President Obama was sufficiently gracious in welcoming the World Champion New York Yankees to the White House today, as he has done for other winning teams from other leagues. But he did include a bit more snark in his remarks than usual, acknowledging the polarizing nature of Major League Baseball's all-time winningest franchise.

"This is a team that goes down to spring training every year expecting to win it all -- and more often than not, you guys get pretty close," Obama said at a ceremony in the East Room. "That attitude, that success, has always made the Yankees easy to love -- and, let's face it, easy to hate as well."

Obama, a noted Chicago White Sox fan, jabbed that the South Siders would be just as successful if they had a closer like Mariano Rivera.

"It's painful to watch Mariano's cutter when it's against my team, or to see the Yankees wrap up the pennant while the Sox are struggling," he said. "Although I do remember 2005, people -- so don't get too comfortable."

Afterwards, the Yankees professed to be awestruck by their visit to the White House, even veterans like Derek Jeter who has visited four times before. But he did warn the president not to take too many more pot shots at the pinstripers.

"He better be careful with that. There are a lot of Yankee fans that vote," the Yankee captain told reporters after the event.

As the White House and the DNC roll out an initiative aimed at preserving Democratic majorities in Congress, the President would be wise to heed that advice.

Here was President Obama last Thursday talking about financial regulatory reform:

Now, there's a legitimate debate taking place about how best to ensure taxpayers are held harmless in this process.  And that's a legitimate debate, and I encourage that debate.  But what's not legitimate is to suggest that somehow the legislation being proposed is going to encourage future taxpayer bailouts, as some have claimed.  That makes for a good sound bite, but it's not factually accurate.  It is not true.  (Applause.)  In fact, the system as it stands -- the system as it stands is what led to a series of massive, costly taxpayer bailouts.  And it's only with reform that we can avoid a similar outcome in the future.  In other words, a vote for reform is a vote to put a stop to taxpayer-funded bailouts.  That's the truth.  End of story.  And nobody should be fooled in this debate.  (Applause.)

Adam Davidson of National Public Radio the following day:

"A vote for reform is a vote to put a stop to taxpayer-funded bailouts," Obama said in his speech in New York on Thursday.

I cannot find any experts -- of any party -- who are willing to agree with Obama on this one.

"We're not seeing a very forceful step on the too-big-to-fail problem," said Carmen Reinhart, an economist at the University of Maryland. "If there's any doubt that the crisis may be systemic, we will bail out again."

So, if a major bank says, "Hey, save us or the economy will go under," the government's going to save the bank. Full stop.

And Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times yesterday:

Unfortunately, the leading proposals would do little to cure the epidemic unleashed on American taxpayers by the lords of finance and their bailout partners. The central problem is that neither the Senate nor House bills would chop down big banks to a more manageable and less threatening size. The bills also don't eliminate the prospect of future bailouts of interconnected and powerful companies.

Too big to fail is alive and well, alas. Indeed, several aspects of the legislative proposals sanction and codify the special status conferred on institutions that are seen as systemically important. Instead of reducing the number of behemoth firms assigned this special status, the bills would encourage smaller companies to grow large and dangerous so that they, too, could have a seat at the bailout buffet.

Two points worth making. First, as a policy matter, this is no small discrepancy between the President of the United States and two news organizations.  The President declared on Thursday, without nuance or caveat, that the Dodd bill ends "too big to fail." Period. On successive days NPR and the New York Times asserted the opposite.

Someone is clearly wrong. Why hasn't anyone from the White House press corps followed up and asked the President to address the issues raised by NPR and the NYT and to either lay out evidence supporting his claim or force him to retract it.

Point two: as a political matter, this is where we end up when we have a President who relies so heavily on rhetorical tricks and demagoguery to make his case- as Obama did Thursday by declaring any opposing viewpoint to his as "illegitimate." Despite his eloquence and thoughtful demeanor, Obama  doesn't try to win arguments through persuasion so much as he does by demonizing and de-legitimizing those who hold a different view.

The President used this tactic repeatedly during the year long health care debate.  And we're now learning that at least some of the criticisms of his plan, which he dismissed at the time as "illegitimate," were well grounded in reality (See here, here, here, here, and here for a recent sampling of stories).

The bottom line is that Obama's habit of declaring opposing viewpoints as outside the bounds of legitimate discourse doesn't serve the country or the President well at all. It is exceedingly divisive, poisons serious bipartisan debate and won't help the President's credibility and moral authority in the long run.

President Obama, in web video to grassroots supporters today: "This year, the stakes are higher than ever. It will be up to each of you to make sure that young people, African Americans, Latinos and women who powered our victory in 2008 stand together once again."

Gallup: "Younger voters remain less enthusiastic about voting in this year's midterm elections than those who are older, underscoring the challenge facing the Democratic Party in its efforts to re-energize these voters, who helped President Obama win the presidency in 2008."

As attorney Geoffrey Fieger considers another gubernoatiral bid, a new poll finds he would be the favorite in the Aug. 3 Democratic primary. The EPIC-MRA survey (April 21, 400 Dem LV, MoE +/- 4.9%) found Fieger, best known for representing assisted-suicide doctor Jack Kevorkian, leading three other Dems with 28% of the vote.

The other Democrats tested include: House Speaker Andy Dillon, Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero and state Rep. Alma Wheeler. Fieger received much of his support in the three Detroit-area counties of Oakland, McComb and Wayne. Dillon held a small lead among voters not within those counties.

Fieger 28
Dillon 20
Bernero 13
Wheeler 8
Und 29

As the Detroit Free Press reports, Fieger needs "to move quickly, with less than three weeks left to collect the 15,000 valid petition signatures required to put his name on the Aug. 3 primary ballot."

Trying to make the best of a terrible situation, Illinois Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias is up with a new 60-second TV ad in which he acknowledges the failure of his family's bank, and then tries to spin it into an attack on his GOP opponent, Mark Kirk.

"When I left, over four years ago, it was in good shape. But no one could have foreseen these problems," he says. A narrator than invokes Kirk's "votes for the Bush policies that got us into this mess," an eyebrow-raising attempt to blame the previous president for Broadway Bank's collapse, it seems. "If a business like my father's, that he started 30 years ago, can fail, it's happening everywhere," Giannoulias says.

You can read the full script of the spot, called "Fighter," after the jump.

(more...)

A recent Gallup poll finds that the partisan ID gap in the first quarter of 2010 is the narrowest it has been since President Bush's re-election. It is the latest in a series of datapoints that suggest that the Democrats are alienating parts of the coalition that enabled them to achieve their outsized majorities.

President Obama and the Democratic Congress inherited an America where self-identified Democrats comprised a majority of the country, and where they outnumbered Republicans 52%-39%. This had been relatively stable from about mid-2006 to the end of 2008. This gap immediately began narrowing, and by the end of last year the Democrats were down to a 47%-42% edge.

Today, the Democrats enjoy a one-point lead in party identification, which is about the edge they held in the 2004 elections. This has significant implications for the 2010 races. The Democrats had argued vociferously that they are not in for a brutal 2010 due to the Republicans' relative unpopularity among the electorate. But this story demonstrates that the advantage is eroding.

To be sure, the Republicans haven't achieved a permanent majority of their own. The number of Republican self-identifiers hasn't improved – instead the number of Republican leaning Independents has increased, while the number of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents has declined.

But nevertheless, this poll shows that the Democrats are increasingly pushing Independents away during the Obama Administration, that these Independents are increasingly aligning themselves, at least for the time being, with the GOP, and that we are back to a pre-2006 electorate. And if we are reverting to a 2004 electorate in 2010, it could represent major losses for the Democrats. In 2004, Republicans won 232 seats; winning just that many seats today would represent a 54-seat pickup for the GOP, which is two seats more than they picked up in the 1994 midterms.

David Paul Kuhn wonders whether or not a dark horse presidential candidate will emerge for the GOP in 2012.

Mike Memoli and Kyle Trygstad preview the week ahead in politics on Politics Nation.

RCM editor John Tamny, writing on Forbes.com, documents the history of expensive luxury items becoming affordable everyday goods and argues that the same thing could happen with health costs if the government doesn't try to limit insurance company profits.

On RCW, Todd Crowell writes about how the current turmoil in Thailand mirrors the period leading up to the Spanish Civil War.

On RCS, Jeff Neuman points out that despite some recent ugly sports headlines, there are a few things to be thankful for, including the modest expansion of the NCAA Basketball Tournament, the NFL Draft in primetime and the Oklahoma City Thunder.

Also, Jeff Briggs has a rundown of how draft prognosticators fared in last week's NFL draft on the Sidelines blog.

Finally, check out the Media Watch blog for commentary on the latest happenings in the media world.

Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold (D) is airing his first TV ad of the campaign. The 30-second spot focuses on his work to cut the deficit and his vote against the 2008 bailout.

The ad comes a week after former Gov. Tommy Thompson (R) declined to challenge the three-term Democrat. Feingold will likely face one of the following three Republicans: businessmen Terrence Wall and Dave Westlake, or former Wisconsin Commerce Secretary Dick Leinenkugel, who is formally announcing his entrance to the race today.

A1, Boston Globe:

WASHINGTON — Administrators at Harvard, Brown, and other elite universities are softening their resistance to the Reserve Officers' Training Corps more than four decades after the military scholarship programs were driven from campus in the face of fierce antiwar sentiment.

Many professors, students, and administrators say the more welcoming climate is a result of growing support for the military since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. But they contend it has become pronounced since February, when Pentagon leaders for the first time advocated overturning the law that bans gays and lesbians from serving openly in the ranks.

SurveyUSA has surfaced to poll the Washington Senate race, and finds some unpleasant news for incumbent Patty Murray (4/19/10-4/22/10, 517 LV, MOE: +/- 4.4%).  She fails to get above 46% against any of her opponents, and does so in a sample that looks an awful lot like the 2008 electorate.

Patty Murray (D) -- 42%
Dino Rossi (R) -- 52%

Patty Murray (D) -- 46%
Don Benton (R) -- 44%

Patty Murray (D) -- 46%
Clint Didier (R) -- 44%

Patty Murray (D) -- 45%
Chris Widener (R) -- 43%

Patty Murray (D) -- 45%
Paul Akers (R) -- 44%

Patty Murray (D) -- 45%
Art Coday (R) -- 41%

The more I look over these numbers, the more I'm struck by how bad they are for Murray.  She gets clobbered by Rossi, who has run two statewide elections in the last five years, losing by ten points.

But even if Rossi doesn't run, she's stuck at around 45% against the rest of the field, which includes a state senator (Benton), an inventor (Akers), a doctor (Coday), a former pro football player and farmer (Didier), and a businessman (Widener).  These are the type of candidates who should be pulling 30% against even an unpopular three-term Senator right now, not running neck-and-neck with her.

Indeed, when you examine the differences between the Murray-Rossi polling and the other polling, we see that the only difference is that Republicans and Independents move to undecided.  Murray gets 73% of Democrats against Rossi (with 6% undecided), while against the others she receives between 76 and 79 percent of the Democratic vote, with 5-9% undecided.  But Rossi gets 87% of Republicans and 59% of Independents.  The other Republicans get around 48% of Independents and 78% of Republicans, with undecideds rising into the double digits in those categories.

In other words, I suspect that even if Rossi doesn't run, these other Republicans have significant room for growth, much more so than Murray has.

And it gets even worse.  SurveyUSA finds an electorate with the following demographic breakdown:  36%D, 23%R, and 39%I; 20% 65+; 33% conservative, 43% moderate, 19% liberal.

In 2008, the Washington electorate was 36%D, 26%R and 39%I; 19% 65+; 32% conservative, 41% moderate, 27% liberal.

Very few people are expecting the 2010 electorate to resemble the 2008 electorate this closely; it is expected to be older, whiter, and more conservative.  I certainly don't expect fewer Republicans in the electorate than there were in 2008.  In other words, this poll might actually understate how bad things are for Murray.

Every cycle there is a race that surprises in the last few months of the cycle.  On the Republican side, my money is probably on the North Carolina Senate race.  But on the Democratic side, my money is increasingly on this Murray race.