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Perhaps I am just being alarmist here. Perhaps I am wrong about all of this. Or perhaps we will look back at Jaynes in the future with horror, as our inboxes fill up with mudslinging about the candidates. I truly hope I am mistaken about this, and not prophetic.
In the era of Michael Steele, Sarah Palin, and Bobby Jindal, it's pretty hard to stand out in the world of conservative lunatic ravings. But Andrew Breitbart's recent opinion piece in the Washington Times truly raises (lowers?) the bar for the rest of the field in right-wing Crazytown. His thesis is that liberal blog commenters are ruining things for the conservatives' attempts to have a nice online chat.
As opposed to, say, the process that Senator Dianne Feinstein's Presidential Inauguration Committee (PIC) used, which led to a multi-layered fiasco of epic proportions.
It really is a bit early to focus on President Obama's approval ratings in the polls, I know. But, rather than looking at the overall picture of how he's doing, I have been noticing something interesting which I don't believe others have picked up on -- Obama's numbers dramatically improve depending on the sample used by the pollsters. When "likely voters" (LV) are polled, the numbers they give are different from when either "registered voters" (RV) or "all adults" (A) are polled. Obama's LV approval rating is about five points lower than the RV/A numbers. The difference is more pronounced in the disapproval ratings, where LV numbers are fully ten points higher than RV/A numbers.
In today's main event we will discuss the idiocy of the most recent Republican talking point -- "Obama's trying to do too much, too fast" (which is weak, to be sure, but then they had to kind of scramble after their last talking point "Obama is killing the stock market" became inoperative due to a rally). But before we get to that, we have some housecleaning to do. Call it "old business" -- a few new developments in things that I've commented on previously.
So where was the reporting on the improvement of those numbers with the votes on the 2009 budget bill? Where were the stories on the nightly news shows praising Obama for getting about a tenth of Republican House members to vote for the 2009 budget, and almost one in five Republican senators? It's pretty hard to call this anything other than "bipartisan," especially since we lost a few of our own Democrats on the votes as well. Where were the headlines screaming "bipartisan budget passes!" Where were the followup stories to your "sky is falling" theme from a few weeks ago, telling the public that Obama was making definite progress in reaching out to Republicans, and Republicans were responding to do what is best for the country rather than blindly following partisan demands? I must have missed those stories, since you obviously are all such good journalists that you followed up on your previous "Obama is a failure" stories with some "Obama makes bipartisan progress" stories, right?
Kathleen Parker is not my favorite Washington Post columnist. I just wanted to say that up front, to get my own biases out in the open. But I have to give her credit, for stating some truth last Sunday on not one but two Sunday morning news shows. She said almost the same thing on both CBS' Face The Nation and NBC's The Chris Matthews Show. Such honesty from the Washington crowd -- especially from someone many label conservative -- is rare. So I wanted to give her some credit today.
For all the terminology of the political world, all the divisions and divisions-within-divisions, there is no term which defies definition quite the way populism does. When we speak of conservatives or liberals or progressives or even libertarians, we pretty much all agree what the label means, and who it covers. Hyphenation and neologisms abound to adequately describe individual factions of the major groups; such as social conservatives versus fiscal conservatives, or neo-conservatives versus paleo-conservatives. But there's no disagreement with the general scope of what "conservative" means. The concept of populism doesn't have this generally-agreed-upon consensus among the public, however. Even historians define the term differently amongst themselves. And this is just within America's politics -- populism can mean even more diverse movements when talking about the rest of the world.
The District of Columbia is about to take a big step along the road to political relevance. They appear poised to receive a full vote for their "shadow" member of the United States House of Representatives. In a bargain which harkens back to the Missouri Compromise, Utah will also add a House member at the same time. Much has been said about this story in the past week, but everyone seems to be overlooking one good result which will come from the new arrangement: a tie will never again be possible in the Electoral College, at least not without a third-party candidate picking up at least one elector.
The Republican Party is at a real fork in the road. It is rare, in politics, to be able to see with absolute clarity such dividing points while they are happening, I should point out. Usually these things are analyzed after the fact, when conclusions can be drawn with certainty. But the GOP is now at such a point, and it faces two choices: absolute purity, or some shade or another of pragmatism ("the road less traveled," as it were, for Republicans these days).