Morning Must Reads

That may or may not be true, but if that’s what the administration believes, then it’s the political reality.

As the president’s top politico, David Axelrod, said it is time for the president “to take the baton.” What Axelrod means is that Obama will be much more visible on the issue in public and much more focused on it in private. But the question remains – what’s left? The president is constantly on television and the press conference he will hold Wednesday night will be his fourth such event. Aside from projecting his image onto the lunar surface, there’s not much more his team can do.

Last week, the White House, with the help of writer Ceci Connolly, was casting Obama as the new LBJ, arm twisting Congress into a deal. But things are getting worse and Congress is close to full revolt. As Rep. Henry Waxman starts marking up a House bill that looks to be an expensive, shoddy mess and senators admit that only by reviving a moribund bipartisan bill is any reform at all even possible, the new refrain from the White House is: “we knew it would be hard.” But the question is why it has to be hard right now?
The answer is likely that the administration believed that they had to get everything done early before the president’s popularity started to fade, but that choice is looking less wise.

“Obama’s top strategists, including Axelrod and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, have repeatedly defended the administration’s ambitious agenda by saying that success breeds success — each legislative victory makes the next one easier to accomplish, they insist. The flip side, then, is that a health-care failure could doom the rest of Obama’s agenda.

Obama’s advisers express confidence that the setbacks of the past week can be overcome, and they insist they have spent “no time” discussing the impact on his political fortunes if health-care reform does not pass this year.”

New York Times — Governors Fear Medicaid Costs in Health Plan
 
Governors have seen this movie before – the federal government gets itself into a spending problem, so Congress lets the costs trickle down to the states. And a bipartisan group of governors ripped into the health care plans taking shape for being a massive cost shift to the states.

And while many can be placated by promises of new subsidies, the reaction of the governors shows where the voters are and the new willingness for even politicians with low risk thresholds to give health care reform raspberries.

With many of the former high-profile stars gone (Sarah Palin), distracted (Mark Sanford), or busy (Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bobby Jindal), most expected a dull session when the National Governor’s Association met in Biloxi, Miss. But as Writers Kevin Sack and Robert Pear show, the fear of becoming dumping grounds for the costs of the unfunded aspirations  of Obamacare has upped the ante.

“Each of several health care bills coursing through Congress relies on a large increase in eligibility for Medicaid, the state and federal insurance program for the poor, as one means of moving toward universal coverage.

Because the states and the federal government share the cost, any increase in eligibility levels, benefits or payments to doctors would impose new burdens on the states unless Washington absorbs them. In at least one of several bills circulating in Congress, the states would eventually pick up a share of the new costs, and the governors fear they cannot count on provisions in other bills that they will not bear costs.”
 
Wall Street Journal — Democrats’ New Worry: Their Own Rich Voters
 
As chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Rahm Emanuel helped drive a restoration for his party by recruiting and running conservative Democrats in Republican-leaning districts. His success in 2006 and 2008 is evident. But as writer Jonathan Weisman shows, the consequences of that success include a diverse, factious majority that is bucking the party line. For example, the centrist Democrats who won seats in Rockefeller Republican districts don’t want their rich constituents to pay the bill for a huge health-care plan.

“The tax issue is presenting many new Democrats with a quandary as they struggle to get their political footing. “These members are going to have to make their own determinations on how to balance these interests,” said Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and himself a representative of the affluent suburbs of Washington.

The issue of taxes has long bedeviled Democratic candidates, but in 2008, Mr. Obama took control of it. He campaigned hard on tax cuts for the middle class, savaged as a tax increase Republican Sen. John McCain’s proposal to subject the value of health-insurance benefits to income taxation, and convinced most Americans they would be unaffected even as he said he would allow taxes to rise on the rich.

But as Democrats who served in Congress in 1994 will attest, the game changes when abstractions on taxing the rich turn to reality. President Bill Clinton’s 1993 deficit-reduction plan largely focused tax increases on the rich, but the collateral damage on Democrats was broad. And nobody wants to be the next Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, the suburban Philadelphia House freshman who cast the deciding vote on the Clinton budget, only to be swept from office the next year.”
 
Wall Street Journal — ‘Empathy’ Takes a Knock in Confirmation Hearings
 
Writer Jess Bravin has the most interesting after-action report on the Sonia Sotomayor hearings, pointing out that while the judge is cruising to victory, she and her Democratic defenders all trashed the notion that “empathy” was an important consideration when selecting a Supreme Court justice. Sotomayor may be a stealth empathizer, but it’s back to the drawing board for liberals looking for a name for their judicial philosophy.

“Liberals have long chafed at conservatives’ success in framing judicial appointments as a political issue, with their evocation of criteria such as “strict constructionism” and “originalism.” Conservatives coined those terms to contrast their views with Supreme Court decisions from the 1950s and ’60s that they contended strayed from the Constitution’s original meaning.
‘’Empathy’ is Obama’s effort to find a new label free of the baggage that might be carried by the old labels, but it just didn’t work,’ said Larry Kramer, dean of Stanford Law School.

Some liberals prefer older labels, like the ‘living Constitution’ to describe progressive approaches to the law. Maryland Sen. Ben Cardin said he and other Judiciary Committee Democrats ‘believe that the Constitution and constitutional protections require contemporary interpretations’ but that the judge’s work still boils down to ‘the facts and the law.’

‘There’s a lot of agreement that as far as a personal characteristic, we like empathy,’ Mr. Cardin said in an interview. ‘But in terms of ruling from the bench, there really isn’t a role for empathy to play.’”
 
Washington Post — Poll Shows Obama Slipping on Key Issues
 
The Washington Post/ABC poll has been kinder to President Obama than any of its big-time counterparts, but now even it shows trouble for the president and his agenda.

While more respected polls have had Obama under a 60 percent approval rating for months, the Post poll has finally crossed the threshold.

This is like having your mother tell you you’re screwing up.

“Since April, approval of Obama’s handling of health care has dropped from 57 percent to 49 percent, with disapproval rising from 29 percent to 44 percent. Obama still maintains a large advantage over congressional Republicans in terms of public trust on the issue, even as the GOP has closed the gap.

The erosion in Obama’s overall rating on health care is particularly notable among political independents: While positive in their assessments of his handling of health-care reform at the 100-day mark of his presidency (53 percent approved and 30 percent disapproved), independents now are divided at 44 percent positive and 49 percent negative.”