Pew has some new Presidential job approval figures that give an additional insight into the way Barack Obama is peeling off support from the Republican coalition.
The basic partisan breakdown looks like this:
Presidential Job Approval
Democrats – 88%
Independents – 63%
Republicans – 34%
But what is particularly noteworthy is the split within the Republicans:
Conservative Republicans : 28% approve, 47% disapprove
Moderate and Liberal Republicans: 46% approve, 30% disapprove
Wow. More moderate and liberal Republicans approve of the job Obama is doing than disapprove – almost 50% favorable, in fact.
For a number of years now political independents have been polling closer to Democrats than Republicans on a wide range of issues. But now moderate and liberal Republican voters are also starting to drift distinctly away from the conservative Republican “base.”
Looks like the Democrats are going to have to buy a bigger “Big Tent” – It appears there are some new elephants coming inside.

I’ve been reading TDS Co-Editor Stan Greenberg’s remarkable new book, Dispatches From the War Room, detailing his dealings with five remarkable heads of state (Bill Clinton, Nelson Mandela, Tony Blair, Ehud Barak, and Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada). And his second of two chapters on Bill Clinton, which focuses on the early days of his presidency, raises some interesting comparisons and constrasts with the initial steps taken by Barack Obama, particularly on the economy.
Clinton didn’t unveil his own economic plan (including his stimulus package) until the State of the Union Address on February 17. That happens to be the same calendar day on which Obama signed his stimulus package into law. Clinton’s stimulus package was pared down from $30 billion to $16 billion before it was even submitted to Congress (it ultimately fell below $1 billion). Obama’s came in at just under $800 billion. Clinton had to abandon the centerpiece of his campaign’s economic plan, a middle-class tax cut, again before it was submitted to Congress. Obama’s centerpiece tax cut was pared down in the stimulus package somewhat, but largely survived. Clinton’s approval ratings for his approach to the economy started high, fell quickly, rose again, and then fell again during his first few months in office. Obama’s have fluctuated somewhat, but have been largely steady.
Most notably, as Greenberg reminds us, the Clinton White House’s handling of his economic and budget plan–which, after all, wound up being the cornerstone of his administration’s extremely impressive economic record–was universally described, by friends and enemies alike, as “chaotic.” It certainly exceeded in uncertainty and actual confusion the “rookie mistakes” and occasional missteps that the Obama White House staff and economic team, which have barely had time to find their offices, are so often accused of.
Yes, the stakes facing Obama right now on the economy are significantly higher than those facing Clinton sixteen years ago, but not quite on the order of magnitude that many observers assume. The unemployment rate in January of 1993 was 7.3 percent, as compared to 7.6 percent in January of 2009. And Clinton, even more than Obama, had campaigned on reviving the economy and improving middle-class economic prospects.
In any event, some historical perspective is always helpful, and Stan’s book, which explicitly focuses on leaders in times demanding change, provides such perspective in rich and varying detail.

Well, I’m happy to report a very prominent convert to the theory that President Obama is engaging in a strategy of “grassroots bipartisanship” whose success is best measured by public opinion trends, not near-term support from Republicans in Congress. Mike Tomasky of the Guardian has a post up today that not only embraces the much-derided B-word, but cites TDS and New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg as the only folks who seem to completely “get it.”

I believe that Barack Obama is right to talk about bipartisanship, and I do not think that he should drop it because of the congressional voting pattern on one piece of legislation. I think his critics – and on the broadly construed left, among bloggers and pundits and whatnot, they are legion to the point of near unanimity, with only two exceptions I can think of – are missing an important point.
The standard criticism of Obama’s bipartisan outreach goes like this. He met with Republicans on Capitol Hill. They stiffed him. They showed that they’re impossibly troglodytic. Why should he waste any more time on these people? Just crush them.
But here’s the thing. This criticism, and this entire debate about the efficacy of his bipartisan overtures, presumes that Obama’s audience for his bipartisan talk is the Republicans in Congress and the conservatives in Washington.
But that is not his intended audience. His audience is the country.

You should read the whole thing. And you should also check out Hertzberg’s typically fine column, which coins a wonderful phrase for Obama’s political strategy: “Gandhian hardball.”

There are currently two separate pieces available on The New Republic’s site providing some serious perspectives on the direction of political journalism these days. The first is a straightforward but poignant lament for the radical downsizing of The Los Angeles Times by a former reporter there, Joe Mathews. And the second is an analysis by Gabriel Sherman of Politico, that largely web-based chronicler of the daily news and talk of Washington.
The decline of the high-quality daily newspaper offering world, national, state and local coverage is hardly a new story: declining readerships, high fixed costs, corporate consolidation, vast new online competition, shrinking ad revenues, and now, for some papers, huge investment losses by their parent companies, have all taken a major toll. The current economy seems to be simply accelerating a process that was well under way, in some respects many decades ago.
It’s a lot less clear whether Politico represents any sort of wave of the future. Yes, it’s been successful, not only in generating a lot of buzz and (at least during the presidential election) high readership, but even in making a profit. Yes, it’s also scored quite a few “scoops.” But Politico may be a Beltway sui generis; where else could a periodical largely read online successfully support itself with ad revenue from a print edition that’s given away on the streets of a relatively small area? That’s a unique function of Washington’s peculiar climate for lobbying competition at present, and also of the fact that it’s one of the few places in the country where the economy’s doing well. It’s also worth noting that Politico was very nearly born as a project of the Washington Post, where its two co-editors, John Harris and Jim VandeHei were previously political reporters. Thus, it may better reflect where a few big surviving newspapers are headed in an online-dominated future, than representing any sort of successor to the newspaper itself.
In any event, the two pieces are well worth a careful read.

At pretty much any point during the last four or five years, you could count on two public opinion survey measurements looking really, really bad: approval ratings of Congress, and assessments of the direction of the country.
So it’s interesting to note that both these numbers seem to be gradually moving up.
According to a new Gallup survey, Congress’ job approval rating jumped from 19% a month ago to 31% from February 9-12, or about the time that Congress was finalizing the economic stimulus package. As Gallup notes:

Gallup has been measuring public approval of Congress on a monthly basis since January 2001. During that time, there have been only two month-to-month increases larger than the 12-point jump observed this month.
The largest single-month increase was a 42-point rally in congressional support after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, from 42% in a Sept. 7-10, 2001, poll to 84% in mid-October 2001. Gallup found similar increases in ratings of other government institutions around that time.
The next-largest jump of 14 points occurred after Democrats took party control of both the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate in early 2007.

And if the 31% approval rating for Congress sounds pretty low, check this out:

In general, Congress’ approval ratings tend to be low. In fact, the current 31% score is very near the historical average of 35% in Gallup Polls since 1974.

The “direction of the country” (or right track/wrong track) numbers are gradually improving as well, even though most of the economic indicators continue to deteriorate. Look at pollster.com’s chart on these numbers, and you can see “right track” sloping up and “wrong track” sloping down since October at a pretty steady pace.
Meanwhile, President Obama’s job approval rating seems relatively stable in the low 60s, depending on the poll you follow.
At some point, maybe sooner, maybe later, the Obama approval ratings and the “right track” number should begin to converge. When and where they converge will probably tell you everything you need to know about the political direction of the country in 2010 and 2012.

David Waldman aka Kagro X has a must read at Daily Kos for those who may be wondering about the GOP’s track record in criticizing Democratic economic policy. Waldman has assembled an amusing collection of quotations from Republican politicians making ‘Chicken Little’ predictions about the Clinton Administration’s economic policies, which later resulted in the most impressive period of economic prosperity the U.S. has yet experienced. A sample:

On Clinton’s deficit reduction package –
Rep. Robert Michel (R-IL), Los Angeles Times, 5/28/93: They will remember who let loose this deadly virus into our economic bloodstream.
Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-GA), GOP Press Conference, House TV Gallery, 8/5/93: I believe this will lead to a recession next year. This is the Democrat machine’s recession, and each one of them will be held personally accountable.
…Rep. John Kasich (R-OH), CNN, 7/28/93: This plan will not work. If it was to work, then I’d have to become a Democrat…
…Rep. Christopher Cox (R-CA), 5/27/93: This is really the Dr. Kevorkian plan for our economy.
On jobs –
Rep. Dick Armey (R-TX), CNN, 8/2/93: The impact on job creation is going to be devastating, and the American young people in particular will suffer a fairly substantial deferment of their lives because there simply won’t be jobs for the next two to three years to go around to our young graduates across the country.
…Rep. Jim Bunning (R-KY), 8/5/93: It will not cut the deficit. It will not create jobs. And it will not cut spending.

Read the whole thing for more chuckles, as well as guidance for how seriously Americans should take the GOP’s current rash of Chicken Little doomsayings.

Sheri Berman, associate professor of political science at Barnard College, Columbia University and author of “The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth Century,” has an interesting big picture essay at Dissent‘s web pages. There’s a lot in Berman’s essay that merits thoughtful consideration, but we’ll just share this teaser and encourage everyone to give her entire piece a read:

Helping people adjust to capitalism, rather than engaging in a hopeless and ultimately counterproductive effort to hold it back, has been the historic accomplishment of the social democratic left, and it remains its primary goal today in those countries where the social democratic mindset is most deeply ensconced. Many analysts have remarked, for example, on the impressive success of countries like Denmark and Sweden in managing globalization—promoting economic growth and increased competitiveness even as they ensure high employment and social security. The Scandinavian cases demonstrate that social welfare and economic dynamism are not enemies but natural allies. Not surprisingly, it is precisely in these countries that optimism about globalization is highest. In the United States and other parts of Europe, on the other hand, fear of the future is pervasive and opinions of globalization astoundingly negative. American leftists must try to do what the Scandinavians have done: develop a program that promotes growth and social solidarity together, rather than forcing a choice between them. Concretely this means agitating for policies—like reliable, affordable, and portable health care; tax credits or other government support for labor-market retraining; investment in education; and unemployment programs that are both more generous and better incentivized—that will help workers adjust to change rather than make them fear it.

Berman has much more to say about the challenge of globalization faced by social democrats and democratic socialists in a 21st century context, as well as their respective accomplishments in the 20th century. Her article should be of considerable interest to all Democrats and progressives concerned with long-haul strategy.

One major problem Democrats are having in their internal debate regarding Obama’s support for “bipartisanship” as a political strategy results from fact that different political commentators use the word in several distinct senses and at several different levels of analysis. In ordinary Democratic political discourse there is no agreed-upon way to distinguish them.
There is a basic concept from military strategy that may prove helpful in this regard. In military thinking, the term “strategy” itself is usually broken down into three levels – the small scale level of individual battles (often called tactics), the medium-scale level of military campaigns (often called the “operational” level), and the large-scale level (sometimes called strategy proper or “grand strategy”).
This schema is, on the surface, simple. It becomes more complex, however, because the “small-medium-large” distinction repeats itself like a fractal pattern in geometry over and over at many different levels of the military hierarchy, creating a number of overlapping levels of “small-scale”, “medium-scale” and “large-scale” strategies.
This is easier to see in a specific example.

During World War II, from the point of view of the U.S. commander in Bastogne in December, 1944, the holding actions conducted at the junctions on the three main roads leading into the city were small scale battles, the defense of the city proper was the mid-level strategic challenge and the overall struggle in the geographic area around the city (which including managing the airlift of supplies through the blockade, the German outflanking of the city and continuation of their offensive to the West and the eventual relief of the city from the South by Patton’s Third Army) was the large-scale strategic perspective.
On the other hand, from the point of view of General Eisenhower and the allied command, all of Bastogne was a single battle, the entire German winter counter-offensive (The “Battle of the Bulge”) was a mid-level struggle and the entire Western front (including its resupply via the North Atlantic sea routes and the strategic bombing of Germany) represented the large-scale strategic perspective.

It is easier to disentangle these distinct layers of strategy in a military environment because the rigidly hierarchical organization (“squad-platoon-company” etc.) makes the overlapping frameworks more explicit than does politics. But the basic “small-medium-large” way of analyzing strategy can still be of use in political strategy. In the case of the current argument over “bipartisanship” for example, it makes it quickly apparent that different commentators are talking about quite different levels of strategy when they announce that “bipartisanship” has “failed”

Ezra Klein argues that Obama should have begun with a larger figure for the stimulus package as an initial bargaining position rather than seek “bipartisanship”
John Judis argues that mass membership progressive organizations like unions and MoveOn should constitute themselves as a “loyal opposition” in order to leverage legislation in a more progressive direction rather than passively supporting Obama’s “bipartisanship”.
David Broder and other high priests of the commentariat describe Obama’s “bipartisanship” as an admirable but naïve objective, floundering on a “deeply-rooted beltway culture” of Washington.

Set side by side, it is easy to recognize that these commentators are referring to essentially different things. More difficult, however, is to figure out how to clarify the ambiguity.
As a very preliminary first step, consider the following typology:

Tactical bipartisanship – seeking the support of individual Republican congressmen and women for a particular bill or measure.
Operational bipartisanship – Trying to convince a significant group of Republicans to constructively participate in the shaping of a broad legislative agenda, even if such an agenda is inevitably Democratic-dominated
Strategic bipartisanship – attempting to overcome the Republican-fostered partisan division of the electorate during last three decades. Appealing directly to Republican voters as distinct from Republican congressmen. This is the level that Ed Kilgore refers to as “grassroots bipartisanship”.

This is a very preliminary, “seat of the pants” shot at a framework. But it suggests a way of beginning to approach this particular problem – one that also starts to tackle the broader problem of distinguishing the different level of Democratic strategy.
(Note: For clarity, I have oversimplified the actual categorization framework that is used in military strategy. Democrats who want to get a deeper sense of this subject should read the two most influential statements of “Strategy” in the postwar period – Basil Liddell-Hart’s post-war edition of “The Strategy of the Indirect Approach” and Edwin Luttwack’s Strategy – the Logic of War and Peace.)

Since it’s President’s Day, and also the official commemoration of Lincoln’s bicentennial (he was actually born on February 12, 1809), it’s as good a time as any to reflect on Honest Abe and what his legacy tells us about presidential legacies generally.
As you may know, CSPAN just published a ranking of all 42 American presidents prior to Barack Obama (yes, 42, because Grover Cleveland served twice) based on a survey of 65 presidential historians. Lincoln ranked first, just ahead of George Washington and FDR.
And while no one this side of neo-Confederates would doubt Lincoln’s greatness, the bicentennial has revived some revisionist talk, most notably an article in The Root by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., entitled “Was Lincoln A Racist?”
Gates offers mainly a reexamination (much more positive in the end than the title might suggest) of well-known facts about the Great Emancipator’s attitudes on race: while always hating slavery, he also frequently disavowed any support for civic or social equality for African-Americans; was a longtime advocate of “colonization” (voluntary resettlement of black Americans in Africa) as the “solution” for the country’s race problems; was slow and halting in his steps towards abolition of slavery; was open to gradual emancipation in southern and border states to the very end of the Civil War; and expressed only partial support for voting rights–and then mainly for Union veterans–for freedmen (although one of his few such statements did convince John Wilkes Booth to execute his assassination plan).
What makes this controversy, and its first cousin, the question of Lincoln’s Reconstruction policies, so perennial is, of course, the premature termination of his presidency and his life. While the great Reconstruction historian Eric Foner in his own Lincoln bicentennial piece for The Nation stresses the steady evolution of Lincoln’s racial views in the direction of what we would today consider an enlightened position for a white politician of his time, some troubling facts remain. Before the Civil War ended, Lincoln fought hard for the readmission to the Union of Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee and Virginia with relatively few conditions; deployed much rhetoric (and advice to his generals Grant and Sherman) in favor of quick reconciliation and light treatment of former Rebels; and did, after all, at a minimum acquiesce in the nomination of Andrew Johnson as his second vice president, even though he had better reason than most to doubt Johnson’s racial views, having exempted Tennessee from the Emancipation Proclamation on Johnson’s private advice.
In his chapter on Lincoln in The Reconstuction Presidents, historian Brooks Simpson has this to say:

It is fascinating but futile to ponder what Lincoln might have done had he lived, in part because Lincoln himself did not know what he was going to do.

While Lincoln did not suffer from Johnson’s debilitating belief that “there is no such thing as Reconstruction” because no constitutional secession had actually occurred, there’s no question he was on a collision course with Radical Republicans in Congress over Reconstruction, and might well have, thanks to his incredible wartime prestige, prevailed in that battle and let the defeated South replace slavery with Jim Crow a decade earlier than was ultimately the case. (Without Congressional Reconstruction, moreover, Democrats would have almost certainly regained national power much earlier as well).
As Simpson notes, we’ll never know. But the one thing we do know is that Lincoln’s untimely death preserved his legacy intact. And it’s probably no coincidence that the most highly esteemed president in the CSPAN ranking was preceded by the lowest ranking, James Buchanan, and succeeded by next-lowest-ranking, Andrew Johnson.

As Friday’s staff post on a new Democracy Corps survey illustrated, Barack Obama’s general leadership as president continues to enjoy robust public support, despite the reams of MSM, conservative, and sometimes progressive opinion suggesting that his first days in office have been characterized by a steady fall from grace.
This reality has even penetrated one of Washington’s most important bullhorns for self-referential beltway buzz, Politico. In an article today entitled “Public Still Sky-High on Obama “Brand,” Ben Smith notes in some detailt that all the screaming over the stimulus bill, Daschle, Gregg, Obama’s various “missteps,” and the supposed re-energization of the GOP, doesn’t seem to be resonating that well around the country:

With Barack Obama’s victory in passing a massive stimulus package marred by days of bad press — as not a single House Republican backed the bill, his health czar went down in flames and his second pick for commerce secretary walked away — the administration has been cut down to size, and lost some of its bipartisan sheen.
Such, at least, has been the beltway chatter, but so far the numbers don’t back it up.
Obama’s approval rating remains well above 60 percent in tracking polls. A range of state pollsters said they’d seen no diminution in the president’s sky-high approval ratings, and no improvement in congressional Republicans’ dismal numbers.
And that’s before the stimulus creates billions of dollars in spending on popular programs, which could, at least temporarily, further boost Obama’s popularity.
“It’s eerie — I read the news from the Beltway, and there’s this disconnect with the polls from the Midwest that I see all around me,” said Ann Seltzer, the authoritative Iowa pollster who works throughout the Midwest.

Now this is hardly the first time in recent history that daily news cycle wars in Washington have been erroneously conflated–particularly by Republicans–with national political perceptions, as anyone who remembers the monomaniacal GOP effort to drive Bill Clinton from office will attest. But no matter what your partisan allegiences happen to be, it is good to be reminded that the universe doesn’t revolve around Washington scorecards of who is up and who is down. Americans, for all their foibles, don’t have the long-term memory capacity of a flea, and on same occasions have a better understanding of broad historical trends, philosophical differences between the parties, and empircal reality than the smart but self-absorbed denizens of the Emerald City.