Is Obama a Progressive President?

While many seem dubious at the moment, I have no doubt about Obama, despite my view that he ought simply to get out of Afghanistan.

Sometimes it is the small unnoticed things that tell the tale:

From the Washington Post by way of the Huffington Post:

Hundreds, if not thousands, of lobbyists are likely to be ejected from federal advisory panels as part of a little-noticed initiative by the Obama administration to curb K Street's influence in Washington, according to White House officials and lobbying experts.

The new policy -- issued with little fanfare this fall by the White House ethics counsel -- may turn out to be the most far-reaching lobbying rule change so far from President Obama, who also has sought to restrict the ability of lobbyists to get jobs in his administration and to negotiate over stimulus contracts.

Of course they are fighting back. The Huffington Post story:

"Not surprisingly, lobby groups, corporations, and other K Street influencers are up in arms.

The reaction from the lobbying community has been swift and overwhelmingly negative. Some of the loudest criticism has come from the Industry Trade Advisory Committees (ITACs), a collection of more than a dozen panels that provide policy advice and technical assistance to the Commerce Department and the U.S. Trade Representative. The ITACs, whose roughly 400 members include at least 130 lobbyists, officials say, have taken the lead in attacking the White House policy as misguided and harmful to U.S. business interests; a letter to Obama from committee chairs last month included executives from Boeing, IBM, Harley-Davidson and International Paper.

"This action will severely undermine the utility of the advisory committee process," the letter read. ". . . The characteristics that make many Advisors valuable to the Administration [are] the same characteristics that are being used to artificially disqualify them from participation in the Committee system."

You can read White House Counsel's full letter responding to lobbyists' critiques of the decision here. A brief excerpt:

I assure you our action was not provoked, as you suggest, by "criminal and unethical behavior of a few individuals." Indeed there have been some egregious abuses, but this decision was not meant to besmirch anyone who is a registered federal lobbyist.

It is about the system as a whole.

Indeed.

Harper vs Obama

Recently columnist Norman Spector asserted that a year after the 2008 elections Harper is more popular than Obama. One finds echoes of this in other columns as well.

Here is Spector on November 16:

Yet today, Mr. Harper is flirting with a majority. Canadians have grown increasingly comfortable with him, as judged by his approval ratings. And the Conservatives just won two of four by-elections, including a surprise victory in Quebec – where conventional wisdom had them dead, if not completely buried.

Mr. Obama, meanwhile, has suffered the steepest decline of the 12 elected presidents since Gallup began polling.

Minor details: the last poll on the subject (in October by Angus Reid) found that Canadians disapproved of Mr. Harper by a margin of 45-34, while the aggregate of all U.S. polls currently find that, by a margin of 48.4% to 46.5%, more Americans approve of Mr. Obama as President than disapprove. Overall, as of today, a majority of 54.4% to 39.1% have a favourable view of Mr. Obama.

Of course Mr. Obama inherited an economy going over a cliff that has just barely begun to reverse course, while Canada has benefited from higher global commodity prices, the product of economic strength reasserting itself in Asia and elsewhere.

As Brendan Nyhan noted in August:

The approval ratings of presidents tend to decline over time... And in Obama's case, he faces a poor economy that will push his approval numbers into the 40s very soon.

Despite a more favourable economic environment due to better luck, Harper is not doing as well as Obama. Of course Mr. Spector cherry picked just the Gallup Poll. Nonetheless, Obama has fallen and will likely fall further, but Mr. Spector's comparison is, to say the least, deeply misleading.

November 9 by-election in Montmagny

There is a certain amount of nonsense being spouted about Monday's by-elections. For example, Mulroney biographer L. Ian Macdonald, discussing the outcome in Montmagny-l'Islet-Kamouraska-Rivière-du-Loup, describes "the Conservatives taking a seat from the Bloc... (as) a game-changer". This was the only by-election result of any significance on Monday, but Macdonald vastly overstates its importance.

He seems to have forgotten the Conservative victory on September 17, 2007 in the Roberval-Lac St. Jean by-election where the Conservatives came from 8 points back in 2006 to win by 40 points. By the time of the 2008 election, however, that lead had shrunk back to 4 points and the Conservatives wound up with fewer seats in Quebec not more. Was that 2007 result a game-changer? Obviously, it was not. What we saw instead was a replay in Montmagny-l'Islet-Kamouraska-Rivière-du-Loup on Monday night where a previously second place Conservative party won a seat from the Bloc, albeit with much smaller gains than in Roberval in 2007.

Jeffery Simpson was closer to the mark in the Globe today:

Slowly, the polls – for what they're worth – showed a drift away from the Liberals toward the Conservatives, a drift occurring in other parts of Canada, too.

On Monday, therefore, the Conservatives took a seat (Montmagny-L'Islet-Kamouraska-Rivière-du-Loup) previously held by the Bloc in the Lower St. Lawrence, a part of Quebec that historically prefers any party but les rouges . It's part of a band of seats in Quebec on both sides of the St. Lawrence that is nationalist, rather anti-elitist, rural and small town, and that has voted for the Union Nationale, the Créditistes, the Parti Québécois, the Bloc and now the Conservatives.

The Conservatives chose a popular local mayor, Bernard Généreux, who captured nearly 43 per cent of the vote and allowed the Conservatives to win their 11th Quebec seat. No one should read much into by-elections. Still, it's an encouraging Conservative result.

Simpson overstates the les rouges reference - Pearson and Trudeau were successful here. He could also have noted the significance of being on the government side during a period when pork has a blue tinge.

TC calculates that the Conservative gains in Montmagny by itself are consistent with the Conservatives winning about 17 seats overall in Quebec. Notably the Conservative gains in Montmagny were not echoed in the Hochelaga numbers so even that number is doubtful. One aspect of this we should not overlook: the Bloc vote is generally younger and therefore less likely to turn out for a by-election. This would likely account for some of the difference in Roberval between 2007 and 2008.

Overall the Conservatives remain in a strong position, similar to the 2008 election outcome (as noted in my previous post) courtesy of the incompetence of the Ignatieff Liberals to date and the inability of the NDP, which had a good night on Monday, to break out decisively in a way that might allow them to be seen as the main alternative to the government.

TC continues to find the Conservatives' strength surprising given the recession, although strong commodity prices have partially shielded Canada from its worst consequences. And the political fallout from the downturn is not finished given its impact on budgets, so we may yet see some negatives for the government. However, one of the opposition parties must be seen as a plausible alternative to Harper, and we don't have that yet.

The majority is a minority

There seems to be an assumption floating around (for example, the opening line here) that the Conservatives would win a majority if an election were held today. TC averaged three polls out last week, from Nanos, Environics and Ekos, and came to the following seat numbers:

C - 145
L - 82
NDP - 34
BQ - 47
Oth. - 1

This is roughly identical to the last estimate of Democratic Space.

With the arrival of Peter Donolo to add some accomplished political experience to Ignatieff's office, which had none before, we may wonder whether these numbers (that are so close to 2008) represent a Liberal bottoming out and a Conservative peak. The NDP and Bloc continue to hold their own.

An election seems a long way off.

No Drama Obama

TC continues to find Barack Obama an extraordinary political leader - a talent without parallel in my lifetime.

Here is a testimonial from the Wall Street whiz who presided over the auto bailout:

New to business meetings with Presidents, I found Obama's style consistent with his 'No drama Obama' image and on a par with the best CEOs I had spent time with. He was cordial without being effusive and decisive when his advisers were divided....

Read the rest of it here.

I also read the full account of the bailouts here in Fortune. Here are some highlights:

Among the surprises along the way: We were shocked, even beyond our low expectations, by the poor state of both GM and Chrysler. Looking just at the condition of GM's finances and Chrysler's new-car pipeline, the case for a bailout was weak.

But on the other hand, as we surveyed the interconnected web of finance companies, suppliers, and related businesses, the potential impact of the likely alternative -- liquidation -- stunned us. We imagined that the collapse of the automakers could devastate the Midwest beyond imagination. We were determined not to fail. But as we started down the road, we saw mainly obstacles....

And this description of GM management:

Everyone knew Detroit's reputation for insular, slow-moving cultures. Even by that low standard, I was shocked by the stunningly poor management that we found, particularly at GM, where we encountered, among other things, perhaps the weakest finance operation any of us had ever seen in a major company.

For example, under the previous administration's loan agreements, Treasury was to approve every GM transaction of more than $100 million that was outside of the normal course. From my first day at Treasury, PowerPoint decks would arrive from GM (we quickly concluded that no decision seemed to be made at GM without one) requesting approvals. We were appalled by the absence of sound analysis provided to justify these expenditures.

The cultural deficiencies were equally stunning. At GM's Renaissance Center headquarters, the top brass were sequestered on the uppermost floor, behind locked and guarded glass doors. Executives housed on that floor had elevator cards that allowed them to descend to their private garage without stopping at any of the intervening floors (no mixing with the drones).

The majority conundrum

While the focus of current discussion is about a possible Conservative majority, the reality is that our regionally and ideologically fragmented system makes a majority problematic even when a party seems well positioned to do so. Many believe Harper’s Conservatives presently are in that position now. However, one needs majority type polls at the end of an election campaign not in hypothetical horse races in the media. Some recent polls point to just such a hypothetical majority (Ekos, Strategic Counsel and Angus Reid) but others (Decima, Ipsos) don’t. This is largely because of differences in the Ontario sub-samples, which suggests some instability in Ontario opinion, and that its ultimate direction remains unclear.

As TC has touched on before, winning a majority is extremely difficult in the current Canadian party system. One could make the case, for example, that the Conservatives were headed for a majority in 2008, but fumbled the opportunity by getting the politics of culture wrong in Quebec. A misstep like that could occur in any region. We forget that the Conservatives also lost seats in Newfoundland as a consequence of their feud with Danny Williams. The point is that it is enormously difficult to have everything work right at once in enough regions to secure 155 ridings.

Fundamentally, the problem is that the Bloc Québecois control a group of francophone ridings in Quebec usually numbering around 50. They dipped as low as 38 in 2000 when they were hurt by the unpopularity at the time of the PQ Bouchard regime in Quebec City. They won 49 seats in 2008.

That means that to win the 155 seats needed for a majority, another party must win 59.8% of the remaining seats. If we look at history in the pre-Bloc era (but after 1957 when the number of seats won by third parties began to grow significantly), we see only the Diefenbaker landslide majority of 1958 (78.5% of the seats) and a similar win by Mulroney in 1984 (74.8% of the seats) exceed that benchmark. By this standard, the Trudeau majority of 1968 (58.3% of the seats) almost but not quite qualifies, while his majorities in 1974 (53.4% of the seats) and 1980 (53.4% of the seats) do not.

It is highly unlikely there will be an election before the spring of 2010 – an eternity in politics. The outcome is more likely than not to be another minority. When we see the Bloc vote collapse the conditions for majority governments in Canada can emerge once again. The recent Ignatieff meltdown does suggest another scenario for a majority, but there are many ways for the Conservatives to go astray between now and voting day when it eventually comes.

Strategic Counsel Poll in Globe - A Majority?

While I can't estimate an exact number, there is no doubt the Strategic Counsel Poll we saw in the Globe would produce a small Conservative majority.

However, on the weekend the PM did two things that appear to rule out an early trip to the polls. He announced a royal visit and called early by-elections on consecutive days. What this says I think is that Conservative support (and likewise Liberal weakness) is premised on deep antipathy by Canadians to the idea of an early election. If Harper tried to force one, it would be obvious, and a fair portion of their support would evaporate. Just a slight loss would mean no majority, and leave the Conservatives where they are now.

This paradox is very much to the current benefit of the Liberals who are not ready for a campaign. Ignatieff nonetheless seems oblivious to his party's predicament. If Michael Ignatieff ever manages to find a way to 24 Sussex Drive he will owe a debt of gratitude to Jack Layton that he did not have to enter an election campaign in the fall of 2009.