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- Some takes on the spending freeze, reproduced without comment. John Judis: "Obama turns out to be a wonderful orator, but, to date, a lousy professor." Chris Hayes: "I wish there was a way to sue for political malpractice, because what we're seeing from the White House and congressional Democrats these last two weeks would make for a depressingly good case." Spencer Ackerman: "It’s telling that the most important force in the Obama administration for rebalancing defense priorities is a holdover Republican defense secretary."Greg Sargent: "He seems to be giving up on his own potential for persuasion."
- If I had to paint with a broad brush, I'd say Democrats are at their lowest point since the second inaugural of W in 2005. But in 2005, Democrats successfully fought back an attempt to privatize Social Security, proving that there were some issues on which they would not compromise. Yet in 2010, when the smart money is on sticking with the agenda you campaigned on, there's little enthusiasm for finishing the job on health care. Perhaps if Obama took a cue from Reagan at this point in his presidency, he could use the bully pulpit to make the case for progressive politics and demystify what the federal budget is composed of.
- Almost half of the sample in this PPP survey gauging whether people "trust" particular news networks replied in the affirmative for Fox News, which is rather shocking. The crosstabs [PDF] offer little to explain the results, other than the the 46-65 age group comprising 45 percent of the sample. PPP's conclusion is similar to my own: "A generation ago Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in the country because of his neutrality. Now people trust Fox the most precisely because of its lack of neutrality" (emphasis in original).
- I guess I should be pleased that political science research on independents in the American electorate has filtered up to the Keepers of Beltway Conventional Wisdom like Chris Cillizza (primarily through Ezra Klein's unique position as a political blogger who happens to be a wonk). But that doesn't mean that the research has actually sunk in. Cillizza presents the role of independents as a lively "debate" between the "conventional wisdom" of media elites such as himself and the "counter-conventional wisdom" of political scientists like John Sides before pointing to a Third Way poll that compares self-identified independents in the recent Massachusetts special election to self-identified independents in the 2008 elections. Cillizza's point is that in both cases, independents mattered. Well, yeah. But this tells us nothing about what these so-called independents actually believe.
- Michael Brendan Dougherty writes that he is finished with the conservative movement. Some thoughts: 1) His realization that it's become impossible to converse with movement conservatives has been obvious for years. 2) His observation that conservatives are obsessed with themselves is easily the most unconservative thing about them: the totalizing nature of their ideology. 3) That their principled defense of a lost golden age of Western Civilization depends on who you ask. 4) He correctly notes that the conservative movement is best at preserving itself.
- Remainders: Sen. Bill Nelson joins the Coward Caucus; the Senate fails to invoke cloture on the creation of a deficit commission; the tea party convention hits a rough patch; Barack Obama understands shallow media narratives better than the reporters crafting them; for the GOP, purity tests are the essence of conservatism; perhaps if Newsweek is calling America ungovernable, this idea might begin to penetrate our political discourse a little; and I'll bet this "middle" of American politics has not only candy, but beautiful and free unicorns as well;
--Mori Dinauer
