The media is stirring up drama regarding tomorrow's vote - namely, they are speculating whether Landrieu and Lincoln will vote with Reid to start debate.

Of course they will. Three big reasons:

(a) "Keep the Ball Rolling". Tomorrow's vote - like all of the votes to date - is a process vote, meaning that Obama and the leadership can argue, "Vote yea to keep the process going. We can improve the bill later if you stick with us." Every vote they have won to date has, I think, been won based on this argument - and it should carry the day tomorrow. The problem comes with the last vote, i.e. to end the process and enact the law. You cannot argue to keep the process going on the final vote!

(b) No Harm For Yea. GOP candidates could conceivably tie tomorrow's vote to a vote for health care, but that's a very specious argument to make. I would guess that local newspapers and television outlets would call them out on it. Plus, if (for instance) Blanche Lincoln votes yea tomorrow but ultimately votes against closing debate - those ads would be very ineffective. What's more, there is an easy rejoinder, which we are already hearing: "I voted to open debate. What's so bad about debate?"

(c) Lots of Harm for Nay. A nay vote would gravely damage prospects for reform. And legislators on the Democratic side do not want to kill reform unless/until they absolutely have to, i.e. voting in favor on a particular item would seriously hurt their political careers. As noted above, a yea vote tomorrow will not damage anybody's political prospects. A nay vote, on the other hand, would make that senator a pariah in the broader party (the interest groups, activists, and enthusiasts on the Democratic side) - which, I hasten to add, is the primary funding source for all of these members. Lieberman's Independent Democrat status makes him basically half a Dem and half a GOPer. He's voting yea, which should tell you all you need to know.

Final point. The fact that these Democratic moderates are actually spending time "pondering" whether to vote against starting debate is a sign that they are very skittish about this bill. My guess is that this deliberation is just a dog and pony show for the folks back home - what's noteworthy is that these senators feel they must do this. The reason why is pretty clear. Take the nationwide net approval/disapproval of this bill, then subtract 10 to 20 points. That will put you in striking distance of what the voters in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Nebraska think of it. Then remember that Blanche Lincoln is up for reelection next year, Ben Nelson is up in three years, and Mary Landrieu has yet to develop much electoral security in her increasingly Republican state. She's up in 2014 - and if Obama wins reelection, she would have to stand before the voters of Louisiana in one of the roughest macro environments around (incumbent party's second midterm).

If I had to bet, I'd say the bill has maybe 54-56 votes in the Senate - with Bayh, Landrieu, Lieberman, Lincoln, Nelson, and Pryor all at least a little iffy. Losing Olympia Snowe between the Senate Finance Committee and the floor is a big deal - ideologically, she and Susan Collins are indistinguishable from Nelson. Also, these moderate Democrats come from generally Republican states [except Lieberman, who is going to need every Republican vote he can muster in 2012], and having Snowe on board gave them bipartisan cover that they do not have anymore. Liberals have been complaining about "President Snowe" for some time, but her support was a big deal. A few weeks ago, the story supposedly went that President Obama wanted Harry Reid to pursue Snowe's trigger idea. I'm not sure I believe that, frankly (it seemed a bit like a C/Y/A ploy by the White House) - but if it was true, then this is why. Keeping Snowe on board guarantees at least 61 votes. Losing Snowe might cost the Democrats up to six more senators.

With the introduction of Harry Reid's health care bill - talk will inevitably focus on whether the public option or the Stupak amendment will undermine the legislation. Yet, if the bill dies, I do not think either of these will be the primary cause of death.

I think this will be the culprit:

This is the CBO's analysis of how the Reid bill will cut Medicare. The total reductions come out to $491 billion over 10 years when everything is factored in.

The following has been said by other commentators, but I have to add my voice to the chorus: This is insanity, Democratic leaders. Why are you doing this?

Getting AARP's support might give you cover among the Washington crowd, but let's inject some common sense here. Lots of people are members of AARP, but that does not mean they are intensely committed to it, and will therefore follow its lead on such an important issue. AARP is not like the unions in that regard. Lots of people join to get discounts on auto insurance and movie tickets, meaning that affiliation with the organization is broader than it is deep.

Obama's current numbers among senior citizens demonstrate the validity of this point, not to mention the concern that Democrats should have heading into 2010. Gallup has him at 45% among those over 65, and at 49% among those between 50 and 64. Hint. Quinnipiac has him at 42% with those over 55. Hint hint. Rasmussen currently shows Democrats losing the generic ballot among seniors by 15 points; in 2008, Democrats split the senior vote with the GOP. Hint hint hint.

Let's review the political power that American seniors wield. In the Virginia gubernatorial election, people over 65 accounted for 18% of all voters. In New Jersey it was 19%. People over 65 accounted for 19% of all voters in the 2006 House midterm. And even in the "Yes We Can!" presidential election of 2008, when college kids supposedly overwhelmed the normal electoral process, the 65 and over crowd still accounted for 16% of the electorate (unchanged relative to 2004).

The 2006 House exit poll showed the Democrats winning the national vote by a margin of 54 to 46. If, however, we plug in Rasmussen's current generic ballot number among seniors in place of what the Democrats actually won from that cohort in 2006, their lead falls to 52-48. Note that this assumes no change among younger cohorts. That's seniors alone cutting the Democratic margin in half. This also assumes that seniors do not come out in greater numbers in 2010 to defend against perceived assaults on their Medicare benefits.

Blanche Lincoln knows what I'm talking about. When she won reelection in 2004, seniors made up 16% of the electorate and went 59-41 for her. In the 1998 midterm, seniors made up 26% of the electorate and went 60-37 for her. In both contests, they were her strongest supporters. I wonder what she thinks of Table 2 in the CBO's analysis of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Bob Dole knows what I'm talking about, too. From January through September of 1995, Bill Clinton's job approval numbers were tepid, with a typical net approval rating of about +2.5. Things turned around for him in late 1995 when the budget battle heated up and Clinton took a stand against...GOP reductions in projected Medicare spending! I'll let Michael Barone finish the story. This is from the 1998 Almanac of American Politics:

[I]n August 1995 [Clinton] started running political ads against the Republicans' Medicare plan. All this was part of a strategy pollster Dick Morris called "triangulation," taking positions between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans so as to elevate the president's stature above both...In November and December he negotiated on the budget with Speaker Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, promising them agreement at times, but he ultimately vetoed most of their appropriations bills. That technically shut down non-emergency functions of the federal government, a step which many Republicans initially welcomed and thought would be popular. This was a stunning miscalculation, as was their lack of a strategy to deal with Clinton's vetoes...By the time Republicans backtracked and agreed to Clinton's terms, their ratings were down and they were running behind Democrats in the polls.

The President declared at the time the deal was struck that his proposal was a "sensible solution" that showed "you can balance the budget in 7 years, and protect Medicare and Medicaid, education and the environment and provide tax relief to working families." He cruised to reelection.

Not coincidentally, Dick Morris was the first to suggest that mucking around with Medicare would mean trouble for the Democrats. He knows what he's talking about, and in September he wrote:

The Democratic Party, led by Obama, is systematically converting the elderly vote into a Republican bastion. The work of FDR in passing Social Security in 1937 and of LBJ in enacting Medicare in 1965 is being undone by the president's healthcare program. The elderly see [Obama's] proposals for what they are: a massive redistribution of healthcare away from the elderly and toward a population that is younger, healthier and richer but happens, at the moment, to lack insurance. (Remember that the uninsured are, by definition, not elderly, not young and not in poverty - and if they are, they are currently eligible for Medicare, Medicaid or SCHIP and do not need the Obama program.) The elderly see the $500 billion projected cut in Medicare through the same lens as they viewed Gingrich's efforts to slice the growth in the program in the mid-1990s. [Emphasis Mine]

Why are Obama, Pelosi, and Reid doing this? How could they be so foolish as to repeat the most egregious mistake of the Republicans of the 104th Congress? Why are they forcing their vulnerable members to vote on a bill that would cut Medicare in this fashion? Do they dislike their moderate colleagues? Do they find the chore of being the majority party too burdensome? Have they simply gone mad?

If you are looking for a good snapshot of where President Obama's job approval is right now, you cannot do better than the RealClearPolitics average. It's intuitive, straightforward, and indispensable.

Another way to look at Obama's job approval is to examine the trend line for each pollster. This can offer a way to control for their "house effects." The following chart does that by looking at the monthly average of eight major media pollsters (Fox, CBS, CNN, Ipsos, Pew, NBC, ABC, and AP).

A few observations are in order:

1. By separating the pollsters from one another, we can see the various house effects. For instance, CBS and ABC are the most favorable polls to Obama while Fox and NBC tend to be the least. AP and CNN are the "bounciest." Some months, they are above the average. Other months, they are below.

2. Obama's job approval slid precipitously from July through August. This coincides with the heating up of the health care debate. This trajectory is consistent across all eight pollsters.

3. The President rebounded a bit from his August/September lows, but he is now at or near his lowest point in all of the polls except the (bouncy) AP poll, which had him much lower in September than the other polls. This chart makes that clear:

4. The polls generally find Obama's overall job approval higher than his approval on various issues. For instance, these are the results of the latest ABC News/WaPo poll:

One can't help but wonder if a legislative success on the health care package will result in a further decline in the President's job approval rating.

5. What will be interesting to watch next year is whether the President's job approval slides further as the campaign begins in earnest. Will the Republican argument against Obama and the Democrats - once it hits the airwaves - damage the President's standing further? It is possible. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton both suffered about 8-point declines in their job approval ratings from January to November of their first midterm years. [Obama is about where both Presidents were at this point in their terms, a little behind Reagan and a bit ahead of Clinton.] George W. Bush's net approval dropped 36 points in 2002; of course, it was very high after 9/11. Also regarding Bush 43, when the Democratic campaign against him heated up in early 2004, his net job approval slid 13 points from the first of the year to the beginning of the summer.

Will the Republican argument against Obama push some voters who disapprove of Obama on specific issues into overall disapproval? Will it push some of those marginal approvers into disapprove/don't know?

This weekend my wife and I went to my in-laws to play pinochle. I play on my mother-in-law's team, and after she pulled double aces, we decided to call it a night. As it usually does, the conversation turned to politics, and then to the health care debate.

Both of my in-laws are swing voters. They were skeptical of Obama last year, but finally voted for him after the financial collapse in September, 2008. "Time for a change," they explained to my wife. So, I was interested in their views. They expressed great skepticism of the reform efforts, and freely admitted that they don't know what's in these bills. "Nobody knows what's in them!" my father-in-law said emphatically at one point. Health care is a major issue for them, but neither of them seemed to have faith that the Democratic offerings would solve any of the nation's health care problems, about which they know a great deal.

This got me thinking, not only about the health care debate - but also the ebbs-and-flow of electoral politics. Partisans on both sides like to make much of the last election that favored them, while ignoring the others that didn't favor them. For many Democrats, 2008 was the definitive election. 2004? An outlier, an aberration, something to be cast aside in the Age of Obama. Just as many Republicans made the same mistake in 2004, happily overlooking returns from 1992 through 2000 when the Democratic presidential candidates won more votes than the Republicans.

But if we take all of those results seriously, how can we make sense of them? Part of it, surely, is that the electorate favors the incumbent party when times are good, and punishes it when times are bad. But I don't think that accounts for everything. Both parties offer a whole menu of policy proposals, and only some of them relate to the management of the economy or issues of war and peace. The country swings back and forth because there are a host of voters - folks like my in-laws - who can at least tolerate the policies of both sides. Why?

The following hypothesis is just that, a hypothesis. But I'll offer it because I think it is intuitively plausible, and hopefully it can generate some good discussion. The Republican Party has historically been, and remains today, the party of business. The Democratic Party has long been the party of those whose interests are not aligned with business - poor farmers in the 19th century, labor unions in the 20th, immigrants, and so on. Today the Democratic Party is aligned with an expansive government, and the Republican Party is not. These attitudes toward government have not been written in stone - instead they have varied according to the needs of the parties' core constituencies. In the 19th century, business generally wanted tariffs - expansive, taxing government! - so the GOP pushed for steep tariffs. Today, business generally likes low taxes, and so the GOP is a low tax party. A similar transformation happened with the Democrats. In his 1832 campaign against Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson, the first Democratic President, demagogued the Bank of the United States, the symbol of intrusive federal government in the early Republic. Yet after the Democrats embraced the idea that the government could be mobilized to support social welfare, it began to advocate a more expansive role for the feds.

This has resulted in the fundamental political divide of the day: business or government. This is an oversimplification in some respects, but I would maintain that a choice between the two parties is often a choice between which entity you distrust more at the time of the election: big business or big government. Perhaps this helps explain the peculiar American tradition of swing voting.

My in-laws are a good case in point. They don't like big business. They think big business is happy to sacrifice a fair wage for profit, and that the government needs to do what it takes to rein it in. They often remark negatively upon the massive bonuses the Wall Street execs have pulled in while average Americans have taken it on the chin. They often criticize Wal-Mart for its failure to provide health care for many of their employees. But they also don't care much for big government, either! They don't view the government as being particularly effective or efficient, and they do not want its role in their health care to increase. They don't see the Congress or the President representing the interests of the people very well, so they aren't terribly thrilled with the big government proposals that these branches have produced.

The Democrats are stuck in a rut because of this health care debate, even after the back-to-back thumpings they delivered to the GOP. Maybe this is why. After all, a vote against the business party is not necessarily a vote for the policies of the government party. The public can want the government to stop letting business interfere in their affairs without wanting the government to start interfering! They can - and do - distrust both big business and big government. I don't think the Democrats - or at least a lot of their leaders who run the show in Washington, D.C. these days - really thought of it that way when they were formulating their legislative agenda last winter. Maybe that is what has caused them to lose so much political momentum so quickly.

Maybe not. I'll say this, though: if the Democrats keep on the path they're on, I expect my in-laws to swing back the other way next time around.

So, you've decided to become the leader of a big political party. Only one problem: it's too big! What to do?

Well, you've come to the right place. Here at the Horse Race Blog, we've developed a three-step guide to making that broad party a little more...narrow. Just follow these simple instructions and your majority party will be smaller and a little easier to handle in no time!

***

Step 1: Participate in a bitterly divisive nomination battle against a prominent opponent, making sure that you only win certain factions within the party. Leave your opponent to win other factions, even down to the very last contest. If possible, make condescending remarks about how bitter, clingy, and xenophobic some of those other factions in your own party are. This will ensure that they remain perpetually skeptical of your administration.

Having won the nomination, make no serious effort to unite this divided and fractured party. Do not nominate for vice-president somebody who is a prominent member of the opposing faction. For instance, if you're a Northern/urban candidate looking to alienate Southern/rural members of your party - make sure that the well-regarded governor of Tennessee does not find his way onto the ticket. Also, no unity tickets. Make your primary opponent swallow hard and endorse you, then give the veep nomination to somebody else.

If you complete Step 1 perfectly, you should see early signs of success. Namely, lifelong members of your party will vote for the opposition, perhaps for the first time ever. If they do this in an election that you win decisively anyway, all the better. That's how you know you're off to a good start.

Step 2: Design your cabinet so that there are few (if any) prominent members of the opposing faction installed in any important posts. If you followed Step 1 perfectly, it means your primary opponent is still out in the cold. You might have to nominate her to a prominent spot. That's less than ideal, but it is understandable. However, make no additional gestures to those other factions in the party.

That popular governor from Tennessee? He should be nowhere to be found. That senior statesmen from Georgia? Again, nowhere. How about that bipartisan bridge-builder from Louisiana? I don't know where he is, but he better not be at your cabinet meetings. After all, what you don't want are those hard feelings being softened because of the composition of your government.

Also, think big. It's important to be as broadly dismissive as possible. For instance, your cabinet should not only sample almost exclusively from the North, it should also draw heavily from urban areas. Bottom line: don't think one-dimensionally about your cabinet. It can be used to disgruntle multiple factions in your party at once!

Finally, it's smart to staff your West Wing with as many "hacks" from your campaign as possible. After all, these are the people who helped you split your party into two pieces in your quest to win the nomination. It's a good idea to keep them around, for there is a lot more work on that front left to do!

Step 3: These opposing factions in your party will now be thoroughly frustrated. Good work! It's time to kick it up a notch - by aggressively, relentlessly pursuing a legislative agenda that they obviously can't support.

Ideally, you'll want the leadership in the Congress to be chock full of fellow Northern/urban members. You can't control that yourself, but if you're so lucky as to have leaders equally committed to shrinking the size of your party - you can let them do most of the work. Take a back seat and just exhort them to follow their instincts. They'll know what to do!

Again, think multi-dimensionally. For instance, if the focus is on health care, encourage them to push through a massive expansion of government. That's bound to aggravate the South, which has never been too thrilled about the idea of a big federal government. But also, do not try to stop your urban allies if they push for a "robust" public option, which would be a particularly tough pill for rural members of Congress to swallow.

Other things like a massive government bureaucracy for "cap-and-trade," subsidization of the auto industries, and retaining your predecessor's bailout of (mostly Northern!) banks are all excellent ways to tweak those pesky Jacksonian "friends" of yours! Also, encourage those congressional leaders to help you blow a huge hole in the deficit, so that those Southern deficit hawks know that there's a new sheriff in town.

Ultimately, what you want are not simply defections for the major bills, but also defections on small ball procedural matters. That's a sign that your rank-and-file "allies" have realized that your legislative program is so unpopular in their districts that they must oppose you on every vote. Voting against the rule is halfway to joining the opposition, which means you're halfway to your goal!

***

Following these steps to the letter will ensure a nicely divided party heading into the midterm elections. Of course, the mainstream media will not notice this, as they will be obsessing over the comparatively insignificant divisions in the opposition. But take heart! You have now finished the hard work necessary for long term success: a smaller political party that is less able to build a majority coalition in years to come. Congratulations!

That's what you wanted, right?

There are a lot of absurd post-election memes floating around out there. For instance, I've seen people suggest that NY-23 has national implications, but the GOP takeover of the NJ governor's race and its running of the tables in VA (winning all three statewide races and extending its majority in the House of Delegates) were purely local. That one makes me chuckle. If there was an Olympic medal to be had for pretzel logic, it would probably win the silver.

But not the gold. The gold must go to the ridiculous notion that the GOP is in so much trouble because it is divided, as evidenced by the results in NY-23. Never mind the fact that the party came together in New Jersey and Virginia. No: the divisions in a district that saw just 135,000 votes cast is a sign that the GOP is divided.

I think this is ultimately a faulty argument, but I can see how one would make it (kind of). The reason it gets the gold is not by an error of commission, but of omission. For, the GOP's divisions - whatever they may be - are utterly, totally dwarfed by the continuing divisions in the Democratic Party. Not only in scale, but in significance. Republicans might be divided over the symbolic role of Sarah Palin in the party, but Democrats are divided over what to do about health care.

Consider: three Democratic House committee chairs have committed to vote against Pelosi's bill on Saturday: Bart Gordon of Tennessee (Science), Colin Peterson of Minnesota (Agriculture), and Ike Skelton of Missouri (Armed Services).

Consider: up to 30 House Blue Dogs are considering voting no.

Consider: they're still going to lose at least a few pro-life Democrats on the vote, even if they adopt the compromise language proposed by Brad Ellsworth.

Consider: the House has decided to punt on the issue of immigration reform in the bill, knowing full well it will explode the fragile coalition they are putting together. Here's Politico:

And gone, for the moment, is an immigration fight that threatened to derail the entire bill when Hispanic lawmakers protested a move to include Senate verification language that would bar illegal immigrants from purchasing insurance through the exchanges.

That fight, like the one over biofuels, will be waged on another day, in a showdown with the Senate over just about everything else in the bill. For now, it seems Speaker Nancy Pelosi has finally exhausted enough of her weary troops into the "yes" position.

And lest you think that the House Hispanic Caucus is kidding around, consider the following from The Hill:

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus was also weighing its options on what to do about a push by some vulnerable centrist members to block illegal immigrants from being able to buy insurance on the bill's "exchanges," even with no subsidy.

Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) said he "would have a hard time voting for" a bill or procedural measure that did that.

"I'm tired of feeding hatred and bigotry," Gutierrez said.

He's talking about "feeding hatred and bigotry" on the Democratic side of the aisle. Remember, no Republicans are involved in the House process!

This does not even get into the tensions between the House and Senate. As significant as the tensions within the House are, I still expect Pelosi to get to 218 on her bill. The real fireworks will come if/when they get around to merging the bills (assuming that Reid can produce something that get can to 60 votes in his own chamber...substantially more difficult than Pelosi's task). After all, it was John Conyers, the Democratic Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, who once said that the Democrats were "in trouble" because of Max Baucus, the Democratic Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. Senate Finance's product, incidentally, is well liked by the Blue Dogs, who want the final product to be more like it. But then again Raul Grijalva's reaction to it was that it did not have "legitimacy." He's the co-chair of the House Progressive Caucus.

But divisions are a Republican problem this week! Yep.

So, congratulations to all of you pundits spinning the NY-23 race as a sign of the crippling divisions within the GOP. I cannot offer you an actual Gold Medal in Pretzel Logic, but perhaps I'll offer you a complimentary copy of this 1974 classic from Becker and Fagan:

The following points are what we know for certain:

1. The voters of Virginia declared a preference for Bob McDonnell over Creigh Deeds.

2. The voters of New Jersey declared a preference for Chris Christie over Jon Corzine.

3. The voters of New York's Twenty-Third Congressional District declared a preference for Bill Owens over Doug Hoffman.

And that's it. Anything else is reading between the lines, and subject to the haziness that necessarily goes along with such an endeavor.

As the great political scientist, E.E. Schattschneider, once famously said (and I'm paraphrasing here): the voters are a sovereign with a vocabulary of just two words, yes and no; moreover, they can only speak when spoken to. Reflecting on this insight over the years, I have found it to be one of the most profound lessons for understanding American elections.

The nature of our electoral system is such that voters are given a very limited role in the process of governance. With the exception of ballot initiatives, they do not get to sound off on specific issues. And, when it comes to elections for office, they only get to register their preferences for a candidate. They do not get to indicate what they liked about their candidate, what issues motivated them, what problems are worrying them, and so on. The exit polls provide us with some insight on their motivations, but they remain fundamentally obscured.

If the voice of the people is limited, our interpretation of what they have said must rest heavily on our filling in the many gaps. That can be a tricky endeavor - for we're always inclined to fill in those gaps with our own voice, interpreting electoral returns in a way consistent with our own ideological dispositions. That can sometimes cause trouble.

A great case in point comes from Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Like most of America's successful presidents - Roosevelt had keen democratic instincts. He knew how to build a winning political coalition, and more importantly he knew how to hold it together. He won a big victory in the 1932 election, which he took as a mandate to initiate the New Deal. The voters agreed. They gave him even more congressional Democrats in the 1934 midterm, which he took as a mandate to expand the New Deal to include items like Social Security. Again, the voters agreed. When he stood for reelection in 1936, he won a resounding victory.

This is the point at which the story of the Squire of Hyde Park takes a turn. Historians shift from praising him to criticizing him. He took his resounding victory in '36 as a mandate to do several things, including cutting spending, purging New Deal opponents from the Democratic Party, and packing the Supreme Court. But, as it turned out, that is not what the public wanted - and they turned on Roosevelt in the 1938 midterms, sending nearly 100 Republicans to the House of Representatives and leaving his majority there entirely dependent upon Southern Democrats.

Viewed in hindsight, it's easy to be critical of Roosevelt, as many historians are. But when we examine matters from his perspective, it gets more difficult to blame old FDR. After all, he took his previous victories - in '32 and '34 - as mandates to promote big changes in the structure of the government. And he was right! So, what is so ridiculous about the proposition that '36 gave him leave to alter the Supreme Court? More generally, why were '32 and '34 mandates for what FDR wanted, but '36 was not? Judged solely by the votes themselves, we'd have to conclude that '36 was his largest victory to date, and thus perhaps his broadest mandate yet. But, as it turned out, that's not what it was at all.

This points to the difficulty in scrutinizing electoral returns for deeper meaning. I'm not saying it is impossible. It is possible. I do it myself from time to time. But it's a very difficult task because - as I noted above - the voice of the electorate is so very constrained. You have to fill in the blank notes for yourself - and if a maestro like Roosevelt could have so much trouble with that...what hope do the rest of us have?

Personally, I'm a big believer in a humble, narrow interpretation of election returns. On a purely political level, I think a politician is better served by under-interpreting his mandate than by over-interpreting it. It's true sometimes they mean big things - 1860 and 1896 come instantly to mind. But other times they don't mean much of anything. In the earlier part of this year, I argued strenuously that many Democrats were wildly over-interpreting Barack Obama's election in 2008. I disagreed when they pronounced it to be the dramatic inauguration of the new, permanent Democratic majority. My attitude then, as now, is that this is inconsistent with a fair and broad read of electoral history, the party system, and the general mood of the public. So, my narrow interpretation of last night is that the results we saw are in tension with that permanent majority hypothesis - and that they are more consistent with the alternative theory of continuing, robust competition between the two parties.

Was last night a "message" to Barack Obama? Maybe yes. Maybe no. I have my suspicions, but ultimately I'm not sure because he was not on the ballot anywhere. I think last night can be understood as a cautionary tale for the President - and here I would point to the case of New Jersey. Times are tough in the United States of America. And Corzine's defeat should remind us that when politicians get the blame for tough times - no amount of campaigning, spending, union organizing, or anything of the sort can spare them from the wrath of the voters, even in a state that is highly partial to their side of the aisle. Jon Corzine got the blame for the tough times in New Jersey, and that meant an end to his political career. If Barack Obama ends up getting blamed for these tough times - no number of rallies, campaign dollars, magnificent speeches in filled-to-capacity stadiums, or optimistic slogans will keep him in the White House.

A large portion of the country is now prepared to assign blame to him, in some form or another. The RealClearPolitics average shows a large minority - 44% - registering disapproval of the President's handling of the job. That is not just the conservative base of the GOP. It is larger than that, and that number could grow over the next year. The lesson from last night, I think, is that Jon Corzine won roughly the share of voters who approve of the job he was doing - and his opponents won those who disapproved. The same fate awaits Barack Obama. He'll be judged on how well he governs - and if the country deems him to have done an insufficient job, all the politicking between now and the end of time will not do a thing for him.

Wow. The pundit class is in full swing, interpreting the meaning of NY-23. "What's it say about Obama's administration?" "What's it say about the state of the Republican Party?" "What's it say for the upcoming health care debate?" So many questions. I'll do my best to answer them, each in turn.

Nothing, nothing, and nothing!

I'm sorry to disappoint (I'm not sorry!). I know we're all excited to have a dramatic election to ponder - so I hate to be the party pooper (I relish being the party pooper!). No doubt the twists and turns have been dramatic. But sometimes drama has a deeper meaning - like in Hamlet. And sometimes it doesn't - like in the Young and the Restless.

This is the Young and the Restless. There are few, if any, broader inferences to draw from this race about the national political climate.

Here are five reasons why:

(1) Dede Scozzafava was selected by the Republican Party in an extraordinary way. This should pour a bucket of cold water on the idea that there is some internal revolution happening in the Republican Party. Most Republican nominees have to go through a primary process in which the "base" evaluates candidates. This did not happen, and that created two big problems: (a) a candidate too moderate for the Republican base was chosen (b) in a process that does not have the legitimacy that primary elections have. If Scozzafava had to compete in a primary, she either would have lost (most likely scenario) or, had she won (less likely), she would have been able to claim a legitimacy that she could not claim. Because most party nominees are chosen by primaries, it means you cannot extrapolate from NY-23 to the broader party.

(2) Dede Scozzafava was a TERRIBLE candidate. Her people called the cops on John McCormack. Seriously. She held a press conference in front of Doug Hoffman's campaign office, and enabled the Conservative Party candidate to produce this lovely bit of free publicity:

Scozzafava didn't drop out only because Hoffman was on the rise. She dropped out because she was running out of money. I wonder why. Suppose you're a donor to Scozzafava. You're a Snowe-Collins-Specter type Republican, convinced that you're the future of the party and so on and so forth. Still, your money is as hard earned as any buck held by a tea-partier. Are you going to give it to this woman? I doubt it. That's what we call chasing good money after bad.

If Dede Scozzafava was a substantially worse candidate than your average Republican nominee in a competitive race - and she clearly was - then we cannot generalize from her fate to the fate of Snowe-Collins-Specter type nominees.

Incidentally, I don't know why pundits are so obsessed with northeastern Republicans. Hasn't anybody noticed how many seats from the South the GOP has picked up in the last 20 years? That seems to me to be an extraordinarily beneficial tradeoff for the Grand Old Party. The Northeast has been shedding seats decade after decade. In the last thirty years, the Mid-Atlantic region has lost 18 seats. And they're going South - Florida and Texas have picked up 18 seats in the last 30 years. If, in 1976, the Ghost of William McKinley (the quintessential Republican) had been offered the following deal: "Decline in the Northeast but rise in the South, or stay the same in both regions"...wouldn't he have taken the swap? Maybe not at first - but after the Ghost of Mark Hanna had told him all about the upcoming demographic changes in both regions - I bet he would!

Relatedly, it seems to me that the Republican Party - being a party that stretches across all regions of the country - should weigh its attention according to population. And, in that kind of analysis, more focus should be dedicated to fielding good candidates in the Midwest and especially the South than in the Northeast. That's where the most potential pickups for the GOP are. So why so much attention given to the Northeast? (Partial answer: Most people encouraging the GOP to focus on the Northeast rarely if ever vote Republican. E.g. David Axelrod's recent advice for how the Republican Party can build a majority. But that's a column for another day!)

(3) New York has long-standing third party options. One purpose of the New York Conservative Party is to act as a check on the Republican Party. Most states do not have this, and if this race had occurred in, say, Pennsylvania - where there is no such third party - Hoffman would not have had the kind of opportunity he found in the Conservative Party.

This makes a big difference. This was a real three-way race because New York has real third parties. Most states don't. Again, this makes it really hard to generalize from NY-23 to the rest of the country.

(4) Turnout could be really, really low. The NY-20 special election had about 160,000 people vote in it. Compare that to the more than 287,000 who voted in the general election in NY-20 in 2008. The special had just 57% of the turnout that the general had. This makes a huge difference.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that turnout in NY-23 will be 57% of what it was in the 2008 general. That would put it at about 125,000, meaning that you'd need 62,501 votes to win a majority. I'll posit that there are this many potential Hoffman votes in the district and this many potential Owens votes, too! What matters is who actually comes out to vote. That's the dominant factor in low-turnout special elections.

This matters to some extent in general elections, but not nearly as much. Accordingly, it is very difficult to generalize from a special election result to the sentiment of the entire district, let alone the country at large!

(5) The 2010 midterms are a year away. I'll make two observations about many of the pundits tut-tutting about NY-23:

(a) They'll admit that a year is a "lifetime" in politics, but this only ever serves as a C/Y/A cliché rather than a fundamental truth that informs their analysis.

(b) They'll have forgotten about NY-23 a year from now.

A year is a long time in American politics. In November, 2008 Barack Obama won the presidency of the United States. A year prior, he was trailing Hillary Clinton badly and under fire from his own supporters for not wasting his money as HRC was. A year before that, few people even knew who he was. In November, 1991 George H.W. Bush's job approval stood at 62%. A year later a folksy governor from Arkansas had unseated him. In November, 1938 Republicans picked up nearly 100 House seats in the midterm election, and FDR looked to be finished. A (little less than a) year later, Germany invaded Poland and the prospect of world war made FDR the center of the political world once again. In November, 1928 Herbert Hoover was elected in the third consecutive Republican landslide in what really looked to be an enduring majority. A year later...well, you get the idea.

***

So, am I interested in the results of NY-23? You bet I am. But I'm a political junkie, and I find this stuff highly entertaining. That doesn't mean that it carries with it any particular meaning. You can be entertained by Hamlet and Y & R, but only one of them means anything.

Fellow junkies, I implore you: let's see this contest for what it is - simple, meaningless entertainment - and stop pontificating on its broader implications!

With all the twists and turns in the race for New York's 23rd Congressional District, it seems like it should mean something, right? You don't have all this drama without some higher purpose, or so the thinking goes. Predictably, pundits have been working overtime to explain the point of this soap opera in Watertown.

For what it's worth, I do not think that a special election - any special election - is a particularly good barometer of the political climate of any place outside the district in question. Factor in low turnout, and sometimes it is hard to argue that it's even a good barometer inside the district. The race in NY-23 is further complicated by a prominent third party candidate. So, I think there are no inferences to draw from this race about national politics. And I think most analysts would essentially agree on that point. Pontificating aside, will anybody update their 2010 predictions based on the outcome in this race?

That being said, I do think there is a lesson to be learned here. It just doesn't have anything to do with the 2010 midterm, Barack Obama, the health care battle, etc. It's not so much a current events lesson as it is a civics lesson. The drama in this race is yet another example of the fundamental truth about the contemporary party organization: it is extraordinarily weak. And I don't mean that the 2010 Republican Party is weak. I'm talking about the whole system: Democrats and Republicans; local, state, and federal; congressional and electoral. Weak, weak, weak!

Consider the circumstances of this three-way, now two-way race. The local Republican Party organization nominated a candidate that the party's core electorate was not prepared to accept. What happened next?

If the party organization was strong, we would have expected the base to swallow hard, respect the power of the organization in this case, and get behind Scozzafava. But since the organization is weak, the base revolted and started migrating to the Hoffman camp.

Predictably, the national and local party organizations stood behind Scozzafava. That's their job, afterall. But as the race drew national attention - strategic politicians with ambitions for higher office began to involve themselves. What happened next?

If the party organization was strong, we would have expected those strategic pols to recognize the dangers of upsetting the powers-that-be in the party machinery, and to back Scozzafava against the base. But since the organization is weak, they started lining up behind Hoffman, one after another. Some of them even "bravely" changed their endorsements after they realized that the base disagreed with their initial decisions!

A unique factor facilitating this turnaround was the Conservative Party, a mainstay of New York politics that helps set the electoral agenda in the state. In this case it gave disaffected Republicans an easy outlet to voice their grievances. Still, when we strip away all the unique features of this particular race, we find a generalizable quality to this contest: the political power of the Republican Party is not really housed in the party organization - not in NY-23, and not really anywhere else. Instead, party power lies in the nexus of party activists/donors, base voters, and ambitious officeholders/candidates. As the events in NY-23 have made pretty clear, the party organizations play a limited role in the game of power politics.

In fact, they have been weak for a long time. Progressives took the general right to nominate party candidates away from them. The New Deal and good government reforms stripped them of most of their patronage. So nowadays, party bosses don't really have the power to boss anybody around. They have no carrots and no sticks. That's not a good recipe for a 21st century Boss Tweed!

The drama in NY-23 shows just how weak today's party organizations are. Quirkily enough, the local party had the technical power to nominate a candidate without a primary. However, while there wasn't a de jure primary here - the base's response to Scozzafava was tantamount to a de facto primary. Party leaders like Sarah Palin and Tim Pawlenty were quick to "certify" those results because they have national ambitions that will ultimately require the support of those same base voters. And that was it for Scozzafava, the choice of the local party organization.

As I have argued many times on this blog, contemporary party organizations - from the Republican National Committee all the way down - really have just one job: to launder money to cash-strapped candidates who must spend massive amounts of dollars in a campaign finance environment governed by restrictive laws like the FECA and the BCRA. Once these organizations step beyond this role - and especially when they go against the mass of voters who constitute the party base - they have virtually no authority.

This party impotence extends from the very top and travels all the way down to the local level. At the top, the victorious President gets to redesign his national committee in his own image. Congressional party leaders have no power whatsoever to remove defectors from their seats. In actuality, they'll funnel as much money as possible to defectors who are in electoral trouble. And state and local parties? If the withdrawal of Scozzafava isn't evidence enough of just how little power they actually have, I'll put it this way. Most of you reading this are greatly interested in politics. A lot of you probably contribute dollars and maybe even time to your favorite candidates. To you, I'd ask: how much money and time have you contributed to your state and local parties?

Last week I argued that question wording might be influencing polling outcomes on the public option - generally skewing the results closer to the Democratic side of the ledger because of contested buzzwords like "choice," "competition," and "option."

I noted at the time that the best way to test this theory was via an apples-to-apples scenario in which we can hold the pollster, the methodology, and the time of the poll constant. That's why I thought the Rasmussen results were significant: Rasmussen changed the wording of questions on the public option and found markedly different results.

The new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, conducted by Hart/McInturff, gives us another such opportunity. They split their sample into two groups (A and B), and ask each subsample a different version of a public option question.

Here's the first version, asked of subsample A.

This is your typically tilted question. The idea of a "choice" is referenced - again, Republicans would hotly dispute this. In this specific wording, respondents are asked how they feel about "(giving) people a choice," forcing opponents of the public option to play the part of Ebenezer Scrooge. Unsurprisingly, this wording produces some good results for public option advocates. Another potential factor driving these results: opponents of the public option might not have a category to register their opposition here. Can they say "not at all important?" Perhaps, but does that accurately reflect their views? A lot of opponents of the public option think it is quite an important issue.

Here's the second version of the public option question, asked of subsample B.

This one is less tilted to the Democratic side, although Republicans would still dispute the idea that a health care marketplace with a public option will actually generate competition. Still, the removal of the highly loaded phrase "(giving) people a choice" makes this less tilted overall - also, this time people have an opportunity to register support or opposition. And notice the big change. A majority of respondents are either uncertain or in opposition.

So, this is another apples-to-apples comparison. As with Rasmussen, NBC/WSJ finds that changes in question wording on the public option can produce big changes in the poll results.

Howard Fineman is perplexed:

[T]the pursuit of Snowe is pretty close to obsessive, which is not a good thing either for Democrats or for the prospects of health-care reform worthy of the name. First, Snowe's exaggerated prominence is both the result and symbol of Obama's quixotic and ultimately time--wasting pursuit of "bipartisanship." In case the White House hasn't noticed, Republicans in Congress are engaged in what amounts to a sitdown strike. They don't like anything about Obama or his policies; they have no interest in seeing him succeed. Despite the occasional protestation to the contrary, the GOP has no intention of helping him pass any legislation. Snowe may very well end up voting for whatever she and Democrats craft, but that won't make the outcome bipartisan any more than dancing shoes made Tom DeLay Fred Astaire.

First of all, let's clear away some of the underbrush - namely the prickly things Fineman has to say about Republicans. If a health care bill contains: (a) an individual mandate; (b) an employer mandate; (c) plenty of new tax increases; (d) no tort reform; (e) few of the substantive ideas Republicans have been pushing for a while; (f) potentially a government-run insurance program - is it any surprise that almost all Republicans are opposed to it? Isn't that what makes a Republican a Republican? This reads to me like another critique blasting Republicans for not being...Democrats.

Anyway, I have some thoughts on what might account for the White House's "obsessive" pursuit of Snowe. Last week I posited that perhaps it was because Lieberman has already signaled his intention to vote nay, but the latest news on the "Independent Democrat" from Connecticut is that he might vote for cloture then against the bill. If that's true, then Snowe would not be the 60th vote.

Here's an alternative explanation. Below is a look at the ideological scores of key Senate moderates, by two different metrics: their DW-Nominate scores from the 110th Congress and their National Journal "Percent Conservative on Economic Policy" scores on economic policy from the 110th Congress.

The DW-Nominate scores typically run from -1 (liberal) to 1 (conservative). The NJ scores are pretty self-explanatory. You can really appreciate the ideological polarization inherent to Congress here by looking at the DW-Nominate gap between, say, Lisa Murkowski and Evan Bayh. There is a big gulf here, which helps explain that - contrary to Mr. Fineman's analysis - the GOP is in opposition not because they "have no interest in seeing him succeed," but because there is a huge ideological divide between Democratic party leadership, and even the most moderate members of the GOP caucus. If the lack of bipartisanship is due to the fact that Republicans have become more conservative, it's also due to the fact that Democrats have become more liberal.

But notice those peculiar members right smack dab in the center: Collins, Snowe, and Nelson. In actuality, each of them is closer to one another than they are to their fellow partisans. Collins, Snowe, Nelson, and Specter (before he jumped ship) are almost like a third party in Congress: the hyper-moderate party.

So, here's a two-part explanation for why Snowe is being wooed so aggressively. One: Collins, Snowe, Nelson are essentially identical on the ideological scale; accordingly, if one of them supports the bill, the others might follow suit. Two: Snowe voted for the bill in the Senate Finance Committee; if she eventually bails, that could be sufficient to scare Nelson off.

My intuition is that if a final reform bill can get 60 votes, it should actually get 62 votes because of these three hyper-moderates. However, if Snowe switches from a yay to a nay, that could be sufficient to ward the other two off.

Bottom line: on an ideological level, it might be fair to say that there are three factions in the Senate: liberals, conservatives, and this small group of moderates. It's not enough for Democrats simply to unite the liberals. They also have to find a way to include at least one of these moderates. On the stimulus bill, these moderates were a package deal. They might be again, in which case it makes sense to court Olympia Snowe, the one moderate of the three who participated in the committee process.

A few weeks ago, I made this point about understanding what's really happening in the health care debate:

One of the problems with writing about Congressional policymaking as it happens is that a lot of the real meaty stuff happens behind closed doors, and leaders who give "progress reports" do not have an incentive to offer accurate assessments. Instead, they are better off giving overly bullish reports, i.e. spin. So, here is the trouble I find myself in. I suspect that most of the members who speak to the press are trying to spin me. I also do not trust the journalists producing the news stories that serve as my primary data set. I do not think they can differentiate the spin from the reality - and in fairness to them, I do not see how they could. So, like Descartes, I am in quite the epistemological quandary here. But unlike old René, I do not have an insightful axiom like "I think therefore I am" to build knowledge upon.

I am usually very hesitant to quote myself, but I wanted to bring this point back because it is really salient. Scanning across the major insider Washington publications this afternoon - I noted these headlines:

What's the status of the public option in the House?
-Politico: "Pelosi lacks votes for most sweeping public option"
-The Hill: "Pelosi calls an emergency meeting on push for 'robust' public option"
-Roll Call: "Pelosi Still Pushing for 'Robust' Public Option"
-Politico (again): Pelosi publicly whipping on robust public option

What does Obama think about the public option?
-Roll Call: "Obama Expresses Skepticism to Senators on Public Option"
-The Hill: "Obama working on getting Senate votes for public option"

Remember, all of this is happening after we thought the public option was dead but now it's back...AND after we thought Obama was abandoning the public option but then he gave it a solid endorsement in his September address to Congress.

Also, will moderate Democrats vote on cloture for a bill they disagree with?
-The Hill suggests maybe so.
-Congress Daily suggests maybe not.

This is like a merry-go-round. Around and around we go. The reason? All of this is happening behind closed doors, and public access to the debate is highly constricted. These journalists are doing good work getting as much information as possible out of Democratic leaders, but so long as the debate remains behind closed doors, we just can't be sure about what will be in the final House and Senate bills.

Something similar happened with Senate Finance over the summer. They were making good work, making good work, making goo..and then the whole thing collapsed. You just never know when legislators are meeting secretly and our source of information are press reports.

-Jay Cost

Progressives in the blogosphere and the halls of Congress are pushing for the so-called "public option." One of their major arguments is that the public wants it.

But does it?

From a certain perspective, the public option polls very well. Let's look at some of the polls on this in the current RCP average of Obama's job approval, being careful to note question wording.

Here's ABC News/Washington Post:

Here's Marist:

Here's CBS News/New York Times:

Here's CNN:

Case closed, right?

Not exactly.

In the aggregate, the polls present a very mixed picture. These numbers are good for reform efforts, but other numbers are bad. For instance:

-Respondents don't generally approve of the reform bills. In some polls, a majority disapproves.

- Respondents give mixed marks to Obama for his handling of the issue.

-Respondents strongly disapprove of the job Congress is doing with health care.

-Only a small portion of respondents believes they will actually be helped by the health care reform proposals.

-All in all, since the health care debate really heated up in July, Obama's job approval has dropped in the RCP Average from about 59% to 52%. His disapproval rating has gone from about 34% to 43%

How can we reconcile these gloomy numbers with the sunny results on the public option?

It might be due to the public's lack of information. I'm sure that the average polling respondent is paying some attention to the health care debate, but she is paying much less attention than political junkies. This will limit the amount of information she actually has in her mental filing cabinet. So, the crucial question is: even if she has absorbed some pro- and anti-reform arguments, does she have enough information to relate them to specific reform proposals? Color me skeptical on that one. I think your average respondent - even with some general opinions on reform - will have a hard time using those broad considerations to evaluate items like the individual mandate, guaranteed issue, community rating, and...wait for it!...the public option.

So, asking about specific proposals might be taking the conversation too far into the woods for the average respondent - and she is going to have a hard time recalling a relevant piece of information upon which to base a response. Instead, she might use the question itself as a basis for her answer. It follows that the information or perspective given in the question could make her more or less partial to the proposal under consideration.

And the pollsters are frequently providing information that is partial to the Democratic side of the ledger. As Kellyanne Conway argues:

Asking an under-informed public in a poll about "public option" is incomplete. It calls for a response to feel-good phraseology rather than a probing of underlying ideology. "Public option" in health care is not so different from "campaign finance reform," "Violence Against Women's Act," "revenue enhancements" or for that matter, "world peace' and "no rain this Saturday."

The pollsters are using plenty of "feel-good phraseology." ABC News/WaPo presents the idea that the government insurance plan would "compete" with private insurance plans. This is a contested notion, as Republicans think that the public option will drive private insurance away.

Marist uses the phrase "public option," which has become the conventional term for this insurance reform - but is nevertheless an intentionally constructed phrase designed to garner maximum public support. "Government-run health care" is foreboding, but "public option" is inviting.

CNN uses the phrases "public health insurance option" and "compete."

CBS News/NY Times specifically relates the public option to Medicare, a program that is so popular that Democrats are now thinking about reframing their pitch for the public option as merely an extension of Medicare to all. I wonder if they got that idea from CBS News/NY Times!

If the theory that question wording is playing a role is correct, then altering the wording should induce a change in the results. So, what happens when information less partial to the Democratic side is introduced? To start answering this question, let's consider the Gallup results, which are decidedly less bullish on the public option:

Like ABC News/WaPo, Gallup uses the Democratic buzzword "compete." However, Gallup also uses a Republican buzzword: "government-run." This is opposed to the weaker formulation - "government administered" - offered by CBS News/New York Times and CNN. With this more balanced choice of words, Gallup finds a roughly even split. I would not call this definitive evidence, but it suggests that we might be on the right track.

Let's take a look at Rasmussen. He has offered a series of really interesting questions on health care. First, he gives a basic version of the question that ABC News/WaPo, CBS News/NY Times, Marist, and CNN asked:

Would you favor or oppose the creation of a government-sponsored non-profit health insurance option that people could choose instead of a private health insurance plan?

That gets strong approval, as per usual when people hear words like "choose," "compete," and "option."

Then Rasmussen asks this follow up:

Suppose that the creation of a government-sponsored non-profit health insurance option encouraged companies to drop private health insurance coverage for their workers. Workers would then be covered by the government option. Would you favor or oppose the creation of a government-sponsored non-profit health insurance option if it encouraged companies to drop private health insurance coverage for their workers?

What happens when this Republican argument is substituted for the Democratic argument? Support for the public option plummets dramatically. Nearly 3/5ths of all respondents voiced opposition to the public option when it was phrased in this way.

Additionally, Rasmussen asked whether respondents thought the public option would save taxpayers money (they didn't), whether they thought it would offer better health insurance than private insurance (again, no), and whether people preferred to have a public option or a guarantee that nobody will lose their current coverage (the guarantee won in a landslide).

These results are very consequential. After all, Rasmussen is holding a lot of factors constant, enabling us to observe: same poll + same methodology + different frame for the question = different answer. That strongly suggests that the frame used for the public option question goes a long way in determining the answer the public gives.

So, does this mean that the public is actually against the public option? I'd say no. Instead, I would suggest that the public lacks sufficient information about that specific item to deliver a firm opinion. Accordingly, its opinion varies depending upon question wording, priming effects, the ebbs and flows of the news cycle, and so on.

Ezra Klein had an interesting read on the health care negotiations taking place in the Senate. Noting that Olympia Snowe is now one of the few participants in the high-level talks, Klein hypothesizes:

Democrats really want this bill to be bipartisan -- to the point that they're giving the Republican a space in the negotiations equivalent to the chairmen of the two relevant committees. Indeed, I wouldn't be shocked if this perk had been negotiated in advance of Snowe's vote yesterday.

This shifts the room's balance of power substantially: The negotiations were previously confined to one liberal Democrat and one centrist Democrat. Now they'll be between one liberal Democrat, one centrist Democrat, and one moderate Republican. In practice, this is likely to mean that Baucus will have something of a trump card against Dodd. If there's a particularly thorny dispute, and Snowe weighs in strongly alongside Baucus, it's hard to imagine Reid siding with Dodd, except in the most extraordinary of cases.

This is a distinct possibility. Given the importance attached to bipartisanship, can they exclude her even if they wanted to? How would it look if they told their sole Republican supporter to take a walk?

Of course, we cannot know for sure why Snowe is involved, given the secrecy of these closed door negotiations. I'd raise another possibility that I think is worth considering. It is not incompatible with Klein's suggestion - and I offer it speculatively because nobody outside the Senate knows anything for sure.

Let's assume that the Democrats have decided not to pursue reconciliation (at least not yet), and they are looking for a 60-vote coalition in the Senate. In that situation, you'd want the chamber's marginal legislator in the talks. He/she is the 60th vote, the one to break a Republican filibuster. By definition, if the marginal legislator supports the final product, the final product passes. At first blush, having Snowe in the room makes no sense. To get past a filibuster, all you need are the 60 Democrats. Wouldn't somebody like Ben Nelson or Blanche Lincoln be the marginal legislator? Snowe would presumably be the 61st legislator, thus making her vote nice for appearances but not crucial. Right?

Not necessarily. I'd note with interest this video snippet that has been making the rounds.

If Lieberman is a "no" on the Finance bill, then presumably he'd be a "no" for a more liberal bill produced by melding the Finance bill with the HELP bill. He's already on record as a "no" on the public option, and in this clip he sounds distinctly Republican in his talk of scaling back the size of the reforms.

But why would Lieberman be a "no" to the Finance, HELP, and House bills? After all, he is still a Democrat, even if he qualifies it with the adjective "Independent."

Lieberman will be 70 years old in 2012, the year he is up for reelection. Let's assume he wants another term. What might his electoral calculation be?

Well, you can bet your bottom dollar that the left is going to target him once again. They may or may not be able to field a viable candidate, but Lieberman would be smart to operate under the assumption that they will. Lieberman fended off a challenge from his left flank in 2006, defeating Ned Lamont in the general election by 10%. However, GOP nominee Alan Schlesinger won just 9% of the vote. In fact, 18% of all voters were self-identified Republicans who voted for Lieberman. 14% of all voters were self-identified conservatives who voted for Lieberman. Simply put, Lieberman won that 2006 race in large part because conservative Republicans voted for him, not Schlesinger.

This means that Lieberman now has to win over voters well to the right of his old electoral coalition from when he was a typical Democrat. Losing the support of the left means he must go looking for conservatives, whom he managed to find in sufficient numbers three years ago. So, suppose Lieberman antagonizes conservatives in his home state so much that they get behind a more viable candidate in 2012. That Republican wins 20% of the vote rather than 9%. If the Democratic nominee can replicate Lamont's 39%, Lieberman would lose.

This might explain Lieberman's unequivocal "no" on the Finance bill in the above clip. If he is worried that a vote with Obama on health care will damage him with his right flank, then he has an incentive to oppose the efforts.

The challenge for Lieberman, of course, is that he now has two flanks to keep happy. He has a right flank that could drift over to a Republican, and he still has a left flank that could drift over to somebody like Lamont or Richard Blumenthal. That's the challenge when you are the centrist candidate in a three-way race. Maybe Lieberman's calculation here is that, given the soft support among voters for the reform efforts, his best bet is to endorse reform generally but oppose these bills. Meanwhile, he votes with the Democrats on less divisive issues to lock down his remaining Democratic supporters. In that situation, maybe his Republican backers won't turn on him, and the moderate and Independent-leaning Democrats will not hold his "no" vote on health care against him. The progressives, of course, will continue to hate him - but they're no longer in his coalition.

I'm not saying that this strategy would work. By sitting between the two parties, Lieberman's reelection prospects are highly uncertain, to say the least. It's possible that, when push comes to shove, he just cannot win reelection from this centrist position, no matter how hard he tries. At a minimum, it is fair to say that Lieberman's switch from Democrat to "Independent" Democrat makes him more dependent on conservatives for reelection than he has been in previous cycles. If he is planning to run again in 2012, he has to figure out a way to keep them happy without alienating the moderate Democrats who stuck with him against Lamont. Maybe this is his solution to that tricky problem.

If so, then Olympia Snowe might be indeed the 60th, marginal legislator. That could explain why she is in the room with Harry Reid, Chris Dodd, and Max Baucus.

Like I said, this is speculative. I have used the words "if," "maybe," "perhaps," and "suppose" quite a bit in this post. I just offer this as one theory out of many plausible explanations that could account for what is happening behind the closed doors in the Senate

One of the features of contemporary American politics that I find really interesting is that voters see themselves as ideologues rather than partisans. "I'm a conservative first and a Republican second." Or, "I'm a progressive who happens to affiliate with the Democratic Party!" I take this to be a consequence of America's ambivalence toward the two-party system, which dates back to the Founding.

I think this anti-party sentiment is generally fine. It actually has a lot of benefits. Americans like to see themselves not as factionalists, but as nationalists. The ideologies they subscribe to have a universal character to them. Conservativism and liberalism offer something for everybody. The parties, on the other hand, are factional. They (almost) always have been. I think that helps explain the antipathy toward the parties in the mass public, and the preference among many strong partisans to see themselves as ideologues rather than partisans. It's also a way for them to differentiate themselves from the party caucus in the Congress, which is almost never popular.

Yet this aversion to party politics does have some unfortunate side effects. Conservatives might read National Review, might never miss an installment of the Rush Limbaugh Show, and might dutifully put out the quadrennial Bush/Cheney or McCain/Palin yard sign - but they rarely participate in party politics. The party organizations are not the locus of mass political activity. In decades past, some local and state parties did have that role, but not any more. Instead, today's party organizations are little more than legal money-laundering units that help candidates get around campaign finance laws.

In the last five years, I have noticed a peculiar phenomenon about the national party committees. Twice in a row the out-party's committee seems to have been "captured" by an ambitious politician who seems more interested in making a name for himself rather than doing the nitty-gritty, unglamorous work of laundering money. I think two factors help explain this.

First, the national party organizations remain weak (as they always have been), but state party organizations have been on the decline for some time. They are not a place where partisans meet up and participate in politics. This means that ambitious politicos looking to make a name for themselves are not heading to the state parties, and of course not going to the national organizations. Instead, they look to be congressional aides, White House staffers, or maybe to a spot in a state legislature. Simply put, there is a shallow talent pool.

Second, the party organizations do control quite a lot of money. That's a consequence of federal law - first the Federal Elections Campaign Act (FECA) and now the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA, a.k.a. McCain-Feingold). As is typical with broad laws like these, they are full of unintended side-effects. Combined, these laws make the parties an excellent place for donors with spare dollars to send their cash. Because the Supreme Court struck down provisions of the BCRA, the parties can spend unlimited dollars on behalf of candidates so long as the dollars are "independent" (yeah right!). All of this means that the national committees literally raise hundreds of millions of dollars every cycle.

Combined, these factors provide a strong incentive to ambitious, semi-famous politicians to serve as national committee chairman as a way to stay relevant. These pols might not be able to win elections themselves, but candidates who want to win have to come to them. Plus, the cable networks are always happy to host them - with the absurd implication that they are somehow the "leaders" of their respective parties. Because the talent pool is so shallow in the party organization system, there is not a great deal of competition.

Case in point: Howard Dean. Dean's flame-out in the 2004 primaries was so spectacular that I don't think he had anywhere else to go. So, he ran for chair of the DNC, and served there for four years. Today, Democrats control the White House, all the executive agencies, and both chambers of Congress. Yet why does Howard Dean not have a government job or even a prominent non-governmental agency position? I ask that question rhetorically, for the answer to me is pretty obvious: he did a crap job as DNC Chairman, taking it from the fundraising powerhouse that it was in the Terry McAuliffe years and turning it into the runt of the Democratic litter.

I have suspected for a while that Michael Steele might ultimately fall into the same category. Politically, he was sort of in a dead-end. He had served a brief stint as Lieutenant Governor of Maryland, but then lost a 2006 Senate race to Ben Cardin. He did not have a lot of political opportunities by the time 2009 rolled around, and perhaps that is why he ran for the RNC chair.

His brief tenure to date has only enhanced my suspicions. He talks about expanding the party to blacks and Hispanics. That's a good thing in theory, but it is not the job of the RNC chairman. Worse, the appeal seems to me to be shallow and vain. The party would reach out not by developing new policy proposals to appeal to these voters, but by promoting its new, oh-so-hip chairman, i.e. lots of face time for Michael Steele!

And of course, there are the incredibly foolish things he says. These began to dribble out of his mouth literally as soon as he won the position. Remember this message he delivered to President Obama when he won the chairmanship? "I would say to the new president, congratulations. It is going to be an honor to spar with him...And I would follow that up with: How do you like me now?" The vanity of that line is matched only by its utter stupidity. Actually, the two are intertwined. You'd have to be vain and stupid to think that the President of the United States would ever give a second thought to the chairman of the Republican National Committee. The President probably laughed when he heard that. I sure did.

The gaffes have slowed over the last few months, but they have not stopped. Just recently, he launched a blog called "What Up?" whose inaugural post contained not one, but two grammatical mistakes. Allah over at HotAir blogged about this, and he summed up his assessment with a single guttural noise: groan. That the RNC has since changed Steele's blog name is a sign that either they came to their senses, or somebody who is somebody told them to dump it. Personally, I thought it was incredibly condescending. Steele's strategy for appealing to minority voters includes butchering the English language? What does that say about Steele's opinion of these targeted voters?

Steele's priorities appear to be misplaced, and his erroneous view of what a good chairman does might ultimately manifest itself in FEC reports. So far, he has not done an exemplary job of raising money. Year-to-date, the RNC has pulled in about $51 million dollars in contributions. That is $5 million less than 2007 at this point, $22 million less than 2005, and $19 million less than 2003. The RNC under Steele got off to a very slow start - the February through June '09 reports showed the RNC raising less than the other years every month. The July and September reports were better, but August was still behind. Plus, an important point to remember about 2003 and 2007 is that there were Republican presidential candidates collecting dollars that might otherwise have gone to the RNC. Michael Steele does not have that kind of competition this year. The best comparison in the McCain-Feingold era is 2005, and Steele is well behind.

Above all, the RNC needs to focus on its fundraising infrastructure. It must be ready for the Obama money tsunami that will be crashing ashore in the fall of 2012. If you thought the President raised a lot of money last cycle, you haven't seen anything yet! Also, the party needs to figure out why the Democrats have managed not only to catch up to, but actually exceed, the Republicans in fundraising - this after the banning of soft money, which had historically helped the Democrats. That's a puzzler that should have Republicans - above all Michael Steele - thinking about innovation. This should be happening to the exclusion of guest hosting radio shows, Mr. Chairman!

Republicans should be worried about Michael Steele. I wouldn't press the panic button just yet. The last report was not too bad, so maybe he is turning a corner. Yet all told there are big reasons for concern. If Steele cannot start behaving himself and demonstrate competence in fundraising, Republicans might want to start looking at other places to contribute their dollars. If Steele's RNC cannot accomplish these basic tasks, why should Republicans assume it can spend the money well, either? There are alternative sources for party dollars: the National Republican Congressional Committee for House candidates, the National Republican Senatorial Committee for Senate candidates, and the Republican Governors Association for gubernatorial candidates. I'd note that Democrats did something like this in 2006 and 2008: as the DNC's fundraising lagged because of Dean's ineptitude, the DCCC and the DSCC prospered as smart Democratic donors found a more reliable place to contribute their dollars.

Republicans might not participate directly in the party committees, but they can always vote their disapproval with their dollars. They might have to do that.