Political Wisdom: Independence Day

Florida Gov. Charlie Crist is scheduled to announce today that he is abandoning the Republican Party (or did the party abandon him?) and running as an independent for the U.S. Senate against Republican Marco Rubio and Democrat Rep. Kendrick Meek.

Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic reports that Crist “tried to reach White House chief of staff Emanuel through intermediates. WH refuses to take the call.” Ouch.

The untaken call has left John McCormack at the Weekly Standard wondering:

What’s Crist up to? Might he be interested in cutting a deal to caucus with the Democrats if they chase Meek from the field? Who knows? But the most plausible path to victory for Crist is if Meek backs him. That’s a real possibility, I think, later in the game if Rubio and Crist are each getting about 40% in the polls and Meek is getting about 20%. But, as voters get to know the lesser-known Rubio and Meek, it’s probably more likely they emerge as the frontrunners and Crist fades as election day approaches.And then does Crist throw his support to Meek in hopes of getting a nice ambassadorship? Again, who knows? In a three-way race things could get a little crazy (maybe starting with the speculation about how crazy things could get).

The switch raises more questions than answers, notes John Dickerson at Slate, but one thing is clear: “The political rules of hugging have changed.”

Crist’s downfall in the Republican Party is often clocked from the moment he hugged President Obama in February 2009. Obama, in the early stages of his attempt to reach out to the other party, praised Crist’s support of his stimulus spending during a Florida visit, and the governor praised right back. The hug alone wasn’t where Crist’s transgressions began or ended, of course. But it became a powerful symbol that opponents within the Republican Party used against him. (His opponent launched a Web fundraising page with the picture and a caption that read “Get the picture?”)

Obama’s Poll Problem: White Backers in ’08 Are Deserting Him

Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, is a former White House correspondent with two decades of experience covering Washington government and politics. Click here for Mr. Brown’s full bio.

As the folks in the White House begin looking toward President Barack Obama’s presumed re-election campaign in 2012, there is one statistic that might worry them more than any other: Little more than a third of white voters currently think the president is doing a good job.

That data point is hidden in the crosstabs of the myriad polls that show a very polarized nation that gives the president a middling job approval rating overall.

Mr. Obama’s job approval rating remains in the mid-to-high-40s overall only because he gets a thumbs up from more than 90% of blacks and gets majority support from Hispanics.

A mid-40s job approval isn’t a terrible place for a politician to be. President George W. Bush won re-election in 2004 with those kinds of numbers.

And, of course, asking voters if they approve of Mr. Obama’s job performance is different than asking if they would vote for him. Any polls that test Mr. Obama against specific Republicans are too early to be meaningful.

However, a president’s job approval is a good reading on the public’s attitude…

Political Wisdom: Arizona, Goldman Sachs Stir the Pot

Political theatrics are plentiful on two quite different fronts today: Arizona’s new immigration law and Goldman Sachs’ performance leading up to the economic meltdown of 2008.

First, Arizona. Politico’s Kasie Hunt finds a sizable gap between the reactions of the two parties in Washington to Arizona’s new statute allowing local law-enforcement officials to check residents’ immigration status and jail those who can’t verify their legality:

Democrats can’t shout loud enough about how much they hate Arizona’s harsh immigration law. But Republican lawmakers are hedging, dodging, and reaching for nuance—anything to avoid taking a strong stand on Arizona.

House Minority Leader John Boehner says it’s a state issue and, well, it has 70 percent support in Arizona. Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) is “sympathetic.” Florida Senate candidate Marco Rubio, a Cuban-American and rising conservative star, has major “concerns.” … Indeed, for a party that has been remarkably unified and on message of late, the Arizona fallout has jammed Republicans who need to please a base that is virulently anti-illegal immigrant yet still wants to expand their party’s appeal to Hispanics, the fastest growing demographic in the country.

Oh, and Politico notes elsewhere that former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush spoke out against the law in an interview.

A Plague Stalking America: The Deficit Addiction

The giant federal deficit and debt—the subjects everybody loves to talk about but nobody likes to do anything about—move back to center stage in Washington this week as a new debt commission gets rolling and a high-profile conference is convened.

Don’t expect much to actually happen this year, an election year in which political leaders will grow increasingly allergic to making hard decisions. But here’s a humble suggestion on how to make a nice start in addressing the nation’s yawning deficit problems: The two parties could confess their original sins and acknowledge what needs to be done.

This suggestion arises in large measure because President Barack Obama’s newly appointed, bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform—let’s just call it the debt commission—is to hold its first meeting on Tuesday.

Then, on Wednesday, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, the nation’s leading scold on deficit and debt, holds an all-star conference in Washington. Former President Bill Clinton, current budget director Peter Orszag, the chairmen of the new debt commission—Republican Alan Simpson and Democrat Erskine Bowles—and former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan all will be on hand. If earnest talk is enough to solve the debt problem, it will be fixed by 2:30 p.m. Wednesday.

Alas, earnest talk isn’t enough. Political will and a modicum of bipartisanship are required. Most political will in Washington is devoted right now to prevailing in this fall’s midterm election, and bipartisanship is rare as an empty New York cab in the rain.

So in practical terms the most one can hope for in coming months is a modest start.

See the full column here.

A Hole in the Political Center, In New York as in the Nation

This Capital Journal column looks at one important way New York politics resembles the nation’s:

In some ways, one of the most surprising stories of the 2010 midterm election season is that Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York is still considered a fairly safe bet for re-election. That tells you something about what’s happened to politics in New York, and the rest of the country, in recent years.

Ms. Gillibrand is a bit of an accidental senator. She was appointed by David Paterson—himself an accidental governor—to fill the seat vacated when Hillary Clinton left to become secretary of state. Ms. Gillibrand had served just two years in the House and immediately encountered critics within her own party. Gov. Paterson and their party back home have imploded in scandal and ineptitude, and the national environment is toxic for many Democratic incumbents.

So there was a time when the Gillibrand seat would have been a ripe target for some formidable, young, moderate Republican. But the most potent moderate Republicans in New York—former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and former Gov. George Pataki—aren’t so young, and both have decided they have better things to do.

Thus, while something could still change, Republican officials in Washington have concluded they don’t have much of a chance at her seat. And therein lies an important tale of the gaping hole in the middle of American politics.

One of the most important trends in national politics over the last generation has been the way much of the country has divided up into ever-brighter blue and red—Democratic and Republican—camps. Moderately blue states, especially in the Northeast and West Coast, have become darker blue, and light-red states, especially in the South and Mountain West, have become darker red.

See the full column here.

Political Wisdom: The Power of 41 Votes

Why are Republicans stalling financial regulatory reform legislation?

There’s five reasons, writes Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic, including Democrats’ current unpopularity and the GOP’s “substantive objections to parts of the bill based on political philosophy and their understanding of the economy.” However, Ambinder writes, the Capitol Hill bickering is more political jockeying as senators in both parties expect the bill to—eventually—pass.

“Voting to delay debate on a popular bill is not the same thing as opposing it. In the end, even Richard Shelby expects a good number of Republican senators to come aboard. By twenty points, Americans trust Obama to fix this situation more than they do Republicans. That will matter in the end. And this IS a big bill that WILL change a lot of things.”

Perhaps the problem for Republicans is not that they oppose the Democrats’ bill, but that they haven’t proposed even tougher legislation, writes Matthew Continetti at The Weekly Standard.

“The great mystery to me is why Republicans are passing up the chance to argue that this bill doesn’t go far enough. Why not embrace the Brown-Kaufman amendment to break up the banks, in order to show that the GOP stands against all massive agglomerations of power, whether in Washington or on Wall Street? The Republicans could raise Cain about the ratings agencies, who gave good scores to bad mortgages but whose oligopoly is not addressed in the Dodd bill. And they might ask why the Democrats want to end Too Big to Fail for the banks, but not for Fannie, Freddie, and GM.”

While much has been made about the importance of the legislative process in writing sweeping legislation, Matthew Yglesias writes for The Daily Beast that Democrats are hoping that a swifter process—in contrast to the lengthy health care debate—will result in a better bill.

“It’s a politically smart strategy, and in many ways it’s a good strategy, but it carries with it some substantial costs. It means we’re looking at a bill that punts on many of the biggest issues. It means that neither the broad public nor the narrower circle of policy elites and experts and semi-experts have a firm grasp of the relevant questions. And this in turn means that we’ve got a bill whose main premise is that we need to trust the same institutions and many of the same people who were arguably responsible for the crisis in the first place. Progressives are basically left to hope that Tim Geithner knows what he’s doing. That’s a big contrast with the health-care battle—in which the basic idea was much bigger than any one politician. The case for speed, however, is fairly strong and comes in three parts.”

Political Wisdom: Examining Immigration

Today, we look at the flurry of activity around a immigration legislation.

Jonathan Martin, writing in Politico, says Arizona’s “passage of a new hard-line anti-immigration law may force both Democrats and Republicans into a place they don’t want to be: dealing with the contentious, no-win issue of immigration reform in the midst of an election year. … the polarizing issue is fraught with peril for both parties — so much so that, when asked about the politics of it all, former Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie paraphrases the words of Democratic New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson: ‘When immigration is an issue, nobody wins.’ ” He continues, “for Democrats to pass immigration reform before November, party leaders would have to force members from conservative-leaning districts to cast yet another tough vote that could raise the ire of swing voters. But Republicans face longer-term peril — if they continue to push aggressive legislation cracking down on illegal immigrants, Hispanic voters are likely to continue their exodus to the Democratic Party. “

Political Wisdom: From Christie to Crist

Chris Christie has been getting a lot of attention for his tough budget cutting, generating new buzz about the GOP Garden State governor and the 2012 presidential race.

Steve Kornacki, writing in Salon, looks at whether the conservative New Jersey governor could become a dark horse in the 2012 field. “On the surface, it’s a far-fetched notion. He’s only been on the job for a few months. He’s practically unknown nationally and hasn’t been hitting the rubber chicken circuit in Iowa and South Carolina. Nor does he have a substantial donor network. And he’s a bit … um … corpulent — not exactly the president out of central casting. But it’s also not impossible to see an opening for him. Just consider his dark horse competition. In the last few months, the names of Marco Rubio, Scott Brown and Mitch Daniels have been floated — would Christie really be any more of a long shot than any of them? As his recent media coverage shows, his story is a compelling one for conservatives: a ‘real’ Republican who won in a deeply blue state and didn’t back down after taking office.”

Daniel Foster, writing in National Review Online, considers Christie’s budget cutting, and concludes: “Decades of big, bad government and a rare red mandate in a blue state have left Chris Christie with the daunting task of convincing the beneficiaries of the status quo that the party is over and that they’ll have to help clean up. The school-budget battle was the first real test of the feasibility of that program. In winning that battle by, in his words, treating voters like adults and ‘governing like a one-termer,’ Christie may have drawn the union’s death wishes, but he just might have saved New Jersey’s life.”…

Political Wisdom: Grading Obama’s Wall Street Speech

The reviews are rolling in on President Barack Obama’s speech on Wall Street regulation, and they are an eclectic mix.

Ezra Klein, in his Washington Post blog, would have liked Obama to be a little more (Franklin) Rooseveltian in his denunciations of Wall Street practices. Comparing Obama’s speech to one FDR gave blasting the financial community in 1936 in New York, Klein writes that Obama “delivered a rather different message to organized money. He asked not for their hatred, but for their support. ‘I am here today because I want to urge you to join us,’ he said, ‘instead of fighting us in this effort. I am here because I believe that these reforms are, in the end, not only in the best interest of our country, but in the best interest of our financial sector.’”

Klein notes that the the proposed legislation Obama is touting merely changes the regulatory scheme for the financial industry. “But the question is whether that’s a sufficient thing. Whether we also need legislation that is decidedly not in the financial sector’s best interest. Legislation that brings down their share of total domestic profits and forces down their relative wages and makes it less lucrative for smart college graduates to rush into investment banks. “

Howard Fineman of Newsweek, by contrast, saw plenty of populist red meat. “There are those, like Ezra Klein, who think President Obama somehow wimped out in his speech at Cooper Union. But my take is different. I think that, certainly by his standards, that was a fiery populist speech—arguably, at least in tone, one of the toughest he’s given as president.”

The Race Against Time in Iran Policy

My latest Capital Journal column looks at where Iran policy is headed:

Iranian forces launched a big military exercise in the Persian Gulf Thursday, thereby underscoring a grim reality: The strategy for stopping Iran’s nuclear program is turning into a race against time before options turn from mediocre to bad to worse.

The goal of American policy right now is to slow down the clock—that is, to stretch out the time Iran needs to become nuclear-arms capable. The hope is to buy time to give other kinds of pressure a better chance to work before military options move to the fore.

That’s why the current foot-dragging in adopting new economic sanctions at the United Nations Security Council is so troublesome. In an ideal world, and in the Obama administration’s original vision, a U.N. resolution imposing new economic penalties would have been passed two months ago.

So now, here’s where things are headed: American officials say they hope a U.N. resolution will pass in the next few weeks. That would clear the way for step two, in which the U.S. and its European allies, with some help from Japan, would layer on additional sanctions of their own with more bite, clamping down on Iran’s access to the international financial system and squeezing its Revolutionary Guards, the real power behind Iran’s nuclear program.

Getting this economic squeeze in place is crucial. The hope is that when Iran’s leaders see that economic pressure has moved from possibility to reality, they will return to negotiations over their nuclear program, which they contend is for producing energy, not weapons.

It’s worth pausing here to note that having a credible military threat on the table is useful for both prongs of this strategy—getting biting sanctions, as well as getting Iran to take its predicament seriously. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while feuding with the Obama administration on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, is extremely useful on this front.

See the full column here.