Anyone paying attention to political discourse during the last two or three months is aware of an acute unhappiness with the Obama administration among a goodly number of self-conscious progressives, sometimes expressed in terms of the president’s “betrayal” of “the Democratic base,” which may not turn out to support the party in November.

But is “the Democratic base” really as upset with Obama as elements of the progressive commentariat?

Mark Blumenthal looks at the numbers over at pollster.com, and concludes there’s not much evidence of displeasure with the president among rank-and-file Democrats, particularly those of a more progressive bent. Using Gallup’s weekly tracking poll of presidential approval ratings as a benchmark, Blumenthal notes:

Obama’s rating among liberal Democrats the week before Christmas (89 percent) was just a single percentage point lower than in the first week of his presidency (90 percent). None of this suggests a full revolt.

Approval ratings, of course, don’t get at intensity of support or disdain, which could have an impact on voting participation, particularly in midterm elections. So Blumenthal goes on to look at more nuanced measurements:

Between late February and mid-December, the ABC/Post survey shows an overall decline in Obama’s strongly favorable rating from 43 percent to 31 percent. Among liberal Democrats, strong approval started out at 77 percent in February and varied between a low of 72 percent and a high of 81 percent through mid-September. It fell in October (65 percent) and November (67 percent) before rebounding in December (76 percent).

So that’s a one point drop in Obama’s high “strong approval” rating from self-identified liberals between February and December.

Now everyone doesn’t mean “self-identified liberal Democrats” when they refer to the “party base.” As Blumenthal notes, Bob Brigham, among others, has suggested that “base” really refers to smaller communities like activists or donors. But it is fair to say that the political relevance of any particular community is somewhat limited if its views are sharply at odds with those of rank-and-file voters who say they share the same ideology.

Remember that next time anyone presumes to speak exclusively for “the base.”

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

I don’t know exactly what it is about being a “conservative columnist” at The New York Times, but now the young-un on that beat, Ross Douthat, is exhibiting the same habits as his older colleague, David Brooks. Brooks, of course, has mastered the art of looking down at the squabbling major parties from a great height, condemning them both, and somehow always coming down in the conclusion with recommendations that coincide with the short-term positioning of the Republican Party.

In his first column of the new year yesterday, Douthat performs a similar pirouette, with some interesting twists. His own skywalk begins with an Olympian view of America’s position in the world after the aughts–we’re now just a superpower, not a “hyperpower”–then predictably cites political polarization as one of the threats to our competitive position.

Warming to his task, Ross criticizes conservatives of the Bush era for a failed experiment in reduplicating Reaganomics, but then equals the score by accusing “Obama Democrats” of “returning to their party’s long-running pursuit of European-style social democracy — by micromanaging industry, pouring money into entitlement and welfare programs, and binding the economy in a web of new taxes and regulations.”

Aside from that very questionable characterization of the Democratic agenda, you will note that Douthat does not observe any causal relationship between one party’s “sins” and the other’s. Any “micromanaging industry” that’s going on presently is, rather obviously, the result of an economic calamity introduced under the previous national management. I don’t know if by “pouring money into entitlement and welfare programs” Douthat is referring to stimulus legislation used to counteract the disastrous effects of the economic calamity, or to the resolutely centrist health care reform proposal that is struggling through Congress after being signficantly compromised along the way. Any “new taxes” in prospect are part of said centrist plan, or part of the broader Democratic objective, announced not this year but as early as 2002, of reconfiguring the tax system to resemble what it looked like before the failed Republican exercise in Reaganomics that Douthat denounced earlier in his column.

All this is rather ho-hum High Broderism, but then Douthat gets more interesting when he proposes his own “center-right agenda” to replace the horrific move to the left essayed by Democrats. He begins with a tout court endorsement of the agenda recently laid out by Manhattan Institute wonk Jim Manzi, which is all the rage right now in what’s left of the non-Tea Party conservative commentariat:

Manzi’s National Affairs essay, a tour d’horizon of our socioeconomic situation, provides a solid place to start. He proposes a fourfold agenda: Unwind the partnerships forged between Big Business and Big Government in the wake of the 2008 crash; seek financial regulations that “contain busts,” by segregating high-risk transactions from lower-risk enterprises; deregulate the public school system, to let a thousand charter schools and start-ups bloom; and shift our immigration policy away from low-skilled immigration, and toward the recruitment of high-skilled émigrés from around the globe.

To this list, I would add tax reform and entitlement reform. The former should broaden the tax base while cutting taxes on work, childrearing and investment. The latter should means-test both Social Security and Medicare, reducing both programs’ spending on well-off retirees rather than questing fruitlessly for their privatization.

Now Manzi’s agenda has some virtues, but not so much as a Republican agenda. The Obama administration hopes to “unwind the partnerships” between government and business as fast as it can, and it, too, seeks to re-regulate the financial system in order to “segregate” high-risk transactions. For all the perennial conservative caterwauling about teachers’ unions holding a veto over good education policy, Obama, too, is a big fan of charter schools. This only looks like a “center-right agenda” if you buy the earlier Douthat premise that Obama is hell-bent on Swedenizing America.

Shifting the immigration system to favor higher skills (a very old “idea” also embraced today by Michael Barone) is not, as Douthat seems to think, a way to buy off conservative hatred of high levels of immigration; it may make the corporate community happy, but won’t do a thing for rank-and-file conservatives who dislike any wage competition from immigrants, and who want not a calibration of policies but wholesale expulsion of immigrants already in the country.

As for Douthat’s own supplementary ideas for a “center-right agenda,” he offers “tax reform” and means-testing Medicare and Social Security. Now “tax reform” as he is apparently discussing it is either one of two things: a continuation of the Bush-era failed experiment in Reaganomics involving deficit-financed tax cuts, however well-targeted they happen to be to workers and families, or a redesign of the system involving tax increases on some to pay for tax cuts for others. As Douthat knows, the constituency within the Republican Party for any tax increases on anybody could be comfortably accomodated in his own office.

Moroever, at a time when Republicans are shrieking about mean old Obama’s euthanasia-inspired efforts to cut Medicare benefits, Douthat is proposing the one “entitlement reform” — means-testing — that’s even less popular than privatization. It ain’t happening, and thus, like most of the rest of Ross’s “center-right agenda,” it’s not a serious contribution to the actual debate.

Now you could give Ross Douthat credit for thinking outside the box and proposing things that his own party would never embrace, which is tempting since he is a decent, thoughtful man. Or you could conclude, as many of us have simiilarly concluded about David Brooks’ MO, that by condemning Democratic policies without offering anything realistic to replace them, he’s simply ratifying the “Party of No” agenda of killing Obama’s policy intiatives and then figuring out later what to do once Republicans are back in the saddle again. It all adds up to an endorsement of Republican victory in 2010 and 2012, even if that would predictably return the country to the conservative policies that so distressed Ross Douthat, in retrospect of course, over the last ten years.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Though he called it “unlikely,” the New York Times Magazine‘s Matt Bai unleashed the idea this weekend that disgruntled progressives might support a primary challenge to President Barack Obama in 2012, even suggesting that Dr. Howard Dean could be positioning himself to make the challenge himself.

It’s natural for pro-Obama Democrats to recoil from even discussing the possibility of the President being “primaried,” but I’d argue it’s healthier for everyone to pull the idea right out of the closet and examine it closely, beginning with the recent history of such challenges.

* Four of the last eight presidents (Bush 41, Carter, Ford and Johnson) prior to Obama faced serious primary challenges in their re-election campaigns.

* In all four cases, the challengers (McCarthy in 1968, Reagan in 1976, Kennedy in 1980 and Buchanan in 1992) ran on the implicit or explicit message that the incumbent had betrayed his party base. In all four cases, the incumbent was struggling in the polls to some extent, amidst shaky economic conditions (less LBJ than the others, though inflation was a big concern in 1968).

* In three of the four cases (all but Bush 41), the incumbent’s party had done very poorly in the prior midterm election.

* All four challenges ultimately failed to secure the party nomination.

* The opposition party–twice Democrats, twice Republicans–won all four general elections.

Suffice it to say that primary challenges to sitting presidents are more common than many people realize, but never, in recent history, successful in any way other than chastening party leaders via general election defeat.

There is a fifth president whose re-election campaign might well be examined in this context: one Richard M. Nixon. He, too was having some trouble in the polls going into 1972. He rather notably was presiding over a very unpopular war, and the economy was sufficiently troubled that he actually imposed wage and price controls. His party had a very disappointing showing in the 1970 midterms. And he faced intraparty insurgencies coming from two different directions: antiwar Republicans (yes, there were some back then) who ultimately produced a candidate, Rep. Pete McCloskey of CA; and conservatives, some of whose leaders (including William F. Buckley, Jr.) signed a statement “suspending” their support for Nixon in 1971. Conservatives, too, produced a sittling member of Congress willing to take on the incumbent, Rep. John Ashbrook of OH.

Ultimately, of course, Nixon brushed aside these intraparty challenges with ease, and won the general election by a huge 49-state landslide, in no small part because of divisions and weaknesses in the Democratic party. (Yes, the excesses of his reelection campaign contributed to his rapid fall from grace and forced resignation in 1974, but no one really thinks that the crimes and misdemeanors we now know collectively as “Watergate” won him re-election.)

My point in mentioning Nixon is to note that primary challenges don’t necessarily doom incumbents, and that developments in the opposing party can have a very large impact on the fate of struggling incumbents.

Now, I personally doubt that any serious primary challenge to Barack Obama will ultimately develop, if only because it would be exceptionally difficult to mobilize a revolt of “the party base” against the first African-American president. Obama will also likely benefit from the same phenomenon that kept Bill Clinton from being challenged for re-election in 1996: the desire for a united front against a militantly vicious GOP. And lest we forget, there’s always the strong possibility that by this time two years from now, the war in Afghanistan could be winding down, the economy could be reviving, health care reforms could be very popular, and Republicans could be gearing up for a fratricidal nomination battle of their own.

But Democrats might as well talk through the consequences of a primary challenge to Obama while it’s an abstract proposition rather than an imminent threat. The precedents for potential insurgents aren’t very encouraging.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

As the 2000s come to a close, prominent publications (here and here) have joined in the name game: what to call these nameless past ten years. This post, by former PPI stalwart Mark Ribbing, was originally published by PPI in August:

The time is coming to give this decade a name. We are four months from its end, and still we have no handy moniker that captures the spirit of the 2000’s, their odd blend of dislocation, dissolution and hope.

Back at the start of the millennium, commentators offered various spoken shorthands for the 00’s, but none have caught on. The most logical choice, “The Two-Thousands,” is unwieldy. Playing on the multiplicity of zeros, some pundits suggested “The Zeros” or even—in an antiquarian turn—“The Aughts.”

Others chose to see all those circles not as numbers, but as letters, and to pronounce them as such—“The Oh’s.” This, it turns out, was a step on the right track. But let’s consider a different pronunciation, one that captures not only the numerical identity of the 00’s, but also their historical essence: “The Ooze.”

This name’s been suggested before, mainly as a gag entrant in the dub-the-decade sweepstakes. Now it’s time for us to embrace its aptness for our times. Let us ponder ooze.

My desk version of Webster’s dictionary lists its first definition of “ooze” as a verb meaning “[t]o flow or seep out slowly, as through small openings.” The second is “[t]o vanish or ebb slowly,” and offers as an example the following phrase: “felt my confidence ooze away.”

But “ooze” is not just a verb for things that seep through small openings (like an infiltrating terrorist, or a flu virus) or for things that vanish or ebb over time (like Arctic ice, or the U.S. manufacturing-job base).

For “ooze” is also a noun. It is mud, goop, gunk, but its meaning goes a bit, well, deeper than that.

Back to the dictionary. It turns out that ooze is the “[m]udlike sediment covering the floor of oceans and lakes, composed mainly of the remains of microscopic animals.” In other words, it is the inert decayed matter of that which was once alive, and moving, and whole, however fragile it turned out to be.

This was our national condition all too often in the 2000’s—a perceptible wearing-away of living, intact structures that upheld our sense of security, liberty, prosperity, and mutual obligation.

This sense of national loss and unsettlement was a continual theme of the first eight years of the decade. It was an undercurrent running from the September 11 attacks to Hurricane Katrina, from the abuses at Abu Ghraib to the implosion of our financial sector.

Yet before we mire ourselves in pessimism, let us once again consider the floors of oceans and lakes, where microscopic beings settle and separate into the mud. The resulting stew is a vital staging ground for life itself. It is a place where ecosystems filter and regenerate themselves.

In short, ooze need not only signify decay. It can also represent the conditions for lasting growth and renewal—the kind that emerges from the ground up.

Such emergence is often hard to see at first. Ooze does not lend itself to clarity or rapid fruition. But down there, beneath the surface, things are happening that will one day become visible to the wide world.

Somewhere, a laid-off worker is taking her career into her own hands and starting up a new business. An abandoned building is reborn as a charter school. A vacant lot becomes part of the growing nationwide push toward local, sustainable sources of food.

The American instinct for renewal was crucial to Barack Obama’s electoral appeal, and it may yet manifest itself in a national willingness to confront such challenges as our deeply flawed health-care system, our educational dysfunction, and our increasingly costly dependence on fossil fuels. These are big problems, and anyone who expected them to be solved easily or without opposition has forgotten the basic truths of human nature, and of democracy.

What matters is this: Progress toward change is indeed taking place, on all of these fronts and others besides. That progress may seem too slow, and it may send its tendrils down the occasional dead-end channel, but it’s nourished by something quite real — a keen desire to see our nation do better, to reclaim its inventive, expansive soul. The Ooze is where we have been, and our future is forming in its depths, nourished by the broken shells of what had come before.

‘Tis the season for year-end assessments. As the pundit class weighs in on Obama’s year in office, one meme has been particularly frustrating: the judgment that Obama “failed” to bring bipartisanship back to Washington.

Yesterday’s The Hill has the latest entry in the bogus narrative. “Obama’s first year yields few results in drive for bipartisanship” reads the headline. It then gives the floor to Republican sources:

“You might remember that Senate Republicans began the year hopeful that the president would actually make good on his campaign promises to reach across the aisle and build consensus,” said one GOP aide, who argued the divide began with the stimulus.

“People were skeptical of Obama’s rhetoric, but nobody could have predicted the surge in partisanship that his administration would wage over the first year. And their fierce partisan approach has become a major reason why independent voters are sprinting away from Democrats.”

In true he-said-she-said fashion, The Hill then gives some Democrats a chance to respond, without bothering to weigh in on who’s speaking in good faith and who’s spinning.

William Galston, in his evaluation of President Obama’s first year in American Interest magazine, offers a similiar take:

[T]he President never tried very hard to render bipartisanship a matter of substance as well as tone, making it all but certain that he would not redeem an important promissory note he had issued to the American people during the campaign.

Newsweek‘s Evan Thomas said much the same thing a month ago:

Obama tried to foster bipartisanship at the outset of his administration, but he didn’t try very hard, and his fellow Democrats can be just as rigidly partisan on the left.

It’s indisputable that Washington is as rancorous and polarized as ever. And there’s no question that Obama may have set himself up for criticism by campaigning as a post-partisan figure who could bridge the Washington divide.

Misplacing the Blame

But to blame Obama for failed bipartisanship is to blame the only grown-up in the room for the mess the kids are making. The two real culprits are a Republican Party that refuses to act responsibly, and a mainstream press that is unable or unwilling to call them on it.

What we have in the GOP today is a party that has lost all interest in policy now that it’s out of power. It has one goal: to destroy the Obama presidency. Every hand extended by the other side is to be rejected. The Republicans know what they’re doing — the media, true to form, has stuck to its pox-on-both-houses posture. Never mind that the president has made an honest effort to get Republicans interested in the idea of governing again: if Republicans keeps saying no, it must be because Obama’s not asking often and nicely enough.

Take the claim that the stimulus represented a violation of Obama’s pledge to reach out to the other side. Here was a stimulus plan that was one-third tax cuts designed to appeal to Republicans — tax cuts that economists agreed would be less than stimulative. Despite that sop to conservatives, it got only three GOP votes, including one from a Republican who would soon make the switch to the other side, Arlen Specter.

To think that Obama could have won more GOP votes had he given in a little more is to misread the GOP. The stated Republican objection to the stimulus was that there was too much spending in it — which is exactly what stimulus is. The hidden Republican objection, of course, was that it just might work. And if there’s one thing the GOP is deathly afraid of, it’s the rebound under Obama’s watch of an economy that they wrecked.

Take another example: health care. Some have complained that the Democrats rammed through their bill without Republican input. Does anyone not remember the slow-as-molasses work of the Senate Finance Committee on its bill, geared specifically toward winning the support of Republicans?

The Party of No Compromises

The Republican idea of compromise is that Obama enact Republican policies. Anything short of that means that he must not be serious about reaching out. Even policies that won Republican support in the past are now encountering opposition, lest Obama claim a bipartisan win. (Exhibit A: John McCain, hitherto a strong supporter of cap-and-trade, has now flip-flopped on it, calling it part of a “far left” agenda.)

True bipartisanship — the idea of two parties arguing in earnest over the direction of the country and reaching the necessary compromises to make sure everything runs smoothly — is impossible with the current Republican Party. Obama has made every effort to reach out to Republicans. And as president, annoying as it may be for some progressives, he should continue to seek the higher ground and not get caught up in the daily trench warfare. But there’s only so much one person can do in dealing with a rabid and unbending opposition.

A certain madness has gripped the GOP. Many in the media know it — and yet their stories barely mention the phenomenon. The same kabuki dance keeps getting enacted news cycle after news cycle. Fact-free spin is treated as a legitimate retort to good-faith argument. The enablers of a Republican Party gone rogue, the media are a key contributor to our broken politics. Only when the news stops giving politicians and parties the incentive to act irresponsibly can we expect irresponsible actors to even begin thinking about changing their ways.