Here’s the summary of the report from D-Corps:
The self-identifying conservative Republicans who make up the base of the Republican Party stand a world apart from the rest of America, according to focus groups conducted by Democracy Corps. These base Republican voters dislike Barak Obama to be sure – which is not very surprising as base Democrats had few positive things to say about George Bush – but these voters identify themselves as part of a ‘mocked’ minority with a set of shared beliefs and knowledge, and commitment to oppose Obama that sets them apart from the majority in the country. They believe Obama is ruthlessly advancing a ‘secret agenda’ to bankrupt the United States and dramatically expand government control to an extent nothing short of socialism. They overwhelmingly view a successful Obama presidency as the destruction of this country’s founding principles and are committed to seeing the president fail.
Key Findings
Instead of focusing on these intense ideological divisions, the press and elites continue to look for a racial element that drives these voters’ beliefs – but they need to get over it. Conducted on the heels of Joe Wilson’s incendiary comments at the president’s joint session address, we gave these groups of older, white Republican base voters in Georgia full opportunity to bring race into their discussion – but it did not ever become a central element, and indeed, was almost beside the point.
First and foremost, these conservative Republican voters believe Obama is deliberately and ruthlessly advancing a ‘secret agenda’ to bankrupt our country and dramatically expand government control over all aspects of our daily lives. They view this effort in sweeping terms, and cast a successful Obama presidency as the destruction of the United States as it was conceived by our founders and developed over the past 200 years. This concern combines with a profound sense of collective identity. They readily identify themselves as a minority in this country – a minority whose values are mocked and attacked by a liberal media and class of elites. They also believe they possess a level of knowledge and understanding when it comes to politics and current events, one gained from a rejection of the mainstream media and an embrace of conservative media and pundits such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, which sets them apart even more.
Looking at the current political debate, it was evident in our focus group discussions that the divide between conservative Republicans and even the most conservative-leaning independents remains very, very wide. Independents harbor doubts about Obama’s health care reform but are desperate to see some version of health care reform pass this year; the conservative Republicans view any health care reform as a victory for Obama and are militantly opposed. The language they use further reflects this divide. Conservative Republicans fully embrace the ‘socialism’ attacks on Obama and believe it is the best, most accurate way to describe him and his agenda. Independents largely dismiss these attacks as partisan rhetoric detracting from a legitimate debate about what many of them do see as excessive government control and spending

A just-out WaPo-ABC News poll reveals that the ‘public option’ for health care reform now wins a “clear majority” (57 percent) of the public, according to a report in today’s Post by Dan Balz and Jon Cohen. However, the poll also brings signs of trouble for the proposal to tax the so-called ‘Cadillac’ health care benefits, as Chen and Balz report:

But if there is clear majority support for the public option and the mandate, there is broad opposition to one of the major mechanisms proposed to pay for the bill. The Senate Finance Committee suggested taxing the most costly private insurance plans to help offset the costs of extending coverage to millions more people. Sixty-one percent oppose the idea, while 35 percent favor it.

If Democratic lawmakers needed another reason to be skeptical about taxing health care benefits, unions are fiercely opposed to the idea. As Jeff Crosby put it in his AFL-CIO blog:

Vincent Panvani of the Sheet Metal Workers (SMWIA) warns:If any of these Democratic Senators vote for this, they’ll be out in 2010, and it will be used against Obama….[Y]ou’re taxing the middle class. Teamsters President James Hoffa calls taxing health care benefits “the poison pill that will kill reform.” The Laborers have attack ads at the ready…We have to say, right now, that we will kill any effort to tax our benefits as yet another transfer from our pockets to the health care profiteers.

Perhaps there is a income line that can be drawn to protect union workers from having their hard-won health benefits being taxed, while making those at higher income levels pay their fair share. Democratic leaders need to be very clear and unified that union benefits be exempted and only the wealthy, if anyone, will have their health benefits taxed. This ought to be doable, and most of the revenue shortfall should be made up with tax hikes on unhealthy substances like tobacco, liquor and soft drinks.

A couple weeks ago I expressed skepticism about a Pew survey suggesting that a majority of Americans were feeling pretty bullish about military action towards Iran to stop its nuclear program, in no small part because the poll didn’t distinguish between different types of military action.
Now there’s a Washington Post/ABC poll finding that’s a bit more nuanced. 42% of respondents favor an air attack on Iranian facilities to prevent acquisition of nuclear weapons, while 54% oppose that step; and 33% favor an invasion of Iran to topple the government, while 62% are opposed.
The Post write-up on the poll notes that partisan differences on these questions aren’t as large as you might expect, though ideological splits are more noticeable (liberals oppose bombing Iran 74/24, while conservatives favor it 56/38, and moderates are positioned exactly half-way between the two). Even Republicans (57/40) and conservatives (51/44) oppose a ground invasion aimed at regime change, perhaps remembering how that went in Iraq.
This poll doesn’t make support for military action contingent on the failure of other options; Americans support direct talks with Iran by 82/18, and international economic sanctions by 78/18.

The crucial nature of the individual mandate for health care reform has drawn some helpful attention to the fact that universal coverage isn’t just a charity measure for the uninsured, but a way of creating a risk pool broad enough to lower costs generally, while also avoiding over-utilization of high-cost care options like emergency rooms. In fact, private insurance companies are among the most avid supporters of the individual mandate because it guarantees them new customers.
But as Peter Harbage explains at The New Republic today, a penalty-based coverage mandate isn’t the only way, or even the best way, to get more people insured:

[F]or all of the attention we’re paying to mandates, we’re not giving nearly enough attention to automatic enrollment and other innovations that can get people insured, rather than penalize them if they’re not. Ideally, we’ll get to a “culture of coverage” where everyone assumes they are supposed to have health insurance, much as everybody now assumes they are supposed to get primary education. The situation is quite similar, actually: We have truancy penalties, but most parents send their kids to school because the education system is affordable to families, easy to access, and social pressure says it is the right thing to do.

Automatic enrollment could not only make sure people are insured, but can also help steer them to the plan best designed for their medical and economic circumstances. They would be free to change coverage, but wouldn’t be forced to navigate the current highly complex system to get covered in the first place. It’s worth thinking about as we near the end-game of the health reform debate.

Polls three years in advance of a presidential contest aren’t worth a lot generally, but they do give you a sense of the sentiments of hard-core, high-attention “base” voters who have a disproportionate impact on the nominating process. The latest offering from Rasmussen on the possible Republican field shows Sarah Palin fading a bit (her new insta-book is probably coming out just in time), and Tim Pawlenty continuing to arouse mysteriously high levels of disdain.
The “who-do-you-favor-for-2012” poll has Mike Huckabee ahead at 29%, Mitt Romney at 24%, Palin at 18%, Newt Gingrich at 14%, and Pawlenty at 4%. More interestingly, the “who-do-you-least-favor” question puts TimPaw at 28%, Palin at 21%, Gingrich at 20%, Romney at 9%, and Huckabee at 8%. Usually little-known candidates don’t arouse much hostility, but in the current GOP atmosphere, it’s possible that a goodly number of conservative base voters don’t like any potential nominee who hasn’t spent sufficient time howling at the moon about socialism and the destruction of the Constitution. Indeed, it’s worth noting that one candidate who has distinguished himself in this respect, Mike Huckabee, seems to represent the center of the party right now, being most popular and least disliked.
The poll also asks GOPers how likely they think a win over the President is in 2012. 50% say victory is “very likely,” and another 31% “somewhat likely.” That could change, but primary voters who are very confident about a win tend to favor the most ideologically pure candidate available. This would not be Tim Pawlenty, who continues to be a fine candidate only on paper.

The moral case for the public option in health care reform has been well-made by numerous Democratic leaders, activists and writers, and some have also made a persuasive case that it’s good political strategy. Robert Parry’s Consortium News post, via Alternet, takes the argument a step further; that the public option is not only politically-wise; it should be implemented on a faster track — or the Democrats could be risking “electoral disaster.” As Parry explains:

Indeed, if the Democrats abandon the public option for the sake of passing a bill like the one that came out of the Senate Finance Committee, they may be courting electoral disaster once voters grasp that they will have to wait years for the law to be implemented and then that it could lead to higher costs for much the same unpopular private insurance plans.
…As the legislation stands now, many of the key features that hold some promise of helping consumers – such as the “exchange” where individuals and small business would shop for the best product – won’t even take effect until 2013. That means that Americans now facing the crisis of no health insurance won’t get much help for another four years, if then.
…By contrast to the four-year phase-in for these relatively modest reforms, the Medicare single-payer program for senior citizens was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson on July 30, 1965, and was up and running less than a year later.
..The implementing delays mean that in both 2010 and 2012, Republicans will be free to make the truthful case that the Democrats – despite their promises – had accomplished little to help the American people on health care. Already, Republican senators are using the talking point that the four-year delay is part of a budgetary trick to make the bill appear cheaper over 10 years than it would be if its key features took effect quickly.

Parry believes the implementation delays of both the insurance exchanges and public option ‘trigger’ could work against each other to an even more deleterious effect:

…But the insurance exchanges won’t open until 2013, so it may take years before any trigger would be pulled. At minimum, the industry would have earned a lengthy reprieve.
And by the time, the exchanges have a chance to be tested, Congress and the White House could be in Republican hands. If that’s the case, the Republicans might well undo even the triggered public option. Unlike the Democrats, the Republicans would surely not worry about ramming their preferred policy through the Congress.

Conversely, Parry sees a huge upside to a bolder implementation strategy:

On the other hand, if Congress enacts a public option now, it presumably could be implemented at least as fast as Medicare, especially if it were piggybacked onto the existing Medicare bureaucracy. That would enable Democrats to show they had accomplished something beneficial for the public before voters go to the polls in November 2010.
By 2012, if the CBO predictions of substantial savings prove true, Obama could campaign for reelection on the basis that he had improved the welfare of the American people — and the budget outlooks for government and business.

It would be bitterly ironic if Democrats enacted a strong health care reform bill, with a solid public option, but then suffered political damage because it was implemented too late to do us some good. Parry makes a compelling case that putting implementation of both a public option and health exchanges on a faster track is wise strategy.

Just a hearty Amen and an addendum to Ed Kilgore’s post below, which provides one of the most crucial insights of the entire health care reform debate going on among Democrats: Every Democratic senator must be put on record — and soon — as supporting the party on cloture, no matter which health reform bill he or she advocates.
This has to be the first flashpoint at which Democratic leaders invoke party discipline, particularly when the stakes are the most important legislative reform in many decades. This is our line in the sand, where the emphasis should now be for all Democrats who care about health care reform and their party’s integrity.
And let all rank and file Democrats agree on one thing, if nothing else — that any Democratic senator who betrays the Party on a critical cloture procedural vote will get exceptionally well-funded primary opposition, regardless of his or her approval numbers. And may all progressive bloggers, journalists and activists pledge their hearts, souls and firstborn to the cause of denouncing cloture turncoats as shameless sell-outs for the rest of their miserable days.

Now that every committee of jurisdiction in both Houses of Congress has reported health care reform legislation, it’s time for reform advocates to focus obsessively on one formidable “choke point” that could kill legislation: a Republican Senate filibuster supported by Democrats. This is true not only for progressives generally, but specifically for hard-core supporters of a “robust” public option. The odds of getting 60 senators to pre-commit to that kind of bill are roughly zero. The odds of getting 60 senators to allow a vote in which 50 senators support that kind of bill are much, much better.
That’s why I applaud blogger Mike Stark’s fairly successful effort to corner Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas on the very specific question of Pryor’s willingness to support a filibuster. Pryor allowed as how it would take a “crazy” development on the substance of the legislation to convince him to vote against cloture. That’s not an unconditional commitment, but it’s still pretty important. Other reform advocates should emulate Stark, and focus their questions and please to Democratic senators on the sole question of helping Republicans block a vote on the party’s and the Obama administration’s top domestic prioriity. How they vote on the bill itself is strictly secondary at this point, and completely irrelevant if cloture fails.
This issue is becoming even more critical and time-sensitive given Joe Lieberman’s broad hints that there is not any template for health care reform that he can support. You can get upset about that, or you can say you don’t give a damn how Lieberman votes on final passage of a health reform bill so long as he votes for cloture to allow it to come to the floor. When Lieberman was allowed to keep his committee chairmanship after campaigning for the Republican presidential candidate for president in 2008, it was with the implicit understanding that he’d vote with the caucus on procedural votes. Despite many recent efforts to create a 60-vote threshold for passage of legislation by making cloture votes synonymous with final passage votes, cloture is inherently and exclusively a procedural matter. There should be no excuse for “no” votes on cloture for something this important.
I unuderstand that many progressives remain focused on the public option, and fearful that the final congressional product will be unacceptable from their point of view. But that’s an entirely academic issue until such time as 60 votes are secured for cloture. Get that done, and then we can fight over which version of the public option can secure 218 votes in the House and 50 votes in the Senate, and can initiate meaningful and successful health care reform.

In recent weeks President Obama has absorbed a volley of hits from progressives who are disssatisfied with his caution on a wide array of policies, including Afghanistan, the public option and bail-outs, to list a few (as reported for example, in Ed Hornick’s CNN.com post, “Candidate vs. boss: Obama’s ship not so tight these days, some say“). But the progressive cause may be better-served by taking a step back and considering his accomplishments in a broader historical context. Peter Beinart, senior fellow at the New America Foundation. and a former New Republic editor, does just that in his latest Daily Beast post, “Liberals Lay off Obama.” As Beinart explains,

…Our do-nothing president did something that Democratic presidents have been trying to do for most of the last century: He celebrated a universal health care bill’s passage through Senate Committee. For good measure, the Dow topped 10,000 for the first time since last fall’s meltdown. Obama’s polling has even ticked up: According to Gallup, he’s more popular than he’s been since summer…Even this summer, when the press was announcing a dip in Obama’s fortunes, the health care bills were moving steadily through Congress, the stimulus was gradually slowing the nation’s economic descent, and Obama’s approval ratings never fell below 50 percent…Get ready for the “Obama comeback” stories, in which the same publications that recently declared that “he’s failing miserably” (Politico) and “suddenly looking unsure of himself” (The Economist) discover that he’s thriving again. But the boring truth is that he was pretty much thriving all along.

Beinart attributes Obama’s sagging image, despite his accomplishments, to the media’s penchant for exagerating trends in roller-coaster fashion to heighten a story’s drama. But he believes Obama will ultimately be judged “against a low bar” — the disaster created by his predecessor. Even if Dems get “clobbered” in the mid-terms, Beinart believes, Obama should be looking pretty solid by 2012, when the stimulus will be showing positive results. Beinart continues:

So liberals should stop complaining that Obama hasn’t done anything. Sure, he hadn’t yet done much to bring world peace, but the stimulus bill — which includes vast sums for college tuition, renewable energy and mass transit — is one of the most important pieces of progressive domestic legislation in decades. And if Obama twins that with health care reform, he’ll have done more to rebuild the American welfare state in one year than his two Democratic predecessors, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, did in a combined twelve.

For drama-seeking journalists, Beinart concludes, “The dreary truth is that politically, Obama is both lucky and good, and he’s well on his way to a successful first term.” Beinart’s big-picture analysis sounds plausible enough, and if he is right, the grumbling Dems of today will likely become Obama’s champions of tomorrow.

For much of this year, one of the surest bets in political circles has been that embattled New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine would go down to defeat at the hands of Republican former U.S. attorney Chris Christie. Aside from Christie’s (now tarnished) goo-goo rep as a corruption fighter, the thinking was that Corzine had a “ceiling” of somewhere in the low forties, thanks to persistently low approval ratings and the likelihood that most NJ voters had fixed opinions of the incumbents. Thus, for the first time in decades, a GOP candidate would get the late breaks in a NJ campaign, and end the party’s long losing streak in the Garden State.
Now the polls are all showing Corzine and Christie running neck-and-neck, with the big wild card being the double-digit support being attracted by independent candidate Chris Daggett.
At Politico today, Jonathan Martin looks at the race from Christie’s perspective, and focuses on the strategic dilemma faced by the GOP candidate in dealing with Daggett:

Christie, who had been running a traditional anti-incumbent campaign against Corzine, must now reckon with a perennial question faced by candidates who are imperiled by a lesser-known, third-party contender: To attack Daggett is to elevate him, effectively acknowledging that he’s a serious candidate and offering him free publicity. But ignoring him could amount to disregarding the most serious threat to Christie’s campaign, leaving Daggett to siphon away a significant amount of voters who are intent on registering their opposition to Corzine.

But Christie really doesn’t control that decision, since his major funding source, the Republican Governors’ Association, has already started going after Daggett with sledge hammers. It appears their theory is that attacks on Daggett as a “tax-and-spend liberal” will either flip Daggett voters to Christie, or perhaps even drive liberal voters who would otherwise support Corzine to the third-party candidate (who already has significant support from environmentalists). Again, the operative assumption is that Corzine’s vote has hit its “ceiling,” so there’s relatively little risk in drawing further attention to Daggett.
But you have to wonder: does Christie’s vote (now that he’s increasingly campaigning like a conventional conservative Republican) also have a “ceiling,” based on the Republican Party’s legendary handicaps in NJ?
This question shows why the outcome in NJ may have national significance, beyond the silly efforts of pundits to make every state race a referendum on Barack Obama, and the undoubtedly positive impact a Corzine win would have on Democrats who had written off the incumbent many months ago. If the Republican party “brand” is enough to sink a challenger against one of the most vulnerable opponents you’ll ever see, then Democrats aren’t the only party with a lot to worry about going into next year’s 2010 midterms.