SmartRemarks

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that Obama’s address tonight may well have been the first presidential speech I’ve ever seen that genuinely lived up to the full meaning of the word “presidential.” The first time in my life we’ve had real, effective leadership in Washington. So this is what it looks and sounds like!

It’s sincerely heartening these days, of course, just to hear a presidential speech delivered in complete, grammatical sentences, shorn of angry fearmongering and brazen paralogia. But Obama had to achieve far more than that. He had a tightrope to walk, having to avoid being too doom-n-gloomy (and thereby get accused of talking down the economy) but also avoid making unrealistically rosy promises (and thereby get accused of empty politicking). The times we are in are indeed, as he phrased it, “difficult and perilous,” yet he had to make clear that they are not insurmountably so.

He pulled it off.

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Tags: Bill Kristol, economy, education, energy, financial crisis, George Lakoff, health care, media, Obama, polling, Rachel Maddow, Republicans, State of the Union

New Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele looks like he’s going to be a fertile source of embarrassing quotes; the “don’t trust us” thing the other day was not just an anomaly. Today’s latest:  according to The Washington Times, Steele wants the GOP to be the hip-hop party.

No, seriously. To wit: Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Michael Steele, Republicans

After much Congressional wrangling and pontificating, Obama was finally able to sign the economic stimulus bill yesterday.

What exactly does this mean?

Make no mistake: this bill is less than it could or should have been. Really, there should have been only two guiding principles in putting this bill together:

1) Figure out every worthwhile project on which public funds could reasonably be expended—public or private, state or federal, “shovel-ready” infrastructure or long-term investment.

2) Fund them all.

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Tags: economy, Obama, Republicans

It’s been far longer than I intended since my last post. Sometimes time just runs away from you. So let me just toss off a few ideas that have crossed my mind in recent days, and get caught up…

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First off:  the wrangling in Washington over the new “economic stimulus package” has been interesting to watch. Obama has gone out of his way to be as “post-partisan” as promised, extending an olive branch to Republicans the likes of which Dems never saw under eight years of Bush, wining and dining them, inviting input… and in response they basically gave him the finger. (Although, anxious not to alienate a public who likes him, they tried to shift their ire toward the Democratic leadership.) And the usual suspects in the punditocracy backed them up.

Basically, the GOP’s goal right now seems to be to shrink the stimulus bill down to something so small and weak that it won’t be effective… and then to blame their opponents for its ineffectiveness. All while the country at large continues to suffer, of course.

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Tags: Battlestar Galactica, Congress, Dan DiDio, DC Comics, economy, Final Crisis, House of Representatives, Illinois, Legion, Obama, Republicans, Senate, super-heroes, television, Tom Geoghegan, unemployment

I don’t usually do this sort of thing, but sometimes an item is worth sharing whether I have much to add or not. So…

Quoted for truth:

From Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com

User B.R. writes in:

“…everyone (media and blogs alike) are treating the filibuster as a far more commonplace occurrence than it should be. Part of the reason for this is that the GOP has learned to use the procedural filibuster (as allowed for them by Senate Rule 22 from 1975) for everything, and Reid gives in and calls for cloture…”

B.R. raises several interesting points, but they ultimately point back to one thing: Harry Reid has been exceptionally ineffective as the Democrats’ majority leader.

The number of cloture votes skyrocketed in the 110th Congress following the Democratic takeover of the Senate and Reid’s assumption of the majority leader position. The Senate voted on 112 cloture motions in the 110th, exactly double the number (56) of cloture votes in the 109th Congress, and two-and-a-half times as many as the average number of cloture votes (44) over the previous nine Congresses.

…a majority of these cloture motions were in fact triggered by Republican floor action, and the vast majority of them were also procedural filibusters — the actual filibuster, in which Mitch McConnell wets his pants while reading from the phone book for 19 hours, is now exceedingly rare.

There are basically two mechanisms that a majority leader can employ to limit filibusters: firstly, he can threaten to block votes on certain of the opposition party’s legislation (or alternatively, present carrots to them for allowing a vote to proceed), and secondly, he can publicly shame them. Reid managed to do neither, and the Senate Republicans did fairly well for themselves considering that they were in a minority and were burdened by a President with negative political capital.

So long as Obama’s approval ratings remain strong, it’s somewhat likely that he will exact enough public pressure on moderate Republicans like Susan Collins to force a majority vote on broadly popular issues like health care, whether or not Collins ultimately votes ‘aye’ on the underlying measure. In those cases, the 60 vote threshold may be overrated. On other issues like the Employee Free Choice Act on which Democrats have been less effective at framing the public debate, the 60-vote threshold may be more tangible.

The bottom line, however, is that the Republicans are filibustering more and more often because they can get away with it. If Reid can’t get them to pay a greater public price, then the Democrats ought to find somebody else who can.

Damn straight. Take it to heart, folks. This is why people say leadership matters.

Tags: filibusters, Obama, Reid, Republicans, Senate

As the Obama administration and the new Congress set about choosing priorities and strategies for policymaking, an important consideration will be the political attitudes of the electorate. That, however, is often as much a matter of perception as reality.

It therefore comes as no surprise that even before Election Day (and with increased fervency once the results were in), status-quo-oriented opinion makers were spreading the meme that “America is a center-right country”:

Jon Meacham in Newsweek:
“America remains a center-right nation… [Obama] will have to govern a nation that is more instinctively conservative than it is liberal—a perennial reality that past Democratic presidents have ignored at their peril.”

Joe Scarborough on MSNBC:
“This country is more conservative than it was when we took over in 1994 after two years of calamitous Democratic rule. It is a center-right country.”

Karl Rove in the WSJ:
“It is a tribute to his skills that Mr. Obama, the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate, won in a country that remains center-right.”

John Boehner in the WaPo:
“America is still a center-right country. This election was neither a referendum in favor of the left’s approach to key issues nor a mandate for big government. Obama campaigned by masking liberal policies with moderate rhetoric to make his agenda more palatable to voters.”

Rich Lowry at NRO:
Republicans are consoling themselves by telling anyone who will listen that we still live in a ‘center-right country.’ They’re right.”

And there are countless others. As David Sirota has documented, media usage of the term spiked dramatically right after the election, and is still going strong.

The problem here is, it’s just not true.

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Tags: Congress, conservatism, history, media, Obama, Pelosi, polling, Reid, Republicans

Well, despite some optimistic tea-leaf reading earlier in the day about turnout, the voters of Georgia have returned Republican Saxby Chambliss to the Senate in today’s run-off election, defeating challenger Jim Martin by a wide margin.

Disappointing, but I guess even in a remarkable year, you really can’t win them all.

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Tags: Congress, Election 2008, Republicans, Senate

Believe it or not, the Republican party’s approval ratings have actually gotten worse since the election.

As CNN reports, just 34 percent of Americans polled have a positive impression of the party, versus 61 percent with a negative view. Gallup says that’s the party’s worst performance since they started asking the question in 1992, and the 27-point spread is 11 points worse than in a recent CNN poll. Meanwhile, Democrats are holding steady at 55 percent approval.

So what does this say for the future of what is now incontrovertibly the “opposition party,” with at least 70 fewer seats in Congress than it held just over two years ago? That part’s not at all clear.

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Tags: conservatism, Republicans