The reluctance of moderate Democrats in both Houses of Congress to support key elements of the Obama administration’s agenda has unsurprisingly angered others in the progressive coalition.
Among the angry, OpenLeft’s estimable Chris Bowers has come up with a new strategy that’s more immediate than his site’s general argument for launching or threatening primary challengers to “centrist’ Dems: molding the Progressive Caucus into a more aggressive faction that will withhold votes for unacceptable legislation, just like the Blue Dogs:

Instead of 60 votes in the Senate, what progressives need is Democratic control of both branches of Congress, control of the White House, and a progressive block of at least 13 Senators and 45 House members that will vote against Democratic legislation unless their demands are met. What we need is our own version of the Blue Dogs and Evan Bayh’s “conservodem” Senate group that is large enough, and staunch enough, to be able to block Democratic legislation by joining with Republicans.
We need this group to draw hard lines in the sand for the two biggest legislative priorities of 2009: health care and climate change. The group needs to make it clear that, if their demands are not met, then no climate change or health care legislation of any sort will be passed. Demands like:
1. Health care: A public health insurance option that is immediately available to all Americans.
2. Climate change: Restoring the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon and renewable energy targets that surpass those put in place by China..

The impact of such a group of Super-Blue Dogs, of course, totally depends on the credibility of its threats to vote with Republicans against Obama and leadership-sponsored legislation. Chris Bowers obviously thinks they should and would, but the administration’s point of view on this dynamic will be crucial. Maybe they’d actually like a left-counterpart to the Blue Dogs,or maybe they think there are enough dogs-a-barking right now.

As discussed here, there was a lot of talk yesterday about two big national polls that showed some weakening of public support for elements of the Obama agenda, and a sudden upsurge of concern about budget deficits, along with continued high support levels for the President, and continued hard times for Republicans. (A third poll, from Pew, came out later in the day, and generally showed the same trends).
Most of the commentary on the polls focused on short-term issues, particularly health care. But over at The New Republic, TDS Co-Editor William Galston offered a much broader assessment about public opinion trends that point towards possible difficulty for Democrats in the 2010 elections. After noting the President’ still-strong overall approval ratings, and the strong public belief that he inherited many of the country’s problems, Galston notes these danger signs for Obama and Democrats:

[T]he people have little confidence in government as an effective instrument of public purpose. Trust in government remains near an historic low and has not improved significantly since the beginning of Obama’s presidency. Only 34 percent think that government should do more to solve national problems, down seven points in the past three months. Sixty-nine percent express “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of concern about the expanding role of the federal government in areas such as automobile companies, corporate compensation, and health care.
Second, people are unsure about Obama’s overall economic strategy. Only 46 percent say that they are “extremely” or “quite” confident that the president has the right set of goals and policies to improve the economy; 53 percent are not. According to Pew, approval of the president’s handling of the economy has declined by eight points (from 60 to 52 percent) since mid-April.
Third, evidence is accumulating that the administration misjudged the public’s reaction to increased spending and rising budget deficits, which now rank second in the list of top concerns in the NYT/CBS poll, behind only job creation and economic growth, and ahead of health care costs as an economic issue….
Fourth, while there is majority support for the broad architecture of health reform that the administration espouses, doubts about specifics are multiplying.

Moroever, says Galston, the economic situation is not likely to visibly improve–particularly in terms of unemployment–before voters go to the polls in November of 2010:

Indeed, [the] history of recessions over the past three decades suggests that unemployment is likely to be at least as high on Election Day next year as it is today. In the face of jobless recoveries, both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton saw their personal popularity decline during their first two years in office, and their parties experienced significant losses during the first mid-term test.
The best thing Democrats have going for them right now is the public’s near-total withdrawal of confidence from the Republican Party, which now “enjoys” its lowest rating ever recorded in the NYT/CBS survey–a finding that Pew confirms. But if the deficit surges while the job market languishes, even the Republicans’ collapse may not be enough to save the governing party from a painful reverse next year.

Democrats need to take these warning signs seriously, but I would note three mitigating factors, all related to the fact that elections are between parties and candidates, and are never pure “referenda” on the “governing party.”

Read more…

The “expectations game” is important in politics not just in terms of polls and elections, but also public policy. We’re seeing an excellent example of the power of lowered expectations on the health care front this week.
As noted here yesterday, higher-than-expected CBO cost estimates of draft Senate plans created a bit of a panic among health reform advocates, with gloom-and-doom sentiments enjoying a sudden bull market. So when the Senate Finance Committee leaked a “revised” draft plan to WaPo’s Ezra Klein late yesterday, the reaction was a lot more muted than you might normally expect. The new draft scales down subsidies, ramps up an individual mandate, deploys purchasing cooperatives rather than a public plan, and doesn’t touch the tax exclusion for employer-provided benefits–all decisions that might have produced a major progressive backlash a week ago.
Not so much today. Sure, there’s plenty of unhappiness in the blogosphere. Digby had a succinct reaction:

It’s a good day to be an insurance company CEO. An mandate from the government forcing people to buy your product and no serious competition from anybody but your monopolistic buddies in the industry, all of whom look after each other very, very well.

At Open Left, which has been conducting an aggressive campaign in favor of a strong public plan, the Finance draft produced more of a sigh than a shout:

[E]ven if we can find cost savings, the Senate says it’s too expensive to provide a public healthcare option. Rural Democrats have in many cases sided with the health insurers on this one, in spite of the fact that the small business and self employment base of the rural economy faces significant healthcare infrastructure hurdles.
It’s shameful the way these legislators have completely abandoned their constituents. Who acts like this?
Stand with Dr. Dean and ask your representatives where they stand on a public option.

Then there Ezra Klein, who visibly struggles with himself to characterize the draft plan–finally settling on the term “comprehensive incrementalism”–and then offers this glass-half-full assessment:

It is one of the paradoxes of the legislative process that something that is substantively quite timid can also be quite bold. This version of health reform is far from what the country needs. It is far from what any health-care experts would develop left to their own devices. But it is still a monumental initiative and, if passed, it would be the most significant step forward since the creation of Medicare and Medicaid.

Both Ezra and Matt Yglesias also fell back on hopes that are the legislative equivalent of the halftime locker-room cry: “We’ll get ’em in the fourth quarter:” Here’s Matt:

[T]he cost savings implied by a robust public plan would do a lot to resolve some of the financial issues that are making it difficult for Finance to offer coverage that’s as generous as they initially intended. Thus far, unfortunately, cost conscious centrist senators haven’t tended to look at the public plan in that light. But since any legislation will go through several rounds of ping-pong with more liberal outfits—HELP Committee, the House of Representatives—I hope there’s still some time to turn their thinking around.

Indeed: House Democrats could unveil an outline of their own health care proposal as early as today. It will be most interesting to see if it changes the dynamics of a health care debate that’s gotten quickly bogged down in the Senate. And then the President, who has been relatively quiet about congressional developments on health care, will need to decide when and how to weigh in.
UPDATE: Here’s Jonathan Cohn’s initial and optimistic take on what’s coming out of the House committees.

As alluded to in my earlier post today, two separate developments are coinciding to create a pretty bad atmosphere for progressives and the Obama administration: public opinion surveys indicating that Americans are beginning to worry a lot about budget deficits, and real-life events on Capitol Hill that reinforce the argument that universal health coverage may be more expensive than originally calculated.
In terms of the public focus on deficits, it’s worth noting that polls continue to show that very few Americans blame Barack Obama for the fiscal condition of the country. I have a post up at fivethirtyeight.com examining that finding, and speculating that Republicans may be accidentally insulating the president from blame for deficits in their obsessive desire to attack George W. Bush for “betraying conservative principles” by spilling so much red ink.
While you are over at 538, you should check out Nate Silver’s post examining public opinion trends during the Clinton health care debate of 1993-94. He concludes that the president’s willingness to serve as a front-and-center advocate for health reform mattered then, and matters now. And as I indicated earlier today, I couldn’t agree more. More importantly, that’s the advice being offered by TDS Co-Editor Stan Greenberg, who has been there and done that when it comes to health care reform.
It’s time for some beef from the Bully Pulpit.

Note: this is a guest post from Alan Abramowitz, Alben W. Barkley Professor of Political Science at Emory University, and a member of the TDS Advisory Board. It’s a follow-up to his May 20 post on public opinion about abortion.
We have more evidence on current public opinion on the issue of abortion from a new CBS/New York Times poll. The survey, which was conducted from June 12-16, asked respondents to choose one of three options–abortion should be generally available to those who want it, abortion should be available but with stricter limts than now, or abortion should not be permitted. 36 percent of respondents wanted abortion to be generally available, 41 percent wanted it available with stricter limits, and 21 percent wanted it prohibited. Three percent of respondents were undecided.
These results were almost identical to those obtained in numerous CBS/NYT polls over the past 16 years. The CBS/NYT poll asked this question 16 times between January of 1993 and September of 2008. In those 16 surveys the average results were 36 percent for the first option, 39 percent for the second option, and 22 percent for the third option.
In addition to this result, the new CBS/NYT poll found that 62 percent of respondents considered the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion “a good thing” for the country while only 32 percent considered the decision “a bad thing” for the country. And 64 percent of respondents said they did not want the decision to be overturned by the Court compared with only 29 percent who did.
Taken together, these results demonstrate that (a) there is no evidence of any substantial shift in public opinion on the issue of abortion and (b) a solid majority of the American public continue to support the Surpreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision. Since overturning Roe remains the main goal of the “pro-life” movement, these results clearly indicate that a large majority of Americans do not support the “pro-life” agenda.

Even as much of the elite-level discussion of universal health coverage continues to focus on the “public option”–the existence and nature of a government-run insurance plan that would compete against private plan, as proposed by the administration–a more basic issue may prove to be the biggest obstacle to health care reform: money.
Yesterday TNR’s health care specialist Jonathan Cohn metaphorically hit the “panic button” over two Congressional Budget Office estimates of the cost and impact of health care proposals eminating from the Senate HELP and Finance Committees:

On Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office delivered its scoring of a bill that the Senate Finance Committee had submittted. The (relatively) good news was the projected impact: The proportion of people without insurance would drop by two-thirds. But the price tag came in at $1.6 trillion over ten years. That was a lot higher than expected.
It’s not clear to me why the score came so high; I don’t know whether it was a problem of bigger outlays (on subsidies, Medicaid expansions, etc.) or smaller offsets (efficiency savings, tax increases, etc.). All I know is that Finance members and their staffers were hoping to come in a lot lower.
And the timing of the announcement was just awful. It came one day after the CBO delivered another projection, this time to the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee. That verdict was different: HELP’s language, according to CBO, would mean outlays of just $1 trillion. But CBO also predicted the HELP bill would ultimately reduce the number of people without insurance by less than half.

Keep in mind that two of the original ideas submitted by the administration for helping offset the cost of moving to universal health coverage–significant auction fees from a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions, and a tighter cap on income tax deductions for high earners–have pretty much been killed in Congress. And a third–limiting the exclusion on health care benefits from income taxation–is unpopular as well (and it doesn’t help that Democrats harshly criticized John McCain for proposing “a tax increase” via this route last year).
All these money problems with financing health care reform come at a time when polls are showing heightened concerns about budget deficits. Just today, a new NBC/Wall Street Journal survey shows 58% of Americans
agreeing “that the president and Congress should focus on keeping the budget deficit down, even if takes longer for the economy to recover.” Similarly, a new CBS/New York Times poll shows respondents favoring deficit reduction over spending to stimulate the economy by a 52%-41% margin.
It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the President will need to spend some serious political capital in convincing both Congress (especially nervous Democrats) and the public that we can’t afford to put off health care reform any longer. That’s what Stan Greenberg has been suggesting based on the bad experience of the Clinton health plan, and all the current signs point to the need for a big push from the bully pulpit.
UPDATE: Ezra Klein concurs with Jon Cohn’s unhappy assessment of the impact of CBO’s cost estimates this week:

[H]ealth reform has just gotten harder. The hope that we could expand the current system while holding costs down appears to have been just that: a hope. And CBO doesn’t score hopes. It only scores plans. The question now becomes whether we want health-care reform that achieves less of what we say the system needs, or more. Doing less would be cruel to those who have laid their hopes upon health reform. But doing more will be very, very hard.

I’m still not totally down with my colleague Matt Compton’s enthusiasm for Twitter. But I will have to say that its use by Republican politicians–which seems to short-circuit their mental filters–has been a source of constant edification.
The latest example is a tweet from warhorse GOP Rep. Peter Hoekstra of MI comparing his fellow House Republicans protesting a procedural maneuver by Nancy Pelosi last year to the people in the streets of Tehran. Politico’s Anne Schroeder Mullins says it all in her Shenanigans column:

Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.) may be reaching with his analogies here, Tweeting this: “Iranian twitter activity similar to what we did in House last year when Republicans were shut down in the House.”
Really?
So he’s comparing the Iranian uprising – and the use of technology to spread the word globally – to the House Republicans’ mini rebellion in the darkened House chamber last summer? Hundreds of thousands of people in the streets protesting for democracy, is comparable to Drill Here Drill Now?
Hoekstra spokesman Dave Yonkman cleared a few things up for Shenanigans and said: “Congressman Hoekstra did not compare the ongoing violence in Iran to when Democrats shut down the House chamber during the energy debate last summer. The two situations do share the similarity of government leadership attempting to limit debate and deliberation, and the ability of new technologies to bypass their efforts and allow for direct communication. That’s the only point that he was trying to make.”
That clears it up. So Hoekstra was merely comparing Nancy Pelosi’s refusal to hear drilling amendments to the censorship and crack down by the Iranian ruling regime.

These guys ought to stick to staff-edited press releases.

We’re all used to being told that the Christian Right as we used to know it is dead, dying, moribund, divided, leaderless or rudderless. But for at least two putative candidates for president in 2012, the Old Time Religious Right in all its atavistic glory is an important constituency to be wooed. And that’s why (as Sarah Posner discusses in today’s edition of her FundamentaList column for TAP) southern Baptist minister Mike Huckabee and Baptist-turned-Catholic Newt Gingrich recently went to one of the Christian Right’s holy cities, Virginia Beach, for a “Rediscovering God in America” event that was webcast live by God.TV (an interesting site, BTW).
It’s no surprise that Huckabee showed up; he’s struggling to hang onto the Christian Right as an electoral base. Those who remember his 2008 campaign as representing a refreshing and light-hearted break in the grim and monotonous presentation of Republican dogma might not recognize him now. According to the local newspaper in Virginia Beach, here’s some of what he had to say to the event:

Huckabee told the audience he was disturbed to hear President Barack Obama say during his speech in Cairo, Egypt, on Thursday that one nation shouldn’t be exalted over another.
“The notion that we are just one of many among equals is nonsense,” Huckabee said. The United States is a “blessed” nation, he said, calling American revolutionaries’ defeat of the British empire “a miracle from God’s hand.”
The same kind of miracle, he said, led California voters to approve Proposition 8, which overturned a state law legalizing same-sex marriages.

Nice, eh?
Other speakers included the Virginia-based Christian Right warhorse Ollie North, and David Barton, the leading advocate of “Christian Nation” revisionist history.
But this was really Gingrich’s event, as you might guess from the name, which is also the title of his latest book and movie.
The Newtster wasn’t about to let Huckabee outdo him on the subject of America’s unique divine mission:

“I am not a citizen of the world,” said Gingrich, who was first elected to the U.S. House from Georgia in 1978 and served as speaker from 1995 to 1999. “I am a citizen of the United States because only in the United States does citizenship start with our creator.”

I guess Newt has never heard of Saudi Arabia.
In any event, Newt’s maintenance of close ties to the hard-core evangelical Right is interesting because he recently left Protestantism altogether and was accepted into the Roman Catholic Church (for those interested in how this twice-divorced confessed philanderer managed that, the answer is that his first wife died after their divorce, and his second marriage was annulled by the Archdiocese of Atlanta because that wife had been previously married; thus officially, Newt is merely a remarried widower with a very bad habit of engaging in fornication, adultery and illicit cohabitation).
Newt’s long transition from Southern Baptist to Catholic tells you a lot about the past and present of both faith communities in the United States.

Read more…

As the high-stakes battle over health care reform gets very serious in Washington, we have a well-timed reminder from TDS Co-Editor Stan Greenberg at TNR today about what happened to the Clinton administration’s health reform plan in 1993 and 1994, when he was Clinton’s top pollster.
Greenberg stresses the exceptional similarity of public opinion on health care then and now:

Then and now, the country proclaimed its readiness for bold reform. In both instances, one-quarter say that the health care system “has so many problems that we need to completely rebuild it”; half the country sees “good things” in the current system but believes “some major changes are needed.” Then and now, about 60 percent of the public feel dissatisfied with the current health insurance system. Yet three-quarters are satisfied with their own health insurance–once again eerily parallel numbers.

And yet again, says Greenberg, cost-containment arguments for universal health coverage will be difficult to make on a macro level, and essential to win on an individual family level, where calculations of the net effect of reform will be made sooner or later.
One ironically positive factor for Obama’s health plan is that the fear of losing insurance coverage due to unemployment is higher than it was 16 years ago. Another is that union members, who are often happy with their own health insurance, are feeling a lot more insecure.
But in the end, Greenberg argues, it’s the President’s advocacy for his plan that most needs to rise to the occasion:

At the moment, the country is tilting toward enacting Obama’s reforms, and it will do so more enthusiastically if Obama learns from the Clinton experience and rises to the educative role that he relishes. He must respect the thoughts, feelings and calculations of ordinary citizens who are not easily spun on important issues. People will take out their calculators when he lays out his plan, and he can’t avoid speaking candidly about its costs and consequences. And he can’t forget that he has a big story to tell about a changed America, one in which health care is but a pile of bricks in the new foundation he is laying.

The new issue of Democracy magazine–the first since my esteemed friend Michael Tomasky took over as editor of the journal–feaures an essay, styled as a “re-review” of several books from a few years ago, by the equally esteemed journalist Ron Brownstein on the subject of why Karl Rove’s “realignment” project failed. It’s a good question worth pondering at some depth. But I think Ron’s take, which faults several of the authors of the “re-review” volumes for overestimating and emulating “base polarlization” as a political strategy, misses some key points.
Here’s his basic hypothesis:

To reread the major political books from the years around Bush’s reelection is to be plunged, as if into a cold pool, back into a world of Democratic gloom and anxiety. Those books were linked by the common belief that Republicans had established a thin but durable electoral advantage that threatened to exile Democrats from power for years, if not decades. Many books from that time assumed Democrats could avoid that eclipse only by adopting the tactics used by Republicans in general and Rove in particular. Liberal activists and thinkers all exhorted Democrats to attack Republicans in vitriolic terms, to find liberal “wedge issues” that could divide the electorate as sharply as the conservative stand-bys of abortion, gun control, and gay marriage, and most important to emulate Rove’s approach of seeking to win elections more by mobilizing the party’s base with an uncompromising message than by persuading swing voters with a more centrist appeal….
[But] Bush’s reelection proved the high point of Rove’s vision, and even that was a rather modest peak: Bush’s margin of victory, as a share of the popular vote, was the smallest ever for a reelected president. Through Bush’s disastrous second term, the GOP’s position deteriorated at an astonishing speed. By the time Bush left office, with Democrats assuming control of government and about two-thirds of Americans disapproving of his performance, his party was in its weakest position since before Ronald Reagan’s election. Rather than constructing a permanent Republican majority, Rove and Bush provided Democrats an opportunity to build a lasting majority of their own that none of these books saw coming.

I quoted this section at considerable length because Brownstein seems to be conflating two different if not contradictory themes: (1) that lots of people failed to understand the demographic “upside” for Democrats of the Republican focus on “wedge” issues that divided the electorate, and (2) that Rove failed because “base mobilization” and “polarization” drove a decisive number of voters into the Democratic coalition.
On the first point about demography, the puzzling omission in Brownstein’s “re-review” is any reference to The Emerging Democratic Majority, the 2002 book by (TDS Co-Editor) Ruy Teixeira and John Judis, that pretty much got it all right, not that they got much credit for it when it was published on the eve of a big Republican midterm victory.
The omission, I suspect, is attributable to Brownstein’s focus on the second point, and his concern that Democrats who wanted to emulate Rove with a counter-polarization strategy were wrong, and thus weren’t vindicated by Rove’s subsequent failure. This preoccupation may also account for an inclusion in the re-review that’s as odd as the exclusion of Teixeira and Judis: Tom Schaller’s Whistling Past Dixie, which sharply distinguished itself from other mid-decade handwringing progressive tomes by predicting a bright Democratic future, but which also endorsed an anti-southern polarizing strategy that Brownstein wants to knock down.
Since I share Ron’s general antipathy to political strategies that focus excessively on base mobilization and polarization, it pains me somewhat to say that I think he exaggerates the role of those strategies in Rove’s failure.

Read more…