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.”

As Ed Kilgore noted in a post last week, the White House has been dropping hints that the first Obama budget, which will be formally released on Thursday but will be a major topic of the President’s speech to Congress tomorrow, will at least lay the foundation for universal health care.
Jonathan Cohn at TNR has some more advance intelligence on the budget and health care, and is hearing that Obama will specifically identify only a portion of the funds needed in the long run to move towards universal health care:

Obama will restate his commitment to making health care available to everybody, to improving the quality of care, and to bringing its costs under control–in effect, reiterating the promises he’s made since he started running for president. He will also call for putting aside money in the budget for fulfilling that commitment–a sum, I’m told, that will be “significant” and enough to convince skeptics he’s serious about the endeavor.
Some of that money will represent savings from other government health programs. For example, Obama will propose that the government reduce the excessive payments it now gives to private insurers participating in the Medicare program. Another source of funds will be a financial contribution from medium- and large-employers who don’t provide employees with health insurance.
But even when all of this money is put together, it won’t be enough to pay the very high cost of universal coverage. Making coverage available to everybody involves, among other things, expanding programs like Medicaid and subsidizing the purchase of insurance for people who can’t afford it on their own.* And although Obama will aggressively pursue reforms designed to make medical care less expensive over time, it will be many years before those reforms can yield significant savings.
Here’s where things get interesting. Obama will say he’s determined to find that remaining sum, through offsetting revenue increases or spending cuts that will allow him to stay true to his pledge of fiscal responsibility. But Obama won’t be specifying the offsets in this budget overview. Instead, he’ll pledge to work with Congress on identifying them.

So: as Cohn goes on to say, how Obama frames this “down-payment on universal health care” in his speech tomorrow will be very important both politically and fiscally. You can expect Republicans to charge that he’s asking Americans to buy a pig in a poke. But more likely, what he’s trying to avoid is creating a big ripe immediate target for Republicans and industry opponents of his plan, while seeking to convince folks that universal health care is worth the cost, and the effort.

Bill Scher’s Blog for our Future post features a link-rich discussion on “Are Blue Dogs helping or Hurting EFCA?”
CQPolitics Poll-Tracker flags a Fox News/Opinion Dynamics Poll, conducted 2/17-18, indicating that “Voters say by 66 percent to 28 percent that Obama had tried to reach out to Republicans and be bipartisan about the package, and they say 60 percent to 33 percent that the Republicans have not sincerely tried to act in a bipartisan way.”
Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball takes an updated look at the ’10 Senate races and concludes that “so far the Republicans appear to have very limited opportunities to pick up Democratic seats.” Hotline On Call‘s Jennifer Skalka focuses on the Senate race in MO, and reports on Robin Carnahan’s chances for taking the seat for Dems, due to a contentious GOP field.
Alexander Zaitchik’s Alternet post “5 Great Progressive Moves by Obama That You Might Have Missed” discusses Obama’s action on behalf of high speed rail, broad band expansion, reforming the Faith-Based Intitiative, a more sensible drug abuse policy and arms control — not too shabby for month one.
Susan Davis of the Wall St. Journal takes a look at the pros and cons of President Obama’s first month and provides an opportunity for readers to give Obama a letter grade. Somewhat surprisingly, 35+ percent of WSJ readers give him an “A”, a higher percentage than any other grade. But Dems gotta like the comment following the post by GreyK: “Out of the wreckage of the previous administration we see a group of thoughtful dedicated people trying to get the country back on track. Me likey.”
Sam Quinones, L.A. Times ace reporter on Mexico and related U.S. immigrations issues, has a frightening report in the latest issue of Foreign Policy on the expanding drug war south of the Rio Grande, now spilling over into U.S. border states, a development which could have a potent efect on U.S. immigration policy — and the growth of a key pro-Democratic party constituency.
Pollster.com concludes a week-long series on TDS co-editor Stan Greenberg’s new book “Dispatches from the War Room,” with a contribution from Greenberg.
Chris Bowers makes the case at OpenLeft that “legalizing marijuana is more popular than the Republican Party, most leading Republicans, and virtually the entire Republican platform..”

Careful readers of my last post just below may have deduced that I don’t have a real high opinion of Rick Santelli, the CNBC reporter who treated viewers yesterday to a lengthy tirade on the outrage of Barack Obama trying to help “losers” who can’t pay their mortgages. It’s fine by me if anyone wants to disagree with Obama on housing policy, though I’m not sure why CNBC thinks it’s okay for a “reporter” to indulge himself with a hyper-ideological tirade from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. But what I find despicable about Santelli is his puffed-up sense of moral superiority towards millions of people he knows nothing about, and who are already suffering from personal economic misfortunes that I rather doubt he could imagine.
In any event, I regret to report that Santelli’s receiving not only approbation, but instant folk-hero status on the political Right. At National Review, aside from Larry Kudlow’s “moral hazard” lecture playing off Santelli’s rant, you’ve got an interview with Santelli himself, wherein he modestly appraises himself as just a red-blooded American saying something that everybody he knows agrees with, and then a mocked-up “Palin-Santelli 2012” campaign poster published at The Corner by Kathryn Lopez. Joe the Plumber must be green with envy.
I don’t know what’s more disturbiing about this festive treatment of Santelli’s expression of the Rage of the Trading Floor: that so many conservatives seem to identify with him, or that they seem to think his is a point of view that could soon sweep America, where the main feeling about the economy is that people who aren’t doing well deserve it.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

There was a lot of self-delusional and semi-fascistic talk among conservatives during the late stages of the presidential campaign blaming the entire economic calamity on poor people and minorities who supposedly blew up the Boom Times by taking out mortgages they couldn’t afford to pay. As an exercise in right-wing populist “wedge politics,” it didn’t work. But it didn’t go away, as witnessed by yesterday’s now-infamous on-air tirade by CNBC business reporter Rick Santelli from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade.
You should watch the video itself, but the main thrust of Santelli’s jeremiad was aimed at Obama’s new foreclosure relief proposal, which rewarded “losers,” and will place the United States on a trajectory to become just like Cuba. The sheer self-righteousness of Santelli’s rant–inflated by attaboy cries (genuine or facetious) from the prosperous white men on the trading floor around him–was what was remakable about it. As Ezra Klein brilliantly observed:

[W]atching the traders bray and cheer as Santelli calls for the streets to run green with the equity of the working class is an astonishing insight in the psychology of the crisis. These guys feel betrayed. America let them down! After all, they didn’t buy the mortgages and default. They just bought the packages that then defaulted. They trusted Americans to be responsible and they were burned for it. And so you know what? Screw ’em. This is their problem. Let them default. They should lose their houses. Wall Street is tired of being ground under the thumb of the lower middle class. This country has coddled those losers long enough, and see where it’s gotten us.

But I think something a bit deeper is going on here as well. Santelli’s argument is not much more than a crude and boorish version of a lot of the sober “moral hazard” criticism of Obama’s housing plan. You probably know the idea: when government helps people who have suffered from bad behavior in the past, it encourages bad behavior in the future. Better to make them object lessons of the consequences of bad behavior. What are a few million ruined lives as compared to the advantages of a country with improved moral muscle tone?
The problem with this “analysis,” of course, is that there really weren’t a whole lot of people who sat down one fine day and decided: “I think I’ll buy a house I really can’t afford and then default on the mortgage!” Put aside the blandishments of lenders, the national ideology of homeownership as a sign of middle-class status (and as a rare source of working-class capital), and the widespread expectation that housing values would continue to more-or-less improve for the foreseeable future. More fundamentally, it’s difficult to wax angry at homebuyers who somehow did not anticipate losing jobs, health insurance, savings, home equity, and most of all the ability to sell homes at a break-even price. And you also have to wonder how many people who are upset at government help for housing “losers” were the completely accidental beneficiaries of more fortunate trends in the housing market in the past (e.g., those millions who bought at a price slough, built up equity without lifting a finger, and then used government-subisidized home equity credit to retire debt, boost savings, and acquire many nice things).
What may be at the bottom of some of the angrier “moral hazard” talk is even deeper than the habit of blaming victims, with the oft-accompanying strains of self-righteousness and sometimes racism. Big economic downturns challenge one of the most abiding myths that well-off Americans venerate: that economic success is a sign of personal virtue. The corrollary, of course, is that economic failures tend to deserve it. That obviously wasn’t true in the depths of the Great Depression, when a fourth of the population couldn’t get jobs. But the myth lived on, and precisely at times when it seems to be endangered by empirical evidence, it sometimes emerges in a nasty and vengeful manner, as when Rick Santelli indulged himself yesterday in sneering at Barack Obama for caring about “losers.”

Even as we await the effects of the economic stimulus package, the Obama administration’s first federal budget is due to be released next week. And according to some rich hints dropped by Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszsag to Politico‘s Ben Smith, that budget is likely to focus to a surprising extent on creating a foundation for universal health care:

Though the budget’s details have been closely held, Orszag revealed, in broad terms, two: a continued focus on health care policy and a plan “to restore the nation to a sustainable fiscal trajectory over the five-to-10- year window.”
The next step on health care, he said, is a set of “changes to Medicare and Medicaid to make them more efficient, and to start using those programs more intelligently to lead the whole health care system.”
With a growing body of research finding some practices more cost-effective than others, the program’s reimbursement rules can be used to force changes at those hospitals — a sort of back door to health care reform.
“Medicare and Medicaid are big enough to change the way medicine is practiced,” he said.

This suggests steps to link health care cost containment to a major shift towards adoption of medical best practices, including outcome-based medicine, chronic disease management, and prevention, all big preoccupations of Orszag when he ran the Congressional Budget Office.
So: a move towards universal health care in a budget that will reflect widespread fears over the fiscal implications of the stimulus package? Yes, because of the vast implications of medical cost containment for the federal budget.
The Obama administration’s focus on convincing Americans that universal health care will actually save money over the long run is likely to be a central feature of next week’s “fiscal responsibility summit,” which has been advertised as a first step towards “entitlement reform.” As Jonathan Cohn explained at The Treatment blog yesterday, progressives fearing some sort of change-Social-Security agenda should calm down; the “summit” will largely be about Medicare and health care costs.
As Ben Smith notes, next week will be a really big week for Peter Orszag. Comprehensive health care reform foundered in the 1990s in part because Americans weren’t convinced that the status quo would wind up being far more expensive and less reliable. Making that case again, and more effectively, will be very important for the administration and the country.

At OpenLeft today, Chris Bowers asks a good question: is it more attractive, on balance, for a politician like, say, Kathleen Sebelius or Janet Napolitano, to accept a position in the Cabinet as opposed to continuing as governor or running for the U.S. Senate?
Chris, who admits he was disappointed by Napolitano’s decision to become Secretary of DHS and is ready to be disappointed if Sebelius becomes Secretary of HHS, mainly because he views both women as the best available Senate candidates in their states, nonetheless comes up with a list of reasons for instead getting Lost in the Cabinet.
It’s a perfectly good list that mainly focuses on what a risky and difficult chore it is to run for statewide office, but I do think he misses a couple of pertinent points.
For one thing, 2009 is a historically bad time to be a governor, particularly in states like Arizona and Kansas with Republican-controlled legislatures. The pressure to cut services or raise taxes (the latter very difficult in a conservative state) is enormous, even with the help now on the way via the economic stimulus package. And both Napolitano and Sebelius are term-limited after next year, so neither could run for another term in the hopes of better economic times.
For another thing, you shouldn’t conflate gubernatorial and senatorial gigs as “statewide offices.” Governors, even in bad times, typically wield a lot of power. They have thousands of state employees ultimately reporting to them; don’t really have to answer to anyone other than the law and the public; and can make news pretty much whenever they want. They also get a free place to live, usually a very nice one with state-paid help.
A Senator is one of a hundred preening narcissists. A freshman has little real influence. Staffs are tiny by state government standards, and turnover is heavy. The solons are invariably subordinate to the party leadership and various committee and subcomittee chairs. And you have to maintain not one but two homes at your own expense, and live a bifurcated existence of shuttling between Washington and your home state (otherwise you are “losing touch”). There’s a good reason most Senators are independently wealthy before running for office. And I’m always surprised when political observers are surprised that this or that sitting or former governor doesn’t choose to “move up” to the Senate. It’s clearly a demotion.
Finally, being a Democrat running for Senate in a red state like Arizona or Kansas isn’t the same as running for governor. Senatorial campaigns are almost invariably nationalized and polarized, unlike gubernatorial campaigns where manifest executive abilities and state/local issue configurations can give Democrats in conservative areas a fighting chance.
So nobody should really be that astonished that even a screwed-up agency like DHS looked like an attractive challenge to the very competent Janet Napolitano, or that Kathleen Sebelius might prefer to play a role in an administration that could revolutionize the American system of health care. The alternatives really weren’t that seductive.

The marquee off-year political contest of 2009 is very likely to be Virginia’s gubernatorial race. Yes, New Jersey will also have a gubernatorial contest in which incumbent Democrat Jon Corzine could get a serious challenge, probably from former U.S. Attorney Chris Christie, generally considered the strongest Republican in the race. But Virginia’s proximity to the chattering classes of Washington; the Democratic national party chairmanship of outgoing Gov. Tim Kaine; the intense scrutiny of VA last year as the classic purple-to-blue state; and media fascination with Terry McAuliffe’s gubernatorial bid; will probably combine to make the Commonwealth race a big national political obsession.
At RealClearPolitics today, Sean Trende offers a decent primer on the VA race, with lots of historical detail on the state’s politics going back to the nineteenth century. My main quibble with Trende’s analysis is his implicit assumption that discontent over the economy or the state’s fiscal condition will hurt the incumbent party in Washington and Richmond. It’s entirely possible, even in conservative but hard-hit parts of the state like the Southside, that voters will not warm to a national or state GOP that seems to be telling them that pleas for government assistance represent attempted robbery or a desire for welfare dependency. And that’s why I am also less certain than Trende that GOP candidate Bob McDonnell will be able to largely ignore his party’s rural base and aggressively pursue suburban votes elsewhere.
This is another way of saying that we don’t know yet whether the national repudiation of Republicans in 2006 and 2008 represented a temporary “throw-the-bums-out” reaction or the beginnings of a pro-Democratic realignment. But I wouldn’t be real confident about assuming that recent history tells you everything you need to know about the standing of the two parties in various parts of Virginia today.
Trende’s assessment of the candidates is well-informed, including his suggestion that the likely-to-get-nasty competition between the two Democratic candidates from NoVa, McAuliffe and Brian Moran, could either create an opening for the third candidate, Creigh Deeds, or force him from the race altogether. His assessment of the sole Republican candidate, McDonnell, is also interesting:

McDonnell avoids many of the problems that have beset previous Republican nominees. But there is one potential problem – he is a bona fide social conservative. McDonnell will likely be attacked for his law degree from Regent University (founded by Pat Robertson), and comments he made while he was a Delegate to the effect that anyone engaging in oral or anal sex could be found in violation of Virginia’s “crimes against nature” law (he also claimed not to remember whether he had ever violated the law)…
The comment about the crimes against nature law could affect him much as Allen’s macaca comment or Kilgore’s death penalty ad affected them – by becoming wedges between the Republicans and their Northern Virginia base.

Yeah, I don’t think it will be too long before every late-night comic in the world has some high-profile fun with McDonnell’s 2003 comment that he doesn’t really recall whether he’s ever violated the state’s sodomy laws. And he’s not well positioned ideologically to claim that this is a “private” or “family” matter.
Unless McDonnell tries or is forced to make the campaign about cultural issues, the economic and fiscal situation, and the condition of the two parties in VA at present, will likely determine the race, against any of the Democrats currently running. Yes, the national media will try to make it all a referendum on Barack Obama, and that idea could cut in different directions among different Virginia voters. But as Trende concludes, the race begins as a toss-up, and the positive omen for Virginia Democrats is that they’ve won all but a few of the very close statewide races in Virginia in recent years.