 60th Senate vote last month, had Republicans offered any suggestions other than complete repudiation of the bills already enacted by a majority in the House and a supermajority in the Senate, Democrats would have snapped them up instantly. But in an atmosphere where long-held Republican ideas on health reform like the individual mandate were suddenly being denounced as socialist or even fascist by the Right, no serious offers were forthcoming, unless you think such “ideas” as sweeping away state regulation of health insurers via mandatory interestate sales is “serious.”
So let’s not hear any empty threats about Republican “partisanship.” For better or worse, the GOP made a clear and collective decision last year to take partisanship to the max on every conceivable front, and they have been quite successful with that strategy in a nilhilistic sort of way. But there are no arrows left in that particular quiver.

As you may have heard, Glenn Beck has gotten himself into some serious hot water by suggesting that people (or more specificially, Christians) leave their churches or even their denominations behind if they harbor any talk about “social justice” or “economic justice,” terms he identifies as “code” for communist- and Nazi-sponsored totalitarian designs. As usually interpreted, Beck’s line sounds like a fairly common kulturkampf tactic by conservatives who are engaging in civil war against alleged “modernism” within the Roman Catholic Church, or who have been urging Protestants for years to abandon “liberal” mainline churches for various fundamentalist gatherings.
But if you listen to what Beck actually said yesterday, in another rant on the subject, he’s saying something about Christianity that’s a lot more radical than the usual back-to-the-1950s stuff about religion focusing on personal morality rather than caring for the poor. Calling “social justice” a “perversion of the Gospel,” Rev. Glenn explains it this way:

Nowhere does Jesus say, “Hey, if someone asks for your shirt, give the government a coat, and then have the government give him a pair of slacks.” You want to help out, you help out.

Now you often hear religious conservatives argue that state social welfare programs undermine the charitable instinct or the private organizations that help the poor. But Beck seems to be suggesting that any government efforts–indeed, any collective efforts–to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, and so forth, are “perversions of the Gospel.” Beck’s Jesus is a strict libertarian.
Beck’s original remarks were treated by some as a thinly veiled attack on the Catholic Church, since, as the conservative religious journal First Things quickly pointed out, the very term “social justice” was invented by a nineteenth-century Jesuit theologian interpreting St. Thomas Aquinas. “Social justice” isn’t just a trendy contemporary slogan, and it certainly wasn’t pioneered by communists or Nazis: it was the central theme of the great Social Encyclicals of various Popes, most notably Leo XIII, whose 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum, is considered especially normative.
More basically, the idea that Christianity is opposed to state action in pursuit of the common welfare is highly alien to both Catholic and Protestant traditions. Most religious observers would contend that “social justice” as practiced by communists and Nazis is a “perversion” of Christianity, and hardly any would confuse government-sponsored health and welfare programs with totalitarianism. Even amongst the hard-core Christian Right, most spokesmen save their Nazi analogies for attacks on legalized abortion.
As it happens, Beck is a Mormon, which isn’t exactly a libertarian creed, either. But he’s really endangering his status on the American Right by claiming that Jesus would today be out there with the Tea Party folk fulminating about the “looting” of taxpayers to help the poor.

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

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

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