On this most hallowed civic holiday in the United States, those of us in some cities and towns will have to endure the sights and sounds of another Tea Party Event, designed, in the words proclaimed on the web site of its organizers, for "declaring independence from tax-and-spend politicians."

As David Wiegel explains in the Washington Independent today, the whole tea party thing is "losing steam," and the protests tomorrow won't rival in size--or in the splendiferous presence of major Republican politicians--those back on April 15.

Maybe that's because "the movement" isn't visibly affecting public opinion. Maybe because some of the participants remembered that the time-honored way to "revolt" against elected officials you don't like is at the ballot box. Maybe others looked around on April 15 and saw themselves in less than good company.

Or maybe some would-be tea party-hardies thought it about it and realized that they shouldn't exploit our country's National Holiday and patriotic symbols to grind partisan and ideological axes, despite the frequent tendency of conservatives in recent years to do just that.

To those who may have made the decision to lay down the Obama-bashing cudgels for this one day, I will raise a glass of sweet iced tea in tribute.

Link | Comments (0)

I'm not a big fan of Michael Barone after his long drift into predictable conservative punditry, but the man does still know a lot about politics. And in a column earlier this week, he conducts an interesting analysis of the strategic deficits that afflicted the entire Republican presidential field in 2008.

He concludes that all of them, including the ultimate nominee, John McCain, had flawed strategies that either defeated them or (in McCain's case) nearly did. And he suggests that none of the currently-named Republican candidates for 2012 looks to be in any better a position.

I won't go through the whole analysis, but Barone seems to think that Mitt Romney made the most avoidable mistakes: flip-flopping conspicuously on cultural issues to make himself the Iowa front-runner, at the expense of his image of "authenticity" and the resources he might have devoted to croaking McCain in New Hampshire and beyond.

But in mocking McCain's "next-in-line" strategy, Barone also implicitly mocks the widespread belief that Republican nominations sort of just happen, as "disciplined" conservative voters wait to be told who has earned the nod via long and loyal service to the party. I've examined that myth at some length over at fivethirtyeight.com, and found it less than persuasive.

So while we are a long way from 2012, it does matter how Republican candidates prepare themselves for the contest. And right now, there's no one with anything like a big strategic advantage.

Link | Comments (1)

While the basic principles of health care reform should be simple enough for progressive political leaders to frame as opposing forces gird for the battle over health care reform, American voters are being presented an ever-expanding range of complex issues and policies . As WaPo's Dana Milbank put it in his July 2nd column,

...Americans are passionate and confused about it -- and their opinions are all over the lot.

A CNN-Opinion Research poll found that 51 percent of Americans favor Obama's health-care plan, but a Wall Street Journal-NBC poll found that only 33 percent think it is a "good idea." A New York Times-CBS News poll found that nearly six in 10 would be willing to pay higher taxes so that all could be insured, but a Kaiser poll found that 54 percent would not be willing to pay more to increase the number.

A Quinnipiac University poll found that a majority -- 54 percent -- believe that reducing health-care costs is more important than covering those who lack coverage, while the Times-CBS poll found that 65 percent thought that insuring the uninsured was a more serious issue. A Washington Post poll found that 57 percent of Americans are dissatisfied with the health-care system -- but 83 percent are satisfied with the quality of their own care.

In short, when it comes to health care, the state of the union is confused. The confusion won't be cleared up by the complexity of the debate, with all the jargon about community ratings and insurance exchanges and risk adjustments and guaranteed issues...

A point made also in Mark Blumenthal's July 1 post at Pollster.com:

Let's start with what is hopefully obvious: Democrats in Congress are drafting multiple proposals, and the Obama administration has not specifically endorsed any of these. So a well informed respondent ought to have trouble evaluating "Obama's plan," since Obama has not yet committed to a specific plan. Even more important, very few Americans are following that debate with rapt attention. Last month's CBS/New York Times poll, for example, found only 22% of Americans saying they have heard or read "a lot" about the health care reform proposals (50% said they heard or read "some," 23% not much, 5% nothing).

"Softness" of responses is also a concern with analyzing polling data, particularly regarding health care reforms. As Blumenthal notes of the difficulty of overgeneralizing about polling responses:

When pollsters push as hard as CNN/ORC for an answer, a lot of the responses are going to be very soft, often formed on the spot and based on very superficial impressions. Nonetheless, if I were charged with conducting a benchmark survey for a candidate over the next few months, and I had room for only one question about health care reform, I would be tempted to ask a very general question about "President Obama's plan to reform health care" (though I'd strongly lean to the NBC/WSJ version that explicitly prompts for "no opinion").

Yes, public opinion on health care reform is multi-faceted. Americans come to the debate with a rich set of values and attitudes about what they like and dislike about the health care system, what they would change and what they worry about changing. Most have not yet focused on the details of the legislative debate. Many never will. So questions about specific policy proposals can produce results all over the map. As Slate's Chris Beam puts in an excellent summary this week, "health care polling is especially variable, depending on the wording, the context, and the momentary angle of the sun."

The Kaiser Family Foundation adds in its wrap-up of some recent public opinion polling on'Footing the Bill'.

What the public thinks about health care reform from this point will depend on what they learn about any proposals over the course of the summer – whether it be the actual details of any plan that might emerge or the spin on such a plan that will inevitably come from ideologues on both sides, the health care industry itself, and interested advocacy groups. Our surveys have repeatedly found that opinion on most specific proposals is quite malleable and can be moved in both directions. Expect this to happen.

It's not hard to see why framing is critical to the success of any health care reform package. President Obama has settled on a current strategy of framing the debate in terms of cost. In his article in The Atlantic on "Obama's Inversion Of Harry And Louise," Mark Ambinder notes of the President's framing of the health care reform debate:

His basic message: your health coverage will be taken away if we don't reform health care this year.

His arguments for reform have focused heavily on rising costs and the unsustainability of the current system. His public remarks on the matter are rife with figures about how much costs have risen and will rise in the future, and how soon the nation won't be able to pay them.

"In the last nine years, premiums have risen three times faster than wages. If we don nothing, they will rise even higher. In recent years, over one third of small businesses have reduced benefits and many have dropped coverage altogether since the early '90s," Obama told the audience at his town hall meeting on health care in Annandale, Virginia Wednesday.

"If we do not act, more will lose coverage and more will lose their jobs. Unless we act, within a decade, one out of every five dollars we earn will be spent on health care," Obama said.

Obama's economic rhetoric is all about how things can't remain the same. It's the same point the Harry and Louise ad made, but backward, and in Obama's version, the "naysayers" who oppose health reform are the ones who play fast and loose with the coverage Americans currently enjoy. And as polling indicates that Americans are concerned heavily with costs, the president has, in turn, stuck to telling people about the costs of not passing his plan...And so part of his rhetoric is about shaking people with fear into supporting his reforms. If Harry and Louise made people afraid of passing Clinton's reform plan, Obama is making people afraid of not passing his.

President Obama is undoubtedly right that cost-containment is a critical element of any successful health care reform pitch. But any successful pitch is also going to have to explain in simple terms how the reforms will improve health security for millions of Americans. Ruy Teixeira argues in a TNRtv clip that the public option of health care reform proposals has surprising bipartisan appeal in recent polling, which suggests it could have merit as a key messaging/framing point.

George Lakoff, along with co-authors Glen W. Smith and Eric Haas offer ten excellent messaging/framing suggestions in their HuffPo article "Health Care Reform: Some Basic Principles," including

Principle 3. Health care is central to the moral mission of the American government.

The American government has twin moral missions: protection and empowerment of the individual - equally for everyone.

Protection includes not just the military and police, but also consumer protection, worker protection, environmental protection, safety nets, investor protection, and health care.

Empowerment is what enables Americans to make a living and have a good life if they work at it. It includes systems of public road and buildings, education, communication, energy, banking -- and health.

No one can make a dime in America or achieve their goals in life without protection and empowerment by America's government.

and,

Principle 7. The American Plan provides care instead of denying it.

Why do HMO's have a high administrative cost - 15 to 20 percent or more? They spend money to justify denying you the care you need and all too often delaying care so much that you are harmed by the delay.

The American Plan is there to provide you care, not deny or delay it. Its administrative costs would be low, about 3 percent.

And, also at HuffPo, In his post "Hoping for Audacity," Drew Westen emphasizes the need to tell the "how we got here" story as a prerequisite for good framing of reforms:

The American people would understand why we need to offer at least one health insurance plan not controlled by the insurance companies if someone would just tell them the story of how it came to be that our premiums have doubled as millions more Americans have lost their coverage.

...The President is offering the public a series of stories that are all missing half the plot and half the characters--namely, the part of the plot that says how we got where we are (e.g., 50 million without health insurance...He is trying to sell health care reform without calling out the drug and insurance industries, whose profits have soared at our expense.

We should have no doubts whatsoever, that the opponents of health care reform are now focusing with utmost intensity on which frames will be most effective in obstructing meaningful reform, as my May 6 post noted. Let's not be caught unprepared.

Link | Comments (0)

In a Financial Times column that congeals a number of complaints heard in various quarters of late, Clive Crook blasted Barack Obama for "choosing to be weak" on climate change and health care legislation.

Some progressives who are upset by the watered-down contents of the House climate change bill, or worried about where the Senate's going on health care, might scan Crook's column and nod their heads in agreement. Actually, though, Crook seems less concerned about the precise nature of climate change and health care provisions than about Obama's refusal to flat out defy not only Congress but public opinion:

Congress offers change without change – a green economy built on cheap coal and petrol; a healthcare transformation that asks nobody to pay more taxes or behave any differently – because that is what voters want. Is it too much to ask that Mr Obama should tell voters the truth? I think he could do it. He has everything it takes to be a strong president. He is choosing to be a weak one.

While political leadership does generally require the shaping of public opinion, few successful leaders "tell the truth" to constituents in the form of telling them they are ignorant louts who are either too stupid to understand the choices involved in big challenges, or too selfish to make sacrifices in the national interest. That seems to be what Crook would have Obama do to look "strong."

In terms of dealing with Congress, moreover, Obama has simply learned from the lessons of past presidents (particularly Bill Clinton) that success almost never involves my-way-or-the-highway presidential edicts, and that choosing the right moment for presidential interventions is as important as how much pressure is exerted. In other words, "strength" is no substitute for "strategy."

Like most supporters of climate change legislation, I'm not happy with the compromises that were made to get the Waxman-Markey bill out of the House. But instead of despairing like Crook, I'd listen to another unhappy camper, Bradford Plumer, who has a good column that details all the reasons that passage of a bill like this is worthwhile and perhaps crucial (one of them being the disastrous effect that a failure to enact anything might have on the international climate change negotiations this December). And I might listen to Al Gore, hardly a man adverse to telling "inconvenient truths," who worked the phones to keep progressive Democrats on board in the House when many were tempted to bolt over their disappointment in the final product.

As for health care, it's entirely too early to make any real judgment on Obama's congressional and public-opinion strategy. Yes, the president will need to strongly deploy the bully pulpit, probably more than once. But Crook's assertion that Obama is abandoning the idea of health care cost-control or major changes in the incentive system for health services because he's not out there right now demanding big public sacrifices in the middle of a recession either an overstatement of the facts or an impolitic demand that health reform be made as unsavory as possible.

Even by Crook's standards, Obama would obviously be "stronger" if the financial system and then the economy hadn't melted down just before he took office. But that's the hand he was dealt, and he should be allowed to play it.

Link | Comments (1)

With a certain governor of South Carolina off the boards as a national spokesman for hard-core fiscal conservatism, not to mention a potential presidential candidate, you can expect more attention to be paid to another of the Palmetto State's right-wing firebrands, U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint. You may recognize his name from his frequent votes (sometimes with his fellow "true conservative" Tom Coburn of OK) against consensus positions in both parties, particularly on confirmations (e.g., he was one of two senators to vote against confirmation of their colleague Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State).

Though known for his partisanship and anti-government zealotry, DeMint hasn't shirked the Cultural Right, either, winning perfect vote ratings from the National Right to Life Committee and zero vote ratings from the Human Rights Campaign. Indeed, Demint gained a lot of notoriety during his 2004 Senate race for arguing that gays and lesbians, and for that matter, unwed pregnant women, shouldn't be allowed to teach in public schools (a position he retracted because it had become a "distraction," not because he admitted it was wrong).

So it's with more than passing interest that I read a recent interview of DeMint in that ancient corner of the conservative fever swamps, Human Events, in connection with his new book, modestly titled Saving Freedom: We Can Stop America's Slide Into Socialism. Two remarks by DeMint were particularly striking. First up was this:

Define socialism as a government controlling aspects of the economy. Most members of Congress think that just about every aspect of American society and economy should be regulated, controlled, taxed in some way by the federal government and increasingly so. I think it’s very fair to say that most members of Congress lean socialist on policies.

Notice that DeMint doesn't say "most Democrats in Congress," but "most members of Congress."

Further into the interview, DeMint shares his thoughts about the fundamental "threat to freedom":

I regret to say that there are two Americas but not the kind John Edwards was talking about. It’s not so much the haves and the have-nots. It’s those who are paying for government and those who are getting government. At this point, the data I’ve seen is 52% of Americans get their income directly or indirectly from a government source. And if you think about how that works in a democracy, why would the voters be concerned about the growth of government if they weren’t paying and they were getting something from it.

Democracy cannot work when you have a majority of people dependent on the government. And this is not just the poor. The way we’ve set up Social Security and Medicare, everyone who retires are dependent, parents are dependent on the government for education of their children and now, if you look at the folks who come through my office -- business people, farmers, bankers -- everybody is coming to Washington to get their piece of the government because we’re running all this money through here now.

This is interesting for several reasons. It's not often that you hear a politician come right out and say that making parents "dependent on the government for education of their children"--i.e. public schools--is a form of socialistic welfare-statism. As for Social Security and Medicare, most conservatives have learned to frame their privatization proposals in terms of "solvency" or "entitlement reform" or "letting people control their benefits." Not since Barry Goldwater's disastrous 1964 campaign have I heard a major Republican politician attack the wildly popular retirement programs as fundamentally illegitimate, or their beneficiaries as parasitical wards of the state.

DeMint's "two Americas" rap is also interesting since it exhibits the underpinnings of the kind of rhetoric that even the McCain campaign deployed last year in attacking progressive taxation. Poor people or old people who don't pay their "fair share" of taxes aren't just getting off lightly; they are a threat to democracy.

In other words, Jim DeMint seems to be the real deal when it comes to serious "true conservatism," or at least he is when he's in the friendly confines of an interview with Human Events. Tuck this away in the memory banks in case the man does decide to run for national office. He's seriously scary.

UPDATE: When I decided to write about DeMint, I didn't realize that on this very day, he would help prove my point by coming out in favor of the military coup in Honduras. Looks like he may be determined to become the next Jesse Helms.

Link | Comments (0)

One of the most important indicators of the health of a political party or movement is its ability to accept adverse results and learn from them. By that standard, Democrats faced the supreme challenge in 2000, when it took an unprecedented (and almost self-consciously political) intervention by the U.S. Supreme Court to finally deny the presidency to the winner of the popular vote.

Sure, some Democrats never got over what many just referred to, without need of explanation, as "Florida," but most moved on, and it's often said that the 2000 experience was--along with technology, and then later, the Iraq War--the prime mover in the creation of the entire netroots phenomenon.

Well, yesterday Republicans experienced a far less momentous and far less controversial setback in a close contest, when Norm Coleman finally conceded to Al Franken. And it's significant that so many are not at all taking it well.

As Eric Kleefeld explained at TPM, the reaction to Franken's elevation at Fox was very, very grouchy, perhaps reflecting bad blood going back to News Corp's lawsuit against Franken in 2003.

Harder to explain on personal terms was the Wall Street Journal editorial that accused Franken of stealing the election, basically on grounds that Coleman had a whopping lead of 725 votes on Election Night and everything that happened subsequently was the devilish work of lawyers.

Such acts of denial are of a piece with the more general determination of conservatives to rationalize every recent political setback as "about" something other than their own leaders, policy positions, and ideological shibboleths. It is by this mental magic that George W. Bush, the hand-picked candidate of the conservative movement in 2000, and a president most conservatives were hailing as a world-historical colossus as late as 2005, becomes some sort of alien presence whose failures have no bearing on the future of "true" conservatism.

Without question, political defeats can make you crazy. But it's very important to keep that insanity temporary. If I were a Republican, I'd be getting pretty worried by now about the ability of my comrades to perceive political reality without wild distortions.

Link | Comments (0)

If there's a "must-read" online today, it's probably Tim Fernholz's article for The American Prospect on the ever-increasing need for the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress to start setting out realistic benchmarks for accomplishments between now and November 2010.

Improving on the incompetence of the Bush administration isn't that hard. But at some point, Democrats must point to new expectations and meet them. Fernholz suggests three areas where new benchmarks are particularly urgent: "economic stimulus" measures, foreclosure prevention initiatives, and the war in Afghanistan. In the first area, measurements for success are hazy; in the second, accomplishments don't meet the administration's own goals; and in the third, what we are measuring in terms of strategic objectives has changed.

Here's Fernholz's cautionary conclusion:

All three of these cases demonstrate the challenge of translating simple policy goals -- fight the recession, prevent foreclosures, and win a war -- into complex government programs. The fact that solving these public problems is difficult doesn't mean they shouldn't be tackled; the government is the only institution capable of tackling them. But walking the fine line between measures that mean something and numbers that mean votes can be a difficult one. If the president and Democrats in Congress want to keep being the Party of Government and not just the party that likes government, they need to figure out how to be good executives as well as good legislators, and prove it.

Link | Comments (0)

At virtually any given moment, the news-cycle-driven chattering classes of politics have in the background of their computer screens or the pockets of their briefcases a Big Thumbsucking Magazine Article on a political topic that they read during periods of calm. The Big Article du jour is Todd Purdum's massive profile of Sarah Palin in Vanity Fair.

Most of the buzz about the piece deals with a variety of off-the-record snarks about Palin from McCain campaign staff. Indeed, conservative columnist Bill Kristol and McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt have engaged in a public exchange of insults over alleged leaks to Purdham.

Personally, I thought Purdum's best insight was about the exceptionally exotic nature of Palin's home state of Alaska, which he thinks the McCain campaign never understood:

The first thing McCain could have learned about Palin is what it means that she is from Alaska. More than 30 years ago, John McPhee wrote, “Alaska is a foreign country significantly populated with Americans. Its languages extend to English. Its nature is its own. Nothing seems so unexpected as the boxes marked ‘U.S. Mail.’” That description still fits. The state capital, Juneau, is 600 miles from the principal city, Anchorage, and is reachable only by air or sea. Alaskan politicians list the length of their residency in the state (if they were not born there) at the top of their biographies, and are careful to specify whether they like hunting, fishing, or both. There is little sense of government as an enduring institution: when the annual 90-day legislative session is over, the legislators pack up their offices, files, and computers, and take everything home. Alaska’s largest newspaper, the Anchorage Daily News, maintains no full-time bureau in Juneau to cover the statehouse. As in any resource-rich developing country with weak institutions and woeful oversight, corruption and official misconduct go easily unchecked. Scrutiny is not welcome, and Alaskans of every age and station, of every race and political stripe, unself-consciously refer to every other place on earth with a single word: Outside.

In all the hype and buzz about Palin when she first joined the ticket, and all the silly talk about her potential appeal to Hillary Clinton supporters, the ecstatic reaction to her choice on the Cultural Right didn't get much attention. She wasn't an "unknown" or a "fresh face" to those folks. They knew her not only as a truly hard-line anti-abortionist, but as a politician who had uniquely "walked the walk" by carrying a pregnancy to term despite knowing the child would have a severe disability. And all the personality traits she later exhibited--the folksiness, the abrasive partisanship, the hostility towards the "media" and "elites," the resentment of the establishment Republicans who tried to "manage" her, and the constant complaints of persecution--almost perfectly embodied the world-view, and the hopes and fears, of the grassroots Cultural Right. (This was particularly and understandably true of women, who have always played an outsized role in grassroots conservative activism.) Sarah Palin was the projection of these activists onto the national political scene, and exhibited the defiant pride and ill-disguised vulnerability that they would have felt in the same place.

This base of support for Palin--maybe not that large, but very passionate, and very powerful in places like the Iowa Republican Caucuses--isn't going to abandon her just because the Serious People in the GOP laugh her off in favor of blow-dried flip-flopping pols like Mitt Romney or blandly "electable" figures like Tim Pawlenty. To her supporters, mockery is like nectar. And that's why Sarah Palin isn't going to go away as a national political figure unless it is by her own choice, or that of the people of her own state.

Link | Comments (2)

When Al Franken takes his seat in the U.S. Senate on Monday, it could mark a pivot point for the Democratic Party, as well as the nation. Senator Franken will give the Democrats a significant edge in filibuster politics, the 60th vote that could make possible enactment of real health care reform and other needed legislation. Indications are Franken will be a staunch progressive Senator in the mold of Paul Wellstone, who he strongly supported, and a reliable advocate of needed social reforms.

Credit Franken, not only with running a good campaign that unhorsed an incumbent and rising GOP star, but also playing a chill hand in the 7 plus months after the election. Franken avoided getting suckered into name-calling battles with Coleman, kept a high tone and handled the media with impressive skill. His image as a sober and serious U.S. Senator improved steadily during the recount and post election conflicts, as Coleman's image deteriorated into one of a quarrelsome obstructionist. Franken's 5-zip win from the Minnesota Supreme Court sealed the deal. Coleman, rumored to be interested in running for Governor, would have destroyed his political future if he persisted after a unanimous state Supreme Court decision against him. Hopefully, he has already been damaged by his obstructionist antics.

Franken could be an important Senator, if he rises to the challenge presented by Wellstone's example and becomes an energetic champion of the progressive agenda. He certainly showed he had the mettle for battling the right-wing in his conflicts with Bill O'Reilly and Fox news. Franken smartly restrained his SNL-honed snark and wit during the campaign and aftermath, but he should be able to let fly a well-targeted zinger once in a while to enliven Senate debates.

Link | Comments (0)

The big political news yesterday was a unanimous decision of the Minnesota Supreme Court that Al Franken had indeed won a U.S. Senate seat last year (unsurprising), followed by Norm Coleman's concession (more surprising, since many expected him to pursue a federal court challenge to delay Franken's seating).

So Democrats now hold 60 seats in the U.S. Senate. As Ezra Klein points out today, neither party has held that many Senate seats since 1975, after the Watergate Landslide of 1974.

Most Democrats by now have figured out that 60 isn't quite the magic number it is sometimes described as being in the Senate. Yes, it theoretically makes it possible to stop or even preempt filibusters and control the floor, but only with unanimity (or near-unanimity), which is hard to come by. But it will have a certain psychological impact, particularly going into an election cycle where Republican will be hard pressed to maintain their own numbers in the Senate.

Let's hope, at least, that Al Franken really enjoys being a Senator. He certainly earned his seat.

Link | Comments (0)