Over at The New Republic, TDS Co-Editor William Galston has published an article pointing to Ronald Reagan’s negotiation of an economic crisis and his subsequent landslide re-election as instructive for Barack Obama today.
In Galston’s take, Reagan overcame plunging approval ratings and a very difficult midterm election by constantly reminding Americans of the opposing party’s responsibility for the economic calamity, and its apparent failure to learn from it, and by sticking to his basic policy guns despite poor short-term results.
In some ways, Obama should find it easier than Reagan did to hold his predecessor responsible for the terrible economy, since a recession was well under way in Bush’s final year as president, and the financial collapse occurred on his watch. On the other hand, Reagan’s party did not have the sort of control of Washington (the House remained Democratic throughout his tenure) that Obama’s does, and even the Republican-controlled Senate rebelled against him on occasion (most notably in forcing a tax increase in 1982).
Generally, though, the parallels between Reagan’s political situation then and Obama’s now are indeed striking. And certainly Democrats hope to be able to say in 2012 that it’s “morning in America again.”

Yesterday’s elections in Israel can and are being spun in two different directions. On the one hand, Tzipi Livni’s Kadima party, which is committed to the pursuit of a two-state solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, narrowly (and somewhat surprisingly) outpolled Bibi Netanyahu’s Likud, theoretically giving her the opportunity to form a government. On the other hand, right-wing parties as a whole gained strength, and the big winner was Avigdor Lieberman’s hyper-nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu party, which eclipsed Labor, the long-time governing party of the country, to become the third largest electoral bloc.
Today, in fact, Livni and Netanyahu are in hot pursuit of Lieberman’s support, since either leader can obtain the chance to put together a government with a majority of Knesset members on board. Lieberman’s party, among other things, favors the disenfranchisement of “disloyal” Israeli Arabs, and is adamantly opposed to any negotiations with Hamas.
At present, there are three possibilities for Israel’s next government: a right-wing coalition led by Netanyahu (the most likely outcome); a Kadima-led coalition that includes Lieberman’s party (which would definitely come with a veto over any possible talks with Palestinians); or some sort of “centrist” coalition (presumably led by Livni) that includes both Kadima and Likud but excludes Yisrael Beiteinu.
Any of these three scenarios would likely paralyze any Israeli movement towards new negotiations with the Palestinians or with Syria, while increasing the odds of unilateral action towards Iran. Livni’s personal victory notwithstanding (and remember that she was until recently a Likudnik herself), the Israeli political center has clearly moved to the right by any meaningful measure. This is obviously not good news for the Obama’s administration and its aspiration to jump-start new land-for-peace negotiations.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

There is something inherently sad about reading a writer with a reputation for greatness and coming to the sudden, jarring realization that time and technology have inescapably passed him by. But that kind of conclusion is hard to avoid after reading Leon Wieseltier’s latest Washington Diary for The New Republic.
The centerpiece of his column is a complaint about an email he received from President Obama after the Inauguration. The crux of Wieseltier’s argument boils down to this: Obama’s rhetoric and the tools he uses to advance it are based on the premise that we are one nation, united with common purpose and goals, but we are in fact a splintered collection of people with divurgent views of reality and all Obama’s techological ‘networks’ only succeed in creating a veneer of actual connectivity.
The argument about our relative level of unification as a country seems silly knowing that close to three quarters of Americans approve of Obama’s rhetoric, and perhaps that’s why Wieseltier saves his real ire for the networks. Toward the end of the piece, he writes:

For one of [Obama’s] innovations in American politics has been the zealous adoption of the ideology of the network. To be sure, there were practical reasons: email and YouTube are cheaper than direct mail, and of course cooler–but direct mail is all they are. The number of people who can be reached in an instant is genuinely astounding–but this is a marketer’s dream, nothing more.

This statement is indicative of a fundmentally-flawed and outdated worldview.
If I were to guess, I’d bet that Wieseltier still pays for a newspaper subscription. Why does that matter? Because people who purchase print newspapers are readers.
People who read newspapers online, however, are users. Using tools built by the media outlets, we email articles to friends. We share op-eds on Twitter, react to news stories on blogs, and we post columns to Facebook.
People read direct mail. People use Internet communication.
We forward the emails that Obama sends to our family. We rate YouTube videos and then we post them to our personal websites. We react to everything, which in turn sparks a ‘national conversation.’
Compare that with offline communication. No one ever puts new postage on a piece of direct mail to send on to a friend.
And the remarkable thing about Obama and his staff is their ability to turn online communication into offline action.
Since the campaign ended, thousands of individuals have signed up to Facebook groups with the expressed intent of lobbying Congress to pass Obama’s recovery bill. This weekend, thousands of people attended ‘Economic Recovery House Meetings’ to discuss the president’s plan. Organizing for America tells that there were 3,587 meetings in 1,579 cities in 429 congressional districts and all 50 states.
Try getting people to do that with a piece of direct mail.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

A very interesting discussion has broken out between two titans of the polling-analysis business, Mark Blumenthal of pollster.com and Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com. Nate has been exploring the theory (beloved of some Obama critics in the blogosphere) that the President’s rhetoric of bipartisanship on the economic stimulus legislation has blurred his message even as rank-and-file Republicans move decisively against him, producing net losses in his approval ratings without producing any offsetting benefits. Mark responded with alternative explanations of the slight drop in Obama’s approval ratings as entirely predictable, and suggested that a more partisan approach might have worsened them significantly.
Here’s the nut graph of Mark’s argument:

[Is there] evidence of the limits of bipartisanship? Let’s remember that Obama holds an overall approval rating that most polls now peg in the mid-sixty percent range, after winning with 52.9% of the votes cast. Doesn’t the aggregate approval rating, including approval from roughly a third of Republicans, say something about the benefits of the “bipartisan” messaging? And how will those Republican and Republican leaning independents respond to harsher partisan rhetoric from the President?

(It’s worth noting that the most recent Democracy Corps poll also found a third of Republican voters supporting Obama’s “policies and goals”).
Nate’s response adknowledges that there’s no way to definitively answer the question of Obama’s more partisan path-not-taken. But in terms of the path he did take:

[As] Mark points out, most of the decline in Obama’s approval ratings has come from Republicans, among whom he has lost a net of about 24 approval points (approval rating less disapproval rating) in two weeks. This is in spite of the fact that by roughly a 2:1 margin, Republicans think that Obama is in fact working in a bipartisan fashion, according to the latest CBS News poll.
In other words, there are quite a lot of Republicans who believe that (i) Obama is in fact governing in a bipartisan manner but (ii) disapprove of his performance anyway. Republicans can appreciate Obama’s civility — but still disagree with every piece of his agenda.

More pointedly, Nate suggests that Obama really doesn’t need rank-and-file Republican support to keep his approval ratings at a positive level. His conclusion:

[The} value of maintaining the appearance of bipartisanship does not appear to be all that high if it gets in the way of persuasion. For a week or so there during the stimulus debate, we were getting a lot of the former from the White House, but not so much of the latter.

This appears to put Nate at least generally in the camp of those who applauded the President’s speech to the House Democratic Caucus last week, and his press conference last night, as a sign that a chastened Obama has largely gotten over all the bipartisanship claptrap and is finally delivering a clear progressive message that will attract anyone who is genuinely persuadable.
As it happens, I’m among those who also have applauded Obama’s most recent speeches, but for a somewhat different reason than those articulated by most progressive bloggers. He’s distinguishing cooperation with “Republicans” (or perhaps more accurately, non-Democrats) from accomodation of conservative ideological attacks on his agenda, which in turn he’s identifying with the failed Bush policies of the past, and with business-as-usual in Washington. To put it another way, he’s seeking to identify those who are outside of (or shakily committed to) his November 4 coalition who are actually persuadable, and separating them from the GOP, whose obdurate opposition to the stimulus package is actually a good thing in terms of expanding the Democratic Party.
And this is why despite my enormous respect for Nate Silver, I think he’s got one conclusion almost backwards when he says:

While Obama certainly needs the support of a couple of Republican senators to pass his agenda, he doesn’t necessarily need the support of Republican voters.

In terms of his long-range goals, Obama’s ability to influence a significant minority of Republican voters–and even more importantly, of Republican-leaning independents–is of greater value, and comes at a lower cost, than efforts to drag more than one or two Republican senators across the line on specific legislation. Such broad support outside Washington, if it is maintained, will either create great pressure on at least some Republican members of Congress to behave themselves, or if they don’t, will help alienate potentially Republican voters from the GOP. This is what I’ve called “grassroots bipartisanship,” and looking beyond the stimulus bill to future fights over health care and other key issues, and to the next two election cycles, it remains a pretty good strategy for Obama.
That doesn’t mean that Obama has done everything right during the stimulus debate: he often didn’t make the distinction between grassroots Republicans and independents and conservative ideologues in Washington very clear; the Gregg and Daschle cabinet controversies interfered with his message and embroiled him in what looked like conventional Beltway politics; and all the attention being paid to the “centrist coalition” in the Senate also helped make the final legislation look like the produce of High Broderist deal-cutting. You can also make the case that the administration’s handling of the latest phase of the financial industry “rescue” looks dangerously a lot like the handling of the first phase by the Bush administration, which the general public strongly disliked.
But all those missteps were potentially damaging not because they involved “bipartisanship,” but because they imperiled the President’s ability to stand for a large-majority, supra-partisan coalition around the country seeking to force change on Washington.

After cruising the Rags of Record for insightful reports on the Senate vote on the stimulus, take a couple of minutes to read Dieter Bradbury’s article in the Kennebec Journal Morning Sentinel, “Collins gains political capital in vote: Senator won’t back stimulus if bloated spending measures reinstated.” Bradbury’s article provides an interesting home-state perspective on what is involved in piecing together a barely filibuster-proof majority, while focusing on Collin’s pivotal role in sculpting the compromise. Bradbury also does a good job of showing how Collins boosted her own stock, including:

Richard M. Skinner, a government professor at Bowdoin College, said Collins is now in good shape to win administration and Democratic support for bills that would benefit Maine, having played a pivotal role in the economic stimulus debate…”She’s really in a position to get what she wants from the Obama administration,” he said.

While artfully covering her rear flank:

Even if the stimulus fails and the economy continues to decline, it’s unlikely that Collins would pay a price for supporting the measure, said Sandy Maisel, who teaches government at Colby College.”If this is passed and it is seen as a failure, it will reflect on the Obama administration,” he said.
Maisel said the risk for Collins lies just ahead, as a conference committee hashes out differences between the $827 billion Senate bill and the $820 billion House version. Collins has said she will not support the bill if “bloated” spending provisions are reinserted….”If she decides she’s not going to vote for the conference report, then she is in the position of being the person who causes this to go down,” Maisel said.

Hard to see much of an upside in Collins playing a spoiler role. But the option is there if public opinion heads south on the stimulus, an unlikely prospect, if recent polls are any indication.
The 61-36 procedural vote was close to perfect, indicating that the compromise bill is about as progressive as it could have been and still pass. This is not to say that the left critics are wrong about the stimulus being too small and the tax cuts too large to do much good — a separate question. They may be right. But a razor-close margin is exactly what you want to see to get the most progressive possible bill passed.
Collins’ leadership shows the important role liberal Republicans will play during the Obama administration. Sure, we would rather have a filibuster-proof Senate majority. But it helps a lot to have a few Republicans neutralizing the ideologues in their own party. It reminds me of a similar situation back in 1982-83, when Republican Congressman Jack Kemp was instrumental in passing the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday bill. From a pragmatic, reform agenda point of view, the proper care and feeding of liberal Republicans is a worthy Democratic priority.
Give due credit as well to President Obama and his legislative staff for having the smarts to give Collins the room she needed to maneuver the centrists into position and cobble the majority together. Harry Reid also owes her big time. As Bob Herbert put it in his New York Times column today,

It’s early, but there are signs that Mr. Obama may be the kind of president who is incomprehensible to the cynics among us — one who is responsible and mature, who is concerned not just with the short-term political realities but also the long-term policy implications…Mr. Obama is like a championship chess player, always several moves ahead of friend and foe alike. He’s smart, deft, elegant and subtle. While Lindsey Graham was behaving like a 6-year-old on the Senate floor and Pete Sessions was studying passages in his Taliban handbook, Mr. Obama and his aides were assessing what’s achievable in terms of stimulus legislation and how best to get there.

It will take a little more time to see if the white house is really playing championship chess. For now, however, the poker analogy fits nicely, and Obama and Collins have just played a very shrewd hand.

Note: this is a guest post from Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, offering his own take on the debate over President Obama’s handling of the stimulus legislation. We invite and intend to publish different points of view on this subject, as part of our continuing debate on the extent to which Democrats should accomodate, on philosophical, strategic or tactical grounds, “bipartisan” approaches to the administration’s agenda.
The stimulus plan, President Obama’s first serious attempt to change the way Washington works, is hitting a stonewall of partisan rigidity. Republicans are the worst offenders, but Obama is also getting strafed from his left.
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman came out blasting yesterday, all but calling the president a postpartisan wimp.
Obama’s stimulus plan, he said, is too small to plug the hole in our economy created by faltering private demand. And he chided the president for allowing a bipartisan group of Senate moderates to strip various provisions out of the House bill. In language that could qualify for a Pulitzer Prize in hyperbole, Krugman claimed that the dastardly centrists would kill hundreds of thousands of jobs and cut vital health care and food programs, while offering new a fat tax break to affluent homeowners.
On food stamps and aid to states, Krugman makes a fair point. But some of the education provisions are more questionable and the housing credit, properly targeted on first-time homebuyers, could help to halt the slide in housing prices. In general, Krugman’s outrage seems out of proportion to the actual differences between the House and Senate bills.
If size matters, as Krugman insists, it’s worth pointing out that the Senate plan is bigger ($827 billion vs. the House’s $819 billion). Many economists believe that the plan’s details matter less than its scale, because they believe what’s essential now is to boost the confidence and “animal spirits” of U.S. consumers, businesses and lenders.
Besides, the House and Senate are very different institutions and are almost always going to serve up different versions of bills. Reconciling them is why we have legislative conferences. What’s more, Obama only has 58 Democratic votes in the Senate, two shy of a filibuster-proof majority. He needs to pick up a handful of GOP votes to get the bill into conference. The real world choice we face is not between $827 billion and whatever larger figure Krugman believes Washington must spend to rescue the economy, but between roughly $800 billion and a smaller package.
What really seems to bug Krugman, though, is Obama’s postpartisan vision. Instead of wasting time reaching out to Republicans, the president ought to reach for a baseball bat. By strenuous campaigning against GOP obstructionism, Obama could remind voters of why they liked him in the first place, and turn up the heat on his conservative opponents. The problem with that theory is that voters responded powerfully to Obama’s promise to end partisan paralysis in Washington rather than pursue a Democratic version of the Rovian strategy of maximum feasible polarization.
It is galling, of course, to hear Hill Republicans assert that they are simply standing on their “small government” principles. This would be more convincing if the party hadn’t colluded in an orgy of earmarking, borrowing and spending during the Bush years – crowned by a new $8 trillion prescription drug entitlement for seniors.
Perhaps, as Krugman complains, Obama waited too long before countering GOP attempts to conflate stimulus with pork.
But in eschewing the strident partisanship that many on the left pine for, Obama is keeping faith with the people who elected him. He’s also maneuvering the Republicans into a position where they appear as dogmatic, lock-step partisans –and politically impotent to boot, since they can’t block a big stimulus bill from passing. And let’s face it: While the president has tried to foster a new spirit of comity and cooperation, the stimulus plans make very few concessions to GOP demands when you look at the big picture.
So let’s all take a deep breath. If progressives want Obama to succeed, they need to avoid ideological purism and reflexive partisanship, and give their new president the tactical leeway he needs to maneuver around Washington’s formidable obstacles to change.

There’s been a lot of highly critical commentary over the last few days about the thundering absence of any clear policy rationale underlying the $100 billion or so in reductions in the economic stimulus package secured by the so-called “centrist” group of senators. Today’s Washington Post op-ed by one of that group, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) hasn’t exactly helped matters.
Yes, Specter cites a couple of cuts (Title I education spending, preventive health measure) and suggests that they represent types of spending that would be nice, but can’t be afforded right now. Why? Because they add up to the amount of money that Specter and company have arbitrarily decided must be cut from the legislation. It’s a classic example of circular reasoning. Or if you prefer, as Ross Douthat put it, Spector possesses a “mind incapable of thinking about policy in any terms save these: Take what the party in power wants, subtract as much money as you can without infuriating them, vote yes, and declare victory.” Similarly, Jonathan Chait observes:

It’s not like there’s some firm cap that forced the Senate to cut helpful spending programs. The cap is there because Specter decided to put it there, an act that flies in the face of the very economic theory that justifies the bill in the first place.

More specifically, unless I’ve missed it, the “centrist” group has yet to offer any sort of explanation for why aid to budget-strapped state governments took such a conspicuous hit in their “compromise.” I mean, the fiscal crises affecting nearly all of the states are real. The recession-deepening cuts they are already making in personnel, in infrastructure programs, and in direct services to low-income Americans, are very real. Do the “centrists” think there’s enough money in the package as amended to head off these highly unhelpful developments, or do they just not care? Who knows?
A cynic might observe that all of the four senators that Arlen Specter identifies as the organizers of the “centrist” coup-by-amendment–himself, Ben Nelson, Susan Collins and Joe Lieberman–happen to come from states where the governor is of the other party.
But another factor, particularly given the timing, might have been a strange little statement put out by the Republican Governors’ Association last Thursday urging Congress to reject the stimulus legislation entirely, because governors really didn’t need the money. In quotes from RGA chairman Mark Sanford of SC, Gov. Sarah Palin of AK, Gov. Rick Perry of TX, Gov. Bobby Jindal of LA, and Gov. Haley Barbour of MS, the statement complained vaguely about “strings and mandates” accompanying the bill (although much of it either increases the federal share of costs for existing programs, or, in the case of the single largest program killed by the “centrists,” made $25 billion available for absolutely anything the states wanted to do), and called instead for tax cuts. This maneuver was obviously intended to undercut a statement made a week or so earlier by the bipartisan National Governors’ Association asking Congress to act quickly on the stimulus legislation–and noting the urgency of aid to states–and scattered press reports that many Republican governors were at least privately expressing support to Obama.
Mark Sanford has been so adamant in his opposition to what he calls a “bailout” of the states that Rep. Jim Clyburn from SC secured language in the House version of the stimulus bill allowing state legislatures to bypass governors and apply for federal assistance if the governor refuses to do so.
I don’t know if the “centrist” senators or their staffs read any of this “don’t help us” stuff, but it makes about as much sense as any other explanation of the specific steps they took to reshape the stimulus legislation.

The Republican echo chamber has been working overtime, trying to stampede a backlash against the Obama stimulus package. But the publlic is apparently not buying it. A Greenberg Quinlan Rosner poll of 1200 LV’s in 40 competitive House districts conducted last week, for example, found that 64 percent of respondents supported President Obama’s stimulus package, with 27 percent opposed. In addition, 57 percent agreed that the recovery package is needed now. Even better, as Andy Barr notes in his Politico report on stimulus polls,

Asked if they would be more or less likely to support an incumbent if they voted for the stimulus, 27 percent of respondents to Greenberg’s poll said more likely, 15 percent said less likely and 53 percent said it would make no difference.

As the GOP and their minions in the media (see our Saturday staff post) press for an early end to the Obama Administration ‘honeymoon,’ it is proving to be a very tough sell. As GQR head and TDS co-editor Stan Greenberg put it, “Voters overwhelmingly believe they are living with an economy that is the product of Bush and the Republicans.”

Maybe it’s the decade or so I spent working in federal-state relations for three Georgia governors, or maybe it’s just that I’m amazed at how little specific information is being provided in the MSM about the cuts made in the Nelson-Collins amendment to the Senate economic recovery/stimulus bill, but I decided to do some digging and calculations about the “$40 billion in state aid cuts” that are mentioned in most of the stories.
The original House-Senate “State Fiscal Stabilization Fund” was set at $79 billion over two years. After a small rakeoff for territories and administration, it was divided roughly into $39 billion to the states (with a pass-through to school districts for unused funds) to restore prior state education cuts; a $15 billion “state incentives grant” program keyed to progress towards state education goals (presumably those set by No Child Left Behind); and then a $25 billion fund that could literally go to any state function, including education. This last flexible fund is basically general revenue sharing, though unlike the old Nixon-era program, it all goes to the states.
The amendment killed the flexible fund entirely; cut the “state incentive grant” fund in half (to $7.5 billion); and then left the remaining $31 billion in the fund distributed to offset state education cuts. So in the state fiscal stabilization section alone, the $40 billion cut everybody’s talking about involves $25 billion in flexible money and $15 billion in education funding.
There are obviously some separate cuts in education spending, though much of it is in school construction funding that presumably doesn’t affect operating budgets, though it does reduce the stimulative effect of the overall bill.
Additionally, though I missed it earlier, the original Senate bill cut out a House-passed $1 billion temporary increase in appropriations for the Community Development Block Grant, which is the most flexible money that would have been available to local governments.
All this matters because one of the original rationales of the entire legislation was that state and local government service and personnel cuts would undercut the stimulative effect of the federal effort.
States (and indirectly, local governments) will still benefit considerably from other elements of the bill as enacted by the Senate, most notably the estimated $87 billion that would be made available through temporary federal matching rates for the Medicaid program. But if the Nelson-Collins amendment sticks through the House-Senate conference (a very good bet given the one-vote-cushion the bill seems to have in the Senate), the flexible money is gone, and education has taken a pretty big hit.
If you want to strain your eyes by staring at the bill as it now stands in the Senate, go here. And the best detailed summary of the cuts made in the original Senate bill and the Nelson-Collins amendment, the National Conference of State Legislatures has a spread-sheet in a new article on its site.

Those who hoped that the proliferation of cable news programs would lead to more balanced news coverage for progressives found no comfort in a report issued last week by ThinkProgress.org:

…In the debate over the House economic recovery bill on the five cable news networks, Republican members of Congress outnumbered their Democratic counterparts by a ratio of 2 to 1.The analysis tallied interview segments about the stimulus on CNBC, Fox Business, Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC during a three-day period, finding that the networks had hosted Republican lawmakers 51 times and Democratic lawmakers only 26 times.

And in a more recent analysis, not much improvement:

ThinkProgress has found that Republican lawmakers outnumbered Democratic lawmakers 75 to 41 on cable news interviews by members of Congress (from 6am on Monday 2/2 through 11pm on Thursday 2/5)

ThinkProgress notes also that,

Last week, Fox News came the closest to balance with 8 Republicans and 6 Democrats. But the so-called “fair and balanced” network was not able to maintain such a ratio this week, hosting 24 Republicans and only 11 Democrats.
The business news networks were particularly egregious this week. CNBC had more than twice as many conservatives, with 14 Republicans and 6 Democrats. Fox Business was even worse, hosting 20 Republicans for just 4 Democrats.

Worse, ThinkProgress adds:

Though the imbalance is already stark, the tilt of the coverage would have been even more lopsided if the analysis had been broken down into whether a lawmaker who appeared on TV was a supporter or a critic of the economic recovery plan. Some of the most frequent Democratic guests this week were outspoken critics of the proposed stimulus plans, such as Sens. Ben Nelson (D-NE) and Kent Conrad (D-ND).

Hard to see it any other way than Big Media wanting to undermine the President, whether for ratings or naked political bias. Leftside Annie, one of the more than 500 respondents to the ThinkProgress post said it well: “Liberal Media? Bullshite.”