President Obama came into office promising a new age of cooperation and an end to partisan division. That promise has been an absolute and complete failure.

According to Gallup Obama has been a historically polarizing figure in his three years in office, with a massive gap between his support from Republican and Democrats. By a wide margin Obama first term has been the most polarizing of any modern president and George W. Bush is the only other president to at times have been more polarizing than Obama currently is.  From Gallup:

While the health care bill Obama decided to advocate for and the decision of Senate Republicans to adopt a political strategy of total opposition probably played a part in increasing the polarizing of opinions about Obama, a high degree of polarization was most likely unavoidable.

Regardless who Obama was or what he did, he would likely have ended up a polarizing figure. What we are seeing is the result of our political parties steadily becoming more ideologically unified and coherent in the past few decades. This is something we are seeing both in Congress and in opinions about the President. It is not surprising 8 of the 10 most polarizing years for opinions about the president on record all happened in the last ten years.

It will be interesting to see if Obama’s absolute failure to bring the parties together, because they are apart for a reason, will cause future politicians to stop even trying to make this absurd promise.

At some point as a country we are going to need to accept that fact that the unusual combination of regional history and race issues that previously produced an era when members of Congress technically from different parties would actually hold nearly identical policy views is over. It is not coming back.

In addition to the individual mandate being extremely unpopular, opinions about the entire Affordable Care Act have remained negative and been trending downward. The Kaiser Family Foundation poll found 44 percent view the law unfavorably while just 37 percent now view it favorably. From Kaiser:

While the trend is very slight and not perfect, looking at the data, the law’s favorable numbers have been heading slightly downward since the law was signed by President Obama. In the first six months after passage, on average, 46 percent held a favorable view of the law. In the last six months, on average, only 38 percent viewed the law favorably.

This is why during the State of the Union President Obama gave only the briefest passing mention to his signature health care law, and he didn’t even mention it by name. The State of the Union was a political speech. It is now clear that Obama so terribly mismanaged the politics of health care reform that the law is a serious net negative for the Obama campaign.

There is no way Obama could have spent more time talking about the biggest legislative action of his presidency and still have received the incredibly broad approval he did get from people who watched the speech. Don’t expect the issue of health care to be brought up by choice by Democrats in the upcoming campaign.

Occupy Supply command post tent at Occupy Rochester

Occupy Supply is announcing a contest to give away five 11′ x 11′ command post tents worth $5000 each, three media laptops equipped with webcams for live streaming and twelve $100 gift certificates for supplies from the Occupy Supply store to reward occupations for their ongoing community activism.

DADT and Keystone XL Pipeline activist Lt. Dan Choi will personally deliver the five tents to the winning occupations, and host a celebration of the occupation’s achievements courtesy of Occupy Supply.

The corporate media may be eager to eulogize the occupy movement, but Occupy Supply serves over 60 encampments across the country and we learn about new ones every day.

Local occupiers have helped stop the execution of a death row inmate. They’ve blocked the entrance to banks and demanded they divest from for-profit prisons. They’ve saved homeowners from eviction and forced cities to open homeless shelters.

Accomplishments like these should not go unnoticed. That’s why Occupy Supply is launching this contest to celebrate Occupy’s early successes and raise awareness of the people who are investing countless hours in the decidedly non-glamorous retail politics necessary to build a movement.

These brand new tents are equipped with presentation boards, tables and lighting systems. They have floors and liners to keep out the cold and wind, and provide the perfect setting for occupations to organize and plan for the spring. We recently gave one of these command post tents to Occupy Syracuse (photo above) who like it so much they have asked for another.

Some occupations have had their encampments evicted or have moved indoors, so we’ll also be awarding laptops with built-in webcams (perfect for livestreaming!) to the top 3 vote getting occupations that cannot use a tent.

How it works

• Nominations will open on Thursday, January 26th, 2012 at 9:00AM EST and close on Sunday, January 29th, 2012 at 11:59PM EST.
• There is no limit to the number of times an occupation can be nominated.
• Each nomination must be accompanied by a link that verifies the action for which the occupation is being nominated.
• In the case of multiple nominations per individual occupation, Occupy Supply will use its discretion to choose the action(s) it believes will best represent that individual occupation for consideration in final voting.
• Voting will open on Monday, January 30th, 2012 at 9:00AM EST and close on Wednesday, February 1st, 2012 at 11:59PM.
• The top 20 vote recipients from the initial round of voting will move on to the final round, which begins on Thursday, February 2nd at 9:00AM EST and closes on Saturday, February 4th at 11:59PM EST.
• In the event of a tie, Occupy Supply liaisons will cast tie-breaking votes on the Sunday, February 5th 2012 liaison conference call.

Winners will be announced at Firedoglake on Monday, February 6th, 2012.

As February approaches, we know that occupiers could really use a morale booster and there’s nothing better than being acknowledged for their inspirational activism.  Nominate your occupation for a chance to win one of these prizes by for their local community-oriented activism.

Day in, day out we hear stories from our 120 local member liaisons about the heroic actions of these occupiers who are working tirelessly for real, tangible change in their communities.

Download the Contest Flyer for distribution to occupations: Downloadable PDF | Online version

Contest Rules: Downloadable PDF | Online version

Nominate your occupation here

Occupy Supply has raised over $180,000 to supply occupations across the country.  100% of all money received goes to the purchase and distribution of supplies.  You can donate to Occupy Supply here.

Even after almost two years since the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the individual mandate continues to be as unpopular as always. An overwhelming 2/3rds of the county holds an unfavorable view of the mandate and the majority thinks the Supreme Court should strike it down. From Kaiser Family Foundation poll:

As for the public’s own views of the mandate, the January poll shows that the requirement that everyone obtain health insurance or pay a fine continues to be unpopular. This month’s poll finds the public more than twice as likely to have an unfavorable rather than favorable view of the provision (67% to 30%), very much in line with findings of previous Kaiser polls. Reflecting this dislike for a mandate, 54 percent of Americans say the Court should rule the individual mandate unconstitutional, while just 17 percent say they think it should be found constitutional. Roughly mirroring public views on the mandate, 55 percent of the public say they expect the Justices to find the mandate unconstitutional and 29 percent expect the Justices to find it constitutional.

The individual mandate was clearly politically toxic long before the Democrats voted for the law and it has remained politically toxic ever since. The Democrats had both ample warning and ample time to replace it with a less controversial and unquestionably constitutional alternative to encourage individuals to get insurance. Such a modest correction would have been easy to make right before passage to increase support for the law.

I don’t know if I can think of another policy that was ever viewed so unfavorably by the electorate yet was still very publicly pushed forward by one party. The disdain this move showed toward public opinion played an important role in driving the conservative energy that allowed the GOP to win a historic victory in the House. The fact that Democrats could have easily avoided this political problem yet actively choose not to makes it one of the greatest unforced political errors in American politics.

Given how many people actually expect the Supreme Court to strike down the mandate, it is hard to guess whether a favorable ruling for the administration would be a political positive or negative for Obama. On one hand, the court upholding the mandate could get people to resign themselves to the idea of the mandate and the new law.

On the other hand, most of the people who currently hate the mandate are expecting the Court to take care of it for them. They currently don’t think they need a Republican to win the Presidency for the highly unpopular mandate to go away. If the Court doesn’t get rid of it as these people expect, that could give many a new incentive to help elect Republicans in order for the GOP to get rid of the mandate with legislation.

I’m of two minds about President Obama’s shout out for Senate rules reform in his State of the Union speech. I’m glad he brought attention to the need for reform, but mostly I’m very disappointed with what he chose to call for. From the State of the Union:

Some of what’s broken has to do with the way Congress does its business these days.  A simple majority is no longer enough to get anything -– even routine business –- passed through the Senate.  Neither party has been blameless in these tactics.  Now both parties should put an end to it.   For starters, I ask the Senate to pass a simple rule that all judicial and public service nominations receive a simple up or down vote within 90 days.

This change would make the only thing exempt from the filibuster in the Senate the particular business of a president in making appointments.

The real problem with the current Senate rules governing debate that allow for filibusters and 60 votes requirements for closure is that they hurt good governance.  Allowing that is illogical and frankly idiotic.

The current senate rules make a mockery of the clear Constitutional intent that the Senate be a majority vote chamber except where the Constitution explicitly requires more. They make our government even more biased in favor of the status quo. They destroy accountability by allowing parties to make partisan promises that they know they will not have to keep.  The rules also shift the balance away from the far more representative House to the already undemocratic Senate. Finally, super majority requirements have repeatedly been shown to be a very bad way to run a legislative chamber.

The fact that the senate rules also allow a minority to make it slightly harder for a president to fill executive and judicial positions without the president using recess appointments is just one relatively minor issue in comparison.

Yet instead of calling for a meaningful fix to the root cause of the problem, President Obama just called for the creation of a new special privilege that would help only the president. Calling only for this one change but leaving the rest of the problem in place makes this look more like a power grab than a call to honest and fair reform. There is no good reason to say a minority in the Senate shouldn’t be allowed to filibuster the business of the executive branch but should be allowed to filibuster the business of the House or even a majority of the Senate.

President Obama, if you believe the 60 votes for closure rule is unfair or bad for the government, you should call for it to be eliminated, not call for just a special exemption for presidential appointments.

The organization Reporters Without Borders conducts an annual ranking comparing each nation’s level of press freedom, and they’ve just dropped the U.S. rating by 27 places. The dramatic drop came as a result of the many arrests and efforts to harass reporters trying to cover the Occupy movement and the police raids of Occupy encampments.  In the 2010 ratings, America was ranked 20th in press freedom, but we have now dropped to 47th this year. From Reporters Without Borders:

Led by President Yoweri Museveni, Uganda (139th) launched an unprecedented crackdown on opposition movements and independent media after the elections in February. Similarly, Chile (80th) fell 47 places because of its many freedom of information violations, committed very often by the security forces during student protests. The United States (47th) also owed its fall of 27 places to the many arrests of journalist covering Occupy Wall Street protests.

We are now ranked lower then most western European countries including Finland, Norway, Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, Ireland, Germany, Belgium, UK, France, Spain, etc.

One of the many things the occupy movement has done is help focus more attention on the aggressive militarization of basic law enforcement in the United States.  And that’s been combined with police efforts to prevent both professional and amateur reporters from covering the story.

If you look at President Obama’s State of the Union address as primarily a political speech to kick off his re-election effort, you get a strong sense of what the Obama campaign thinks are his strengths and weaknesses.

The auto rescue and several foreign policy successes made up a huge part of the speech.  But if you weren’t paying extremely close attention, you may have missed Obama’s few passing references to his signature health insurance law.

As best as I can tell, these are the only references to the Affordable Care Act in the entire speech:

I will not back down from protecting our kids from mercury pollution, or making sure that our food is safe and our water is clean.  I will not go back to the days when health insurance companies had unchecked power to cancel your policy, deny you coverage, or charge women differently from men. And I will not go back to the days when Wall Street was allowed to play by its own set of rules.

[...]

That’s why my education reform offers more competition, and more control for schools and States.  That’s why we’re getting rid of regulations that don’t work.  That’s why our health care law relies on a reformed private market, not a Government program.

On the other hand, even my Republican friends who complain the most about government spending have supported federally financed roads, and clean energy projects, and federal offices for the folks back home.

That’s it: in the entire 7,000 word speech, there are only two lines, one of which ignores the proposed large expansion of government Medicaid, sandwiched between other unrelated talking points.

I take this as a strong sign that the Obama campaign is basically admitting they simply can’t win the politics on Obamacare. It’s a sign they believe their best political approach is just to ignore the issue as much as possible in the campaign. The law was unpopular when it passed and is still unpopular to this day. There is no reason to believe it will get any more popular by November.

In the auto rescue case, the policy was actually implemented right away, and now we are seeing results.  In contrast, most all of the health care law and its promised benefits won’t even start to be implemented for another two years. Obama simply can’t campaign successfully on health insurance reform when there are few tangible benefits from his signature law, and the health insurance coverage situation is now worse than when the law was passed.

This strategy of mostly ignoring health care may even work politically for Obama if Mitt Romney wins the Republican nomination. Given the incredible similarity in their health care laws, Romney is going to have a tough time successfully hitting Obama on the issue without leaving himself vulnerable.

In an attempt to defend President Obama’s foreign policy decisions the Center for American Progress has released a terribly misguided one page chart comparing the Iraq war and the Libya war. The chart’s basic message is that Obama is better than Bush, because Obama is much more thrifty when he launches an illegal war based on lies.

The chart basically implies both wars did the same good, removing one dictator each, but the Libya war was done more quickly and for the low low price of $1.1 billion instead of $806 billion. The chart and accompanying blog by Ken Sofer is deeply wrong on so many levels. From Ken Sofer:

Indeed, the last year saw the end to two very different wars and two competing visions of American power. One war, in Iraq, finally came to end in December after a series of poor policy choices and overzealous neoconservative thinking cost the U.S. nearly a trillion dollars and 4,500 American lives over the course of eight and a half years.

The other war, in Libya, accomplished nearly the exact same objectives as the war in Iraq, but the selective application of American power and the diplomatic efforts to gain the support of both NATO and the U.N. Security Council allowed the U.S. to accomplish its goals for just over $1 billion and not one lost American life.

(emphasis mine) If we are now admitting that the Libya action was a war, as opposed to not even a hostile action, then it means it was an illegal war; so Obama broke the law. Obama violated the constitution by starting a war, without Congressional approval,  against a country that posed no immediate threat to the United States. That is a real issue whether or not our “objectives” were achieved or achieved at a  relatively low cost.

Of course to make the claim that the same “objective,” mainly regime change, was accomplished in both Iraq and Libya is to ignore that was not supposed to be our objective. In the lead up to both wars, regime change was not the stated objective of either George W. Bush or Barack Obama. We supposedly went to war with Iraq to get rid of Saddam’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, while Mr.  Obama said our goal in Libya was simply to protect the civilian protesters in one section of the country. You can only make the case that Obama achieved the same “objective” at a lower cost if you implicitly admit Obama also lied to the country about why he started a war and accept that regime change was always his real goal. This does not make Obama look better then Bush.

Finally, claiming Obama got the support of the UN Security Council is a massive distortion of the truth. The UN approved a resolution calling for a no fly zone to protect civilians. It did not authorize regime change nor authorize the United States’ military to fight for one side in a civil war. By the same token, Bush could point to many different UN resolutions against Iraq, including ones calling for a no fly zone, to claim international justification.

Is this sadly the best defense of Obama foreign policy that can be offered by a “progressive” organization?  To be sure, Obama is like Bush in most of the horrible ways that count when it comes to launching unnecessary wars based on lies, but at least his wars are way cheaper.

Obama is Bush with efficiency.

Since President Obama took office the percentage of uninsured people in America has been steadily raising and has now reached a new high. From Gallup:

This rise in the number of uninsured is for the most part not the fault of the Obama administration. It is primarily the result of long term trends, rising health care costs, and the huge spike in unemployment during the economic crash, as workers lost their employer-provided insurance. Some smaller aspects of the Affordable Care Act, like young adults staying on their parents’ plans, have even helped keep the level of uninsured from going even higher.

Still this development is deeply problematic for Mr. Obama. One of his biggest accomplishments that supporters tend to point to is his passage of the Affordable Care Act and its health insurance reforms.

I simply don’t know how the Administration can successfully campaign on passing a law to expand coverage, when the level of uninsured has increased significantly during Obama’s tenure. It is tough for people to see such a law is any form of a real accomplishment when over a year after its passage it hasn’t even begun to accomplish its main promises and the exact opposite is taking place in people’s lives.

Instead of campaigning on delivering for the American people with his signature legislation, Obama will be forced to explain that even though the insurance situation has gotten worse, voters need to trust his claims that his signature law will eventually improve things in the future.

“Eventual change in the future I hope you believe me about” just doesn’t have that nice campaign ring to it.

The decision to delay the start date of the primary expansion in the Affordable Care Act until 2014 should be remembered as one of the most idiotic political and policy decisions ever made. I would argue that if Obama narrowly loses in 2012, it could be the single decision that is most responsible.

The Administration reportedly supported the delays to hold down near-term costs and achieve a more favorable 10-year cost estimate from the CBO.  Almost no one will remember the bill’s official CBO score come November 2012, but plenty of people will remember they haven’t seen any tangle benefits from the law Obama spent a year working on in the middle of an economic and unemployment crisis.

Dan Choi's Tarsands Supporters show up for him today

Looking forward to hearing the government’s excuse as to why out of 1250 people arrested at the White House during the Tar Sands action, Dan Choi was singled out for prosecution.

For history of government’s prosecution of Dan over his DADT activism, including court documents, visit the FDL archive page:

Archive: United States v Lt. Dan Choi

Previous posts on the Tarsands action:

• Bill McKibben: The Tar Sands Action Continues in Front of White House
• Tar Sands Action: Are You Discouraged, or a Flaming Firebagger?
• Jane and Others Jailed Till Monday, Take Action, Support the Tar Sands Sit-In
• Livestream: Flaming Firebaggers Tar Sands White House Sit-In