It depends on how seriously you regard polls taken six months before the November election. But there’s some intriguing news on several fronts today:
Gov. Deval Patrick’s standing in his re-election battle has jumped 10 points in a month, according to Rasmussen. He now leads Republican Charlie Baker by a margin of 45 percent to 31 percent, with independent Tim Cahill bringing up the rear at 14 percent. It appears that the Republican Party’s relentlessly negative anti-Cahill ads have damaged Cahill without doing much for Baker.
Public Policy Polling reports that President Obama’s approval/disapproval rating is now 50 percent/46 percent, his best standing since last October.
Who knows what will happen over the next few months? These things generally come down to the economy, and the recovery has been slow and unsteady. At the very least, though, it seems that the throw-them-all-out story line has been called into question.
In my latest for the Guardian, I take a look at Solicitor General Elena Kagan’s record — and conclude that President Obama’s decision to name her to the Supreme Court may prove to be one sellout too many for his progressive base.
Thanks to Greg Mitchell’s Twitter feed, I know far more about the New York Times/CBS News poll of tea-party supporters than I would have if I’d relied solely on the Times’ polite take. (The Times does better with an interactive presentation of the complete results.) What you really want to do is check out CBS News’ coverage, starting here. A few findings that are worth pondering:
Fewer than half — 41 percent — believe President Obama was born in the United States. Thirty percent flatly declare that Obama was born in another country, and another 29 percent don’t know. In other words, 59 percent of tea-partiers are either hard-core or soft-core birthers.
Then again, 32 percent of Republicans believe Obama was born in another country.
Eighteen percent of Americans identify with the tea-party movement, and just one percent of them are black. Not surprisingly, 52 percent of this overwhelmingly white group say that too much is made of the problems facing black people, and one-fourth believe the Obama administration favors blacks over whites.
Fifty-four percent are Republicans, and 41 percent are independents. Given that 73 percent say they’re conservatives, it stands to reason that most of the independents are politically to the right of where they perceive the Republican Party to be. Just 5 percent say they are Democrats.
Sixty-four percent believe a flat-out falsehood (other than the birther falsehood): that taxes for most Americans have risen during the Obama presidency. In fact, they have fallen.
And here’s the explanation: 63 percent say they get most of their news from the Fox News Channel, and large majorities hold favorable view of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin.
While anger is a prime motivating factor, tea-party “activists” turn out to be even angrier than mere supporters: 72 percent of activists are mad as hell, compared to 53 percent of supporters.
Conclusion: Anyone who thinks the tea-party movement isn’t motivated by racial fears is deluding him- or herself.
Let’s see how many media outlets report on the speaker who angrily referred to President Obama as “Barack Hussein” (not even the typical “Barack Hussein Obama”) at this morning’s tea-party rally on the Boston Common — and on all the members of the audience who cheered. Not this one, unfortunately.
I won’t call it racism, but it’s certainly a case of playing on racial fears.
Later this week I’ll be writing more about the historic health-care bill passed by the House on Sunday night. For now, though, a few semi-connected observations.
1. If you read nothing else on the politics of health-care reform, you must read this blog post by David Frum, a Republican strategist and former speechwriter for George W. Bush. Frum doesn’t like the bill; he thinks it’s too expensive and will harm businesses. But he is withering in his criticism of the Republican leadership for its take-no-prisoners approach to legislation that is, he asserts, moderate at its core and based on Republican ideas.
“Conservatives and Republicans today suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s,” he begins. “It’s hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the disaster.” He continues:
At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo — just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994.
Only, the hardliners overlooked a few key facts: Obama was elected with 53% of the vote, not Clinton’s 42%. The liberal block within the Democratic congressional caucus is bigger and stronger than it was in 1993-94. And of course the Democrats also remember their history, and also remember the consequences of their 1994 failure.
Every line is quotable, so by all means read the whole thing. But he is especially strong on the strategic error Republicans made in following the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, noting that not only do they want Democrats to fail, but, fundamentally, they want Republicans to fail, too. Why? It’s good for business.
2. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman today connects the dots between opposition to health-care reform and race. It’s not hard: All he has to do is quote former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who recently said passage would be as harmful to Democrats as civil-rights legislation was in the 1960s. [See correction below.]
Gingrich’s clear message was that white opposition to racial justice was good for the Republican Party, and happy days are here again. And Krugman offers a few other choice examples as well.
The racial subtext to health-care reform has been right below the surface all along. Let’s not forget that South Carolina congressman Joe Wilson, who bellowed “You lie!” at President Obama last September, has a long and foul history of involvement in Confederate causes. This weekend, the tea-party protesters included someone holding up a racially charged poster of Obama as a voodoo doctor (I’ve lost track of where I found it, but if you’ve got a link, send it along), and of some flinging the N-word at Congressman John Lewis, a legendary civil-rights leader. (Homophobic slurs were directed at Congressman Barney Frank as well.)
You can’t even bring this stuff up without being criticized for characterizing a group based on the actions of a few, and I do understand that argument. But if anyone on the scene tried to stop or shout down these knuckle-draggers, their efforts have gone unrecorded.
3. As the media play their favorite parlor game of picking winners and losers, they ought to consider that the biggest loser of all might prove to be Congressman Steve Lynch of South Boston.
Lynch, as we know, announced his opposition to the Senate bill last week. No surprise there — a lot of House Democrats didn’t like it, which is why they came up with the complex strategy of approving the Senate bill, then approving a set of amendments to send back to the Senate.
But Lynch backed himself into a corner with strong language that made it almost impossible for him to shift. By Sunday, the emotional momentum had clearly turned, and Lynch had nowhere to go. He wound up being one of just two House members to vote against the Senate bill and for the amendments — a move that may have put him on the “right” side both times, but that was transparently craven. (So why did the “yes” tally rise by just one, from 219 to 220? Believe it or not, someone voted “yes” on the Senate bill and “no” on the amendments. Go figure.)
The talk today is whether a progressive Democrat might challenge Lynch in the primary. That’s happened before without much effect. This time, though, Lynch could face an opponent who can raise money from the netroots, and without his erstwhile friends in organized labor to drag him over the finish line.
Sounded like a good idea at the time, eh, Congressman?
Correction: Krugman relied on a Washington Post story, and the Post has now published a correction. Gingrich says he was referring to Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society social programs and the Vietnam War, not to civil-rights legislation.
In my latest for the Guardian, I argue that if Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick loses his re-election bid this fall, as seems very possible, it will tell us precisely nothing about President Obama, despite their surface similarities. The reason is that Patrick’s political troubles, largely of his own making, go back to the earliest days of his administration in 2007.
Old friend Mark Leibovich has a profile of President Obama’s chief political strategist, David Axelrod, in today’s New York Times. The premise is that many Democrats are wondering if Axelrod is too much the star-struck Obama groupie to be effective. But what really caught my eye was this:
Mr. Axelrod’s friends worry about the toll of his job — citing his diet (cold-cut-enriched), his weight (20 pounds heavier than at the start of the presidential campaign), sleep deprivation (five fitful hours a night), separation from family (most back home in Chicago) and the fact that at 55, he is considerably older than many of the wunderkind workaholics of the West Wing. He wakes at 6 in his rented condominium just blocks from the White House and typically returns around 11.
Leibovich also finds Axelrod “tearing into a five-inch corned beef sandwich on rye with a Flintstone-size turkey drumstick waiting on deck.”
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Axelrod really has lost his mojo. Don’t you think he might be doing a better job if he were working, say, eight to 10 hours a day, eating properly, sleeping eight hours a night and getting some exercise?
As it stands, his routine would bring most of us to the brink of a nervous breakdown. That can’t be good for the president or the causes he champions.
In my latest for the Guardian, I find myself agreeing with Gerard Alexander’s essay in the Washington Post that liberals are condescending. But it’s hard not to be when many on the other side reject evolution, think global warming is a hoax and believe President Obama was not born in the United States.
In the guise of an apology, Republican congressional candidate William Hudak writes that Sen.-elect Scott Brown promised to support him and then reneged when the Hudak campaign went public. Hudak writes in an op-ed that appears in today’s Salem News:
Scott and I spoke personally and he agreed to help my campaign. But pressing forward with an endorsement announcement without his written permission or review of our press release, was wrong and for that I have apologized.
Hudak also apologizes for putting signs on his lawn depicting President Obama as Osama bin Laden — that is, if you were among the “some” who were offended — and tries to make it sound like his birther views, which he recently disavowed, were based on super-special information that came into his possession because he’s an attorney, rather than the same Internet crap we all saw.
I think the Brown team has handled the Hudak matter fairly well up to this point. But it’s time for Brown himself to say something that will cause Hudak to cross him off his Christmas card list once and for all.
