The difference between MSNBC and Fox News

Whereas Fox News’ bread-and-butter is criticizing President Obama, the liberals at MSNBC … criticize President Obama:

While much attention has been paid to the feud between the Fox News Channel and the White House, the Obama administration is now facing criticism of a different sort from Ms. Maddow, Keith Olbermann and other progressive hosts on MSNBC, who are using their nightly news-and-views-casts to measure what she calls “the distance between Obama’s rhetoric and his actions.”

While they may agree with much of what Mr. Obama says, they have pressed him to keep his campaign promises about health care, civil liberties and other issues.

“I don’t think our audience is looking for unequivocal ‘rah-rah,’ ” said Ms. Maddow, who calls herself a liberal but not a Democrat.

Truth be told, I can barely watch Keith Olbermann. I find Maddow more palatable, but not enough to catch her show every night. But MSNBC isn’t just the leftward version of Fox News; it has conservative hosts on its air, and its liberals are more willing to go after one of their own.

Poll: Americans love Republicans more than Democrats

New York Daily News:

For the first time in years, the GOP has the lead in generic ballot preferences over Democrats. That is, if people are asked whether they’ll vote for an unnamed Democrat or Republican for Congress, 48% are saying they’ll back the Republican, versus 44% who will choose the Democrat.

A lot is driven by the economy, and it’s mostly independents fleeing Democrats. Back in July, independents were about evenly split. Now they favor the Republican Party by a huge 22-point margin.

I’ve got no explanation or spin for this: The Democrats are running things now and, so far, they’re not making people very happy. When you run the show, you gotta deliver. And despite the president’s efforts, most people aren’t going to care that things are getting worse more slowly. They want better. Better is what you’re going to have to deliver if you want to keep power.

What did tea partiers accomplish in NY-23?

That’s the topic of my column this week with Ben Boychuk. To recap: “tea party” conservatives in that New York congressional district managed to drive a moderate Republican out of the race — and ended up handing the seat to a Democrat in a district that has long sent the GOP to congress. As I write in the column, we’ve seen this story before:

For a good idea of what tea party activism might accomplish, take a good look at Kansas.

It’s about as Republican a state as they come. It last went for a Democratic presidential candidate in 1964. And the GOP has 300,000 more registered voters than its Democratic rivals. But the state’s governor is a Democrat. So is the attorney general.

How in the heck did that happen? Easy. The Republican Party in Kansas tore itself in two, between center-right “moderates” and conservative true believers. The infighting has been going on for more than a decade, leaving voters alienated and giving Democrats opportunities for electoral wins in a state they have no business contesting.

That looks similar to events in New York. The district there had sent moderate Republicans to Congress forever — its last congressman, John McHugh , crossed party lines to work as President Obama’s Secretary of the Army. But when the GOP establishment picked a similarly centrist Republican to run for office, the tea party folks rebelled and backed a different candidate. Who lost.

The tea party movement started as the biggest expression of sore loserdom in America’s recent political history. George W. Bush had expanded “socialized medicine” — in the form of the new Medicare drug benefit — and turned a budget surplus into a deep deficit. Yet the tea partiers only took to the streets when a Democrat was elected president. It’s not difficult to figure out what motivated them.

So the fact that tea partiers are now holding Republicans to account is refreshing. But parties that insist on ideological purity are usually losers at the ballot box; Democrats began their recent comeback when centrists like Sens. Jim Webb and Bob Casey joined their cause. Tea partiers should heed the lesson if they want to win.

No, seriously: Time to kick Joe Lieberman out of the Democratic caucus

Exactly what do Democrats gain by keeping him in?

Sounding more like an independent than a Democrat, Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., tells ABC News he will campaign for some Republican candidates during the 2010 midterm elections and may not seek the Democratic Senate nomination when he runs for re-election in 2012.

“I probably will support some Republican candidates for Congress or Senate in the election in 2010. I’m going to call them as I see them,” Lieberman said in an ABC News “Subway Series” interview aboard the U.S. Capitol Subway System.

So, Harry Reid: Joe Lieberman is working against you on domestic priorities. He’s against you on foreign policy priorities. And he’s stumping against your candidates. What’s the upside?

Joe Lieberman will join Republican filibuster of health reform. He should just join the Republicans already.

Politico:

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said Tuesday that he’d back a GOP filibuster of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s health care reform bill.

Lieberman, who caucuses with Democrats and is positioning himself as a fiscal hawk on the issue, said he opposes any health care bill that includes a government-run insurance program — even if it includes a provision allowing states to opt out of the program, as Reid’s has said the Senate bill will.

It’s time for Democrats to kick Lieberman out of the Democratic caucus and strip him of every perk of seniority he gets from them.

He’s with Republicans on the war. He’s with them in the presidential campaign — he was almost the GOP vice presidential nominee! — and now he’s with them on the most significant domestic policy debate of this generation. I wouldn’t suggest kicking him out if he was merely voting against the public option. The fact that he’s willing to filibuster, however, means he’s of no use to Democrats whatsoever. Get rid of him.

James Carville is wrong

Politico:

On CNN’s “State of the Union,” Democratic strategist James Carville became the first leading Democrat to suggest publicly that there might be political advantage in letting Republicans “kill” health care.

“Put a bill out there, make them filibuster it, make them be what they are, the party of no,” Carville said. “Let them kill it. Let them kill it with the interest group money, then run against them. That’s what we ought to do.”

If you want to win elections for Democrats, that’s a great idea.

If you want to get health reform done for the American people, that’s really lousy, stupid idea — and James Carville should be ashamed of himself. (Not that he will be.)

Listen: The Democrats have 60 votes in the Senate and a majority in the House — as well as control of the White House. If they’re going to be thinking of winning elections now, they should be thinking of how to do it by governing the country competently, implementing proposals that help American families.

Take a loss so that Democrats can get re-elected — and do what, exactly? If they can’t get reform when they hold all the levers of elected power, then what’s the point of electing them?

Karl Rove isn’t irritating me quite so much this time

One big reason Bill Clinton’s attempt at providing national health insurance failed in the 1990s is because Republicans didn’t feel like they could afford to give him the victory. Starting a government program that would make health care cheaper and easier to access, folks like Bob Dole realized, would make many Americans grateful to Democrats for years to come. Rather than risk electoral losses, the GOP — not for the last time — decided its best bet was to be the “Party of No.”

So I think it’s telling that Karl Rove is advising Republicans to oppose President Obama’s health-care initiatives … by coming up with some alternatives.

It’s extremely unlikely that Republicans will be able to pass their own health-care plan in this Congress. But in politics you can’t beat something with nothing, so it is critical that the GOP offers an alternative to President Barack Obama’s government-run monstrosity.

Americans will listen more closely to Republicans if they make empirical and specific arguments against Mr. Obama’s attempted government takeover of the nation’s health system. But they must also offer proposals that families, small-businesspeople and health-care providers will applaud.

Well great. I doubt that I’ll like the GOP proposals much — and I’m a bit skeptical that they’re offered in complete sincerity, rather than as a political countermove. (Dole, out of electoral politics, is suddenly enthusiastic.) I think Brendan’s right a single-payer system would probably be best, but Republicans aren’t going to go for it.

But if the politics of the country has shifted enough that cries of “socialism” can’t kill efforts to expand health insurance, if the debate starts with the presumption that Americans have a right to health care outside an emergency room, if the debate starts with an acknowledgement on both sides that too many Americans go without insurance and proper care and if the debate is about the best solutions rather than improvement versus status quo — well then, that’s a debate worth having.

Want to run the government? You need Arlen Specter

It’s interesting that Arlen Specter’s jump to the Democratic Party comes the same day that conservative Ross Douthat makes his debut as a New York Times columnist. Douthat looks at a Republican Party that is purging itself of all moderate elements in favor of a “hardcore conservatives only” approach that’s likely to be an electoral loser in the future. Republicans could’ve avoided that future pain, he suggests, if they’d nominated Dick Cheney — not John McCain — to be the 2008 GOP nominee … and seen firsthand that Americans aren’t going to be too interested in that kind of Republican Party.

Certainly, that approach has lost the Republican Party the services of Arlen Specter — and put the GOP in a position to be shut almost entirely out of governing.

So even though Democrats are going to be annoyed by Specter’s compromises and failures to adhere closely to the party line, they should think about what he signifies: The expanding of their tent. It’s true you don’t want the tent to expand so much that you stand for nothing but power — and, well, there’s some danger of that in bringing Specter into the fold. But here’s the thing: There’s always going to be guys like Specter who hang out at the edges, who don’t fit neatly into either party. And there’s always going to be voters like that, too: Independent voters make up about a third of the population.

In the end, the party that can attract those guys — and voters — on the edge is going to be the one that gets to run things. There will be some compromises in ideological purity, yes, but that’s the cost of things. And on the whole, it’s probably better to run things imperfectly than to be on the losing end.

Is Barack Obama our most polarizing president?

That’s what Michael Gerson says in the Washington Post today.

Who has been the most polarizing new president of recent times? Richard Nixon? Ronald Reagan? George W. Bush?

No, that honor belongs to Barack Obama. According to the Pew Research Center, the gap between Republican and Democratic approval ratings for Bush a few months into his first term was about 51 percentage points. For Obama, this partisan gap stands at 61 points. Obama has been a unifier, of sorts. He has united Democrats and united Republicans — against each other.

Obama, he notes, ran on a platform of bipartisanship. That Republicans don’t love Obama, Gerson suggests, means that Obama is a failure.

It would have been relatively easy for President Obama to divide the Republican coalition, peeling off less-partisan Republicans with genuine outreach. Many Republicans were prepared to accept short-term deficits to stimulate the economy in exchange for long-term fiscal responsibility. Obama could have focused more narrowly on resolving the financial crisis — the key to all economic recovery — and delayed his ambitions on other issues to a more realistic time. In the process, he might have gotten some Republicans to share his political risks instead of nursing grievances on the sidelines.

That’s almost certainly not true. Obama, remember, did reach out to the Republican coalition on the stimulus package, giving away more and bigger tax breaks of the type the GOP wanted at the outset. What did he get for his troubles? Arlen Specter signed on. And that was about it. And that’s fine: Republicans shouldn’t support what they don’t want to support. But to suggest that if only Obama had given away a little more, Republicans might’ve signed on for, say, expanding health care coverage — someday — is either naive or disingenuous.

In any case, it’s worth pointing out that just because Obama doesn’t have the support of Republicans doesn’t mean he is polarizing. Maybe it’s the Republicans who are simply polarized. That seems just as likely an interpretation to me.

Byrd warns against Obama “power grab”

Politico:

Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), the longest serving Democratic senator, is criticizing President Obama’s appointment of White House “czars” to oversee federal policy, saying these executive positions amount to a power grab by the executive branch.

In a letter to Obama on Wednesday, Byrd complained about Obama’s decision to create White House offices on health reform, urban affairs policy, and energy and climate change. Byrd said such positions “can threaten the Constitutional system of checks and balances. At the worst, White House staff have taken direction and control of programmatic areas that are the statutory responsibility of Senate-confirmed officials.”

Byrd also wants Obama to limit claims of executive privilege while also ensuring that thes White House czars don’t have authority over Cabinet officers confirmed by the Senate.

“As presidential assistants and advisers, these White House staffers are not accountable for their actions to the Congress, to cabinet officials, and to virtually anyone but the president,” Byrd wrote. “They rarely testify before congressional committees, and often shield the information and decision-making process behind the assertion of executive privilege. In too many instances, White House staff have been allowed to inhibit openness and transparency, and reduce accountability.”

I’m trying to remember: When Republicans held Congress under the Bush Administration, did any leading GOP members push back against executive overreach? Maybe Arlen Specter did, but everybody knows he’s not a real Republican.

I’m increasingly of the mind that Democratic governance is just about the worst thing for this country — except for the alternatives.