If there’s a “must-read” online today, it’s probably Tim Fernholz’s article for The American Prospect on the ever-increasing need for the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress to start setting out realistic benchmarks for accomplishments between now and November 2010.
Improving on the incompetence of the Bush administration isn’t that hard. But at some point, Democrats must point to new expectations and meet them. Fernholz suggests three areas where new benchmarks are particularly urgent: “economic stimulus” measures, foreclosure prevention initiatives, and the war in Afghanistan. In the first area, measurements for success are hazy; in the second, accomplishments don’t meet the administration’s own goals; and in the third, what we are measuring in terms of strategic objectives has changed.
Here’s Fernholz’s cautionary conclusion:

All three of these cases demonstrate the challenge of translating simple policy goals — fight the recession, prevent foreclosures, and win a war — into complex government programs. The fact that solving these public problems is difficult doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be tackled; the government is the only institution capable of tackling them. But walking the fine line between measures that mean something and numbers that mean votes can be a difficult one. If the president and Democrats in Congress want to keep being the Party of Government and not just the party that likes government, they need to figure out how to be good executives as well as good legislators, and prove it.

At virtually any given moment, the news-cycle-driven chattering classes of politics have in the background of their computer screens or the pockets of their briefcases a Big Thumbsucking Magazine Article on a political topic that they read during periods of calm. The Big Article du jour is Todd Purdum’s massive profile of Sarah Palin in Vanity Fair.
Most of the buzz about the piece deals with a variety of off-the-record snarks about Palin from McCain campaign staff. Indeed, conservative columnist Bill Kristol and McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt have engaged in a public exchange of insults over alleged leaks to Purdham.
Personally, I thought Purdum’s best insight was about the exceptionally exotic nature of Palin’s home state of Alaska, which he thinks the McCain campaign never understood:

The first thing McCain could have learned about Palin is what it means that she is from Alaska. More than 30 years ago, John McPhee wrote, “Alaska is a foreign country significantly populated with Americans. Its languages extend to English. Its nature is its own. Nothing seems so unexpected as the boxes marked ‘U.S. Mail.’” That description still fits. The state capital, Juneau, is 600 miles from the principal city, Anchorage, and is reachable only by air or sea. Alaskan politicians list the length of their residency in the state (if they were not born there) at the top of their biographies, and are careful to specify whether they like hunting, fishing, or both. There is little sense of government as an enduring institution: when the annual 90-day legislative session is over, the legislators pack up their offices, files, and computers, and take everything home. Alaska’s largest newspaper, the Anchorage Daily News, maintains no full-time bureau in Juneau to cover the statehouse. As in any resource-rich developing country with weak institutions and woeful oversight, corruption and official misconduct go easily unchecked. Scrutiny is not welcome, and Alaskans of every age and station, of every race and political stripe, unself-consciously refer to every other place on earth with a single word: Outside.

But what bothered me most about the profile was that with so many words to work with, and for all his focus on why McCain was a fool to put her on the ticket, Purdum never gets around to examining in any detail why the Conservative Base loves her so. That’s a strange omission, particularly since the whole piece begins with Palin’s speech earlier this year at an Indiana Right-to-Life event–significantly, her first public appearance outside Alaska in 2009.
In all the hype and buzz about Palin when she first joined the ticket, and all the silly talk about her potential appeal to Hillary Clinton supporters, the ecstatic reaction to her choice on the Cultural Right didn’t get much attention. She wasn’t an “unknown” or a “fresh face” to those folks. They knew her not only as a truly hard-line anti-abortionist, but as a politician who had uniquely “walked the walk” by carrying a pregnancy to term despite knowing the child would have a severe disability. And all the personality traits she later exhibited–the folksiness, the abrasive partisanship, the hostility towards the “media” and “elites,” the resentment of the establishment Republicans who tried to “manage” her, and the constant complaints of persecution–almost perfectly embodied the world-view, and the hopes and fears, of the grassroots Cultural Right. (This was particularly and understandably true of women, who have always played an outsized role in grassroots conservative activism.) Sarah Palin was the projection of these activists onto the national political scene, and exhibited the defiant pride and ill-disguised vulnerability that they would have felt in the same place.
This base of support for Palin–maybe not that large, but very passionate, and very powerful in places like the Iowa Republican Caucuses–isn’t going to abandon her just because the Serious People in the GOP laugh her off in favor of blow-dried flip-flopping pols like Mitt Romney or blandly “electable” figures like Tim Pawlenty. To her supporters, mockery is like nectar. And that’s why Sarah Palin isn’t going to go away as a national political figure unless it is by her own choice, or that of the people of her own state.

When Al Franken takes his seat in the U.S. Senate on Monday, it could mark a pivot point for the Democratic Party, as well as the nation. Senator Franken will give the Democrats a significant edge in filibuster politics, the 60th vote that could make possible enactment of real health care reform and other needed legislation. Indications are Franken will be a staunch progressive Senator in the mold of Paul Wellstone, who he strongly supported, and a reliable advocate of needed social reforms.
Credit Franken, not only with running a good campaign that unhorsed an incumbent and rising GOP star, but also playing a chill hand in the 7 plus months after the election. Franken avoided getting suckered into name-calling battles with Coleman, kept a high tone and handled the media with impressive skill. His image as a sober and serious U.S. Senator improved steadily during the recount and post election conflicts, as Coleman’s image deteriorated into one of a quarrelsome obstructionist. Franken’s 5-zip win from the Minnesota Supreme Court sealed the deal. Coleman, rumored to be interested in running for Governor, would have destroyed his political future if he persisted after a unanimous state Supreme Court decision against him. Hopefully, he has already been damaged by his obstructionist antics.
Franken could be an important Senator, if he rises to the challenge presented by Wellstone’s example and becomes an energetic champion of the progressive agenda. He certainly showed he had the mettle for battling the right-wing in his conflicts with Bill O’Reilly and Fox news. Franken smartly restrained his SNL-honed snark and wit during the campaign and aftermath, but he should be able to let fly a well-targeted zinger once in a while to enliven Senate debates.

The big political news yesterday was a unanimous decision of the Minnesota Supreme Court that Al Franken had indeed won a U.S. Senate seat last year (unsurprising), followed by Norm Coleman’s concession (more surprising, since many expected him to pursue a federal court challenge to delay Franken’s seating).
So Democrats now hold 60 seats in the U.S. Senate. As Ezra Klein points out today, neither party has held that many Senate seats since 1975, after the Watergate Landslide of 1974.
Most Democrats by now have figured out that 60 isn’t quite the magic number it is sometimes described as being in the Senate. Yes, it theoretically makes it possible to stop or even preempt filibusters and control the floor, but only with unanimity (or near-unanimity), which is hard to come by. But it will have a certain psychological impact, particularly going into an election cycle where Republican will be hard pressed to maintain their own numbers in the Senate.
Let’s hope, at least, that Al Franken really enjoys being a Senator. He certainly earned his seat.

Having presented and then already violated a pledge to avoid further posts about the Governor of South Carolina, I don’t quite know what to do when the man provides irresistible provocation that has nothing to do with his sex life.
Maybe I should emulate the great college football blog, everydayshouldbesaturday, which for obscure reasons insists on references to Illinois (and former Florida) coach Ron Zook as “NAME REDACTED.”
My own political NAME REDACTED sent an email out to his key supporters yesterday that basically said he’s determined to stay in office because governing is the most painful punishment for his sins he can imagine. After mentioning the option of resignation, NAME REDACTED said this:

A long list of close friends have suggested otherwise – that for God to really work in my life I shouldn’t be getting off so lightly. While it would be personally easier to exit stage left, their point has been that my larger sin was the sin of pride.
They contended that in many instances I may well have held the right position on limited government, spending or taxes – but that if my spirit wasn’t right in the presentation of those ideas to people in the General Assembly, or elsewhere, I could elicit the response that I had at many times indeed gotten from other state leaders.

In other words, NAME REDACTED feels that governing is the best penance, and that opposing effective governing–my own gloss on the ideology this man embraces–is how he can best make things up to God and others for his personal failings.
To sum it up: South Carolinians are expected to do penance for NAME REDACTED’s sins. And that ain’t right. Let him do penance with his own business, which needs tending.

Yesterday I predicted that the Supreme Court’s Ricci decision would quickly move to the center of the Right’s case against the confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor. That’s already happening today.
Underlying this tactical decision by conservatives is the belief that affirmative action is an wedge issue whose time has finally come back round at last. Check out George Will’s column today on Ricci, in which the imperious High Tory all but stamps his feet in impatience that anybody could still think affirmative action is appropriate:

The nation shall slog on, litigating through a fog of euphemisms and blurry categories (e.g., “race-conscious” actions that somehow are not racial discrimination because they “remedy” discrimination that no one has intended). This is the predictable price of failing to simply insist that government cannot take cognizance of race.

Moreover, conservatives will brandish recent polls showing apparent public rejection of the kind of affirmative action the city of New Haven seems to have been exercising in the Ricci case, here from CNN and here from Quinnipiac.
So: is the affirmative action “wedge issue” back, and does it pose a serious threat to Sotomayor’s confirmation?
I weighed all the evidence at fivethirtyeight.com earlier today, and concluded: no, almost certainly not.
The polling around the Ricci decision shows the same old public attitude towards affirmative action that’s been prevelant since the last excitement over the issue, in the mid-90s. People don’t like quotas and preferences. But they do favor affirmative action, and stubbornly resist efforts to “end” rather than “mend” it. And Barack Obama is very firmly established on the high ground of this subject.
As for Sotomayor, here’s where I come down:

The bottom line is that Ricci shouldn’t be a big factor in the Sotomayor confirmation fight so long as she insists that she was applying well-established precedents in the interpretation of a statute enacted by Congress–i.e., she was far from exerting any sort of “judicial activism” or racial-ethnic point of view, and was just doing her job. President Obama can and should defend her on this point, and both should benefit from his superior positioning on the issue, and the reluctance (political if not ethical) of at least some potential Sotomayor critics to directly attack the first African-American president and the first Latina Justice on baldly racial grounds.

We’ll soon see, but it looks like conservatives are picking up Ricci as just the most convenient stick to hit her with, and it’s not a big stick in the final analysis.

For all but four of the 50 states, the 2009 fiscal year ends today. And as P.J. Huffstutter and Nicholas Riccardi explain in the LA Times this morning, 32 of those states didn’t have a budget in place for the new fiscal year as of yesterday:

Although the majority of those are expected to pass eleventh-hour budgets, the fiscal futures of a handful remain uncertain, said Todd Haggerty, a [National Conference of State Legislatures] research analyst.
“It’s a lot of states that are coming down to the wire,” Haggerty said. “It’s far more than we’ve seen in the past, and it’s because of the state of the economy.”
Since 2002, only five states have been forced to shut down their governments. Some of the closures were brief: In 2007, Michigan’s doors were closed for four hours before lawmakers passed emergency measures that bought them time to close a $1.75-billion deficit.
“What’s different now is that the recession has eroded tax revenues across the country,” Haggerty said. Collectively, he said, states are wrestling with budget deficits totaling $121 billion.

The article identifies Arizona, California, Indiana, Mississippi and Pennsylvania as states that appear likely to undergo some sort of shutdown of government services tomorrow.
Most states have already cut services. According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities:

At least 39 states already have cut key services that are important to vulnerable residents. Cutbacks have affected health care (21 states); services for the elderly and disabled (23); K-12 schools (24 states); and higher education (32). Some 41 states have made cuts to their workforces, through furloughs, layoffs, cuts in benefits or other steps. These counts exclude still deeper cuts that have been proposed in many of the states still working on their 2010 budgets.

CPBB estimates that total state budget shortfalls through fiscal year 2011 exceed $350 billion–a lot of money by anyone’s standards. And the situation would be a lot worse if the federal economic stimulus package–even with significantly reduced levels of flexible assistance to state and local governments–had not been enacted. “States, on average, are using the money to fill about 40 percent of the gap between available funds and what they need to balance their budgets.”
So there won’t be any party-hats or champagne on tap tonight in state capitols. The fiscal situation for most is bad and getting worse.

In his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ at the Center for American Progress web pages, TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira explains why the “public option” for health care reform is drawing strong support in opinion polls:

…A recent CBS/New York Times poll showed 72 percent favoring “the government offering everyone a government administered health insurance plan—something like the Medicare coverage that people 65 and older get—that would compete with private health insurance plans,” compared to just 20 percent who were opposed.
Why is support for a public plan running so high? The chief reason is the public’s overriding concern with health care costs. Polls consistently show that people are most dissatisfied about health care costs, both for themselves and for the country as a whole.
This pattern is nicely illustrated by data from a March CNN poll showing 17 percent dissatisfied with the quality of the health care they receive, 26 percent dissatisfied with their health care coverage, 48 percent dissatisfied with their total health care costs, and 77 percent dissatisfied with the country’s total health care costs.

Distrust of private insurers plays a major role in shaping public opinion, as Teixeira notes:

…They have little faith that private insurance companies, left to their own devices, can deal with this problem. In fact, they believe by a wide 59-26 margin that the government—and not private insurance companies—can do a better job holding down health care costs.
…In an April Kaiser Family Foundation survey, the public, by 57-39, said the “better way to encourage health insurance companies to provide the best product for the lowest price” is to have private insurance companies and a public plan compete with one another instead of private insurance companies competing amongst themselves.

In building a health care reform consensus, Dems would do well to base a good part of their pitch on the public option’s advantage in containing costs — which Teixeira terms “both good policy and good politics.”

Katrina Vanden Heuvel’s thoughtful ‘Editor’s Cut’ piece “Time to End False Bipartisanship” in The Nation is an important contribution to shaping the debate on health care reform. As America’s most venerable progressive magazine, The Nation is read by many of America’s tough-minded left of center social critics, a vitally-important constituency for securing meaningful health care reform. In her editorial, Vanden Heuval provides what may be the best case yet made for urging left Dems to support a health reform plan anchored in a public option, as a step toward a universal, single-payer system down the road:

…Like 59% of the Americans surveyed in January 2009 by CBS News and the New York Times, I would prefer, as would my colleagues at The Nation, to see Congress respond to this country’s healthcare crisis by scrapping a failed-for-profit system and replacing it with a comprehensive national health insurance program.
But for now, the calculus of political viability has taken single-payer off the table. That doesn’t mean we cease fighting to get it back on –but it probably means we need to balance our short and long-term goals. Let’s assume some compromise in our political system is inevitable. The hard question is whether the compromise opens the door to greater progress or forecloses opportunity. A weak public plan will make it harder to get healthcare expenses under control while extending care to all. A weak plan may discredit healthcare reform for a generation. Real reform will cement strong attachment to the party which has shown it can pass legislation truly improving the condition of people’s lives…

Vanden Heuvel opposes coddling centrist Dems, who are backing away from the public option and warns of the need to get them to “pay more attention to the broad majority favoring a strong public option than to the wads of dough lavished on them by big Pharma and insurance lobbyists.” She is clear also that the acceptable compromise does not include pandering to Republicans who oppose even a public option:

It’s time to part ways with obstructionist Republicans and pass a strong healthcare bill with a majority vote, which is possible if efforts cease to get a handful of Republicans to cross over. Redefining bipartisanship at a time when the GOP has become a male, pale and stale party committed to deficit demagoguery and fearmongering is the common sense and, I’d even argue, pragmatic course. Instead of wasting time on recalcitrant GOP holdouts, do what Drew Westen, author of the terrific book “The Political Brain,” advises to pass meaningful healthcare change: “Focus on principles, tell compelling stories, move people emotionally and send clear messages.”

Many liberal Democrats are still fiercely supportive of single-payer reform as the best possible alternative. But Vanden Heuvel’s editorial is a signal that the broad outlines of health care reform being advocated by the Obama Administration and other progressive Democrats provide a credible stepping stone toward an all-inclusive, single payer system. As she asks “…With a President with high approval ratings and an historically unpopular GOP–if this isn’t a time to pass sweeping reform with a strong public plan, then when is?”

Today’s 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court decision in the case of Ricci v. DeStefano is going to get cited, distorted and taken out of context massively in the next few weeks, so it’s probably a good idea to make an effort to actually understand it.
As you may know, the case involved a promotion test for firefighers in New Haven, Connecticut in which all the white and one Hispanic) applicants scored better than all the African-Americans. The city tossed out the tests figuring that promotions based on it would fall prey to the “disparate impact” standard for employment discrimination suits under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. White firefighters sued on both statutory and constitutional grounds, lost at the trial court level on a motion for summary judgment, which was upheld by Judge Sotomayor’s Second Circuit Court of Appeals. The Supremes narrowly reversed this decision on statutory but not constitutional grounds, with the usual conservative coalition of Kennedy, Roberts, Alito, Scalia and Thompson in the majority, with the usual Kennedy opinion.
Here’s how Tom Goldstein of SCOTUSblog characterizes Kennedy’ s treatment of the Second Circuit’s ruling:

I am struck by the extent to which the majority opinion largely treats the court of appeals’ ruling as a non-event. To the contrary, Justice Kennedy almost seemingly goes out of his way not to criticize the decision below, notwithstanding that the Supreme Court takes a dramatically different view of the legal question. The Court indicates that the state of the law before today’s ruling was “a difficult inquiry,” and that its “holding today clarifies how Title VII applies.” It rejects the plaintiffs’ outright attack on the Second Circuit’s decision as “overly simplistic and too restrictive.”

That figures, since Sotomayor and company were applying limited case precedents in a very plausible way–plausible, indeed to the four Supreme Court dissenters from today’s decision, including the Justice Sotomayor has been appointed to replace, David Souter. So it’s no big deal in terms of Sotomayor’s confirmation, right?
Well, you’d think so, but that’s certainly not how conservative activists are going to play it. Michelle Malkin’s headline tells you exactly how they will play it: “Racism rejected: SCOTUS reverses Sotomayor in firefighters case .”
As it happens, new data from ABC/Washington Post on the Sotomayor nomination came out just yesterday, showing solid majority support for her confirmation. You better believe that the groups already determined to mine the confirmation fight for fun and profit will use a cartoon version of today’s decision to try to turn things around.