As alluded to in my earlier post today, two separate developments are coinciding to create a pretty bad atmosphere for progressives and the Obama administration: public opinion surveys indicating that Americans are beginning to worry a lot about budget deficits, and real-life events on Capitol Hill that reinforce the argument that universal health coverage may be more expensive than originally calculated.
In terms of the public focus on deficits, it’s worth noting that polls continue to show that very few Americans blame Barack Obama for the fiscal condition of the country. I have a post up at fivethirtyeight.com examining that finding, and speculating that Republicans may be accidentally insulating the president from blame for deficits in their obsessive desire to attack George W. Bush for “betraying conservative principles” by spilling so much red ink.
While you are over at 538, you should check out Nate Silver’s post examining public opinion trends during the Clinton health care debate of 1993-94. He concludes that the president’s willingness to serve as a front-and-center advocate for health reform mattered then, and matters now. And as I indicated earlier today, I couldn’t agree more. More importantly, that’s the advice being offered by TDS Co-Editor Stan Greenberg, who has been there and done that when it comes to health care reform.
It’s time for some beef from the Bully Pulpit.

Note: this is a guest post from Alan Abramowitz, Alben W. Barkley Professor of Political Science at Emory University, and a member of the TDS Advisory Board. It’s a follow-up to his May 20 post on public opinion about abortion.
We have more evidence on current public opinion on the issue of abortion from a new CBS/New York Times poll. The survey, which was conducted from June 12-16, asked respondents to choose one of three options–abortion should be generally available to those who want it, abortion should be available but with stricter limts than now, or abortion should not be permitted. 36 percent of respondents wanted abortion to be generally available, 41 percent wanted it available with stricter limits, and 21 percent wanted it prohibited. Three percent of respondents were undecided.
These results were almost identical to those obtained in numerous CBS/NYT polls over the past 16 years. The CBS/NYT poll asked this question 16 times between January of 1993 and September of 2008. In those 16 surveys the average results were 36 percent for the first option, 39 percent for the second option, and 22 percent for the third option.
In addition to this result, the new CBS/NYT poll found that 62 percent of respondents considered the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion “a good thing” for the country while only 32 percent considered the decision “a bad thing” for the country. And 64 percent of respondents said they did not want the decision to be overturned by the Court compared with only 29 percent who did.
Taken together, these results demonstrate that (a) there is no evidence of any substantial shift in public opinion on the issue of abortion and (b) a solid majority of the American public continue to support the Surpreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision. Since overturning Roe remains the main goal of the “pro-life” movement, these results clearly indicate that a large majority of Americans do not support the “pro-life” agenda.

Even as much of the elite-level discussion of universal health coverage continues to focus on the “public option”–the existence and nature of a government-run insurance plan that would compete against private plan, as proposed by the administration–a more basic issue may prove to be the biggest obstacle to health care reform: money.
Yesterday TNR’s health care specialist Jonathan Cohn metaphorically hit the “panic button” over two Congressional Budget Office estimates of the cost and impact of health care proposals eminating from the Senate HELP and Finance Committees:

On Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office delivered its scoring of a bill that the Senate Finance Committee had submittted. The (relatively) good news was the projected impact: The proportion of people without insurance would drop by two-thirds. But the price tag came in at $1.6 trillion over ten years. That was a lot higher than expected.
It’s not clear to me why the score came so high; I don’t know whether it was a problem of bigger outlays (on subsidies, Medicaid expansions, etc.) or smaller offsets (efficiency savings, tax increases, etc.). All I know is that Finance members and their staffers were hoping to come in a lot lower.
And the timing of the announcement was just awful. It came one day after the CBO delivered another projection, this time to the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee. That verdict was different: HELP’s language, according to CBO, would mean outlays of just $1 trillion. But CBO also predicted the HELP bill would ultimately reduce the number of people without insurance by less than half.

Keep in mind that two of the original ideas submitted by the administration for helping offset the cost of moving to universal health coverage–significant auction fees from a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions, and a tighter cap on income tax deductions for high earners–have pretty much been killed in Congress. And a third–limiting the exclusion on health care benefits from income taxation–is unpopular as well (and it doesn’t help that Democrats harshly criticized John McCain for proposing “a tax increase” via this route last year).
All these money problems with financing health care reform come at a time when polls are showing heightened concerns about budget deficits. Just today, a new NBC/Wall Street Journal survey shows 58% of Americans
agreeing “that the president and Congress should focus on keeping the budget deficit down, even if takes longer for the economy to recover.” Similarly, a new CBS/New York Times poll shows respondents favoring deficit reduction over spending to stimulate the economy by a 52%-41% margin.
It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the President will need to spend some serious political capital in convincing both Congress (especially nervous Democrats) and the public that we can’t afford to put off health care reform any longer. That’s what Stan Greenberg has been suggesting based on the bad experience of the Clinton health plan, and all the current signs point to the need for a big push from the bully pulpit.
UPDATE: Ezra Klein concurs with Jon Cohn’s unhappy assessment of the impact of CBO’s cost estimates this week:

[H]ealth reform has just gotten harder. The hope that we could expand the current system while holding costs down appears to have been just that: a hope. And CBO doesn’t score hopes. It only scores plans. The question now becomes whether we want health-care reform that achieves less of what we say the system needs, or more. Doing less would be cruel to those who have laid their hopes upon health reform. But doing more will be very, very hard.

I’m still not totally down with my colleague Matt Compton’s enthusiasm for Twitter. But I will have to say that its use by Republican politicians–which seems to short-circuit their mental filters–has been a source of constant edification.
The latest example is a tweet from warhorse GOP Rep. Peter Hoekstra of MI comparing his fellow House Republicans protesting a procedural maneuver by Nancy Pelosi last year to the people in the streets of Tehran. Politico’s Anne Schroeder Mullins says it all in her Shenanigans column:

Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.) may be reaching with his analogies here, Tweeting this: “Iranian twitter activity similar to what we did in House last year when Republicans were shut down in the House.”
Really?
So he’s comparing the Iranian uprising – and the use of technology to spread the word globally – to the House Republicans’ mini rebellion in the darkened House chamber last summer? Hundreds of thousands of people in the streets protesting for democracy, is comparable to Drill Here Drill Now?
Hoekstra spokesman Dave Yonkman cleared a few things up for Shenanigans and said: “Congressman Hoekstra did not compare the ongoing violence in Iran to when Democrats shut down the House chamber during the energy debate last summer. The two situations do share the similarity of government leadership attempting to limit debate and deliberation, and the ability of new technologies to bypass their efforts and allow for direct communication. That’s the only point that he was trying to make.”
That clears it up. So Hoekstra was merely comparing Nancy Pelosi’s refusal to hear drilling amendments to the censorship and crack down by the Iranian ruling regime.

These guys ought to stick to staff-edited press releases.

We’re all used to being told that the Christian Right as we used to know it is dead, dying, moribund, divided, leaderless or rudderless. But for at least two putative candidates for president in 2012, the Old Time Religious Right in all its atavistic glory is an important constituency to be wooed. And that’s why (as Sarah Posner discusses in today’s edition of her FundamentaList column for TAP) southern Baptist minister Mike Huckabee and Baptist-turned-Catholic Newt Gingrich recently went to one of the Christian Right’s holy cities, Virginia Beach, for a “Rediscovering God in America” event that was webcast live by God.TV (an interesting site, BTW).
It’s no surprise that Huckabee showed up; he’s struggling to hang onto the Christian Right as an electoral base. Those who remember his 2008 campaign as representing a refreshing and light-hearted break in the grim and monotonous presentation of Republican dogma might not recognize him now. According to the local newspaper in Virginia Beach, here’s some of what he had to say to the event:

Huckabee told the audience he was disturbed to hear President Barack Obama say during his speech in Cairo, Egypt, on Thursday that one nation shouldn’t be exalted over another.
“The notion that we are just one of many among equals is nonsense,” Huckabee said. The United States is a “blessed” nation, he said, calling American revolutionaries’ defeat of the British empire “a miracle from God’s hand.”
The same kind of miracle, he said, led California voters to approve Proposition 8, which overturned a state law legalizing same-sex marriages.

Nice, eh?
Other speakers included the Virginia-based Christian Right warhorse Ollie North, and David Barton, the leading advocate of “Christian Nation” revisionist history.
But this was really Gingrich’s event, as you might guess from the name, which is also the title of his latest book and movie.
The Newtster wasn’t about to let Huckabee outdo him on the subject of America’s unique divine mission:

“I am not a citizen of the world,” said Gingrich, who was first elected to the U.S. House from Georgia in 1978 and served as speaker from 1995 to 1999. “I am a citizen of the United States because only in the United States does citizenship start with our creator.”

I guess Newt has never heard of Saudi Arabia.
In any event, Newt’s maintenance of close ties to the hard-core evangelical Right is interesting because he recently left Protestantism altogether and was accepted into the Roman Catholic Church (for those interested in how this twice-divorced confessed philanderer managed that, the answer is that his first wife died after their divorce, and his second marriage was annulled by the Archdiocese of Atlanta because that wife had been previously married; thus officially, Newt is merely a remarried widower with a very bad habit of engaging in fornication, adultery and illicit cohabitation).
Newt’s long transition from Southern Baptist to Catholic tells you a lot about the past and present of both faith communities in the United States.

Read more…

As the high-stakes battle over health care reform gets very serious in Washington, we have a well-timed reminder from TDS Co-Editor Stan Greenberg at TNR today about what happened to the Clinton administration’s health reform plan in 1993 and 1994, when he was Clinton’s top pollster.
Greenberg stresses the exceptional similarity of public opinion on health care then and now:

Then and now, the country proclaimed its readiness for bold reform. In both instances, one-quarter say that the health care system “has so many problems that we need to completely rebuild it”; half the country sees “good things” in the current system but believes “some major changes are needed.” Then and now, about 60 percent of the public feel dissatisfied with the current health insurance system. Yet three-quarters are satisfied with their own health insurance–once again eerily parallel numbers.

And yet again, says Greenberg, cost-containment arguments for universal health coverage will be difficult to make on a macro level, and essential to win on an individual family level, where calculations of the net effect of reform will be made sooner or later.
One ironically positive factor for Obama’s health plan is that the fear of losing insurance coverage due to unemployment is higher than it was 16 years ago. Another is that union members, who are often happy with their own health insurance, are feeling a lot more insecure.
But in the end, Greenberg argues, it’s the President’s advocacy for his plan that most needs to rise to the occasion:

At the moment, the country is tilting toward enacting Obama’s reforms, and it will do so more enthusiastically if Obama learns from the Clinton experience and rises to the educative role that he relishes. He must respect the thoughts, feelings and calculations of ordinary citizens who are not easily spun on important issues. People will take out their calculators when he lays out his plan, and he can’t avoid speaking candidly about its costs and consequences. And he can’t forget that he has a big story to tell about a changed America, one in which health care is but a pile of bricks in the new foundation he is laying.

The new issue of Democracy magazine–the first since my esteemed friend Michael Tomasky took over as editor of the journal–feaures an essay, styled as a “re-review” of several books from a few years ago, by the equally esteemed journalist Ron Brownstein on the subject of why Karl Rove’s “realignment” project failed. It’s a good question worth pondering at some depth. But I think Ron’s take, which faults several of the authors of the “re-review” volumes for overestimating and emulating “base polarlization” as a political strategy, misses some key points.
Here’s his basic hypothesis:

To reread the major political books from the years around Bush’s reelection is to be plunged, as if into a cold pool, back into a world of Democratic gloom and anxiety. Those books were linked by the common belief that Republicans had established a thin but durable electoral advantage that threatened to exile Democrats from power for years, if not decades. Many books from that time assumed Democrats could avoid that eclipse only by adopting the tactics used by Republicans in general and Rove in particular. Liberal activists and thinkers all exhorted Democrats to attack Republicans in vitriolic terms, to find liberal “wedge issues” that could divide the electorate as sharply as the conservative stand-bys of abortion, gun control, and gay marriage, and most important to emulate Rove’s approach of seeking to win elections more by mobilizing the party’s base with an uncompromising message than by persuading swing voters with a more centrist appeal….
[But] Bush’s reelection proved the high point of Rove’s vision, and even that was a rather modest peak: Bush’s margin of victory, as a share of the popular vote, was the smallest ever for a reelected president. Through Bush’s disastrous second term, the GOP’s position deteriorated at an astonishing speed. By the time Bush left office, with Democrats assuming control of government and about two-thirds of Americans disapproving of his performance, his party was in its weakest position since before Ronald Reagan’s election. Rather than constructing a permanent Republican majority, Rove and Bush provided Democrats an opportunity to build a lasting majority of their own that none of these books saw coming.

I quoted this section at considerable length because Brownstein seems to be conflating two different if not contradictory themes: (1) that lots of people failed to understand the demographic “upside” for Democrats of the Republican focus on “wedge” issues that divided the electorate, and (2) that Rove failed because “base mobilization” and “polarization” drove a decisive number of voters into the Democratic coalition.
On the first point about demography, the puzzling omission in Brownstein’s “re-review” is any reference to The Emerging Democratic Majority, the 2002 book by (TDS Co-Editor) Ruy Teixeira and John Judis, that pretty much got it all right, not that they got much credit for it when it was published on the eve of a big Republican midterm victory.
The omission, I suspect, is attributable to Brownstein’s focus on the second point, and his concern that Democrats who wanted to emulate Rove with a counter-polarization strategy were wrong, and thus weren’t vindicated by Rove’s subsequent failure. This preoccupation may also account for an inclusion in the re-review that’s as odd as the exclusion of Teixeira and Judis: Tom Schaller’s Whistling Past Dixie, which sharply distinguished itself from other mid-decade handwringing progressive tomes by predicting a bright Democratic future, but which also endorsed an anti-southern polarizing strategy that Brownstein wants to knock down.
Since I share Ron’s general antipathy to political strategies that focus excessively on base mobilization and polarization, it pains me somewhat to say that I think he exaggerates the role of those strategies in Rove’s failure.

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By the time you read this, it’s possible that the U.S. House will have already voted on a conference committee report for a supplemental appropriations bill mainly dealing with funds for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But whichever way the vote goes, it’s very interesting to watch Republicans line up to vote against the bill in the teeth of years of harsh rhetoric they deployed against Democrats for failing to “support the troops” by voting for Bush-era war supplementals. Yes, they claim they are voting not against “the troops” but against non-germane amendments, but then they voted for bills with non-germane amendments in the Bush supplementals regularly. Democrats voting against war funding in the past weren’t voting to defund the troops, either, but were trying to influence the overall war strategy in Iraq.
If I had to guess, it’s the nature of the “non-germane amendment” this time around that is proving to be catnip to GOPers. It involves money for the International Monetary Fund to help countries hurt even worse than we are by the financial meltdown. And so, before you can say “Frank Luntz,” they’ve come up with a term for the IMF money that looks like polling dynamite: “foreign bank bailout.”
It’s not often that you get to demonize a piece of legislation using a combination of three very unpopular words. That’s probably at least one more than they could resist.

In the continuing argument over ideology and violent extremism in America, conservatives are making some very odd assertions. Check out this statement by conservative San Francisco Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders:

I reject the idea that James W. von Brunn, the alleged Holocaust museum gunman and known white supremacist and anti-Semite, is right wing — as well as the implication that racism and conservatism somehow are connected. The KKK is not welcome at any conservative event I’ve ever attended.

Look at what is going on here – the term “right-wing” and “conservative” are being treated as interchangeable and both terms are being counterposed to “white supremacists” and “anti-Semites” – who are no longer part of “right-wing” ideology. In effect, not only the term “conservative” but also the term “right-wing” is being rescued from any associations with racism and anti-Semitism.
And it’s not just Saunders. There’s actually a whole cottage industry over in the right blogosphere arguing this same notion – that white supremacy is not really a part of any known and recognized “right-wing” ideology. Instead, it is in some utterly unique category all its own or is actually a left-wing idea (please don’t ask for details on this second notion. It goes something along the lines of “racist=Hitler=vegetarian=feminist=Hillary Clinton=liberal”)
But, wait a minute. Wasn’t the whole heroic start of the Bill Buckley/National Review initiative designed to “rescue” true, Burkean conservatism from the nutty and disreputable “right-wingers” of the 50s– the John Birchers, southern racists, anti-Semites, anti-fluoridation paranoiacs and so on? Wasn’t this clean break with the racist, anti-Semitic “right-wing extremists” central to the entire ethos of the new breed of Goldwater-Reagan- conservatives who then rose to the leadership of the Republican Party?

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There’s an old joke about a narcissist being someone who goes to a football game and thinks the team is talking about them in the huddle. There’s a dangerous element of that attitude in some U.S. reactions to unfolding events in Iran.
Already the chattering classes are falling into the habit of handicapping the twists and turns of the Iranian election crisis in terms of a “win” or “loss” for President Obama (viz, Martin Peretz’s post on Saturday entitled: “Ahmadinejad: 1; Obama: 0”). While international events do often affect the standing of the chief executive of the world’s most powerful nation, it’s a really bad idea to begin thinking that the rest of the world calibrates every action in reaction to U.S. policies. Believe it or not, foreigners have their own fish to fry.
Today Matt Yglesias tries to make this simple point in reacting to some hysterical tweeting by the man who might well have been in charge of the United States right now, John McCain (“If we are steadfast eventually the Iranian people will prevail,” said the Arizona senator’s thumbs):

That’s right. Whether or not the Iranian people prevail depends on how steadfast we are. How steadfast we are in what? In wishing them well? In tweeting mean things about the Iranian security services? Of course what Americans do isn’t totally irrelevant, but it’s unquestionably a peripheral factor in this drama. Iran is a country populated by Iranians, and their fate is primarily in their own hands.

Some of what Yglesias calls “neocon egomania on Iran” is coming, of course, from people who have favored military action against Iran for years, and who will treat every development in Tehran as reflecting the degree to which America or Israel is or isn’t conveying a credible threat of force. Worse yet, others think of Iran as part of an undifferentiated “Islamofascism” that is bent primarily on the destruction of The West, and believe Iranian repression should be viewed as a mocking reaction to Barack Obama’s “appeasement” of Islam in his Cairo speech. Check out this characteristic take from the Washington Times‘ Wes Pruden:

If Iranian voters had thrown Mahmoud Ahmadinejad into the street, the American president would have assumed that he was the One who did it, and the American press would have led the hosannas for the messiah from the south side of Chicago.Just a few more speeches, a few more respectful bows toward Mecca, and all the rough places would be made smooth and plain. But now even Mr. Obama must wake up and smell the tear gas.

Lest it be objected that Pruden is a marginal, extremist figure, his argument was pretty much the same one made Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” by Mitt Romney, the early frontrunner for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination:

The comments by the president last week, that there was a robust debate going on in Iran, was obviously entirely wrong-headed. What has occurred is the election is a fraud, the results are inaccurate, and you’re seeing a brutal repression of the people as they protest. … It’s very clear that the president’s policies of going around the world and apologizing for America aren’t working. … Look, just sweet talk and criticizing America is not going to enhance freedom in the world.

One of the most destructive tendencies of contemporary conservatism has been its determination to conflate recognition of the limits of American power with “weakness” or “appeasement.” With that comes a strong tendency to overrate the global impact of every word uttered in Washington, to the point that we Americans are expected to sacrifice our own freedom of action and self-interest in submission to our awful responsibilities as a world power.
The delusions associated with narcissism should be rejected if and when Iran’s crisis subsides, and we get around to considering what happens next in U.S.-Iranian relations. To quote Yglesias again:

[Whatever] the outcome of Iran’s domestic political struggles, the fundamental strategic calculus remains the same. Airstrikes against Iranian nuclear facilities will not accomplish the goal of maintaining a verifiably non-nuclear Iranian military, and an agreement on nuclear issues between the U.S. and Iran would still serve the interests of both countries. Under the circumstances, no matter what the outcome, pursuit of such an arrangement should continue to be a priority.

Recogning that basic reality will be easier if conservatives would stop talking as though Iranians are backward children whose every act is dictated by their reaction to “rewards” and “punishments” meted out by the United States.
UPDATE: John Judis of TNR has published a very good post about the cautious approach to a situation like Iran’s that a “prudent idealism” would suggest.