There's a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll out. The numbers are grim for Democrats and Barack Obama, but more to the point, the country continues to express a general and very real disgust.
Chuck Todd, Mark Murray, Domenico Montanaro, and Ali Weinberg of NBC's First Read summarize the major findings this way:
In the poll, Obama's approval has dropped below 50% (to 47%); his party faces its first net-negative fav/unfav since Sept. 2007; and one-third think he has the right goals and priorities to fix the economy....
In the poll, 55% think the country is on the wrong track; 61% believe the country is in a state of decline; and a whopping 81% believe the past year in Congress has been marked by division and a lack of willingness to compromise. (Compare that with the 52% who thought, immediately after Obama’s presidential victory, that unity would prevail in 2009.) What’s more, Sarah Palin’s fav/unfav is 32%-40%, up a tick since her book tour. And the Republican Party’s fav/unfav is 28%-43%. Indeed, the anti-Washington sentiment is so strong that the conservative, libertarian-leaning Tea Party movement has a net-positive fav/unfav, 41%-23%. Populism is alive and well, folks. And it’s up for grabs. Washington-establishment types watch out: 2010 could be the year of the outsider and turn into the THIRD-STRAIGHT change election cycle, an unprecedented level of political volatility in this country.
Looking ahead to next year’s midterms, Democrats enjoy only a two-point advantage on the generic ballot, 43%-41%, which is their smallest edge on this question since 2004. In addition, unlike was the case during the 2008 election season, Democrats are now the ones facing an enthusiasm gap. According to the poll, 56% of Republicans said they were “very interested” in next year’s midterms, compared with 46% of Democrats who said that.... Moreover, when you look at the generic-ballot score among high-interest voters, Republicans have an eight-point advantage, 47%-39%.
Yesterday, the House narrowly passed, 217-212, a $174B jobs bill, just hours after raising the national debt ceiling (another) $300B. Not a single Republican voted for it, and 38 Democrats (including, obviously, a lot of Blue Dogs) voted "nay" along with the Republicans.
Of its passage, Obama said:
All over our country this holiday season, Americans who lost their jobs in the Great Recession are looking for work. Today the House answered with some productive ideas to respond to this great need, offering new initiatives including repairing our roads and bridges, providing relief to Americans who have lost their jobs and preventing layoffs at the state and local level. They complement the proposals I made last week to buttress small businesses with new tax cuts and increased lending and provide incentives to consumers who retrofit their homes. Some may think standing by and taking no action is the right approach, but for the millions of Americans still out of work, inaction is unacceptable.
The post-healthcare reform stage of this presidency will be defined by three words: jobs, jobs, jobs. To the degree Obama and the Democrats make the stimulus and jobs bill monies work, the stark NBC/WSJ poll numbers will fade; to the degree matters in the "Great Recession" do not, those numbers will probably worsen.
Last night on Fox, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders told Neil Cavuto he will vote no on the health care bill.
SANDERS: I'm going to do my best to make this bill a better bill, a bill that I can vote for, but I've indicated both to the White House and the Democratic leadership that my vote is not secure at this point.
And here’s the reason: When the public option was withdrawn, because of Lieberman's action, what I worry about is how do you control escalating health care costs? How do you give competition to the private insurance companies, who are raising rates, premium rates, outrageously every single year—whose whole function in life is to make as much money as they can?
What a strong, Medicare-type public option would do is at least provide competition to these private insurance companies and prevent, I believe, these large increases in rates.
CAVUTO: So unless they change that, they are not going to be counting on Bernie Sanders.
SANDERS: Well, I’m doing my best right now to make this bill a bill that works for the American people.
CAVUTO: So they gain Joe Lieberman and lose you? That sounds like a wash to me.
SANDERS: Well, we will see what happens.
MyDD's Charles Lemon and Igor Volsky of Think Progress have more.
Organizing for America, the post-campaign version of the Obama for America campaign's juggernaut website/mailing list/organizing tool that compiled and rallied more than 3 million supporters during Obama's 2008 presidential run, is asking its supporters to help rally their home-state senators on the health care reform package with calls to Washington. Obviously, many of these emails or phone calls are unnecessary or wasteful because some senators will be on board no matter what, others not; so it's really about wavering senators (that means you, Ben.)
A version of the script found here has gone out by direct email, and those who go to the OFA site are immediately greeted by an appeal to take action. That script reads in part:
If we don't pass health reform, millions of Americans will be trapped in a broken status quo, unable to pay their bills or see a doctor when they need one.
More and more employers will drop coverage for employees. And Medicare and Medicaid will blow a hole through our budget.
There's too much at stake not to get this done. That's why, as of this morning, OFA supporters have made 849,856 calls to Congress in support of health reform since August.
And that's why today, with the Senate locked in last-minute negotiations, our goal is to hit one million calls.
Of course, many of the names on the OFA mailing lists are supporters who were hoping that the health care bill would include some of the provisions now negotiated away--public option, Medicare buy-in and the prescription drug importation I wrote about earlier today.
So I'm just wondering aloud whether and to what degree there will be pushback from OFA members about getting these emails, if at all? OFA says it's approaching a million calls, which is impressive. Might it lose some disgruntled supporters along the way? I doubt Mitch Stewart would say so, and the list is propriety so we will likely never know....
Center on budget and Policy Priorities
There's been a lot of complaining about the president this week, myself included. But one thing he does not deserve blame for are the projected structural deficits over the next decade.
According to a new report issued by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, and based on figures from the Congressional Budget Office, the Bush43 tax cuts and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are responsible for a much bigger share of the annual deficit projections than TARP, the stimulus package and even effects of the economic downturn (i.e., lost treasury revenues) combined.
Yes, Tea Party Nation, you read that correctly: All of this big government socialism that has so frightened you is dwarfed by the deficit contributions of those tax cuts for the most wealthly Americans. But please, run out in the streets with your Obama/Joker signs defending those in Jay-Z's tax bracket. Now, more than ever, they need your help.
Sniping aside, look: You can hold Obama accountable for TARP, since he supported it, and of course the stimulus. Though he hasn't withdrawn fully from Iraq and is ramping up in Afghanistan, you can only proliferate or scale back something somebody else started, so even that is at best a push for GWBush. You could even argue that as we move forward the treasury losses of the downturn gradually become Obama's responsibility.
But the tax cuts? That's all on you, George. (Well, W, his fellow Republicans, and the Dems who voted with them.)
The report--the title of which actually says it all: President Obama Largely Inherited Today’s Huge Deficits: Economic Downturn, Financial Rescues, and Bush-Era Policies Drive the Numbers--summarizes its findings as follows:
The events and policies that have pushed deficits to astronomical levels in the near term, however, were largely outside the new Administration’s control. If not for the tax cuts enacted during the Presidency of George W. Bush that Congress did not pay for, the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that began during that period, and the effects of the worst economic slump since the Great Depression (including the cost of steps necessary to combat it), we would not be facing these huge deficits in the near term.
While President Obama inherited a bad fiscal legacy, that does not diminish his responsibility to propose policies to address our fiscal imbalance and put the weight of his office behind them. Although policymakers should not tighten fiscal policy in the near term while the economy remains fragile, they and the nation at large must come to grips with the nation’s deficit problem. But we should all recognize how we got where we are today.
So the Dorgan-McCain amendment in the health care reform legislation that presumably would have lowered prices per-dose or per-pill prices for prescription drug by allowing the importation of prescription meds form Canada and Western Europe was defeated 51-48 on Tuesday. As the Los Angeles Times reports:
The defeat of the drug importation proposal from a bipartisan group of lawmakers, which would have made it easier to import cheaper prescription drugs from Canada and Western Europe, was a crucial victory for Obama and the pharmaceutical industry.
The politically charged amendment had held up the Senate for a week and threatened to derail the whole healthcare bill.
The vote on the amendment -- cosponsored by Sens. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) -- was 51 to 48, nine short of the 60 needed to pass.
Even if some get mad at me for saying so, I find this more dispiriting and irksome than the failure of the public option. (He said, ducking beneath his desk as rotten fruit soars overhead.) Seriously, and not to diminish the potential benefits of the public option, or for that matter the Medicare buy-in, this concession just smacks of naked surrender to one and only one industry: Big PHarma. At least with the public option and Medicare buy-in one can point to a variety of trade associations and other groups raising various and sometimes legitimate objections or caution flags. Here it's just about maintaining ologoplistic market control for domestic drug sales. And I don't want to hear about drug safety--this is Canada and Western Europe as exporters we're talking about.
Doubly irksome is the fact this was sponsored by Dorgan--one of Obama's biggest early supporters back in Iowa in late 2007 and early 2008--and McCain, who was Obama's general election opponent. In other words, you can't even dismiss this as some purportedly looney left provision, or something Sen. Bernie Birkenstocks tried to sneak past an unwitting Senate, for Dorgan and McCain are straight out of centrist casting. (Confession: I've been licking my chops all afternoon about dropping in that last turn of a phrase.) I mean, if you can't get 60 votes for something supported by two senators of good faith who are viewed as decent brokers for centrists in their respective parties--and who supposedly hold sway on such things--well, then that just testifies to the powers allayed against that provision.
Triply irksome is that one of the key powers allayed against it, in the end, was Obama himself. He reversed field once the pharmas threatened to withdraw support for the overall package. I know, I know: realpolitik means cutting the deals to get the overall package thru, and "everybody can't get everything they want," as the refrain this week goes. But c'mon: this is a perfect example of the "special interest politics" for which "hope and change" was very expressly and quite repeated promised as--can't help myself again--the antidote.
Quadruply irksome, but not at all surprising? This release from MAPlight.org, showing that senators who opposed allowing imports received on average 66 percent more in campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical industry than those who voted for the amending to allow imports; among Democrats only, the figure is even a big higher (70 percent).
I've got a headache. Can somebody mail me an cheap bottle of aspirin from Toronto?
I realize this is merely peripheral to the debate over health care reform, health policy generally, and Americans' health status. But as those larger issues are discussed, the fact that--surprise, surprise--some of nation's children are getting sick at school, and not from wiping their noses on their sleeves and sneezing all over each other, is disconcerting and at least timely.
The USA Today reports on new CDC findings showing that school cafeterias remain subpar (if a little better than recent history) in terms of food safety and food quality:
No food-borne illness has sickened more schoolkids in the past decade than norovirus, and none is linked as consistently to improper food handling in cafeterias, a USA TODAY investigation found.
Data kept by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that norovirus caused at least one-third of the 23,000 food-borne illness cases reported in schools from 1998 through 2007. The toll: about 7,500 sick children, USA TODAY found. Those figures represent just a fraction of all cases. Investigators suspected but couldn't confirm norovirus in nearly 2,000 additional illnesses in schools during that period, and the CDC says many more cases go unreported.
The purpose of the inspection requirement is to ensure that the facilities and workers comply with safety and sanitary requirements — from checking food temperatures to wearing gloves.
But the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the school lunch program, acknowledges that the rule is almost impossible to enforce...
Federal data show that more than half the schools in eight states — including California and New York— failed to meet the requirement for two inspections during the 2007-08 school year. In Maine, the state where the fewest schools conformed to the law, fewer than 1% of schools met the requirement that year.
Although such outbreaks often begin in the cafeteria, more than 8,500 schools failed to have their kitchens inspected at all last year, and another 18,000 fell short of a requirement in the Child Nutrition Act that calls for cafeteria inspections at least twice a year, USA TODAY found. The mandate is part of the National School Lunch Program, which provides food for 31 million schoolchildren across the nation. Almost every school in the United States receives food as part of the program.
Well, that last part about receiving food from the National School Lunch Program is, in fact, part of the problem, if memory serves. Reading Eric Schlosser's book Fast Food Nation, the one part that is indelibly seared into my brain is the "shit is in the meat" line he writes after explaining how recalled beef shipments that didn't pass inspection for sale in supermarkets are often bought by the USDA and then distributed to the schools. Hopefully, that no longer happens at the rates it did before FFN went to print. But still...
Anyway, USA Today provides a 50-state ranking so you can check out how your state fared in terms of inspections here. On the east coast, it's almost 1 p.m.--enjoy your lunch!
War Room is written and edited by Alex Koppelman, with contributions from Salon reporters around the country.
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