In Politico‘s ‘The Arena,’ Drew Westen has this harsh evaluation of the Obama Administration’s leveraging of its mandate:

Unless the Democrats dramatically change course or the new President puts his foot down and reminds the American people who they voted for, any new legislation will have to pass muster with co-presidents Collins, Specter, and Snowe, and their shadow cabinet of Cornyn, Boehner, Shelby, and McConnell. The new co-presidents will not be able to do the kind of damage their party did over the last eight years, but they will be able to prevent the Democrats from fixing it—and to allow the radical conservatives to say “I told you so” in two years and take back large swaths of the House and Senate. If somehow this stimulus package succeeds, they will be able to claim that it was their changes, their tax cuts, and their “fiscal restraint” that worked.

Ouch. I’m hoping Westen has overstated the case here, especially insofar as his prognosis for the ’10 elections are concerned. Less than a month into president Obama’s term seems a little early for d.o.a. pronouncements. Still Westen may have a point about the need for some bully pulpit to rally supporters, which has been well-noted by Ed here at TDS and others.
Digby has an interesting take on Westen’s argument, affirming his “good case that winning elections required appealing to emotion,” but adding,

I never agreed with him and some other advisers, that people didn’t also need to vote on the basis of substantive political argument. If you don’t ground politics in ideas, it’s nothing more than show business (or religion.) And while the Republicans are great showmen, they very definitely ground their politics in ideology. They sell it with emotion, to be sure, and it’s completely incoherent when you scratch beneath the surface, but it’s there. It’s what they call “principle” and it brainwashes people to sell out their own self-interest without knowing they are doing it.
…there is a consequence to refusing to fight campaigns on ideology and present those ideas as a cogent set of political principles. Right now, the Democrats are basically assuming that people are hurting enough to find the Republicans reprehensible for trying to obstruct the help they need. That’s a pretty risky strategy….Democrats do themselves no favors by looking for magic bullets. What Westen (and Lakoff before him) prescribed was invaluable. But they were never adequate. Ideology matters and the Democrats have to explain theirs and attack the Republicans’.

Both Westen and Digby provide important insights here. But it’s not quite enough just to call for a more energetic presidential bully pulpit and a more vigorous statement of ideological clarity. What seems to be missing thus far is a commitment and a structure to transform Obama’s prodigious campaign assets into a strong, responsive citizen lobby. Obama does have a potentially powerful, but as yet undeployed asset in his massive mailing list of supporters, who wait to be mobilized as citizen lobbyists. He has been sending out emails to his supporters. But I’m wondering if a more formal structure, perhaps a multi-state network headed up by his best campaign workers could be called together and organized into a legislative task force, so that they have a clear identity, instead of just receiving emails urging them to action. It hasn’t really been tried before. But the potential for such an organization has never been stronger — and the need has rarely been more compelling.

The hot read in the progressive chattering classes today is an article for The New Republic by the always-estimable John Judis arguing that Barack Obama can’t achieve his goals without vibrant and popularly-based pressure from the Left to raise his progressive game.
His argument has predictably unleashed a lot of pent-up progressive angst about Obama’s “centrism” and “bipartisanship.” Some of it is very specific, like Ezra Klein’s suggestion, which galvanizes a very large number of scattered lefty blogospheric views, that Obama should have come into the “stimulus” debate with a much bigger figure, like maybe a trillion-and-a-half, anticipating the “centrist” reductions necessary to get the legislation through Congress and raising the final figure.
Other commentors on Judis’ hypothesis, like Glenn Greenwald, argue for a broader opposition to Obama, because, they think, he has little but contempt for progressive views:

Part of the political shrewdness of Obama has been that he’s been able to actually convince huge numbers of liberals that it’s a good thing when he ignores and even stomps on their political ideals, that it’s something they should celebrate and even be grateful for. Hordes of Obama-loving liberals are still marching around paying homage to the empty mantras of “pragmatism” and “post-partisan harmony” — the terms used to justify and even glorify Obama’s repudiation of their own political values.

To get back to Judis’ own argument, it’s important that he doesn’t seem to value the progressive-gabber allies that have found his article most attractive:

I think the main reason that Obama is having trouble is that there is not a popular left movement that is agitating for him to go well beyond where he would even ideally like to go. Sure, there are leftwing intellectuals like Paul Krugman who are beating the drums for nationalizing the banks and for a $1 trillion-plus stimulus. But I am not referring to intellectuals, but to movements that stir up trouble among voters and get people really angry.

Judis goes on to critique the unions and Moveon.org as the progressive forces that need to support a Loyal Opposition From the Left, and to offer the immensely radical and (according to some interpretations) proto-fascist Share the Wealth and Townsend movements of the 1930s as historical precedents for the kind of constructive Left alternative that can keep Obama’s feet on the path of righteousness.
There’s not much doubt that Judis’ hypothesis is closely related to his fear that Obama, particularly on the internatioal finance front, simply isn’t getting the job done. As he said back in early January:

Obama is certainly right to abandon the “anything goes” mentality of the Bush administration and to promote an $800 billion stimulus program. But to reverse to current economic collapse, the new administration may have to go even farther than this in the direction of a fiscal equivalent of war and a new Bretton Woods.

In many respects, Judis is calling for a moblization of progressives to push Obama “to the Left” based on his assumption that Obama, like FDR in his first year, is going to fail in generating a major turnaround in the economy.
And I’d have to say that Judis’ prescription will only make sense if Obama indeed fails. You can’t really mobilize anything like a Huey Long or Francis Townsend “left opposition” to Obama short of a catastrophic economic failure that challenges the basic presumptions of American democracy.
Moreoever, the most viable left-populist opposition to Obama agenda is going to be about the financial bailouts, and the relative ability of Obama-Geithner to distinguish their efforts from those of their Republican predecessors. John Juds may have already decided they simply can’t do that; if they can, then the grassroots pro-Obama campaign that Judis implicitly abhors may actually make sense.
The broadest issue raised by Judis is the idea that Barack Obama needs a Left Opposition to position himself as the new “center.” I will mention without further commentary the rich irony of the idea that the liberals who so resented Bill Clinton’s alleged “triangulation” strategy are now begging Obama to triangulate them.
My own feeling is that Obama should continue to focus on commanding a majority of Americans in support of his presidency and his general agenda, and at the same time seek to lead and represent progressives, even if they don’t like every element of his strategy or policies. His whole political persona up until now has been to depict himself as a progressive who also reprents the “center” in American politics. The “left” can support him or (selectively) oppose him. But the idea that he can’t succeed without an obdurate Left Opposition that forces him, and the debate, to the Left, strikes me as both an extrapoliation of congressional politics into public opinion, and as an underestimation of Obama’s own political abilty to move national policy to “the left” on his own terms.

Democracy Corps has just released an important new study, “President Obama’s Political Project,” the first in-depth analysis of how the public perceives “the president’s mission and larger mandate for the country.” The study is based on data from two surveys of LV’s, conducted for Democracy Corps by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner from 1/26-29 and 2/9-10. Among the findings (from the overview):

Not surprising, when forced to choose voters say that returning the economy to sound footing and creating quality jobs is Obama’s top goal. But more surprising, given the dominance of the stimulus story, is that voters see through this to other goals – which are seen as somewhat more important to the Obama project – and thus give the presidency definition beyond the recovery. For the public, at the heart of the Obama project is a turn away from greed and the super-rich and toward the middle class and its values, with greater opportunity, security and rising prosperity.

The PDF Analysis of the survey data indicates that 60 percent of voters support the Presdient’s economic recovery plan, while “a cautious 40 percent” agree that “he is keeping his promise to create or save 3 milllion jobs.” A remarkable 82 percent of survey respondents agreed that “making sure this country works not just for the super-rich. but that everyone has a chance to succeed and prosper” is Obama’s “most important goal.”
Interestingly, the public fervently supports Obama’s efforts on behalf of “restoring respect for America in the world as a moral leader, restoring our key alliances and putting more emphasis on diplomacy,” with 60 percent agreeing that “Obama is keeping his promise” in that regard. As the overview explains:

Equally surprising, given the focus on the economy, is the importance that voters say Obama places on restoring respect for America around the world. The view that he wants to change how America relates to the world is nearly as strong as the perception that he is committed to greater equity and restoring the middle class and ranks above short-term job creation. This response underscores the scope of what voters think Obama is trying to achieve.

Further, DCorps reports that,

…the public is very attentive to the larger character of his project and how it can change the American society and America’s position in the world. Over 60 percent of voters say Obama and the Democrats are making progress addressing the country’s problems, twice the number who say they are faltering, but that judgment and the character of the Obama political project will emerge in the struggles ahead.

Despite all of the fuss about cabinet appointments and other issues and distractions, the public sees a clear mandate for for President Obama with a high degree of confidence that he is doing his best to address America’s critical priorities.

While we are obviously in the midst of a national economic crisis, it’s equally obvious that some places and some categories of citizens are getting hit harder than others. But how will the geographical impact of the recession play out over time?
Well, the controversial but always stimulating urban theorist Richard Florida has some elaborate thoughts on that subject in a long cover article for The Atlantic. Some of his analysis unsurprisingly relies on his longstanding contention that places with high concentrations of “creative class” types will do well over the long run. But he offers some more specific insights that make a great deal of common sense.
Most notably, he points out that you can’t predict a given metropolitan area’s economic trajectory simply by shoehorning it into or out of a “troubled industry” category. Charlotte, for example, is a major banking center, which ought to spell trouble, but the consolidation of that industry through buyouts of near-bankrupt institutions may actually concentrate banking jobs there and get the city through the worst of the crisis. Similarly, the southern states sporting foreign car plants could obtain some relative benefit if U.S. automakers continue to struggle or go belly-up.
There are some cities, though, that have in the recent past fueled hyper-growth through locally determined economic factors that don’t auger well for the future. Florida mentions Phoenix and Las Vegas, whose growth explosions have been heavily dependent on construction, real estate, and retiree savings (Vegas, of course, also depends enormously on tourism, and thus national income and consumption trends) as places that may never quite be the same. To a large extent, their main growth industry was growth itself.
What the reader takes away from this article is that breezy generalizations about the regional impact of the crisis (which in turn helps determine its political impact) are often imprecise. Sure, the manufacturing centers of the Heartland are in deep, deep trouble, but Chicago, suggests Florida, is enough of a national and international center for professional services (and part of a “mega-region” that includes Toronto) that it could emerge even stronger. The most famous financial center of them all, New York, actually has a far more diversified economy than Des Moines, Iowa.
There’s a lot of other material in the article about things like the “metabolism” of various cities that reflects Florida’s earlier work, and is interesting if not self-evidently convincing. But it’s not too early to think about the reshaping of the country, and of the geographic and demographic trends we all began to take for granted over the last several decades, that will likely follow when the current crisis ends.

Open Left‘s Chris Bowers has a fun takedown of msm reports that term Gregg’s withdrawal a “blow” to Obama. Bowers is exactly right. The idea is pretty silly.
Yes, No-Drama Obama would rather have had all of his appointments go smoothly. But reasonable voters understand that there was no way to predict Gregg’s histrionics. Most U.S. Senators get it that cabinet secretaries are charged to carry out the President’s policies, as part of a team, not as unelected free agents doing their own thing. I remember being taught that in middle school civics class. Gregg’s realization comes a little late and invites ridicule.
Characterizing Gregg’s vacillations as a “blow” to the President, rather than the GOP, is also a stretch. More on point is this from the comments following Bowers’ post:

He’s shown the whole world what we in NH have always known – that Judd is all about what Judd wants…And he, the last major GOP figure in NH, has become the laughing stock of both parties.

and another:

Merits of the appointment aside, I don’t see how this is a “blow”; the public is left with the clear impression that Obama made yet another attempt to bridge differences with the GOP, only to be rebuffed…This doesn’t make him look bad; if anything, he looks magnanimous, and the GOP looks petty.

Well said. Like Obama’s bipartisan outreach efforts or not, his sincerity, goodwill and consistency in reaching out are not in doubt. Indeed, they are highlighted in contrast to his Republican adversaries.
The Gregg withdrawal may also recall memories of McCain’s erratic behavior concerning his decision to debate or not following the economic meltdown. That can’t be good for the GOP.
Especially given Ed’s point in his post yesterday about the importance of the Census, Gregg’s withdrawal is not unwelcome among Democrats concerned about strengthening our case for reforms. President Obama now has plenty of cover for nominating a strong Democrat to head the Commerce Department, and it would be a shame not to use it. In that regard, Larry J. Sabato’s contribution to a round-up on the Gregg withdrawall in today’s WaPo may prove instructive:

The Gregg withdrawal can be a watershed. It’s been a grand and noble experiment, but now the Obama administration should abandon aggressive bipartisanship. The president deserves great credit for reaching out to Republicans in Cabinet appointments, frequent consultation and some substantive compromise on the stimulus bill. President Obama read public opinion correctly: Americans want civil debate between the parties, and that aspect of bipartisanship should be continued.
Yet pleasantries should never be exchanged at the cost of an electoral mandate. Obama secured a higher percentage of the vote than any Democratic presidential nominee since 1860, save for Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. Splitting the difference on issues of principle waters down his mandate and dilutes the changes his supporters expect him to deliver. We have a two-party system, not a one-party scheme, and the fundamental differences between Democrats and Republicans create clear choices for the electorate. Obama should succeed or fail based on enactment of the Democratic platform. Voters will be the judge of Democrats’ handiwork in 2010 and 2012. Leave “national unity” governments to parliamentary nations, and let the American two-party system work.

It may be that the President’s bipartisan outreach will get better results later on, after his Administration is more securely established. For now, Sabato’s argument makes sense.

Today’s surprise announcement by Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) that he is withdrawing his nomination as Commerce Secretary has a lot of implications, large and small. But one thing is very clear: his withdrawal removes a potential threat to a well-conducted decennial Census in 2010.
Whatever his merits and demerits generally as a senator, Gregg has been a consistent enemy of efforts to let the Census Bureau conduct a count using anything like aggressive efforts to, well, count Americans. As a New York Times editorial observed when Gregg was first nominated:

The Census Bureau is a major agency within the Commerce Department, and the decennial census — the next one is in 2010 — is a mammoth undertaking. After years of mismanagement and underfinancing by the Bush administration, the bureau is so ill prepared to conduct next year’s count that Congressional investigators have warned that it is at high risk of failure unless corrective action is taken immediately.
Mr. Gregg was never a friend of the census. As chairman of the Senate committee that oversees the Commerce Department’s budget, he frequently tried to cut the bureau’s financing. In 1999, he opposed emergency funds for the 2000 census requested by President Bill Clinton and the Republican-controlled House.

An accurate census obviously has a big political impact, given its impact on reapportionment of Congress and the fifty state legislatures. But it also has an enormous effect on all sorts of federal programs that distribute dollars based on census figures concerning the concentration of various population groups in various states and localities. And beyond government, the census is the most critical database for virtually every measurement of American society, in business, in the social sciences, and in journalism.
It’s not totally clear when the Obama administration decided to pair the Gregg nomination with a proposal to make the census director report directly to the White House. But Gregg’s own statement of withdrawal called the census issue one of the two problems–the other being the economic stimulus legislation–that kept him from moving forward with this nomination.
There will be plenty of time later to analyze why Obama made this flawed appointment. It doesn’t really matter, ultimately. But its withdrawal is good news for anyone who wants a fair and complete Census.

Via ThinkProgress, we learn today that the office of House GOP poohbah Eric Cantor has issued a statement dismissing President Obama’s commitment to “bipartisanship” as nothing more than a marketing ploy:

“Though the administration’s marketing of its bipartisan hard work has been outstanding, the actual work has been almost nonexistent,” said Brad Dayspring, spokesman for House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.).

This is because, presumably, Obama and House Democrats did not give a whole lot of thought to accomodating the arguments of Cantor and other House Republicans that the entire thrust of the economic stimulus legislation was a terrible idea, involving “welfare” and “socialism,” that should be rejected in favor Bush-style across-the-board and corporate tax cuts, along with deregulation.
As one of the more consistent defenders of Obama’s brand of “bipartisanship” in the progressive blogosphere, I’d beg leave to make it clear that it has nothing whatsoever to do with the Eric Cantors of the political world. Obama’s “grassroots bipartisanship” means reaching out to the millions of Republicans (and Republican-leaning independents) around the country who may not particularly like or trust Democrats, but who generally accept the idea of direct government action to revive the economy and to deal with long-overdue national challenges like health care reform, climate change, regulation of the financial sector, and ridding Washington of the death-grip of pay-for-play special pleading by corporate interests. Some of them also don’t like a foreign policy that engages in unnecessary wars at the expense of our national interests. These are the people who have been fundamentally misrepresented–literally and figuratively–by congressional Republicans for years, a misrepresentation that looks likely to grow worse as GOPers convince themselves that Bush’s main sin was excessive “moderation.”
So in reaching out to these essentially disenfranchised Americans, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for Obama to recognize the GOP pols who have disenfranchised them as their exclusive bargaining agents. I don’t fault him for going throgh the motions of “reaching out” to the Cantors of the world, because their predictable rejection of his overtures helps make his broader point. And in any event, anyone who thinks Eric Cantor gives a damn about “bipartisanship”–short of some sort of corrupt Washington power-sharing arrangement that repudiates the results of the last two national elections and the real-life results of Republican rule–hasn’t been paying much attention to the events of the last eight years.

In an example of how one person’s political crisis represents another person’s opportunity for grassroots democracy: An email from the National Jewish Democratic Council today offers a link to a site wherein you can go through various scenarios for Israeli party coalitions, and Build Your Own Government.
The site itself is in Hebrew, which could limit its usefulness to many American kibitzers. But the party lines are all color-coded.
Next time Barack Obama has to put together a coalition in the Senate to pass key legislation, a tool like this would be helpful.

Last Sunday, Open Left published a critique of an article we ran here at TDS – an article by Andrew Levison titled Obama the Sociologist. The critique, by Paul Rosenberg, is tough and argues its thesis with commendable energy and seriousness, but, at the same time, it also keeps the debate civil and clearly focused on the issues. In the coming months, as greater problems and tensions arise within the Democratic coalition and community, it is going to become more and more vital that Democrats maintain certain standards of respect and civility, even as they passionately debate policies and political strategies.
Specifically, here are three positive things that Rosenberg’s does in the course of his argument:

1. He assumes the writer he is criticizing is intellectually honest and doesn’t attribute ulterior motives. There are several places where Rosenberg explicitly notes that he has the opportunity to take a cheap shot, but chooses to give the author the benefit of the doubt instead.
2. He treats a debate between Democrats over political strategy as an attempt to identify both good ideas and bad ones and not as a contest whose goal is refute everything an opposing author says. At one point (referring to both Levison’s article and a related analysis by Mark Schmitt) Rosenberg says “I want to stress that both pieces are thoughtful and have useful insights. But I believe both are colored by wishful thinking and have some very flawed analysis as well.” A strong disagreement is very clearly and firmly stated, but it avoids being rude or insulting.
3. He avoids criticizing a publication as a whole for the opinions expressed in a particular article. At one point Rosenberg says: “this is not an attempt to pick a fight, much less to position Open Left in opposition to The Democratic Strategist. Indeed, despite some differences with its initial analysis, I completely agree with the main thrust of another recent piece.”

This is an excellent starting point for a set of rules for how Democrats should debate amongst themselves. TDS supports these standards and hopes that the rest of the Democratic community – progressives, centrists, conservatives, whatever — will all follow Rosenberg’s lead.
(Note: The Author of Obama The Sociologist is developing an amplification of his original analysis that will appear in a few days)

A House-Senate conference committee has come up with what will probably be the final version of the economic stimulus package.
From scattered media reports, it looks like the “losers” in the negotiations will be first-time homebuyers and house-flippers who won’t get much of the Senate-passed tax credit for home purchases; and state governments, who will lose most if not all of the flexible federal assistance supplied in the House bill. The AMT “patch” in the Senate bill, that temporarily protects upper-middle-class taxpayers from a big hit on Tax Day, stayed in at a price of $70 billion.
There are garbled reports as to whether conferees did or did not scale back the Obama “Make Work Pay” tax credit, the centerpiece of his campaign’s tax plan.
The one thing that is reasonably clear is that the package will be enacted. The only Republican senator even threatening to leave the reservation after the Senate passed its bill, Arlen Specter, will have a hard time rejecting the conference report unless he’s willing to get deep in the weeds of the differences from the Senate bill. And we will soon see the Obama administration and congressional Democrats thumping the tubs for quick passage of the final bill.
THURSDAY MORNING UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist
Politically, there’s a lot of grumbling from House Democrats–both progressives unhappy with Senate-passed cuts and Blue Dogs who don’t like unfunded tax cuts–about the AMT “patch,” which survived conference intact (see this Tom Edsall piece for an assessment of the politics of this provision). But it’s unlikely to develop into a revolt on the conference bill itself.