I will be on a semi-hiatus the next month, traveling far from posting availability.  But I may pop up now and then, and will return full-steam on November 21.  I do indeed hope I miss some important progressive accomplishments, particularly on health care reform. 

I will be on a semi-hiaitus the next month, traveling far from posting availability.  But I may pop up now and then, and will return full-steam on November 21.  I do indeed hope I miss some important progressive accomplishments, particularly on health care reform. 

It´s too early to write off the gubernatorial aspirations of Creigh Deeds in Virginia, but if he doesn´t overcome a consistent lead by Republican Bob McDonnell in the next twelve days, you can be sure many pundits will attribute his defeat to Barack Obama. 

There´s only one problem with this hypothesis: despite his extraordinary unpopularity in other parts of the South, the President remains relatively popular in the Old Dominion.  According to pollster.com, Obama´s average approval/disapproval ratio in recent Virginia polls is 51/46.  Even Rasmussen has him in positive territory at 53/47, and the latest Washington Post poll had him at 53/46.  This is precisely the same margin by which Obama carried the Commonwealth last November. 

Nor does general disdain for the Democratic Party appear to be the culprit.  The current governor of Virginia, Tim Kaine, is chairman of the Democratic National Committee.  His average approval ratio at pollster.com currently stands at 53/39.

It´s always tempting to interpret state electoral contests as bellwethers for national political trends, particular in odd years like this one.  But it´s usually wrong. 

Ed Kilgore is Managing Editor of The Democratic Strategist and a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute.

For much of this year, one of the surest bets in political circles has been that embattled New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine would go down to defeat at the hands of Republican former U.S. attorney Chris Christie.  Aside from Christie's (now tarnished) goo-goo rep as a corruption fighter, the thinking was that Corzine had a "ceiling" of somewhere in the low forties, thanks to persistently low approval ratings and the likelihood that most NJ voters had a fixed opinion of the incumbent.  Thus, for the first time in decades, a GOP candidate would get the late breaks in a NJ campaign, and end the party's long losing streak in the Garden State.

Now the polls are all showing Corzine and Christie running neck-and-neck, with the big wild card being the double-digit support being attracted by independent candidate Chris Daggett. 

At Politico today, Jonathan Martin looks at the race from Christie's perspective, and focuses on the strategic dilemma faced by the GOP candidate in dealing with Daggett:

Christie, who had been running a traditional anti-incumbent campaign against Corzine, must now reckon with a perennial question faced by candidates who are imperiled by a lesser-known, third-party contender: To attack Daggett is to elevate him, effectively acknowledging that he’s a serious candidate and offering him free publicity. But ignoring him could amount to disregarding the most serious threat to Christie’s campaign, leaving Daggett to siphon away a significant amount of voters who are intent on registering their opposition to Corzine.

But Christie really doesn't control that decision, since his major funding source, the Republican Governors' Association, has already started going after Daggett with sledge hammers. It appears their theory is that attacks on Daggett as a "tax-and-spend liberal" will either flip Daggett voters to Christie, or perhaps even drive liberal voters who would otherwise support Corzine to the third-party candidate (who already has significant support from environmentalists).  Again, the operative assumption is that Corzine's vote has hit its "ceiling," so there's relatively little risk in drawing further attention to Daggett. 

But you have to wonder: does Christie's vote (now that he's increasingly campaigning like a conventional conservative Republican) also have a "ceiling," based on the Republican Party's legendary handicaps in NJ? 

This question shows why the outcome in NJ may have national significance, beyond the silly efforts of pundits to make every state race a referendum on Barack Obama, and the undoubtedly positive impact a Corzine win would have on the morale of Democrats who had written off the incumbent many months ago.  If the Republican party "brand" is enough to sink a challenger against one of the most vulnerable opponents you'll ever see, then Democrats aren't the only party with a lot to worry about going into next year's 2010 midterms.

This item is cross-posted from The Democratic Strategist, where Ed Kilgore is Managing Editor.

The progressive zeitgeist during the last week has leaned pretty strongly in the direction of a health care reform system that would provide for a strong public option that states could either opt into or opt out of, as opposed to a "triggered" public option where, in theory at least, objective market conditions would determine what happens in particular states. 

Interestingly enough, one of the Democratic senators considered shaky on health reform, Bill Nelson of Florida, said today that he favored the "trigger" over any state option.  When you look at the state Nelson represents, you can perhaps understand it.   At present, Florida has a Republican governor and a Republican-controlled legislature, and is facing a highly competitive 2010 election cycle.  (For the record, I've been raising my own alarms about the impact of a state option on the dynamics of the 2010 elections at the state level).

Why isn't this point of view held more generally?  It could be because the "trigger" idea emerged earlier than the various state option schemes, so that insistence on an "untriggered" public option became part of the general campaign against abandonment of the public option altogether.  Or it may be because many progressives, citing polls, think the public option is so popular that resistance in the states can be overcome. 

I don't quite understand why anyone would assume that state legislatures are more resistant than the U.S. Senate to the blandishments and threats of the forces opposing the public option, but it's a legitimate argument in a debate that really needs to break out among all advocates of health care reform.  Barring a "robust" national system, the public option is in fact going to be "triggered" in parts of the country one way or another.  The question is who or what does the "triggering," under what sorts of circumstances. 

This item is cross-posted from The Democratic Strategist, where Ed Kilgore is Managing Editor.

Taking a quick look around the right-wing fever swamps this morning, it was possible to form the opinion that the Nobel Prize Committee had honored Barack Obama with its peace prize in order to confuse and enrage American conservatives.

The Right clearly did not coordinate its talking points.  There was in fact a breakfast buffet of reactions.

Dismissal of the prize as "anti-American" was one approach.  At The Corner, Andy McCarthy suggested it be renamed the "Yasir Arafat Peace Prize," and denounced the award as a "symbolic statement of opposition to American exceptionalism, American might, American capitalism, American self-determinism, and American pursuit of America's interests in the world."

Others went for pure snark along the traditional lines of mocking Obama as "The One."  Here's Ann Althouse:

The question isn't why did they give Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize. The question is why didn't he get the Olympics.

The story of Barack Obama is the story of winning things when he hasn't yet done enough to deserve them. He is, quite simply, Barack Obama. We understand that. Why didn't the IOC understand? You could see it in that smile on his face, when he concluded his little speech in Copenhagen, that he bore the sublime knowledge he would acquire the Olympics for Chicago. Because he is Barack Obama, the man to whom grand prizes are given.

Then there were those who suggested a sinister intention by the Nobel Committee to force Obama even further in his horrible anti-American direction.  That was the tack taken by Rush Limbaugh:

And with this award the elites of the world are urging Obama THE MAN OF PEACE not to do the surge in Afghanistan, not take action against Iran and its nuclear program and to basically continue his intentions to emasculate the United States.

Finally, and I didn't delve deeply into such literature, some on the Right just went nasty nuts.  Behold the reaction of Erick Erickson of the prominent conservative site RedState: "I did not realize the Nobel Peace Prize had an affirmative action quota for it, but that is the only thing I can think of for this news."

(Oops, sorry, I forgot: by mentioning this slur, I am guilty of playing the "race card.")

It will be interesting to see which of these interpretive themes will emerge as the conservative consensus choice.  One thing's for sure: the Right will claim what many have called an "aspirational award" damages Obama's domestic political standing, for that is their own fond aspiration. 

As the U.S. Senate prepares for floor action on health care reform, there's a sudden profusion of schemes that seek a compromise on the key "public option" question by giving states a lot of leeway.  Tom Carper is floating a state "opt-in" approach.  Others are talking about a state "opt-out" system.  The Finance Committee has already adopted Maria Cantwell's proposal to let states use federal subsidy funds to cover a majority of the uninsured as they see fit.   And the original Baucus markup vehicle included Ron Wyden's proposal to let states do all sorts of "experimentation" with federal funds. 

The political value of these approaches is pretty obvious: by giving states flexibility on the key questions surrounding the public option debate, health reform proponents hope to give shaky Democrats and maybe a Republican or two an avenue to get out of the way of health reform while accomodating home-state pressure from health insurers and/or providers. 

This makes abundant sense in Washington.  But the question must be asked: are the states ready to get into the driver's seat on the basic design of health care systems, public and private, within their borders?

Michael Crowley expresses shock over a new Pew poll finding that 61% of Americans would favor military action to prevent Iranian development of nuclear weapons if other options fail. 

I'm less shocked.  In the run-up to the Iraq War, the belief that Saddam Hussein had developed or was rapidly developing WMD, including nuclear weapons, was a pretty important factor in the robust majorities that favored military action.  And the discovery that he actually didn't have WMD helped turn Americans against the war once his regime had been toppled.  Since evidence of an Iranian nuclear program is far better established, it's not that shocking that Americans would react now as they did in 2002 and 2003. 

But the other big thing that obviously turned Americans against the Iraq War was the immense cost and difficulty of consolidating the initial military victory.  In the Pew poll, respondents are asked if they favor "military action."  It's entirely possible that many of those answering "yes" are thinking in terms of some "surgical strike" that will destroy the nuclear program without a wider war.  Should negotiations and/or sanctions fail and we are actually contemplating military conflict with Iran, it will more than likely become apparent that eliminating Iran's nuclear program will require an actual ground war aimed at regime change.  It's at that point when the lessons of Iraq will truly begin to sink in, and support for "military action" will go down.  But we haven't had that debate yet.

In the ongoing debate over what's likely to happen in the 2010 elections, a point that I've tried to make repeatedly is that the Republican Party is exceptionally weak, and thus not in a great position to harvest discontent with Congress, the Obama administration, or the condition of the economy.  A lot of conservatives seem to think the relative unpopularity of the GOP is a temporary "hangover" from the Bush years that will gradually dissipate.

But if you look at the public opinion data on party favorability (which can all be found together at PollingReport.com), what's striking is that the GOP's bad reputation isn't getting any better. Pew, which offers respondents a range of options that appears to boost favorability, had the GOP's total favorables at 40% in August, 40% in April, 40% in January, 39% in May of 2008, and 41% on the eve of the 2006 midterm elections. That's as flat a line as you will ever see. GOP total unfavorables for that stretch of time oscillated slightly from the high forties to the low fifties; they were at 50% in August. Meanwhile, Fox has Republican favorability actually declining, from a ratio of 45/49 just before the 2008 elections, to 41/50 in April, to 36/53 in July. The same pattern is found by CBS/New York Times, where Republicans had a favorable/unfavorable ratio of 37/54 in October of 2008, then 31/58 in April of this year, and 28/58 in June.

I won't go through all the polls in terms of Democrats, but unsurprisingly, they show the Democratic Party losing favorability in recent months, but maintaning significantly more popularity than Republicans. Pew, for example, had the Democratic Party's total favorables at 49% (versus 41% unfavorable) in August, down from 62% (versus 32% unfavorable) at the beginning of the year.

So you make the case that the recent abrasive behavior of the Republican Party may have helped damage Democrats, but isn't helping Republicans much, either. Since Republicans have a much tougher climb to make to reach anything like majority status, they are in danger of committing a political murder-suicide.

Chris Orr's post about the early assembly work on Tim Pawlenty's 2012 presidential bid is interesting in that he handicaps the Minnesotan primarily in terms of who he is not: not the flip-flopping, health-care-reforming Mormon Mitt Romney, not the disorganized and "goofy" Mike Huckabee, not the divisive and erratic Sarah Palin, and not the non-candidate David Petraeus. 

Thus Chris captures the basic problem with Pawlenty '12: what, precisely, is his positive appeal? Yes, he's a bona fide cultural conservative; that checks an essential box, but you can't throw a rock at any Republican meeting these days without hitting ten people avid to end legalized abortion and stop gay people from getting married.  Yes, he coined a nice phrase--"Sam's Club Republicans"--to illustrate the need for a broader GOP base.  But absent any real agenda for appealing to these folks, it's nothing but a slogan, and when two young conservatives, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam sought to fill out the phrase with actual policies in a recent book, they were generally hooted off the stage by their ideological brethren.  Yes, he's governed a blue state, but has never been terribly popular in Minnesota or had any real national following.

In his fine smackdown of Mike Gerson's weird exchange with Ezra Klein over the alleged 1933-vintage threat of marginal internet comment thread ranters, Jon Chait suggests that Gerson "look up Godwin's Law," alluding to the famous internet adage about the inevitability and absurdity of reductio ad Hitlerum arguments. 

Jon's right, but given Gerson's aggressive lack of interest in the hate speech preached to vast audiences in his own more conventional media, and on his own side of the ideological spectrum, I'd suggest another reading to my fellow Christian: Matthew 7:3.  "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"

As analysts in both parties debate the possibility of a 1994-style pro-GOP landslide in 2010, an interesting thing is happening in the two gubernatorial races that will conclude this very November.   As you may know, it's supposed to be an iron law of history that the party controlling the White House always loses gubernatorial elections in these two states, and early general election polls this year showed Republican candidates Bob McDonnell in Virginia and Chris Christie in New Jersey with big leads. 

But now, as voters begin to really focus on these campaigns, recent polls show both contests tightening up considerably.  The latest two major polls in Virginia (from the Washington Post and Insider Advantage) show Democrat Creigh Deeds cutting McDonnell's lead to four points, and a new Democracy Corps survey in New Jersey shows incumbent Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine pulling within one point of Christie. 

Deeds has been running ads in vote-heavy northern Virginia tying McDonnell's public record to his abrasively right-wing master's thesis, and greater scrutiny of Christie seems to have tarnished his goo-goo reformer image.  Both GOPers may still win, but the current trends provide a reminder that "history" doesn't vote, and that voters choose between actual candidates, not just symbols of the national parties.