Okay, just one more unavoidable reference to Mark Sanford unless he makes some real news by resigning as governor or getting impeached. In his poignant press conference on Wednesday, he made a cryptic reference to “working through” his infidelity issues on “C Street” in Washington.
This was quickly deciphered by Dan Gilgoff of US News and others as a reference to the Capitol Hill townhouse owned by a shadowy fundamentalist group variously called “The Family” and “The Fellowship,” which sponsors the National Prayer Breakfast and a variety of other religious events and services aimed at elite political and business leaders. Turns out that the other would-be-presidential-candidate-with-an-adultery-scandal, Sen. John Ensign, lives at “C Street” when he’s in DC, whose proprietors knew about and tried to help him manage his problem, as Manuel Roig-Franzia explains in today’s Washington Post:

The house pulsed with backstage intrigue, in the days and months before the Sanford and Ensign scandals — dubbed “two lightning strikes” by a high-ranking congressional source. First, at least one resident learned of both the Sanford and Ensign affairs and tried to talk each politician into ending his philandering, a source close to the congressman said. Then the house drama escalated. It was then that Doug Hampton, the husband of Ensign’s mistress, endured an emotional meeting with Sen. Tom Coburn, who lives there, according to the source. The topic was forgiveness.
“He was trying to be a peacemaker,” the source said of Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma.

“Peacemaker” is one term for it; “damage controller” is another.
These incidents cast some unwelcome light on “The Family,” a secretive group (sort of an evangelical version of the conservative Catholic elite group Opus Dei, though much less focused on conversions) whose vast array of activities were exposed last year in a sensational book by Jeff Sharlet. By sheer coincidence, I’ve just started reading Sharlet’s book, and it’s pretty disturbing to me on both religious and political grounds.
That intrepid chronicler of the Christian Right, Sarah Posner of The American Prospect, summarized Sharlet’s take on “The Family” last year in an article that also offered an interview with the author:

The Family exposes the inner workings of an elite and secretive association of politicos (The Family boasts a bipartisan but mostly Republican roster of members, including Sens. Sam Brownback, a Kansas Republican, and Mark Pryer, an Arkansas Democrat) and business executives (such as the CEOs of Continental Oil and the defense contractor Raytheon) who have exploited their uber-masculine, uber-capitalist version of Christianity to serve political and profit-making goals, from union-busting here at home to imperialist adventures abroad.

But I’m not sure even Sharlet knew that The Family’s services included counseling and public-relations-damage-control for governors and senators caught up in adulterous affairs. I guess when you are trying to impose what you think to be the Will of God from the top down, you spare no expense or trouble in managing your investments.

Democracy Corps is out with a new analysis of public opinion on health care reform, based on extensive polling and focus group work. Much of it reflects the advice that TDS Co-Editor Stan Greenberg has been offering on how to succeed where President Clinton failed in securing universal health coverage.
But the new DCorps memo provides an interesting focus on the “swing vote” for health care reform:

Proponents and opponents of reform will be battling for the 35 percent of the electorate
who are not satisfied with the health insurance system but satisfied with their personal insurance.
Conservatives and some in the media think these voters are not serious about change, but that
misreads them, as we realize from our focus groups last week. They are “satisfied” with their
choice of doctors, that their employer is picking up most of the cost and that they may have
better insurance than others. But, they are not happy about having traded off wages or gotten
locked into a job because of health care or about the fate of a child with a chronic ailment who
may not be able to get insurance in the future. So, they are nervous about change, but they want
it.

The DCorps team goes on to identify five key strategies for appealing to these key voters:
1. Voters need to hear clearly what changes health care reform will bring.
2. Build a narrative around taking power away from the insurance companies and giving it
to people.
3. The president and reform advocates have to explain concretely the changes that will mean
lower costs.
4. Show all voters and seniors that there are benefits for them, including prescription drugs.
5. All of these points should be made with the dominant framework that continuing the status
quo is unacceptable and unsustainable.
This analysis leads to a overarching narrative that DCorps recommends:

Continuing the status quo in health care is not acceptable and not sustainable. Keeping the status quo means the insurance companies are still in charge, jacking up rates and denying coverage. It means more people losing insurance or enslaved to their job, prices skyrocketing for families and businesses and our companies less
competitive. We need change so that people no longer lose coverage or get dropped for a pre-existing condition, and see lower costs.

“Safe change” is always a tricky message to convey, even when people are open to or eager for change. But if DCorps is right, then it will be the key to navigating health care reform through many obstacles.

As a follow-on to Michael Cohen’s post late yesterday, it’s worth noting that those who put a lot of emphasis on recent polling showing a surge of concern about budget deficits need to address some problems with such polling. At TNR, Linda Hirshman draws attention to an interesting new analysis from Pew that obtains notably different results from other recent polls on the importance of deficits to the public, by asking much more straightforward questions:

Instead of offering the public an elaborate scenario in which they were asked to probe their innermost feelings and choose a position that accords with their “point of view” about what should worry the government more, as NBC did, Pew asked: “If you were setting the priorities for the government these days, would you set a higher priority on ‘spending more to help the economy recover’ or ‘reducing the budget deficit'” (rotating the choices). Forty-eight percent of those questioned put a higher priority on spending more to help the economy recover, while 46 percent chose reducing the deficit.

Spending and deficits have long been an area where the precise wording of poll questions can produce widely varying results, as James Vega demonstrated in a May post on Resurgent Republic’s message polling. And this has been particularly true of polling about such abstractions as “stimulating the economy,” which isn’t nearly as popular as specific categories of public investment or spending such as health care or education.
These are all factors for Democrats to seriously consider before urging a major pullback on the Obama domestic agenda on grounds that the public wants deficit reduction first.

Note: This is a guest post from Michael A. Cohen, Senior Research Fellow at the New America Foundation and author of “Live From the Campaign Trail: The Greatest Presidential Campaign Speeches of the 20th Century and How They Shaped Modern America.” We welcome it as part of a continuing effort to enlist diverse voices in discussions of Democratic strategy.
Last week Ed highlighted a post over at TNR by William Galston raising a number of red flags about public opinion and growing doubts about the President’s domestic agenda. One of the points Galston made jumped out at me – and has been further crystallized by Mark Sanford’s painful press conference yesterday:

The best thing Democrats have going for them right now is the public’s near-total withdrawal of confidence from the Republican Party, which now “enjoys” its lowest rating ever recorded in the NYT/CBS survey–a finding that Pew confirms.

Yet even with this good news and additionally positive approval ratings for President Obama, Galston offered some rather timid recommendations for Democrats, arguing that they need to focus on “major legislative initiatives . . . that the public can accept” and to make a priority “their ability to persuade the public that something real is being done to rein in spending and debt.”
But I wonder if Bill is making this a bit too complicated and overemphasizing temporary concerns over spending, the deficit and traditional voter suspicion toward government. Right now it seems the most important two factors in public opinion are that the country trusts Barack Obama to do the right thing and they don’t trust Republicans . . . at all.
Right on cue, this week’s new poll from the Washington Post provides compelling evidence of this phenomenon. At the same time that confidence in the President’s stimulus package is softening his approval ratings remains sky high – at 65%. In addition, Obama is far more trusted that his Republican opponents on a host of issues.
Obama maintains leverage because of the continuing weakness of his opposition. The survey found the favorability ratings of congressional Republicans at their lowest point in more than a decade. Obama also has significant advantages over GOP lawmakers in terms of public trust on dealing with the economy, health care, the deficit and the threat of terrorism, despite broad-based Republican criticism of his early actions on these fronts.
The GOP’s approval rating is at 36% with disapproval at 56% and only 22 percent self-identify as Republicans. After watching Mark Sanford yesterday and considering the public spectacle of another prominent Republican publicly confessing private infidelity, it’s hard to imagine that these numbers are going to see much bump in the near future.
Even on the deficit, an issue that both Republicans and Democrats have trumpeted as being of great concern, the President has a twenty-point advantage over the GOP. Recent polls on health care reform show strong support for a so-called public option even though the idea has near unanimous opposition from Republicans. While it can be dangerous to draw too overly broad conclusion from a handful of polls, it’s hard to see any evidence at all that GOP attacks on the President are having much of an impact. In fact, outside their narrow base of supporters, Republicans seem to have almost no credibility, notwithstanding Jim Vandehei and Jonathan Martin’s threadbare effort to find a sliver of hope for the GOP.
The President – even in the face of worsening economic news – has not only enormous credibility, but is widely trusted. Again, according the Post, a majority of voters see the President as someone “”who will be careful with the public’s money” rather than a tax-and-spend Democrat. Quite simply, with strong majorities in the House and Senate, it’s been a long time since the country has seen a political leader with this type of political capital (whatever George Bush might have said in 2005).
So the time has come to use it. Galston’s advice is an argument for playing defense rather than the right course of action for Democrats: going on the offensive. While Obama obviously should not ignore the deficit, he and the Democrats must avoid overreacting to an issue that is generally a stalking horse for a lousy economy. If the economy shows signs of improvement, as it likely will when the stimulus package begins to kick in, I would be willing to make a small wager today that concerns over the deficit will decline. In the end, Democrats will live or die by not only the strength of the economy, but also by the ambition of their policy goals.
As for the notion that Obama should be tied down by perceptions of what he thinks the country “can accept,” frankly this is even worse advice. As Galston notes, voters “have little confidence in government as an effective instrument of public purpose. Trust in government remains near an historic low and has not improved significantly since the beginning of Obama’s presidency.”
But the way to change that perception is not to nibble around the edges, but instead move forward a piece of legislation that changes the entire political equation for Democrats: something like passing a sweeping health care package. The negative perception that voters continue to have toward government is because, as Obama suggested during the campaign, they don’t see it being responsive to their needs.
Forget the polls for just a second. In November 2008, the electorate voted not only for change, but they voted to send someone to Washington who would change the tone, bring new ideas and get things done. Passing comprehensive health care reform is the best way I can think of to not only fulfill the promise of Obama’s campaign, but also expose the rigidity of Republican opposition. If Democrats are dealing with a down economy in 2010 they will likely pay a price at the polls, but the best response to bad economic news is evidence that Congress and the President have worked to fulfill their campaign promises. As I asked a few days ago at Politico: “Would Democrats prefer to go to the voters and say, ‘I shrunk the deficit’ or would they rather say, ‘I passed health care legislation that improves access and care for 50 million people — and, by the way, my opponent voted against it?”
I can already imagine the likely response to my confidence: 1993 and 1994. The political path I’m advocating, of course, bears striking similarities to President Clinton’s ambitious domestic policy agenda. The critical difference, however, is the lack of confidence voters have not only in the Republican Party, but for conservatism in general. In addition, there is simply no question that the electorate trusts Obama far more than it did Clinton. I understand, Galston’s pleas for caution and no one who lived through 1993 and 1994 would ever question the dangers of overreaching. But if ever there were a time for overreaching it would be right now

I said in my very last post that I was done talking about you-know-who and his trip to you-know-where, and I’ll try to stick to that. You’d think conservatives would want to let it go, as well. But not Rush Limbaugh, who in an act of chutzpah that is remarkable even for him, is blaming you-know-what on Barack Obama. Here via Christopher Orr is a snippet:

My first thought was he said, ‘To hell with this. The Democrats are destroying the country. We can’t do anything to stop it. I gave everything I had to stop it here in South Carolina.’ … Folks, there are a lot of people looking at life and saying, ‘screw it.’ They’re saying, ‘screw it.’ Before Obama takes away their money, before Obama takes away their house, or the economy takes away their house, there are people who are saying, “To hell with all this…. I’m just going to try to enjoy it as much as I can.’

Thus spake one of the few identifiable leaders of the Republican Party. I hope that this is a broad hint that Limbaugh himself is about to say “screw it” and move his own tired act offshore or off the air.
Go Galt, Rush!

Don’t know about you, readers, but I’m ready to quickly forget about Mark Sanford for a good long while and leave him to whatever reckoning he faces with his family and the people of South Carolina. I’d just as soon not see elaborate exposure of his personal emails, or minute-by-minute scrutiny of how he spent his time on state-paid trade missions to Argentina.
But there are a couple of residual points on the general subject of media coverage of politics that do need to be addressed for future reference.
1) Is the vast attention being paid to the Sanford Saga a flashing warning sign about media or public obsession with the sex lives of politicians, and/or about the spread of a “celebrity gossip” culture into politics?
2) Does the exposure of Sanford show that politicians no longer have any expectation of privacy?
These are questions that we have been hearing at least since the “Monkey Business” scandal derailed Gary Hart’s 1988 presidential campaign, and they are both quite legitimate. But if you think about it even briefly, the Sanford Saga doesn’t really fit the troubling template of a salacious public and its media hounds devouring someone’s private life.
First of all, the Sanford story was big-time national news long before it had anything to do with sex. Sure, there was private speculation that something a bit out of line with Sanford’s self-proclaimed “family values” convictions might be going on, and for all I know, some of the Republican politicians in South Carolina who made a big issue of Sanford’s disappearance had reason to think that ol’ debbil Lust was lurking in the background. But for most of us, and in virtually all the public discussion of Sanford’s vanishing act, sex didn’t enter the picture until the governor raised it himself in yesterday’s press conference. Maybe it’s troubling that the explanation Sanford’s staff originally put out–that he chose to spend Father’s Day weekend wandering alone on the Appalachian Trail with no means of communication with the outside world–seemed strange enough to make it a “story” (though again, if his Lieutenant Governor, a fellow Republican if not exactly a friend, hadn’t gone on national television to complain about it, I don’t know how big a “story” it would have been). But this isn’t about any national sex mania.
Second of all, there are certain steps any public official needs to take to maintain an “expectation of privacy.” The very first is to ensure that one’s private life does not interfere with the performance of public duties. I have a very hard time believing that Mark Sanford could not have maintained a communications link with his office without disclosing where he was and what he was doing with whom. I am sure he had been issued what is sometimes jokingly called an “Armageddon Pager” that is used to alert a public official–especially a chief executive–of an emergency. He must have decided to leave it at home; otherwise, his staff would have been able to credibly say: “We don’t know where he is, but we know how to reach him if the need arises.” That would have cut off the whole “who’s in charge?” line of inquiry at the knees. To put it another way, the expectation of privacy for governors (or for that matter, presidents) does not include being unavailable to do your job–not for an hour, much less for five or six days. That’s just part of the job description, and it’s nothing new.
Maybe psychologists can explain why Mark Sanford pursued a course of action almost perfectly designed to draw attention to the behavior he was supposedly trying so hard to hide–or why, in the midst of an illicit affair, or a Friendship With Privileges, or whatever it was, he worked so hard to make himself a national political figure and a putative presidential candidate (sort of a slow-motion equivalent of Gary Hart’s “go ahead and follow me” taunt to reporters asking if he ever fooled around).
But in writing a couple of posts on the Sanford Saga, I can honestly say I don’t feel like I’ve been part of some panting media pack chasing the latest sex story, or violating the governor’s privacy. I personally wish it had turned out that he was just an anti-social or stressed-out man who asked his family for the Father’s Day gift of some peaceful time alone. But he chose to paint the big bullseye on his back, and make it bigger by a career-long habit of moralizing about other people’s behavior (not to mention trying to deny women and gays/lesbians any privacy rights). So let’s forget about the man with a clean conscience.

I was about to sit down and write about the sudden denouement of the bizarre Mark Sanford saga, when Matt Yglesias gave me a welcome excuse to deal with a very different question involving South Carolina. Here’s Matt’s question:

I find myself continually compelled to think about the political situation in late 1860 through the ahistorical lens of today’s political controversies. After all, if Barack Obama with a popular majority and 59 Democratic Senators can’t get a climate change bill through the Senate, then what kind of anti-slavery legislative agenda would Abraham Lincoln have been able to drive through congress had the South not seceded? The Republicans were committed to excluding slavery from the territories, but perhaps slave state Senators could have just dealt with this through ceaseless filibustering. It was only the withdrawal of the Confederate members from Congress that gave the GOP the majorities it needed to pass its agenda.
Right?

Well, not exactly, in my admittedly non-expert but reasonably informed opinion.
What panicked many southerners most about Lincoln’s election wasn’t so much anything he’d promised to do, or was capable of doing, on slavery in the short term. The real disaster was the successful emergence of a sectional northern party that was hostile to slavery and the South’s interests (as white southerners saw them), and the final collapse of the Second Party System in which southern Whigs and Democrats were able to largely neutralize or at least contain anti-slavery sentiment in both parties. Southerners knew they’d always be outgunned in a purely sectional party alignment. Moreover, since the Planter Interests were largely Old Whigs who were more pro-union than most southern Democrats, the death of the Whigs vitiated resistance to the ever-present secession idea at a crucial juncture. Even so, secession was a dicey proposition. In Georgia, for example, only apocalyptic storms on the day of the vote for delegates to a secession convention decided the result (future Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, once a warm friend of Lincoln’s in the Whig Caucus in Congress, was the leader of those fighting immediate secession).
It’s also important to remember that it was not at all clear initially that the federal government would oppose secession militarily–and it indeed didn’t until South Carolinians fired on Fort Sumter.
Could the South have defended slavery and their other regional interests successfully without secession, as Matt suggests? That’s hard to say, since “defending slavery” didn’t, from the point of view of the protagonists of the time, just depend on defeating or stalling anti-slavery measures in Congress, but on proactively opening up territories to slavery, for both economic and political reasons. One of the factors in northern sentiment that helped create the Republican Party was the belief that the federal government was and would ever be controlled by the “Slave Power,” through the South’s leverage over both parties. The Republican victory in 1860 definitely meant that Power would never be the same, even if Lincoln had done nothing on the policy front.
Matt might be hinting that the self-destructive Obama-hatred and extremism of today’s Republicans is “folly,” insofar as they are finding it relatively easy to thwart or compromise him in Congress on key issues like climate change. That could well be true. But like secession ultras in 1860, today’s conservative activists don’t seem that interested in tactical victories. They feel robbed of a mandate for fundamental changes in public policies, from outlawing abortion to decimating “entitlements,” that once seemed tantalizingly close. And even if they only believe half of their own rhetoric, they also think a moderately successful Obama administration would be disastrous to their cause. Like those who fought Lincoln in 1860, many of those who fight Obama today do not believe time is on their side.

Want to know why some of us political junkies get so obsessed with getting hold of “crosstabs” for polls that break down responses by various demographic categories? Look no further than the latest ABC/Washington Post poll, which showed a fairly polarized electorate (if leaning pretty heavily in the President’s direction) in terms of approval or disapproval of the President’s job performance.
But with the crosstabs, which were released yesterday, we can identify some dogs that really don’t bark in explaining support or lack of support for Obama.
Most notable are the close similarities of approval/disapproval ratios for voters in households earning more than $50,000 (62/32) and those earning less (67-30), and for voters with (64/33) and without (65/30) college educations. In case you think race or ethnicity distorts those numbers, the ratio for whites earning more than $50,000 is 60/35, and for whites earning less than $50,000 is 61/37. Whites with college education split 63/35, while whites without college–normally a bad demographic category for Democrats–favor Obama 59/37.
Other findings that might surprise you: white voters positively assess Obama’s job performance by 60/36; men by 61/35; southerners by 59/35; and white southerners by 49/46.
Meanwhile, one of the largest gaps other than party ID and ideology is between white evangelical Protestants (38/56) and white non-evangelical Protestants (61/33). White Catholics (58/38) are a lot closer to their mainline brethren than to the evangelicals with whom elements of the Catholic hierarchy have aligned themselves on cultural issues, illustrating my argument that intra-communal political disagreements have now trumped the old Catholic-Protestant divisions on politics.
So next time you hear the talking heads on television yammering about some top-line poll finding–and they do it nearly every day–toss a beer can at the screen and say: “What about the crosstabs?”

There’s been a certain Kabuki Theater quality to arguments over a “public option” in a reformed, competitive system for universal health care, with many progressives insisting on the inherent superiority of public programs not driven by profit-seeking, and many conservatives calling the public option a Trojan Horse for a single-payer system.
Today in The American Prospect, Paul Starr calls attention to key issues about how a public option should be structured that go beyond these reflexive attitudes:

The great danger is that the public plan could end up with a high-cost population in a system that fails to compensate adequately for those risks. Private insurers make money today in large part by avoiding people with high medical costs, and in a reformed system they’d love a public plan where they could dump the sick. Although the proposals before Congress aim to limit insurers’ incentives to skim off the best risks, the measures are unlikely to eliminate those incentives entirely.

The regulatory environment for both public and private options will have an enormous impact on their relative costs, which in turn could determine whether the system as a whole can actually work, explains Starr:

Unconstrained, the public plan could drive private insurers out of business, setting off a political backlash not just from the industry but from much of the public. Over-constrained, the public plan could go into a death spiral itself as it becomes a dumping ground for high-risk enrollees, its rates rise, and it loses its appeal to the public at large. Creating a fair system of public-private competition — giving the public plan just enough power to offset its likely higher risks — wouldn’t be easy even if it were up to neutral experts, which it isn’t.

Those who view a public-private “hybrid” system as a nice compromise between the status quo and a single-payer system need to think more deeply about these questions.

One of the odder stories of the last week has been the disappearance of SC Gov. Mark Sanford, who reportedly went hiking on the Appalachian Trail, and was out of touch with his staff and family for at least five days. His lieutenant governor, Andre Bauer–a fellow Republican, BTW–publicly freaked over the disappearance. And all sorts of fun-loving amateur sleuths have been all over this (including, according to Josh Marshall, a SC television reporter who’s found a witness who saw Sanford boarding a plane in Atlanta several days ago). Admittedly, you can get in a pretty good hike in at Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, but it’s not exactly the best place for getting close to God or nature.
Sanford finally called his staff, and will reportedly return to his office on Wednesday. But Southern Political Report‘s Tom Baxter has been the first to allude to the real mystery:

How, it was asked, could a governor be absent from his four sons on Father’s Day and think he could run for president? How could his wife not be certain of his whereabouts? Under what circumstances could Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer take charge if there were an emergency? And why was the last ping on the governor’s cell phone from a location near Atlanta, when there are easier ways to access the trail?
Perhaps the most puzzling question went unasked, however: How did anyone notice he was gone?
Sanford, who has feuded with Republicans and Democrats alike, and who inquired after he was elected whether he could live in his beach house on Sullivan’s Island rather than the governor’s mansion in Columbia, can lay claim to being – the first word to come to mind is “disengaged,” but it would be more accurate to say, “distant” governor in the country.

I can relate. I won’t name any names, but I once worked for an elected official who sometimes seemed to disappear for months at a time, right there in his office.
Which leads to a philosophical question: If a governor walks in the woods, and nobody’s there to see it, is he invisible?
UPDATE: As you may have heard by now, turns out Sanford was in Argentina, not Appalachia, because he wanted some place “exotic” to recover from the rigors of the SC legislative session, which ended with an assortment of veto overrides by the Republican-controlled legislature. Whatever else this “story” represents, it’s got to be one of the most inept public relations jobs by a major politician since Larry Craig’s explanation of why he got arrested in an airport restroom.
UPDATE II: Southern Political Report says that there’s now talk among SC legislators about impeaching Sanford. This really isn’t working out well for the would-be 2012 presidential candidate.