The 111th Congress is still a few days from concluding, but with Saturday’s Senate vote repealing the military’s Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell policy, it can boast a record of progressive accomplishment that may give pause to liberal critics of the Obama administration. Ratification of the START treaty just before Christmas would be a nice capper before the difficult period begins with the Republican takeover of the House and the official burial of any filibuster-proof Democratic Senate Majority.
Since this is my last memo for 2010, it’s as good time as any to examine the political mood of the country going into 2011.
It’s worth noting that there’s really no consensus interpretation of what ultimately happened in the midterm elections. Democrats remain divided between those who view the November setback as primarily a structural phenomenon attributable to a bad economy and inevitable shifts in the turnout patterns, and those who believe strategic and tactical errors by the President and congressional leaders invited the defeat. Liberal activist criticism of Obama for his conciliatory public attitude towards Republicans, conservative Democrats, and “big business,” while familiar to anyone who remembers the Clinton years, reached a sharp new point near the end of the year, nearly producing a revolt in the House against the Obama-McConnell tax deal.
But it’s unclear whether this hostility among opinion-leaders is widely shared in the actual “base” of Democratic voters. The latest Gallup tracking poll does show Obama’s job approval rating among self-identified liberal Democrats dipping below 80 percent for the first time, but 79 percent approval is still a pretty high number. Anyone fantasizing about a left-bent primary challenge to the president should look at last week’s Magellan poll of NH, which showed Obama trouncing any potential rival there, even though it should be one of his weakest states.
Republicans, meanwhile, have largely taken a triumphalist view of the midterms as indicating a conscious conservative “turn” in the electorate that has rejected Obama, Pelosi and their “socialist” policies. The major topic of dissension among conservative commentators is whether the risk to be most avoided is an ideological rigidity that prevents Republicans from taking advantage of Democratic missteps, or instead a return to the “big government conservatism” and ideological laxity that, in their view, doomed the Bush administration.
Since the air is often full of warnings to party leaders from both sides of the spectrum against compromise with the satanic opposition, it’s interesting to look a little more deeply at Democratic and Republican attitudes on the subject of bipartisanship. A recent analysis by Pollster.com’s Mark Blumenthal reaches the striking conclusion that poll numbers showing high public support for “compromise” can be misleading:
For many partisans, “compromise” is really a disguised expression of partisanship. They want to see the leaders of both parties working together, but mostly in support of their preferred policies. A larger number of Democrats — a third to half — are open to their leaders compromising with the Republicans, and that difference helps tilt the overall numbers in favor of compromise.
In other words, support for “compromise” is lower than it looks, but for all the progressive angst about Obama betraying his base, he appears to have more maneuverability when it comes to compromise than does his Republican counterparts. Certainly the base-dominated 2012 presidential nominating process is likely to exert a strong rightward influence on the GOP.
Five key things to look for early next year:
The dynamics of the 2012 election cycle will depend on all five of these factors, aside from the nuts and bolts of money and organization and candidate personalities. Whether the two parties—or barring that, the president alone via executive action—can accomplish much while jockeying for future position is another question entirely.