A Blue View

Obama: "I'd rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president"

 

Best Obama quote on Washington & the Media's ways:

When your poll numbers drop, you are an idiot. When your poll numbers are high, you are a genius. If my poll numbers are low, then I am cool and cerebral, and cool and detached. If my poll numbers are high, boy, he’s calm and reasoned all right.

Do The Dems Have The Guts?

NY Times:

Seeking to avert the collapse of major health care legislation, the White House and Democratic leaders in Congress face a crucial decision about whether to use a procedural maneuver that would allow them to advance the bill despite the loss of their 60-vote majority in the Senate.

The maneuver, known as budget reconciliation, could allow President Obama and his party to muscle the legislation through Congress with a simple majority vote in the Senate. But it carries numerous risks, including the possibility of a political backlash against what Republicans would be sure to cast as parliamentary trickery.

The procedure is also subject to complex rules that could make it difficult for Democrats to include all the provisions needed to win approval of the bill, especially among rank-and-file House Democrats. For instance, it might be difficult to include provisions related to insurance coverage for abortions.

Still, for Mr. Obama, it may be the only route available to win passage of the sort of ambitious overhaul that he has pressed as his top domestic priority. And the White House and Congressional leaders have known all along that they might need to employ the tactic to finish a health bill.

“The idea that at any given time the Senate would have 60 votes was not what we would call the most ironclad assumption,” the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said at a news conference on Thursday. “We have always thought, what if? You know, what if the policy decisions are such that they can’t get 60 votes for it?”

Senior Congressional aides said that lawmakers and the White House were increasingly focused on a plan by which the House would adopt the health care bill approved by the Senate on Dec. 24, with any changes made in a separate bill using the budget reconciliation maneuver.

But Democratic leaders are no longer confident that rank-and-file House Democrats would be willing to go along. The victory by the Republican, Scott Brown, in Massachusetts last Tuesday not only denied Democrats their 60th vote, but raised a specter of fear for Democrats over the midterm elections.

Some Democrats said that regaining the support of the caucus could depend heavily on what Mr. Obama says in his State of the Union speech on Wednesday.

Republicans, however, have made clear that they will portray Mr. Obama and Democrats as trying to use a hardball tactic to win passage of the health care legislation ...

Some Democrats seem prepared to give up on a health care bill or to put it off for several weeks. Others have begun calling for a sharply scaled-back measure that they hope could win bipartisan support. But it is unclear if Republicans would cooperate even on a modest bill.

In the meantime, aides have been trying to devise a process by which the Senate could make changes to its health bill on a reconciliation measure even before the House voted on the Senate-passed health bill. Some lawmakers said House Democrats might have to vote first.

Obama's Predicament Cartoons

"Obama turns out to be a wonderful orator, but, to date, a lousy professor"

John Judis:

I defer to Noam on the administration’s motives for announcing this spending freeze and on the real impact of the freeze on spending. But I want to say two things about it.

First, if it was done to appease bond traders (where have we have heard that before?), it is ridiculous. Interest rates aren’t exactly soaring these days. It is not 1993.

Second, whatever the administration’s motive – whether it was to appease bond traders or tea-partiers – and whether the effect on the actual budget is large or small, the administration’s announcement is an admission of abject failure.

Obama was, after all, a professor, as were two of his main economic advisors, Larry Summers and Christina Romer, but in the past year, they have failed utterly to explain to Americans (let alone the bond traders) how deficits function in recessions. Yes, it is hard to do so, but no harder than it was for Ronald Reagan to explain to middle class Americans how regressive tax cuts would actually benefit them. 

For better or worse – and mostly the latter – Reagan actually tried to explain to Americans what his policies were about. The Obama administration has abdicated. Where are the charts? The graphs? The ads that patiently explain deficits and recessions? The stories, the anecdotes? And it’s not just the budget. It’s the health care plan as well. Or the need for financial regulation. Obama turns out to be a wonderful orator, but, to date, a lousy professor.

Spinning

Joe Klein:

I watched David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett and bits of Robert Gibbs on the Sunday shows this morning, and it wasn't pretty. I'm still not sure where the Administration stands on health care reform--all in, partly in, all out...and if partly in, which parts? Obama himself told Stephanopoulos earlier in the week that insurance reform was still possible...but then told the Ohio town meeting on Friday that insurance reform isn't possible unless you have a mandate because people will choose not to buy health insurance until they need it.

So, confusion. It's unavoidable at this point--the system is still shuddering from the aftershocks of the Massachusetts election and it's difficult to sense what sort of legislation is still possible. But it would be nice to hear the Administration acknowledge something like this: We went a bridge too far. When you have to resort to deals like the Cornhusker Kickback, the Lieberman collapse, the union buyoff, you don't have the broad support that's necessary to put something like health care reform into law. As Karen has argued, that's the most important message from Massachusetts. Another message: we like the universal health care we have in Massachusetts, but we don't want to make any sacrifices--especially when it comes to Medicare funding--so that the rest of the country can get universal, too.

It will take some time to sort this out, to see how and whether health care can be disaggregated into digestible legislative bits...and which parts of it are just indigestible for the moment. But more time on health care, unfortunately, is the last thing Obama can afford to spend. It has consumed too much of his presidency, and his political capital, already. He needs to make himself politically relevant to the public again. The State of the Union speech on Wednesday is where that process begins.

More Obama's First Year Cartoons

Poll: Thanks To Democratic Support, Obama's Approval Most Polarized for 1st Year President

Gallup:

The 65 percentage-point gap between Democrats' (88%) and Republicans' (23%) average job approval ratings for Barack Obama is easily the largest for any president in his first year in office, greatly exceeding the prior high of 52 points for Bill Clinton.

Overall, Obama averaged 57% job approval among all Americans from his inauguration to the end of his first full year on Jan. 19. He came into office seeking to unite the country, and his initial approval ratings ranked among the best for post-World War II presidents, including an average of 41% approval from Republicans in his first week in office. But he quickly lost most of his Republican support, with his approval rating among Republicans dropping below 30% in mid-February and below 20% in August. Throughout the year, his approval rating among Democrats exceeded 80%, and it showed little decline even as his overall approval rating fell from the mid-60s to roughly 50%.

"Prior to Ronald Reagan, no president averaged more than a 40-point gap in approval ratings by party during his term; since then, only the elder George Bush has averaged less than a 50-point gap."

Thus, the extraordinary level of polarization in Obama's first year in office is a combination of declining support from Republicans coupled with high and sustained approval from Democrats. In fact, his 88% average approval rating from his own party's supporters is exceeded only by George W. Bush's 92% during Bush's first year in office. Obama's 23% approval among supporters of the opposition party matches Bill Clinton's for the lowest for a first-year president. But Clinton was less popular among Democrats than Obama has been to date, making Obama's ratings more polarized.

Obama still has three years left in his first term and possibly seven more as president, so there is much time for the polarization of his approval ratings to subside. However, if the current level of polarization persists through the end of his term, Obama would exceed Bush as the president with the most polarized approval ratings.

Bush's average Republican-Democratic gap for his eight years in office was 61 points. This included the record gap for a single approval rating: 83 points, which occurred twice -- in September 2004 (95% Republican, 12% Democratic) and October 2004 (94% Republican, 11% Democratic).

"Obama Turns Up Heat Over Ruling on Campaign Spending"

NY Times:

President Obama took aim at the Supreme Court on Saturday, saying the justices had “handed a huge victory to the special interests and their lobbyists” with last week’s 5-to-4 decision to lift restrictions on campaign spending by corporations and unions.

The decision will have major political implications for this year’s midterm elections. After it was announced, Mr. Obama immediately instructed his advisers to work with Congress on legislation that would restore some of the limits the court lifted. But in his weekly address on Saturday, he sharply stepped up his criticism of the high court.

“This ruling strikes at our democracy itself,” Mr. Obama said, adding: “I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest. The last thing we need to do is hand more influence to the lobbyists in Washington, or more power to the special interests to tip the outcome of elections.”

How much the administration can do about the ruling remains unclear, although Mr. Obama said he had instructed his advisers to work with Congress on a “forceful, bipartisan response.”

That process got under way Friday, a White House official said, when Norm Eisen, Mr. Obama’s special counsel for ethics and government reform, met with two leading Democrats — Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York and Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland — to begin talks on how Congress might proceed.

The sharply divided decision overturned parts of a 2002 law — known as the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, after the two senators who sponsored it — that severely restricted political advertising paid for by corporations and unions in the 30 days before a presidential primary and in the 60 days before general elections.

The five justices who sided with the majority characterized it as a victory for the First Amendment and freedom of speech. The ruling was expected to unleash a torrent of attack advertisements in the coming midterm elections; many analysts said it would benefit Republicans in a year when Democrats are already on the defensive.

But the decision could also have a significant effect on Mr. Obama’s expansive domestic agenda. The president has angered many of the big-money industries — like banks and insurers — that would be inclined to dig deep into their pockets to influence the outcome of the president’s legislative proposals.

Obama's First Year Cartoons

Obama Centralizes Campaign Control As He Assesses How To Move Forward

An interesting NY Times article about Obama's taking over the Democratic campaign system and how the White House is thinking about moving forward strategically. And by reading between the lines, you can also learn one of the reasons they think Martha Coakley lost: her campaign's polling was too optimistic, causing them to realize her troubles too late to turn the tide:

President Obama is reconstituting the team that helped him win the White House to counter Republican challenges in the midterm elections and recalibrate after political setbacks that have narrowed his legislative ambitions.

Mr. Obama has asked his former campaign manager, David Plouffe, to oversee House, Senate and governor’s races to stave off a hemorrhage of seats in the fall. The president ordered a review of the Democratic political operation — from the White House to party committees — after last week’s Republican victory in the Massachusetts Senate race, aides said.

In addition to Mr. Plouffe, who will primarily work from the Democratic National Committee in consultation with the White House, several top operatives from the Obama campaign will be dispatched across the country to advise major races as part of the president’s attempt to take greater control over the midterm elections, aides said.

“We are turning the corner to a much more political season,” said David Axelrod, a senior adviser, who confirmed Mr. Plouffe’s role. “We are going to evaluate what we need to do to get timely intelligence and early warnings so we don’t face situations like we did in Massachusetts.”

As Mr. Obama prepares to deliver his State of the Union address on Wednesday and lay out his initiatives for the second year of his presidency, his decision to take greater control of the party’s politics signals a new approach. The White House is searching for ways to respond to panic among Democrats over the possible demise of his health care bill and a political landscape being reshaped by a wave of populism.

Improving tactical operations addresses only part of his challenge. A more complicated discussion under way, advisers said, is how to sharpen the president’s message and leadership style.

The reinforcement of the White House’s political operation has been undertaken with a sense of urgency since Tuesday, when a Republican, Scott Brown ... The White House was caught off guard when it became clear that Democrats were in danger of losing it, and by the time alarm bells sounded from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, it was too late.

The president summoned Mr. Plouffe to the Oval Office hours before the polls closed and asked him to assume the new role because of the implications the midterm elections hold. Mr. Plouffe built a reputation in 2008 as a master of the nuts and bolts of campaigns, and will assemble a team to provide unfiltered information that serves as an early-warning system so the White House and party officials know if a candidate is falling behind ...

The party is trying to become less reliant on polls conducted by candidates, which can often paint a too-rosy picture of the political outlook. The president’s leading pollster, Joel Benenson, will be among those conducting research for Mr. Plouffe, aides said, along with others who will divide the country by regions ...

“Our own political operation will be more rigorously in communication with the other elements, so we can compare notes,” Mr. Axelrod said. “What we learned from Massachusetts is that we need to be more assiduous about getting our own data and our own information so we have a better sense of where things stand.”

The White House intends to send Mr. Obama out into the country considerably more in 2010 than during his first year in office, advisers said, to try to rekindle the relationship he developed with voters during his presidential campaign.

His first big chance will come when he delivers his State of the Union address. Rather than unveil a laundry list of new initiatives, advisers said, Mr. Obama will try to reframe his agenda and how he connects it with public concerns. In particular, he will focus on how his ideas for health care, energy and financial regulation all fit into the broader economic mission of creating what he calls a “new foundation” for the country, the key words being “rescue, restore and rebuild.”

While presidents typically experience rough patches, this one is particularly challenging for Mr. Obama. Liberals have grown disenchanted with what they see as his unwillingness to fight harder for their causes; independents have been turned off by his failure, in their view, to change the way Washington works; and Republicans have become implacably hostile.

The long and messy legislative fight over health care is a leading example of how Mr. Obama has failed to connect with voters, advisers say, because he appeared to do whatever it would take to get a bill rather than explain how people could benefit.

“The process often overwhelmed the substance,” said Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director. “We need to find ways to try to rise above the maneuvering.”

The discussion inside the White House includes at least two distinct debates: Should Mr. Obama assume a more populist or centrist theme in his message? And should the White House do what it takes to pass compromise legislation or should it force votes, which even if unsuccessful can be used to carry an argument against Republicans in the fall?

Defiant Obama Vows to Push Agenda

NY Times (watch the Town Hall):

President Obama, striking a no-retreat, no-surrender posture in the wake of his party’s humiliating defeat in the Massachusetts Senate race this week, vowed Friday to press on with his expansive domestic agenda — including a health care overhaul and tough new restrictions on banks — even if it meant he had to “take my lumps” from political critics.

Mr. Obama came to this Cleveland suburb for the second stop on his White House to Main Street Tour to spread the word that his administration is about jobs, jobs, jobs. With his approval rating down to about 50 percent, a bruising season of midterm elections ahead and Democrats reeling from the resounding note of disapproval in Massachusetts, the ordinarily cool and cerebral Mr. Obama sounded unusually defiant, even fiery, at a town hall-style question and answer session at Lorain County Community College here.

The president used the word “fight,” or some version of it, more than 20 times.

Mr. Obama vowed to “never stop fighting for policies that will help restore home values.” He promised that he was “not going to stop fighting to give our kids the best education possible.” He pledged he would not “stop fighting to give every American a fair shake,” to continue fighting for a new Consumer Protection Agency and for openness in government. And of course, Mr. Obama pledged to fight for jobs.

“So long as I have some breath in me, so long as I have the privilege of serving as your president, I will not stop fighting for you,” Mr. Obama said. “I will take my lumps. But I won’t stop fighting to bring back jobs here.”

The president’s appearance here comes one day after he picked an especially big fight, with Wall Street, by calling for new limits on banks that would prevent them from becoming too big to fail. He sounded as if he would relish it.

“It’s going to be a fight,” the president said, warming up to the crowd. “You watch. I guarantee you, when we start on financial regulatory reform, trying to change the rules to prevent what has caused so much heartache all across the country, there are people who are going to say, ‘Why is he meddling in government’ or ‘Why is he meddling in the financial industry? It’s another example of Obama being big government.’ No, I just want to have some rules in place so that when these guys make dumb decisions, you don’t end up having to foot the bill. That’s pretty straightforward. I don’t mind having a fight.”

Mr. Obama’s bellicose rhetoric carried echoes of his tone in the 2008 campaign. He is now trying to strike a more populist tone to tap into anger many Americans feel about bailouts on Wall Street while Main Street is suffering. At the same time, the White House is trying to frame the midterm elections on terms favorable to Mr. Obama, by casting him as someone who will stand with the little guy, even if those fighting words contrast with his image as a politician who cares about bringing people together.

“There will be a fulsome debate about who is fighting for Main Street and who is siding with the special interests,” said Dan Pfeiffer, Mr. Obama’s communications director, adding, “There is nothing inconsistent between trying to bring people together to solve problems and standing up to the insurers and the lobbyists.”

Mr. Obama’s shift in tone actually began last week, before Tuesday’s bruising loss in Massachusetts, when the president appeared before the House Democrats and warned that if Republicans want to “stand up for the status quo” and block his health care bill, “that is a fight I want to have.” He used a version of that language at the White House on Thursday in announcing his plan for restrictions on banks.

While here, Mr. Obama made a plea for the health care bill ... Conceding that the plan had “hit a little bit of a buzz saw this week,” Mr. Obama acknowledged that the process “has been less than pretty” and that the measure was so big and unwieldy it looked like “a monstrosity,” creating fear and anxiety among ordinary Americans. But he made the case that passing the measure was an imperative ...

Mr. Obama rode to office on the strength of his cool temperament, but in recent weeks, even some Democrats have questioned whether he appears too distant from voters. Earlier this week, in an interview with ABC, the president acknowledged that many Americans have a sense of “remoteness and detachment” from policy makers in Washington.

On Friday, Mr. Obama alluded to it again, saying it was “pretty easy to get a warped view of things” in Washington. With all the problems he faces in the capital, he sounded especially happy to be let loose for a few hours.

Obama's Town Hall In Elyria Ohio (video)

Watch (read NY Times analysis):

Weekly Radio Address: "Fighting for the Public Against Special Interests"

WhiteHouse.gov:

The President talks about his first year fighting against special interests and barring lobbyists from his Administration, as well as the fight to come in the wake of a recent Supreme Court decision.

The Mass Election In Cartoons

With all the news this week, I've been behind on posting cartoons. Here's a sample of what you missed.

"President Obama mistakenly thought he could win Americans over with rational policy decisions and an even temperament"

More rational thought from Jon Stewart:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Political Shift in D.C.
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

Massachusetts, Two Days Later

As a way to process Tuesday's election results, I spent lots of time yesterday on lots of news sites and blogs. There are way too many to excerpt as is normally done, so instead, here is my index to the best commentary and analysis out there.

How did it happen

The only "exit" poll I know of, from Research 2000:

Mass. Voters Protested Against Weak Wall Street, Health Care Policies

Rick Holmes, a columnist for the suburban Boston Metro-West News thinks it was primarily Coakley's fault:

Martha's many mistakes

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) blames Obama for "health care's demise"

Weiner On Health Care's Demise: We Lacked Leadership From Obama

Michael Scherer of Time broadens that to encompass Obama's first year:

Five Ways Obama Went Wrong

Nate Silver of 538.com builds on David Leonhardt's idea that Obama has pleased no one (and worse, angered many) by not countering the perception he's a progressive even while he pursued centrist policies:

The bills before Congress are politically partisan and substantively bipartisan.

Mass Hysteria:

Jonathan Chait of TNR is seeing Mass Hysteria so he argues that the CW is missing the real forces at play in the Mass election and suggests Obama needs to be like George Bailey during the panicked run on his bank in It's A Wonderlife Life:

Why Democrats need to take a deep, deep breath. Maybe two.

Ezra Klein of the Wash Post uses a very different entertainment reference, Monty Python & the Holy Grail, to make the same point (and the comment a Republican submitted is also worth reading):

Sometimes a bunny is just a bunny

Jon Stewart hits the hysteria nail on the head:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Indecision 2010 - The Re-Changening
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

Analysis of the results and what to do next:

Jonathan Chait next argues that no one should interpret the Mass results as any kind of referendum on health care:

We've got ours, and we don't want to pay for anybody else to enjoy this great system we have.

Steven Pearlstein of the Wash Post argues the same thing as Chait and believes it's not over:

GOP win doesn't mean health reform is dead

Ezra Klein suggests a radical way to move forward on health reform

Democrats could scrap the legislation and start over in the reconciliation process. But not to re-create the whole bill.

Ezra also warns the Dems if they abandon health care now, their base should rightly abandon them:

If Democrats let go of health care, there is no doubt that a demoralized Democratic base will stay home in November. And that's as it should be.

Tim Egan agrees the Dems need to get a spine and a much, much better mouth:

They can cowboy up, pass health care that helps right the major wrongs of the system, and then explain what they’re doing.

On a more serious note, The NY Times editorial board offers very pointed advice to Obama & the Dems:

It is indisputable that the Republicans have settled on a tactic of obstruction, disinformation and fear-mongering, but it is equally indisputable that the Democrats have not countered it well.

Amy Walter, writing in NationalJournal.com, suggests how the Dems can generally win back Independents:

Will Democrats Feel Voters' Pain?

What The Mass Results Mean: Throw The Bums Out

Here are the reasons I believe Scott Brown won:

• 10% unemployment
• an inept opponent
• 10% unemployment
• health reform sausage making, the GOP's ability to exploit fears and the Dems inability to cut throw that and explain the benefits
• 10% unemployment

Here is the reason he did not win (no matter how the GOP spins it):

• repudiation of the overall Obama agenda

The most recent Va, NJ, and Ma elections, in fact, now join the similar 2008 and 2006 ones: all were 'throw the bum out' elections.  The problem for the Dems is that they are now the bums. The Republicans should also check their unadulterated glee: they're the bums in plenty of places too.

Obama Now Has A Long List Of Tough Choices

Adam Nagourney:

Special elections come and go. And the party that wins the White House one year ordinarily loses seats in the next Congressional election that comes along.

But what happened in Massachusetts on Tuesday was no ordinary special election.

Scott Brown, a Republican state senator for only five years, shocked and arguably humiliated the White House and the Democratic Party establishment by defeating Martha Coakley in the race for a United States Senate seat. He did it one day short of a year after President Obama stood on the steps of the United States Capitol, looking across a mass of faces that celebrated the potential of his presidency.

As a result, Mr. Obama will spend the first anniversary of his inauguration watching Democrats tangle in an unseemly quarrel over who lost Massachusetts — Ms. Coakley’s pollster, Celinda Lake, called the Huffington Post four hours before the polls closed to blame Democratic leaders in Washington — and contemplating a political landscape that has been thoroughly upended in the course of only 10 days.

The implications are sure to be far-reaching, and the result leaves Mr. Obama with a long list of tough choices.

Stripped of the 60th vote needed to block Republican filibusters in the Senate, will Mr. Obama now make further accommodations to Republicans in an effort to move legislation through Congress with more bipartisanship, even at the cost of further alienating liberals annoyed at what they see as his ideological malleability?

Or will he seek to rally his party’s base through confrontation, even if it means giving up on getting much done this year?

Will he find a way to ram his health care bill through Congress quickly in the wake of the Massachusetts loss, so that his party can run on a major if controversial accomplishment? Or will he heed the warnings of Republicans, and now some Democrats, that to do so would be to ignore the message of Tuesday’s election, with its clear overtones of dissatisfaction with the administration’s approach so far?

It is not just questions of policy: for Mr. Obama and the Democrats, already worried about the coming midterm elections, the results could hardly have been more distressing. States do not come more Democratic than Massachusetts, the only one that voted for George McGovern over Richard Nixon in 1972, a fact that older residents still recount with fresh pride. By challenging the legacy of Edward M. Kennedy, the holder of the contested seat for 46 years and a liberal icon, the Republican victory could only be dispiriting to the left.

Most ominously, independent voters — who embraced Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign and are an increasingly critical constituency — seemed to have fled to Mr. Brown in Massachusetts, as they did to Republicans in races for governor in Virginia and New Jersey last November. It is hard not to view that as a repudiation of the way Mr. Obama and Democratic Congressional leaders have run things.

“This is a giant wake-up call,” said Terry McAuliffe, the former Democratic National Committee chairman who lost a bid for the Democratic nomination for governor in Virginia last year. “We have to keep our focus on job creation. Everything we have to do is related to job creation. We have to do a much better job on the message. People are confused on what this health care bill is going to do.”

Even before the polls closed, the White House was suggesting the outlines of a recovery strategy, a combination of a more populist tone and an embrace of greater fiscal responsibility.

A Day For Mourning

The class aspect to Brown's win is obvious. Coakley did well in the state's urban areas, the wealthy western suburbs of Boston and the Berkshires. In middle and working class suburban towns, she was clobbered.

Mass. Race Harbinger For "Monumental Clash" Over Health Care In Midterm Elections

The Wash Post:

Democrat Martha Coakley's struggle to stave off a potentially devastating defeat in Tuesday's special Senate election in Massachusetts marks a critical turning point in the year-long debate about health-care reform. Regardless of the outcome of the race, the two parties appeared headed toward a monumental clash over the issue in the coming midterm elections.

A victory by state Sen. Scott Brown, who was given little chance of winning only a few weeks ago, would give Republicans 41 votes in the Senate and further embolden them to challenge the core of President Obama's agenda. Democrats could face an internal battle over how or even whether to proceed with the legislation, as well as how to deal with the issue in the fall races.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) sought to head off possible talk of retreat, vowing to press ahead with the legislation. "There is no 'back to the drawing board,' " she told reporters Monday in San Francisco. She said there will be a final health-care bill "one way or the other."

But Republicans were warning of a political backlash if Democrats proceed in the face of a Brown victory ...

Despite the general opposition to the legislation in this and other polls, Democrats reiterated Monday their belief that, once the politically debilitating debate ends, they can turn health-care reform into a winning issue. Their strategy is to make a populist argument that they say will put Republicans on the defensive for opposing politically popular measures designed to check the power of insurance companies.

"The only way to win this debate is to get the bill passed and implement it," White House senior adviser David Axelrod said. He said that public fears about the legislation are "based on a caricature" that will disappear once people learn more about the benefits. "That's the case we're going to make," he said ...

"The Democrats' argument to date has been 'Okay, these are bad numbers, but it's the sausage making, and if they pass the bill they can reframe it and be better off,' " said Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster whose firm has done the surveys for Brown. Sounding bullish about Massachusetts, he added: "I am coming to a different conclusion today than I would have last week. This bill has now been rejected by the American public."

Democrats are determined to prove that assertion wrong, by either a Coakley victory in Massachusetts or a major public relations effort this year. But the outcome in Massachusetts now stands as the marker that lawmakers in both parties will use to assess the politics of the issue that has gripped the country for so long.

The Bitter Irony: Potential Lack Of Progressive Support Tomorrow Might Force Acceptance Of "Inferior" Senate Health Bill

Do you know any Progressives who have been so bothered by Obama and his pragmatism and willingness to compromise, that they've lost interest and tuned out? I bet many of these purists were also so upset with the "watered down" Senate health reform bill, that they called for its rejection too.

If you do know any such folks, and they live in Massachusetts, you need to let them know that unless they get over it by tomorrow, their disaffection may force the House to accept the Senate bill as is. Here's the NY Times:

With the Massachusetts special election for United States Senate increasingly unpredictable, Democrats in Washington are contemplating a fall-back plan to advance far-reaching health care legislation, even if a Republican victory on Tuesday deprives Senate Democrats of the crucial 60th vote they need to overcome filibusters.

For the moment, at least, the preferred Plan B would be to try to persuade House Democrats to approve the health care bill that the Senate adopted on Christmas Eve, obviating the need for an additional Senate vote and sending the measure directly to President Obama for his signature, administration officials and Congressional aides said on Sunday.

House Democrats have expressed complaints about the Senate legislation, and Congressional leaders and top White House officials, including Mr. Obama, worked last week to negotiate various compromises.

Over all, however, the bills are similar, if not identical, on a vast majority of issues. For supporters of the health care overhaul, the complaints with the Senate bill may seem minor compared with the prospect of outright defeat of the legislation, the president’s top domestic initiative, and the thought of Republicans’ using a health care failure to clobber Democrats in this fall’s midterm elections.

Aides said that the Democrats could move forward with the Senate-passed bill and then push through a raft of changes during the upcoming federal budget process.

If rank-and-file House Democrats balk, party leaders have other options. They could try to pass a revised health care bill in the Senate before the new Massachusetts senator is sworn in. Or they could try to use a procedural tactic known as budget reconciliation that would require only 51 votes.

But there is little appeal in those choices. Rushing a bill through the Senate would prompt howls from Republicans and accusations of foul play. And budget reconciliation would most likely require scaling back the scope of the health care changes.

From a political and public relations standpoint, officials said it seemed better for House Democrats to step forward and make the case that approving the Senate bill would be better than having no health care bill.

A House Democratic aide said the House view of the Senate bill had not changed. “We are working toward a compromise bill,” the aide said.

The Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” warned that health care would be a political weapon under any circumstances.

“I think the politics are toxic for the Democrats either way,” Mr. McConnell said.

"We lose this one, we lose the opportunity for Barack Obama and the change agenda to move forward"

Yesterday on the campaign trail, from the Boston Globe:

President Obama, putting his political capital on the line, swept into town yesterday to bolster Martha Coakley’s campaign in the final days of an extraordinarily and unexpectedly tight US Senate race, saying that a Democratic victory tomorrow is vital to moving his agenda forward.

"Understand what’s at stake here, Massachusetts. It’s whether we’re going forward or going backwards,’’ Obama told a capacity crowd of 1,500 Coakley supporters at a Northeastern University gymnasium. “I can’t do it alone. I need leaders like Martha by my side so we can kick it into high gear, so we can finish what we’ve started.’’

The stakes for Obama are significant, as he tries to preserve Edward M. Kennedy’s long-held Senate seat for Democrats and deflect the sudden and unexpectedly strong candidacy of state Senator Scott Brown, who would become the 41st Republican in the US Senate and give the party the filibuster power it needs to derail the president’s health care over haul ...

The Republican - who has made much of the fact that he owns a pickup truck with 200,000 miles on it - rallied the crowd with one of the frequent refrains of his campaign: “I’m Scott Brown, I’m from Wrentham, I drive a truck, and I’m asking for your vote.’’

Obama, in a reference to that Brown campaign line, told the crowd at the Boston rally: “You’ve got to look under the hood.’’

During his 25-minute speech, Obama criticized Brown’s record, saying that the state senator has voted with Republicans 96 percent of the time and that it would be “hard to suggest’’ he would be independent from the Republican agenda.

Obama also cast the Massachusetts election in stark terms regarding the future of the Democratic agenda, including the health care reform plan, which Coakley supports and Brown does not.

Health Care, And Entire Obama Agenda, On The Line Tomorrow

Joe Klein:

If Martha Coakley actually manages to lose the Senate race in Massachusetts, there will be all sorts of recriminations--but, I believe, one inescapable conclusion. People will say she was a lousy candidate who went to sleep after the primary, taking the general election for granted. True enough. Some will say that Scott Brown is an attractive guy who ran a smart campaign. Also true.

But the inescapable conclusion is that this campaign--now that it's become a huge news story nationally (and also in Massachusetts, which should drive a big turnout)--is a referendum on President Obama's health care reform bill...and the horrifically messy process that produced it. As readers know, I support the bill--it isn't my ideal, the Ron Wyden plan was--because it achieves two important goals: it makes it impossible for insurers to deny coverage and it subsidizes those too poor to afford health care now. It also points the way to a more orderly and consumer-friendly future through the establishment of health care exchanges where individuals and small businesses will have the same market clout (and lower prices) that major corporations now enjoy.

This is good policy, but it now seems entirely possible that it was bad politics. It might have been better for the President to have paid more attention to the public skepticism about governmental activism and built trust by going after more popular demons--Wall Street, for one; Congressional profligacy, for another.

At the end of his presidency, Bill Clinton told me that he should have enacted welfare reform before trying health care. He needed to establish credibility as a good manager--at that point, most middle class voters considered the welfare system a worthless scam (and it was, as subsequent events showed, in desperate need of reform). Obama probably needed to do something similar...and he will, belatedly, do so this year, pushing for stricter financial regulations and a tax on big banks to recoup the bailouts. He should also revive his campaign pledge of a National Infrastructure Bank, which would take decisions about the most important new public works projects out of the hands of Congressional porkers. If Obama had done so in his first year, his approval ratings might be closer to 60% than to 50% today.

He chose instead to take on health care reform, a project of indisputable long-term value to the country. He has gotten farther than most experts considered possible. He has made embarrassing compromises in the process, but it's likely he couldn't have gotten to this point any other way. He has spent most of his political capital. And, if the Democrats lose the election in Massachusetts, Obama loses his veto-proof majority in the Senate...and if he does, his gamble will, most likely, have failed. This will say profound things about government's ability to take on big projects in an atmosphere overwhelmed by special interests, Republican nihilism, media sensationalism and public apathy.

Massachusetts will be spun any number of creative ways, no matter how it turns out. But health care is, in the end, what this is all about.

"One year later assessing Obama: Testing the promise of pragmatism"

Wash Post:

A month before he was inaugurated, Barack Obama pinpointed one of the biggest challenges he would face as president ... At the time, Obama said he did not think his victory marked an abrupt end to the skepticism ushered in by President Ronald Reagan toward top-down government and social engineering by Washington.

"What we don't know yet is whether my administration and this next generation of leadership is going to be able to hew to a new, more pragmatic approach that is less interested in whether we have big government or small government; they're more interested in whether we have a smart, effective government," he said on that day in December 2008.

As Obama marks the first anniversary of his inauguration on Wednesday, that question remains one of the most politically charged of his presidency -- and central to the politics of this election year -- and will hinge on how Americans judge Obama and his policies.

Will the public conclude that his policies worked, however much they may cost and however much they may entail more government intervention in the economy? Or will they regard his agenda as intrusive and ineffective big government? What steps may Obama take to alleviate public discontent over these first-year decisions?

The stakes are sizable, with an early referendum coming Tuesday in a special Senate election in Massachusetts. Democrats are fighting to hold the seat once occupied by the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, a dramatic turnaround in a contest previously seen as an almost certain win. A Republican victory would imperil the administration's health-care initiative and cast a pall over already-nervous Democrats, who fear considerable losses in November's midterm elections.

Obama receives mixed reviews for his first-year performance, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. His approval rating stands at 53 percent, with 44 percent disapproving. Among independents, 49 percent approve, the lowest of any of his recent predecessors at this point in their presidencies.

Majorities disapprove of his handling of the major domestic issues -- the economy, health care and the federal budget deficit. But more approve than disapprove of his handling of terrorism and Afghanistan, and he has broad support for his response to the attempted terrorist bombing on Christmas Day ...

The poll also shows how much ground Obama has lost during his first year of trying to convince the public that more government is the answer to the country's problems. By 58 percent to 38 percent, Americans said they prefer smaller government and fewer services to larger government with more services. Since he won the Democratic nomination in June 2008, the margin between those favoring smaller over larger government has moved in Post-ABC polls from five points to 20 points.

White House advisers maintain that many of Obama's actions are temporary and not a permanent enlargement of federal power at the expense of private industry. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said such actions as the bailouts of the banks and auto companies "were emergency interventions to stabilize" an economy on the edge of a depression.

The promise of change, which echoed so powerfully during his campaign, is now another source of division. At the time of his inauguration, three-fourths of the country said Obama would bring needed change to Washington. Today the nation is evenly divided on whether he has. Three-fourths of Democrats say yes; three-fourths of Republicans and a majority of independents say no.

Around the White House these days, the president's advisers draw analogies with Reagan to paint a hopeful portrait of Obama's weakened standing. Reagan, they note, had approval ratings around 50 percent at the end of his first year in office and ended up winning a landslide reelection victory in 1984. What they don't say so vocally is that Reagan's approval dipped into the 40s in the fall of 1982, and that his party suffered substantial losses in Congress that November ...

Vin Weber, a former Republican congressman from Minnesota, said the Obama team's analysis that America was ready for a sharp change in direction was not as misguided as many conservative critics contend. When the administration launched the stimulus and the health-care package, he said, "they thought the country was at a very different place ideologically -- and had reason to believe that it was at a different place."

Since then, Weber said, the country has reattached itself to its more centrist moorings, or even moved to the right.

"When the Clinton administration faced similar difficulty, they were quite adept at reorienting themselves to the center ideologically," Weber said. "Can this administration and this Congress do that? It's not clear to me how they do that."...

Growing partisanship

Obama begins his second year having failed to ease political polarization. "What I haven't been able to do in the midst of this crisis is bring the country together in a way that we had done in the Inauguration," he told People magazine recently. "That's what's been lost this year."

Obama's Disaffected Base

Boston Globe:

The feverish excitement that propelled Barack Obama and scores of other Democrats to victory in 2008 has all but evaporated, worrying party leaders who are struggling to invigorate the base before Tuesday’s Massachusetts Senate race and November’s critical midterm contests, pollsters and party activists said.

President Obama’s scheduled visit to the Bay State on behalf of Democratic candidate Martha Coakley today, a rescue bid planned suddenly by the White House last week after Republican Scott Brown pulled even or ahead in some polls, will be a key test of the president’s ability to reenergize his dispirited party.

But the challenges to getting an enthusiastic turnout for Democrats in 2010 are huge. Young voters and left-wing Democrats have become frustrated with progress on the Obama agenda in Washington. Polls show that Obama’s popularity among younger Americans is down.

“People are rightfully disenchanted’’ with the way things are going in Washington, said Michael Vastola, 21, a Tufts University senior and active College Democrat. “I’m personally concerned, because I hope they keep their interest in this upcoming election.’’

While many young voters imagined that an Obama presidency would mean a speedy closure of Guantanamo Bay prison, a wind-down of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a health care plan that would, at least, provide a government insurance plan to compete with the private sector, they instead are frustrated at the slow pace of change, Vastola and others said.

“There was this expectation that this was going to be like a Hollywood movie. He was a candidate almost fictionalized from day one,’’ Boston-based Democratic political consultant Michael Goldman said of Obama. “Does it make me frustrated? It does. But it’s reality, it’s the world as it really is, not the fantasy.’’

The trend threatens to do serious damage to the Democrats this fall as they seek to hang onto their majorities in Congress. With “tea party’’ activists and other conservatives eager to vent their anger over Democratic policies, low Democratic turnout could be devastating to the majority party. While a GOP takeover of either chamber of Congress seemed highly unlikely even a month ago, Democratic officials, spooked by developments in deep-blue Massachusetts, fear that Republicans could score big upsets this fall.

The White House is clearly disheartened by the attacks it is getting from the left flank of the party.

“I don’t know why some segments of political observers don’t seem to be as motivated. There’s a lot at stake. There’s a lot at stake in the election in Massachusetts; there’s a lot at stake in what’s debated every day on Capitol Hill. What’s at stake is whether we’re going to go forward with ideas for an economic recovery,’’ said White House press secretary Robert Gibbs ...

Polls show that young voters still like Obama, but with less intensity than during the campaign, when 18-29 year-olds voted for him by two-to-one, according to Harvard’s Institute of Politics. Now, 58 percent of those young voters approve of Obama, compared with 54 percent of American voters overall. And a majority of young voters disapprove of the way Obama is handling every key issue the institute studied, including health care, Iran, Afghanistan, the economy, and the budget deficit.

Young voters “have really fallen back in line to look more like the rest of America,’’ said the Institute of Politics polling director, John Della Volpe, a dangerous trend for Democrats who have relied in recent elections on heavy youth support.

Further, while 52 percent of young voters showed up at the polls in 2008, their turnout was abysmally low in last November’s elections, with just 19 percent of eligible young voters casting ballot in New Jersey, 17 percent in Virginia, and 10 percent in New York City’s mayoral race, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University, which tracks youth voting patterns.

How Coakley Could Lose: "Democrats didn’t show up at the polls because they assumed victory." The Impact: "Huge"

Tobin Harshaw:

... After all, in bluer-than-blue Massachusetts, what threat was any Republican challenger, much less a lowly state senator known primarily for an old Cosmo centerfold and a daughter who was deemed “pretty good” by Simon Cowell? ...

“Riding a wave of opposition to Democratic health-care reform, GOP upstart Scott Brown is leading in the U.S. Senate race, raising the odds of a historic upset that would reverberate all the way to the White House, a new poll shows,” reports Jessica van Sack of the Boston Herald.”The poll shows Brown, a state senator from Wrentham, besting Coakley, the state’s attorney general, by 50 percent to 46 percent, the first major survey to show Brown in the lead. Unenrolled long-shot Joseph L. Kennedy, an information technology executive with no relation to the famous family, gets 3 percent of the vote. Only 1 percent of voters were undecided.”

Could this possibly be for real? Let’s beseech the oracle, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver:

Earlier today I tweeted about how there wasn’t enough evidence to describe the Massachusetts special election as a “toss-up”, as some other forecasters have done, based on the information available to us at that time. Well, now there’s some new evidence. And it isn’t good for Martha Coakley. In particular, the evidence is a Suffolk University poll that shows the Republican, Scott Brown, ahead by 4 points, 50-46.

Suffolk is a fairly average pollster, and I’m sure if we looked long and hard enough, we could develop some critiques of the poll. But there are no particular red flags and … c’mon, let’s not be silly, because there are a lot of other polls that you’d also have to critique in order to discredit the notion that the race is too close to call, including the PPP poll that showed Brown up by one point a week ago (since which time he’s almost certainly gained ground), the Rasmussen poll that showed a 2-point race for Coakley, and Coakley’s internals, which reportedly have shown her ahead by just 2-5 points.

... there’s something larger going on here, and it’s hard not to see the race as a referendum on three separate issues: health care reform; the Democratic Party heading into the 2012 midterms; and (the suddenly vulnerable) President Obama himself. The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson lays out the stakes:

Brown’s victory would give Republicans 41 seats in the Senate, enough to break the Democrats’ filibuster-proof margin by a single vote. In other words, Tuesday’s impact would extend beyond health care. It would hurt the Democrats chances to pass a jobs bill, which is already suffering in the Senate; a financial regulation bill which already receive zero Republican support; a cap and trade with dwindling prospects even though there are some Republicans like Lindsay Graham who have expressed interest in working with Democrats on climate change legislation; and immigration reform …

That said, health care reform might be safe — for a while. The interim senator Paul Kirk is a Democrat who has promised to vote for health care if he isn’t displaced first. Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin has signaled that a final winner from Tuesday’s vote could take more than a week to determine, because a federal vote allows for 10 extra days for military and absentee ballots to come in. Another source told the Boston Herald that the vote might not be certified until February 20. If that’s true, it gives the Democrats a lot of time to hammer out the final details.

That may be true, but according to Byron York of the Washington Examiner, many Democrats are preparing to avoid the collateral damage of a Coakley loss:

Some Democrats, eager to distance Obama from any electoral failure, are beginning to compare Coakley to Creigh Deeds, the losing Democratic candidate in the Virginia governor’s race last year. Deeds ran such a lackluster campaign, Democrats say, that his defeat could be solely attributed to his own shortcomings, and should not be seen as a referendum on President Obama’s policies or those of the national Democratic party.

The same sort of thinking is emerging in Massachusetts. “This is a Creigh Deeds situation,” the Democrat says. “I don’t think it says that the Obama agenda is a problem. I think it says, 1) that she’s a terrible candidate, 2) that she ran a terrible campaign, 3) that the climate is difficult but she should have been able to overcome it, and 4) that Democrats beware — you better run good campaigns, or you’re going to lose.”

Thompson, too, envisions the Democrats’ worst nightmare:

But here’s the X-factor. If Coakley loses, recriminations follow. Pundits would break down the defeat along various lines: 1) She was a horrible candidate. 2) Democrats didn’t show up at the polls because they assumed victory. 3) Health care reform’s growing unpopularity and the Democrats’ perceived dithering and weakness contributed to Coakley’s erosion. 4) “The Tea Parties Win! In the very state where colonists first rose up against the tyranny of the Old World, the American People took a stand against the Leftist Agenda and dumped the tea of tyrannical over-reach into the Bay of Oblivion…” The first two will be liberal explanations. The third will be the centrist read. And that last one is made ready-to-order for Glenn Beck and his ilk.

Brown’s victory would represent both a tactical blow to the filibuster-proof majority and a mojo killer, which could make liberal Democrats start to wonder whether they could be Coakleyed in November. That would tie huge anchors to the Democrats already plodding economic agenda. Stay tuned. Tuesday is huge.

Time To Dump The Obama Is "Too Cool & Detached" Meme

Greg Sargent:

You hear this line again and again from opinionmakers. Obama's approach to the Christmas Day terror plot was "too cool." He's too "detached." Not emotionally engaged. Doesn't give you the sense he's in charge. Isn't a "strong father," as Maureen Dowd put it.

But a raft of polls gives us more than enough info to call B.S. on this meme.

Yesterday's Gallup poll found Obama's rating on terror has actually inched up since the foiled plot. Yesterday's Quinnipiac poll said that 66 percent view Obama as a "strong leader." A CNN poll found that 64 percent like Obama's personality and leadership qualities.

That isn't all. A CBS poll found that 57 percent approve of Obama on terrorism. Still another poll found that 65 percent have confidence that Obama will protect them from terror. Got that?

These findings, to be clear, don't say much about the public's attitudes towards his actual policies, which have indeed taken a dip in the polls.

But they clearly show that the electorate is comfortable with his temperament and leadership tone. So it's time to junk the "Obama as Spock" meme. Wouldn't you say?

"White House's Tax Proposal Targets Big Banks' Risks"

Wall St Journal:

President Barack Obama plans Thursday to propose taxing large banks based on their exposure to risk as a way to recover taxpayer losses from the 2008 bailout of the financial sector, people familiar with the matter said.

The plan marks the latest in a slew of proposed fees, penalties and constraints the White House envisions slapping on Wall Street during the clean-up of the financial crisis.

If approved by Congress, the new tax—which the White House calls a "financial crisis responsibility fee "—would force more than 25 banks to collectively pay the federal government roughly $100 billion over 10 years.

The numbers could change as the final tally of losses from the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program is calculated. The top five Wall Street banks earned profits of about $30 billion through the third quarter last year. The proposal will also help the administration tackle the U.S.'s giant budget deficit.

Companies that benefited from the government's debt-guarantee program would also be taxed, a decision that would affect GE Capital, the finance arm of General Electric Co.

The banking industry has already objected to initial reports of the proposal, which Mr. Obama is expected to detail at the White House on Thursday ...

The proposal would not require small banks to pay the fees, the people familiar with the matter said, the latest sign that Washington's post-crisis clean-up is hitting large financial institutions most heavily.

The administration hasn't disclosed the exact equation it will use to determine what each bank owes, but the rough contours suggest that J.P. Morgan, Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp. will top the list of banks with the largest exposure.

Banks that lean heavily on funding sources other than customer deposits, meanwhile, could pay proportionally higher taxes. That means that Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley could get penalized. Another big loser could be Citigroup, whose main U.S. banking unit's insured deposits represent a relatively small slice of the company's liabilities.

The 2008 law creating TARP required the White House to come up with a proposal to recoup any losses. The latest government report estimates losses to be about $120 billion. A large portion of those losses are expected to be from government investments in the automotive industry, a burden Mr. Dimon said Wednesday that banks shouldn't be required to shoulder.

Harry Reid Remark Cartoons

"For Obama, a tough year to get the message out"

Dan Balz:

In winning the White House, Barack Obama's team earned a reputation for skill and discipline in dominating the communications wars with opponents. In office, virtually the same team has struggled, spending much of the past year defending the administration's actions on the two biggest domestic issues -- the economy and health care.

The White House has sought to sell health-care reform as a way to make coverage affordable and accessible to middle-class families. But it was also presented at various times as a cost-containment measure, a restraint on greedy insurance companies, a moral imperative to cover the uninsured and, to Democratic lawmakers, as a "can't fail" enterprise. The president and his aides sent mixed signals on the "public option" as well, voicing support for a government-run plan while signaling their willingness to see it die to get a bill passed.

On the economy, administration officials put themselves at a disadvantage with faulty projections of the jobless rate and an overly rosy prediction of how many jobs the stimulus package would create or save. Once they had put in place policies to deal with the worst of the crises Obama inherited, they moved on to health care and later to Afghanistan. The result was a perceived loss of focus in addressing public unrest about unemployment that has prompted a shift back to the economy recently.

It is an axiom of political communication that the president wields the world's biggest megaphone and is therefore capable of setting an agenda and dominating a debate. Obama has used his rhetorical skills repeatedly to good effect, but officials acknowledge that there are limits.

"There is real power there," White House senior adviser David Axelrod said of the president's platform. "But it's not a magic wand. The bully pulpit does not put people to work."

Obama's advisers have learned what previous White House teams came to realize when they arrived in Washington, which is the vast difference between campaigning and governing. Asked what happened to the Obama team, Mark McKinnon, who was a media adviser to President George W. Bush, said, "They're human. They've walked into the propellers of the federal government."

Axelrod said the challenge of managing and controlling messages in a campaign and in the White House is "the difference between tick-tack-toe and three-dimensional tick-tack-toe. It's vastly more complicated." <Continue reading.>

"In Massachusetts, Anxiety for Favored Democrats"

NY Times:

Martha M. Coakley, the Democrat running for SenatorEdward M. Kennedy’s seat in Massachusetts, had seemed so certain of winning the special election on Jan. 19 that she barely campaigned last month.

But the dynamic has changed in recent days. The news that two senior Democratic senators will retire this year in the face of bleak re-election prospects has created anxiety and, even in this bluest of states, a sense that the balance of power has shifted dramatically from just a year ago.

With the holidays over and public attention refocused on the race, Ms. Coakley’s insistence on debating her Republican opponent, Scott P. Brown, only with a third-party candidate present has drawn mounting criticism.

And a new poll that showed a competitive race between Ms. Coakley and Mr. Brown has generated buzz on conservative blogs and energized the Brown campaign — though many news organizations dispute its methodology.

In a sudden flurry of activity, the Coakley campaign released its first television advertisement on Thursday and accepted the endorsement of Mr. Kennedy’s widow,Victoria Reggie Kennedy, at a splashy event outside Boston.

A Brown win remains improbable, given that Democrats outnumber Republicans by 3 to 1 in the state and that Ms. Coakley, the state’s attorney general, has far more name recognition, money and organizational support.

But a tighter-than-expected margin in the closely watched race would still prompt soul-searching among Democrats nationally, since the outcome will be the first real barometer of whether problems facing the party will play out in tangible ways at the polls later this year....

"In a political universe ruled by ideological yellers, [Obama] lacks both an ideology and the pipes"

Richard Cohen is worried. Are you?

Last month, no American soldiers were killed in Iraq. Last month, the unemployment rate dipped a bit, the stock market ended the year up, the financial system did not crater, Detroit's Big Three began to get a pulse -- and yet a consensus started to form that Barack Obama, who is either responsible for or merely presided over all this good stuff, is a failure.

What's more, the consensus came supported by numbers ... Obama began 2009 with 43 percent of Americans strongly approving of his performance and ended it with 26 percent feeling that way. Any way you measure the polls, Obama did not have a good year.

On the left, the president is being pummeled for health-care legislation that does not include a public option and that has not dispatched insurance executives to Guantanamo. On the right, he is being pummeled for socializing the economy, establishing death panels and allowing maniacal Nigerians to load their Calvins with boom-boom and fly into peaceful Detroit. It's a cartoon.

In foreign policy, Obama has sorely disappointed his fans on the left for escalating the war in Afghanistan and on the right for not escalating it enough. Guantanamo, which he vowed to close, is still open. He supports gay rights, but don't ask and don't tell about "don't ask, don't tell." He zigs, he zags. Change! Hope! But not much of the former and little of the latter.

To some, he's weak on the environment. To others, he's too strong on the environment. He is camouflaged in the incomprehensible, leaving no (carbon) footprint and quixotically tilting at energy-producing windmills. He confers too much with our allies, bows when he should shake and has not brought peace to the Middle East -- as, you will remember, George W. Bush did.

Much of this critique is asinine. If the Republican Party had its way -- and God sees to it that it doesn't -- the country would by now have reverted to the barter system and the unemployment rate would be around 25 percent. The GOP economic program simply does not exist, and even Bush knew this. When push came to shove, he tossed his ideology overboard and used government money to bail out financial institutions.

Still, the reason the GOP criticisms have started to stick is that Obama can be made into anything his critics want. He is a lean man of ideological clay who has let others mold his image. His bottom line is forever on the move. It's not that he's not good or smart; it's rather that in a political universe ruled by ideological yellers, he lacks both an ideology and the pipes.

The White House faces a major political problem. Obama's first year was not a bad one -- and yet he suffered. The coming year threatens to be much worse. Fatalities are going to increase in Afghanistan. Unemployment could fester. The debt is going to increase, and all over the country, state and municipal governments are going to go broke and look to Washington for help. The land will roil with anger, and Mr. Cool in the White House is not up to FDR-like fireside chats. He was born to blog.

Journalists like to believe that if they are getting criticism from both sides of the story, they must be doing something right. This is not true for journalists -- they may actually have gotten the story doubly wrong -- and it is certainly not true for political figures. In Obama's case, his misfortune is to be a leader without a cause.

He wanted a health-care bill. Why? To cover the uncovered. Maybe. To rein in the insurance companies. Maybe. To lower costs. Maybe. What mattered most was getting a bill, any bill. This is not a cause. It's a notch on a belt.

Obama could be a great president. He has already achieved much -- possibly saving the country from financial ruin, salvaging the auto industry, getting some sort of health-care reform. Possibly, possibly. Yet his numbers sink as his achievements rise. He is the Johnny Appleseed of cognitive dissonance, so utterly detached that when he wins it seems to be only for himself. Pollsters measure him but poets have described him. William Butler Yeats got it down years ago: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

Partisan Watch: Red States Are Becoming More Red, Blue States More Blue

Fox News has really been hyping the 2 Blue Dog Dems from the deep South who recently become Republicans so I'm sure they'll give this party switching story just as much play: the ex-Republican Senator from Rhode Island is leaving the GOP to run for governor as an independent. Here's the NY Times:

Lincoln D. Chafee, the former Republican senator from Rhode Island who lost his seat to a Democrat in 2006 despite his family’s longtime presence in state politics, announced Monday that he would run for governor there as an independent.

Mr. Chafee, 56, left the Republican Party after his loss to Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat, saying the party’s agenda had grown too conservative. In Congress, he opposed President George W. Bush’s tax cuts and was the only Senate Republican to vote against authorizing the war in Iraq.

Gov. Donald L. Carcieri, a Republican who took office in 2003, cannot seek re-election because of term limits, and the only Republican to enter the race dropped out last month. Mr. Carcieri, a conservative with flagging approval ratings, is the only Republican in statewide office.

On the Democratic side, Patrick C. Lynch, the state’s attorney general, and Frank T. Caprio, its general treasurer, are competing for their party’s nomination. Both are well known in the state, but so is Mr. Chafee, whose family has loomed large in Rhode Island politics for more than a century. His father, John, was the state’s governor for six years in the 1960s before serving in the Senate for two decades; upon his death in 1999, his son was appointed his successor ...

Mr. Chafee faces significant challenges in the governor’s race: Rhode Island is overwhelmingly Democratic, and he trails his Democratic opponents in fund-raising. But New England voters have elected a number of independents in recent decades, including two governors — Lowell P. Weicker Jr. in Connecticut and Angus King in Maine.

In Massachusetts, Timothy Cahill, the state treasurer, is running for governor as an independent after leaving the Democratic Party last year.

Darrell M. West, vice president of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, said Mr. Chafee would be a strong candidate even without the backing of a major political party. His name recognition, his personal wealth and the fact that about half of Rhode Island voters are not affiliated with a party all work in Mr. Chafee’s favor, Mr. West said.

“The Chafee family name is the gold standard in Rhode Island,” he said. “And while Rhode Island does tend to elect Democrats, independents are the largest voting bloc in the state.”

"2009 has been an extraordinarily successful year for Obama"

Andrew Sullivan summarizes Obama's first year in office. How would you rate Obama?

2009 has been an extraordinarily successful year for Obama. Since this is currently a minority view and will prompt a chorus of "In The Tank!", allow me to explain.

The substantive record is clear enough. Torture is ended, if Gitmo remains enormously difficult to close and rendition extremely hard to police. The unitary executive, claiming vast, dictatorial powers over American citizens, has been unwound. The legal inquiries that may well convict former Bush officials for war crimes are underway, and the trial of KSM will reveal the lawless sadism of the Cheney regime that did so much to sabotage our war on Jihadism. Military force against al Qaeda in Pakistan has been ratcheted up considerably, even at a civilian cost that remains morally troubling. The US has given notice that it intends to leave Afghanistan with a bang - a big surge, a shift in tactics, and a heavy batch of new troops. Iraq remains dodgy in the extreme, but at least March elections have been finally nailed down.

Domestically, the new president has rescued the banks in a bail-out that has come in at $200 billion under budget; the economy has shifted from a tailspin to stablilization and some prospect of job growth next year; the Dow is at 10,500 a level no one would have predicted this time last year. A stimulus package has helped undergird infrastructure and probably did more to advance non-carbon energy than anything that might have emerged from Copenhagen. Universal health insurance (with promised deficit reduction!) is imminent - a goal sought by Democrats (and Nixon) for decades, impossible under the centrist Clinton, but won finally by a black liberal president. More progress has been made in unraveling the war on drugs this past year than in living memory. The transformation of California into a state where pot is now more available than in Amsterdam is as remarkable as the fact that such new sanity has spread across the country and is at historic highs, so to speak, in the opinion polls. On civil rights, civil marriage came to the nation's capital city, which has a 60 percent black population. If that doesn't help reverse some of the gloom from Prop 8 and Maine, what would? And, yes, the unspeakable ban on HIV-positive foreigners was finally lifted, bringing the US back to the center of the global effort to fight AIDS as it should be.

Relations with Russia have improved immensely and may yield real gains in non-proliferation; Netanyahu has moved, however insincerely, toward a two-state solution; Iran's coup regime remains far more vulnerable than a year ago, paralyzed in its diplomacy, terrified of its own people and constantly shaken by the ongoing revolution; Pakistan launched a major offensive against al Qaeda and the Taliban in its border area; global opinion of the US has been transformed; the Cairo speech and the Nobel acceptance speech helped explain exactly what Obama's blend of ruthless realism for conflict-management truly means. 

The Beltway cannot handle all this. And that's why they continue to jump on every micro-talking-point and forget vast forests for a few failing saplings.

But when you consider the magnitude of shifting from one conservative era to one in which government simply has to be deployed to tackle deep structural problems, the achievement is as significant as his election year.

I remain, in other words, extremely bullish on the guy. There is a huge amount to come - finding a way to bring down long-term debt, ensuring health insurance reform stays on track and reformed constantly to control costs, turning the corner on non-carbon energy, reforming entitlements, finding a new revenue stream like a VAT, preventing Israel from attacking Iran, preventing Iran's coup regime from going even roguer, withdrawing from an Iraq still teetering on new sectarian conflict, avoiding a second downturn, closing Gitmo for good, ending the gay ban in the military ... well, you get the picture.

Change of this magnitude is extremely hard. That it is also frustrating, inadequate, compromised, flawed, and beset with bribes and trade-offs does not, in my mind, undermine it. Obama told us it would be like this - and it is. And those who backed him last year would do better, to my mind, if they appreciated the difficulty of this task and the diligence and civility that Obama has displayed in executing it.

Yes, we have. And yes, we still are the ones we've been waiting for - if we still care enough to swallow purism and pride and show up for the less emotionally satisfying grind of real, practical, incremental reform.

And then one of his readers commented on what Obama has done to the Republicans:

"The Republican Party ... [has not and] cannot come to grips with the very nature of the problems of modern American politics"

Another thought invoking article from Jonathan Chait:

... In reality, both parties have plenty of ideas that they would like to implement if given the political power to do so. Republicans’ policy ideas primarily involve cutting marginal tax rates and regulations. The question isn’t whether the Republican Party has any ideas. The question is whether the party has any relevant ideas.

In the days following the 2008 election, some Republicans predicted that the party would retool itself in response to reality--not just political reality but the actuality of policy challenges. “Republicans,” wrote conservative Ramesh Ponnuru in Time, “will have to devise an agenda that speaks to a country where more people feel the bite of payroll taxes than income taxes, where health-care costs eat up raises even in good times, where the length of the daily commute is a bigger irritant than are earmarks.” Nothing like that rethinking has happened or will happen.

Whatever the merits of President Obama’s agenda, it is clearly a response to objectively large problems facing the country. The administration has selected three main issues as the focus of its domestic agenda: the economic crisis, climate change, and health care reform ... it is impossible to dismiss the problems Obama has chosen to address. In all three areas, the Republican Party has adopted a stance of total opposition, not merely because it disagrees with aspects of Obama’s solutions, but because it cannot come to grips with the very nature of the problems of modern American politics.

Begin with the economic crisis. The root cause of the collapse, as we all know by now, is that financial firms have grown so large and interconnected that the risks they incur can bring down the rest of the economy, forcing the government to intervene. After some initial support, the Republican response has been to denounce the financial bailout, without making any case that failing to save the financial system would have prevented a far deeper disaster.

To some extent, Republicans are simply exploiting populist anger. But the deeper problem lies in the rigidity of conservative ideology. In the most simple and pure market model, a business must be allowed to fail in order for capitalism to function. Once the government begins propping up failed firms, we have embarked upon the road to serfdom and there is no turning back.

As a general principle, this is eminently sensible. Yet it cannot accommodate the reality of a financial industry that, left to its own devices, can bring the rest of the economy down with it. David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter turned conservative apostate, recently recounted his attempt to persuade a group of young conservatives that they had to bend their principles in the face of economic calamity. As Frum recalls it, one of the conservative interlocutors replied, “Maybe it was a good thing we weren’t in power then--because our principles don’t allow us to respond to a crisis like this.”

To deal with the fallout from the financial collapse, Obama helped shepherd a stimulus package consisting of temporary spending and tax cuts. There is some debate among economists as to the effectiveness of fiscal stimulus, though economic forecasting firms have arrived at a consensus that the stimulus helped cushion the blow of the recession. But the rhetoric within the GOP is utterly disconnected from this academic and professional economic analysis. In the Republican view, the stimulus has either done nothing whatsoever to help the economy, or it has deepened the recession.

House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, appearing at a recent public forum, complained that the media were ignoring his party’s economic ideas. OK, replied a reporter, what are those ideas? Cantor could only pivot to his political calculation. “The big idea is to get, to get, to produce an environment where we can have job creation again,” he replied. “And see, that’s where the Obama administration’s agenda so clearly disadvantages the Democrats in this upcoming election in eleven months and advantages us.” So the “idea” is to exploit public discontent over the economy.

Republicans do have an alternative--albeit one they understandably prefer not to discuss in any detail. Senator Jim DeMint introduced a GOP stimulus plan, authored by the Heritage Foundation, that consists of making the Bush tax cuts permanent and adding onto them a series of permanent tax breaks heavily tilted toward corporations and high-income earners. It would cost more than $3 trillion--more than triple the cost of Obama’s stimulus--over the next decade, after which point its costs would continue to accrue (whereas the stimulus will end after a few years). This is some sort of ideological brain-stem reflex, not the product of any analysis of the state of the U.S. economy.

One observer dismissed DeMint’s plan thusly: “It is not innovative or particularly clever. In fact, it’s only eleven pages.” Oddly enough, this observer was DeMint himself, talking up his proposal in a speech at the Heritage Foundation. On the contemporary right, it is a mark of intellectual integrity that even a massive economic cataclysm would not prompt any revising of one’s economic prescription. And, while DeMint speaks from the fringe of the party, his beliefs are by no means confined to it: 90 percent of the current Senate GOP caucus voted for his plan.

On climate change, the Republican response has been equally instructive.

"Oh come all ye tea baggers"

The Idealist / Pragmatist Split Within The Democratic Party

NY Times:

Howard Dean ran for president in 2004 as the outsider ready to battle an entrenched establishment in Washington. And so, four years later, did Barack Obama.

Now, one year into Mr. Obama’s presidency, a sharp dispute between the president and Mr. Dean over the health care bill the Senate approved Thursday — Mr. Dean denounced it as a sellout, while Mr. Obama heralded it as a historic breakthrough — is illustrating the roots of the ideological breach within the Democratic party.

It is not just that the left wing of the party thinks that its centrists hold too much sway and are too quick to cave when faced with pressure from the right. It is also that this White House, stocked as it is with insiders, people whose view of politics is shaped by the compromises inherent in legislating, is confronting a liberal base made up largely of outsiders to the lawmaking process who are asking why they should accept politics as usual.

As much as Mr. Obama presented himself as an outsider during his campaign, a lesson of this battle is that this is a president who would rather work within the system than seek to upend it. He is not the ideologue ready to stage a symbolic fight that could end in defeat; he is a former senator comfortable in dealing with the arcane rules of the Senate and prepared to accept compromise in search of a larger goal. For the most part, Democrats on Capitol Hill have stuck with him.

By contrast, Mr. Dean, the former Democratic Party chairman who has long had strained relations with this administration, said the White House was slow to fight and quick to make concessions — particularly on creating a public insurance plan — and demanded that Democrats kill the Senate version of the health care bill.

That sentiment was echoed by liberal efforts that grew up around the Dean campaign, notably Daily Kos and MoveOn.org, which argued that Mr. Obama was not tough enough in staring down foes, be they insurance companies or Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, the Democrat-turned-independent from Connecticut.

“He ran as someone who would fight against entrenched special interests on behalf of the little guy,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which has emerged as one of Mr. Obama’s leading critics in recent days. “And what we learned in this debate is that he’s not willing to fight and exert pressure on entrenched special interests when it comes to big ideas.”

Of course, it is easier to be an outsider when you are on the outside, which is where Mr. Dean is these days, after making an unsuccessful effort to win a post in the Obama White House. And Mr. Dean’s longtime feud with Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, was noted by many Democrats who were taken aback by the sharp tenor of Mr. Dean’s attack on others in the party. (Mr. Dean declined to comment.)

Still, Mr. Obama’s approach to this battle should not be a surprise to anyone who has followed his career or his campaign for the White House. He served in the United States Senate and in the Illinois Senate. His choice for chief of staff — Mr. Emanuel — was the No. 3 person in the House Democratic leadership, and many of his top West Wing aides came out of staff jobs in the Senate.

Mr. Obama may find it frustrating that it is impossible under Senate rules to get something through without 60 votes, but those are the rules and he is going to play by them. He was not about to go to Connecticut and to whip up the public against Mr. Lieberman, or to press for him to be relieved of his leadership positions in the Senate, as Mr. Green suggested he do.

“The president wasn’t after a Pyrrhic victory — he wasn’t into symbolism,” said David Axelrod, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama. “The president is after solving a problem that has bedeviled a country and countless families for generations.”

All of this has come at a time of strains between Mr. Obama and the left. Mr. Obama has come under fire on several fronts, like health care, escalation of the war in Afghanistan and his failure so far to make good on a campaign pledge to end the ban on open homosexuals in the military.

Mr. Obama has moved to the center on some issues since he became president, particularly on elements of national security. Still, he never presented himself as a doctrinaire liberal, and much of what he is doing as president tracks with what he talked about during the campaign.

Mr. Obama’s call to send more troops to Afghanistan is what he always talked about in the context of outlining his opposition to the war in Iraq. “It’s not like he woke up one morning and said, ‘Let’s go fight a war in Afghanistan,’ ” Mr. Emanuel said. “He talked about it in the campaign.”

And Mr. Obama never exhibited the left’s passion for establishing a public insurance option as part of an overhaul of health care. He rarely talked about it during scores of debates, speeches and interviews during the campaign; instead he focused on expanding coverage, lowering costs and ending health insurance abuses.

During the campaign, many people saw in Mr. Obama what they wanted to see in him, and in the Democratic primaries he often appealed more directly to the left than did Hillary Rodham Clinton, his main rival for most of the contest. The question now is whether legislative and policy accomplishment — signing a health care bill, however imperfect in the eyes of liberals, steadying the economy, winding down the war in Iraq — will be enough, assuming Mr. Obama achieves them, to maintain the support and enthusiasm of those on the left who wanted even more from him.

Mr. Green said that Mr. Obama’s failure to push for the public option — or to enlist his network of grass-root supporters behind it — had sapped the energy out of the base and would have consequences for the 2010 elections. If Mr. Green is correct, that could be a real problem for Democrats, particularly given how energetic opposition to the health bill and the entire Obama agenda appears to be among Republicans.

But this could also prove to be a test of just how much power the outside voices in the left wing have over the insiders in the White House and on Capitol Hill. The stinging attack from Mr. Dean and organizations on the left calling for the defeat of the health care bill failed to dissuade a single Senate Democrat from voting for it. And Mr. Axelrod said he was not worried that would hurt the party come November.

“When people focus on what this bill is and not what it isn’t and recognize what an enormous landmark achievement it is, progressive achievement, you’ll see folks rallying around this and not running away from it,” he said.

Obama's Dilemma (cartoons)

     

Senate Passes Health Care Bill 60 - 39

NY Times:

The Senate voted Thursday to reinvent the nation’s health care system, passing a bill to guarantee access to health insurance for tens of millions of Americans and to rein in health costs as proposed by President Obama.

The 60-to-39 party-line vote, on the 25th straight day of debate on the legislation, brings Democrats a step closer to a goal they have pursued for decades. It clears the way for negotiations with the House, which passed a broadly similar bill last month by a vote of 220 to 215.

If the two chambers can strike a deal, as seems likely, the resulting product would vastly expand the role and responsibilities of the federal government. It would, as lawmakers said repeatedly in the debate, touch the lives of nearly all Americans.

The bill would require most Americans to have health insurance, would add 15 million people to the Medicaid rolls and would subsidize private coverage for low- and middle-income people, at a cost to the government of $871 billion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

The budget office estimates that the bill would provide coverage to 31 million uninsured people, but still leave 23 million uninsured in 2019. One-third of those remaining uninsured would be illegal immigrants.

If the bill becomes law, it would be a milestone in social policy, comparable to the creation of Social Security in 1935 and Medicare in 1965. But unlike those programs, the new initiative lacks bipartisan support. Only one Republican voted for the House bill last month, and no Republicans voted for the Senate version ...

The fight on Capitol Hill prefigures a larger political battle likely to play out in the elections of 2010 and 2012, as Democrats try to persuade a skeptical public of the bill’s merits, while Republicans warn that it will drive up costs for those who already have insurance.

After struggling for years to expand health insurance in modest, incremental ways, Democrats decided this year that they could not let another opportunity slip away.

As usual, lawmakers were deluged with appeals from lobbyists for health care interests who have stymied similar ambitious efforts in the past. But this year was different.

Lawmakers listened to countless stories of hardship told by constituents who had been denied insurance, lost coverage when they got sick or seen their premiums soar. Hostility to the health insurance industry was a theme running through the Senate debate ...

The bill would establish stringent federal standards for an industry that, since its inception, has been regulated mainly by the states.

Under the bill, insurers could not deny coverage because of a person’s medical condition; could not charge higher premiums because of a person’s sex or health status; and could not rescind coverage when a person becomes sick or disabled. The government would, in effect, limit the profits of insurers by requiring them to spend at least 80 to 85 cents of every premium dollar on medical care.

The specificity of federal standards is illustrated by one section of the bill, which requires insurers to issue a summary of benefits that “does not exceed four pages in length and does not include print smaller than 12-point font.”

Another force propelling health legislation through the Senate was the Democrats’ view that it was a moral imperative and an economic necessity.

Obama Assesses His First Year & Rejects Criticism Of Health-Care Bill

Wash Post:

President Obama outlined Tuesday a first-year legislative record that he said rescued the economy and placed it on a path of long-term growth, even as he acknowledged that some unfinished items would probably be more difficult to achieve heading into a midterm election year.

In an Oval Office interview with The Washington Post, Obama rejected criticism that he has compromised too much to secure health-care reform or turned over too much authority to congressional leaders in pursuing his broad legislative agenda.

But some of Obama's signature initiatives, including cap-and-trade legislation and financial regulatory reform, remain unfulfilled heading into an election year likely to be shaped by what he achieved in Congress this year. Obama personally made the case for his legislative record at a time when his approval ratings are among the lowest of his presidency and as even some of his most ardent supporters are questioning the results of his congressional strategy.

"Overall, if you had a checklist of promises made, a lot of those promises have been kept," Obama said. "When those things are complete, and I think they will be, we will have achieved a fundamental shift in health care, energy, education and our financial regulatory system that will put this economy on a firmer footing to grow over the long term."

As the Senate prepares to pass its version of health-care reform legislation, Obama's advisers have portrayed a highly successful year pushing important bills through Congress, comparing his record to those of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson. Presidential scholars offer a more cautious appraisal, even as they note that Obama is operating in a more partisan time in Washington than those Democratic predecessors had.

Obama's legislative record includes the $787 billion stimulus bill passed in February, a mix of tax cuts, infrastructure spending and aid to state and local governments that was the largest of its kind. It also includes a variety of bills addressing issues of particular interest to his political base that had been languishing for years.

Although Obama noted in the interview that "the most important thing we did this year was to ensure that the financial system did not collapse," health-care reform dominated his agenda and will stand as at least one pillar of the legacy he leaves behind. He has come under sharp criticism for the size and shape of the legislation, including from former Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean ...

In the interview, Obama vigorously defended the legislation, saying he is "not just grudgingly supporting the bill. I am very enthusiastic about what we have achieved."

"Nowhere has there been a bigger gap between the perceptions of compromise and the realities of compromise than in the health-care bill," Obama said. "Every single criteria for reform I put forward is in this bill."

In listing those priorities, he cited the 30 million uninsured Americans projected to receive coverage, estimated savings of more than $1 trillion over the next two decades, a "patients' bill of rights on steroids," and tax breaks to help small businesses pay for employee coverage.

First Year Presidential Myths

Wash Post:

It has been nearly a year since Barack Obama was (sort of) sworn in as the 44th president of the United States. So what can his first year in office tell us about the next three?

Everything, most armchair historians say: The first year of a presidency is a make-or-break opportunity for an administration to assert control of Congress, achieve its legislative priorities and impress the American people with its effectiveness.

Many of Obama's supporters also buy into this idea. They can be heard comparing the president's first year in office to that of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and otherwise describing the year's achievements in effusive terms. ("By any measure -- domestic, legislative or foreign -- this has been a historic year for America," White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said in a recent interview.) Meanwhile, the president's critics gleefully compare his job approval numbers, which have steadily dipped during this first year, to those of past presidents. They say these numbers show that the more people get to know Obama, the less they like him -- and the less they will like him in the years come.

But a closer look at history suggests that both too much and too little can be made of a president's first year in office.

Continue reading to learn the 5 myths:

1. Congress is your willing handmaiden.
2. Nothing gets done legislatively after the first year.
3. Your party's base abandons you.
4. The first 100 days don't really matter.
5. After the high of winning the election, your approval ratings have nowhere to go but down.

Poll: Support Jumps For Obama & Health Care Bill

CNN reports that liberals and young people are coming home to Obama & the Senate bill (Read what Joe Klein thinks these results imply for the progressives who want to kill the bill):

Support for the health care reform bill that Democrats are pushing through the Senate has risen six points since early December, according to a new national poll, and although a majority of Americans still oppose its passage, only four in ten agree with Senate Republicans that the bill is too liberal.

The CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey, released Monday, also indicates that President Barack Obama's approval rating has experienced a similar six-point rise.

According to the poll, 42 percent of Americans, based on what they've read or heard about the bill, support Senate Democrat's legislation. That's up from 36 percent in a poll conducted December 2-3. Nonetheless, a majority of people questioned in the survey, 56 percent, oppose the bill.

Today's Health Care Cartoons

Obama Takes Heat From The Left (cartoons)

On Climate Change & Health Reform, Obama Is Willing To Take What He Can Get

NY Times:

President Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, likes to say that the only thing that is not negotiable is success. The last 48 hours offered a case study in how the president applies that maxim to governing.

After weeks of frustrating delays and falling poll numbers, Mr. Obama decided to take what he could get, declare victory and claim momentum on some of the administration’s biggest priorities, even if the details did not always match the lofty vision that underlined them.

From Copenhagen to Capitol Hill, the president determined the outer limits of what he could accomplish on climate change and health care and decided that was enough, at least for now. He brokered a nonbinding agreement with other world powers to fight global warming, averting the collapse of an international summit meeting. And he blessed a compromise on health care to guarantee the votes needed to pass the Senate.

Neither deal represented a final victory, and in fact some on the left in his own party argued that both of them amounted to sellouts on principle in favor of expediency. But both agreements served the purpose of keeping the process moving forward, inching ever closer toward Mr. Obama’s goals and providing a jolt of adrenaline for a White House eager to validate its first year in office.

Mr. Obama seemed encouraged by the progress ... After landing in a Washington-area snowstorm and retiring for a few hours of rest, Mr. Obama appeared in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House on a snowy Saturday. He called the health care deal “a major step forward” and the climate change agreement an “important breakthrough.”

Still, he acknowledged that neither was exactly what he had set out to achieve. On climate change, he said that the Copenhagen pact “is not enough” and that “we have a long way to go.” On health care, he noted that “as with any legislation, compromise is part of the process.”

In an interview, Mr. Emanuel said the developments showed that Mr. Obama “sets out the North Stars for us” in terms of broad and ambitious goals, but is willing to let his staff and allies haggle over the specifics. “He doesn’t negotiate the ends,” Mr. Emanuel said. “He’s very open to discussing alternative routes.”

Critics cautioned against making too much of the agreements. “They are pyrrhic victories,” said John Feehery, a Republican strategist and former Capitol Hill aide. “Neither deal will necessarily improve his poll ratings with swing voters, nor will they energize his base. And neither take the necessary steps to put the American economy back on track, which should be the only thing he is thinking about right now.”

The climate deal in particular may seem more than it is. With the Copenhagen conference unable to agree on binding limits on greenhouse gases linked to climate change, Mr. Obama settled for a three-page agreement with no short or midterm goals but a long-term commitment to prevent world temperatures from rising by more than two degrees by midcentury.

The health care legislation is much further along, and while it compromised on abortion and abandoned a government-run health plan, it still includes many changes long favored by Democrats. If it passes the Senate this week as now appears probable, it stands a much better chance of actually becoming law, culminating decades of largely failed efforts to revamp the nation’s health care system.

Mr. Obama has put a high value on process and keeping things moving, recognizing that history generally does not remember the to and fro, only the big sweep of presidential accomplishments. He may not get the health care plan he envisioned but, if the legislation passes, he will insure 30 million more people, stop insurers from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions and at least try to rein in costs. He will not end climate change in his presidency, and may not get the market-based emission caps he wants, but he may move the country, and the world, toward meaningful action.

Of course, to many on both sides of the aisle, there is a less sympathetic narrative.

Wall St Back Together Again (cartoon)

 

New NBC Poll: "For Democrats, the red flags are flying at full mast"

A new poll contains lots of bad news for Obama and the Dems. The news for the GOP, however, isn't all good. From the Wall St Journal (full poll results):

Less than a year after Inauguration Day, support for the Democratic Party continues to slump, amid a difficult economy and a wave of public discontent, according to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.

The findings underscored how dramatically the political landscape has changed during the Obama administration's first year. In January, despite the recession and financial crisis, voters expressed optimism about the future, the new president enjoyed soaring approval ratings, and congressional leaders promised to swiftly pass his ambitious agenda.

In December's survey, for the first time, less than half of Americans approved of the job President Barack Obama was doing, marking a steeper first-year fall for this president than his recent predecessors.

Also for the first time this year, the electorate was split when asked which party it wanted to see in charge after the 2010 elections. For months, a clear plurality favored Democratic control.

The survey suggests that public discontent with Mr. Obama and his party is being driven by an unusually grim view of the country's status and future prospects.

A majority of Americans believe the U.S. is in decline. And a plurality now say the U.S. will be surpassed by China in 20 years as the top power.

Democrats' problems seem in part linked to their ambitious health-care plan, billed as the signature achievement of Mr. Obama's first year. Now, for the first time, more people said they would prefer Congress did nothing on health care than who wanted to see the overhaul enacted.

"For Democrats, the red flags are flying at full mast," said Democratic pollster Peter Hart, who conducted the survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff. "What we don't know for certain is: Have we reached a bottoming-out point?"

The biggest worry for Democrats is that the findings could set the stage for gains by Republican candidates in next year's elections. Support from independents for the president and his party continues to dwindle. In addition, voters intending to back Republicans expressed far more interest in the 2010 races than those planning to vote for Democrats, illustrating how disappointment on the left over attempts by party leaders to compromise on health care and other issues is damping enthusiasm among core party voters.

But public displeasure with Democrats wasn't translating directly into warmth for Republicans. Twenty-eight percent of voters expressed positive feelings about the GOP -- a number that has remained constant through the Democrats' decline over the summer and fall. Only 5% said their feelings toward the Republicans were "very positive."

And in one arena, Afghanistan, Mr. Obama appeared to have some success in winning support for his planned troop surge. Liberals remain largely opposed to the strategy, but in fewer numbers compared with before Mr. Obama made his case in a speech at West Point. Overall, by 44% to 41%, a plurality believe his strategy is the right approach.

Poll: Views Of Obama Up On Afghanistan, Down On Everything Else (Especially Health Reform)

Wash Post:

As the Senate struggles to meet a self-imposed, year-end deadline to complete work on legislation to overhaul the nation's health-care system, a new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds the public generally fearful that a revamped system would bring higher costs while worsening the quality of their care.

A bare majority of Americans still believe government action is needed to control runaway health-care costs and expand coverage to the roughly 46 million people without insurance. But after a year of exhortation by President Obama and Democratic leaders and a high-octane national debate, there is minimal public enthusiasm for the kind of comprehensive changes in health care now under consideration. There are also signs the political fight has hurt the president's general standing with the public.

One bright spot for the president in the poll is Afghanistan. His announcement Dec. 1 that he was ordering an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to that country, to bolster the 68,000 already there, wins majority support. More than half of all Americans, 52 percent, approve of how he is handling the situation there, up from 45 percent before the speech.

But Obama and the Democrats have had decidedly less success convincing the public that their health proposals will bring positive change. More than half of those polled, 53 percent, see higher costs for themselves if the proposed changes go into effect than if the current system remains intact. About as many (55 percent) say the overall cost of the national health-care system would go up more sharply. Moreover, just 37 percent say the quality of their care would be better under a new system; 50 percent see it as better under the current set-up.

Even among those who presumably stand to benefit most from a major restructuring of the insurance market -- the nearly one in 5 adults without coverage -- there are doubts about the changes under consideration. Those without insurance are evenly divided on the question of whether their care would be better if the system were overhauled.

Obama's Pragmatism: Liberal Ends, Not Means

Ezra Klein's clever, timely analysis:

The first year of the Obama presidency has been a long tutorial on the difference between liberal ends and liberal means. If I told you America has a president determined to pass large amounts of Keynesian stimulus spending (that's particularly concentrated in impoverished areas), a near-universal health-care plan, and a bill addressing climate change, you'd say liberals had recaptured the White House. Ambitious liberals, even.

But though Obama's program is quite liberal, he doesn't seem to care much how it's achieved. A public option would be nice, but if it's not there, then that's fine, too. Full auction of permits is a good idea, but if most get given away to corporations, then that's how it goes. Infrastructure spending is good, but if tax cuts are the price of passage, then tax cuts there shall be. The best description of the administration's ideology probably came from Rahm Emanuel when he said, "The only nonnegotiable principle here is success."

You could imagine a lot of presidents more dogmatically liberal than Obama, but I wonder whether there are a lot of plausible hypotheticals in which they amass more liberal achievements than Obama. At the executive level, it might be the case that being too liberal is a liability to, well, liberalism.

By Night End, “I was almost convinced that I deserved it”

The Caucus:

President Obama ended the night with a joke.

“I was almost convinced that I deserved it,” Mr. Obama said in his final address of the day, after devoting hours listening to speeches that trumpeted the achievement of his Nobel Peace Prize.

Mr. Obama was making a toast at a black-tie dinner on Thursday for the Nobel Committee. He thanked his Norwegian hosts for the honor and singled out one of the winners who came before him in the 108-year-history of the award: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“The course of the civil rights movement was still uncertain. How that would play itself out was not yet entirely known,” Mr. Obama told the Nobel Banquet dinner crowd. He added, “As a consequence, I think it’s fair to say that it helped to put the wind behind the sails of a movement that is largely responsible for both Michelle and my presence here tonight.”

It was a poignant moment for Mr. Obama, who by the end of a long day and an overnight flight here, seemed to be feeling emotional at the award bestowed on him. He turned to his sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, who also traveled to Oslo for the award presentation, and he began speaking briefly of someone he rarely mentions: his mother.

“This is called a point of personal privilege,” Mr. Obama said. “I don’t want to make her cry, but I do want to say my sister is here tonight, and it was in one of the earlier toasts discussed a passage in my book that talks about my mother and the values that she instilled in me.”

Their mother, Stanley A. Dunham, died of cancer in 1995, a year before Mr. Obama started his career in elected politics. He credits her for instilling a sense of curiosity, wanderlust and compassion.

“I do think that it’s worth noting that, to the extent I am deserving of this esteemed prize, either now or in the future,” Mr. Obama said, “it will be largely because of her and the largeness of her heart.”