I have previously noted that mobilization is the subtext of Obama’s serial pandering to various client groups of his coalition, already somewhat withered from his 2008 win. However, it is also the subtext of Team Obama’s already impressive network of field offices in swing states, as Nate Silver recently noted:

Field offices serve as a base for the most effective get-out-the-vote tactics, like door-to-door canvassing. In fact, in 2008, the Obama campaign’s wide web of field offices, and the advantages those offices gave Mr. Obama over Mr. McCain, helped flip three states to Democratic from Republican, according to a study by Seth E. Masket, an assistant professor with the Department of Political Science at the University of Denver.

Additionally, Team Obama is rolling out “Dashboard,” a next-generation get-out-the-vote tool to integrate voter contact from field volunteers with social networking.

Over the past few weeks, Team Romney has been playing catch-up on the ground, particularly in key states like Virginia, Ohio and Colorado. It certainly helps that Team Romney seems intent on working more smoothly with the RNC than maverick John McCain did in 2008. But Nevada may turn out to be as big a mess for the state GOP as it was in the 2010 Senate race, thanks to the Paulian contingent. As far as the ground game goes, the right should remain concerned.

However, Romney has more flexibility to focus on persuasion as well as mobilization. Some of this is small-ball stuff. For example, Romney’s speeches on education before Hispanic and black audiences are probably as much for suburban, yuppie white women, intended to inoculate Romney against the inevitable charges of racism, extremism and plutarchy headed his way.

More significantly, it seems Team Romney intends to play as much or more in the air than on the ground. Here, Obama’s faltering fundraising is already a factor:

In truth, the unprecedented flood of dollars that is about to engulf the presidential race—and the near certainty that the majority of them will be spent by the Republicans—is what keeps [Obama campaign manager Jim] Messina and his brethren awake at night, gnawing at their fingernails like a pack of feral crystal addicts after a hellacious weeklong binge. And while the Obamans talk assuredly about how the effect of the TV ads can be counteracted by a robust turnout operation, the financial pinch is already being felt in terms of their strategy. When Messina detailed Obama’s pathways to 270, for example, the fifth option involved playing full-out in Arizona, whose large Hispanic population should make it ripe for the picking and where public polling shows Obama and Romney in a dead heat. But that possibility remains on hold, seen as a bridge too far (at least for now) for a campaign that desperately needs to husband its resources.

“The money is a huge problem,” confides a senior campaign maven. “We’ll see how long we can stand it. The money alone can’t beat us, but if we get bad jobs numbers a couple months in a row, then all of a sudden, things could get kinda hairy.”

Thus, no one should be surprised if the money squeeze begins in earnest below the radar of the summer campaign coverage:

Asked about the best use of the nominee’s time in the months before the conventions, Stacie Spector, a senior adviser to President Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign, offered two words:

“Raise money.”

The second-most important thing a nominee can do? Raise money, said Spector.

The same ground-vs-air dynamic is playing out among interest groups and SuperPACs, too. The left generally has the superior ground game in most election cycles, and it hasn’t stopped the right from winning elections. But in an era where audiences are increasingly fragmented and ad-skipping technology is prevalent, the right may have to start rethinking the balance between the ground and the air.

The two big examples cited by writers like Matthew Continetti are Team Obama’s handling of same sex marriage and the seemingly ineffective attacks on Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital. These two supposed stumbles share at least two notable features.

First, both reflect tensions between elite Democratic constituencies that in recent cycles have funded the party and the rank-and-file constiuencies that have voted for it. Same sex marriage is a cause celebre for Hollywood, gay rights activists and the post-grad crowd, but not nearly as popular with working-class whites and socially-conservative blacks. The Democrat apparat is well aware of how much financial support they received from Wall Street, hedge funds and private equity firms in the pre-Obama era, but young Occupiers, Big Labor dinosaurs and assorted class warriors would like to plead ignorance. The stories about these issues are less about the Obama campaign specifically than about the difficulty any Democrat president would have managing the party’s voting coalition. One of the major themes of Sean Trende’s The Lost Majority is the difficulty any major party has in maintaining a broad coalition over time (Obama’s is already narrower than Bill Clinton’s). The major theme of Jay Cost’s Spoiled Rotten is how clientelism is a particular problem for the Democrats.

Second, these conflicts have particular resonance with a key Democrat constituency, i.e., the establishment media. Both issues involved what the media perceived as hypocrisy on Obama’s part. More significantly, they both afforded the media to push Obama from the left. Joe Biden’s allegedly premature comments supporting same sex marriage gave the media the opportunity to grill the White House about the gap between Obama’s stated position and the position the media believed to be his true position. Does anyone think the media would have been that dogged if establishment journalists did not uniformly support same sex marriage? Is the media’s problem more with Obama’s Bain-based attacks, or with the part about Obama taking money from the finance sector?

These two points provide two cautionary notes. First, Team Obama’s problems on these issues are not necessarily a sign of the campaign’s incompetence, but are perhaps an inevitable product of having to manage the Democratic Party’s voting coalition. Team Obama was probably going to have to choose which of its constituents to please, and which to annoy.

Second, if so, the media storyline about these problems being an issue of incompetence may be mostly that — a media storyline. In particular, it may be a media storyline driven by journalists’ own progressive biases. Conservatives and libertarians ought to look at the track record of the media forgiving Obama’s hypocrisies (e.g., rejecting public funding of his campaign, any number of national security and foreign policy stances) before planning on the media continuing with the incompetence storyline through November. The establishment media has written about “How Obama Got His Groove Back” on any number of occasions during his first term. It is a fair bet we will see those stories again before Election Day.

[M]any voters have come to regard their desires as entitlements. They become incensed when their leaders are not responsive to their needs. Like any normal set of human beings, they command their politicians to give them benefits without asking them to pay.

The consequences of this shift are now obvious. In Europe and America, governments have made promises they can’t afford to fulfill. At the same time, the decision-making machinery is breaking down. American and European capitals still have the structures inherited from the past, but without the self-restraining ethos that made them function.

The American decentralized system of checks and balances has transmogrified into a fragmented system that scatters responsibility. Congress is capable of passing laws that give people benefits with borrowed money, but it gridlocks when it tries to impose self-restraint.

Of course, there are many Americans who still have an ethos of self-restraint. Those Americans have elected people to the House and Senate in an attempt to restrain and reform the entitlement state. And David Brooks has metaphorically compared them to Nazis, uninterested in governance.

How does Brooks square that circle? By assuming that the problem is gridlock, which he blames on the tougher position the right is now taking as the fiscal cliff draws ever closer. (I know; it’s just craaaaazy of the right to do this, amirite?)

Mind you, the big-taxing, so-called “balanced approach” to addressing sovereign debt problems is failing where it is being tried in Europe. The wingnutty wingnuts at the OECD and the IMF already knew it would fail, and that solutions which rely overwhelmingly on controlling spending work. Yet Brooks bitterly clings to the center-left establishment mindset that has led America to the situation he now despairs.

Jonah Goldberg addresses this ideology in The Tyranny of Clichés:

If I say we need one hundred feet of bridge to cross a one-hundred-foot chasm that makes me an extremist. Somebody else says we don’t need to build a bridge at all because we don’t need to cross the chasm in the first place. That makes him an extremist. The third guy is the centrist because he insists that we compromise by building a fifty-foot bridge that ends in the middle of thin air? As an extremist I’ll tell you that the other extremist has a much better grasp on reality than the centrist does. The extremists have a serious disagreement about what to do. The independent who splits the difference has no idea what to do and doesn’t want to bother with figuring it out.

Goldberg does not identify centrism ans an extreme ideology, but the quoted example (and others given in the book) graphically demonstrate it can be at least as impervious to logic or data as any other ideology. Anyone who finds those examples a straw man should consider the very real examples compiled by the NYT’s Ross Douthat:

It wasn’t the Tea Party that decided to create two new health care entitlements (Medicare Part D and Obamacare) just as America was about to go over a fiscal waterfall. It wasn’t kooks and reactionaries who got the European Union into its current mess. It wasn’t the radicals of the left and right who risked the global economy on a series of disastrous real estate bets, or locked our government into a permanently symbiotic relationship with the banking and financial sectors, or created a vast labyrinth of unaccountable bureaucracies in the hopeless quest for perfect security from terror attacks. And to bring things up the present day, it wasn’t the more “extreme” members of the Senate — be they Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn on the right, or Bernie Sanders on the left — who just voted for more short-term spending and tax cuts without any plan to pay for it.

***[W]hat Jesse Walker has dubbed the “the paranoid style in center-left politics” *** seems like a rather odd response to a political moment in which nearly all of our overlapping crises are the result of disastrous misgovernment at the center ***. The Tea Party’s politics are not my politics, but the movement has virtues as well as vices, and at the very least it represented a possible alternative force at a time when our politics desperately needs alternatives, whether right-wing or left-wing or something else entirely, to the policies that have led us to our present pass. Nothing good may come of it, but an awful lot more ill has come from politics-as-usual of late than from grassroots populism.

Brooks and his ilk are a particularly odious sort; they have urged and pursued a ruinous course of misgovernment, all the while deluding themselves that they are not extreme and demonizing the people who are not responsible for the West’s current malaise.

Today, while Obama enjoys about a three-point edge over Romney, his electoral support remains well short of 50 percent. His job approval remains significantly lower than that of the past five incumbents who won their reelection contests and is actually two points lower than Jimmy Carter’s was at this point in 1980. (It is four points higher than George H. W. Bush’s job approval in 1992, however.)

Other yellow lights are flashing as well. One recent survey found that only 46 percent of the people think that Obama deserves to be reelected, versus 49 percent who do not. He receives mediocre grades for his handling of the economy and job creation. Another survey found fully 48 percent of the electorate would “never” vote for Obama, suggesting a ceiling below his 2008 share of the vote. (The corresponding figure for Romney was 46 percent.) And despite some recent improvement, key parts of the Democratic base remain less excited about the 2012 contest than are their Republican counterparts.

Read The Whole Thing, but the vast majority who don’t can get a flavor of it from TIME’s Michael Scherer.

The reactions to Galston’s report seem misguided. David Brooks wonders why Obama isn’t getting “crushed”, as the “economic climate is as bad as or worse than it was in 1968, 1976, 1992 and 2000, years when incumbent parties lost re-election.” Brooks concludes that Obama is benefiting from the Emerging Democratic Majority (despite Galston noting the lack of enthusiasm among said Majority) and because the president is just so gosh-darned likeable, what with the creased trousers and all (although the new USAT/Gallup poll is one of several showing Romney’s favorables climbing).

The unlikely duo of James Pethokoukis and Juicebox Mafioso Ezra Klein explain how Brooks gets it wrong, arguing Obama’s buoyancy may be explained by the economic fundamentals and incumbency (although Klein does the latter implicitly). I generally agree with them about the economics, but less so regarding incumbency. John Sides, one of the co-creators of Klein’s Wonkblog model, concedes the model overestimated the incumbent party’s vote share in 1992-2008, and that the model’s estimates for 2012 also feel a bit too optimistic for Obama. Similarly, Alan Abramowitz’s “Time For a Change” model, which gives Obama a good chance of winning a second term with modest economic growth and an approval rating in the low- to mid-forties has over-predicted the vote of the incumbent candidate by at least 1.85% in each of the last four presidential elections.

Any discussion of why Obama isn’t being “crushed” is disappointing because early head-to-head polls are not very reliable in predicting election results. The classic case is May 1980, when Carter was ahead of Reagan by 9%, despite a much higher misery index than today. A more useful reaction might be to treat Galston’s report as a prism through which to view the Romney and Obama campaigns.

For example, the report suggests Romney has two major problems. First, only 31% of Americans think Romney has a clear plan for fixing the economy — even worse than the 36% who think Obama has one. Second, Galston takes seriously the possibility that Obama could gain traction if he succeeds in painting Romney as a right-wing extremist (I tend to doubt this is possible, but it will not be for lack of trying).

The main lesson for Romney seems to be that he should not only critique Obamanomics, but also spend more time on Romneynomics. Granted, the election is mostly a referendum on Obama and Romney’s 160-page economic plan is more a plan to have a plan than a plan. Nevertheless, Bill Clinton did alright in 1992 as the Man With a Plan, so Mitt ought to mention his more often. It might be even better to bumper-sticker a few big ideas because few will read the 160-page version.

Moreover, while Romney rightly focuses on controlling government spending, Matt K. Lewis is likely correct that talking up economic growth is at least as important politically. If done well, this approach would also blunt the left’s campaign tactics. Again, Bill Clinton would be the model here: Romney can be the guy who is working on America’s real problems, while Team Dem is focused on petty distractions.

Furthermore, this approach would help exploit the myriad problems for Obama that Galston identifies. The issues most important to Americans, chiefly the economy, do not favor Obama. Thus, Team O is left with a strategy which is essentially an amalgam of 2004 and 2008. It draws on 2004 by relying on mobilizing supporters more than persuading swing voters. It draws on 2008 insofar as that mobilization is confined to a subset of the coalition Obama won 3+ years ago (largely the demographics of the supposed Emerging Democratic Majority). As Sean Trende observes in his book, The Lost Majority, Obama won a higher percentage of the vote than Bill Clinton ever did, but Obama’s coalition was demographically narrower. The political perfect storm that swept Obama into office has been replaced with the Obama record; Obama’s available demographics will have narrowed accordingly.

Obama’s reelect strategy is visible in the daily headlines, but typically not considered in toto. (Jay Cost came pretty close to it.) Political junkies notice Obama’s student loan policy is a sop to the young, the absurdly fictional “Julia” a pitch to single women (esp. single mothers), the reversal on same sex marriage a balm for Hollywood’s big donors, gay rights activists and the media, and so on. Brooks views these positions as the sort of small-ball politics Clinton used successfully in 1996, which has it backwards. Clinton played small-ball to appear more conservative and reach for the center as the economy ramped up; Obama is taking positions to pander to his base as the economy limps.

This is crucial to note because, in a larger sense, it is nothing new. Barack Obama’s approval ratings have declined from lofty heights because he has governed as What Swing Voters Haven’t Liked About Democrats For Decades. His response to the recession was an orgy of spending that made the prior profligacy of George W. Bush look frugal by comparison. Then, as as the economy failed to respond, Obama spent a year pursuing the progressive Holy Grail of more socialized healthcare. If there is a lasting negative reaction among independents to the hoopla over Obama’s reversal on same sex marriage, it will be because they judge it as not only merely political, but also as another example of Obama pandering to the left instead of working on the economy (not unlike the backlash to Bill Clinton getting drawn into the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” issue early in his presidency). Obama is campaigning as he has governed — as an Old Democrat pandering to interest groups, engaging in big-spending crony capitalism while failing to address our structural economic concerns for the common good. Mitt Romney, if he recognizes the opportunity, could turn Obama’s campaign strategy into a goldmine for himself.

[T]he months between the end of the primary season and the formal start of the general election at the conventions are an especially perilous period for candidates in Mr. Romney’s position.

It is then that challengers to an incumbent are most susceptible to being defined on terms other than their own, because despite months on the campaign trail they are still not yet terribly well-known by many Americans. Unflattering characteristics, new elements of their record, gaffes and embarrassing biographical details – all can take on outsize importance as rival campaigns labor through the spring and summer to create perceptions that stick with voters through Election Day.

***

The risks of failing to win the spring-summer narrative battle are substantial. Just ask Michael Dukakis, Bob Dole or John Kerry, all of whom failed to establish strong positive images during this period and allowed their opponents to brand them in ways they never overcame.

Oddly enough, the WaPo’s Chris Cillizza recently noted that in elections with an incumbent since 1980, Mondale, Dole and Kerry all had high favorable ratings and lost, while Bill Clinton won with middling favorable ratings. And unlike Stevenson, Cillizza actually shows you the numbers that back him up. Stevenson is engaged in some zombie journalism about the effectiveness of negative campaigning. At least Cillizza was good enough to state his premises openly, even if he tended to bury them, e.g.:

Political scientists would have you believe that the data is determinative. But the data is subject to how each side conducts their respective campaign.

Actually, political scientists who stress that campaigns tend to turn on the fundamentals almost always concede that campaigns matter. Their argument is simply that they don’t matter as much as journalists who make their living covering them think. Mondale, Dukakis, Dole and Kerry all ran against incumbents (or a sitting Veep) who benefited from recovering or healthy economies. The only winning candidate in those cycles who substantially outperformed what the economy would suggest was Clinton, who still failed to reach 50% of the vote.

BTW, this problem is not limited to political coverage. Last week, the NYT magazine profiled Joe Weisenthal, the lead financial blogger for Business Insider, including this anecdote:

Last summer, amid rising concern that the economy would tip back into recession, Weisenthal repeatedly highlighted contrarian chunks of evidence suggesting that we were actually on the verge of stronger growth. It was a lonely view for a long time. It was also correct.

In a post last November titled “Everyone Is Wrong About What Is Driving the Market These Days,” Weisenthal reproduced a Google search showing a slew of articles describing the stock market as “headline-driven,” meaning that prices were responding to the latest news. Then he showed a chart he created illustrating the close relationship between movements in stock prices and a basic economic indicator.

“So it’s a ‘headline-driven market’?” he wrote. “Nah, not really. . . . The market is just moving with the fundamentals, week in and week out. The headlines are mostly a distraction.”

Most political journalists figured out that the rise in Obama’s approval rating had something to do with this. However, they still seem trapped into pretending that when the real swing voters finally start paying attention to the campaign, the result will not largely converge with the fundamentals. The history of head-to-head polling suggests that about half of what we see now is noise, that the curve mostly flattens out at this stage of an election and that polls don’t really start to suggest the outcome earlier than August. The evidence for mid-May being a quiet turning point in the campaign is wafer-thin.

Goldberg *** explained that there “is a certain Marxist sting” to the cliché of being “on the right side of history.” It’s a way, he continued, of “saying to your opponents, ‘hey, look, you’re going to lose this argument eventually so you might as well quit now and stop complaining.’”

Indeed, Marx’s stages of history smack of this sort of determinism. Moreover, given his gig at National Review, it’s not surprising that Goldberg — by way of Burke — alludes to part of the magazine’s mission statement, in which William F. Buckley, Jr. famously proclaimed the mag “stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”

At times, I run the risk of falling into an inversion of this cliché. Less than a week ago, I wrote:

The past century has been one in which progressives have put forth the idea that Soviet communism is what works, that Eurofascism is what works, that Maoism is what works, and that Eurosocialism is what works. The actual history of the past century is one in which Eurofascism was defeated in WWII, Soviet communism was defeated in the Cold War, Maoism has degenerated into a fascism and crony capitalism that only Tom Friedman finds attractive, and Eurosocialism is taking its own road to the dustbin of history. To be sure, voters in the UK and France are resisting, the Germans less so. But fiscal realities will continue to intrude, regardless of which governments they elect. They will eventually figure out what the OECD and IMF already have about the solution to their problems: spending less is the answer.

(More on the degree to which failed European “austerity” has relied on taxes here.) I have also been fairly optimistic about what the current state of the Eurozone will teach Americans:

I am not for doing nothing about the debt ceiling and have written a number of pieces about the need to do something about the public debt at all levels of government. Moreover, it is certainly possible that in a debt crisis, the intransigence of the left could force the federal government to take a tax-heavy approach proven to fail in all those other OECD countries. I tend to think there is still enough of the American spirit around to resist becoming wage slaves to the state. Assuming we can manage to avoid a more statist approach than Canada, Sweden and Finland, it would seem the left ought to have the greater interest in defusing the debt bomb now, as a crisis will likely be tougher on their priorities.

Goldberg’s book, as much as the current political tensions in parts of the Eurozone, is a reminder that good policy choices do not make themselves. Indeed, Matt K. Lewis is very likely correct in declaring austerity “in and of itself,” a political loser today. Unfortunately, simply talking up economic growth is not only insufficient as a policy matter, but also too easily embraced as a political dodge of our debt problem.

History, like policy, does not make itself. One thing the right should grudgingly admire about the left is their relentlessness. The left never stops agitating, “educating” and organizing to push its version of history, even in the face of its evident failure over the past several decades. Excepting Walter Mondale, they rarely run on the promise of massive tax hikes for the middle class — but they never stop talking and writing about the future necessity for them. They never stop writing and talking about their dream of socialized healthcare — and take whatever jumps they can in that direction whenever they have sufficient control over the government.

Non-statists need to be equally relentless, both in pursuing our vision and in confronting the left’s vision. Indeed, non-statists should be even more driven, given the left’s effective control of the establishment media. This structural disadvantage makes our candidates even more important, because for all the of the media’s attempted agenda-setting, campaign coverage (and advertising) still necessarily focuses on the candidates and their messages.

Although I have had my share of problems with Mitt Romney, one of his primary virtues is that he frequently makes the point that Obama is leading America in the direction of Eurosocialism at precisely the moment Eurosocialism is imploding. It is my hope that when Team Obama starts its Mediscare campaign in earnest, Team Romney will lead its response by noting that the do-nothing Obama approach will also end Medicare as we know it — but that the likely result will be the non-innovative, rationed healthcare of Eurosocialism. Even when the left thinks it can put non-statists on defense, we should be working to create the environment in which statism is understood as not “what works,” more tax revenues are a small part of any solution to public debt (preferably from tax reform and consequent growth), and reform of the entitlement state is politically palatable. Many find Romney a weak standard-bearer for conservatism, but he has been willing to carry this banner — and it is a crucial one to carry, not only for this election, but for cycles to come.

First, the WaPo story originally reported that Stu White had “long been bothered” by the incident, but White told ABC News he was not aware of it until this year when he was contacted by the Washington Post. The WaPo has now airbrushed this section of the story to read:

“I always enjoyed his pranks,” said Stu White, a popular friend of Romney’s who went on to a career as a public school teacher and said he has been “disturbed” by the Lauber incident since hearing about it several weeks ago, before being contacted by The Washington Post.

As I write this, the WaPo has failed to append a note about the alteration of the story, in an apparent violation of the the WaPo’s corrections policy. Moreover, the new WaPo version remains at odds with White telling ABC he had not heard of it until he was contacted by the WaPo.

Second, it appears that the Lauber family is not happy with the WaPo hit piece. Christine Lauber — who appears to be quoted in the WaPo story — told ABC News she and her sisters will likely put out a statement later via a family attorney.

“If he were still alive today, he would be furious [about the story],” she said with tears in her eyes.

The NYT’s Ashley Parker has been tweeting bits of what that statement may contain. Although the Lauber family did not refute the haircut story, they say the portrayal of John is “factually incorrect.” The family adds: “We are aggrieved that John would be used to further a political agenda.”

It will be tough for the media to use the victimization of John Lauber as a cudgel against Mitt Romney if Lauber’s family thinks the media are the ones doing the victimization.

“I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together, when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married,” Obama told Roberts, in an interview to appear on ABC’s “Good Morning America” Thursday. Excerpts of the interview will air tonight on ABC’s “World News with Diane Sawyer.”

The president stressed that this is a personal position, and that he still supports the concept of states deciding the issue on their own.

Well, that’s semi-evolved, anyway. I suppose it remains to be seen how progressives will embrace states’ rights.

On Twitter (and elsewhere), a number of smart people have suggested that Obama benefitred from yet another distraction from the economy and the debt. Yet gay rights are a classic wedge issue that divides Obama’s prospective coalition, which would seem to be an unwelcome distraction for Democrats. Many have also suggested Obama found himself painted into a corner by comments from people like VP Joe Biden. Allahpundit provides a decent elaboration of this thinking:

Looks like his strategy now is simply to get it over with ASAP and then let people forget about it over the next six months. Some key constituencies, like young voters, will cheer. Others, like black voters, might not be thrilled but given their overwhelming support for O the risk that he’ll lose many votes because of this is minimal. Meanwhile, Romney’s unlikely to make it an issue since it’d throw him off his core economic message. (See, e.g., Haley Barbour insisting yesterday that the gay-marriage chatter lately is a Democratic distraction.)

All true enough, but I continue to think “The Decision” here is driven less by pressure from Sheriff Joe than by broader campaign considerations.

Recall how Democrats think about the demographics:

[Ruy] Teixeira, writing with John Halpin, argues in “The Path to 270: Demographics versus Economics in the 2012 Presidential Election,” that in order to be re-elected, President Obama must keep his losses among white college graduates to the 4-point margin of 2008 (47-51). Why? Otherwise he will not be able to survive a repetition of 2010, when white working-class voters supported Republican House candidates by a record-setting margin of 63-33.

Obama’s alternative path to victory, according to Teixeira and Halpin, would be to keep his losses among all white voters at the same level John Kerry did in 2004, when he lost them by 17 points, 58-41. This would be a step backwards for Obama, who lost among all whites in 2008 by only 12 points (55-43). Obama can afford to drop to Kerry’s white margins because, between 2008 and 2012, the pro-Democratic minority share of the electorate is expected to grow by two percentage points and the white share to decline by the same amount, reflecting the changing composition of the national electorate.

What yesterday’s elections may have told Team Obama is that the bitter clingers out there are bitter enough to give 41% of the Democrat vote in West Virginia to a convicted felon and to ease a ban on same-sex marriage into the North Carolina constitution. They may have concluded that their energies are better spent targeting more socially liberal white college graduates in the suburbs of northern Virginia, Philadeplphia, Denver, etc. than wasting time on trying to persuade Rust Belt Jacksonians to pull the lever for Barack Obama again while (as Allahpundit suggests) considering discontent among socially conservative African-Americans an acceptable risk now. The establishment’s mockery of Obama’s unevolved position may have suggested to Team Obama that painting Mitt Romney as a right-wing extremist is made more difficult when the president shares Romney’s position on SSM.

Obama’s hastily-arranged interview with Roberts suggests his campaign was prepared to let SSM drift off the news radar, until facts on the ground drove a public (but controlled) flip on the issue.

Yesterday, I opined in passing that Obama was backing off in hopes of keeping North Carolina in the mix of battleground states where the GOP has to spend money. Others have suggested Obama’s concerns are bigger than that. The Hotline’s Josh Kraushaar suggested Obama’s gay rights kabuki is more about the Rust Belt than North Carolina and Virginia, asserting that Obama has a much better shot at winning white votes in the former region than the latter. Kraushaar tweeted this shows Obama is still playing for Ohio and Pennsylvania, casting doubt on the VA/NC model. He believes it shows that Obama’s path to reelection remains challenging, because it relies on getting votes from working-class whites who oppose same sex marriage.

If Kraushaar is correct, he was understating Obama’s plight. That is the lesson of the otherwise funny candidacy of federal inmate Keith Judd, who racked up an impressive 41 percent of the vote against Obama in the West Virginia Democratic primary. The sort of Jacksonian, bitter clingers voting ABO in that state are also found in southwest Virginia, Western Pennsylvania and southern Ohio.

Moreover, Sean Trende suspects Obama’s reluctance to back SSM relates to the African-American vote and the importance of black churches in getting to his 2008 turnout numbers. Trende suggests that if Blacks voted in composition and number at pre-2008 levels, Obama has little room for error. Given that Black voters overwhelmingly backed the SSM ban on the ballot in North Carolina, despite Obama’s token opposition and a vigorous campaign against it by the NAACP, Trende is likely on target here. Obama likely needs very strong Black turnout in the urban centers of states like Pennsylvania and Ohio (and perhaps Virginia and North Carolina) to balance projected losses among rural and working-class white voters in these states.

In one sense, this is not news. But it gives needed perspective to the propaganda establishment outlets like TIME churn out about the confidence of Team Obama supposedly has in facing Mitt Romney. The media can write for months about how many paths to victory Obama has, and how few Romney has. But Team Obama is not campaigning that way. They are projecting confidence, while campaigning as though November will be a nail-biter. Team Romney would do well to follow that example.

Taking the latter first, Gallup reports 50% of Americans are in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage (down marginally from last year’s 53%). However, the latest PPP poll suggests a SSM ban will pass, with only 39% opposing the idea. Although I tend to doubt Obama will win North Carolina in November, he undoubtedly would like to keep it in the mix of battleground states where the GOP has to spend money. Accordingly, while much will be made of the fact that SSM is backed by Democrats and Indies but largely opposed by Republicans, White House flack Jay Carney spent yesterday looking like a Dancing With The Stars contestant regarding Pres. Obama’s stated opposition to SSM.

Turning to the Indiana primary, where recent polling suggests the incumbent Lugar may get knocked off by state treasurer Richard Mourdock, I found the defense of Lugar by Peggy Noonan highly instructive, although not for the reasons she hoped:

What Washington needs is sober and responsible adults. We are as a nation in a moment of real peril, facing challenges that are going to become existential—maybe already are—if we don’t do something about them. We won’t be able to ignore them—an unsound tax system, increasing and highly ideological regulation, an entitlement system whose demands will crush our children—for long. So right now, and more than ever, we need mature folk involved in our governance, people for whom not everything is new. People who know how to do things, who began studying a complicated issue 25 years ago and have kept up, who know it backward and forward. People who know the ways of the chamber backward and forward, and who know how to talk across the aisle. There is value in experience, in accomplishment and expertise. There is value in the ability to take the long view, and do your best with modesty and with an eye toward all the big jumbly categories of America, which are not limited to “rightist” and “leftist.”

The question that argument provokes is: “What exactly has Dick Lugar done about these issues that are possibly already existential?” In explaining the main reasons Lugar may lose, Noonan manages a fairly honest answer:

If Mr. Lugar loses on Tuesday it will likely be due to two things. The first is a number: 35. That’s how many years he’s been in the Senate, how many years he’s lived and worked primarily in the environs of Washington, not Indiana, where apparently he no longer has a home. That was a mistake. Thirty-five is a big number. Nonideological people might look at it and think, “It’s time for a change.”

Please mentally underscore that Lugar apparently no longer has a home in Indiana, because virtually every establishment media account of this primary notes that Mourdock’s campaign is fueled by support from “outside groups.” Dick Lugar has become an “outside Senator,” unlikely to return to Indiana should he lose. I find it difficult to summon big, salty tears over his treatment at the hands of “outside groups.”

Noonan continues:

The other reason is a fact. What fuels conservative frustration is not only legislation like ObamaCare and scandals like Solyndra, but a growing sense that for 40 years, members of the party have sent Republicans to Washington and Washington—its spending, its regulating, its demands—keeps getting worse, not better. How could this be? It’s not just that Democrats have their Democratic ways, it’s that the Republicans they’ve sent haven’t waged a good enough fight. Everything bad there happened while they were there. So—tear it all down, remove everyone and start over.

This is a hard argument to counter because there is some truth in it. No matter who you send, Washington keeps growing. But Mr. Lugar remains as what he is, exceptional, and in his case there are many factors…

In short, the answer to the question of what Lugar has done about the possibly already extential threats to the nation is: “not much”. Indeed, Noonan praises his bipartisanship, when the go-along, get-along approach has actually fueled these threats. You know who has written eloquently about this problem? Peggy Noonan:

For conservatives on the ground, it has often felt as if Democrats (and moderate Republicans) were always saying, “We should spend a trillion dollars,” and the Republican Party would respond, “No, too costly. How about $700 billion?” Conservatives on the ground are thinking, “How about nothing? How about we don’t spend more money but finally start cutting.”

***

The second thing is the clock. Here is a great virtue of the tea party: They know what time it is. It’s getting late. If we don’t get the size and cost of government in line now, we won’t be able to. We’re teetering on the brink of some vast, dark new world—states and cities on the brink of bankruptcy, the federal government too. The issue isn’t “big spending” anymore. It’s ruinous spending that they fear will end America as we know it, as they promised it to their children.

While Lugar deserves credit for his work on issues like nuclear disarmament, he has contributed to the current existential threat and until now displayed no awareness of this. Had he spent more time among Hoosiers, perhaps he would have noticed their discontent. Should he lose today, he will seek solace from his real constituents in the Beltway, who will condemn the excessive partisanship of the Tea Party movement, conveniently forgetting Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) retired in 2010 because the leftwing agenda of a Democratic Congress made getting re-elected too difficult.

If there is austerity in Europe, in most cases it hasn’t taken the form of massive spending cuts.

Following years of large spending expansion, Spain, the United Kingdom, France, and Greece—countries widely cited for adopting austerity measures—haven’t significantly reduced spending since “austerity” supposedly started in 2008. When spending was actually reduced—between 2009-2010 in Greece, Italy, and Spain—the cuts have been relatively small compared to the size of bloated European budgets. Meaningful structural reforms were seldom implemented. Instead, whenever cuts took place, they were always overwhelmed with large counterproductive tax increases.

This so-called balanced approach—some spending cuts for large tax increases—has been proven to be a recipe for disaster by economists. It fails to stabilize the debt, and it is more likely to cause economic contractions.

That summary excludes Ireland, but as Kyle Wingfield notes, the top marginal tax rate there rose 17 percent amid a global recession. In contrast, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia have bounced back strongly after adopting strict austerity measures and vastly reducing government indebtedness. The finding that the big-tax, “balanced” approach to fiscal consolidation generally fails is consistent with prior studies from the OECD and IMF.

So what is the effect of the Greek and French elections? Maybe not much. As Rick Ackerman reminds us, “even the socialists in Greece’s parliament were forced to support austerity measures a few months ago, because without such measures the country would have been unable to borrow enough cash to meet payroll.” As for France, even Jukebox Mafioso Matt Yglesias acknowledges:

[O]ne very plausible story of what happens next is simply that the European Central Bank will decide it needs to bring the continent’s newest leader to heel. If the ECB signals that it will only support the French banking system and the French economy if Hollande sticks with the status quo program, then Hollande may well have no choice. Elections in Europe aren’t necessarily what they used to be.

Or, as Iowahawk bluntly tweeted to Greece: “[Y]ou can vote against austerity all you want. Austerity doesn’t give a sh*t about election results.” Also: “French vote out austerity, gravity; prompts new fears of airborne flocks of rich, drunk flying Frenchmen.”

The fairy tale is that Americans, deep down, really agree with liberals on all of these issues and would heartily embrace their agenda if only these side issues, scandals, and manufactured distractions would just get out of the way.

Geraghty noted that Dems were playing the politics of distraction in 2010. The midterm elections did not end well for them. Pres. Obama seems bent on trying it in a nationwide campaign for 2012. The good news is that independents tend to base their vote more on the economy than partisans do. The bad news is that voters often care less about issues than they do about a candidate’s character, broadly defined. This is why Team Obama is fueling media coverage of the supposed likeability gap between Obama and Romney, stories about how the candidates treat (or eat) dogs, and so on. And this is ultimately why it’s probably a good thing if some on the right fight those battles, while Romney and the GOP focus on the economy. The right does not want to buy into the inverse of the liberal fairy tale.

On the other hand, the fact that the 7%-10% of voters who end up deciding elections are almost by definition not swayed by ideology does not lessen the importance of making the case for smaller government, economic freedom and personal responsibility. As Jonah Goldberg points out in The Tyranny of Cliches, one of the fundamental cliches of the progressive left is pragmatism, i.e., that they are simply doing “what works.” It is also one of the progressive left’s fundamental falsehoods.

The past century has been one in which progressives have put forth the idea that Soviet communism is what works, that Eurofascism is what works, that Maoism is what works, and that Eurosocialism is what works. The actual history of the past century is one in which Eurofascism was defeated in WWII, Soviet communism was defeated in the Cold War, Maoism has degenerated into a fascism and crony capitalism that only Tom Friedman finds attractive, and Eurosocialism is taking its own road to the dustbin of history. To be sure, voters in the UK and France are resisting, the Germans less so. But fiscal realities will continue to intrude, regardless of which governments they elect. They will eventually figure out what the OECD and IMF already have about the solution to their problems: spending less is the answer.

Voters in America — even the non-ideological, low-information voters — will end up absorbing these lessons as they move through life. The right should not adopt pragmatism as its own cliche, but the decay of 20th century progressivism will continue to push the electoral mainstream rightward.

Nevertheless, Brownstein’s article ends up noting the more interesting medium-term questions involve younger and future generations of Hispanics already here and automatically eligible to vote. Democrats rely on straight-line projections of growth in this demographic as part of their Emerging Democratic Majority theory. However, as Steve Malanga suggested after the 2008 election, the economy is a big part of the Hispanic vote, just like it is to everyone else:

Why has the GOP been unable to make more headway among Hispanics? One answer has to do with income. As political scientist Andrew Gelman notes in his new book, Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State, lower-income voters continue to vote disproportionately Democratic, despite a popular notion among pundits that many of them have shifted to the GOP for cultural reasons. That fact suggests that Hispanics—nearly half of whom live in households whose earnings fall in the country’s bottom two income quintiles—would naturally trend Democratic. And in fact, in the McCain-Obama contest, 83 percent of Hispanic voters with annual incomes of $15,000 or less voted for Obama, as did 71 percent of those earning between $15,000 and $30,000. By contrast, 51 percent of those with household incomes between $150,000 and $200,000 voted for McCain.

Sean Trende makes a similar point in his recent book, The Lost Majority, while also noting that if the Democrats decide to pander heavily to Hispanics on issues like immigration, they risk losses among other groups.

The latest data crunched by the Pew Hispanic Center suggests successive generations of Hispanic youth are catching up economically. Indeed, later generations are already marginally more likely to identify themselves as Americans first (and even more likely to identify as white). A pause in illegal immigration may allow for even swifter assimilation. That would be good for America generally and Hispanics in particular, but perhaps much less good for the Democratic Party.

As for the short-term, Brownstein reports that while there will be 22-24 million Hispanics eligible to vote this year:

Hispanic registration is not keeping pace. The number of Hispanics registered to vote grew from 9.3 to 11.6 million from 2004 to 2008. But in 2010, Hispanic registrations declined to 10.9 million, according to Antonio Gonzalez, president of the William C. Velasquez Institute, which studies Hispanic political participation.

***

At one point, Gonzalez predicted that 12 million Hispanics would vote in 2012, up from just under 10 million in 2008 and about 7.6 million in 2004. Now he thinks it unlikely to reach such a peak. While there will be a “surge” in Hispanic voter registration this year, Gonzalez says, it will begin from the depressed level it reached after 2010. And that ultimately will yield a harvest of around 11 million Hispanic voters this fall, and possibly less, he says. Concerted registration and turnout efforts from Democrats likely will enlarge Hispanic participation in a few key states, especially Southwestern states like Arizona and Nevada, but unless something changes, Gonzalez predicts, “We won’t be turbocharged as a national electorate.”

Again, less than ideal for the Democrats.

First, these polls and media stories merely confirm what we would have surmised a year ago: FL and OH are going to be close, PA remains a tough get for the GOP, and VA has been trending Democratic but not a sure thing for Obama in light of the 2009 and 2010 elections there.

Second, as Nate Silver notes, state polling is still noisy at this point in the campaign.

Third, as political scientist Andrew Gelman notes, the past several decades have seen a steady decline in the variation of statewide vote swings. Come November, the swing in the swing states will likely mirror the swing nationally. Electionate makes a similar point, although I have some disagreement with the underlying reasoning:

There’s a growing chorus arguing that Obama has an electoral college advantage. The underlying assumption is that the race is close nationally and yet Obama seems poised to secure well over 300 electoral votes. In my view, that argument is misguided for a simple reason: the race isn’t close nationally, and the electoral college consequently reflects an Obama advantage.

Electionate’s claim that the race isn’t close nationally is based in large part on the argument that Rasmussen and Gallup are skewing perceptions of the race. I will not rehash the claims against Rasmussen; some of them are quite reasonable, others less so. Gallup defends its polling here and here. Rather, I will note that Electionate’s plot excluding Gallup and Rasmussen tends to show a slowly tightening race, which is what you see with Gallup and Ras in the mix. Eyeballing the plot suggests Obama currently has an edge of a bit over 4% — but today’s RCP average gives Obama an edge of 3.6%. That’s not much a difference, particularly when considering that head-to-head polls at this point in the election cycle explain less than 50% of eventual results. [Note: Electionate does not name RCP as an offender on this score.]

However, this is another reason to focus more on Obama’s job approval number than any Electoral College map at the moment. The current RCP averages are 48.3% approve, 47.4% disapprove. If you exclude Gallup and Ras, 47.8% approve and 47.3% disapprove. Again, judiciously including Gallup and Ras has no significant effect on the numbers; if anything, they boost Obama’s approval number. For the zombies focused on the 2004 campaign analogy, note that while Bush had declining job approval eight years ago, he went into the election with a 49.8% job approval by the RCP average.

None of this will keep we political junkies from obsessing over polls and maps. It’s fun to do that. Just keep in mind that at this point in the campaign, they probably do not tell you what you really want to know.

Why? Because Bush whose popularity was sliding amid rising questions about the war in Iraq — among other things — knew that there was no path to victory against Kerry by spending any substantial time touting his accomplishments during his first four years in office.

Partisans on both sides were already lined up either for or against Bush and no amount of positive (or negative) advertising would move them off of how they intended to vote. Undecided voters didn’t like Bush so positive ads amounted to a waste of time. The only way to win was to make Kerry even less palatable.

Obama is in a somewhat similar — albeit it slightly stronger — position that Bush found himself at this time in 2004. The struggling economy has dragged down the current incumbent’s numbers and two of his main legislative achievements — health care and the economic stimulus — are not popular with the American public. (They are popular with the Democratic base, however, which is why Obama is touting some of those accomplishments in web ads — a means of communication that helps gin up energy in the base.)

Mind you, Jay Cost has looked in depth at the 2004 campaign and found essentially the opposite result:

The election that year was a referendum on Bush: people who disapproved of him voted overwhelmingly for Kerry; people who approved of him voted overwhelmingly for Bush. In fact, the Bush approvers/Kerry voters were more numerous than the Bush disapprovers/Bush voters.

As Jay noted: “If anything, Kerry did a better job at peeling away voters from the “other” side than Bush did.”

Cillizza’s sloppy thinking is most evident in his final paragraph quoted above. I doubt he missed the day in writing class about paragraph structure and how topic sentences are supposed to be supported by and flow from the topic sentence. Here, we are told Obama is in a slightly stronger position than Bush, but the rest of the paragraph actually suggests why Obama is in a weak position. [My theory is that Cillizza believes this because Bush's approval was trending downward in May 2004, while Obama's has generally trended upward since Autumn 2011. However, I would note Bush's downward trend broke over the summer of 2004 -- and it's entirely possible the converse could happen here, based on the natural rhythms of a presidential election year and the state of the economy. The main point here is that Cillizza could not be bothered to support his assertion with data or argument.]

Cillizza spells out his bedrock premise near the end of his piece:

Remember: Campaigns run negative ads because they work.

However, political scientists like John Sides will tell you that we haven’t remotely arrived at a place where research suggests that negative ads “work.” This is not to say that negative ads never work; it is merely to say that at best, Cillizza can only claim that campaigns run negative ads because they believe negative ads work. Sides calls the idea that negative ads work a “zombie,” because it refuses to die, despite the general lack of data supporting it.

Conservatives will be inclined to attribute the sloppy thinking of such stories entirely to political bias by journalists who would prefer Obama’s reelection. However, without excluding bias as a factor, the problem runs deeper than that.

The 2012 election will be mostly a referendum on the incumbent and the economy, as such elections almost always are. Yet coverage of the campaign to date has overwhelmingly focused on the horse race, tactics, strategy, money and advertising, absolutely dwarfing coverage of policy, the candidates’ public records and even their personal issues. The same was true of the 2008 general election coverage, despite a financial panic and two war theaters. Indeed, two of the world’s easiest predictions are: (1) after the 2012 elections, journalists will hold conferences where they decry the fact that they disserved the public with too much horse race coverage; (2) they will do it again in 2016.

The establishment media’s enormous bias toward horse race coverage is fundamentally self-serving. If campaign strategists and pollsters are the puppet-masters who determine election outcomes, then the reporters who relay their plans to the unwashed masses have status. But if people think that the event of the moment may not matter all that much, fewer people read the Washington Post. And even zombies gotta eat.

Yesterday, I wrote about the claims from Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein that the GOP is ideologically extreme and scornful of compromise, noting that the Democrats are similarly afflicted with the problems they identified. However, we need not simply analyze their claims on the basis of what is wrong with both parties. We can also look at the affirmative record of the parties.

One of the biggest and most fundamental tasks of the federal government today is developing a budget. There is consensus on this point. Obama’s budget director has warned that our exploding public debt is “serious and ultimately unsustainable.”

Republicans have proposed a budget (largely the work of Rep. Paul Ryan) to address the debt bomb, and have taken considerable political flak for it, which will only increase in the general election campaign.

The Obama administration’s position?

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, speaking on behalf of the Obama White House, to Rep. Paul Ryan: “You are right to say we’re not coming before you today to say ‘we have a definitive solution to that long term problem.’ What we do know is, we don’t like yours.”

In the House of Representatives, Pres. Obama’s non-solution budget was unanimously defeated, 414-0. The House Democrats’ budget, which relies on massive tax increases and gutting defense spending, while doing nothing about runaway entitlement spending, nevertheless fares only marginally better in reducing the debt/GDP ratio than Obama’s non-solution. Neither the Obama budget or the House Dems’ budget comes close to either the Ryan plans or the bipartisan plans floating around the Beltway.

Speaking of which, people like Ornstein and Mann presumably favor some old school, center-left Grand Bargain along the lines of the Bowles-Simpson Commission recommendations. Beltway establishmentarians pine for the days in which the GOP signed onto budget deals that hiked taxes in return for future spending cuts that never seem to materialize.

In the House, a version of the Bowles-Simpson plan attracted a grand total of 38 votes, suggesting House Republicans are not the only ones scornful of this Grand Bargain. In the Senate, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid blocked Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad from taking a vote on a version of this plan, even in committee. Indeed, Senate Democrats, in violation of federal law, have failed to pass any budget for almost three years.

Democrats oppose the Republican budget approach for relying heavily on restraining government spending and avoiding massive tax increases. However, a study of fiscal consolidations in 21 countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development over 37 years concludes that failed attempts to close budget gaps relied 53% on tax increases and 47%, while successful consolidations averaged 85% spending cuts and 15% tax increases. Moreover, the International Monetary Fund would suggest spending cuts and tax cuts as a “Plan B” for overextended countries.

As for Republicans being ideologically extreme, consider the polling coming out of the GOP presidential primary campaign. Americans saw the ideology of the GOP candidates — including Michelle Bachmann and Rick Santorum — as closer to theirs than Barack Obama’s ideology. Even among so-called independents, only Bachmann scored as more extreme than Obama, who holds the record for the most polarizing first, second and third years in office since Gallup started measuring polarization. A majority of Americans (and independents) said Barack Obama’s political views are “too liberal,” a greater percentage than believed either of his main Republican challengers — Rick Santorum (38%) or Mitt Romney (33%) — is “too conservative.” A majority of Americans (and independents) disagreed with Obama on the issues most important to them, while only a plurality disagreed with either Romney or Santorum.

Today’s post is much shorter than yesterday’s, because if you reread Ornstein and Mann, you will find none of this real-world context in their op-ed. In order for them to condemn Republicans as “the problem,” they ignore the country’s biggest problems, save for a passing reference to our exploding public debt as, er, “fiscal pressures.” They ignore the Democrats’ gross irresponsibility and dereliction in meeting the basic duties of governance, similarly burying their heads in the sand. They ignore that the Democrats’ preferred approach to the debt — when forced to consider it — has tended to fail worldwide. They denounce the GOP as ideologically extreme, public opinion data to the contrary. No wonder they demand the media switch entirely to a propaganda machine for the Democratic Party. Their reality-based community is a Potemkin village.

–Karl

Rep. Allen West, a Florida Republican, was recently captured on videoasserting that there are “78 to 81” Democrats in Congress who are members of the Communist Party. Of course, it’s not unusual for some renegade lawmaker from either side of the aisle to say something outrageous. What made West’s comment — right out of the McCarthyite playbook of the 1950s — so striking was the almost complete lack of condemnation from Republican congressional leaders or other major party figures, including the remaining presidential candidates.

It’s not that the GOP leadership agrees with West; it is that such extreme remarks and views are now taken for granted.

***

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

Although Ornstein and Mann claim to “have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted,” they provide no links to all the op-eds they did about the extreme statements about Republicans being Un-American, comparing them to fascists, Nazis, racists and so on made by Democratic Reps. Nancy Pelosi (on her own and with Steny Hoyer), George Miller, Debbie Wasserman-Shultz, Barney Frank, Maxine Waters, Jerrold Nadler, Jesse Jackson Jr., Sam Gibbons, Tom Lantos, Keith Ellison, Baron Hill, Jared Polis, Steve Cohen, Sheila Jackson Lee, Eleanor Holmes Norton and Louise Slaughter. Or Senators Robert Byrd and Blanche Lincoln. Or current Califonia governor Jerry Brown. Or repeat offender Al Gore. People might be forgiven for thinking Democrats, not to mention Ornstein and Mann, take that extreme rhetoric for granted in their rush to condemn the GOP.

As for the supposed anti-science bent of the GOP, Ornstein and Mann probably should not have picked the week in which Gaia theorist James Lovelock announced he and others had been unduly alarmist about global warming to wheel out this particular trope. Moreover, O&M apparently have not noticed the degree to which Democrats are anti-vaccination, anti-nuclear, and anti-animal research. And they missed how Democrats ditch science whenever it threatens party dogma on race and gender issues.

Ornstein and Mann next trot out several GOP boogeymen to explain the current apocalypse. They spend the most venom on vilifying Newt Gingrich, who in their telling poisoned the well by building the first GOP House majority in 40 years by scandal-mongering and demonizing his opponents (Democrats never did this before 1994, you know). Gingrich certainly did shine a light on the corruption of the Democratic leadership of the time, including Jim Wright and Dan Rostenkowski, and the GOP did benefit on balance in 1994 from the House banking scandal. However, Ornstein and Mann certainly do not make the case that the Wrights and Rostenkowskis were clean and deserved to remain in powerful positions in the House.

Moreover, as self-proclaimed scholars of Congressional history, Ornstein and Mann surely know that the election of a GOP House in 1994 was the culmination of electoral trends stretching back to Eisenhower, accelerated by the rise of the New Left within the Democratic Party starting in the late 60s and early 70s, and turbo-charged by the first two years of the Clinton administration. The GOP has not held the House for most of the years since 1994 because of a few bounced checks. However, the notion that Republican majorities in Congress reflect public support for the GOP agenda conflicts with their narrative, so Ornstein and Mann play dumb about all of this.

Ornstein and Mann then move on to the supposed intransigence of the GOP during the Obama administration:

On financial stabilization and economic recovery, on deficits and debt, on climate change and health-care reform, Republicans have been the force behind the widening ideological gaps and the strategic use of partisanship.

What O&M leave out here is any consideration of whether the Democrats’ legislation on any of these issues was all that popular. They also skip over the fact that Democrats had large majorities in both houses of Congress for the first two years of the Obama administration, even enjoying a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate for the period between the election of Al Franken and the death of Ted Kennedy. They further leave out the fact that Obama rejected a Republican suggestions on economic recovery with the in-your-face declaration “I Won” on his third day in office, and made a priority of cutting a campaign ad against the lone Republican who voted for Obamacare in the House. And O&M fail to acknowledge that it was Obama who torpedoed a bigger deal during negotiations over the debt ceiling, after the allegedly intransigent-on-taxes GOP leaders signaled willingness to accept $800 billion in revenue measures.

They also complain about the escalating use of the filibuster. They overlook the argument that the filibuster can be a way to promote compromise. They also overlook Ornstein’s past enthusiasm for the filibuster, coincidentally enough when Republicans were threatening the so-called “nuclear option” to end Democratic filibusters.

Ornstein and Mann then jump back in time again:

No doubt, Democrats were not exactly warm and fuzzy toward George W. Bush during his presidency. But recall that they worked hand in glove with the Republican president on the No Child Left Behind Act, provided crucial votes in the Senate for his tax cuts, joined with Republicans for all the steps taken after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and supplied the key votes for the Bush administration’s financial bailout at the height of the economic crisis in 2008. The difference is striking.

Moving past the hilarious understatement of Bush Derangement Syndrome we all endured for eight years, what are Ornstein and Mann actually suggesting here? If their thesis is that the GOP has pursued a radical policy agenda, did Dems go along with these measures solely out of some moral obligation to bipartisanship? Or might it be that the GOP agenda is not as extreme as Ornstein and Mann suggest? Occam’s Razor suggests politicians tend to vote based on what will keep themselves in office, or in the case of unpopular measures based on what they judge to be truly in the national interest. In Ornstein’s and Mann’s world, when Dems vote for a Bush administration bill, it is solely Democratic noblesse oblige, as though the Bush administration allowed no input from the Ted Kennedys of the world on NCLB.

Ornstein and Mann trot out complaints about the GOP from people like former senator Chuck Hagel, but fail to note the complaint from former Senator Evan Bayh, made after Scott Brown’s Senate victory in the deep blue state of Massachusetts: “Whenever you have just the furthest left elements in the Democratic Party attempting to impose their will on the rest of the country, that’s not going to work too well.”

O&M continue:

Shortly before Rep. West went off the rails with his accusations of communism in the Democratic Party, political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, who have long tracked historical trends in political polarization, said their studies of congressional votes found that Republicans are now more conservative than they have been in more than a century. Their data show a dramatic uptick in polarization, mostly caused by the sharp rightward move of the GOP.

For dudes bent on calling the GOP anti-science, you would think Ornstein and Mann would not only know, but also note that the use of the Poole-Rosenthal data to make these sort of claims is, er, not without controversy among political scientists. You would be wrong.

On a roll, Ornstein and Mann get egregious with this one:

In the House, some of the remaining centrist and conservative “Blue Dog” Democrats have been targeted for extinction by redistricting, while even ardent tea party Republicans, such as freshman Rep. Alan Nunnelee (Miss.), have faced primary challenges from the right for being too accommodationist.

O&M really hope you do not click on the link they provided, which reports:

On Tuesday Reps. Jason Altmire and Tim Holden, members of the moderate-to-conservative caucus of Democrats known as the Blue Dog Coalition, lost their primary battles to more liberal opponents who painted their centrism as apostasies that could no longer be tolerated.

These were the latest blows delivered to the Blue Dogs, whose membership ranks have been decimated the last two years by a perfect political storm that has driven the House Democratic caucus farther to the left than at any time in the last decade.

It’s increasingly unclear whether Democrats can ever reclaim the House majority unless they pick up ground in the conservative-leaning terrain that the Blue Dogs once represented. In addition, with so few moderates left, there are fewer House members in the political center to create the sort of bipartisan coalition that in the past has provided the bulwark of support for budget compromises.

In other words, Democratic moderates are “targeted for extinction” by Democrats (especially Big Labor), in the same way they accuse the right of doing to GOP officeholders. To be sure, The GOP has its Jeffordses, Specters and Snowes, but the switches of the Gramms and Shelbys and the departures of Democrats like Bayh and Ben Nelson, not to mention the primary defeat of Joe Lieberman by the left-wing “netroots,” demonstrates this is a bipartisan phenomenon.

Ornstein and Mann’s highly selective reading of history all builds to this:

Our advice to the press: Don’t seek professional safety through the even-handed, unfiltered presentation of opposing views. Which politician is telling the truth? Who is taking hostages, at what risks and to what ends?

Urging the press to be unfair and suggesting Republicans are hostage-takers is their recipe for bringing moderation bipartisanship into our political sphere. Extremism is the defense of center-left establishmentarianism is no vice!

What could possibly go wrong?

Less than half of 18-to-24-year-old voters want Obama to win reelection, and he leads a generic Republican candidate by just 7 percentage points, according to a survey of youth voter attitudes released Thursday by the Public Religion Research Institute and Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs.

The poll did not test Obama against Romney directly, but found more enthusiasm for Obama than Romney. The Hill’s Amie Parnes found a somewhat different result in another poll:

Obama leads presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney 60 percent to 34 when it comes to the youth vote, according to a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll. But Obama’s enthusiasm has taken a nosedive, the poll shows. In 2008, 63 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds took a big interest in the election. Four years later, 45 percent have the same level of interest, reflecting the most sizable drop in one of the major voting groups.

Yahoo’s Chris Moody reports on yet another survey:

The wide-ranging survey of 3,096 18-29 year-olds conducted by Harvard University’s Institute of Politics shows 43 percent said they plan to vote for Obama in November, while just 26 percent plan to vote for Romney. The last time Harvard matched Obama against a GOP challenger, in December 2011, they asked who young voters thought would win the election: 36 percent said Obama would lose, a sign that support for Obama is increasing closer to the election.

***

However, Obama’s approval rating has dipped by six percentage points from Obama’s first year in office, according to a Harvard poll taken in November 2009, from 52 percent to 58 percent. That could be a sign that the youth vote is far more up for grabs in 2012 than it was in 2008, when Obama overwhelming won the youth vote.

As John Sides notes, these types of stories should always be read in the context of a number of polls, as well as the broader population and other demographics. Sides notes that a recent Pew poll has Obama over Romney 61%-33% among 18-29 year-olds, in comparison to Obama’s 66%-33% victory with the demographic in the 2008 exit poll. Those numbers better for Obama than some of the polls cited above, but what Sides notes is that Obama’s numbers now are down 3%-5% among all of the age demographics from the 2008 exit poll results. Moreover, as Andrew Gelman notes, nonuniform swings are difficult to detect in a survey, because they have a larger margin of error. In short, Obama’s problem with young voters is likely reflective of Obama’s problem with voters generally.

So why is Obama wooing college students and slow jamming the news with Jimmy Fallon at taxpayer expense this week? Because Team Obama, like most everyone, is anticipating a much closer election in 2012 than in 2008. If Obama were to drop from 66% to the level of youth support John F. Kerry got in 2004 (~54%), he would lose ~2% of the overall vote, which he likely cannot afford. We cannot know this for certain. Obama’s 2008 performance with young voters was tied in part to his boost in performance and turnout of minority voters. Conversely, we do not know whether the Republican-leaning youth vote was particularly depressed. While the latest raft of polls might look like Obama’s youth vote has softened, the GOP should not take it for granted any more than Obama does.

After all, when I read generally conservative columnists like Matt K. Lewis or John Podhoretz disdaining “manufactured” outrages from different angles — even when the GOP may enjoy some temporary advantage from the kerfuffles of the current campaign — I am not entirely unsympathetic. Indeed, I am already on record arguing that institutionally, the GOP should not engage in these controversies, but note that Democrats have been generating them to distract from the anemic economy and the Obama administration’s record on the issues Americans care most about. I think that’s pretty close to Podhoretz’s position, if I’m reading him correctly.

On the other hand, I recognize at least two problems inherent in the position of disdaining these distractions entirely.

First, there is at least a whiff of condescension involved. I do not think those upset by the Obama administration’s plans to infringe on religious liberty as part of Obamacare are just pretending to be upset. I doubt the progressives who seem so passionate about increasing access to abortion and birth control are playing make-believe (beyond the notion that such access is “free” in terms of money or overall liberty). People who denounce a Democratic honcho who let her mask slip to suggest stay-at-home mothers don’t really work are not entirely engaged in hype. I may think economic growth, exploding public debt and the entirety of Obamacare to be bigger issues, but it would be elitist to deny there are real issues at the heart of most of the supposed sideshows of the campaign so far.

This is even arguably true about this campaign’s dog tales. Admittedly, whether Mitt Romney once transported his family dog atop his car or Obama ate dog as a child in Indonesia (with little apparent regret as an adult) has no direct policy consequences. On the other hand, Podhoretz admits Democrats became interested in the Romney dog tale because of the effect it had on Mitt’s favorability in focus groups. Moreover, the intersection of moral psychology and politics is a hot topic these past months. And in this regard, it is notable that when asked whether it would be wrong for a family to eat the family dog after it was killed by a car, it turns out that the only group that thinks it alright is college-educated liberals. The swingiest of swing voters are almost by definition not particularly moved by policy arguments, or they would be partisans. America is still a free enough country that we get to tell this key bloc that dog tales are unimportant, but they don’t have to listen.

The second major problem with ignoring campaign sideshows is Utopianism. As Podhoretz notes, opposition research is democratized in the Internet Age. And Lewis concedes that ceding the field to Democrats on these issues may be necessary to win elections (and thereby address those “real” issues). There is nothing in American history, let alone the history of the Internet Age, suggesting that a handful of pundits — or even concerted efforts by candidates and their teams — are going to stop these controversies. To rhetorically shovel against this tide is in one sense noble, but also unconservative to the degree that it pretends human nature is so easily molded by the political realm.

In short, while I still think it helps the GOP to use these kerfuffles to say Democrats want to avoid discussing the economy and Obama’s record, there is probably a role for those who want neutralize or reverse their effect.

The main point Silver misses — perhaps because poll analysis is his blogging bread and butter — is that head-to-head polls at this point in election cycle explain less than 50% of eventual results.

This early in the cycle, I would prefer to follow Pres. Obama’s job approval number. Sean Trende notes the longstanding correlation between the incumbent’s job approval rating and the vote share ultimately received on Election Day. He also notes the close correlation in the 2012 campaign so far:

Since January of this year, the president’s share of the vote against Romney has been, on average, within .55 points of his job approval in the RCP Average on any given day (the median is .5 points). There has only been one day, back on Jan. 10, where he ran more than two points ahead of his job approval. This tendency translates to individual polls as well. ***

On average, Obama runs .93 percent ahead of his job approval. We also might note that there seems to be some systemic bias in Pew that has the president running unusually well (vis a vis other pollsters) compared to his job approval. If you assume that something in Pew’s methodology renders it an outlier, the president would run .42 percent ahead of his job approval.

Thus, this early in the cycle, rather than fret over each poll that comes in, a good number to consider would be Obama’s average job approval +.5 percent.

However, it’s also possible that number could be a ceiling at any given moment. Harry J. Enten has a very nice piece extending Silver’s final point about the small number of elections usually studied (16) makes the notion of “rules” about elections a risky enterprise. Read the whole thing, because there’s plenty of good stuff there beyond what he says about presidential job approval:

Approval ratings are great at predicting winners, but they are inexact. The perceived ideology of an opponent may not play the biggest role in determining the winner, but it does play some role. Also, these historic approval polls are of adults generally, not actual voters – who tend to be somewhat more Republican.

In this particular cycle, Mitt Romney’s moderate image probably helps him by a percentage point or two (which is why Team Obama is trying to paint him as the most right-wing candidate since Barry Goldwater). And the fact that the electorate trends more GOP than the general population also helps Romney. Sean Trende is correct in claiming Obama can win if he boosts his job approval by a couple of points, which is entirely possible. However, Jay Cost correctly notes Obama has not managed this consistently in over two years.

With Lolo, I learned how to eat small green chili peppers raw with dinner (plenty of rice), and, away from the dinner table, I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy).

Although the heart of PolitiFact is the Truth-O-Meter, which they use to rate factual claims. author Louis Jacobson assigned no rating to the seemingly straightforward question of whether Obama ate dog.

In an age of social media, PolitiFact heard complaints via Twitter. Their first response: “We’re not suggesting Obama disputes he ate dog meat in Indonesia. He doesn’t, that we’ve seen. We’re just publishing what he wrote about it.” It would be more accurate to call this a non-response, as it avoids the question of why there is no Truth-O-Meter rating for the claim, as opposed to putting the claim “in context.”

PolitiFact tried again: “Other subjects of “In Context” — Ted Nugent, Hilary Rosen, [and] Rick Santorum.” However, Nugent’s comment was a vague statement about the future, which is not susceptible to fact-checking. Likewise, Santorum’s comments about Satan’s agenda seem faith-based (unless PolitiFact is suggesting they have some way of checking in with the Prince of Darkness). And PolitiFact’s refusal to rate Hilary Rosen’s comment that Ann Romney “never worked a day in her life” merely helped Rosen (and by extension, Democrats generally) wriggle away from the controversy over what is seen as a widespread attitude among the Left toward stay-at-home moms.

More significantly, PolitiFact’s responses ignore their much more relevant track record in this particular area. For example, PolitiFact rated the story about the Romneys transporting the family dog on the roof of their car as “Mostly True.” And PolitiFact rated the story about former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee frying squirrels in a popcorn popper simply “True.”

Thus, it is apparent when it comes to stories about Republican presidential candidates eating unusual animals or arguably stressing a dog, PolitiFact has its Truth-O-Meter at the ready. When a Democrat president’s book contains the admission he ate dog, PolitiFact cannot find its Truth-O-Meter. When Obama is the subject, PolitiFact’ s “heart” simply disappears, even when the problem is made apparent to them by public complaint.

That this supposed Ministry of Truth is biased is not exactly news. A prior study by the University of Minnesota Humphrey School of Public Affairs found PolitiFact harbored a large bias against Republicans. But their double-standard is usually not so obvious and easily exposed.

Consider the gender gap, as Ramesh Ponnuru does:

Of the eight presidential elections from 1980 to 2008, Republicans won five (four if you exclude 2000). Republicans carried women, albeit narrowly, three times; Democrats carried men twice. Republicans can lose even while winning men, as in 1996. Democrats can lose while winning women, as in 2004.

The evidence suggests that women are more inclined than men to vote for Democrats, but this gap doesn’t consistently help either party. It isn’t the case that the larger the gender gap, the worse Republicans do. Republicans did seven points better among men than women in 2004, when they won. They did five points better in 2008, when they lost.

Obama barely won men in 2008. If this race is at all competitive, he will lose them this time. And that’s not all we can predict. Romney will win among large subgroups of women: those who are married, those who are white, those who go to church regularly. Gender isn’t the principal determinant of women’s votes any more than it is of men’s.

Meanwhile, Doug Schoen compiles the arguments why Obama is unlikely to significantly improve his standing among male voters — and specifically among male independents and swing voters. Harry J. Enten not only dissects the gender gap, but also the race gap:

The good news for Romney and the Republicans is that they don’t need to win in 2012 among minority groups. Latinos and African Americans combined will probably make up a little less than 25% of the 2012 electorate. Whites, on the other hand, will make up somewhere between 72-75%. If Romney and the Republicans continue to lose minorities by between 47 and 90 percentage points, as they did with Latinos and African Americans respectively in 2008, they will have to win white voters by around 20 points, instead of their 12-point 2008 lead. It turns out that there is a precedent for this massive white swing in the face of a static minority support for the Democrats.

Enten points to the midterm results from 2006 and 2010, which is a little risky, given the difference in the likely turnout demographics between midterms and general elections. However, he notes the GOP only needs to improve its margins with white voters by about 8%-10% rather than the 19% improvement the GOP saw from 2006 to 2010.

As for likeability, there is actually little empirical study (afaik) of its effect on election outcomes. However, the WaPo’s Chris Cillizza notes that in elections with an incumbent since 1980, Mondale, Dole and Kerry all had high favorable ratings and lost, while Bill Clinton won with middling favorable ratings. I would add that the focus on Obama’s favorables tends to obscure the fact that he also tends to have high unfavorables, close to those of Romney, who has lower favorables, but a fair share of unknowns. Even the CNN poll had Romney’s favorables rebounding as the nasty phase of the GOP primaries ends; Obama, as a universally known quantity, is likely at his ceiling.

As Brendan Nyhan puts it at CJR:

In reality, presidential election outcomes can almost never be attributed to a shift in a single demographic group. Likewise, most campaigns are decided by the popular vote, not the details of the Electoral College. For both reasons, journalists should keep their eye on the big picture. While forecasting models are hardly perfect, they have persuasively shown that presidential elections are shaped by fundamental factors like incumbency and the economy, which tend to move demographic groups roughly in parallel. Obama appears to be overperforming among women now, but campaigns tend to move voters toward the outcomes we’d expect given the fundamentals. The implication is that Romney’s standing among women is likely to recover somewhat. As I recently noted, campaign shocks to candidates’ standing in general election trial heats are largely transitory at this stage of the campaign (link requires subscription). Though the gender gap will persist, Republican women and GOP-leaning independents are likely to find reasons to return home after contraception leaves the news, Romney’s rivals stop attacking him, and the conventions remind them of their partisan loyalties.

Polling at this stage of the campaign does not tell us much, but the media coverage of them says a lot about how the establishment would like to shape the campaign environment. A cynic might observe the media seemingly clings to attacks on the GOP, identity politics and the cult of personality as Obama’s strengths in an anemic economy. Those are not even not even the Emperor’s New Clothes; they are the Emperor’s Old Clothes.

In parts of the conservative press, the president’s increasingly scorched-earth rhetoric is being treated as a sign of his desperation. By resorting so quickly to partisan demagoguery, this argument goes, Obama is effectively conceding that he has nothing else to run on – that his policies are unpopular, that his agenda has largely been rejected, and there is no positive case for a second term that any swing voter is likely to be persuaded by.

There is truth to this: Obama’s legislative achievements are strikingly unpopular. ***

But elections won on fear count just as much as elections won on hope. It was fear that gave George W. Bush the edge over John Kerry in 2004, and it was fear that saved the Bill Clinton from political extinction. (Clinton’s rightward pivot helped him win re-election, but his willingness to savage the Dole-Gingrich Republicans on Medicare was just as crucial to his victory.)

Douthat is likely overstating the situation. Presidential elections are mostly referenda on the incumbent or the incumbent party. Jay Cost looked at 2004 and found:

The election that year was a referendum on Bush: people who disapproved of him voted overwhelmingly for Kerry; people who approved of him voted overwhelmingly for Bush. In fact, the Bush approvers/Kerry voters were more numerous than the Bush disapprovers/Bush voters.

Indeed, from Cost’s data it looks like this dynamic was even more true in 1996, when only 4% of Clinton disapprovers voted for Clinton. Moreover, it seems unlikely that dynamic was due to Ross Perot’s third-party run, as 9% of George H.W. Bush disapprovers voted to reeelect him in 1992, when Perot was a bigger vote-getter.

Nevertheless, Douthat may have a point in identifying Mediscare as part of Clinton’s relative overperformance relative to the economy in 1996. In the 1996 exit polling, Medicare came in as the second-largest “top issue” to voters. However, the top “top issue” in 1996 — the economy/jobs — was the top issue to only 21% of voters, and appears to have helped Clinton.

Can Obama exploit Medicare the way Clinton did? Probably not. In 2012, the economy and unemployment are likely to be the top issue with many more voters and not very likely to help Obama. As of last month, Medicare was an asterisk in Gallup’s open-ended poll of the most important issue to Americans. More broadly, “healthcare” looks to be a secondary or tertiary issue in most polls, although Gallup suggests it could be as important as economic issues. Unfortunately, such results are of limited use, as “healthcare” is not the same as “Medicare” and the response likely encompasses things like dissatisfaction with the existence or operation of Obamacare.

Pres. Obama will probably continue to demagogue the House GOP budget on Medicare. But likely GOP nominee Mitt Romney will probably continue to point out that the unpopular Obamacare law is supposed to be funded with $500 billion in (ahem) “future savings” from Medicare. Moreover, polls from sources as diverse as Kaiser and Reason suggest the arguments that reform is necessary to save Medicare and will not affect current retirees both create potential majority support for the GOP approach.

Chait’s target is the recent Third Way poll of independent voters, which he doesn’t like because “Third Way is an intra-party lobbying group that urges Democrats to adopt moderate, pro-business policies” and its poll tends to support its positions. He notes that if you frame poll questions differently you can get findings like those from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner (taken for the Center for American Progress), such as 81% agreeing that “[r]egular people work harder and harder for less and less, while Wall Street CEOs enjoy bigger bonuses than ever.”

To be sure, the wording of poll questions matters. However, Chait does not bother to quote the questions in the Third Way poll. It appears he does not like questions such as:

I’m going to name some topics that have angered some people in America. For each one, please tell me if it makes you very angry, somewhat angry, not too angry, or not angry at all.

The poll then asks about: Congressional gridlock; the national debt; Wall Street bailouts; America falling behind its global competitors; the wealthy not paying enough in taxes; the next generation’s ability to achieve the American Dream; corporate profits; and China’s economic rise. Another question that seems to bother Chait is: “What do you think would be the most effective way to strengthen our economy?”, giving reducing the deficit, reducing taxes and regulations, and reducing income inequality as options. Had Chait actually quoted the poll’s questions, it might have occurred to his readers that those questions sound much more neutral than the GQR questions he did quote. Indeed, the basic Third Way findings on economic opportunity vs. economic fairness are not much different from those of Gallup and Pew.

However, the issue of question neutrality goes to a larger problem with Chait’s general concept of “real” public opinion polling:

Pollsters understand that very slight differences in the wording of a question, or even in the ordering of questions, can produce dramatically different results. Polls that are actually designed to measure public opinion take great precautions to avoid tilting answers one way or another. They try to frame questions in as neutral fashion as possible, and when they do ask questions that gauge people’s ideological views, they measure it by looking at changes.

So, for instance, a poll might ask if you prefer a larger government with more services, or a smaller government with fewer services. That is a classic polling question. It’s not an accurate snapshot of public opinion, though, because even though it’s posed in a completely neutral way, in frames the question in abstract terms rather than specific terms. Its value as a measuring tool is simply that polls as the same question in the same way every year, and the changes in response to the same question can help tell you how public opinion is changing.

This is a wildly reductive view of public opinion polling, and especially reductive of political polling.

The information gathered from the sorts of polling Chait describes is valuable — even if the polls generated for the establishment media and by entities like Gallup and Pew often fall short of the ideal. However, it does not logically follow that “advocacy” polls are not “real” polls. The issue is the quality of a given poll for its purpose.

For example, another poll from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner — this time for Democracy Corps — looks at several of the messages Pres. Obama and Democrats have been putting out and tests them against hypothetical GOP messages (which are debatable, but beyond my scope today). It is not remotely neutral, but highly informative about public opinion for those actually conducting campaigns. It is advocacy polling like this (which the White House or the DNC surely conducts internally) that explains why Obama is mostly attacking the GOP instead of leading with claims that America is back or has made progress on job creation.

Election campaigns are not waged solely in the editorial bullpens of the New York Times and Washington Post, or the offices of Gallup. Rather, beyond the fundamentals of peace and prosperity, they are driven by candidates and their messages. The candidates, their supporters and their messages are not neutral.

In short, to suggest that advocacy polling is not “real” is in some senses exactly backwards. And to compare the recent Third Way poll to the Center for American Progress poll is laughable. Indeed, Third Way’s “advocacy” here rests primarily on the general, neutral approach of its poll.

For example, Ed Kilgore found a straw man resembling Jay Cost and proceeded to beat it as thoroughly as Obama has been beating various straw men these past months. Kilgore claims that “Cost even goes so far as to tell swing voters what they have to care about,” then quotes Jay:

I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that the average swing voter does not want to talk about the “war on women,” the Buffett rule, or whatever else Team Obama is going to throw out there in the weeks and months to come. That voter wants to talk about jobs, the economy, the deficit, gas prices, the health care bill–in other words, all the issues where the president is vulnerable.

Those not already in the tank for Obama might notice that Jay is not telling swing voters what to think about, but offering his opinion about what they want to talk about. Gallup suggests Cost is correct, with their most recent poll showing voters — even Democrats — think healthcare, unemployment, the debt, national defense and terrorism, and gas prices are all more important issues than birth control policy. Indeed, I doubt Kilgore could find a poll showing any other result (or he would have cited one).

TIME’s Joe Klein has the same complaint, this time with a New Democrat-type:

Bill Galston has a piece in The New Republic listing the reasons why Barack Obama is going to have a tough time winning reelection in November. He’s right about most of them, but wrong about the one at the very top–he buys into the political science mythology that some presidential elections are referendums on the incumbent’s record and others are straight-ahead choices. I’ve seen some elections that are referendums on the President, but those have almost always been Congressional campaigns, like 2010 and 2006 or 1994. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a presidential election that was a pure referendum, and every presidential election I’ve covered involved a choice. There are good reasons for this.

Funny how the so-called “reality-based community” abandons academics when they report findings inconvenient to liberals, ain’t it? Political scientists will tell you that Presidents get pretty much all the blame on (or credit for) the economy, even with divided government, even in presidential election years.

Plus, Klein’s historical examples as bad as his knowledge of the studies. Klein claims that “[i]n 1976, Jimmy Carter tried to make the election a referendum on Richard Nixon–and was in the process of failing at that, when Gerald Ford turned in a weak debate performance and saved the election for Carter.” Political scientist Lynn Varveck explains in her book, The Message Matters, that 1976 was an exceptional year in which Gerald Ford could not successfully campaign on the economy, precisely because Carter could make the contest a referendum on the Nixon era. Klein then claims:

1988 should have been a referendum on the Reagan presidency–Michael Dukakis surged to an early lead in the polls because people wanted a change, then crashed when he couldn’t answer a debate question about what he’d do if his wife were raped and murdered (We haven’t heard a debate like that in a while).

In reality, 1988 was a referendum on the Reagan presidency — Klein just rejects the result of that referendum. The outcome in 1988 neatly tracked the result expected from the economy. Those pesky political scientists would tell Klein early polls are not predictive, if only he would listen. But he cannot listen. If he listened, he would have to abandon his fantasy that Dukakis was somehow done in by a lousy debate answer. (Again, political scientists could tell Klein about the historically small effects that presidential debates have had on general election polls and outcomes. )

If Klein finds regression analyses and scatter plots too difficult, perhaps he can consider public opinion polling. That’s what William Galston (whom Klein criticizes) did last October:

When a president is running for reelection, the electorate is primarily motivated by its judgment of the incumbent’s job performance. Consider some Pew Research Center data on recent presidential contests.

In the spring of 1992, two-thirds of George H. W. Bush’s supporters said that they would be casting their vote for him rather than against Bill Clinton, while two-thirds of Clinton supporters said their vote reflected opposition to Bush. In the spring of 1996, 60 percent of Clinton’s supporters said they would be voting for him rather than against Bob Dole, while 60 percent of Dole’s supporters said their vote reflected opposition to Clinton. Early in 2004, more than 80 percent of George W. Bush’s supporters were for him rather than against John Kerry, while two-thirds of Kerry’s supporters were motivated by opposition to Bush.

To be sure, these numbers tend to shift during the general election as the contenders become better known. Still, by Election Day in 1996, only 47 percent of Dole’s supporters said that they were casting their vote in his favor rather than against Clinton; by election day in 2004, only 43 percent of Kerry’s supporters said that they were casting an affirmative vote for him.

Now look at the most recent Pew results, which showed Obama in a tie with Mitt Romney. About three-quarters of Obama’s support is for him rather than against Romney, while more than two-thirds of Romney’s supporters say they will cast their votes against Obama rather than for Romney.

In short, the historical data, regardless of type, points to 2012 being primarily a referendum on Obama and the economy. Galston suggests that in a general election contest against an unpopular incumbent, the main hurdles for the challenger are to appear competent and non-threatening. Instead of touting his record at every opportunity, Obama seems focused on making Romney seem scary. But if Carter couldn’t make Reagan seem scary, how successful is Obama likely to be?

Participants in all four focus groups were asked, “If President Obama was a car, what kind of car would he be and why?” Voters who still approve of President Obama do not perceive him as a risky choice, but on the other spectrum, voters who disapprove believe he hasn’t delivered and question whether he can change course moving forward. Positive responses liken Obama to practical cars: a minivan (family friendly), an Accord or Camry (not flashy or ostentatious), or a Jeep (navigates hurdles). Those who hold a more negative opinion of the President compare him to cars with persistent problems: an old luxury sports car (looks good on the outside, but what’s under the hood?), Chevy Volt (good idea, but no infrastructure to support it), or a Yugo (all flash, no dash).

That’s the spicy blog fodder in these results, but the second bullet-point is probably more significant:

President Obama’s strength with these voters is based upon his personal appeal not policy approval. These Independents like the President, and they praise his “family focus” and view him as more authentic than the average politician. However, participants’ personal regard for President Obama does not transfer to his policies. When asked what they like most about the President, participants refer almost solely to personal traits like his character and speaking skills. At best, they credit President Obama for trying, but offer minimal support for his policies, including the economic stimulus or health care reform. Compared to four years ago, these voters are not where they thought they’d be today, so as a result, they are not convinced President Obama is leading in the right direction.

Focus groups do not produce scientific results, but the responses here track the results of the latest Third Way poll of independents and “swing independents,” which shows Indies closer to Mitt Romney on the issues, but giving Obama higher favorables than Romney. [Note: Obama's unfavorables are equal to Romney's -- and more strongly unfavorable -- in this poll.] Resurgent Republic suggests the overall economic picture may ultimately weigh on Obama. Are they right?

As it turns out, they may well be right. As political scientist John Sides notes at the NYT, voters’ perceptions of candidates as people are not necessarily consequential to presidential election outcomes, in part because perceptions of candidates are more a consequence than a cause of voting, in part because there are many potential trait dimensions on which voters could evaluate candidates. Sides tends to emphasize the role of partisanship is shaping these perceptions, but there is some evidence the same is true of independents (although I am unaware of data for true independents). For example, in the days before the 2008 election, the Washington Post-ABC News daily tracking poll showed a big shift among Indies on whether issues or qualities rate as the more important factor in their vote. At the same time, McCain’s edge among those more concerned with personal qualities shrank by five percent. In a terrible economic environment for the GOP, those numbers look like rationalization. Four years later, the establishment’s hope that Obama’s personal qualities will carry him to victory in a weak economy may end up looking like a rationalization also.

Regular readers of mine know I am a fan of the fundamentals and stress the dominance of the economy in most election years. Political scientist Lynn Varveck, who has studied the exceptions to the general rule, explains the usefulness of models of modern presidential elections:

If you were running for president, would you want to know what political science forecasting models predict about your party’s fortunes? As Stanley Greenberg said, presidential candidates and their consultants ignore this work at their peril. If you are predicted to win, talk about the economy and own it. If you are predicted to lose — find something else onto which the election can be reset. An issue on which you are closer to most voters and your opponent is constrained by an unpopular position. The latter is very hard and because of that, it is rare, which is why sometimes when we evaluate forecasts based on the economy it looks like campaigns don’t matter much — but this is just because most candidates who are predicted to win understand they have to talk about the economic growth, and when they do that, they win! Only Gerald Ford in 1976 lost after implementing this strategy.

Thus, if Obama thinks the economy will not significantly improve in the next six months, it makes sense for him to look for other issues. To quote Mad Men‘s Don Draper, “If you don’t like what’s being said about you, change the conversation.” But is Obama changing the subject to his advantage?

At first glance, the answer would seem to be “yes.” Low taxes for the wealthy and “cuts” to Medicare never poll pretty well. Thus, it is tempting to conclude that Mitt Romney’s defense of House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan’s budget steps into Obama’s trap.

However, the latest Third Way poll of independents and “swing independents” in this year’s battleground states suggests otherwise. [Note: Some of the states included here seem safely Democratic this year, but the list is quite similar to those reportedly targeted by both Obama and Romney, so I do not fault the poll on this score.] Who the poll calls “swing independents” is important because the broad category of independents include so-called leaners who are actually very reliable voters for their favored party. Thus, it is good news for Obama that at the moment, while he is virtually tied with Romney among these swing state independents in general, Obama leads Romney 35%-29% (44%-38% with leaners in this subgroup) among true independents. Nevertheless, the Third Way analysis of the poll notes Obama won 57% of true independents in 2008. Obama could do this well again, but it should concern his campaign that after four years of his administration, true independents in key states give him only 44% at best, even before a unified GOP goes on the offensive. Third Way also notes these swing independents generally value economic opportunity over economic fairness. RCP’s Alexis Simendinger summarizes:

“Swing Independents are searching for leaders who will articulate a positive vision for the future — one where the American economy is back on top and the next generation can achieve the American Dream. While the fairness framework does not feed this need, an economic opportunity message answers these deep concerns about the future.”

***

While progressives have urged Obama to dump his 2011 rhetorical emphasis on curbing debt and deficits in favor of a more combative re-election bid, those issues remain important to the undecided fence-sitters he will need to win a second term. These voters care about the size of government and debts and blame Congress more than Wall Street and special interests for gridlock and policy myopia.

If the Third Way’s survey is a guide, [Senate Minority Whip Jon] Kyl’s emphasis may be well placed. Fully 93 percent of swing independents said they are “somewhat” or “very worried” about the national debt.

In short, Obama is trying to change the subject, but to one which seems not particularly likely to move the most persuadable voters back into his camp.

The prolonged and hard-fought nominating contest, Mr. Romney’s advisers said, has put his campaign nearly two months behind on its initial plan to build political and field operations in the dozen states where both sides agree that most of the general election will be fought: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin. (In the final phase of the campaign, Romney officials believe that the election could come down to just four states: Colorado, Nevada, Ohio and Virginia.)

Republican elected officials and strategists acknowledged in interviews that Mr. Romney had significant ground to make up — Mr. Obama leads in many early polls of swing states.

BuzzFeed looks at ObamaHQ in Chicago, but the main thing is to look at the map to see how far ahead they are in setting up field offices in key states. I noted last November that Team Obama was peppering Colorado with offices, but you can see he’s doing the same in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and North Carolina (there are few in Nevada, but the population is concentrated there also).

National Journal’s Alex Roarty is intrigued that Team Romney is targeting the Mountain West as potentially decisive, instead of states like Pennsylvania. He really shouldn’t be surprised. The left eyes the Mountain West and Southwest as fertile ground for its Emerging Democratic Majority, but it’s one of Romney’s strongest regions in this campaign. Even now, while the polling generally favors Obama, the latest Purple Poll has Romney within the margin of error in the Mountain West and Southern Swing states.

If Obama is reelected with such terrible feelings about the national condition, it will be unprecedented in the history of public opinion polling. Obviously, that would be no little feat, so what this president is doing is a classic case of misdirection.

The country needs a bad guy to blame for its problems, so day in and day out Obama is providing them with a smorgasbord of villains from which to choose: Wall Street, Big Oil, the Tea Party, Paul Ryan, Rush Limbaugh, the Supreme Court, the Catholic Church, and so on. In fact, virtually everything that comes out of this president’s mouth is about redirecting blame onto some straw man.

I am reminded bf Pres. Andrew Shepherd’s rant about his opponent at the end of The American President:

I’ve known Bob Rumson for years, and I’ve been operating under the assumption that the reason Bob devotes so much time and energy to shouting at the rain was that he simply didn’t get it. Well, I was wrong. Bob’s problem isn’t that he doesn’t get it. Bob’s problem is that he can’t sell it! We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious people to solve them. And whatever your particular problem is, I promise you, Bob Rumson is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things and two things only: making you afraid of it and telling you who’s to blame for it. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections.

This is what screenwriter Aaron Sorkin thought (and likely thinks) conservatives do, but it is what the real president now does, chiefly picking various conservatives as his preferred objects of fear. Indeed, while liberals like Sorkin are fond of painting conservatives as unduly preying on nostalgia for a better time (the Golden Age fallacy), progressives like Obama reflexively defend what Walter Russell Mead calls the Blue Social Model — a 20th century approach to (and cause of) 21st century problems.

There is also the question of whether this is “how you win elections.” Historically, the answer is “no.” Jay casts his eye back to Truman’s 1948 campaign. In the past, Brendan Nyhan has suggested that the economic growth in Q2 of 1948 (and I would say Q4 of 1947 through Q2 of 1948) had more to do with Truman’s reelection than the conventional wisdom of that campaign suggests. Jay Cost (relying on Michael Barone) argues the slowdown in Q3 of 1948 was key. Based on the current economic forecasts, Pres. Obama seemingly has a lot riding on this rather academic argument.

“Nancy Pelosi famous [sic] said that we would have to pass Obamacare to find out what was in it,” Romney said. “President Obama has turned that advice into a campaign strategy: He wants us to re-elect him to find out what he will actually do.

“With all the challenges the nation faces, this is not the time for President Obama’s hide-and-seek campaign,” he added.

Romney argued he presents a stark contrast, boldly laying out his own agenda to solve the country’s litany of problems. That was no more true than when he focused on entitlement spending, an issue Obama has attacked Romney on for adopting the budget proposal put forward by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisc. The plan, the most prominent feature of which includes plans to convert Medicare into a premium-support model, polls poorly with the public, and is clearly an issue the president will highlight ad naseum through November.

But rather than distance himself from Ryan, he resolutely defended the House budget chairman, even praising him by name for having “the courage to offer serious solutions to the problems we face.” And he went on then offensive, accusing Obama of damaging Medicare first. Romney adopted the Democrats’ own attack against Republicans, saying that the president “has taken a series of steps that end Medicare as we know it.”

From this speech, folks on the left see Romney taking Obama’s bait — and that is not an entirely unfair assessment, merely an incomplete one. National Journal reports the Ryan plan polls badly based on its own poll, with an incomplete, misleading question. Nevertheless, given Democrats’ past success with Mediscare campaigns, it is not surprising some are licking their chops today.

However, the left is also missing the subtext of Romney’s speech, which reflects hard-headed realism. It reflects realism about our grave and growing debt problem (even if the Ryan plan is insufficient, it is necessary). It also reflects realism about the general election campaign to come. The Democrats intend to demagogue the Ryan plan and hang it around the neck of the GOP nominee, regardless of the identity of the nominee or his position on the Ryan plan. Romney knows this.

The establishment media, which has already allied itself with gross fiscal irresponsibility, will gleefully assist Team Obama in this campaign. Indeed, Obama’s demagoguery got a standing ovation from a packed house of news editors, while a much smaller crowd of journos gave Mitt Romney the polite golf clap. Romney knows this, too.

In 1996 (surely one of Obama’s models for a Democrat seeking reelection), GOP nominee Bob Dole ran away from the efforts of Newt Gingrich and the GOP Congress to bring the budget under control (even as Newt was driving Bill Clinton to sign welfare reform into law). This year, things could be different. Paul Ryan is probably a more stable ally now than Newt was then (or now). Moreover, even Obama’s budget director has warned that our debt is “serious and ultimately unsustainable.”

On the other hand, it may be — especially if the economy were to perk up between now and November — that Democratic demagoguery on entitlements can succeed again. But Romney’s speech suggests he recognizes he cannot afford to avoid the good fight, because Democrats and the media will surely fight the bad one.

President Barack Obama is leading in the polls, particularly in swing states. The economy is, in some ways, recovering impressively from the mega-meltdown of 2008-09. The Republican Party is poised to nominate Mitt Romney, a man with no public political skills who wants to install an elevator in his garage and has an uncanny ability to generate fear and loathing among many of his party’s most ardent grassroots activists.

Yet Obama, who essentially kicked off the general election season on Tuesday at an annual gathering of newspaper editors, was a grim-faced candidate. No “Happy Warrior” was he. His hair growing grayer by the day, his lips tight and jaw clenched, the president seemed to be looking forward to the campaign with all the joy of a teen combatant in “The Hunger Games.”

***

But the main reason for Obama’s grim mood Tuesday was the political strategy that he and his aides have decided to pursue. The president did not much bother to tout his administration’s achievements. Instead and not by accident, he spent most of his podium time crying havoc about the GOP candidates, the Republican House budget and even what he regards as the danger the Supreme Court will act irresponsibly on health care.

Unlike Fineman, you probably noticed the cognitive dissonance from the lede to the paragraphs which followed. The conclusions Fineman avoids drawing from his observations are the most important thing about Obama’s speech.

As far back as last September, Team Obama has been claiming the 2012 election is a choice between two candidates, rather than a referendum on Obama. The claim is technically true, but generally unhelpful to the incumbent as a practical matter. The fact that elections generally present a choice of the lesser of two evils does not make for a good campaign theme. An incumbent president would much prefer to run on his record and a booming economy. Accordingly, Obama tried out an “America is Back” theme in his State of the Union speech. In late February, Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg found this approach produced disastrous results.

Seven months from the election, we find Obama regressing to play what Fineman calls the “Grim Warrior.” Tuesday’s speech announces to the world that Team Obama has no confidence the economy will improve much between April and November. Tuesday’s speech announces that Obama does not believe he can win on his record. Tuesday’s speech announces that Obama thinks he must convince voters mushy Mitt Romney is a radical extremist to win. Conservatives and libertarians may be disgusted by the text of Obama’s speech, but they should be delighted by the subtext.

First, while it is true the ads he identifies do not attack the “public option” or the employer mandate, it is equally true they do not attack the individual mandate, either.

Second, and more important, the ads Smith identifies ran in November and December of 2009. Unfortunately for Smith, that was near the end of Obamacare’s long journey to passage. He conveniently ignores that in June 2009, the Chamber’s ads were focused on opposing a government-run “public option” and that AHIP was on the sidelines. Smith also ignores that in July 2009, the Chamber was still focused on the “public option” (and supporting the individual mandate), while AHIP ran its first ad, which called for bipartisan legislation providing universal coverage, even to those with preexisting conditions. Watch it, especially if your name is Ben Smith.

As noted in the prior post, what happened next is that Congresspeople and Senators caught a ton of flak from their constituents over the summer recess. But when they returned from recess, Democrats did not junk the “public option.” Instead, they watered down the individual mandate, creating the risk of putting insurers into a “death spiral.” Then, in late October 2009, Sen. Maj. Ldr. Harry Reid submitted a draft healthcare bill including a “public option.” It took White House intervention in mid-December 2009 to get Senate progressives to give up the “public option” and thereby secure the necessary vote of Sen. Joe Lieberman from insurer-friendly Connecticut. BTW, does anyone wonder why the mandate wasn’t Joe Lieberman’s “line in the sand”? Does Ben Smith wonder?

In short, during November-December 2009, AHIP was being stabbed in the back by Democrats like a Quentin Tarantino staging of Julius Caesar. No one should be surprised that AHIP tired of playing Lando Calrissian to the Democrats’ Lord Vader… with the apparent exception of Ben Smith. AHIP ran more bare-knuckle ads for a few weeks that were designed to send a message to the White House and the Democratic Congress as much as the public. But they spent months beforehand supporting legislation that met their criteria (particularly reliance on the individual mandate). That support — and the time it bought Democrats — was valuable, perhaps crucial, to the ultimate passage of Obamacare. I appreciate that Ben Smith took the time to respond to my post, but the history seems to conflict with his memory.

[I]f the mandate won’t clamp down as hard on costs as its backers hoped, it also didn’t prove the political elixir some still believe it was, buying the myth is that the mandate effectively bought off the insurance industry.

The mandate “explains why the big insurers, while opposing the final legislation, never attacked it as vigorously as they did Bill Clinton’s ill-fated reform effort,” New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote this week.

Perhaps a stronger mandate would have soothed the insurers, providing them a guarantee of a big new market, but ObamaCare’s didn’t, and if they were quieter in that opposition, that was a tactical choice driven by the intense attacks on their industry.

In fact, Bloomberg News reported that the main insurance lobby, AHIP, quietly gave $86.2 million to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for a slashing campaign against the plan. The contribution only became public the next fall.

At the risk of peeving Smith further, let’s review a lot of history Smith leaves out of his supposed “debunking.” AHIP was planning to buy into big-government health legislation as far back as 2006. The agenda of Big Insurance was consistent. The industry would accept regulations, including guaranteed issue and coverage of preexisting conditions, in return for the individual mandate, while opposing the inclusion of a “public plan” that would unfairly compete with the industry.

The Bloomberg piece Smith cites turns out to not say quite what he seems to think it says:

The Chamber got the money from the America’s Health Insurance Plans as the industry urged Congress to drop a plan to create a competing government-run insurance plan.

Yes, AHIP, like the Chamber, opposed the so-called “public option.” And if you look at the ad Bloomberg posted with the story, you will see it supported government action, but opposed the “public option” and an employer mandate. Anyone see what they did not oppose? Anyone? Ben Smith? Bueller? A “slashing” campaign this was not. The Chamber supported the individual mandate, as did AHIP.

The BuzzFeed story is likely correct that AHIP would have spent less if the individual mandate had been even more punitive, but after a summer of getting hazed by the public Congressional Democrats set about watering down the politically toxic mandate, even as they continued to push for the inclusion of the “public option.” AHIP spent not to defeat Obamacare, but to ensure the legislation conformed to conditions they would accept. Obama’s flip-flop on accepting the mandate was key to avoiding the total opposition Bill (and Hillary) Clinton faced from Big Insurance in 1993-94. Douthat is correct about that; Smith is the one dealing in myth.

Update (Allahpundit): Ben Smith e-mailed Karl his reply to this post. Karl responds here.

Surprisingly, the NYT’s Adam Liptak wrote an interesting article looking at how the lawyers on both sides of the Obamacare case went about fashioning arguments to appeal to Justice Kennedy. In particular, both Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. and Paul D. Clement tried to appeal to the idiosyncratic way Kennedy tends to view liberty and individual repsonsibility. Although Liptak focused on the much-discussed exchange in which Kennedy left the door open to finding the healthcare market to be unique, he downplayed an almost equally interesting aspect of Kennedy’s jurisprudence:

Justice Kennedy has participated in three decisions on the scope of federal power under the Constitution’s commerce clause. He twice voted to strike down the law before him. Most recently, he voted to uphold a law allowing federal regulation of home-grown medicinal marijuana.

He wrote an opinion in one of the cases, a concurrence explaining why a law concerning guns near schools had to go. The decision rested, he wrote, on “the theory that two governments accord more liberty than one,” which he said gave rise to a “grave constitutional obligation if democratic liberty and the federalism that secures it are to endure.”

On one level, this argument underscores to the difference between a mandate imposed by a state government and the federal government, but it also points to Kennedy’s concern for political accountability. As Ann Althouse quoted Kennedy from United States v. Lopez:

The theory that two governments accord more liberty than one requires for its realization two distinct and discernable lines of political accountability: one between the citizens and the Federal Government; the second between the citizens and the States. If, as Madison expected, the federal and state governments are to control each other, see The Federalist No. 51, and hold each other in check by competing for the affections of the people, see The Federalist No. 46, those citizens must have some means of knowing which of the two governments to hold accountable for the failure to perform a given function. ‘Federalism serves to assign political responsibility, not to obscure it.’… Were the Federal Government to take over the regulation of entire areas of traditional state concern, areas having nothing to do with the regulation of commercial activities, the boundaries between the spheres of federal and state authority would blur and political responsibility would become illusory…. The resultant inability to hold either branch of the government answerable to the citizens is more dangerous even than devolving too much authority to the remote central power.

Althouse noted how this played out in the context of the argument about the Medicaid expansion:

We finally hear from Justice Kennedy ***: “If the inevitable consequence of your position was that the Federal Government could just do this on its own, the Federal Government could have Medicaid, Medicare, and these insurance regulations, assume that’s true, then how are the interests of federalism concerned? How are the interests of federalism concerned if, in Florida or Texas or some of the other objecting States, there are huge Federal bureaucracies doing what this bill allows the State bureaucracies to do?”

Clement hits Kennedy with a word Kennedy has used himself in federalism cases. *** The word is “accountability.” Clement says: “If the Federal Government decides to spend money through Federal instrumentalities, and the citizen is hacked off about it, they can bring a Federal complaint to a Federal official working in a Federal agency.”

However, the point about political accountability runs throughout Obamacare. Creating a Potemkin insurance market with mandates and exchanges was very much about the Obama administration and a Democratic Congress converting the private health insurance market into a social insurance program while trying to pretend otherwise, to escape political accountability both for their long-term goal of a single-payer system and for the inevitable dysfunction of the interim system they have created. It is not clear that Kennedy understands this:

Kennedy mused that Congress could have created a Medicare-style program for the uninsured, run exclusively by the government without the involvement of private insurers.

“Let’s assume that (Congress) could use the tax power to raise revenue and to just have a national health service, single payer,” said Kennedy. “How does that factor into our analysis? In one sense, it can be argued that this is what the government is doing; it ought to be honest about the power that it’s using and use the correct power.

“On the other hand, it means that since … Congress can do it anyway, we give a certain amount of latitude,” Kennedy continued. “I’m not sure which way the argument goes.”

If Kennedy is consistent, he ought to know which way the argument goes in his own mind (he may have simply not wished to tip his hand during the oral arguments, although as Liptak noted, the distribution of his questions at oral argument is suggestive). From the outside, the issue is how well the lawyers involved understood the concerns that drive Kennedy’s jurisprudence. The hacktastic Greg Sargent thinks it was “a terrible misjudgment” for anyone to have treated Justice Scalia as a swing vote, but that wasn’t the misjudgment. Rather, the misjudgment was in not having a sufficient understanding of Scalia’s jurisprudence or in thinking a superficial version of it would somehow fool him (Randy Barnett certainly understands it). Whether Kennedy can be fooled is the $1.76 trillion question.

Conservatives may not like liberals, but they seem to understand them. In contrast, many liberals find conservative voters not just wrong but also bewildering.

One academic study asked 2,000 Americans to fill out questionnaires about moral questions. In some cases, they were asked to fill them out as they thought a “typical liberal” or a “typical conservative” would respond.

Moderates and conservatives were adept at guessing how liberals would answer questions. Liberals, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal,” were least able to put themselves in the minds of their adversaries and guess how conservatives would answer.

That may not be surprising to conservatives, but — if the study is correct — it is likely shocking to so-called liberals. One of the authors of the study, University of Virginia psychology professor Jonathan Haidt, has written a book, The Righteous Mind, from which Kristof summarizes an explanation for the disconnect:

Americans speak about values in six languages, from care to sanctity. Conservatives speak all six, but liberals are fluent in only three. And some (me included) mostly use just one, care for victims.

“Moral psychology can help to explain why the Democratic Party has had so much difficulty connecting with voters,” writes Haidt, a former liberal who says he became a centrist while writing the book.

I am generally skeptical of pseudo-science trotted out in the service of politics. Liberals who are usually quick to discount scientific (especially biological) explanations for phenomena inconvenient to their ideology are much more flexible in trotting out “studies” to paint the right as racist neanderthals. Kristof veers near this territory in his column, but it’s not clear that Haidt buys all the implications ideologues draw from such studies. Indeed, the NYT book review from William Saletan suggests Haidt does not think much of much psycho-punditry himself:

The usual argument of these psycho-­pundits is that conservative politicians manipulate voters’ neural roots — playing on our craving for authority, for example — to trick people into voting against their interests. But Haidt treats electoral success as a kind of evolutionary fitness test. He figures that if voters like Republican messages, there’s something in Republican messages worth liking. He chides psychologists who try to “explain away” conservatism, treating it as a pathology. Conservatism thrives because it fits how people think, and that’s what validates it. Workers who vote Republican aren’t fools. In Haidt’s words, they’re “voting for their moral interests.”

I plan on reading the book and expect I may disagree with chunks of it. For example, Saletan says the book is short on solutions for ideological segregation, but one suggestion is to attack gerrymandering. That may sound good to a psychologist, but political scientists have not found gerrymandering to be an important cause of political polarization. If people like me do not read the book, who will? Liberals are probably more likely to ignore it. They will be reading less objective, less scientific twaddle on the subject from Chris Mooney, which even Kevin Drum doesn’t buy (As someone on Twitter whose name I didn’t get permission to use noted, Mooney might consider that he is the exact sort that has caused more educated conservatives to become skeptical of scientists).

The Obama administration and its fellow travelers largely justify the mandate based on the supposedly unique features of the healthcare market, e.g., the general inability to “opt out,” legal requirements that hospitals provide emergency care, and cost-shifting related to uncompensated care. Judge Roger Vinson addressed these arguments in his decision striking down the mandate; his arguments were generally accepted by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, creating the split with the 6th Circuit that essentially guaranteed Supreme Court review. (Again, liberal geniuses somehow missed this split as an indicator their case was not a slam dunk, even though these decisions have not always followed neat partisan lines.) Judge Vinson’s decision was echoed in some of the skeptical questions raised by Chief Justice Roberts this past week, e.g., asking whether Congress could impose a cellphone mandate to summon emergency services.

Meanwhile, analysts like Avik Roy and Shikha Dalmia examined the free-rider and uncompensated care issues and found them wanting. Again, their critiques were echoed by Chief Justice Roberts, e.g., asking how issues with emergency care are addressed by mandating comprehensive insurance coverage. Although uncompensated care can be an issue in certain circumstances the $43 billion Congress claims affects interstate commerce amounts to only 3%-5% of total healthcare spending, roughly equivalent to the percent big law firms seek to provide as pro bono services. Indeed, it’s only slightly more than the 2% average shrinkage in the retail sector.

Moreover, as John F. Cogan, R. Glenn Hubbard and Daniel Kessler note, peer-reviewed studies suggest cost shifting actually raises private health insurance premiums by a negligible amount, ($80 annually for the typical plan, far less than the $1,ooo Congress estimated):

Where did Congress go wrong? We traced its estimates of the magnitude of the hidden tax of $43 billion per year, or an increase in family premiums by an average of $1,000 per year, to two sources—the aforementioned Health Affairs study, and a non-peer-reviewed study commissioned by FamiliesUSA, a Washington, D.C., group long known for its advocacy of greater government involvement in health care. Yet Congress simply ignored the evidence in the Health Affairs study and failed to recognize the serious flaws in the FamiliesUSA analysis.

Specifically, Congress ignored the $40 billion to $50 billion that is spent annually by charitable organizations and federal, state and local governments to reimburse doctors and hospitals for the cost of caring for the uninsured. These payments, which amount to approximately three-fourths of the cost of such care, mitigate the extent of cost shifting and reduce the magnitude of the hidden tax on private insurance.

Moreover, the economics of markets for health services suggests that any cost shifting that may occur is unlikely to affect interstate commerce. Because markets for doctor and hospital services are local—not national—the impact of cost shifting will be borne where it occurs, not across state lines.

While taxpayers may not be thrilled at picking up the tab for uncompensated care, it is already being done. Moreover, Cogan, Hubbard and Kessler make a point Roy also makes — Obamacare’s reliance on expanding Medicaid (which chronically under-compensates providers) is likely to increase cost-shifting, not decrease it. Furthermore, as Peter Suderman notes, Congress purports to solve this supposed $43 billion problem with $200 billion in subsidies.

Nevertheless, even when fisking Linda Greenhouse, NRO’s Ed Whelan added his point “is not to maintain that any reasonable person must agree with the states’ brief,” while James Taranto noted it was quite possible Greenhouse would turn out to be correct in predicting a lopsided vote for Obamacare and that conservative lawyers he spoke with thought Obamacare would be upheld (which lefties see as an admission they are correct, rather than a recognition of a debate). Despite the profound problems with the key justifications for Obamacare, folks on the right generally have not engaged in the level of dismissive denial the left has.

Jeffrey Toobin of the New Yorker and CNN confidently asserted on Charlie Rose at the beginning of the week that the court would rule 7-2, maybe even 8-1 in favor of ObamaCare. The previous week, he called the anti-ObamaCare arguments “really weak.”

His view was echoed by an equally confident op-ed assertion by the veteran court reporter Linda Greenhouse, who in The New York Times declared the case against ObamaCare “analytically so weak that it dissolves on close inspection.”

It was quite a change, then, to see Toobin emerge almost hysterical from the Supreme Court chamber after two hours of argument on Tuesday and declare the proceedings “a train wreck for the Obama administration.”

Yesterday, after another two hours of argument, he suggested it might even be a “plane wreck.”

Meanwhile, at another New York-based outlet, NYT columnist (and former editorial page editor) Gail Collins emotes:

I can’t believe this might be overturned. How can this law not be constitutional? The other alternatives are forcing taxpayers to cover the cost of the care in emergency rooms for people who don’t want to pay for their insurance, even if they can, or letting human beings just die on the side of the road. I can’t believe fiscal conservatives think either of those options is a good idea.Really, I have my hands over my ears. Not listening.

All the News That’s Fit to Print: “Lalalalalalalalala…”

Yesterday, I noted the libs are likely overreacting, but also noted similar self-delusion from Dahlia Lithwick and Michael Kinsley. Lithwick relied heavily on the aforementioned Linda Greenhouse, whom Ed Whelan shows to be engaged in denial and dismissal herself (along with claiming Nancy Pelosi as a constitutional scholar). Lithwick also asserted an an “argument” that Obamacare’s constitutionality is “best illustrated by the fact that—until recently—the Obama administration expended almost no energy defending it.” Whelan correctly notes that this is as factually false as it is bizarre. The same goes for Kinsley’s claim that that nobody argued the mandate was unconstitutional until after Obamacare passed. Ramesh Ponnuru notes Kinsley is factually wrong, not to mention making a claim progressives would never make regarding legal bans on abortion or sodomy.

Liberals and liberaltarians are increasingly fond of claiming the right lives in an echo chamber. It is said — sometimes even on the right — that the right’s successes in the past few decades has made them intellectually lazy, unable to engage and overcome progressive arguments and attacks as they did in the halcyon days of Buckley and Reagan. However, when it comes to Pres. Obama’s signature achievement, and a major step toward socialized healthcare, the progressives’ experts and top-shelf pundits display the judgment, rhetorical skill and logic of toddlers. The liberal echo chamber has a long history, exemplified nicely in the apocryphal quote attributed to New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael: “I can’t believe Nixon won. I don’t know anyone who voted for him.” Having started with John Podhoretz, we come full circle with his account of the real quotation, which may be even worse.

According to the New York Times, house organ of establishment progressivism, Democrats and Republcians have given little thought to the possibility:

White House officials said that they remain confident that the Supreme Court will uphold the law, and that they have done no planning for the possibility of its full or partial demise.

Congressional leaders in both parties also said there had been no significant contingency planning.

The cynic in me finds that hard to believe.  However, reading Dalia Lithwick or Michael Kinsley would suggest that liberals simply could not conceive of an unfavorable Court decision on Obamacare.  For reasons I may write about later, the idea that Democrats are this much in denial about the possibility seems more plausible to me than it did a year or even a month ago.

The odd couple of Steven Den Beste and Robert Reich think that if only the mandate is truck down, Dems will push for a single-payer system.  As Den Beste explains:

Single Payer is what they always wanted. The bill wasn't originally written that way, though, because they knew that even with twin Democratic majorities, there was no chance of passing it. So they included the mandate instead.

If the mandate is struck down, then Congress will have to act. There won't be any way to repeal the rest of the law because Obama will veto, and the Senate will sustain the veto. The only thing he will agree to is implementation of single payer.

Reich expands:

If the Supreme Court strikes down the individual mandate in the new health law, private insurers will swarm Capitol Hill demanding that the law be amended to remove the requirement that they cover people with pre-existing conditions.

When this happens, Obama and the Democrats should say they're willing to remove that requirement – but only if Medicare is available to all, financed by payroll taxes.

I think Den Beste and Reich are mistaken here, for a number of reasons.  Both recognize Obama embraced the mandate because he could not get single-payer, even with an overwhelmingly Democratic House and 60 Democratic Senators.  Yet, after this unpopular law is further discredited by the Supreme Court, there is going to be some surge of momentum for full-on government-run healthcare?  Not in a GOP Congress elected in large part on opposition to Obamacare — and there is little reason to believe both chambers will not remain under GOP control after the election.  Indeed, Obama will lose the ability to veto changes to Obamacare if he loses reelection, and Congress will have time to see whether that happens. 

Even if Obama were to be reelected, there are a number of reasons why a GOP Congress likely would hold the upper hand.  First, the reason Democrat super-majorities had difficulty passing Obamacare and rejected single-payer is because insurers, phramaceutical companies, and the healthcare industry generally have a lot of clout.  None of the so-called "stakeholders" want single-payer and they donate to politicians across the spectrum.  Second, the spectre of insurers going bankrupt — or being nationalized — would not play well for the president who promised you could keep the coverage you have.  Third, while the mandate is particularly offensive to conservatives and libertarians as as the embodiment of the idea that the federal government can force you to buy things, it is offensive to the mushy middle primarily as the mechanism by which they are forced to pay.  Robert Reich may think these people are excited to shell out payroll taxes to finance Social Security and Medicare; I am less convinced of that.  Indeed, while polls tell us most do not want to "cut" these entitlement programs, one lesson of Obamacare ought to be that people know our public finances cannot afford another costly entitlement.

Daschle was one of the longest serving Senate Democratic leaders in history, and the only one to have served twice as both majority and minority leader. He was President Obama’s initial nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services, and currently serves as a senior adviser at DLA Piper.

The WaPo fails to mention why he was the initial nominee for HHS Secretary. He withdrew mostly because he failed to pay $128,000 in taxes, primarily for personal use of a car and driver provided to him by a private equity firm for which he consulted. But at the time, even the New York Times noted the lurking backstory:

Mr. Daschle’s financial ties to major players in the health care industry may prove to be even more troublesome as health reform efforts proceed. Like many former power players in Washington, Mr. Daschle cashed in on his political savvy and influence to earn $5 million in recent years, including more than $2 million from Alston & Bird, a law and lobbying firm; more than $2 million from the private equity firm, InterMedia Advisors, which provided the car and driver; and hundreds of thousands of dollars for speeches to interest groups, including those representing health insurance plans, medical equipment distributors and pharmacy boards.

Although Mr. Daschle was not a registered lobbyist, he offered policy advice to the UnitedHealth Group, a huge insurance conglomerate. He was also a trustee of the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, on whose behalf he voiced opposition to a federal loan for a freight rail line near the clinic’s headquarters in Rochester, Minn. The loan was subsequently denied by the Federal Railroad Administration.

Mr. Daschle is another in a long line of politicians who move cozily between government and industry. We don’t know that his industry ties would influence his judgments on health issues, but they could potentially throw a cloud over health care reform.

In typical Beltway fashion, Daschle remained the Democrats’ “go-to guy” in the efforts to seize control over American healthcare. The main thing that changed was Daschle’s clients used to be mostly Big Insurance, while at DLA Piper, they seem to include pharmacies and pharmacos. That, and the likely pay increase over the huge pay boost he got becoming a “not a lobbyist” influence peddler.

This is the sort of thing folks a liberal outlet like the WaPo cared about before Obamacare needed a public defense, e.g., Dan Froomkin. Now the paper fails to disclose Daschle’s seeming financial interest, while Ruth Marcus complains about Obama’s naivete in not hiring more lobbyists from the outset. They all probably hoped for an even more socialistic government healthcare law, but now that Obamacare faces an important legal attack, it is time to circle the wagons for the crony capitalism of the mandate.

The term “Obamacare” started out as a derogatory name that opponents of the 2010 health overhaul used when they criticized the law. But on Friday, President Barack Obama signaled he’s trying to reclaim the moniker for those who like the law.

“Happy birthday to Obamacare: two years in, the Affordable Care Act is making millions of Americans’ lives better every day,” read a message from the president’s Twitter feed on Friday, the two-year anniversary of his signing of the insurance-expansion law. Then he tweeted: “If you’re proud of Obamacare and tired of the other side using it as a dirty word, complete this sentence: #ILikeObamacare because…”

To lefty chagrin, the hashtag was quickly taken over by conservative mockery; most of the supportive tweets were Astroturf from elected Democrats (though not — afaik — Dems facing tough races this year). But notice the internal contradiction in the WSJ lede — if Obamacare “started out” as a derogatory name, can it be reclaimed? In reality, there was a school of thought on the left that embraced the term “Obamacare” at first, thinking it was great to use a president with approval ratings in the sixties as the face of the legislation. It was only after the politically toxic initiative began to sink Obama — and many other Dems with him — that even the better White House reporters like Jake Tapper would cave to progressive complaints about the label.

Obamacare remains unpopular, so why the effort by Dems to reclaim the term now? Obama originally planned to avoid marking the two-year anniversary of the law as they would have done if it was popular. However, Democrats likely realized they could not abandon the field as the Supreme Court prepared to hear argument against Obamacare next week. And if they persist past next week, the rebranding effort may give a clue about how Team Obama plans to campaign against most-likely GOP nominee Mitt Romney.