If you are interested in a deeper interpretation of what’s been happening in and to the Obama administration–deeper, that is, than conservative allegations of “radicalism” and “socialism” and progressive complaints about “spinelessness” or “corporate influence”–then I highly recommend a colloquoy on The American Prospect site between TAP’s Mark Schmitt and historian Rick Perlstein. It’s in essence a lookback at the simmering debate among progressive observers that ran all through the 2008 election cycle about Barack Obama’s “theory of change,” and especially the tension between his progressive goals and his rhetoric of bipartisanship.
As it happens, Schmitt (along with Michael Tomasky and yours truly) was highly identified with the argument that Obama’s “theory of change” was aimed at offering the political opposition a choice between cooperation on progressive policy initiatives or self-isolation through obstruction and extremism. In other words, in a country unhappy with partisan gridlock, Republicans would either go along with key elements of a progressive agenda, or shrink themselves into an ever-more-extreme ideological rump that was irrelevant to the direction of the country.
Rick Perlstein was more of an Obama-skeptic, but he, too, began to feel that Obama might be luring Republicans into a big trap. As he recalls now, during the stretch drive in 2008:

Conservatives eagerly played to type — GOP congressional leaders called in Joe the Plumber for strategy sessions, and Newsmax.com started advertising a 2009 “Hot Sarah Calendar.” On my blog I labeled what Republicans had been reduced to as “Palinporn”: “material to help lonely conservatives retreat within their own cocoon of fantasy rather than participate in the actual conversations taking place to govern the country.” It was a very “Obama theory of change” insight: Obama could simply get on with governing. Republicans would conversely build ever more elaborate halls of mirrors that made it increasingly impossible for them to speak to America. In fact, around that time, I was exhilarated by the thought of Rush Limbaugh’s ratings exploding through the roof, from 20 million to 30 million listeners — 30 million Americans able only to speak to each other, sounding to the rest of the country like practitioners of esoteric Masonic rites.

Today, of course, Republicans haven’t gotten any less extreme–au contraire in fact–but their political prospects, for 2010 at least, look pretty good. What went wrong? Was Obama’s “theory of change” fundamentally flawed, making him look weak and unprincipled when talking about “bipartisanship?” Would Democrats have done better under the leadership of someone whose theory of change was based on “fighting” or constituency-tending?
You can read the whole piece, but both Schmitt and Perlstein agree that Obama underestimated the ability of Republicans to achieve almost total solidarity against the new administration, and overestimated his own ability to maintain the strong and excited coalition he put together in 2008, given the excrutiatingly difficult circumstances he face upon taking office. Moreover, they agree that going forward, Obama must find ways to “draw lines” with the Republican opposition without trying to abandon his natural style and tone. To put it another way, they suggest that Obama’s “theory of change” required, in practice, a more aggressive approach than trap-setting and jiu-jitsu. The strategy isn’t just falling into place naturally.
What I would add to their analysis is that this “line-drawing” should focus more on the present and future than the past. Yes, George W. Bush is responsible for a lot of the country’s current problems and even many of the policies that Obama was more or less forced to continue. Yes, Obama inherited two wars, vast long-term budget deficits, and an economic nightmare, and he should remind people of that now and then. But inevitably, fairly or not, with every day that passes more Americans will hold the current administration responsible for current conditions in the country. Moreover, what the “blame Bush” narrative misses is that Republicans have in no small part insulated themselves from responsibility for his record by moving harshly to the Right, implicitly criticizing Bush for not being a “true conservative,” and in particular, attacking the steps he took to head off a global economic collapse, which are deeply unpopular. And focusing on Bush distracts attention from the extremism, craziness and emptiness (depending on the issue) or the post-Bush Republican Party, which ought to be the source of comparison for voters this year and in 2012. Without an aggressive, presidentially-led effort to expose that extremism, you can’t really expect political independents to look past the mainstream media’s inveterate tendency to assume the political “center” is half-way between wherever the two parties happen to be at any moment, and to blame both parties equally for the climate of “partisanship” (or maybe blame Obama even more, since he was supposed to be “post-partisan”).
Presenting a choice not just to Republicans, but to voters, of two distinct courses in American politics and policy is the best chance the president and the Democratic Party has of negotiating the current climate, re-energizing the 2012 coalition, and eventually, getting a clear mandate for progressive governance that will include public support for overcoming Republican obstruction, especially in the Senate.
Obama’s “theory of change” hasn’t been refuted, just immensely complicated, and there’s no compelling evidence that a different strategy of dealing with a public wanting conflicting things, an opposition party that’s gone nihilistic, and the built-in obstructions to change in our system, would have worked better. But at some point, the theory has to be adjusted to current realities and past mistakes, and get visible results. Otherwise, the spectacle of the post-partisan president getting attacked for “socialism” while trimming his own policy sails and begging the opposition for cooperation really will look just feckless.

The news that the president is going to propose a three-year “freeze” on appropriations for non-defense discretionary programs (with veterans and homeland security programs exempted) is creating a lot of consternation among progressives today.
But folded into this consternation is a significant amount of confusion. The term “budget freeze,” long the default-drive Republican fiscal austerity “idea,” usually connotes an across-the-board flatlining of spending in non-exempt accounts, a total commitment to the budgetary status quo that neatly allows its proponents to avoid separating sheep from goats and offending any constituency for any particular program. If that’s what Obama was proposing, it would indeed be inconsistent with any new jobs initiative, or indeed, with key elements of the “middle-class relief” agenda the administration just announced. But that’s not what he is proposing; it is instead really an overall spending “cap” under which specific programs could be increased or decreased, presumably depdending on their usefullness in creating jobs or other worthy social goods. It’s an approach that Bill Clinton, back in 1992, called “cut and invest.”
Since it’s Congress, not the administration, that will actually make appropriations decisions, and since Members of Congress and the committees they chair which often serve as the most powerful constituencies for programs with little real justification, it can definitely be argued that any real “freeze” would look more like the across-the-board variety (indeed, that’s what happened to Clinton’s “cut and invest” budget when Congress got its hands on it in 1993). Alternatively, it can be argued that the whole thing is mainly rhetorical, given public concerns about government spending.
But in conjunction with the president’s push for a bipartisan “deficit commission” that would be emppwered to make recommendations on long-term budget savings that would be submitted to Congress for an up-or-down vote, the “freeze” proposal, whatever it actually means, will definitely upset progressives fearing that Obama is “going Hoover” in economic policy. And make no mistake, there’s one objection to the “freeze” idea that’s not based on confusion: if you really do believe that the federal government needs to be running larger short-term deficits in order to provide Keynsian stiimulus to consumer demand, then any domestic spending limits, however selective in application, will strike you as a very bad approach.

One of the strangest media narratives in American politics today is the idea that the Tea Party Movement represents some sort of disenfranchised “center” that wants the two major parties to play nice and work together on compromise policies to address the country’s problems. Maybe that’s true of some grassroots Tea Party participants, but it’s simply not true of its activist leadership.
If you want fresh evidence of how silly this narrative has become, check out Dave Weigel’s report in the Washington Independent of a meeting at FreedomWorks involving a variety of Tea Party leaders, aimed at drafting a new “Contract with America”-type document for this fall’s elections.
You should read the whole thing, particularly if you are under the illusion that the Tea Party Movement is easily distinguishable from the right wing of the Republican Party. But here’s the most important passage about the discussion:

When all of this was boiled down, the activists came up with three goals. The first: “No tax & spend incumbent goes unchallenged.” The second: “Take over the Republican Party,” which meant scouting out “strategic opportunities to put fiscal conservatives in the House and Senate.” The third: “Fiscal conservatives will take back the House and Senate”….
The less popular items were ones that smacked of federal government intervention in the economy. The group voted down a tight term limits rule, a “Committee on Constitutional Authority” that would rule on whether bills passed muster, and waivers from the EPA “in order to allow states flexibility in establishing environmental priorities.” That prompted activists to argue that they should simply support abolishing the EPA. After no one supported a “corporate welfare commission” to scour wasteful spending, Pennsylvania activist John Stahl suggested that the movement campaign against corporate welfare altogether. And Stahl worried that the Contract was missing a major action item.
“There are assaults underway by the Obama administration, and others, on our Constitutional right to vote,” said Stahl. He rattled off examples — the motor voter law, giving the vote to “anybody who’s on the dole,” amnesty to undocumented immigrants — and argued that it needed to become an issue or there would be “a lot of disappointed people out there.”

Now “abolishing the EPA” is not exactly one of those consensus, bipartisan ideas that gridlock in Washington is holding back from immediate implementation. “Abolishing corporate welfare” altogether sounds nice, but if serious, that means eliminating any tax incentives for socially desirable business behavior, which Democrats have long embraced as a fiscally responsible alternative to direct government spending, and which most Republicans have avidly defended as a form of “tax cuts” that can never be rescinded.
And while rolling back voting rights for poor people, “people on the dole,” or legal immigrants has long been a rhetorical staple for the hard-right faction of the GOP, it’s not “centrist” in any conceivable way.
Some will object that no particular group speaks for the Tea Party Movement, and that’s true, but the more activists sit around with conservative Republicans planning a “takeover of the Republican Party” and promoting radical policy positions aimed at eliminating government initiatives that go back to the New Deal, the more it becomes apparent that genuinely “centrist” Tea Party fans are getting used for a very different agenda. That’s worth understanding, particularly since the “takeover” of the Republican Party under discussion all across the Movement looks like an effort to push on an open door.

I’m with Steve Benen on this one: after listening to Republicans say all weekend that the president needs to surrender on health care reform and start embracing their policy ideas, maybe it’s time to draw a lot more public attention to all that fine GOP thinking on the subject.
So where to begin? I guess that would be with the “plan” that drew 176 Republicans votes in the House in a test vote in November of last year, the so-called “Boehner plan.” Dissed by an official Congressional Budget Office analysis that suggested it would cover almost none of the uninsured, while controlling costs far less effectively than the House Democratic proposal, this plan followed the usual conservative template of focusing on tort “reform,” “interstate markets” for private heath insurance (e.g., elimination of state regulations), elimination of the entire employer-based system, and a two-pronged strategy of subsidizing high-deductible individual health plans for healthy people, and state-run risk pools for sick people. It was, as Matt Yglesias put it, an “un-insurance” plan that would take health policy, in some respects, back to the 1950s.
Another example of Republican “thinking” on health care policy is the idea of “voucherizing” Medicare, which was the central health policy element of the official House GOP “alternative budget” offered last April by Rep. Paul Ryan of WI. While “Medicare voucher” proposals vary, they all at the very least aim at transforming Medicare into a system of federal subsidies for purchasing private health insurance, while capping expenditures regardless of the impact on benefits. To put it simply, seniors would march through the streets with torches to protest any such plan if it were taken seriously.
And then there’s the most fully developed Republican health care plan, the one developed and implemented by the front-runner for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination, and recently promoted by the party’s maximum “new star”: the Massachusetts health reform plan. How about allowing a vote on that in Congress? Oh, yeah, sorry, that’s pretty much the plan already passed by the U.S. Senate without a single Republican vote! It’s socialist!
Suffice it to say that while Democrats have been materially hurt by endless scrutiny and confusion about the substance of their ideas on health care, Republicans have massively benefitted from a total lack of accountability for their own ideas. Best I can tell, Republicans would probably be politically destroyed if people truly paid attention to GOP health proposals. So Democrats should find ways to help their GOP colleagues publicize their ideas.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Most of the analysis of the impact of Scott Brown’s upset victory in Massachusetts has naturally revolved around the Democratic Party. Having lost the “Kennedy seat,” in the bluest of blue states, with health care reform legislation (and the ability to overcome Republican filibusters on other legislation) in extreme peril, and already facing a very difficult midterm election environment, what can the Donkey Party and its leaders do to mitigate the damage? Will they pull together or scatter to the four winds? Will vulnerable House members retire, making a Republican takeover in November that much more likely? And is the president in a political freefall that could make him effectively a lame duck between now and the end of 2011, and a sitting duck in his re-election year?
These are all reasonable questions, but it’s also worth asking whether Republicans may be in danger of over-interpreting the Brown win, and refusing to deal with some of their own political problems.
Few vulnerable Democrats this November will run anything like the kind of clumsy and somnolent campaign conducted by Martha Coakley. Few Republican challengers will have the luxury enjoyed by Scott Brown to pose as all things to all people: a “liberal Republican” to some, a nonpartisan to others, and a tea party zealot to the rest. No other venue will give Republicans the opportunity to attack national health care reform by way of defending identical reforms at the state level. And few states will provide GOP candidates with a fat-and-happy state Democratic establishment used to winning with little or no effort (indeed, some states, such as Georgia and South Carolina, have a fat-and-happy Republican establishment with a growing record of corruption and toxic infighting). More fundamentally, the idea that a Republican Senate victory in Massachusetts means the nation is turning “red” makes no more sense that asserting Nebraska or Alaska turned “blue” when they elected Democratic senators in actual general elections without the skewed turnout patterns exhibited in the Bay State’s special election.
But what makes the new over-confidence so dangerous for the GOP goes beyond the enduring facts that the Republican “brand” remains damaged and that congressional Republicans are distrusted by the public even more than congressional Democrats. The rise in the party’s short-term fortunes has occurred even as it has negotiated a rare, post-defeat race-to-the-Right. This trend has been punctuated by scorched-earth tactics in Congress and a virtual witch-hunt for moderate “RINOs” to vilify and defeat in primaries. At some point, and perhaps soon, the “new” Republican Party will have to define itself as something other than a pure opposition party.
This is true in health care policy, where for all the demagogic GOP rhetoric about defending Medicare from Democratic “cuts,” the default conservative policy impulses vary between “you’re-on-your own” encouragement of individual responsibility for health care costs, to such potential political disasters as voucherizing (or in effect, capping and privatizing) Medicare, and eliminating state regulation of private health insurers. But it’s even truer in economic policy, where the rightward trend in the GOP may have enabled conservative pols to attack corporate subsidies and “bailouts,” but also pushes them to oppose any sort of regulation of the financial system. If, as is already happening, the Obama administration and congressional Democrats begin to push for new regulations in the run-up to November, Republicans may have to fatally re-identify themselves with Wall Street at the worst possible time. Jonathan Chait’s profile on the economic thinking of Republican megastar Marco Rubio of Florida suggests some of the juicy attack lines Democrats could soon enjoy.
There’s also the whole question of turnout in November. What’s been fueling Democratic pessimism about the 2010 elections all along has been the understanding that older white voters—one of Obama’s weakest demographic groups in 2008—usually turn out at relatively high levels in midterm elections, while younger voters—and sometimes minority voters—usually don’t. There’s nothing quite like an Armageddon-like national political atmosphere, with Republican extremism fully on display, to boost overall turnout.
Looking beyond 2010, Republicans have a real problem with their putative presidential field for 2012. It’s easy to say that new “stars” will emerge this November, but it’s extremely unlikely any of them—or for that matter, the flavor-of-the-month, Scott Brown—would be in a position to run for president so soon. That leaves the GOP with some slim pickins: Mitt Romney, whose identification with health reform in Massachusetts is a potentially disqualifying problem; Mike Huckabee, whom economic conservatives and most conservative talk-show-hosts hate; the less-than-scintillating Tim Pawlenty, who is deeply vulnerable to an early knockout blow in his next-door-state of Iowa; and of course, Sarah Palin.
While Democrats have some very big problems, it’s no time for irrational exuberance among Republicans. They’ve got problems, too, and at the moment, appear far less willing to deal with them.

In his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot‘ at the Center for American Progress web pages, TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira demolishes the Republican myth that President Obama has somehow been repudiated by the MA election for the U.S. Senate:

…In a Lake Research poll of voters in that election, Obama actually received a higher favorability rating than the victorious conservative candidate. And in the same poll voters said by 51-43 that Obama is taking the country in the right direction. By 52-41, they also said that “change takes time and things are beginning to move in the right direction” rather than “I am disappointed with the pace of change in this country since the 2008 election.”

Teixeira also points out that the poll indicates the ‘blame Obama for our economic troubles’ meme of the GOP is not being taken too seriously by voters. As Teixeira explains:

…Voters still recognize, despite their serious economic discontent, that current conditions are more the Bush administration’s fault than the Obama administration’s. In the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll, 67 percent assign a great deal or a good amount of blame to the Bush administration for the economic situation compared to just 36 percent who feel that way about the Obama administration’s efforts.
Indeed, consistent with the Massachusetts polling, the public generally believes either Obama’s policies have already made the country significantly better off or are beginning to move the country in the right direction. In a recent Allstate/National Journal poll, 65 percent thought either that his policies had made the country significantly better off (13 percent) or were beginning to move in that direction (52 percent), compared to 31 percent who thought his policies had made the country significantly worse off.

It seems that the “conservative hyperventilating” about Tuesday’s election as a referendum on President Obama cited by Teixeira provides yet another example of failed GOP myth-mongering.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
In the wake of Massachusetts, President Obama faces two urgent decisions. One concerns his agenda for 2010 and beyond. I offered my advice on this last week, have not changed my mind, and won’t repeat myself.
The president must also decide how to proceed with health care legislation. Here I find myself in a paradoxical position. In this publication and elsewhere, I have argued since October of 2008 against beginning the new administration with an ambitious agenda that included comprehensive health reform. Nonetheless, I believe that the president and congressional Democrats would be ill-advised to shelve the effort at this point. Here are my reasons.
First: At the most basic political level, turning tail and running for the tall grass is bound to fail. Democrats who have already voted for health reform (and that’s most of them) can’t take their votes back. Whatever they do between now and November, they’ll be called on to defend what they’ve done. Are they going to say that they’ve changed their minds? Who would believe them?
Second: The American people won’t support representatives they don’t respect. The people respect sincerity, consistency, and strength of purpose. It is often the case that constituents will respect positions with which they disagree—if they think their representatives really mean it. One thing is clear: They won’t respect vacillation and weakness. Does anyone?
Third: The president and congressional Democrats have spent the past year arguing that health reform is in the national interest—that it will broaden coverage, begin to contain costs, increase disposable income, and help improve the government’s long-term fiscal outlook. Which of those arguments ceased to be true between Monday and today?
Fourth: The Founders designed a representative republic, not a plebiscitary democracy. Officials are elected to make judgments on behalf of the people, and the people get to judge those judgments. Large changes are always more uncertain than is the status quo, which is why change is so hard. At some point, elected officials have to tell their constituents, “I’ve done my best to think this issue through, and this is the conclusion I’ve reached. Now it’s your turn.”
There are two cogent arguments against the position I’m defending. The first is that there’s not nearly enough trust in government to sustain comprehensive health reform, and ramming it through in the face of public disapproval will only intensify mistrust and make matters worse. The shortage of trust was a compelling reason not to go down this road in the first place–especially in the context of necessary but expensive and unpopular measures needed to ward off a second Great Depression–but it doesn’t resolve the question of what to do now. It’s a judgment call: Are you more likely to begin rebuilding trust by sticking to your guns–or by in effect saying that you weren’t really that serious about the most important piece of social legislation in decades?
The second counterargument is that elected officials have involved the people in a year-long discussion about health reform, and the people have rendered their judgment, first in public opinion surveys, then in Massachusetts. Proceeding in the face of this judgment, the argument goes, is a gross violation of small-d democratic norms. This brings us back to the issue of the nature of our political system and the principles of conduct it embodies. One might argue that by the fall of 2006, the American people had rendered a negative judgment on the Iraq war and that George W. Bush’s decision to double down with the troop surge was undemocratic. Well, speaking as someone who publicly opposed that war well before we entered it, I have to say that I respect President Bush for making the decision he did … and that it was probably right on the merits. Yes, it’s one thing to be the chief executive, another to be a member of the House. But that difference doesn’t mean that it’s always wrong, or undemocratic, for Congress to exercise independent judgment.
So what is to be done? President Obama’s opening post-Massachusetts gambit–his interview with George Stephanopoulos–was not helpful. Consider the following statement: “I would advise that we try to move quickly to coalesce around those elements of the package that people agree on.” Which people? If he means the American people as a whole, I’m not sure what that proposal amounts to. Sure, everyone would like restraints on insurance companies and constraints on costs increases (the two areas the president cited), but you can’t get them without other things that many people don’t like, such as costly coverage expansion and increased regulatory bureaucracy. If he means Democrats and Republicans in Congress, the zone of agreement is near zero and likely to remain there until November. Given the success of their obstructionism so far, why would Republican leaders change course? And after the failed negotiations in the Senate Finance Committee last year, who believes that Republican moderates would break ranks now? As for focusing on areas of agreement between House and Senate Democrats, I thought that’s what the discussion up until Monday was all about.
If the president sounds such an uncertain trumpet, who will follow? If he still wants legislation, he should invest the full authority of his office to persuade the House to endorse the Senate bill, accompanied by a package of amendments to be considered separately under the reconciliation process. If he has concluded that he has no choice but to take the issue off the table, he should say so. If he continues to utter hopeful banalities devoid of concrete meaning, the fragile reform coalition will collapse within days, with consequences that will endure for decades.

As uncertainty continues to shroud action, or inaction, in health care reform in Congress, Matt Yglesias makes a really important point today about perceptions of this legislation outside the beltway:

To try to put something I’ve said before in another way, folks working on the Hill need to try to step for a moment outside their little circle of Hilliness. Those of us who follow this stuff professional are aware that there is not and has never been a bill called “the Obama health care plan” nor is there any such thing as “Obamacare.” There are, rather, separate pieces of legislation. A House bill, a Senate bill, a Senate Finance Committee draft. And to professionals, there are important differences between these bills. House members voted for the House bill, but the Senate bill is something else entirely. Senate members voted for the Senate bill, but some amendments to make the tax provisions less-unfavorable to union members would be a whole separate bill. I understand all that. I write blog posts about it all the time.
But no normal people care about that even a little. The public has views on the “Obama health care plan.” And 59 out of 59 Democratic incumbent Senators voted for the Obama health care plan. And 218 Democratic House incumbents voted for the Obama health care plan.

Whatever is ultimately enacted, or defeated, is, to most Americans, the “Obama health care plan.” The votes are already in, the Republican target lists and attack ads are already–well, if not in the can, then pretty clear. Unless Democrats really think whatever bill they can pass will be bad for the country, they might as well get it done.

A problem that seems to be getting lost in the current confusion over the fate of health reform legislation is something that has little to do with party or ideology, much less with the details of health policy. It’s cameralism. To put it simply, members of the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate have very different perspectives, mistrust each other’s motives, and rarely communicate. In general, they don’t much like each other. They live and work in two very different institutional cultures, and with the exception of House veterans serving in the Senate, they don’t go to much trouble to find out how the other chamber functions.
Much of the time this “cameralism” is background noise in the legislative process. But when it comes to the kind of highly complex, trust-based maneuvers that health care reformers are talking about this week–you know, House passes Senate bill with assurance that Senate passes bill “fixing” their own bill via budget reconciliation, somewhere down the road–it’s a real problem that can’t just be wished away. And that’s particularly true in an environment requiring almost total agreement among Democrats in both Houses. Maybe that’s one reason the White House is talking about a “cooling off” period on health care reform.

In her Wall St. Journal article, “Union Households Gave Boost to GOP’s Brown,” Melanie Trottman reports on a new Hart Research Poll:

A poll conducted on behalf of the AFL-CIO found that 49% of Massachusetts union households supported Mr. Brown in Tuesday’s voting, while 46% supported Democrat Martha Coakley…The poll showed Ms. Coakley drew more support among voters with a college education, by a five-point margin, while she lost by a 20-point margin among voters without a college degree.

Tula Connell puts it this way in her FiredogLake post, “The Working Class Has Spoken. Will Democrats Listen?” at the AFL-CIO Now Blog:

The poll, conducted by Hart Research Associates among 810 voters for the AFL-CIO on the night of the election, also found that although voters without a college degree favored Barack Obama by 21 percentage points in the 2008 election, Democratic candidate Martha Coakley lost that same group by a 20-point margin.

Read more…