Friday Mashup (4/23/10)

1) Oh noes! It looks like the Dems are in trouble for the fall!

I mean, Little Petey Beinart says so here. And he has to be right, doesn’t he?

NEW YORK – Yes, the Democrats are going to get throttled this fall. But Obama has had so much success that he can afford spending a little time playing defense.

It’s a strange moment in Washington. With the stimulus bill and health-care reform now law, and serious financial regulation gaining momentum, Democrats are witnessing the greatest run of policy success of my lifetime. The victories have been so large that I suspect some liberal wonks are actually having trouble adjusting. As a liberal (not to mention a Jew who grew up rooting for the Boston Red Sox) I know that when you’ve grown accustomed tragedy, and built an entire communal identity around it, triumph can be destabilizing.

When it comes to politics, however, an arena where Democrats were actually growing comfortable with success after the landslides of 2006 and 2008, things are ugly. President Obama’s approval ratings, which belly-flopped to less than 50 percent over the course of 2009, have been treading water there ever since. Despite some liberal wishful thinking, in fact, Obama and his party’s fortunes now look even worse than before health care passed. On April 12, Gallup recorded Obama’s lowest approval rating ever (47 percent). The next day, it reported that Republicans have opened up a lead in generic congressional balloting (“Which party’s candidate would you vote for if the midterms were held today?”). Intrade now predicts that Democrats will lose seven seats in the Senate and 36 in the House.

In the matter of Obama’s approval numbers (and of the polling I’ve seen, the lowest is 46 percent), that still puts him at roughly twice the number of his predecessor for about the last 2-3 years of his wretched reign. And as noted here, if the 2012 presidential election were held tomorrow – and no, I cannot stomach that at the moment either – he would still handily beat presumptive nominees Willard Mitt Romney and a certain former Alaska governor who quit so she could cash in.

Also, I have hardly seen this Gallup/USA Today poll mentioned anywhere from about a month ago, which shows that those polled favored health care reform by a 49-40 percent margin.

But of course, this is to be expected I suppose from Beinart, who has already blamed Obama for “(failing)” in his effort to be “the nonpolarizing president” here.

I don’t know what’s going to happen in the fall, because it’s still a long ways off (we haven’t even made it through the primaries yet, people). Will the Dems lose seats? Probably, but that depends on how much they ignore the dreaded “conventional wisdom” and run on their accomplishments instead.

If they campaign with guts, the losses will be manageable. If they campaign like they’re afraid of their own collective shadow, they’ll lose big. And they’ll deserve it.

2) And in the matter of what happens when an indecisive base sits on its collective hands and lets a Repug seize the momentum and win an election instead, I give you the following on the recent school district votes in New Jersey (here, and once again, I apologize for not getting to this video sooner so I could put it up before the vote)…

(Wednesday), New Jersey voters did something they haven’t done in more than 30 years: defeated a majority of school district tax levies. [Note: I’m calling them “levies” here because that is more accurate. Voters don’t really have a say on the spending portion of the operational budgets of their local schools. They only get to vote on the amount in property taxes that the district proposes levying for the year.]

They also turned out in record numbers. The final statewide vote count hasn’t been compiled, but it is somewhere north of 20% of all registered voters. That may not sound like much, but the previous high for school elections, going back to at least 1976, was 18.6%. 1976 was also the last time a majority of school levies failed. That year, 56% went down. This year, it looks like 59% have been tossed out by voters.

A Monmouth University/Gannett New Jersey Poll released last week found that 29% of registered voters – if they did vote – would support their local school levies, while 37% would oppose them. Based on a sampling of county returns, it looks like that 8 point margin may hold up in the final statewide vote.

There are some other interesting findings as well. Taking Middlesex County as just one example, compared to the April 2009 election, turnout in this one county was up by 65%. The number of “No” votes went up by 90%. But the number of “Yes” votes also went up, albeit by a lower 40%. In other words, turnout increased on both sides of the issue.

So what does this all mean?

Chris Christie and his supporters have claimed victory, saying that New Jersey voters sided with the governor in his battle with the state teacher’s union, the NJEA. However, the governor urged voters to defeat budgets in districts where the teachers made no concessions – and a good number of these actually passed. On the flip side, in the few districts where teachers actually agreed to wage freezes or other concessions – the districts one would expect to be rewarded if voters were out to show support for the governor – a good number (anywhere between 6 and 13 depending on what you count as a “concession”) of the school budget levies failed.

…

So, here’s what we know about the New Jersey public:

1. They think the size of the cuts in state aid to local schools is unfair.
2. They think the teachers’ unions should be willing to come to the table and agree to a wage freeze and benefit contributions.
3. They don’t want educational programs cut.
4. They don’t want their property taxes raised.

All of these are reasons why Garden State voters voted yesterday. They are the reasons why more people than usual turned out to vote “No.” And they are also the reasons why more people than usual turned out to vote “Yes.”

Anyone who claims with certainty that any of these reasons is the main factor behind a majority of school levies going down yesterday is just blowing smoke.

And all of this has managed to deflect attention (for the moment) from the following about Christie’s budget (noted here)…

Here’s the concern: The federal government pays 65 percent of the tab for NJ FamilyCare. When we cut people from the program, they often wind up in emergency rooms where the cost is picked up by the state and by insured patients. Sen. Joe Vitale, the Legislature’s leading voice on health policy, says this cut will wind up costing New Jersey more than it saves.

Democrats should ask other questions as well. Christie would raid a clean energy fund that subsidizes solar and wind power, and energy conservation efforts. It is paid for by ratepayers on each month’s electric bill, and it’s not clear that the state has the legal authority to grab it for other purposes.

Do we really need to cut money to food pantries now, or can Democrats find a substitute cut?

And can we soften these cuts by reducing the planned state surplus of roughly $500 million? Or by reinstating the income tax surcharge on families earning more than $400,000, which would bring in about $300 million during this fiscal year?

And when asked about the tax surcharge, Christie said the following here…

“They (the Democrats) made a political judgment: it was either raise the tax, or we could have the issue to use against a Republican governor,” Christie told reporters, referring to Democratic Party lawmakers.

“They chose the issue over the revenue,” he added. “Well, they got the issue. They’re not getting the revenue.”

Spoken like a true Repug.

Christie is nothing but a bully looking out for his pals and sticking it to everyone else, people (and let’s not forget this either, by the way…Update from 4/24/10: The AP has since corrected itself and said that Christie’s people make collectively about $440K more than Corzine’s, not $2 million).

3) Finally, yesterday marked the 10th anniversary of the ATF raid that took Elian Gonzalez from the home of a Florida relative so he could be reunited with his father in Cuba (as noted in this Wikipedia article, the whole affair generated a truly rare moment of wisdom from the WaPo’s Richard Cohen, among other things).

I don’t have anything particularly brilliant to add here, only to point out that the issue should have been about reuniting him with his father and absolutely nothing more, especially considering the circumstances under which he was taken by his mother from Cuba to begin with.

However, even this story can generate some partisan mythology, as noted here…

More than 300 protesters were arrested in the hours after the raid, and the community’s outrage did not subside. Al Gore, the sitting vice president, lost Florida that November to George W. Bush by a mere 537 votes, and with it the White House. Many pundits said the Elian debacle made the difference.

Watch the movie “Recount” with Kevin Spacey as Gore attorney Ron Klain and take note of the final shot of the movie – namely, all of the boxes of uncounted Miami Dade County votes sitting in a warehouse – and then try peddling that nonsense to me again.

Snarlin’ Arlen’s ’90s Retro Rehash

It seems that our Senator from Pennsylvania is intent on dragging out the confirmation hearing of Attorney General Designate Eric Holder well into the spring, based on this New York Times story today, which tells us that…

Mr. Specter raised questions about Mr. Holder’s role as deputy attorney general on a range of issues that included an investigation into the 1993 federal siege in Waco, Tex., that left David Koresh and about 80 of his Branch Davidian followers dead, and an espionage investigation involving a nuclear scientist, Wen Ho Lee.

But he saved his sharpest criticism for Mr. Holder’s role as deputy attorney general in three controversies in Mr. Clinton’s second term: Mr. Clinton’s pardon of (fugitive financier Marc) Rich in 2001, the president’s decision in 1999 to grant clemency to 16 members of a Puerto Rican militant nationalist group, and the Justice Department’s rejection in 1997 of an independent counsel to examine accusations of campaign finance abuse by Vice President Al Gore and the White House. In each case, Mr. Specter said, Mr. Holder appeared to go against the advice of career professionals at the Justice Department.

Geez, Arlen, you mean you’re NOT going to try and find a way to blame Holder for returning Elian Gonzalez to Cuba also? You’re slipping!

And after this is concluded, I’m sure Specter also will press for hearings into the “real” death of Kurt Cobain, as well as the “murder” of Vince Foster.

To say that all of this is pointless is an understatement; the only one of these “controversies” that I care remotely about is the Rich fiasco, which I posted about here.

And I’ll be curious to see exactly how far Specter goes with his little inquisition on Holder; as Bob Geiger notes here, Our Man Arlen did a lot of yapping about former Bushco AG Abu Gonzales, but didn’t do a whole hell of a lot to try and persuade the Repug Senate “leadership” at the time that Gonzales should go (and Chris Durang of HuffPo notes here that Specter didn’t even put Gonzales under oath when he testified; let’s see if he tries that little trick when Holder visits “the Hill”).

Also in the matter of Specter on a separate issue (FISA), we have a clip from Jack Cafferty here which states in fairly blunt language how our senator buckled on the surveillance issue the same way he did on Gonzales.

Finally, I’d like to remind Specter and the Repugs that, in 2001 when the Dems were the minority party, they chose not to filibuster the confirmation of John Ashcroft as Attorney General even though the Repugs didn’t have the now-traditional “60 votes needed for passage” (here). Though I don’t expect the Repugs to return the favor on Holder if he gets less than 60 now that they’re the minority party, I just thought I’d remind them anyway.

I sincerely hope Chris Matthews is paying attention to all this (still can’t quite get used to him as the party standard bearer against Specter, but there you are).

Update 1: Looks like Grassley wants to play with Arlen too on the Holder nomination based on this (and kudos to Leahy for using Ass-Croft to slap them down).

Update 2: Also looks like Matthews is out (oh noes!!! – I think; hmmm…).

Update 3 1/8/09: What BarbinMD sez here…

Update 4 1/12/09: More of Arlen’s particular brand of hypocrisy here (h/t Atrios)