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Today we're turning over the whole talking points section to the president, because he certainly deserves a victory lap after announcing this week that -- against all odds, and against all the slings and arrows of misfortune -- 7.1 million people signed up for health insurance on the Obamacare exchanges.
The reason for this recycling is our version of President Obama's "spiking the football" this week, in his announcement that Obamacare had astoundingly met the original Congressional Budget Office goal of signing up over seven million people in the first open enrollment period. Call it Obama bragging about Obamacare's "vital statistics." What we're going to do today is review the last nine months of our own predictions on not just Obamacare but the politics of Obamacare, heading into the 2014 midterm election season. If you don't want to read all these excerpts, here's a short version that could fit on Twitter: The politics of Obamacare are now going to pivot to real data instead of Republican doom-and-gloom horror stories.
President Obama's job approval polling was down a bit last month, ending three months of positive news. He didn't slip back much, but the reversal does bring up a serious question: is Obama stuck in a "new normal" of job approval numbers in the low-40s range? We'll take a look at possible answers to this in a moment, but first let's take a look at the new monthly chart.
Today -- the first of April -- Vladimir Putin announced that Russia has officially reabsorbed Alaska. "The Russian territory which has been mistaken referred to as 'the state of Alaska' has now been returned to its rightful and legal owner, Russia. It would be foolish for anyone to ever refer to the Russian Alyaska again as being any part of the United States."
The Supreme Court heard arguments in two cases where corporations are requiring certain women to wear a scarlet "A" on their uniforms... um, no wait... that can't be right... let me check my notes....
Earlier this week, I wrote an extensive book review of former Washington Post reporter Betty Medsger's The Burglary (2014, Alfred A. Knopf). This book chronicles a break-in at the Media, Pennsylvania, branch office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1971, and the subsequent release to the public of files proving the F.B.I. was spending something like 40 percent of its time spying on and harassing political groups and individuals that J. Edgar Hoover didn't approve of. The burglars, who operated under the name "Citizens' Commission to Investigate the F.B.I.," were never caught, despite a five-year F.B.I. manhunt involving more than 200 agents. None of the burglars had ever even been publicly identified before Medsger's book was published.
The Media files were made public in large part due to a few journalists (and a few brave editors) at the Washington Post who received them and reported on them. Attorney General John Mitchell personally called up the editors at the Post in a last-minute attempt to quash the story multiple times the day they arrived, but in the end the decision was made to go ahead and publish. Incredibly, at this time Mitchell didn't even know what was in the burgled files, and even though it was two weeks after the burglary, he had apparently just become aware of it. The event explored new territory in both journalism and in the legal world, because it was the first time secret documents had ever been provided to news organizations after having been stolen from the government. There simply were no precedents to follow.
Forty-three years ago this month, an obscure branch office of the Federal Bureau of Investigations located in a Philadelphia suburb was burgled. All their files were stolen (being 1971, these files were all on paper) and whisked away to a secret hideout, then they were sorted and sent to the media. This criminal act set in motion the idea that our government should no longer operate in secret without any supervision. It was followed by the leak of the government's Vietnam War plans, a congressional investigation (the first ever of its kind) into the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., the resignation of a president brought about in no small part by leaks to the media, and eventually the modern-day document dumps of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. But while the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, and the Church Committee are at least somewhat well-known these days, few people (even few followers of politics, recent history, or the debates on the modern security state) recognize "the Media break-in" as where it all started.
But it's really nothing new to point out the ludicrous nature of what is billed as "breaking news." In fact, I can end precisely where I began this rant. Back in its infancy in the 1970s, "Weekend Update" had a running joke parodying such "breaking news" idiocy. Chevy Chase would be handed a piece of paper (which just goes to show you how long ago this was) at his news desk, and he would glance at it and then report: "This just in... Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead!"
Has it really been a whole year since the Republican Party put out their "post-mortem" document, which tried to identify why they got shellacked so badly in the 2012 election? Since it's not a big date on my political calendar, the one-year anniversary kind of snuck up on me, I'll admit. But since the Republican National Committee used the term "post-mortem" in the first place, I guess it's now time for a post-mortem on the post-mortem (insert your own zombie or "dead man walking" joke here, if you must).