Matt Bai is the latest journalist to join the Twitter backlash.
In a short piece for this week’s Sunday New York Times Magazine, he declares:

If Twitter doesn’t turn out to be just the latest political fad (like, say, psychographic polling, or Ron Paul), then it just may be the worst thing to happen to politics and its attending media since a couple of geniuses at CNN dreamed up “Crossfire” back in the 1980s.

Bai argues that the politicians on Twitter hark back to an earlier era when “American politics was obsessed with the universality of our experience, typified by the enduring cliché of the president with whom you could quaff a beer.”
That’s a surprising and fundamentally wrong-headed view by a writer who has spent a lot of time trying to understand the influence that the Internet is having on politics.
As with so many other things, the content produced by those on Twitter varies. But the best users of the service — like Sen. Claire McCaskill — produce content that is equal parts fascinating and addictive.
Bai dismisses these efforts as attempts at faux-populism. But in reality, they are anything but. They’re intimate and compelling and wholly authentic.
And on the Internet, of course, authenticity counts for everything.
When, Sen. McCaskill tweets about conversations with her children, the feelings she describes are genuine. When she tweets about policy, the positions she takes are clear. And when she talks smack about sports, it is both hilarious and appealing.
The common thread that connects all of Sen. McCaskill’s Twittering is that it reveals a sometimes-intimate and almost-always-appealing side of her personality. It’s a portrait of who she is that we simply do not get for most of her colleagues.
Couple this with the fact that Twitter is not a one-way-street for communication. Sen. McCaskill reads the @ replies that her followers write. She often replies to them in turn. The best Senate offices encourage their principals to draft the occasional reply to a constituent’s mail, but most of the public will never get to see that kind of communication. When we write to a Senate office, we get a form letter (months after the fact).
Twitter makes those replies part of the public conversation. All of us see the importance that Sen. McCaskill places on keeping in touch with her voters back. And the replies are instant — we know the positions she takes the second she posts them.
With all due respect to Bai, Washington would be a better place if more pols (and journalists) grasped the lessons of Twitter.

In a lede that made me look quickly at the date to make sure I hadn’t pulled up something from nine months ago, Poltico’s Josh Kaushaar writes today: “The GOP polling firm Public Opinion Strategies is offering a solution to Republican candidates as they seek to find a compelling message for the 2010 campaigns: Run to prevent Democrats from having unchecked power in Washington.”
You may recall that “checks and balances” or “divided government” was a theme that was supposed to be the magic formula for victory for John McCain last year, enabling him to run against the terribly unpopular Democratic Congress (which unltimately got a lot bigger) without directly attacking Barack Obama. This, of course, was before the McCain-Palin campaign decided to run against Obama and the Democrats as a gang of socialists determined to redistribute wealth from Joe the Plumber to welfare recipients. So color me as unimpressed as the McCain campaign apparently was with poll data showing that, of course, Americans favor “checks and balances” as opposed to “one-party government.”
But whether it’s an effective message or not, you can certainly see how it would be attractive to today’s Republicans, who are determined to oppose everything Obama wants and to remain united around an increasingly atavistic version of “conservative principles,” even as the public makes it ever clearer that it likes Obama and doesn’t like conservatism. Standing up for “checks and balances” sounds vastly nicer than “obstruction” or “the status quo.” And claiming to be playing this essential constitutional role also evokes a certain aroma of bipartisanship, conveniently expressed through systemic opposition to the other party.
It’s unclear to me that congressional Republicans have either the self-discipline or the external power to tone down conservative attacks on Obama as either a secular or religious version of the Antichrist. But even if they can somehow pain a smiley-face on a policy of total obstruction, and sell it as an effort to maintain “checks and balances,” that’s a terribly bloodless sort of appeal to make to a country that’s worried about concrete things like jobs and health care.
Even the GOP pollster who’s hyping the “checks and balances” message as a nifty panacea for what ails his party, Glen Bolger, allows as how it’s “no substitute for policy alternatives,” which is a bit of a problem for Republicans who are increasingly united around Hoover’s economics, Cheney’s foriegn policy, and Palin’s social views. At least, I supposed, it puts them into a context of relevance to what Obama’s trying to do, and not on the margins, howling at the moon and cheering every downward tick in the stock market.

If the current pandemic flu threat becomes a nightmare made real, we are going to hear a lot about the elimination of funding for pandemic flu preparedness as part of the effort to get Senate Republicans across the line on the economic stimulus package. Indeed, as Ryan Powers notes in a Think Progress look- back at that controversy, the appearance of the flu funds on the hit lists of stimulus critics seems to have begun with a Wall Street Journal op-ed by the famed compassionate conservative, Karl Rove.
People like Susan Collins and Arlen Spector who successfully demanded the elimination of the funding will doubtless object that they favored more money for pandemic preparedness, but just not as part of a package aimed at immediately helping the economy.
But as John Nichols notes today at The Nation, the original insertion of the preparedness money by House Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey was explicitly justified in terms of the economic disaster that a pandemic could create–an insight that appears pretty reasonable considering the already-sharp reaction of financial markets to the outbreak in Mexico:

Notably, the second question at the White House press conference on the emergency had to do with the potential impact on the economic recovery.
On Monday, the question began to be answered, as Associated Press reported — under the headline: “World Markets Struck By Swine Flu Fears” — that: “World stock markets fell Monday as investors worried that a deadly outbreak of swine flu in Mexico could go global and derail any global economic recovery.”
Before U.S. markets opened, the Wall Street Journal reported: “U.S. stock futures fell sharply Monday as the outbreak of deadly swine flu stoked fears that a possible recovery in the global economy could be derailed.”

Clearly, preparedness comes in many forms.

WaMo‘s Hilzoy has a sharp retort for WaPo‘s David Broder, who has made a sort of blanket generalization that those who want accountability for torture are driven by “an unworthy desire for vengeance.” Broder’s column doesn’t flat out say that all who want accountability for torture are motivated by such darker emotions. But he does swab with a very broad brush — “politicians and voters who want something more — the humiliation and/or punishment of those responsible for the policies of the past.” Broder warns further about “endless political warfare,” “vendettas” and “untold bitterness — and injustice.”
Punishment for torturers? Horrors. Hilzoy’s post blasts Broder’s psychologizing:

…Who died and made David Broder Sigmund Freud? How on earth does he presume to know what actually motivates those of us who think that the people who authorized torture should be investigated? Speaking for myself: I have never met David Broder. As far as I know, he has no idea that I exist. So how does he know that underneath my “plausible-sounding rationale” lurks “an unworthy desire for vengeance”? And how, stranger still, does he presume to know this about everyone who thinks this — a group that (as Greg Sargent notes) included 62% of the American public before the latest memos were released?

Hilzoy argues that motives for investigating torture are basically irrelevant and,

…By not investigating torture now, we would be setting ourselves up for future government lawbreaking. Isn’t it obvious that preventing this matters more than anyone’s motives?

The poll Hilzoy cited was conducted 1/30-2/1. In Sunday’s Post, Jon Cohen and Jennifer Agiesta cite a WaPo/ABC News poll, conducted 4/21-24:

About half of all Americans, and 52 percent of independents, said there are circumstances in which the United States should consider employing torture against such suspects…Barely more than half of all poll respondents back Obama’s April 16 decision to release the memos specifying how and when to employ specific interrogation techniques. A third “strongly oppose” that decision, about as many as are solidly behind it. Three-quarters of Democrats said they approve of the action, while 74 percent of Republicans are opposed; independents split 50 to 46 percent in favor of the decision.

On Sunday, during “Meet the Press,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs added this clarification on President Obama’s policy on torture:

The president doesn’t open or close the door on criminal prosecutions of anybody in this country because the legal determination about who knowingly breaks the law in any instance is not one that’s made by the president of the United States…he leaves it to the attorney general to figure out who should be prosecuted for what.

Hilzoy is right to call out Broder for his stereotyping, which is reminiscent of the Gingrich era “the left is driven by hate” meme (and the right is driven by, what, love?). Hilzoy is also correct in saying that we can’t just ignore accountability for torture and let bygones be, not if we want to keep a shred of cred as a justice-respecting democracy.
But there is a valid concern buried in Broder’s reference to “endless political warfare.” It would be bad strategy for the Obama Administration to let the torture investigation get on a fast, loud track, at first investigating the decision-makers, but soon devolving into horrific images, grisly photos and revelations sucking away needed media coverage for reforms in health care, economic and energy policy. Then one day we wake up and read on page A-5 that, once again, health care reform is a dead issue for this session of Congress, which is preoccupied with the media circus re-hashing Abu Ghraib ad nauseum. It would serve the interests of “if it bleeds, it leads” journalists and Republicans seeking distractions from Democratic reforms, but it doesn’t serve Obama’s reform agenda.
In terms of legislative accomplishments, Obama has the strongest political momentum of any Democratic president since LBJ, and he understandably wants the public and media focused on his reforms. He did right in releasing the torture files. Getting bogged down on torture as the dominant media issue at this time, however, could obstruct his agenda until his approval/favorable numbers fall, which is exactly what the Republicans want.
America is honor-bound to address accountability for torture — but later better than sooner. Maybe the best thing, strategy-wise, would be for Holder to initiate a thorough investigation, but save the investigation revelations and recommendations until after we get the economy on solid footing and health care reform safely enacted.

Ron Brownstein’s written an important article on Barack Obama’s base of support, drawing on a new Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor survey. It’s worth quoting at some length:

Arguably, the past generation’s most important political trend has been the class inversion in the two parties’ support. Since the 1960s, Republicans have gained enormous ground among blue-collar white voters, many of them conservative on cultural and national security issues, who once anchored the Democratic coalition. Since the 1980s, Democrats have advanced among well-educated and affluent voters who are fiscally moderate but lean left on the same social and foreign-policy issues that have moved blue-collar families toward the GOP.
In the 2008 election, Obama struggled with blue-collar whites but extended the Democratic inroads upscale. This new survey shows him improving his position since then with both camps and further loosening the Republican grip on well-off groups that soured on George W. Bush

He goes on to warn that anti-government attitudes among upscale voters could undermine Obama’s base of support for specific domestic policy iniitiatives, with the proviso that even well-off Americans look to government for solutions on health care. Even there, suggests Brownstein, Obama needs to be careful if he wants to keep the classes as well as the masses on his side:

[G]iven the priority they place on autonomy and their skepticism about Washington, these better-off Obama supporters may be especially sensitive to charges that his initiative will reduce choice by increasing government control over health care. Avoiding the Big Government label that helped sink President Clinton’s universal coverage proposal may be critical not only to Obama’s sustaining approval for his reform plan but also to his solidifying his unusually diverse coalition of support.

Brownstein’s analysis is much more impressive than the usual what-goes-up-must-go-down predictions that Obama’s approval ratings will, any day now, collapse. But even Ron may be overestimating the extent to which the president must rely on discrete approbation of his specific policy initiatives.
If we’ve learned anything from Drew Westen, it’s that political allegiances are not, after all, just a matter of personal calculations of which party is more congruent with one’s preferences on a list of policy issues. If that were the case, Democrats would have won most of the presidential and congressional campaigns of the last three decades.
The political capital that a president can bring to bear in support of his policy agenda is not just the sum of support-levels for his discrete policy initiatives. His personal credibility isn’t just an ephemeral asset that will dwindle away when “real issues” emergge; it matters. And moreover, at a time like this, it also matters that the alternatives are a profoundly unpopular status quo and the policy offerings of a Republican Party that’s lost in some strange time warp where the New Deal failed, Herbert Hoover was dangerously prone to big-government solutions, and Ayn Rand got the fundamentals right.
Brownstein is right that big-picture assessments of his policy agenda among this or that voter category will help determine whether he can maintain his current base of support. But there’s not much appetite right now for “nothing” or “no” as alternatives, and that’s Barack Obama’s ultimate ace in the hole.

There’s an interesting feature up on the American Prospect’s site right now surveying the political landscape in states where Obama cabinet appointees have given up major officies. The premise of the piece, co-written by Dana Goldstein, Adam Serwer and Tim Fernholz is that Obama has “loosened up the politics of several swing states, putting the Democratic Party on shakier footing and creating the space where the next Republican opposition could take root.”
It’s a plausible argument, but not self-evidently right. Janet Napolitano of AZ and Kathleen Sebelius of KS were term-limited, so their early departures didn’t deny Democrats incumbent gubernatorial candidates in 2010. Yes, Napolitano’s resignation turned AZ over to Republican Jan Brewer, which is bad for Democrats in the short run; but given the current fiscal condition of the state, it may turn out to be a good thing that Republicans will go into 2010 controlling both the legislature and the Governor’s Office. The Bennett appointment to Ken Salazar’s Senate seat has caused some internal unhappiness among CO Democrats, but not enough to give Republican any clear advantage. And David Paterson’s political meltdown in NY isn’t primarily attributable to the controversy over his replacement of Hillary Clinton with Kirstin Gillibrand. Finally, it’s suggested that Tom Vilsack’s appointment as Secretary of Agriculture denied Democrats the one candidate who could have beaten (or forced into retirement) Chuck Grassley in 2010. But it’s not at all clear that Vilsack would have run for the Senate if he had remained in Iowa.
All this speculation is fun and has some analytical value, but the reality is that it’s hard to anticipate the national and state political landscape as it may exist in 2010. If you had to guess, you’d figure that incumbency may not be much of an asset this time around, And the notable shrinkage of the GOP’s electoral base nationally has implications in many of the red-to-purple states where the new Obama Cabinet Democrats have done so well. So at this point, whatever they can do to help Barack Obama become an effective president may well be worth the political questions they have left behind.

Paulo Prada’s article “Cuban-Americans Ponder What U.S. Should Do Next” in today’s Wall St. Journal” reports on the splintering of Cuban American opinions on U.S. policy.

More than half the people of Cuban origin now living in the U.S. have emigrated since the 1980s, according to the Census Bureau. That means that they, unlike the Cuban exiles that fled as the Castro regime embraced communism, lived for extended periods with the harsh reality of that economy and are more likely to have immediate family there. Because of the decrepit state of much of the island, most Cuban-Americans no longer harbor a dream of returning to the houses, haciendas, and pueblos their families fled.
“You no longer think about going back to live because what you once had is no longer there,” said Miguel Vazquez, who fled the island as a boy and now runs Sentir Cubano, a store that specializes in such vintage Cuban goods as reproductions of Havana phone books from 1959. “You think about helping redevelop the country once the regime is gone.”

In terms of national public opinion, there is fairly strong support for liberalizing trade relations with Cuba. As Gallup reports:

Over the past decade, Gallup has found Americans remarkably steadfast in their views about U.S. relations with Cuba — particularly in regard to the U.S. trade embargo. Since 1999, Americans have been more likely to support than oppose the U.S. government’s ending its trade embargo against Cuba — with support narrowly ranging between 48% and 51%, including 51% in the new poll.[conducted 4/20-21]..Americans more widely support ending restrictions on travel to Cuba — with 64% in favor.

The poll also showed 60 percent favoring diplomatic relations with Cuba and 64 percent supporting ending travel restrictions.
It’s been a while since there has been a poll of Floridians on the topic of the economic embargo, but a Rasmussen survey conducted in Florida in March ’08 found that “Now that Fidel Castro has turned over power in Cuba to his brother, 37% of Florida voters believe it’s time to lift the economic embargo against Cuba. Thirty-seven percent (37%) disagree and 26% are not sure.”
Pablo Bachelet reports in his article “Democrats in No Hurry to Change Cuba Policy” in the Miami Herald’s series “The Cuba Puzzle” that congressional Democrats are anxious about Florida’s early presidential primary date and are waiting for the “post-Fidel Castro transition to unfold.” No doubt Democrats are thinking about the ’10 and ’12 elections. Florida’s popular Republican Governor Charlie Crist leads in polls for the ’10 Senate race, and President Obama knows that Florida can still be a make or break state for his re-election campaign. Bachelet also reports that “a majority of those who arrived in the United States prior to 1984 — and are more likely to vote — still oppose any concessions to Cuba.” Also Majority Leader Harry Reid supports a “tough line” on Cuba. Given all of these factors, President Obama’s policy of slowly opening up relations seems politically-prudent, if a tad overly-cautious.
In terms of fostering change in Cuba, however, Michael Kinsley made an interesting point in his WaPo op-ed “A Cuba Policy That’s Stuck On Plan A” last week:

As many have pointed out, we won the Vietnam War in a way. Two ways, in fact. Vietnamese fleeing communism have been a great new ingredient in our ethnic stew, and meanwhile Vietnam is embracing capitalism as hard as it can. We’ve already been enriched by the energies of Cubans who have arrived here since Castro’s revolution. So why do we continue to deny the Cubans still stuck on Castro’s Island the opportunity to enjoy the fruits of capitalism as well?

More accurate to say that our withdrawall from Vietnam made it possible for private enterprise to thrive, but his argument that a softer line on Cuba could do the same seems plausible enough. It will be a long time, however, before we can expect bipartisan support for the change. Once again, Dems will have to go it alone.

We’ve all been talking lately about the self-marginalization of conservative Republicans, with one leading indicator being remarks made about states’ rights and even secession by Texas Gov. Rick Perry, the 43d president’s hand-picked successor as chief executive of the Lone Star State.
But who knew Texas Republicans as a group were ready to reject America?
A new Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll of that state indicates that half of Texas Republicans would prefer an independent Texas to a continuation of their affiliation with the United States. Texans as a whole disagree by a two-to-one margin.
This is interesting not just because it provides a particularly graphic example of conservative self-estrangement from the rest of the country: you’d have to figure that Texas Republicans have thought of themselves as super-patriots, certainly willing to support their former governor’s star-spangled crusades against the godless Muslims and French. This super-patriotism apparently doesn’t extend to an America led by an African-American Democrat.
Thus does ideology trump patriotism. It’s sad and scary.

I’ve been saying for a good while that President Obama’s approval ratings and the right-track/wrong-track numbers would eventually begin to converge, and where and when that happened would be politically momentous.
Well, it’s happening more rapidly than I would have guessed, and the point of convergence is quite good for Obama.
The latest AP-GfK poll has the percentage of Americans believing that the country’s headed in the right as opposed to the wrong direction leading by 48% to 44%. I honestly can’t remember the last time a poll showed a right-track plurality, but it was probably just following 9/11; the ratio was at 17 to 78% just prior to the last election. The same poll showed Obama’s approval rating at 64%, pretty much where it’s been since he became president.
Whatever else this ultimately means, Obama has already gotten across the crisis point where people begin to hold him responsible for a status quo that they hate. They still don’t blame him at all for the economic crisis, but his presidency is making them feel better about the future. That’s exactly where he needs to be right now.

When Defense Secretary Robert Gates first unvelied a series of extensive weapons system curtailments and cancellations in the context of the Pentagon’s 2010 budget submission, there was a fair amount of eye-rolling from beltway veterans who knew how well-insulated such systems were in Congress via wide dispersion of manufacturing sites and careful protection of the status quo by senior figures in both Houses–not to mention the lobbying clout of the military-industrial complex.
Now, less than a month later, there are preliminary signs that Gates may win many of his fights over weapons systems. Here’s how Julian Barnes of the Chicago Tribune assesses the current state of play:

Gates and the Obama administration were expected to encounter organized opposition from Defense Department contractors, local officials and Congress. But nearly three weeks after Gates’ dramatic proposal, the lobbyists and lawmakers have been uncharacteristically quiet.
“My general perception is that Gates is going to get his way for 90 percent of these decisions,” said Mackenzie Eaglen, a senior policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation.
Analysts credit the relative calm to the strategy used by Gates. He imposed strict Pentagon secrecy, even making aides and commanders sign non-disclosure agreements, and announced the plan as Congress started on a two-week break. In addition, the proposals are seen as non-political and have bipartisan support.
So far, Gates has signaled he is not going to compromise easily. For instance, the defense secretary dismissed as wasteful a deal offered by one lawmaker to split a contract for new Air Force refueling tankers between two different companies — one favored by the lawmaker, the other by the defense chief.

Aside from the actual impact on U.S. national security, what’s significant about this development (if it sticks) is that Gates has managed to get people thinking and talking about the value of this or that weapons system or procurement program, instead of simply building a fence around the status quo, demanding more of the same, and denouncing anyone who doesn’t agree as “weak on defense.”
You may recall that the acceptance by Obama of Gates as at least a transition figure at the Pentagon was pretty controversial among progressives at first. Now it’s beginning to look like he will accomplish something that progressives and defense reformers have struggled with for years: saying “enough” or even “no” to proponents of well-established weapons systems. That could have a major impact down the road on the politics of national security.