“Congress Is On The Ballot In November”: Forget The Conventional Wisdom, What The Numbers Really Say About President Obama
ABC News and the Washington Post have released a new poll indicating that the president is in trouble — and warn that both his standing and the Affordable Care Act hang over the 2014 elections. As ABC News’ Gary Langer put it: “Barack Obama starts his sixth year in office with the public divided about his overall leadership, dissatisfied with his economic stewardship and still steaming about his rollout of the health care law – all factors threatening not only the president but his party in the midterm elections ahead.
Dan Balz and Peyton Craighill write, “Obama’s general weakness and the overall lack of confidence in the country’s political leadership provide a stark backdrop to the beginning of a potentially significant election year.”
While the president surely needs to raise his standing and address many issues, this is a remarkably biased reading of their own poll. Too bad the last month has not fit the narrative of a failed president on a downward trajectory — like George W. Bush.
What is wrong with their interpretation? It’s hard to know where to start.
- They have the president’s approval rating at 46 percent. The average in all the polls is up, not down. Congressional Democrats would be quite content if the president’s approval rating were in the upper 40s. This is not a blip, but rather the trend based on multiple polls. Commentators should pay attention.
- The congressional generic vote is even, but they failed to note that Republicans had taken the lead at the end last year — and that this is an improvement for Democrats.
- Republicans in Congress are at a remarkable low, relative to the president and congressional Democrats. They are 18 points lower than the president on confidence and 8 points behind the Democrats in Congress. How could you ignore that in a congressional election year—especially when voters in this poll express a strong commitment to vote against incumbents? Did they pay attention to earlier polls from Democracy Corps that showed 50 percent (in an open-ended question) think Republicans are in control of the whole Congress?
- Health care produced one of the more amazing contortions in the poll. They focus on Obama’s handling of the rollout and bury the fact that the country is evenly split on whether they favor or oppose the law. As we have said, the issue unites Republicans and is not a winning issue for them in 2014. Maybe the voters are paying attention to Congress’ failure to extend unemployment benefits and pass a minimum-wage bill— issues that have 60 percent support. Maybe there is a reason that Republicans’ standing continues to drag them down.
Many compare Obama’s number after his inauguration and make that the standard for his standing. He took a very hard hit that hurt Democrats. But his position is improving and health care is no wedge issue. The Congress is on the ballot in November, and I urge those reporting on polls to escape the conventional wisdom about the narrative.
By: Stan Greenberg, The National Memo, January 27, 2014
“GOP’s Plot Against Democracy”: Why It Really Wants To Depress The Vote
The Presidential Commission on Election Administration has released its report and recommendations, and reasonable people everywhere rejoice. The bipartisan commission was formed by Barack Obama following the 2012 election, which was a bit of an embarrassment for a nation that considers itself something of a model democracy. Across the country (but mainly in urban areas and black and Latino neighborhoods), Election Day featured hours-long lines, broken voting machines, inaccurate voter rolls and confusing ballots.
“The Editors” of Bloomberg View declare the report “so resolutely practical that it’s hard to imagine its recommendations stirring much debate, much less controversy.” (They acknowledge that “not all politicians want to make it easier for Americans to vote,” but they fail to specify that that’s more or less part of the Republican Party platform.) Jeffrey Toobin calls it “an unexpectedly bold document.”
The commission’s key recommendations are eminently reasonable: Expand online voter registration, expand early voting, improve and modernize voting machines, and improve efficiency and alleviate wait times at polling places with better training and techniques that have been proven to work elsewhere. Everyone should be able to support all of this, and, best of all, the commission’s recommendations don’t require any federal action at all. They just need to be voluntarily implemented by state and local officials. And how hard could it be to convince state and local officials to make voting easier?
Here’s the first problem with the commission’s report: We already know what’s wrong with American elections and we already know how we should fix those problems. The last bipartisan commission on American elections released its report and recommendations less than a decade ago. That report followed up a major piece of federal election reform, the Help America Vote Act, which was the bipartisan response to the travesty that was the 2000 election. The Help America Vote Act created another bipartisan commission dedicated to making voting easier, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. That commission is supposed to have two commissioners from each party. Republicans in Congress have effectively killed that commission by refusing to appoint or approve any commissioners at all.
Despite that obstruction, the problems with American elections, and potential solutions, were already well-known to voting rights experts. The No. 1 culprit is our absurdly decentralized system, which makes implementing good ballot and registration and access and voting machine standards effectively impossible. But we knew that making registration easier and allowing early voting and voting by mail would improve turnout and make voting easier for the elderly and disabled. We knew urban election districts were at a disadvantage due to population size and density, and insufficient funding. We knew ballot size and clarity was lousy all over the country because of archaic or poorly written laws. The problem has always been finding the resources and political will to fix any of this. Because unless we nationalize voter registration and federal elections, the fixes will have to come not just in 50 separate state legislatures but also at thousands of city halls and county governments.
Which brings us to the second, bigger problem with the report: The commission was tasked with making it easier for Americans to vote. One of the two dominant American political parties is adamantly opposed to that goal. Despite the bipartisan trappings of the commission, despite the fact that Mitt Romney’s campaign lawyer was the co-chair, it is still the case that making it easier to vote is a priority of the Democratic Party. The more honest right-wingers make the argument explicit, but implicit in every voter ID law and attempt to shut down voter registration drives and restriction of early voting is the core conservative belief that voting should be as hard as possible, so that only the right people vote. It is only occasionally said out loud but most conservatives believe in the old saw, usually incorrectly attributed to de Tocqueville or a founding father, about democracy dying when the looters begin to “vote themselves largess from the public treasury.” Throughout American history, conservatives have opposed extending the franchise.
In addition to their philosophical opposition to democracy, Republicans have a more pragmatic reason to making voting as difficult as possible: Recent national election results show an unmistakable correlation between turnout and Democratic Party success. As Dave Weigel points out, some of the commission’s recommendations will make it easier for traditionally Republican blocs like religious voters (and military voters! and the elderly!) to vote, but Republicans believe, with plenty of supporting evidence, that in America in 2014, bigger turnout means more Democratic voters. A bipartisan commission won’t convince Republicans to abandon their campaign to use every tool at their disposal to depress the vote.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, January 24, 2014
“Life Is Tough Enough”: Is Bridgegate Politics As Usual, Or Beyond The Pale?
For those who are not familiar with the story — perhaps that same set of people who in questionnaires do not know where the Mississippi River or the Pacific Ocean is — Governor Chris Christie’s staff created a several-day monstrous traffic jam around the George Washington Bridge last September, apparently to get back at the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee, New Jersey for not supporting the governor for re-election. After denying for months that anything happened, the governor fired everyone he could find, held the world’s longest and most lachrymose press conference, denied all knowledge, said he was “very sad,” and seemed to conclude that he was the victim here. The poor jerks who sat in traffic for several hours apparently didn’t count.
The best and funniest column on this by far was by Gail Collins in The New York Times; I can’t come close to that, so I’ll ask the deep questions.
1. What are the odds that Governor Christie is telling the truth when he says he knew nothing?
Zero, or bagel, as they say in the finance business. I suspect he didn’t order the dirty deed, but this is exactly the kind of stunt political advisors pull when they’re riding high and want to show how tough they are. There would have been lots of smirking around the governor — remember, at the time they would have been quite proud of it — and you would have had to be about as unaware as a tree not to notice. The governor is not known for being unaware.
2. Has there been any kind of pattern that might suggest this sort of behavior was part of the governor’s genotype?
The only way you can say there was no pattern here is if you are a denier of combinatorial probabilities and a lot of introductory math. The Times has specified several incidents which sure look like revenge bullying. If I give the governor a 60 percent probability that each of these events was not part of a pattern (way above my gut feel), there’s still a 92 percent chance that this is all part of a pattern. I’m going with a pattern.
3. Is it surprising that the governor threw everyone on his staff within reach under the bus and denied knowing David Wildstein, a senior staff member and a friend since high school?
Are you kidding me? This is pure “homo politicus” stuff. Take my word on this: There is essentially no one in big-time American politics who wouldn’t gut his or her best friend in an instant for almost any temporary advantage. (The high-school friend matter is almost too easy. No one in the known universe who graduated from an American high school believed any single word, including “a,” “an,” and ” the,” of this story.)
4. Is the actual behavior just life in the big leagues or a touch disturbing?
Certainly this traffic stunt was more inventive than anything I’ve heard before, and I’ve been close to this game since 1970. The other acts were nowhere near as clever but seem to be similar to the traffic stunt in two other big ways: they feel out of proportion, and they targeted civilians, not political pros. They imposed large arbitrary penalties on normal professional people who were simply doing their jobs. But I keep coming back to the folks caught in traffic. Let’s say 500,000 people were caught in the traffic jams for, say, four additional hours each. That’s 2 million traffic jam person-hours. If I value people’s time at $20 per hour, that’s a $40 million cost, all because someone got angry that a Democratic mayor didn’t support a Republican governor who was already winning by a landslide and was simply trying to run up the score. Probably some of the commuters actually lost their jobs because of this.
So ask yourself, if you’re just a citizen, and this guy becomes president with a lot more power and lots more reasons to get angry, how likely are you to be collateral damage in some scheme some other political “advisor” comes up with? I think you have to come down on the “disturbing behavior” side. I know “politics ain’t bean bag,” as Christie said, and if one pol wants to take a whack at another pol, I couldn’t care less. But this crosses a lot of lines.
So back to the question in the title. There’s no way this is normal behavior for normal human beings. Some of it is very normal for “homo politicus,” and for athletes and hedge fund billionaires who feel particularly entitled. But the behavior at the core is way beyond the pale. Life is tough enough without leaders dedicated to getting even at your cost for the tiniest slight or the smallest act of dissent.
By: Bo Cutter, The National Memo, January 20, 2014
“Data Is Digital Gold”: Beyond The NSA, What About Big Data Abuse By Corporations, Politicians?
Taking steps to end, or at the very least to constrain, the federal government’s practice of storing information on the personal communications of Americans is a good thing. There is every reason to respect initiatives that seek to prevent the National Security Agency’s metadata programs from making a mockery of the right to privacy outlined in the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution.
But the moves that President Obama announced Friday to impose more judicial oversight on federal authorities who might “listen to your private phone calls, or read your emails” and the steps that may be taken by Attorney General Eric Holder and intelligence officials to check and balance the NSA following the submission of proposals on March 28 ought not be seen mistaken for a restoration of privacy rights in America.
What the president and his aides are talking about—in response to revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, congressional objections and public protests – are plans to place some controls on the NSA and perhaps to keep most data in “private hands.”
But what controls will there be on those private hands?
As long as we’re opening a discussion about data mining, might we consider the fact that it’s not just the government that’s paying attention to our communications—and to what they can reveal about our personalities, lifestyles, values, spending habits and political choices.
There’s a reason the NSA has been interested in accessing the servers of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple. When you’re mining, you go where the precious resources are, and technology companies have got the gold.
Data is digital gold. Corporations know that. They’re big into data mining.
This data mining, and the commercial and political applications that extend from it, gets far less attention than the machinations of the NSA or other governmental intelligence agencies. Tech publications and savvy writers such as Jaron Lanier recognize these concerns. The Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission and the Senate Commerce Committee have taken some tentative steps to address a few of the worst abuses. But that’s not enough, especially when, as Fordham University’s Alice E. Marwick noted in a smart recent piece for The New York Review of Books,
there are equally troubling and equally opaque systems run by advertising, marketing, and data-mining firms that are far less known. Using techniques ranging from supermarket loyalty cards to targeted advertising on Facebook, private companies systematically collect very personal information, from who you are, to what you do, to what you buy. Data about your online and offline behavior are combined, analyzed, and sold to marketers, corporations, governments, and even criminals. The scope of this collection, aggregation, and brokering of information is similar to, if not larger than, that of the NSA, yet it is almost entirely unregulated and many of the activities of data-mining and digital marketing firms are not publicly known at all.
Significantly, it is not just financial profit that data can yield.
As Robert W. McChesney and I note in Dollarocracy: How the Money-and-Media Election Complex is Destroying America (Nation Books), data is also mined by those who seek power.
Political candidates, political parties, Super PACs and dark-money groups are among the most ambitious data miners around. They use data to supercharge their fund-raising, to target multimillion-dollar ad buys and to stir passions and fears at election time.
Both parties do it. All major candidates do it. Obama did it better than Romney in 2012, and that played a critical role in providing the president with the resources and the strategies that allowed him to easily defeat a well-funded and aggressive challenger. The Grand Old Party’s response was to begin hiring the best and the brightest technical talent. A recent headline announced: “Republican National Committee to Build Platform to Share Voter Data.” Another reported: “RNC Pledges $20 Million to Build Data-Sharing Operation.”
So campaigns are going to do more mining. And so are the billionaires who fund so-called “independent” political operations. Last spring, Politico announced: “Karl Rove, Koch Brothers Lead Charge to Control Republican Data.”
Data already drives the money-and-media election complex that is rapidly remaking American democracy into an American dollarocracy, where election campaigns are long on technical savvy but short, very short, on vision.
So, give the president credit for wading into the debate about how the government uses and abuses phone data. Give key members of Congress, like Jerry Nadler, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, credit for pointing out that what the president has proposed is “not enough” to “safeguard against indiscriminate, bulk surveillance of everyday Americans.”
But then go the next step. Recognize that addressing governmental actions and abuses does not begin to restore privacy rights. For that to happen, there must be recognition that Marwick is right to argue: “While closer scrutiny of the NSA is necessary and needed, we must apply equal pressure to private corporations to ensure that seemingly harmless targeted mail campaigns and advertisements do not give way to insidious and dangerous violations of personal privacy.”
And that recognition must extend beyond concern regarding abusive commercial applications to include an examination of and responses to new approaches to fund-raising and campaigning that have the potential to warp our politics—and democracy itself.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, January 17, 2014
“Boy, How Things Have Changed”: We Will All Be Represented By Lobbyists Someday
Today, former Bush operative and tobacco lobbyist extraordinaire Ed Gillespie confirmed he is going to challenge Virginia Senator Mark Warner. This comes on the heels of news Monday that David Jolly, another lobbyist, had won the GOP primary in a special congressional election in Florida. And let’s not forget the victory of Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic lobbyist and second-worst candidate in the Virginia gubernatorial race.
Three examples makes it a trend. But what, if anything, does it herald for the future of American politics? Will Congress eventually be dominated by empty-eyed, gladhanding walking grins whose only skills are flattering the rich and powerful, and raising obscene amounts of money?
The short answer: Yes, so we might as well get used to it.
Congress was never a place where high idealism triumphed. On the contrary, for most of American history it has been dysfunctional, foolish, racist, in thrall to special interests, awash in money, and often stunningly corrupt. But, at the risk of romanticizing the past, it used to be a place that basically functioned, if you define “functioning” as “passing enough legislation to keep the country tottering along, usually after every other possibility was exhausted, and maybe even making things a little better for people every once in awhile.” It was exciting, for boring people at least, a place where ambitious strivers came for a career in political adventure and accomplishment.
But things have changed. Increasingly Congress has stopped doing anything at all, let alone anything positive, and became a place where not blowing up the world financial system for no reason is a success, and passing a budget like responsible countries do on a routine basis counts as a major accomplishment. And even then, everyone hates you for it anyway. Congress has rarely been well-liked, but it keeps setting new records in unpopularity—in November its approval rating was a record-low nine percent. Which only prompted one question: Who are these nine percent of people?
What’s more, the stupendous sums needed for a modern campaign, driven by Citizens United and the unintended consequences of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law, have turned our representatives’ daily lives into one of endless begging for money. After the election, Ryan Grim and Sabrina Siddiqui wrote about the grim experience awaiting newly elected congressmen:
The daily schedule prescribed by the Democratic leadership contemplates a nine or 10-hour day while in Washington. Of that, four hours are to be spent in “call time” and another hour is blocked off for “strategic outreach,” which includes fundraisers and press work. An hour is walled off to “recharge,” and three to four hours are designated for the actual work of being a member of Congress — hearings, votes, and meetings with constituents. If the constituents are donors, all the better…It is considered poor form in Congress — borderline self-indulgent — for a freshman to sit at length in congressional hearings when the time could instead be spent raising money…
“What’s my experience with it? You might as well be putting bamboo shoots under my fingernails,” said Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.), a high-ranking Democrat.
Terry McAuliffe might not be terribly principled. But one thing he can do better than all but a handful of living humans is raise money—thanks to his utter shamelessness. Consider the time he, by his own admission, left his wife and literally newborn son in the car to raise money for the Democrats:
We got to the dinner and by then Dorothy was in tears, and I left her with Justin and went inside. Little Peter was sleeping peacefully and Dorothy just sat there and poor Justin didn’t say a word. He was mortified. I was inside maybe fifteen minutes, said a few nice things about Marty, and hurried back out to the car. I felt bad for Dorothy, but it was a million bucks for the Democratic Party and by the time we got home and the kids had their new little brother in their arms, Dorothy was all smiles and we were one big happy family again. Nobody ever said life with me was easy.
If the lobbyist-turned-politician trend continues, how much will it actually change on the Hill? After all, parties are getting better and better at enforcing ideological discipline. Devoid of any principle except their own advancement, lobbyists will serve as little more than a precisely calibrated measurement of the political influence of various interest groups and pressure groups. So to the extent that the country is well-served by actual ideological competition, lobbyist-politicians will be a reasonable proxy.
That’s the sunniest interpretation imaginable, anyway. Realistically, more lobbyist-politicians means more looted taxpayer cash stuffing plutocrats’ pockets. These brave new politicians won’t, by themselves, destroy the republic, but a Congress dominated by these money vacuums will probably be hell for the American people. Just wait until a grinning President McAuliffe signs the Chinese Lead-Based Toy Deregulation Act of 2024.
By: Ryan Cooper, The New Republic, January 16, 2014
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 