“High risk” seems to be the consensus term for President Obama’s decision to push for ratification of the new START Treaty during this year’s lame-duck session. That’s understandable; hardly any Republicans senators are on board, and Republican senators-elect are complaining that no treaty votes should be taken until they have been sworn in (of course, they are complaining about the very existence of a lame-duck session, so that’s not a terribly distinctive argument). The administration needs 67 votes for ratification, and once Mark Kirk obtains his early swearing-in just after Thanksgiving, there will only be 58 Democratic senators.
But fewer voices are asking if Republican obstruction of START carries any political risks. There is virtually no evidence that foreign policy had a significant partisan impact on the midterm elections, even amongst the Republican-tilted November 2 electorate; no one can credibly claim any conservative mandate on arms control or other defense policy controversies. The President has consistently obtained some of his strongest approval ratings on foreign policy and defense issues. He has a glittering array of distinguished Republican backers for START representing past GOP administrations. And the argument being made for delay on START by the most visible GOP senators—the treaty needs to be held hostage to higher defense spending (for nuclear modernization)–strikes a discordant note with GOP and nonpartisan demands for immediate reductions in federal spending, not to mention the desire for bipartisanship wherever possible.
Moreover, it’s not clear that Republicans have their own internal act together on defense and foreign policy; there are a host of potential rifts, some left over from the Bush administration, some dating back to the Cold War. Perhaps the threat to delay START ratification is more of a bluff, and if the administration doesn’t call it, progress on any other legislation during the lame duck session could prove impossible. The politics of this fight will now become clearer now that the White House has refused to back down.
The big overriding question, of course, is whether bipartisan cooperation will prove possible on any significant issue, with Republicans making full extension of Bush tax cuts and a drive to repeal health reform their top priorities. There’s some interesting new political science data on the extent to which the midterms increased polarization in Congress (or at least in the House). According to Adam Bonica, who is using the standard measurement for the ideological positioning of Members of Congress:
77 percent of freshmen Republicans in the 112th Congress will locate to the right of the party median from the 111th. In other words, nearly 8 in 10 incoming House Republicans would have been on the right wing of the party in the 111th Congress.
The problem for Republicans is that their “conservatism” does not necessarily dictate clear positions on many defense policy issues, or on the larger conflict between deficit reduction and other policy goals. But ideology by no means disposes the GOP to cooperate with Democrats, and particularly with the President whose defeat in 2010 is, according to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, their paramount goal.
On the public opinion front, pollsters are beginning to shift from retrospective looks at 2010 voters towards efforts to measure the likely 2012 electorate, which will be much larger, younger, less white, and less conservative. The shift in perspective can sometimes be dramatic. Public Policy Polling caused a stir by releasing a large batch of state polls of likely 2010 voters showing President Obama trailing a “generic Republican” in all of them, some by big margins. Then PPP released a poll of Virginians who voted in any of the last three elections, and measured Obama against named potential GOP opponents, and the picture was very different: Obama not only had a positive (50/45) job approval rating in the Old Dominion, but led (or in the case of Mitt Romney, was tied with) all the Republicans who might run against him. And this was in a state where on November 2 Republicans knocked off three Democratic House members and nearly beat a fourth. It’s all about who gets asked, and how the questions are framed.
