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Through the summer the political fortunes of President Obama and the Democrats were apparently descending along with his polling approval rating, like passengers in a Hollywood airplane steadily losing altitude. Then around mid-August, just as Obama’s declining approval ratings were about to crash into a rising disapproval, the plane got back engine power and leveled off, clearing the ridge with a few points to spare. Since then his ratings, positive and negative, have shown only minor fluctuations.
No obvious single event came along to shore up Obama’s political fortunes. Perhaps the antics of rightist ‘Tea Party’ activists and talk radio hosts wore out their welcome. Or perhaps the recession has persisted long enough to become the new normal, and the president gets credit that at least things are not getting worse.
Whatever the cause, the timing has been propitious for Obama and the Democrats. Narrowly avoiding a spate of media chatter about negative poll ratings is the least of their good fortune. The Democrats in Congress now seem poised to pass, and send to President Obama to sign before year’s end, a healthcare reform measure that Democrats have been trying to enact without success for more than 60 years.
As I write this, Senate negotiations have been ongoing for several days to craft a measure that can win 60 Senate votes to beat back a Republican filibuster. The negotiations are behind closed doors, and very little has been leaking out. But as best anyone on the outside can tell, it seems likely that the Senate version of a health bill will indeed meet that 60 vote margin. And there appears to be a pretty good chance that it will include a form of ‘public option,’ that is, health insurance available directly from the government as an alternative to buying private insurance coverage.
Not many people expected this outcome a couple of months ago. When Congress went into its August recess without acting, doubts grew whether any bill would be passed, let alone a robust one. I predicted in The European Courier – and I was an optimist – that key portions of reform would have to be enacted through ‘budget reconciliation,’ a mechanism that avoids a filibuster but introduces a host of other complications and uncertainties. Sometime during the last few weeks, all talk of using budget reconciliation faded.
At the same time, the ‘public option’ – dismissed not long ago as a longshot prospect, of concern mainly to liberal bloggers – is now actively in consideration. While even the more left-leaning House may not quite have the votes for the strongest proposed public option, a somewhat more restrictive version apparently can pass the House, and a still more restrictive version may make it into the Senate version, in which case some form of it is assured in the final bill.
The liberal bloggers can largely congratulate themselves for the rising fortunes of the public option. The White House has repeatedly said that it supported a public option, but in terms that suggested wiggle room, leaving it to liberal activist groups to do the heavy lifting. But the White House may also have been using a characteristic strategy of indirection.
There is a story that a group of activists once approached Franklin D. Roosevelt with a list of policy requests. He heard them out, then told them, “I agree with everything you just said. Now go out and make me do it.” Had Obama taken the lead in pushing for a public option, the Democratic activist base might be more approving but less engaged – and in next fall’s midterm elections, Obama and the Democrats will need their grass roots engaged, not sitting back. By accident or intent, Obama has engaged the liberal grassroots, annoying them in the short term, but in a way that could pay off when he needs it – so long as he delivers a bill in the end that they are happy with.
I will indulge a minor conspiracy theory by suggesting that a similar strategy of indirection lies behind the White House decision to take on Fox News at this moment. The fight itself has been building for some time. Rupert Murdoch’s cable news network has introduced a style of unabashedly partisan and ideological news coverage that is taken for granted in much of the democratic world, but is alien to modern American press culture and convention. In the polite world of the Beltway media, however, this is not to be openly acknowledged.
Thus the White House’s decision to openly treat Fox as part of its political opposition has drawn cheers from its supporters but criticism from mainstream media commentators. Which makes the timing curious. Was the administration willing to accept a small flurry of negative coverage in order to get the media’s talking heads chattering about themselves at a critical moment, rather than nosing into the ongoing and highly delicate Senate health care talks?
As for the chances of a substantive bill passing, the best indicator is perhaps a column in the rightish Weekly Standard that sought to give its readers something to cling to. After all, the columnist wrote, the impending bill might not pass. But he did not say it with much confidence.
If a substantive health care bill passes, it will only take effect in the country over several years. The political effects in Washington will be felt much more quickly. Washington is a courtier city that bends its knee to power, and its default assumption since Ronald Reagan has been that the party of power was Republican. Once Bill Clinton failed to pass a health bill, he became for the rest of his time in office a sort of insurgent in his own capital. By passing a health bill, a long-sought core Democratic policy goal, Obama will have demonstrated a level of dominance over Washington that Democrats have not enjoyed since LBJ.
But meanwhile Democrats will be facing voters at the polls directly in scattered state and local contests in early November, the marquee events being the Virginia and New Jersey governorships. During the summer, Republicans led handily in both races. With little more than a week to go, the GOP margin in Virginia the margin has widened, and pre-mortems have already begun, while in New Jersey the race has fallen back into a tie.
Losing in Virginia, a Southern state that has been trending blue, would be a blow to Democrats. But it is one they are mentally prepared for, and can (perhaps with justice) blame on a weak candidate. Winning in New Jersey is no showpiece triumph, but it delivers a split decision and lets Democrats avoid the narrative of GOP comeback that a double Republican win would surely produce.
Political junkies will read tea leaves from the November election, but whatever happens, the fortunes of Obama and the Democrats are still pinned first and foremost to the economy. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has regained ground to the symbolic 10,000 point level, but unemployment remains very close to an equally symbolic 10 percent.
Conventional wisdom, based on past elections, holds that economic conditions in the spring of an election year are the main driver of whether they reward or punish in the fall. In that case the Obama administration has perhaps six months to show results – though past experience of much milder downturns may not tell us what constitutes showing results in the Great Recession. We are in unexplored territory, economically and politically.
For now, however, the United States seems about to join the rest of the developed world in making some national provision for health care. And in the process, President Obama and Congressional Democrats are giving an impressive display of political discipline and strength.
