Anybody trying to follow what’s happening in the Senate on the stimulus package today is having a bad case of vertigo. The big news yesterday seemed to be that Senate Dems didn’t have the votes to enact the stimulus legislation that was reported out of its committees, and that was roughly similar to what the House enacted. As a result, a self-designated group of “centrists”–apparently five GOPers and up to 15 Democrats–had convened under the leadership of Ben Nelson (D-NE) and Susan Collins (R-ME) to agree on modifications of the package that would reduce its cost and/or eliminate objectionable “pork.”
Now today, even as details of the Nelson-Collins “agreed-to-cuts” leaks out (TPM seems to have the first copy), Harry Reid has dramatically announced that he has the votes to cut off debate and enact a bill. The question, of course, is “what bill?”, though comments by other Democratic senators suggest that they are not including the Nelson-Collins cuts, much less the sort of larger cuts that Collins undoubtedly wants. And that in turn implies that all or nearly all of the Dems involved in the Nelson-Collins negotiations have been, or can be, convinced to vote for the bigger package (inflated to over $900 billion yesterday when the Senate approved an Isakson amendment to give big tax incentives to home-buyers), and that a couple of Republicans other than Collins (Snowe? Voinovich? Specter?) are on board as well.
If the Nelson-Collins cuts–again, a tentative list, not an agreement, since Collins is insisting on much larger cuts–is somehow in play, it’s worth looking at them in some detail. And the first thing that jumps out at you is that $39 billion of the $79 billion in proposed cuts comes from elimination of a State Fiscal Stabilization Fund.
There have already been some blog posts erroneously describing these proposed cuts as relating purely to “education.” That’s because the Department of Education administers this proposed fund. $15 billion on the chopping block is in the form of “state incentive grants” that are indeed about education (apparently aimed at rewarding states that make progress towards their education goals), but the bigger chunk, $24 billion, is the sole unrestricted money for the states in the entire stimulus package, aimed at discouraging states from laying off workers and cutting programs in a way that would undermine the very purpose of the federal legislation. To be sure, there are other funds in the stimulus package aimed at shoring up specific state-administered programs, particularly Medicaid, but the $24 billion the “centrists” are lopping off is the only truly flexible money.
I would guess that lobbyists for state and local government have figured this out and are raising holy hell about it by now. But the fact that so little is known about the composition of the Nelson-Collins group (as Chris Bowers rightly and angrily points out), and no one outside the Senate seems to know whether these negotiated cuts are in or out of what Reid intends to push on the Senate floor, is a sign of how incredibly confusing the legislative dance has become at this crucial moment.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

In the course of about 48 hours, the conventional wisdom about the likely fate of the economic stimulus packagage has undergone a remarkable change from guarded optimism to quasi-panic. In a semi-ironic reference to the rapidly shifting winds, Mike Madden did a post at Salon yesterday entitled: “Stimulus Bill Not Dead Yet.”
The genesis of this sudden shift in perceptions is variable: the Daschle “scandal” has supposedly hurt or distracted Obama; conservatives have been all over the media with a relentless barrage of attacks on the supposed “pork” in the stimulus bill; there’s been public handwriting by Senate Democrats about their failure to nail down 60 votes; two self-styled “centrist” groups of senators from each party are kicking around major modifications to the bill that seem to get larger every minute.
Most of all, Republicans are excitedly high-fiving each other over the trends lines in Rasmussen polling on the stimulus package (see Nate Silver’s warning about the methodology!), showing things moving their way.
Perhaps it’s inevitable because of the quasi-mythical status of Team Obama as it took office, which created high expectations of instant political mastery, but still, I’ve never quite seen so much of a mood-shift based on, well, a mood-shift. Obama’s not perceived as doing well because people are saying that Obama’s not perceived as doing well. This is the sort of self-proliferating cycle of negative perceptions that can develop a ferocious energy, but can also dissipate rapidly in the fact of real-life events.
And that explains the president’s real challenge over the next few days: bringing the stimulus debate back to earth, instead of letting it be determined by who is perceived as doing a better job of spinning it.

Greg Sargent at The Plum Line reports today that Team Obama has decided to “use his massive campaign email list and communications operations to get around the filter of the big news orgs in order to personally sell his agenda directly to the American people.”
This deployment, according to Sargent, was partially motivated by the obsession of the MSM with the Daschle story, which has “blotted out” Obama’s efforts to sell the stimulus package via network interviews.
An email has gone out to the Obama organization’s 13-million-strong email list with video clips and a plea that recipients convene house parties to view Obama’s case for the stimulus package.
This will be an interesting and important experiment, not just in terms of the effectiveness of the Obama organization, but as an effort to bypass media “filters.” Given the negative MSM coverage of the Daschle and related “stories” about disqualified appointees, and continuing conservative efforts to label the stimulus package as pork-laden, it’s an appropriate and potentially critical step to mobilize generally positive public opinion in favor of the legislation as it struggles through the Senate.

TDS co-editor Ruy Teixeira has a new post up at the Center for American Progress website, “Public Opinion Snapshot: Public Strongly Supports Economic Recovery Plan.” Teixeira’s analysis of data from a Diageo/Hotline poll conducted 1/21-24 debunks the GOP myth that voters prefer tax cuts to government spending as a strategy for addressing the current economic crisis:

Conservatives showed remarkable unanimity this week in opposing President Obama’s stimulus plan. Their reasons? Too much spending, too few tax cuts, too big an effect on the deficit. In taking this position, they’re trying to pose as the true friends of U.S. taxpayers.
There’s only one problem: The taxpayers themselves actually support the plan and seem unfazed by the very things the conservatives are complaining so loudly about.
A recent Diageo/Hotline poll asked half of the sample whether they supported an $825 billion plan “even if it means increasing the federal budget deficit in order to do so.” That query elicited a 20-point margin (54-34) in favor
This shows that the public favors the recovery and reinvestment plan even with the price tag and even when it is stipulated that the plan will increase the deficit…

Even better, Teixeira adds:

But what about the thing that really gets conservatives upset—the fact that there’s twice as much new spending as tax cuts? Well, the Diageo/Hotline poll asked the other half of the sample the same question as above, but specified how the money was divided between spending and tax cuts. The result? Support for the stimulus ballooned to a roughly 40-point margin (66-27).
The conservatives aren’t just reading from a different page of the book than the public—they appear to be reading from a completely different book. Some things evidently haven’t changed since George W. Bush left town.

Clearly, conservative members of congress, and even some moderates who want more tax cuts and less spending, should no longer entertain the delusion that they are guided by public support.

The sudden fall of Tom Daschle has left the Obama administration scrambling, and Democrats and the media speculating, about not one but two replacements. While Daschle is usually described as the designated Secretary of Heath and Human Services, he was also appointed to head up the White House Office of Health Care Reform, the coordinating point for a future Obama universal health care initiative.
Jon Cohn of TNR’s The Treatment, and Ezra Klein of TAP, are as usual the go-to bloggers on health care policy generally and this issue specifically. Cohn seems to think Dashle’s designated deputy in the White House, Jeanne Lambrew, ought to get the nod to head the heath care reform office. Klein lists a number of pols who might be considered–a pretty lofty group for what might be a non-cabinet gig–and agrees the Lambrew is fine if Obama wants to go with a wonk. A pol, of course, might be a dual appointment like Daschle. For these very public figures, expect some hasty but intense vetting, not just of tax records but of associations with lobbyists.
Both these issues–not just the tax problem–were the focus of the New York Times editorial yesterday that reportedly represented the coup de grace for Daschle.

Print Version
Editor’s Note by Ed Kilgore: This analysis, written by Andrew Levison, is one of a series of TDS Strategy Memos and TDS Strategy White Papers that The Democratic Strategist will be publishing on a regular basis in the future. As our Editors have said: “ For some time we have felt that the Democratic community has needed an additional format for the discussion of political strategy, one that is longer than standard newspaper and magazine political commentary, is based on empirical data and is directly focused on the analysis of political strategy. We see TDS Strategy memos and Strategy White Papers as filling that role.”
Since Obama took office, two basic notions about his political philosophy have become instant clichés – that he is a “pragmatist” and also an advocate of “bipartisanship.” An extraordinary number of articles and debates have appeared applying these two characterizations to his actions.
Within this broad discussion, Ed Kilgore has made a convincing argument that in Obama’s specific formulation, neither of these two concepts necessarily implies an abandonment of the liberal-progressive goals Obama expressed during the campaign. Kilgore notes that, while Franklin Roosevelt ultimately achieved very profound progressive reforms, he was actually much more accurately described as a “pragmatist” than an “ideologue.” Equally, Kilgore argues that Obama’s bipartisanship is more accurately understood as a “grassroots” bipartisanship he seeks to generate among ordinary Americans rather than the traditional and elite “behind closed doors” deal-making bipartisanship of the senate cloakroom and corridors of power.
But, at this very broad level, political strategy becomes difficult to distinguish from political philosophy. There is also a more concrete and specific level of political strategy that also has to be considered – the level where a president’s specific politico-legislative strategy is designed. On this middle level it can be argued that Obama actually has a more coherent and well thought out approach than either his critics or other interpreters recognize.
To see this, it is necessary to identify a particular blind spot in the perspective of most American political commentators. Modern political science (exemplified in the leading American academic journals) and modern political campaign management (exemplified in “professional” political publications like National Journal, Congressional Quarterly and Campaigns and Elections magazine) actually present a very simplified model of the world, one in which politics is discussed as if it were a separate and isolated realm of life with its own unique rules. In this simplified world, most discussions of politics are based on two seemingly self-evident statements:

1. American elections are won with 50.1 percent of the vote.
2. All votes, regardless of their origin, are, in political terms, equal.

On the surface, these two ideas appear to be not only true but almost tautological. In a great deal of American political commentary, however, they are subtly inflated into two much broader premises that are most emphatically not tautological — and that are, in fact, arguably wrong.

1. That winning support above 50.1 percent is of relatively small or even negligible marginal benefit or importance. Put differently, it is essentially icing on a cake.
2. That any particular political coalition that can be assembled to provide an electoral majority of 50.1% is of exactly equal value and utility to any alternative political coalition that can also produce an electoral majority of 50.1%. No particular majority coalition is inherently any “better” than any other.

These assumptions are rarely stated explicitly, but they are implicit in much of the progressive concern about Obama’s political strategy – the widely expressed fear that he is essentially “leaving achievable progressive victories on the table” because of his commitment to pragmatism and bipartisanship. Having won 53% of the vote and with 59 Democratic senators, it is often argued that he is clearly in a position to seek more progressive, radical or dramatic changes than those which he is actually seeking. To many liberal and progressive commentators, it seems almost self-evident that Obama could demand and get “more” of a progressive agenda enacted if he behaved in a more aggressively hyper-partisan fashion as George Bush did after the 2004 election. Thomas Frank clearly expressed this liberal-progressive view — and frustration — by saying that “Obama should act as if he won.”
But there is good evidence (which we shall see below) that Obama’s political strategy is actually based on an essentially sociological rather than political science perspective. It rests specifically on one key sociological insight — that the political strategy required to enact significant progressive social reforms is substantially more complex and difficult than is the strategy required to simply resist social change.
When significant social reforms threaten to directly affect major social institutions, enacting such reforms requires two things beyond simply wining an electoral victory:

1. The opposition of the key social institution or institutions affected –which in most cases include either the armed forces, big business or the church – must be neutralized or at least very significantly muted.
2. A certain baseline level of sociological support (or at least relative neutrality) must be obtained among a series of pivotal social groups. Sociologically and demographically speaking these groups – religious voters, military voters or business voters — are often predominantly working class, red state voters.

As a result, the coalition necessary to achieve major social reforms will require more than a knife-edge 50.1% majority. Translated into national levels of public support or approval, a commanding majority of as much as 60% may actually be necessary.

Read more…

I think I’d go a step farther than J.P. Green’s cautious optimism about the Gregg appointment in the post just below.
President Obama’s appointment of Gregg to head the Department of Commerce is a fairly remarkable feat of political deal making, and the compromise that appears to have been worked out speaks well for everyone involved:
Obama appoints another Republican to his Cabinet, Gregg gives up his seat in the Senate to work for a president he didn’t support, Democratic New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch has indicated that he will reach across the aisle appoint a long-time Republican to fill the position, and if, as rumored, that appointment is Bonnie Newman then she will agree to serve out the term and then step aside so that the people of New Hampshire have an open field to choose from in 2010.
Politically, for Democrats there’s a lot to like. It’s a tangible effort that Obama and company can point to when asked what they’ve done to change the tone in Washington. For New Hampshire, Gregg might represent the most conservative vote the GOP could hope for. Even if Lynch doesn’t appoint a Democrat, whoever serves out Gregg’s term will likely spend a lot of time voting with the Obama administration. And in 2010, we’ve got an open seat to contest instead of an incumbent to beat.
If you need further convincing, look at the extent to which this move has Republicans annoyed.
Patrick Ruffini is a smart, young, tech-savvy GOP activist who, together with Soren Dayton and Jon Henke, created The Next Right last year to be a gathering point for activists looking to build a new Republican Party. I don’t read as many conservative blogs as I did during the 2008 campaign cycle, but I continue to check out The Next Right every day because it offers a lot of insight into the thinking of those who represent the future of the GOP.
In a post yesterday under the headline, “Republicans Should Drive a Hard Bargain on Gregg,” Ruffini suggests that the GOP should make every effort to stop this appointment unless certain conservative conditions are met:

First, we must frame this as an astonishing partisan power grab. President Bush had the opportunity to nominate Louisiana Democrat John Breaux as Energy Secretary in 2001, thus flipping the seat, but didn’t — leaving the Senate at 50-50 and vulnerable to a Democratic takeover, which as we all know, actually happened.
Second, we need to insist not only that Gov. Lynch appoint a Republican, but that he appoint a Republican from a list of three candidates prepared by Republican leaders in the legislature and the New Hampshire Republican Party — preferably a strong Republican who would run in 2010. Gregg was about as conservative as you get for New England, and any replacement selected by a Democrat is almost guaranteed to be worse.

Neither one of these suggestions makes much sense.
Republicans can try to frame the appointment as a power grab, but my guess is that most Americans are going to see Obama picking a Republican for his administration and a Democratic governor choosing a Republican to fill the seat, even though he’s under no legal obligation to do so. On this point, the GOP is welcome to take Ruffini’s advice, but it is almost certain to be a tough sell.
Ruffini’s second suggestion, if anything, is worse. Aside from Sen. Gregg himself (who could always change his mind), Republicans have no power to insist on any conditions for this appointment. They don’t control the legislature or the governor’s mansion. There is no law on the books in New Hampshire dictating that partisan considerations be made for an appointments. And they don’t have the votes to block Gregg’s confirmation in the Senate (keep in mind, without Gregg, they only hold 40 seats in the chamber).
And by the way, the Bush-Breaux analogy that Ruffini raises is totally off: Bush didn’t appoint Breaux as Energy Secretary because Breaux wasn’t interested in the job, not because Bush was a principled bipartisan man who feared upsetting the partisan balance of the Senate.
If activists like Ruffini want to reinvent the GOP, they have every right to insist that Republicans be focused on conservative principles, and they should demand accountability from their elected officials and party leaders. But Republicans are in the minority at every level of government. That requires that they be a bit more careful about choosing their battles.

Pass the crow, please, re my Friday post on the Gregg appointment. Excuse me for thinking a Democratic Governor would surely appoint a Democratic Senator to replace Judd Gregg, if and when he is confirmed as Secretary of Commerce. The deal was apparently never that simple.
I’m not quite buying the noise that the Gregg nomination is all about the quiet joys of bipartisanship. I doubt that President Obama would put a third Republican in his cabinet without a little quid pro quo somewhere down the line. The explanation that makes the most sense at this point is that the Senator replacing Gregg will support Obama on some key legislation, such as the stimulus package (if it’s not a done deal before then) and/or EFCA and health care reform — not way off the range of possibilities for a centrist/liberal New England Republican. Sort of a sometimes 60th vote to prevent or stop filibustering. That way Gregg gets to save face with his GOP buds, and Obama gets at least some of what he wants from Gregg’s replacement.
The whole thing is a little dicey, in that it requires a lot of trust in, not one, but two Republicans, under the best of scenarios. In his post at OpenLeft, David Sirota calls Gregg a “radical free-trader,” and makes a convincing case that Gregg’s track record on trade issues is worrisome. And there may be another twist or two before all of the fallout settles. I don’t much like the precedent of a Democratic governor caving in and appointing a Republican, which doesn’t help with party-building. But no telling what other behind-the-scenes options Obama had. It’s not the queen gambit I was hoping for. For now, however, it seems reasonable to trust in Team Obama, since they have been pretty shrewd political chess players so far.

I really didn’t intend to write a long series of posts on the question of “ending the culture wars,” or specifically on abortion policy. But my friend Damon Linker at TNR has responded in some detail to my arguments against a strategic retreat on the “constitutionalization of abortion” as a way to detoxify the subject, so I’ll go one more round, and also note some comments made by other folks during this discussion.
First of all, in his latest post Damon makes a rather crucial clarification of his “deconstitutionalize abortion” argument: this isn’t, he says, a practical proposal, but rather a “hypothetical thought-experiment” to convince pro-choice progressives that anything short of such a radical step would not succeed in making the abortion battle anything less than “intractable.” I certainly don’t need convincing on this point; I despair of any end to this particular front in the “culture wars,” but strongly think the “thought-experiment” might make the abortion wars even worse, while providing the people on the other side of the barricades from me and other pro-choice Americans with the opportunity to actually put their convictions into practice backed by the power of the state–not an inestimable factor.
Second of all, shifting to the arguments against his “thought-experiment,” Damon distinguishes between the “conservative side of the culture war” from the “pro-life movement,” and suggests that it’s the former, not the latter, who might be “convinced to stand down from the culture war if the identity-politics provocation of Roe were removed.” Now I’m afraid this reasonable-sounding distinction drifts into all sorts of treacherous territory, not least among them the exceptional slipperiness of trying to measure nuances in terms of public opinion on abortion. By Damon’s math, a quarter of the American electorate wants to outlaw “most” abortions, but isn’t “pro-life” because it recognizes exceptions. But those exceptions can get pretty large: sizable majorities of Americans favor a “health of the mother” exception even to a ban on the very unpopular and rare “partial-birth abortion” procedure–as John McCain learned when he mocked the exception in a presidential debate last October, reflecting the common right-to-life view that it makes any abortion restrictions meaningless. So it’s not that easy to divide people into neat categories like “anti-abortion but not prolife,” much less make the categorization the linchpin of an argument for ending culture wars.
More importantly, Damon offers no evidence that this “non-RTL cultural conservative” grouping is really “provoked” by Roe. Perhaps some conservative intellectuals like Ross Douthat are duly provoked, but it’s significant that the “judicial tyranny” argument that is at the heart of Damon’s case is almost exclusively aimed by Republican politicians at serious RTL activists, often in very targeted settings like John McCain’s“dog-whistle” speech to Christian conservatives last May. Participation in the annual protests against Roe doesn’t seem to extend beyond the organized RTL ranks. But this gets to the real problem with Damon’s “thought-experiment”: if a large segment of “culture-war” conservatives are motivated by mere cultural conservatism, and oppose abortion for traditionalist, or anti-feminist, or anti-sexual-freedom reasons, and not because they believe a fetus is a full human being deserving the same rights as any other human being, then their anti-abortion opinions are as malleable as their opposition to gay marriage or church-state separation. Since these are issues on which Damon agrees that time and generational change will heal most wounds, the same should be true of abortion for those outside the serious RTL ranks. This is particularly true if the status quo is legalized abortion rather than the endless, daily warfare about abortion policy we’d see if Roe is ever reversed (BTW, if anything, I may have understated the havoc that would ensue in a post-Roe abortion polity; see Linda Hirshman’s fascinating Washington Post article last September about the strong probability that states with abortion bans would seek to prevent out-of-state abortions).
Third of all, I probably invited one rejoinder from Damon by suggesting unhappily that the only real comity that pro-choice Americans can offer their RTL brethren was the cold comfort of the slogan: “Oppose abortion? Don’t have one!” Damon took that to mean I was arguing that legal abortion represents “moral neutrality” on the issue. Of course not. But it’s actually the closest to neutrality that the state can get, since after all, nobody in the Roe era is being forced to have an abortion, while in a post-Roe situation–much less the constitutional abortion ban that RTLers favor–some women would certainly be forced to carry pregnancies to term against their will. And I don’t think it’s a very good idea to bring up the slavery analogy as part of an argument for a “states’ rights” position on abortion.
Speaking of “states’ rights,” Jack Whalen of After the Future wrote one of the most cogent of many blog posts agreeing with Damon:

The Dems on the national level should not take sides on abortion. The culture war might rage on, but let it be fought out in the state legislatures rather than in Washington. This should be perceived as neither a Dem nor a Republican issue. If abortion policy was determined on a state-by-state basis, it would make it easier for Democrats on the Federal level to elect legislators whose positions on the economic and civil liberties issues are more in line with Main Steet aspirations without abortion or other divisive cultural issues being a wedge issue or distraction.

His full argument reflects a very common belief among Democrats, which I’ve battled for years, that “cultural” issues are somehow not legitimate, and if we can find a way to consign them to the sidelines, Democrats will win on economic and other issues.
And that brings me to Kay Steiger’s argument (as a guest blogger on Matt Yglesias’ site) that the habit of referring to issues like abortion or same-sex marriage as “cultural issues” trivializes them. I disagree, because “culture” is as important a fulcrum for public policy as any other aspect of human society. Indeed, a nation that can’t figure out how to reflect in public policy a fixed notion of what represents “homicide” or “a family” isn’t likely to do very well in figuring out how to prevent “homicides” or give “families” economic opportunity. And that’s why after decades of agonizing over the subject, I’ve arrived at Linda Hirshman’s position that pro-choice Americans–or more properly, pro-abortion-rights Americans–need to be willing and able to defend the morality of abortion. If we don’t, then we deserve the contempt of the Right-to-Life movement, and are rightly condemned to the self-doubt and guilty consciences that so regularly produce offers of unilateral compromise in the vain hope of peace.

It’s not normally a signal for wild celebration when a political party caucus loses on the largest and most significant piece of legislation in a given year. But it’s definitely party-time for the House GOP, according to a report from the House GOP retreat at the Homestead resort by Politico’s Patrick O’Conner. These Republicans are beside themselves with joy that they managed to engineer a unanimous vote against the economic stimulus package.

“Look at these faces,” said California Rep. Kevin O. McCarthy, pointing to a roomful of Republicans and their families during a dinner in one of the resort’s expansive ballrooms. “They’re all smiling. You’d think these people are still in the majority.”

Aside from the fact that just being employed is a pretty nice thing these days, the GOP solons appear to be thoroughly enjoying the liberty to return to the pre-1994 Republican modus operandi of pure, truculent obstruction. National Republican Congressional Committeee chairman Pete Sessions told the assembled members of Congress “that they need to get over the idea that they’re participating in legislation and ought to start thinking of themselves as ‘an insurgency’ instead.” And right on cue, the big guest speaker was Newt Gingrich, who rose to power by inculcating the ethos of juvenile delinquency into his torpid GOP colleagues, before becoming a national pariah once he had some responsibility for governing.
Another star at the retreat was newly elected RNC chairman Michael Steele, who “offered a partisan rallying call in praise of the vote against the stimulus”:

“I thought it was very important to send a signal, and you sent it loudly, very clearly, that this party, the leadership of this caucus, would stand first and foremost with the American people. You made it very clear that in order to grow through this recession that you not redistribute the wealth of the people of this nation.”
His remarks were in line with the core message most speakers offered over the weekend: The party should return to a back-to-basics fiscal conservatism.
“I know all of you are pumped about the vote the other day,” [House GOP Whip Eric] Cantor told lawmakers Friday night, eliciting loud cheers. “We’ll have more to come.”

In another article at Politico, Ann Schroeder Mullins offered this matched pair of recent missives from the House Republican campaign committee:

“This is an opportunity for us to promote bold, positive and substantive reforms rooted in our core principles; and opportunity to be more than the party of ‘no.’”— NRCC e-mail from John A. Boehner, Jan 20
And: “Last night Nancy Pelosi asked Republicans to join her in maxing out the country’s credit card — Republicans said ‘NO!’”— Pete Sessions in an NRCC e-mail Friday