You don’t have to be a media conspriacy buff to note the very different headlines that MSM outlets have assigned to the release of the Obama administration’s first budget. Indeed, some of them contradict media bias stereotypes.
For example, who do you think is headlining its coverage of the budget with the headline: “Deficits Soar in Obama Budget”? Turns out it’s the supposedly liberal MSNBC. This is slightly more inflammatory than the Fox News headline: “Obama: We Must Add to Our Deficits in the Short-Term.”
The Washington Post, which distinguishes itself by being considered liberal by conservatives and conservative by liberals, leads with: “Obama’s Budget Proposal Would Push Deficit To $1.75 Trillion.”
Meanwhile, the New York Times has a different spin, headlining the budget as: “Obama Plans Major Shifts in Spending.” That’s consistent with CNN’s: “Obama Outlines Big Changes in Spending.”
Maybe these initial headlines don’t matter that much, because the debate over the Obama budget will rage on for months, but it’s interesting to see how this very complicated blueprint for spending and taxes is initially presented to the American people.

On reading CNN’s report about the fallout from Bobby Jindal’s put down of “volcano monitoring,” I felt a sense of some sort of deja vu — haven’t we been here before?
Then, aha, I remembered John McCain’s snarky put-down “$3 million for an overhead projector at a planetarium.” I wouldn’t be surprised if the same knuckle-dragging reactionary wrote Jindal’s speech and McCain’s debate sound bite, so similar is the lame attitude behind them.
In addition to the contempt for science, Jindal’s ‘volcano’ remark is revealing in another way. For one thing, it indicates that the GOP is sorely in need of better speechwriters. The whole rebuttal was pretty thin, even though it does reflect Republican ideology faithfully enough, as Ed notes below. But the volcano remark was going well out of one’s way to step in it. A second-rate speechwriter should be able to understand that such a cheap shot would backfire because of Mount. St. Helens, where 57 people were killed. Certainly they should have been able to come up with something better, considering the broad scope of the stimulus. Crappy speechwriting often comes from lazy research.
A lot of Dem commentators have had fun mocking Jindal’s condescending delivery, here amusingly compared to the oratorical stylings of “Kenneth the Page” on “30 Rock.” Jindal’s rebuttal reminded me more of a comment attributed to Gore Vidal: “Today’s public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can’t read them either.” Not to gloat, but happily, we Dems are in the opposite position of having a thoughtful writer, as well as speaker, at the helm of our party. When Obama’s speechwriters slip up, they have a tough editor to get them straightened out in the person of the President. It helps a lot.

The Obama administration’s first federal budget is officially going out in an hour, but one central feature is already well-known: the basic outlines of his “down payment on universal health care.” $634 billion over ten years has been reserved for this purpose.
But the more important fact about Obama’s health care proposal is its structure. And as Ezra Klein explained yesterday, it is carefully designed to nicely mesh with existing Senate Democratic proposals–principally legislation sponsored by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and a “white paper” issued by Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT)–even at the expense of departing somewhat from what Obama proposed as a candidate for president:

Obama is signaling support for the congressional consensus. The skeletal health plan outlined in tomorrow’s budget has been built to fit the work Congress is already doing on health care reform. As such, it will being with committed allies. It will not lose time defining new concepts to skeptical committee chairs. It will respect and support the existing legislative coalitions It is a strategy aimed at ensuring votes. At passing legislation. At achieving consensus, or as close to it as the Senate can come.

Klein contrasts this approach to that of the Clintons in 1993, who designed a health care reform plan, with a considerable degree of secrecy, that wasn’t really like anything under discussion on Capitol Hill. If for that reason alone, Team Obama begins this health care reform debate with an important leg up on their predecessors.

While we are on the subject of Louisiana Republican politicians, Politico’s Daniel Libit has an update today on what could be the strangest primary contest of 2010: David Vitter’s effort to get himself re-elected to the U.S. Senate after admitting he’d frequented prostitutes in Washington.
He could face a rather unusual field, to say the least. While nobody really thinks porn star Stormy Daniels would have a chance to win either party’s nomination for the Senate (she hasn’t indicated which primary she would enter, if any), her presence in the campaign would ensure that Louisiana voters don’t forget about Vitter’s hypocritical extracurricular activities for even a moment. And if conservative Republicans do get antsy about Vitter’s problems, another potential candidate, the nationally renowned Christian Right figure, Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, could well be there to harvest the backlash.
Vitter’s sought to shore up his support not by choosing the more tolerant horn of the dilemma in which he has placed himself, but by becoming a conservative’s conservative–becoming, for example, one of two Senators casting dissenting votes against Hillary Clinton’s confirmation as Secretary of State, and ranting about supposed ACORN subsidies in the economic stimulus legislation.
One wild card in the 2010 Senate race will involve an upcoming decision by the Louisiana Republican central committee about whether to open up its primary to independent voters (in case you missed it, Louisiana abandoned its famous “jungle primary” for federal–but not state and local–races prior to 2008). A more open GOP primary could tempt other Republicans into the contest, and also force Vitter to do more than simply voting to the right of Jimmy Dean Sausage in the Senate to win his nomination.
In any event, it doesn’t look like Vitter will be allowed to put his “personal problem” behind him any time soon. And in a state that loves its politics down and dirty, the 2010 Senate contest could ultimately rival the “race from Hell”–the infamous 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial runoff between Ed Edwards and David Duke–for sheer weirdness.

As J.P. Green noted below, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal was picked to do the official Republican response to Barack Obama’s address to Congress last night, and the reviews are not very good. His delivery–which managed to sound both sing-songy and uncoordinated–was that of someone not terribly comfortable with prepared texts (you’d be surprised how many politicians share that problem), and his hand gestures were mechanical and distracting. The speech itself had a dumbed-down quality, or at least seemed that way to anyone who knows how bright Bobby Jindal is in real life. Even at National Review’s The Corner, where Jindal has been a folk hero for years, the reaction was one of disappointment bordering on dismay.
Style aside, the most striking feature of Jindal’s response was the sheer weirdness of the official Republican critique of Obama’s first big speech beginning with a reminder of the federal government’s handling of Hurricane Katrina. That’s what left the normally very articulate Rachel Maddow of MSNBC speechless.
But when you really think about it, Jindal’s citation of Katrina made sense (aside from the fact that he’s from Louisiana) in the context of the central theme of his speech, which is that government can’t do anything right other than to tear itself down and thus “empower” citizens. To me, the most remarkable thing in Jindal’s response was his official (if oblique) apology, on behalf of the Republican Party, for George W. Bush’s big-spending liberal ways, which rightly forfeited the trust of the American people. We’ve been hearing that from conservatives regularly since 2006, but it was still sounded odd on national TV in such a formal setting, at a time when the overwhelming majority of Americans who aren’t conservative “base” voters are demanding federal activism.
Most Americans probably think of Katrina as an example of the catastrophic consequences of a federal government that has placed responsibility for emergency response in the hands of incompetent political hacks who didn’t believe in their own mission and didn’t much care about victims who weren’t Republicans and refused to take care of themselves. But it’s clear a lot of conservatives really did think government’s main failure during Katrina was to involve itself–with the bureaucratic rules and regulations that Jindal cited in his lengthy and uncompelling anecdote about himself and Harry Lee–instead of getting out of the way and letting churches and citizens handle it all.
In other words, Bobby Jindal did offer a pretty faithful expression of the Republican Party’s contemporary governing philosophy, such as it is. Instead of complaining about his delivery, Republicans should reflect a bit on Jindal’s core message.
And that’s why the general feeling across the board that Jindal really hurt his national political aspirations last night is a bit ironic. He satisfied the first requirement for any Republican who wants to run for president these days: he echoed the views of the conservative base, just as he did when he joined the small group of Republican governors who pledged to reject some of the stimulus money. But he didn’t do so with a “Reaganesque” ability to perform the sort of rhetorical enchantment that makes core conservative views attractive to the rest of the country. That may prove to be an impossible standard for any potential candidate for president.

President Obama’s first address to Congress was exceptionally well-received, according to opinion polls, focus groups and reportage across the country. For a good round-up of opinion polls and focus groups, check Pollster.com, where Mark Blumenthal cites a CBS News poll which found that 79 percent of viewers approved of the President’s plans for “dealing with the economic crisis” — up from 62 percent before the speech. Additionally, Blumenthal cites a CNN poll showing 68 percent of speech-watchers with a “very positive reaction.”
Blumenthal also reports on a DCorps dial-group of speech-watchers, and quotes TDS co-editor Stan Greenberg’s observation “I’ve never seen anything like it. Republicans never went below 50 [on their dial ratings].”
While most newspapers dutifully quoted from Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s ho-hum rebuttal on behalf of the GOP as a concession to ‘balance,’ a quick survey of “second-tier” newspapers across the country suggests that Obama’s speech generally received a favorable reception from reporters and the public alike. For example, in Detroit, reeling from the meltdown like no other city, Obama’s address seems to have hit the mark. Todd Spangler reported in The Detroit Free Press :

Although not formally recognized as a State of the Union address because it came in the same year as his inauguration, the hour-long speech had all the makings of one and contained much of concern to Michiganders struggling with high foreclosure rates, plant closures and the highest jobless rate in the nation in December at 10.6%…The auto industry, he said, has been beset by “years of bad decision-making” and government shouldn’t protect the industry from “their own bad practices.” But he said it is too big an industry to fail…His commitment to the domestic auto industry is essential, said Sen. Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat.

Miami Herald reporters Robert Samuels and Evan Benn had a man-on-the-street round-up, including:

At the Riverside Hotel on Fort Lauderdale’s Las Olas Boulevard, Rocco Norman watched Obama address the nation on television and said he was pleased to hear the president say he would fight corporate greed.
…”I’m a worker. Most everyone I know is a worker. And we’re scared for our jobs, while the CEOs keep getting bonuses? That isn’t right,” said Norman, 42, a law office assistant.
Obama’s remarks about the economy drew the attention of several Barry University students, who took time off from their studies to watch the address…”It rejuvenated the hope for me that our education system will be able to compete with the Chinese,” said Michael Whorley, an 18-year old freshman…’Usually, in economic turmoil, education is the first thing to go.

The Abilene Reporter-News featured AP white house correspondent Jennifer Loven’s wire report, which explained that the President’s address was more of a speech on domestic policy, but noted:

In contrast to many State of the Union addresses by George W. Bush, Obama did not emphasize foreign policy. He touched on his intention to chart new strategies in Iraq and Afghanistan and to forge a new image for the U.S. around the world even as he keeps up the fight against terrorism…He touted his decision to end the practice of leaving Iraq and Afghanistan war spending out of the main budget. “For seven years, we have been a nation at war. No longer will we hide its price,” Obama said.

The Portland Oregonian ran a well-titled editorial “More Braveheart, Less Cassandra,” which had this plaudit for the President:

The president, deprived by the electoral calendar of the chance to offer a true State of the Union speech this year, made the most of his opportunity to show America an air of confidence and competence. With stock indices down, job insecurity up, local governments planning service cuts and banks being seized weekly, nervousness has threatened to give way to panic. That’s why Obama sought to sound a reassuring note Tuesday night. And let’s face it, the president has a gift for persuasive rhetoric…Obama conveys the demeanor of a man who knows his history, can command attention and is mindful of peril. All of those qualities were on display Tuesday night.

The Omaha World-Herald went with a legislator round-up, “Reaction by the Midlands congressional delegation,” including the following observations:

Republican Senator Charless Grassley: “Beyond the policy debates, the President can do good by expressing confidence in the future and help to give Americans the fortitude we need to weather this economic crisis and come out of it stronger than we were before, as we have done time and again in our country’s 233-year history.”
Democratic Senator Tom Harkin: “The president’s economic recovery package, along with his plans for reducing foreclosures and stabilizing the financial system, will rebuild confidence and stop the downward dynamics in the economy. In the longer term, he is making investments that will restore growth and transform our approach to energy, health care, and education…he intends to move to rein in deficits once the economy recovers. The president made it clear, tonight, that he will continue tackling the fiscal and economic messes created in recent years with boldness and urgency. This will not happen overnight, but it will happen.

Up in New Hampshire, even The Manchester Union Leader published a fairly positive account of the President’s address to Congress, observing,

The central argument the President’s speech was that his still-unfolding economic revival plan has room for — and even demands — simultaneous action on a broad, expensive agenda including helping the millions without health insurance, improving education and switching the U.S. to greater dependence on alternative energy sources.
Rep. Paul Hodes, D-N.H., called Obama’s speech “interesting and inspiring.” “Obama showed that even when we disagree, we can produce the best results when we engage in the process in good faith and he is forcing us to engage in a new way to govern,” Hodes said.
Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H. said the speech was “very strong.” “The President made it very clear that addressing these spending issues is going to be a priority for him, and it’s certainly going to be a priority for me,” Gregg said in a written statement. “I believe that here in the Senate we have the opportunity to take some strong and decisive action in this area by trying to control the rate of growth of entitlement spending, and I am hopeful that the President will come forward with specific programs to accomplish that.”

In her Hotline After Dark post, Katherine Lehr quotes other GOP leaders making positive comments about the President’s speech, including Senators John Thune, Mitch McConnell and John McCain. She also quotes David Brooks calling it an “excellent speech,” which “perfectly captured the tenor of the country” and David Gergen calling Obama’s address the “most ambitious we have heard in this chamber in decades.”
We’ve become accustomed to excellent speeches by President Obama. It appears that this one has also served his strategy of building support outside the beltway, as well as in Congress.

Eve Fairbanks at TNR makes a pretty good observation about the anti-Obama tactics that Republicans have embraced since he officially became president: they are eerily similar to the anti-Obama tactics that the McCain-Palion campaign used unsuccessfully to try to keep him out of the White House in the first place.
Eve mentions the earmark-“pork” attack on the stimulus legislation, various “dramatic” gestures, and hilariously failed efforts to get cool with rock-laden videos intended to go “viral.”
But I think there are some other examples as well: the blame-the-poor reaction to Obama’s housing proposal; cries of “welfare” over Obama’s tax proposals, of “socialized medicine” over his health care proposals; and of “socialism” over his banking proposals. And you can’t help but think of McCain’s adoption of Joe the Plumber when viewing the current conservative mania for Rick Santelli
Moreover, it’s not so much that Republicans are imitating the McCain campaign as that the McCain campaign itself out of desperation embraced some of the longest-playing themes of the hard-core Right. Anyone who’s spent much time listening to conservative talk radio over the last couple of decades would find the rhetoric of both the McCain campaign and of today’s congressional Republicans depressingly familiar. They’re replaying some very old tapes here, and it’s clear they think they are timeless classics.

Matt Miller has an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal which adds to the minority of us progressive gabbers who think that Barack Obama’s “bipartisanship” is aimed at a political realignment rather than short-term compromises with Republicans in Washington.

The president has his eye on a bigger prize than winning a few Republican votes for his stimulus package or having a conservative in his cabinet. He aims to move the political center in America to the left, much as Ronald Reagan moved it to the right. The only way he can achieve this goal is to harness the energies and values of both parties.

Matt doesn’t quite put it this way, but the more concrete Obama objective is to expand the Democratic electoral base by consolidating high levels of support among independents and exploiting the growing divide between Republican politicians and a significant minority of GOP voters.
It’s obviously too early to judge whether this approach is working, but a new Washington Post-ABC poll out today certainly shows how it might work in terms of voter categories.
The Post‘s write-up of the poll dwells on the sharp reduction in Republican support for Obama’s job performance: it’s down to 37% from 62% on Inaugural Day. Well, of course it is; Inaugural Day was and always has been a “peak moment” for any new president, and a month of relentless pounding of Obama by GOP elected officials was bound to resonate with the conservative “base” who heard him described as an elitist socialist baby-killer throughout the presidential campaign.
But Obama’s job approval rating among independents is 67%. Meanwhile, the percentage of voters who think Obama’s trying to compromise with Republicans in Congress is 74%, while the percentage who think Republicans in Congress are trying to compromise with him is 34%. Unsurprisingly, while Obama’s overall job approval rating is 68%, and that of Democrats in Congress is 50%, Republicans in Congress earn a job approval rating of only 38%.
All this could change, but the trajectory in public opinion is towards an isolation of congressional Republicans, who are helping this dynamic along by their behavior towards Obama and the economic crisis itself. You can call it “redefining the center” or simply “realignment,” but if it continues, Obama and the Democratic Party could be well-positioned for the future.

With most of the nation’s governors in town over the weekend for the winter NGA meeting, much of the talk centered around the recovery bill signed into law by President Obama last week.
The stimulus package contains billions of dollars earmarked for state governments, but throughout the process, a handful of conservative governors — namely South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, and Texas Gov. Rick Perry — have threatened to turn the money down.
That threat is largely toothless.
Language inserted into the final bill by South Carolina Congressman James Clyburn, will allow state lawmakers to bypass the executives to access the funds.
Specifically, the law states:

If funds provided to any state in any division of this act are not accepted for use by the governor, then acceptance by the state legislature, by means of the adoption of a concurrent resolution, shall be sufficient to provide funding to such state.

And governors from both sides of the aisle have said they would accept any of the funds rejected by the conservatives.
On Fox News Sunday, Gov. Jennifer Granholm of Michigan told her GOP colleagues, ““We’ll take it. We’ll take your money.”
On ABC’s This Week, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said, “Well, Governor Sanford says that he does not want to take the money, the federal stimulus package money. And I want to say to him: I’ll take it. I’m more than happy to take his money or any other governor in this country that doesn’t want to take this money.”
Predictably, many of the conservatives are now walking back their earlier statements.
For instance, Gov Perry informed the Obama administration last week that Texas would accept its share of the funding.
The reality is that, setting aside some symbolic gesture, all the state governments will put the recovery funds to use.
Anyone suggesting otherwise is simply trying to score cheap points with the conservative base.

Paul Starr has a short, but insightful post, “Breaking the Grip of the Past” at The American Prospect today, which sheds light on president Obama’s political strategy. As Starr explains:

For Barack Obama and the Democrats, the problem is not just the hard-right conservatives who dominate the Republican Party and the right-wing media echo chamber. Given the urgency of present circumstances, the critical impediment may lie in the ambivalent center — among the middle-of-the-road Democrats and Republicans who hold the margin of votes in the Senate, much of the business and opinion-leader establishment, and a large part of the public who are not strongly affiliated with any party or ideological position.
Winning over those groups poses the key challenge if Congress and the new administration are to free the country from the dead right hand of the past. Obama’s mix of conciliatory and assertive stances — an openness to talking with the other side and a willingness to concede, in principle, that it may have a point, yet a determination when pressed to fight for his policies — is not just an expression of his personality. It’s the rational strategy of a politician who can’t get his program through unless he peels off some part of the opposition.

Starr goes on to note Obama’s tendency “not to confront conservatism in general terms” which Starr believes makes some sense because “Many Americans who identify themselves as conservative nonetheless favor liberal positions on specific policies” — a “symbolically conservative, but operationally liberal” group estimated at 22 percent of the public in 2004 by James A. Stimson in his book Tides of Consent. Starr believes surveys indicate there may be a “big increase” in this group since the election.
Starr believes Obama’s ‘whatever works’ rhetoric is calibrated to address this group and the “deep American strain of post-partisanship.” WaPo columnist E.J. Dionne sees the evolving consensus on bipartisanship a little differently in his column today on “Obama’s FDR Moment“:

And when it comes to bipartisanship, the point is not the numerical count of Republicans who vote for this or that. It’s whether frightened citizens sense that government is working…”People want the basic stuff fixed,” said state Rep. Vernon Sykes, a Democrat who chairs the Finance and Appropriations Committee in the Ohio House. “They don’t have a romantic notion of bipartisanship. They just want people to come together to solve problems.”

Post or bipartisanship notwithstanding, Starr credits Obama with drawing a line in the sand against more tax cuts for the rich and do-nothing government. Starr feels this rhetorically-nuanced approach could well “educate the public about the folly of conservative views and help move the country toward a new progressive center.” However, Starr warns,

it’s crucial, perhaps more for others than for Obama, to continue to press the case that our present problems have ideological roots — that they are not due equally to all sides but rather to the mistaken premises, malignant neglect, and sometimes outright malfeasance of a long era of conservative government…But if he concedes too much, it could be another version of disabling triangulation

It’s a delicate balancing act, and the President’s communications skills in educating the public will be on wide display tomorrow, when he addresses the nation. It may be Obama’s “FDR moment,” but he should also remember MLK’s dictum “Ultimately, a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus, but a molder of consensus.”