There’s naturally an obsession among political folk about monitoring the President’s approval ratings, with some recent national and state surveys showing a sag. But it’s worth remembering that politics is not necessarily a zero-sum game in which weaknesses automatically create strength for the opposition, particularly in a period of public unhappiness, and particularly when memories are fresh of how people felt when the opposition was in power.
Moreover, at the state level anti-incumbency feelings don’t always hit the party in power in Washington.
There’s a good example of this phenomenon in a new PPP poll from Minnesota. It shows the President’s approval/disapproval rating deteriorating from 60/30 in April to 54/39 now. But that hasn’t translated into any measurable Republican gains. MN’s own Republican governor, Tim Pawlenty, one of the most-cited possibilities for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012, has suffered his own slide in approval ratings, down into negative territory, from 46/44 to 44/48. And more to the point, a 2012 trial heat shows Obama thumping Pawlenty in his own state 51-40.
Is Pawlenty’s weakness a function of the “Republican brand” or of his own incumbency? Hard to say. But the same poll shows Sarah Palin, who recently decided to get rid of the handicap of governing, with a 39/53 approval ratio, and losing to Obama in a 2012 trial heat by 56-35.
So if you’re into polls, it pays to keep an eye on everyone’s approval ratings, and on actual electoral matchups, not just Barack Obama’s numbers.

Robert Creamer’s HuffPo post, “How Progressives Can Deliver on the Promise of Change in 2009 — Seven Rules for Success,” is a good read for Democrats mulling over the “So what do we do now” options. Creamer, author of ‘Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, ‘ one of the more well-regarded political strategy books of recent years, makes some bold challenges, including:

…We must always present our case in populist terms. We represent the interests of average people — not the elites that benefit from the status quo. The other side will try to argue that we favor a “government takeover” of health care that allows “Washington Bureaucrats” or some other elite to control our lives. If we spend all of our time talking about “insurance exchanges” and the arcana of health care policy we will lose.
We must frame the debate for what it is — a battle between the private health insurance companies and their multi-million dollar CEO’s on the one hand, and the interests of average Americans on the other. Populist frames are necessary for each one of our fights. Populism always trumps policy-speak.

Not a bad strategy slogan. And here’s a piece of Creamer’s carpe diem:

7). This historic window for progressive change will close if we don’t act, just as surely as a hole in the line disappears in football if a running back doesn’t burst through.
Mike Lux’s book, The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be surveys the history of progressive change in our country. He finds that it is not randomly spread. It occurs in clumps – during “big change moments.”
We are blessed to live in one of those big change moments. But, Lux finds, the lengths of those moments have varied enormously depending mainly on how well Progressives execute.
…For the next year, every Progressive in America needs to realize that he or she has an opportunity to make history that simply isn’t available to most people at most times. That means that all of us have a responsibility to all of the Progressives that have gone before us — and to our kids and grandkids — to make the very most of this precious opportunity.
More than anything else people want meaning in life. They want to do something of lasting importance. At this very moment we have that opportunity. It is up to each of us to seize it.
…But — just as in last year’s election — the critical ingredient that will allow us to be successful is the mobilization of millions of Americans. It simply won’t happen without us.
Some people are lucky enough to be able to say: “I was there at Selma.” For many, it was the proudest moment of their lives. Their eyes well up when they speak of it. It changed the course of history.
We all have the opportunity to be present at another one of those moments. To be there, each of us has to empty the stands — march into the arena – and help make history…It’s simple as this: If we don’t take advantage of this historic moment we may not have another for many years to come. If we do, we will help lay the foundation for a period of unparalleled possibility and hope.

Creamer urges progressives to get active with groups working for reforms and offers other pointers for making the most of the current political environment. As always, his insights provoke thought and inspire action

It probably wasn’t marked on your calendars, but yesterday was the 500th anniversary of the birth of John Calvin, the severe and systematic reformer who shaped modern Protestantism and modern Western society in ways too numerous to list. Sometimes directly through his writings, sometimes through the example he set in Geneva, and sometimes through disciples such as the Scots reformer John Knox, Calvin’s imprint on Christianity, particularly in America, is hard to overstate. A wide variety of major Protestant faith communities, including the Congregationalists who dominated colonial and and early-American New England, the Presbyterians, and the Southern Baptists, for all their differences today, were rooted in Calvinist theology. Calvin also had a major impact on the Church of England, and through it on all its many religio-cultural descendants.
But Calvin’s influence went far beyond religion, and far beyond its legendary encouragement of capitalism, particularly in this country. As Damon Linker explains today in The New Republic, Calvin’s central focus on the unconditional sovereignty of God helped spawn an unshakable faith in “Divine Providence” that in turn fed the highly ecumenical concept of America’s special destiny:

Through the Revolutionary War, the years surrounding the ratification of the federal Constitution, and the early national period, pastors and presidents repeatedly praised the “great design of providence” that had led to the creation of a country dedicated to protecting and preserving political and religious liberty. Call it the consolidation of America’s Calvinist consensus. What were once the rather extreme theological convictions dominating a handful of rustic outposts on the edge of a wholly undeveloped continent were now the unifying and motivating ideology of a rapidly expanding and industrializing nation.

And, as Linker notes, a divinely sanctioned “American exceptionalism” has continued to shape thinking about America’s role in the world ever since:

Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy outlook, including his proposal for a League of Nations that would make possible an era of global perpetual peace, grew out of his strong faith America’s providential role in the world. The World War II propaganda campaign frequently appealed to identical convictions. And politicians from both political parties regularly cast the Cold War as a quasi-eschatological conflict between forces of darkness and light — with God clearly standing on America’s side of the battle. Even Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic Party’s answer to the “anti-intellectualism” of Dwight D. Eisenhower, spoke unapologetically in 1952 about the “awesome mission” that “God has set for us,” which was nothing less than “the leadership of the free world.” In more recent years, the cadences of the Calvinist consensus could be heard in Ronald Reagan’s rhetorical evocations of America as a “city on a hill” and George W. Bush’s frequent assurances that history moves in a “visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of liberty.”

I somehow doubt George W. Bush was particularly aware that his foreign policy rhetoric owed anything to a dour sixteenth century Frenchman. That’s how thoroughly the “Calvinist consensus” has seeped into American soil, and why the quincentennial of Calvin’s birth passed with so little public notice in the United States.

In the course of his column today on the politics and economics of a second economic stimulus bill, Paul Krugman offers a useful analogy:
When there’s an ordinary, garden-variety recession, the job of fighting that recession is assigned to the Federal Reserve. The Fed responds by cutting interest rates in an incremental fashion. Reducing rates a bit at a time, it keeps cutting until the economy turns around. At times it pauses to assess the effects of its work; if the economy is still weak, the cutting resumes.

During the last recession, the Fed repeatedly cut rates as the slump deepened — 11 times over the course of 2001. Then, amid early signs of recovery, it paused, giving the rate cuts time to work. When it became clear that the economy still wasn’t growing fast enough to create jobs, more rate cuts followed.
Normally, then, we expect policy makers to respond to bad job numbers with a combination of patience and resolve. They should give existing policies time to work, but they should also consider making those policies stronger.

Monetary policy adjustments, of course, are reasonably simple, and don’t involve the lumbering machinery of House and Senate committees and floor action, or the ambitions of 435 politicians. Still, if the Obama adminstration does come back to the well for a second cup of fiscal stimulus, howling critics should be reminded that this course would be a no-brainer if we were talking about interest rate cuts.

Dictatorships are often caught off guard by sudden explosions of popular discontent. It takes them several days to determine that the protests are so deep and widespread that they cannot be controlled by normal means.
Once they make this determination, however, they often make a strategic decision to strike back as savagely as possible. It is at this point that massacres often occur and hundreds of people are beaten, jailed or simply disappear. Protest movements of ordinary people are by their nature almost never able to directly resist the full power of the organized violence soldiers or elite riot police can unleash against them.
After the violent repression pauses and the streets temporarily become quiet, the regime follows up with a mixture of carrots and sticks. The ordinary protesters are told that they are “forgiven,” that they were mislead by a small group of subversives, that perhaps – perhaps – some unfortunate mistakes had been made and that some small and symbolic concessions will be offered. At the same time, a massive wave of brutal, covert and systematic arrests are made in an attempt to decapitate the leadership of the protests.
The streets are quiet and strangely empty. No-one is sure what will come next.
At this moment the regime has one vast and overwhelming objective — to re-establish a surface appearance of normality. Things must be quiet. The leader has to give a speech reasserting his legitimacy, and reassuring the population that the institutions of the country are intact – that things have gone back to normal.
This is a critical moment in every struggle against dictatorship. If the regime is successful, a surface calm may indeed return. A sullen, grumbling undercurrent of discontent always remains, but life goes back to what it was.
But if the protesters return to the streets to defy the authorities once again, on the other hand, an awesome and profound psychic barrier collapses. The protesters demonstrate to both themselves and to the authorities that their spirit cannot be broken, that they will never again be the same people they were before. From that moment on uniformed men with guns may still control the streets, but the legitimacy of the regime has received a mortal blow.
In moments of quiet reflection the protesters know success may take months or years of patient organizing and persistent struggle, but each of them senses that in some profound way the tide has fundamentally shifted to their side.
The regime will never be the same again — because they will never be the same again.
That is what happened yesterday in Iran.

Christopher Sopher of TAPPED took a shot today at WaPo’s Dana Milbank for a snarky column mocking Rep. Bart Stupak’s hearing on purity and truth-in-advertising issues associated with bottled water. I’ve gotta say, in all due recognition of the fact that Milbank’s column exists to be snarky about the foibles of Washington, Soper makes a good point. Check out this Milbank lede:

There must be something in the water in this town.
The nation is entangled in two wars, a deep recession and a flu pandemic, and the people’s representatives are hard at work investigating the menace of . . . bottled water?

This is the sort of thing you hear all the time: with _______ going on, why is [Washington][Congress][the administration][the mayor][the police] wasting time with ____?
Sometimes a similar howitzer is brought to bear on the idea that anyone in or out of government should be engaged in anything frivolous or fun during hard times (and what times aren’t hard in some respects for some people?): “Don’t you know there’s a war going on?”
Now it doesn’t take a great deal of deep thought to realize that every human and material resource in a society (or a government) as complex as ours cannot be perpetually focused on one or two or three big challenges. Indeed, one reason we have big challenges is that they weren’t adequately addressed when they were smaller challenges. And personally, I’d much prefer that policymakers entrusted with oversight of non-marquee issues just go right ahead and deal with them straight-on, accepting their mundane nature, instead of bending them to fit into the Big Priority Du Jour, by, say, inquiring into the possibility that jihadis are emailing each other with plans to contaminate America’s bottled water supply, or that water bottlers are in cahoots with subprime lenders.
Sometimes those who mock non-top-priority issues simply don’t want those issues addressed at all. I’d say a reasonably high percentage of Republicans who are always bashing Barack Obama for promoting health care reform or climate change legislation instead of “focusing on the economy” really just oppose health care reform and climate change legislation, and would do so if the economy was humming along nicely.
In any event, the idea that there is a direct relationship between the health of our economy and the collective amount of time Americans devote to worrying about it is ludicrous. We can and really must walk and chew gum at the same time, and maybe even pay some attention to what we are using to hydrate ourselves along the way.

As E.J. Dionne has tartly pointed out, a high Roman Catholic official is about to risk “legitimizing” Barack Obama with a meeting on Friday. But there won’t be any right-wing Catholic demonstrations against this “outrage,” because the official in question is Pope Benedict XVI. Furthermore, notes Dionne:

[W]hether he is the beneficiary of providence or merely of good luck, Obama will have his audience with Benedict just three days after the release of a papal encyclical on social justice that places the pope well to Obama’s left on economics. What a delightful surprise it would be for a pope to tell our president that on some matters, he’s just too conservative.

The papal document in question, Caritas in Veritate, appears to represent something of a twenty-first century updating of “social encyclicals” like Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum and Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio, which certainly offended many conservative Catholics in their own time.
Far be it from me to offer an explication of this densely constructed 45-page encyclical. But the reaction of Catholic conservative intellectual George Weigel is worth reading. He views Caritas in Veritate as an impure compromise between the kind of sound thinking he associates with Joseph Ratzinger (good) and the inveterate leftism of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace (bad). Suffice it to say that Dionne’s right: if you turned the more purely economic sections of Caritas in Veritate into an American-style campaign document, it would be denounced by conservative Catholic Republicans as the worst kind of socialism. Via the AFL-CIO’s blog, here’s a section of the encyclical that practically sounds like an endorsement of card-check:

Through the combination of social and economic change, trade union organizations experience greater difficulty in carrying out their task of representing the interests of workers, partly because Governments, for reasons of economic utility, often limit the freedom or the negotiating capacity of labor unions. Hence traditional networks of solidarity have more and more obstacles to overcome. The repeated calls issued within the Church’s social doctrine, beginning with Rerum Novarum, for the promotion of workers’ associations that can defend their rights must therefore be honored today even more than in the past, as a prompt and far-sighted response to the urgent need for new forms of cooperation at the international level, as well as the local level.

Certainly Benedict XVI has bigger fish to fry than the arguments of American Catholics over American politics. But as Dionne points out, the Vatican has already shown a strong antipathy to the demands of conservatives that it go fully partisan in U.S. politics:

The Vatican press has been largely sympathetic to Obama, and in a recent article, Cardinal Georges Cottier, who was the theologian of the papal household under Pope John Paul II, praised Obama’s “humble realism” on abortion and went so far as to compare the president’s approach to that of St. Thomas Aquinas. (Pray this won’t go to Obama’s head.)
No one pretends that the Vatican is at peace with Obama’s views on the life issues, and Benedict mentioned the church’s resistance to abortion at three different points in this week’s economic encyclical, “Charity in Truth.”
But the pope and many of his advisers also see Obama as a potential ally on such questions as development in the Third World, their shared approach to a quest for peace in the Middle East, and the opening of a dialogue with Islam.
The Vatican’s stance and the broadly positive response to Obama’s Notre Dame speech have at least temporarily quelled the vocal opposition to the president among more conservative American bishops. Now, parts of the hierarchy are working closely with the administration on health care reform, immigration and climate change legislation.

So the effort to mobilize American Catholics against Obama that fizzled at Notre Dame is not getting any help from the Vatican, which has its own and much broader priorities.