As Washington gears up for an apocalyptic battle over President Obama’s budget proposals, the issue that most looms over that battle is the administration’s decision to fold two large policy initiatives into the process–health care reform and climate change.
When it comes to health care, we now are in a position to know a lot more about how that decision was made, thanks to Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic. He has an article out today that explains the internal debate in the transition team and then in the White House over the timing of health care reform and its connection with the president’s first budget. Most interesting in this story is Obama’s own crucial role, particularly during the key juncture when would-be HHS Secretary Tom Daschle was first distracted and then sidelines by controversy over unpaid taxes:

[H]ealth care, in the end, might have gotten pushed aside–except that one very senior official in the administration kept insisting that it stay on the agenda. That official was Obama himself.

Another fateful decision–the extent to which the administration would offer a highly prescriptive and comprehensive reform plan, or leave significant wiggle-room for Congress–was also made personally by the president, who had to choose between larger and smaller budget proposals for health care:

Rejecting the $1 trillion proposal, because the offsets it required seemed too severe, Obama went with the $600 billion option–$634 billion, to be precise. The sum wasn’t enough to finance universal coverage; an actual package could cost $1 trillion, if not more, according to many estimates. But Obama decided simply to note that fact and promise to work with Congress on finding the extra money–in a nod to the fiscal concerns of Orszag and Summers. Strategically speaking, this approach was consistent with the widely accepted lesson of the health care battle of 1994–that the Clinton White House should have let Congress take more ownership over the process.

It’s obviously too early to judge how well these decisions play out. But Cohn’s account helps illustrate how thoroughly they were discussed, and makes it clear that Obama :can bring his advisers to him–rather than the other way around.”

If there is one topic that Democrats come back to over and over in electoral analysis, it’s the party’s persistantly weak performance in recene years among non-college-educated white voters, a.k.a., the White Working Class. And there are some obvious reasons for this debate. As Ruy Teixeira’s new study for CAP (“New Progressive America“), Democratic weakness among WWC voters persisted in 2008, although the impact was mitigated by the steady decline in that demographic’s share of the electorate. And that bugs Democrats a lot, since these are voters who should be (and in opinion if not sometimes in voting behavior actually are) responsive to the progressive economic message. There’s even a moral argument that a progressive party which struggles to connect with working-class voters isn’t adequately representing a core constituency.
But as this debate continues, a parallel debate is developing on the other side of the partisan divide, as some Republicans are beginning to argue against the targeting of WWC voters, urging instead a refocus on the upscale voters who have been sharply trending towards Democrats over the last 20 years. In some respects, this point-of-view is the direct corollary of conservative attacks on Obama’s tax policies; they sense that many upscale voters are ready to vote Republican, and perhaps even join the Tea Party “movement,” in reaction to Obama’s outrageous advocacy of top marginal rates on high-earners that resemble those of the bad old 1990s.
But there are some interesting generational arguments as well. Michael Barone suggests, mainly from inferences rather than hard data, that younger WWC voters are pretty much checking out and can’t be relied upon in the future to support the GOP in the numbers represented by their parents. (In fact, there is tantalizing evidence that Obama may have done surprisingly well among under-30 WWC voters in 2008, which Andrew Levison wrote about in a TDS White Paper in December).
Barone cites and at least tentatively endorses another theory, one advanced by David Frum in reaction to the news that single mom Bristol Palin ain’t getting hitched any time soon. Frum contends that young WWC voters don’t exhibit the sturdy folk virtues of their parents, and thus won’t be attracted to the cultural conservatism of the GOP:

Many conservatives carry in their heads a mental image of American society that’s a generation out of date. They imagine the existence of a huge class of socially conservative downscale voters, ready to vote Republican because of abortion and gay marriage.
The story of Bristol Palin should help puncture this illusion.
Take a look at Table A17 in this report by the Educational Testing Service. Of children born to white women with a college degree, only 8% were born out of wedlock. But of children born to white women who did not finish college, 28% were born outside of marriage. Of children born to white women who stopped their education after high school, 42.1% were out of wedlock. And of births to white women like Bristol Palin, who have not completed high school, almost 61% were out of wedlock.

Thus, as Barone puts it in his gloss on Frum’s argument, young WWC Americans are embracing “chaotic and undisciplined” lifestyles that aren’t conducive to GOP voting behavior.
This”forget about the white trash” dismissal of future WWC voters has pretty significant strategic implications for those GOPers who adopt it. And it exposes a dilemma in conservative message development that became obvious during the 2008 campaign, and is becoming even clearer today. In retrospect, as some of us pointed out at the time, the whole Joe the Plumber phenomenon in the McCain-Palin campaign was an effort to put a WWC face on an argument over tax policy that really affected only high-income voters.
The same conflict is even more evident in the current disagreement among conservatives about whether to go after Obama for his “socialist” and “redistributist” economic policies that threaten to destroy the “productive” upper class, or instead to go populist with an attack on bailouts of Wall Street firms, while stressing Obama’s alleged cultural radicalism. And even those who attack bailouts on laissez-faire grounds, like Joe the Plumber’s replacement, CNBC “reporter” Rick Santelli, don’t much like “demagoguery” about the AIG bonuses (which, after all, benefit the very people he has defended as victims of lower-class perfidy).
This conflict is complicated, of course, by the fact that upper-income voters do not proportionately embrace the cultural conservatism that’s been a big factor in WWC Republican voting, and that Frum and Barone suspect the WWC is beginning to abandon, as evidenced in the marital data and symbolized by the devolution of the Palin family.
It’s all pretty fascinating as a sign of fault lines in the GOP and the conservative movement that will probably become more apparent in days to come. And these fault lines have obvious implications for the putative front-runner for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, Bristol Palin’s mother.
We Democrats, of course, would like nothing better than a GOP abandonment of non-college-educated voters as a target. Whatever well-heeled conservatives think of their “chaotic and undisciplined” lifestyles, we’ll take ’em.

After a barrage of big business advertising, and some criticism of the legislation from a couple of Blue Dog Democrats, one might expect that prospects for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act (a.k.a. “card-check”) any time soon would be dim. But it’s not quite so simple as that.
As Jeanne Cummings explains at Politico today, the business community may have overplayed its hand on EFCA, particularly by focusing its campaign on provisions of EFCA that could change in a labor-backed compromise proposal. Anticipating this change of dynamics, business lobbyists are already beginning to shift their arguments against EFCA from the “don’t abolish the secret ballot!” line to one that simply suggests that the economy can’t tolerate an increase in unionization.
Meanwhile, Gallup has a new poll out showing that EFCA is favored by 53% of Americans, with 39% opposing it. Follow-up questions indicate that the respondents who are most closely following the “debate” over EFCA tend to tilt in a negative direction, but since much of the public “debate” has consisted of anti-EFCA ads focusing on the “secret ballot” issue, that’s not suprising. And more importantly, if the anti-EFCA talking points continue to shift towards generic “unions are bad” rhetoric, opinion on EFCA is likely to begin polarizing on that much more general topic.

Good news for the President and Dems from a new bipartisan survey of 800 LV’s conducted 3/12 and 14 by Public Opinion Strategies in conjunction with Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research for National Public Radio. According to GQR’s executive summary (audio here):

The first bipartisan survey conducted for NPR by Public Opinion Strategies and Greenberg Quinlan Rosner since the 2008 election shows Barack Obama with high overall approval ratings and strong marks on handling the economy, but much more important, Democrats winning the big debates surrounding Obama’s first budget on taxes, energy, health care, and the deficit by significant margins.

Further,

On both energy and health care the Democratic message wins by 53 to 42 percent, a margin nearly twice the Democrats’ 6-point partisan advantage. A majority of voters also side with the Democratic argument on taxes (52 to 43 percent) and the deficit (51 to 45 percent).

And,

President Obama’s approval rating remains strong. Nearly six-in-ten voters (59 percent) approve of the job President Obama is doing while just 35 percent disapprove…Indeed, by a near two-to-one margin, voters think that Obama’s economic recovery package will help rather than hurt the economy (40 to 21 percent with 34 percent believing it will have little impact on the economy) and a strong majority favor the recovery package passed by Congress and signed into law by the President (55 percent favor to 42 percent oppose).

The poll findings indicate that retirement and job security are now the top priorities for LV’s. The survey found that “worries about the declining stock market and investment losses” matches “the number who mention loss of work, pay cuts or the inability to get a job” as the two leading concerns of respondents. For more, detail, see the PDF here.

The growing frenzy over AIG’s insistence on providing $165 million in employee bonuses, mainly to securities traders in the company’s catastrophically disastrous financial products group, reflects an entirely legitimate belief that this scandal will serve as a popular tipping point between widespread unhappiness and marching-in-the-streets popular outrage over government bailouts of the financial sector. The President and Treasury Secretary spent much of the day trying to get in front of this fast-moving train, not only expressing their own outrage but discussing the possibility of ways to block the bonuses without creating a whole new financial crisis.
It’s an example of the visibility of this issue that it completely overshadowed Obama’s rollout of initiatives to help small business secure access to credit, itself an important symbol of the administration’s efforts to help worthy victims of the financial meltdown rather than its perpetrators.
It’s obvious that many people from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum are perpetually angry about corporate bailouts. And as for the general public, similar sentiment is definitely growing, as Mark Blumenthal reports today at Pollster.com:

In the survey released just today by the Pew Research Center, nearly half of Americans say they are “angry” about the government “bailing out banks and financial institutions that made poor financial decisions” (39% say they are bothered but not angry, only 12% are not bothered). Not surprisingly, this anger translates into considerable skepticism about bailouts of banks and financial institutions:
62% say the federal government has spent too much on “large banks and other financial institutions in danger of failing,” 8% say it is spending too little and 21% say the amount is about right (Newsweek [pdf]).
59% oppose “giving aid to U.S. banks and financial companies in danger of failing,” while 39% favor it (USA Today/Gallup).
50% disapprove of “the federal government providing money to banks and other financial institutions to try to help fix the country’s economic problems,” 39% approve (CBS/New York Times [pdf]).
Note that the expression of disapproval is slightly lower on the last question, which justifies assistance as way “to help fix” the economy. Nonetheless, the opposition as measured over the last month is still considerable, even before the latest AIG bonus story.

As this last poll finding cited by Blumenthal illustrates, it’s critically important that the Obama administration be viewed as only being willing to help “banks and other financial institutions” when it’s absolutely necessary to “fix the economy,” while fighting like hell against any further abuses or misuses of taxpayer dollars. And that’s why the administration’s response to the AIG bonus issue, even as it prepares to make another $30 billion infusion of cash into the company, is so dicey but so important.
One theory among progressives, well articulated today by TNR’s Noam Scheiber, is that the administration needs to shift to a more radical strategy of temporary takeovers of troubled banks and financial firms, whether or not it’s billed as “nationalization.”
This approach, of course, will immediately be labeled as “socialism” by conservatives, and that may be why the administration has avoided it. But as the AIG furor has documented, there’s some serious risk now that the President will be viewed as both enabling and deploring financial sector abuses, drawing attention to the waste of taxpayer funds even as he’s promoting more bailout money in the very near future. Even as gifted and popular a communicator as Barack Obama will struggle to maintain that balancing act, given the crossfire he will get with each new revelation of the causes and consequences of Wall Street misconduct.

It’s not exactly news that South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford has decided to stake out the most extreme Hooverite position available on the federal government’s efforts to stop the downward spiral of the economy via fiscal stimulus. He’s been ranting about this on every available national platform for months, and scolding his fellow governors, and his fellows Republicans, for wanting “bailouts.” And it’s also no secret that Sanford would like to run for president in 2012.
But it’s interesting to see the lengths to which Sanford is willing to take his crusade for deflation. His latest stunt was to demand that President Obama give him some sort of super-waiver to devote $700 million in federal stimulus dollars (about a fourth of the state’s total allocation) slated for SC not to their intended purposes, but to a pre-financing of future state debts. Gee, that’s just want you want to do in the middle of a recession, particularly in a state whose unemployment rate just jumped to 10.4%.
Sanford made this completely symbolic demand secure in the knowledge that the people of SC wouldn’t actually have to suffer, since SC congressman Jim Clyburn, knowing his governor, inserted into the federal legislation language allowing state legislatures to apply for the stimulus funds if any governor failed to do so by April 3. And after some hemming and hawing, the SC legislature’s Republican leadership is moving to do just that.
Just to make sure, however, that the whole political world understands there ain’t nobody getting to the Right of Mark Sanford, the governor has chosen to analogize people who want to spend the stimulus money for stimulus to the Zimbabwean supporters of Robert Mugabe, as reported by Politico’s Glenn Thrush:

Sanford told reporters in South Carolina that he still intends to turn down millions in stimulus cash, despite the likelihood of his state legislature accepting the cash — and criticism by House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-SC) that rejecting any payments would disproportionately harm African American residents.
“What you’re doing is buying into the notion that if we just print some more money that we don’t have, send it to different states – we’ll create jobs… If that’s the case why isn’t Zimbabwe a rich place?”…”why isn’t Zimbabwe just an incredibly prosperous place. Cause they’re printing money they don’t have and sending it around to their different – I don’t know the towns in Zimbabwe but that same logic is being applied there with little effect.”

As Oliver Willis observed: I’m sure him being from South Carolina had nothing to do with this.” And among the things that Mark Sanford is willing to sacrifice to his “principles”–or more likely, to his ambitions to run for president as the King of the Right–you’d have to list not only his own state’s economic conditions, but its longstanding efforts to rid itself of the legacy of the Confederacy and Jim Crow.
As a native of the Palmetto State, let me say: Nice work, governor.

Read Zuraya Tapia-Alfaro’s post today at NDN Blog for a link-rich update on the current politics of immigration.
In the Sunday New York Times, John Harwood weighs the pros and cons of President Obama abandoning the bipartisan consensus strategy and using filibuster-proof “budget reconciliation” rules to achieve his legislative goals for health care reform and energy independence.
The Associated Press has a report on the growing clout of the moderate New Democrat Coalition.
David Sirota’s “Harkin Delivers The Perfect EFCA Message” at OpenLeft is a good read for those seeking a “succinct smackdown” of the conservative argument that EFCA must be stopped to save the economy.
Crisitunity’s ‘Daily Digest’ at Swing State Project reports that Sen Arlen Specter will stay a Republican, according to Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, who tried to persuade him otherwise.
Newsweek financial columnist Daniel Gross makes the case at Slate.com that Obama “should pay no attention to stock prices” in developing his economic reform strategy.
Sheri and Allan Rivlin have an insightful analysis up at Pollster.com today comparing public opinion towards health care reform in 1993 vs. today
WaPo‘s Chris Cillizza reports in ‘The Fix” that Team Obama is ready to launch “an unprecedented attempt to transfer the grass-roots energy built during the presidential campaign into an effort to sway Congress” to pass the Administration’s $3.55 trillion budget.

One of the odder phenomena of contemporary public life is the enthusiasm of conservative gabbers and even elected officials for the idea of “Going Galt:” the suggestion that the oppressed wealthy of America withdraw their vast contributions to the commonweal in protest against the supposedly confiscatory taxes and redistribution of income to the morally depraved underway at the behest of the Obama administration. The allusion is to John Galt, the hero of Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged, that massive tome that represented the Summa of her rigorously capitalist, atheist, and anti-altruist philosophy of “Objectivism,” which has captured a vast number of adolescents and an impressive number of adults over the last several decades.
I’ve written about this in the context of U.S. Rep. John Campbell’s (R-CA) claim that “we’re living through the scenario” laid out in Atlas Shrugged, wherein the industrial leaders of the West, sick of subsidizing “parasites” and “looters,” drop out, take to the Rockies, and finally, through Galt’s voice–a radio address that took up 90 solid pages in the novel–chastise an economically helpless nation.
But Campbell was just surfing the right-wing zeitgeist, where excited talk about “going Galt” has spread like kudzu. It’s merged, in fact, with the Rick-Santelli-spawned Tea Party “movement” of “productive” people fed up with the poor-and-minority scum who cause the financial collapse by living beyond their means, and who now refuse to shuffle off into the ranks of the homeless and instead are instituting a socialist tyranny.
I don’t need to summarize the “going Galt” literature; that’s already been done quite well by David Weigel of the Washington Independent and Roy Edroso of the Village Voice (the more Galt-sympathetic Stephen Gordon of The Liberty Papers also has a long list of relevant links from various points of view). I also don’t need to analyze the absurdity of well-heeled, not-going-anywhere conservative bloggers and pundits like Michelle Malkin or Helen Smith to encourage others to “go Galt,” or of the self-congratulatory people who think it’s a license to cheat on their taxes, lay off a few underlings, or stop tipping (no, seriously!). Hilzoy has succinctly demolished the clownish and entirely un-Randian nature of these latter-day Galtists.
What I’d like to do as a public service is simply to remind folks tempted to “go Gault” or to gush ignorantly about the subject in blogs or on Fox that they are flirting with a philosophy that is profoundly and expressly hostile to anything that could remotely be described as “conservative.” And before anyone even thinks of offering the “you-don’t-have-to-be-a-fascist-to-love-Ezra-Pound’s-poetry” defense, it’s important to understand that John Galt, Atlas Shrugged, and their creator Ayn Rand represent a remorselessly unified and logical world-view that can’t be sliced and diced into bite-sized portions you can take or leave. Galt’s speech, in particular, which is the supposed inspiration for all this excited Tea Party chatter, was a painstakingly wrought distillation of Rand’s all-encompassing philosophy of Objectivism, which few “conservatives” could stomach, much less endorse. And Rand, if she were alive, would be the first to object to promiscuous use of her words and character, especially by political “conservatives,” whom she largely despised as life-hating slaves to an imaginary God, or as unprincipled demagogues little better in practice than all the other “collectivists.”
The following are a sprinkling of quotes from Rand’s work that ought to make any self-conscious conservative think twice about scribbing “Who is John Galt?” on the nearest whiteboard.

Read more…

I’ve done a couple of posts (here and here) on Stan Greenberg’s fascinating new book, Dispatches From the War Room–enough, I hope, to interest folks in reading Stan’s unique memoir in its entirety.
But I’d be remiss in failing to write a few notes about the central issue of Dispatches: the relationship between public opinion and political strategy, and beyond that, with political leadership.
Throughout the book, Stan challenges the common stereotype that public opinion research ruins political leaders by making them tactical, reactive, and basically gutless. That may be true with some leaders relying on some strategists and pollsters, he acknowledges, but in the right hands knowing public opinion is essential to principled leadership, and to actual change. As he puts it in a post at Pollster.com:

I come out of this believing that strong political leaders build a special bond with people, rather than flying in the face of it. Strong leadership is not defying the public, but engaging with it — using support to get things done; mobilizing the public, educating the public on challenges and goals and working to shift opinion. I look at the example of Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt who were both intensely solicitous of public opinion. Engaging with the public was a precondition for boldness. That contrasts with Bush and Cheney who thought they were strong because they pursued bold policies, never guided by polls and focus groups, but I think we can look now at the consequences. President Obama’s special bond with people is part of his leadership but he will struggle like these leaders to keep people with him and enhance his chances of success. That makes for stronger and more democratic leadership and produce greater civic engagement.

This crucial distinction between the proper and improper role of public opinion research by political leaders comes out most clearly in the chapter of Dispatches about Ehud Barak. In one of the most emotional passages in the entire book, Stan defends himself against charges that he led Barak to abandon negotiations with Syria based on adverse poll results. But he then goes on to explain how in the midst of the famously intense negotiations with the Palestinians over a proposed “final status” settlement, Barak used constant polling not to determine his negotiating stance, but to measure his relative success in bringing Israelis along with him in his astoundingly bold course of action. And to Stan’s own surprise, public opinion in Israel moved significantly on issues long thought to be carved in stone. In the end, Stan suggests, it was the inability of Palestinian leaders even to attempt a similar feat of leadership and public education in their own community that doomed the whole enterprise.
To put it another way, political leaders who do what they are so often urged to do, and eschew public opinion research in order to avoid the temptation of following rather than leading, are actually denying themselves an essential tool for leadership: the ability to intelligently engage the public. To cite a prosaic parallel, those who tell politicians not to use polls are much like the baseball “traditionalists” who have spent much of the last three decades fighting the use of sophisticated statistical methods in evaluating the game and its players. As the baseball pioneer Bill James once observed, people who don’t want more information are almost certainly relying on assumptions and stereotypes that are no less imprisoning than “statistics.” It’s the same with public opinion research. Those who don’t want to know what the public thinks probably assume they already know without asking, or, worse yet, like Bush and Cheney, don’t really care. Wilfull Ignorance or arrogant indifference isn’t really a better option than knowledge when it comes to political leadership in a democracy.
I should also mention a corollary of this approach to public opinion that helps explain the title of Stan’s book: the War Room. The whole idea of a campaign War Room, which originated in the 1992 Clinton campaign, was to foster a highly integrated message and field operation with (literally) no walls. From the point of view of the campaign pollster, that meant sharing all the public opinion research, good or bad, conclusive or inconclusive, with everyone else, as part of an ongoing and highly collaborative effort. Stan doesn’t come right out and say it, but the War Room approach also helped insure that no one, and certainly not the pollster, was given an opportunity to become a backstairs Mephistopheles tempting the candidate to trim his or her sails and abandon the broader strategy and the broader “mission” in search of short-term advantage.
Thus this “pollster’s memoir” actually serves as a very rich and entertaining meditation on the nature of leadership in a democracy–particularly progressive leadership at a time when the public is demanding change. That’s why Dispatches, for all its value as recent history, is especially relevant for progressives right now.

More and more, the Republican Party seems to be chasing its own tail under the direction of its new national chairman, Michael Steele. And this week, the putative revolt against Steele transcended the grumbling about slow staff appointments and his clumsy dance with Rush Limbaugh, and became openly ideological, at a time when the GOP’s ideological rigidity seems to have reached an all-time high. As Ben Smith explained yesterday at Politico:

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele’s series of gaffes turned into something more serious Thursday, as leaders of a pillar of the GOP—the anti-abortion movement—shifted into open revolt over comments in an interview with the men’s magazine GQ.
Steele called abortion an “individual choice” and opposed a constitutional ban on abortion in the Feb. 24 interview, which appeared online Wednesday night. He echoed the language of the abortion rights movement and appeared to contradict his own heated assertions during his campaign for chairman that he is a committed soldier in the anti-abortion movement.
While he issued a statement Thursday affirming his opposition to abortion and his support for a constitutional amendment banning it, the damage appeared to be done as leading social conservatives publicly attacked the embattled chairman.

Some of the criticism came pretty close to the line that separates more-in-sorrow-than-anger rebukes from get-thee-behind-me-Satan anathemas. Mike Huckabee, for example, isn’t satisfied with Steele’s apologies for his heretical comments on abortion:

For Chairman Steele to even infer that taking a life is totally left up to the individual is not only a reversal of Republican policy and principle, but it’s a violation of the most basic of human rights–the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. His statement today helps, but doesn’t explain why he would ever say what he did in the first place.

And Smith quotes several other social conservative activists who clearly would like to drop Steele from the nearest cliff:

“Michael Steele has just walked away from the Reaganesque position of strong moral clarity on abortion to personify why the Republican Party continues to be in a ‘free fall’,” said another activist, Jenn Giroux, the executive director of the conservative group Women Influencing the Nation. “It is amazing that he cannot see and learn from the fact that Sarah Palin’s position on abortion and her unapologetic defense of every conceived child drew crowds by the thousands on that issue alone.”

Trouble is, of course, that dumping Steele as RNC chairman isn’t a very easy or appetizing prospect, either. The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza today offers “Five Reasons Why Steele Stays.” To boil them down: (1) The last thing the GOP needs now is more chaos at the top; (2) Dumping the first African-American RNC chairman so quickly would constitute “symbolic suicide;” (3) There’s no obvious successor; (4) Removing an RNC chairman is procedurally tricky; and (5) Steele is finally getting things moving again at the RNC.
That all makes sense, though Republicans could dragoon some generally acceptable elected official into chairing the RNC, at least as a figurehead, to minimize the damage if they want to show Steele the door. My guess is that Steele stays, but with a muzzle firmly attached to his face. And while that might keep him out of the newspapers and out of trouble, someone who never gets noticed is not exactly what you want these days in a national party chairman.