Then the writers decided Leslie needed a boyfriend. This shouldn’t be a problem in itself; Leslie has had boyfriends before without any meaningful compromises to her character. For some reason, however, the writers decided that hooking Leslie up with Ben, a nerdy assistant city manager played by Adam Scott, meant returning to tedious Hollywood clichés about how women can’t have both their careers and their love lives. To drive the knife in, throughout season four, Leslie stops being the hero of her own story and spends much of her time being rescued by her new boyfriend…the formerly competent administrator needed Ben to rescue her at every turn. When Leslie, who once swiftly dumped a boyfriend to keep the job she had, finds herself unable to break up with this new boyfriend to get the job she has always wanted, Ben saves her by dumping her first. Ben also comes to the rescue when their relationship is revealed to their boss; he quits so that Leslie doesn’t lose her job. Ben immediately goes to work as Leslie’s campaign manager, because by this point in the show, it’s just assumed that he’s her natural caretaker.

I think this argument underestimates the extent to which running for office is not just a big deal for Leslie, it’s a big challenge. And it is for all women. A 2008 Brookings report found that “men continue to enjoy more comfort, confidence and freedom than women when thinking about running for office…Women are less likely than men to be willing to endure the rigors of a political campaign. They are less likely than men to be recruited to run for office. They are less likely than men to have the freedom to reconcile work and family obligations with a political career. They are less likely than men to think they are ‘qualified’ to run for office. And they are less likely than men to perceive a fair political environment.” The “tedious Hollywood cliches about how women can’t have both their careers and their love lives” are a little bit more true in Hollywood than they are in other settings. It’s one thing to be Gabby Giffords and be married to a freakin’ astronaut: it’s another to be a chipper bureaucrat who got caught dating her boss, who is still trying to get rid of his reputation for being arrogant and reckless with public funds. I’m not saying that’s fair for Leslie to be judged by who she dates, but I don’t actually think it’s unrealistic to say that it would be a small-town scandal.

Now there’s no question that Leslie’s overcome some of these obstacles: she’s confident in her abilities and qualifications, she’s willing to work hard to stay in the race, and she was recruited. But she was also dropped by her recruiters as a likely loser, which no matter how willing Leslie was to bull on without their support, must have been a blow. And even though she’s in the race, Leslie might be right to perceive some challenges and to feel real nerves about them. As Brown University political science professor Jennifer Lawless wrote “Voter bias against women candidates also appears to be on the rise: nearly one in every four Americans agree that ‘Most men are better suited emotionally for politics than are most women.’” So it makes sense that as Leslie enters this stage that’s new not just to her, but to her friends, that she’d hesitate, vacillate, misjudge conditions, and make wrong decisions out of justifiable caution and nerves.

And speaking of first-time candidates, I don’t think that Ben is Leslie’s campaign manager because he’d a dude. I think he’s her campaign manager because Leslie tried to foist the job on Ann, who is totally unsuited for the position for reasons that are specific to her character rather than to her gender, and comes to realize that it makes much more sense that for the only person she knows who’s run a successful political campaign (and who, by the way, needs something to do with himself) to coordinate her efforts. It’s not as if Leslie’s just kowtowing to Ben’s decisions like a vulnerable kitten, either: she pushes back against his negative ad, and ends up coming up with a much more powerful idea. During “Bowling For Votes,” Leslie was wrong and Ben was right about how she was spending her time, but the reasons she was wrong were understandable. Almost all of Leslie’s victories while at the Parks Department have come when she’s been able to win over one person or give a one-off good performance. And Leslie’s fantastic at striking deals with Ken Hotate, or helping get to the root of Kelly Larson’s Twilight obsession, but she has less experience with people who don’t like her, or with the need to conserve her emotional energy by connecting with a lot of people at a much shallower level. There’s no question that Leslie is at a core level hyper-competent, but that doesn’t mean that running a campaign or switching jobs doesn’t require new skills—and it would be a pretty boring gambit if Leslie didn’t have to learn or grow by shifting settings, something that’s been good for characters like April and Jerry, too. Having the campaign be a hard, transitional, vulnerable experience doesn’t mean it’s anti-feminist.

All of this said, I do think the show has struggled with how to handle the having-it-all dilemma. It’s not so much that I think that the question of how women balance work and love is a silly one to ask as I think that Parks and Recreation has struggled, like some of its network cousins, to figure out a new and meaningful answer to that question. On The Office, Pam’s essentially given up on the career half of the equation, reconciling herself to work at Dunder Mifflin and avoiding dealing with her problems in sales. On 30 Rock, Liz has reached a point of decidedly modest expectations, laboring away on a lowest-common-denominator show and dating a guy who’s good-looking but whom she essentially supports. Parks and Recreation, I think, would like to reward Leslie with a happy outcome, even though it’s not necessarily easy when your dream job opportunity and your dream guy arrive at the same time (Leslie is, I think, far more involved with Ben than she ever was with Dave, which makes the choice more difficult). And I’m sympathetic to that as a narrative challenge: in a world of antiheroes, it’s hard to think of a television character who I’m more emotionally invested in than Leslie Knope. Finding a way to give her realistic challenges that help her grow is something the show’s struggled with this season, even as I think they’re right to recognize the difference between catching a possum and achieving not just a functional but idealized adult life. With luck, Parks and Recreation will continue to find ways that Leslie’s campaign can expose the ways in which she and Ben are different, while giving them both opportunities to grow into different versions of themselves.

First, Leslie deserves a real race. One of the joys of Parks and Recreation is Leslie’s hyper-competence, but it’s become a little bit too effortless as she’s conquered everything from the Pit to Joan’s Gotcha Dancers. It’s time for Leslie to stretch, and to stretch over something other than a boy. Running for office is the dream of her life, and it should be a heroic quest, not just another one-off episode. And after avoiding the mechanics of the campaign, I’m excited to see the mechanics of the race kick into play, to see Chris write speeches for Leslie in a West Wing nod, to see Tom to find his purpose not as an entertainment mogul but as a different kind of public servant. And I want to see Leslie face a realistic obstacle, rather than an entirely ridiculous one.

Second, I think it’ll be intriguing to see Leslie at least temporarily reunited with a boyfriend who gave her the option of coming with him when she moved, but who left anyway when she said no. Is this whole season going to be a refutation of the idea that you have to make tough choices in order to achieve your dreams? Or will Dave be a counterpoint, someone who looks back on Leslie fondly but is certain in his decision?

In a way, I’m glad we discussed whether Leslie Knope was corrupt or not, because last night’s episode was all about what happens when politicians and business get too cozy. The answer? Disaster, and Tom Haverford bribing the Chamber of Commerce with hair clippers to give Leslie a second chance.

But before we get to that image, it’s important to take a moment to discuss what I think is a core upcoming challenge for Parks and Recreation. The show found its stride when it stumbled upon a balance where people kept underestimating Leslie, who responded by continuing to prove herself almost freakishly competent. It became trenchant commentary on expectations for women in politics, even when the things Leslie was proving herself ninja-like at were throwing Harvest Festivals or moderating horse funerals. But what happens when people are broadly asked to buy into the legend of Leslie Knope? Will she still be bearable? If Leslie’s the kind of person who, when presented with a hagiography, declares “I’m going to watch it ever day for the rest of my life, and when I die, I’m going to project it on my tombstone,” will she be bearable anymore? I’d hate to lose my bureaucratic heroine to typical politician-like self-regard.

There wasn’t much to write home about, or to write about period, in the B and C stories, where Ben stands up to Andy and April for being the world’s worse housemates, and Ron teaches Anne how to do home repairs. And I’m a bit concerned about the broadness of the A story, even though I think it made an ultimately valid pair of points: that Tom’s business is doomed, and Leslie’s campaign isn’t going to be easy.

It’s nice to see that Leslie isn’t a perfect candidate, nervous enough to make up details about potential endorsers in the face of Tom’s insanely detailed briefing book. And once there, she makes unforced errors. “I know I should be chasing your vote,” Leslie says after insulting a salad vendor, “but I stand by my decision to avoid salad and other disgusting things.” And when the president of the Chamber of Commerce asks whether she was responsible for the Harvest Festival, Leslie babbles “It was a team effort. I held them back. They succeeded despite me…bureaucrats aren’t used to bragging about themselves.” This is going to take time, but that’s a good thing. It means plot, and vulnerability, both things that are interesting and compelling, and that Parks and Recreation does well when it tries. Also, I desperately want to shop at Enormous Kenny’s Fried Dough and Mobile Phone Emporium.

I just wish the show had been able to tone it down for Tom’s half of the story, no matter how funny the sight of Leslie wearing a suit into a hot tub is. The problem with the Entertainment 720 plot is that it’s always been too insanely exaggerated to generate any pathos. Jean-Ralphio never could have possibly ended up with that much money in his personal injury lawsuit, and he and Tom have spent it so aggressively stupidly that it’s impossible to sympathize with them. When the Chamber president tells Leslie, “I’m a frugal man, and I don’t like extravagance or showmanship. That’s why I cut my own share…If Entertainment 720 is the kind of business you trust, I’m afraid you and I don’t share the same values,” it’s hard not to agree with him. The show needs to scale down and find its way back to its heart.

Progressive Caucus Co-Chair Raul Grijalva

Josh Marshall ponders: “What if the version of the public option that emerged in the House (which has to be seen as the maximal version of what’s possible) is so constrained and anemic that it wouldn’t really accomplish anything anyway?”

I think this is something that policy-minded progressives understand pretty well and it’s causing a lot of folks in DC to be puzzled about why so many folks want to make their stand on this issue. To help understand, I think it’s useful to read past the sarcastic opening to this Chris Bowers post and read him lay out the strategic thinking in detail. I think what you’ll see is that while the movement on behalf of the public option certainly wants a public option and believes the public option is important, the larger goal is to “to try and make the federal government more responsive to progressives in the long-term” by engaging in a form of inside-outside organizing and legislative brinksmanship that’s aimed at enhancing the level of clout small-p progressives in general and the big-p Progressive Caucus in particular enjoy on Capitol Hill.

That requires, arguably, some tactical extremism. If you become known as the guys who are always willing to be reasonable and fold while the Blue Dogs are the guys who are happy to let the world burn unless someone kisses your ring, then in the short-term your reasonableness will let some things get done but over the long-term you’ll get squeezed out. And it also requires you to pick winnable fights, which may mean blowing the specific stakes in the fight a bit out of proportion in the service of the larger goal.

David Sirota observes that what introduced the “confusion” seems to have been genuine lukewarmness on Bennett’s part about fighting for a public option:

Bennet said that he favored a so-called public option, which would provide an alternative insurance source for those who can’t get private insurance. “But as I stand here today, I think it’s very unlikely that the public option part of this will pass.”

As Sirota says, one possible difference-maker here is rumors of a primary challenge from former Colorado House Speaker Andrew Romanoff. As I’ve observed in the past the prospect of primary challenges also seems to have helped ensure that Kristen Gillibrand and Arlen Specter have stayed onside in major policy fights. Primaries are a pretty clunky and expensive way of fostering party discipline, especially in the Senate, but there aren’t a lot of other tools in the box. It’d probably be smarter and better for everyone to rely more on control over committee chairmanships.

James Suroweicki takes an interesting look at the politics of health reform through the lens of the literature on loss aversion from psychology and behavioral economics. The lesson: People fear change. His advice:

Still, just because you can’t change human nature doesn’t mean you can’t change health care. The key may be to work with, rather than against, people’s desire for security. That’s surely one reason that Obama has consistently promised people that if they like the health insurance they currently have they can keep it. This promise will make whatever reform we get more inefficient and less comprehensive, but it also assuages people’s anxieties. It might even be possible to use the endowment effect and the status-quo bias in the argument for change. After all, although people tend to feel that they own their health insurance, their entitlement is distinctly tenuous. Because it’s hard for individuals to get affordable health insurance, and most people are insured through work, keeping your insurance means keeping your job. But in today’s economy there’s obviously no guarantee that you can do that. On top of that, even if you have insurance there’s a small but meaningful chance that when you actually get sick you’ll find out that your insurance doesn’t cover what you thought it did (in the case of what’s called “rescission”). In other words, the endowment that insured people want to hold on to is much shakier than it appears. Changing the system so that individuals can get affordable health care, while banning bad behavior on the part of insurance companies, will actually make it more likely, not less, that people will get to preserve their current level of coverage. The message, in other words, should be: if we want to protect the status quo, we need to reform it.

This seems sensible. However, two problems remain.

One is that along the same lines as the research Surowiecki is talking about, people find the experience of contemplating potential future loss to be intensely unpleasant. Insofar as people are already walking around filled with anxiety about loss of employer-provided coverage or rescission, then this kind of message will appeal to them. But if you run around trying to tell people they don’t have things as good as they think you do, will they embrace your policies or just decide you’re an unpleasant jerk? Nobody likes the bearer of bad news.

The other is that in politics you not only need a message but also messengers. Not just a plan for change, a constituency for it. And the main constituency for health reform consists of people who don’t think the present system is fundamentally sound. That’s a big part of the reason the public plan element of Obama’s proposals has become such an emotional touchstone for the left. The public plan is a fairly modest part of a fairly modest package of reforms, but it’s the slice of the package that holds out the prospect of eventual transformation of the system into something quite different and less driven by corporate profits.

(white house photo)

Ta-Nehisi Coates is losing patience with Barack Obama’s patience:

But it really hit me yesterday when Obama claimed that health care reform “shouldn’t be a political issue.” Really? Then why did he hand it off to a gaggle of politicians? Why is he even talking about it? Then Obama shouted out Chuck Grassley, who has aided the spread of death panel rumors, as an example of a Republican whose been “working very constructively.” Grassley returned the favor by calling Obama “intellectually dishonest.”

I have no idea what will happen, ultimately. Moreover, I’m not sure that most voters are bothered by any of this. still, it this whole escapade smacks of Obama being too clever by half–of an Obama who can’t get over his own high-mindedness and holds out the bipartisan spirit as a kind of fetish, a gimmick. It’s all so unserious.

He’s obviously right about the “shouldn’t be a political issue” business. This is one of the most annoying ticks of political rhetoric out there. The implication is, I guess, that whatever we’re talking about is too important for mere politics, but coping with the big issues is actually exactly what politics is for. That said, the claim that something or other “shouldn’t be a political issue” is actually a classic of political rhetoric. There’s just no way that Obama and the rest of his team have somehow failed to notice that fact. In general, it’s probably best to assume that Team Obama is not full of stupid people who can’t grasp the obvious fact that health care politics is inherently political and the GOP leadership has no intention of cooperating with him. What we’re watching isn’t a blunder, it’s a strategy.

Eric Alterman has a smart piece on this that the Daily Beast gave an inflammatory title “Obama’s Fake Bipartisanship.” The point, however, isn’t that Obama is “fake”—which implies he’s lying—but that Obama’s political strategy involves a very studied self-presentation as a non-political figure. As Alterman says, this worked well for Obama during the campaign.

My worry would be that it strikes me as very plausible that a political strategist could overlearn the lessons of his own success. The fact of the matter is that Obama’s margin of victory was more-or-less exactly what you would expect based on fundamentals-driven models of presidential elections. We know that the strategy Obama employed “worked” (he won, after all) but there’s no clear evidence that it was particularly brilliant. But you can easily imagine Obama and David Axelrod and other key players becoming overconvinced by their own success.

Consider this remarkable statistic. In 1980, 32 percent of the electorate consisted of white Democrats (or at least white Carter voters) — likewise, in 2008, 32 percent of the electorate consisted of white Obama voters. But whereas, in 1980, just 9 percent of the electorate were nonwhite Carter voters, 21 percent of the electorate were nonwhite Obama voters last year. Thus, Carter went down to a landslide defeat, whereas Obama defeated John McCain by a healthy margin.

And that, in a nutshell, is the changing face of the American electorate. This is one way to understand what’s wrong with conservatives who are urging the Republican Party to somehow return to their Reaganite roots. It’s a different world.

Former Congressman Rob Portman is running for Senate in Ohio. Previously, he was George W. Bush’s OMB chief and his US Trade Representatives. Since everyone hates Bush, linking Portman to Bush seems like a natural strategy. But Chris Cillizza appears to have some doubts that these kind of old news attacks will resonate. And I assume that at some point the situation will change and Cillizza will be right. But for now, I think the evidence suggests that people still have sour memories of the Bush years. Consider this from Rasmussen:

President Obama contends he inherited the nation’s ongoing economic problems and that his actions since taking office are not to blame. Sixty-two percent (62%) of U.S. voters agree with the president that the problems are due to the recession that began under the Bush administration. Just 27% of voters say the problems are being caused more by the policies Obama has put in place since taking office, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Ten percent (10%) are not sure which president is more to blame.

Given that the economic situation is extremely bad—much worse than it was at any point while Bush was actually in office—keeping this argument in front of people seems like an absolutely critical piece of context. Even once the economy starts to turn around, the unemployment rate will continue to be at a bad level for a very long time even if the trend is in the right direction. It’ll be important to keep reminding people that a whole terrible sequence of events was basically baked into the cake as soon as the Bush-era bubble burst.

Basically . . . not much happens. Missouri might tip to Obama.

That said, a presidential election is a zero-sum game. Given that McCain lost, in a sense any counterfactual scenario in which he gets fewer votes isn’t very different from a scenario in which he loses. I think the real question about alienating Hispanic voters is what kind of scenario can we envision in which the GOP captures the White House without retaking Florida, Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada. Nate Silver has the answer and dubs his map “Operation Gringo.”

Long story short, it can be done, but Republicans would have to start doing much better in the Rust Belt.

Tim Fernholtz makes a great point here that I want to rescue from association with Donald Rumsfeld:

Anyway, I did want to draw attention to this commentary by Christian Brose, which does a good job of laying out what Huntsman’s probable assumptions are about his political future and that of his party. But readers, remember: No one has any idea how the politics of 2012 will shake out, and any political calculation based on current assumptions is just a mistake. Looking at Brose’s conventional wisdom handicapping of the 2012 GOP, I don’t see much to disagree with, but now we have to get into Rumsfeldian unknown unknowns territory. Remember when everyone thought George Allen was a front-runner for the 2008 GOP nomination? Hillary Clinton for the Democrats? The permanent Republican majority of 2004? The never-ending Democratic majority in Congress for most of the latter half of the prior century? You get my point. Whatever Huntsman’s calculus is, I hope it isn’t entirely predicated on the political climate three years from now.

Rather than “unknown unknowns,” I think the issue here is the difference between risk and uncertainty. Risk is the odds you know you face. If a flip a coin and bet on heads, it might turn up tails instead. Uncertainty is the fact that other kinds of chance intrude on the real world. If a flip a coin and bet on heads, someone might come running through the halls and knock me down while I’m in the act of tossing.

Political prognostication tends to fall prey to a failure to adequately appreciate how much uncertainty there is in politics. Nobody knows, ex ante, the odds that any given politicians’ re-election bid will be derailed by a weird blowup at a rally. And less abnormally, political outcomes are heavily shaped by events in the real world. But people aren’t very good at predicting events in the real world. The politics of 2012 will have a lot to do with the state of the global economy in 2012. But while people can make some informed judgments about the likely future, nobody really knows what will be happening and nobody knows what policymakers will be doing in response. Nobody knows what foreign crises will emerge over the next 2-3 years and nobody knows how they’ll be resolved. The future, in other words, is pretty inherently murky.

Via Ed Kilgore, Ed Rogers from the Reagan and H.W. Bush administrations makes the point that it’s basically never good to lose a Senator:

Notice to Republicans: Arlen Specter changing parties is good for the Democrats and President Obama and bad for us. If you think otherwise, put down the Ann Coulter book and go get some fresh air. There’s always a delusional element within the GOP that thinks if we lose badly enough the Democrats will gain so much power they will implement all their crazy plans, the people will revolt and purest Republicans will then be swept back into power. Even if this were true, it doesn’t take into account the damage done while our opponents are in control.

I do think it’s always worth considering an alternative. I think it’s very possible that Democrats could “gain so much power” that they implement at least some of their “crazy plans” and that the people, rather than revolting, will just turn their attention to other issues. For example, many Americans feels anxiety about their health insurance status. And the majority of these people vote for Democrats. But if Democrats deliver a health care reform plan that assuages those fears, those voters may start voting more on their hatred of abortion or love of torture and bring Republicans back into power.

You can think of Dwight Eisenhower succeeding as a politician not despite the New Deal, but in large part because the New Deal’s successes eventually built a country that no longer had a strong desire for progressive economic policy. Or how today’s tax cut jihad has trouble attracting votes in part because marginal tax rates are much lower than where they were before Reagan cut them—the issue just doesn’t matter as much to people as it used to.

In his debut column, Ross Douthat laments that Dick Cheney didn’t throw his hat into the 2008 ring, because a Cheney candidacy would have left conservative reformers a stronger hand today:

We tried running the maverick reformer, the argument goes, and look what it got us. What Americans want is real conservatism, not some crypto-liberal imitation.

“Real conservatism,” in this narrative, means a particular strain of right-wingery: >a conservatism of supply-side economics and stress positions, uninterested in social policy and dismissive of libertarian qualms about the national-security state. And Dick Cheney happens to be its diamond-hard distillation. The former vice-president kept his distance from the Bush administration’s attempts at domestic reform, and he had little time for the idealistic, religiously infused side of his boss’s policy agenda. He was for tax cuts at home and pre-emptive warfare overseas; anything else he seemed to disdain as sentimentalism.

This is precisely the sort of conservatism that’s ascendant in today’s much-reduced Republican Party, from the talk radio dials to the party’s grassroots. And a Cheney-for-President campaign would have been an instructive test of its political viability.

I think this is a clever thought experiment, but I doubt that it’s literally true. I think the reality is that governing necessarily involves compromises. But fans don’t like to see the politicians they support compromising. However, as long as the politicians in question are winning it all seems forgivable and you focus on the aspects of the agenda that you support. But when a strategy that entails some compromise leads you to defeat, you necessarily see a backlash from the base which insists that greater purity could have carried the day. I’m fairly certain this impulse would have existed no matter who the Republican standard-bearer had been in 2008.

A further observation would be that while I don’t cherish the thought of conservative purism, one complicating factor for the reform camp is that it’s not true that moderation is always the path to political victory. The Democratic Party’s basic 2008 positioning was considerably to the left of its 2004 positioning on most issues—foreign policy, health care, climate change, civil liberties, you name it—but times had changed and it worked. Meanwhile, though “the base” is always very important in primary elections, the specific electoral system in use in GOP presidential primaries makes it very possible for a candidate who’s not-so-popular with the base to win the nomination.

The noteworthy thing about 2008 is that even though two mavericky candidates (McCain and Huckabee) did well, as did one guy with a moderate record (Mitt Romney), the three of them together came up with about zero interesting, innovative, or sound policy ideas. I think this paucity of real ideas—as opposed to ideas about the need for ideas—is, rather than historical bad luck in not having a Cheney ’08 campaign to point to as a cautionary tale—the bigger problem for reform conservatism.

I think this from Chris Bowers brings a much-needed perspective to the oft-cranky discussions of the Obama administration at Open Left:

It is becoming increasingly obvious that the Senate, rather than the Obama administration, is the biggest obstacle to progressive governance right now. If we were dealing with only the House and the Obama administration, there would be a noticeably more progressive government in America. From health care reconciliation, to 100% auction cap and trade, to a larger stimulus package, to bailout reform, to bankruptcy “cramdown” reform, and even to executive compensation, the Senate has moved to the right of both the House and the Obama administration. As such, it is the Senate, and not the Obama administration, against whom we should be directing more of our distrust and pressure.

Just imagine what we would have accomplished in terms of legislation without the Senate over the past few months. The stimulus would have had a hundred billion more in spending, 100% auctions would be on their way, hundreds of billions for new health care would be on its way, bankruptcy “cramdown” would be law, EFCA would be law, executive compensation limits would be far more severe, and on and on and on. However, if we had the Senate but there was no President, the legislative accomplishments would have been pretty much the same.

I think it’s crucially important to be aware of where the responsibility for disappointments lies. There are some important areas where the Obama administration really is the key actor. They are the ones taking positions on executive power that are at odds with what many people were hoping for from a new administration. And if you want to talk about strategy toward Afghanistan, the Obama administration takes full responsibility for whatever good or bad is coming out of that. But on basic domestic policy legislation, the essence of the matter is that the median member of the House of Representatives is more progressive than the median Senator and a lot more progressive than the sixtieth Senator you need to break a filibuster. Mark Pryor and Susan Collins are trying to unleash some torrent of liberal legislation that Obama is holding back.

To the best of my understanding, the main leaders of the environmentalist movement have made a conscious decision that whipping people into a state of alarm and panic about the prospects of catastrophic climate change is not the right way to go. Instead, there’s a preference for focusing on the positive and trying to paint an appealing vision of the clean energy future. And though it’s not something I’ve peered into in great detail, the research in social psychology seems to me to back that conclusion up—it really is better to focus on the positive political message rather than trying to freak people out.

That said, the trajectory we’re on right now is actually really frightening. The weather seems like a banal topic, but if you study history it’s clear that systematic changes in the climate can have utterly catastrophic impacts on human societies. And it’s also clear that right now climate-related issues are having a significant negative impact on human lives. If you want to give yourself a good scare, Stephan Faris’ book Forecast: The Consequences of Climate Change, from the Amazon to the Arctic, from Darfur to Napa Valley is all about reportage on this sort of thing and the scary near-future we seem to be heading towards.

Reader J.C. emails in:

Your colleagues over at ThinkProgress have a post up talking about Limbaugh’s speech at CPAC. In his address, Limbaugh claims that Dems can’t “can’t accomplish what they want unless they appeal to Reagan voters,” and for years, I would have agreed with him; but it seems to me that younger voters – of whom I am one – are not nearly as enamoured with the cowboy president as our parents were. Public opinion of Reagan is gradually changing, and he seems to get more criticism for his mistakes now than he did during and directly following his presidency. All those calls for his head to be on Rushmore or the $100 bill have quieted as his domestic and economic policies appear more and more problematic.

So here is a question for you: How many of the Reagan voters have come out from under the spell of the Great Communicator? Perhaps more specifically, how many of the people who voted for Reagan are now dead, replaced by Obama voters? Some cold, hard numbers could help fight Limbaugh’s dictums, or at least our perception of the validity of those claims.

I think this nails the basic problem with nostalgia for the Reagan electoral coalition. When Reagan won in 1980, the younger people allowed to vote were born in 1962. In the last election, voters who are at least that old were somewhat more than half the electorate and John McCain did fine with this group:

Specifically, McCain won about 51 percent of the vote among the approximately 53 percent of the electorate that was at least 45 years old. But Obama won a decisive victory among Americans younger than 45—precisely none of whom were part of Ronald Reagan’s original coalition, and few of whom were part of his 1984 re-election campaign. Four years from now, Americans who were too young to vote in 1980 will be an even larger share of the electorate. Obviously, one could link this to other changes in the racial and ethnic makeup of the electorate and specific generational differences in point-of-view on environmental and gay rights issues.

It seems that Republicans are feeling pretty good about themselves these days:

By citing reservations about the economic recovery package, Gregg reinforced widespread GOP criticism about wasteful spending that has less to do with reviving the economy than rewarding Democratic constituencies. And by noting his differing view on the census, Gregg breathed life into Republican charges of a White House power grab over a critical Commerce Department function.

Both issues are part of an emerging GOP case against Obama and the ruling Democratic Party: Strip away the new face, the lofty rhetoric and the promises of post-partisanship and you’ll find the same big-spending party of old, bent on politicizing government to consolidate its hold on power.

Even with the stimulus package on the verge of passing later this week, the unanimous GOP vote against the bill in the House and the near-unanimous opposition in the Senate revealed a Republican Party surprisingly united in direction and in message for perhaps the first time since losing its congressional majority in 2006.

This reminds me of what Eve Fairbanks wrote back on February 9 when she observed that they are “completely obsessed with winning the media “cycle” and getting the sexiest, most provocative quotes on TV, an attitude that yields the kind of overblown dreck RNC chair Michael Steele is now spouting.” She traces the origins of this mentality back to the summer’s “drill baby drill” outbursts “which Republicans cite constantly as the moment that will someday be recognized as the beginning of their rebirth, their A.D. 0: They mounted a lot of antics, their brazenly hyperbolic rhetoric ended up all over the news, and a frightened Pelosi backed down.”

At the time, what Republican optimism about the drilling issue reminded me of was Republican optimism about the immigration issue. At one point, conventional wisdom held that taking a moderately pro-immigrant, pro-immigration line was necessary for a political party hoping to appeal to Hispanic voters. But the conservative base didn’t like that idea and scuttled it. These things happen. But then as more and more congressfolks got swept-up in the far-right maw, they became convinced that this bit of base pandering was going to deliver them to electoral nirvana. Then in November 2006, they took it on the chin.

Then you flash forward to 2008. At one point, conventional wisdom held that offshore drilling was a bad issue for its proponents—the only people who really cared about it were the people whose livelihoods and lifestyles would be imperiled by it—which is why even friend of the oilman George W. Bush never previously campaigned on offshore drilling. But the base wanted to drill offshore. So “drill, baby, drill” it was. And this, too, was supposed to be not just base pandering but brilliant politics. Then in November 2008, they took it on the chin.

Now they’ve convinced themselves that lockstep opposition to economic stimulus is the way to go. And the press, which mostly keeps believing that the right is politically brilliant despite two blown elections in a row, is inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. But it seems hard to figure. Here’s some Gallup numbers:

And more:

I’ll be the first to tell you that none of this will matter very much if the economy is in the toilet in 2012. But the fact remains that what conservatives are doing is moving in lockstep opposition to a popular initiative backed by a popular congress and a Democratic congressional leadership that, while not particular popular, is still more popular than they are. And if you think back to what serious people thought Republicans’ electoral problems were two months ago, it’s very hard to see how complaining that the stimulus bill was insufficiently weighted to corporate and capital gains tax cuts is expanding the party’s appeal to non-whites or to the younger cohort of voters or demonstrating that it’s an effective custodian of the economic interests of lower middle class traditionalists.

I know some progressives who are cheering Sarah Palin on in the view that if the right nominates the most terrible and wingnutty possible leaders, it’ll be easier for progressives to win. And somewhat along those lines, Spencer Ackerman watches the virus of neoconservatism seeking to use Palin as its next host and remarks:

A segment of conservatism still loves Palin, even though it appears that Palin cost McCain support from independents who didn’t think her prepared to take over the presidency. Whether conservatives will embrace Palin when they have policy-heavy and deeply-religious young alternatives like Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal remains to be seen, obviously. But Palin needs a policy platform if she wants to run for president, and the neoconservatives desperately need a political force they can ride back into power. But look: to quote Napoleon, never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.

I think this style of thinking is misguided. Election outcomes are largely determined by the fundamentals, and there’s a large element of chance and uncertainty associated with the whole thing. The best way to become president is to (a) win a major party nomination and (b) hope for luck. In other words, anyone who secures a major party nomination has a decent shot of winning. And over the long haul, the tendency is for power to alternate between the parties. And under the circumstances, one wants both parties to nominate the best possible people. For example, any Republican would have won in 1988. We are fairly lucky, as a country, that we got George H.W. Bush who managed foreign affairs competently and on domestic issues proved willing to reach pragmatic compromises with progressive legislators on some fronts. If instead of Bush we’d gotten someone with more of a Newt Gingrich attitude, the whole situation could have been much, much worse. He could have, like his son, really trashed the country.

Meanwhile, legislatively almost nothing of consequence ever passes on a straight party-line vote even in the current era of heightened partisan alignment. Advancing progressive policy requires some members of the less-progressive party to be open to some elements of the progressive agenda. Indeed, in many ways building that kind of support is the most important part of driving policy.

Now, suppose Kerry were running this year and therefore had the following three advantages over his previous self: (a) he was running after eight years of Republican rule instead of four, (b) the economy sucked, and (c) he had a fantastic fundraising advantage over his Republican opponent.

Question 1: how well do you think Kerry would do? Question 2: how well do you think Obama is going to do this year? Question 3: how big is the difference between the answers to Q1 and Q2?

I think (c) shouldn’t be added into the experiment. You can’t treat Obama’s spectacular fundraising success as exogenous to his individual appeal as a candidate or to his campaign’s particular organizational and tactical gambits. Rather, I think the way to specify the hypothetical would be to wonder what would have happened if instead of offering tepid support for the war and running for president in 2004, Kerry had offered mild opposition to the war and ran for president in 2008. I think he’d be doing pretty darn well, though presumably with a slightly different electoral coalition behind him than Obama has.

Raymond Hernandez for The New York Times takes a look at pro-life Democratic candidates:

Kelli Conlin, the president of the National Institute for Reproductive Health, called the recruitment strategy misguided, saying that surveys conducted by her organization showed that even some Republicans express support for abortion rights when her group described the consequences of outlawing the procedure.

“The movement to recruit anti-choice candidates ignores the larger reality that this is a pro-choice nation,” she said. “It misses the larger point.” (Polls show a divided nation on the issue: A 2008 CNN-Opinion Research poll found that 53 percent of Americans characterized themselves as “pro-choice,” versus 44 as “pro-life;” a 2007 poll by the same organization showed the numbers reversed, 45-50.)

The Times uses Senator Bob Casey (D-PA) as the poster child for this trend, but he actually seems like an outlier example. Pro-choice Democrats regularly win statewide in Pennsylvania — Clinton in 1992 & 1996, Gore in 2000, Rendell in 2002 & 2006, Kerry in 2004 — and, indeed, pro-choice Republicans like Arlen Specter and Tom Ridge have a good record in the state as well. In a place like that, pro-choice voters are naturally going to have a strong preference for a pro-choice candidate. But the fact that Casey’s opponent was Rick Santorum nevertheless left Casey as clearly the more socially and culturally liberal candidate.

The main subject of the article is the rather different case of recruiting pro-life candidates to run in districts or states that are so strongly anti-choice as to make it highly unlikely a pro-choice candidate could win. To me, that seems like a very different calculation. What’s more, it’s clearly a calculation that makes national polling on abortion rights irrelevant.