Barack Obama

In his speech yesterday announcing the American Graduation Initiative, President Obama sounded a new, tougher tone about the past and future of the American economy. NDN has long argued that, prior to the Great Recession, everyday Americans – faced with declining incomes, stagnating wages, and rising healthcare, energy, and pension costs – had been in a recession for nearly a decade. In his speech, the President discussed that fact, noting that we have to do more to ensure broad based American prosperity.

Here's what the President said about how we got here and the New Foundation we must create (emphasis added):

…the hard truth is, is that some of the jobs that have been lost in the auto industry and elsewhere won't be coming back.  They're the casualties of a changing economy.  In some cases, just increased productivity in the plants themselves means that some jobs aren't going to return.  And that only underscores the importance of generating new businesses and new industries to replace the ones that we've lost, and of preparing our workers to fill the jobs they create.  For even before this recession hit, we were faced with an economy that was simply not creating or sustaining enough new, well-paying jobs.

So now is the time to change all that.  What we face is far more than a passing crisis.  This is a transformative moment.  And in this moment we must do what other generations have done.  It's not the time to shrink from the challenges we face or put off tough decisions.  That's what Washington has done for decades, and it's exactly why I ran for President -- to change that mindset.  Now is the time to build a firmer, stronger foundation for growth that will not only withstand future economic storms, but that will help us thrive and compete in a global economy. 

As Simon wrote a few weeks ago, if the President can build a new narrative around the argument that the economic direction of the United States was untenable prior to the Great Recession, pieces of the President's agenda – reforming health care and energy policy and enabling future growth by creating a 21st century workforce (amongst many, many other pieces) – become crucial. It also allows the President to lead a badly needed national conversation about how we are going to remake a saner, more prosperous American economy that goes beyond recovery to respond to the great challenges of globalization.

President Obama has been a long time supporter of the notion that America's community college system can help create a workforce for a 21st century economy. He sounded that note in an op-ed on Sunday and his White House Council of Economic Advisors wrote on the value of community colleges in training the American workforce in a report released today on the Jobs of the Future.

Obama in the Washington Post:

We believe it's time to reform our community colleges so that they provide Americans of all ages a chance to learn the skills and knowledge necessary to compete for the jobs of the future. Our community colleges can serve as 21st-century job training centers, working with local businesses to help workers learn the skills they need to fill the jobs of the future. We can reallocate funding to help them modernize their facilities, increase the quality of online courses and ultimately meet the goal of graduating 5 million more Americans from community colleges by 2020.

From the CEA report, entitled Preparing the Workers of Today for the Jobs of Tomorrow (emphasis added):

Research suggests that the most valuable credentials are those in quantitatively-oriented fields or high-growth/high-need occupations such as health care. Similarly, evidence from Washington State suggests that displaced workers who attend a community college substantially increase their long-term earnings compared to those who do not. Again, the benefits are greatest for academic courses in math and science as well as courses related to the health professions and other technical fields. These findings point to a powerful role for community college education in helping displaced workers through the current economic downturn, particularly if they take classes in fields related to high-growth industries and occupations.

NDN could not agree more with the President and his economic team. Recently, House Democratic Caucus Chairman John Larson introduced H.R. 2060, The Community College Technology Access Act of 2009, which is based on a paper written in 2007 by NDN Globalization Initiative Chair Dr. Robert Shapiro called Tapping the Resources of America’s Community Colleges: A Modest Proposal to Provide Universal Computer Training. The legislation offers free computer training to all Americans through the already existing infrastructure of the nation's approximately 1,200 community colleges.

The bill is faring quite well in the House, with cosponsorship from 41 members:

Rep Blumenauer, Earl [OR-3] - 6/9/2009
Rep Bordallo, Madeleine Z. [GU] - 4/23/2009
Rep Castle, Michael N. [DE] - 4/27/2009
Rep Conyers, John, Jr. [MI-14] - 7/8/2009
Rep Costello, Jerry F. [IL-12] - 4/27/2009
Rep Courtney, Joe [CT-2] - 6/25/2009
Rep Edwards, Donna F. [MD-4] - 4/23/2009
Rep Ehlers, Vernon J. [MI-3] - 4/23/2009
Rep Filner, Bob [CA-51] - 7/8/2009
Rep Grayson, Alan [FL-8] - 4/27/2009
Rep Grijalva, Raul M. [AZ-7] - 6/2/2009
Rep Gutierrez, Luis V. [IL-4] - 6/11/2009
Rep Hare, Phil [IL-17] - 4/23/2009
Rep Himes, James A. [CT-4] - 4/23/2009
Rep Honda, Michael M. [CA-15] - 4/23/2009
Rep Kennedy, Patrick J. [RI-1] - 4/28/2009
Rep Kilpatrick, Carolyn C. [MI-13] - 4/23/2009
Rep Langevin, James R. [RI-2] - 6/2/2009
Rep Lofgren, Zoe [CA-16] - 6/24/2009
Rep Markey, Betsy [CO-4] - 4/23/2009
Rep Matsui, Doris O. [CA-5] - 4/23/2009
Rep McGovern, James P. [MA-3] - 4/23/2009
Rep McIntyre, Mike [NC-7] - 6/8/2009
Rep Miller, Brad [NC-13] - 4/23/2009
Rep Murphy, Patrick J. [PA-8] - 4/23/2009
Rep Napolitano, Grace F. [CA-38] - 4/23/2009
Rep Olver, John W. [MA-1] - 7/10/2009
Rep Pierluisi, Pedro R. [PR] - 6/2/2009
Rep Polis, Jared [CO-2] - 5/6/2009
Rep Price, David E. [NC-4] - 7/9/2009
Rep Reyes, Silvestre [TX-16] - 5/4/2009
Rep Ros-Lehtinen, Ileana [FL-18] - 5/18/2009
Rep Ross, Mike [AR-4] - 4/23/2009
Rep Roybal-Allard, Lucille [CA-34] - 6/11/2009
Rep Ryan, Tim [OH-17] - 7/8/2009
Rep Sablan, Gregorio [MP] - 4/23/2009
Rep Schwartz, Allyson Y. [PA-13] - 6/4/2009
Rep Sestak, Joe [PA-7] - 4/23/2009
Rep Sires, Albio [NJ-13] - 6/3/2009
Rep Smith, Adam [WA-9] - 4/23/2009
Rep Wu, David [OR-1] - 4/23/2009

Robert McNamara died this week, but his life holds lessons for Barack Obama's presidency.   Arguably the leading light of JFK's stable of the best and brightest, McNamara's work as an architect and chief executive of LBJ's Vietnam debacle is well remembered by tens of millions of boomers who came of age during Vietnam, as well as by the President.   The caution for Mr. Obama's advisors lies in the conundrum of how McNamara's brilliance expedited the implosion of the most progressive presidency since FDR -- and how the spectacular failure of the Vietnam policy and the deep domestic divisions it produced helped deliver a generation-long majority to Republican conservatives.  

Mr. Obama came to his presidency at a moment of great opportunity to reshape the nation, the greatest  since LBJ and FDR.   Fittingly, his agenda - economic revival, universal health care access, abating climate change, and restoring effective American power and influence in the world - is the most sweeping since LBJ and FDR.  The core challenge he and his advisors face, however, involves their character more than their intellects, because the potential for greatness imminent in such moments can distort the decisions of the most brilliant leaders and advisors.   The prospect of grabbing history's golden ring breeds a powerful disposition for best-case scenarios, an indulgence which brought down McNamara and LBJ and now may threaten their successors.

Vice President Biden confessed about it this weekend, acknowledging the now risibly-obvious optimism of the administration's economic forecast.   The Obama team is certainly smart enough to recognize that after a year of real-life, worst-case scenarios which ultimately brought on the first systemic, cascading economic meltdown in three generations, it would be foolhardy to base the President's program on a supposition of a quick, sharp recovery.   Yet, they did.  It may be merely human to want to believe in such a miracle, because it could make everything else possible.   The catch is that without that particular miracle, there will be little money for health care reform, at least without risking the nation's credit-worthiness, and little public willingness to accept the costs of a genuine climate change program.  Most important, without the real prospect of people's incomes growing again, the American public could withhold the political support the President will need, again and again, to successfully deal with untold foreign crises and new domestic problems.

The issue here is not pragmatism, but realism.  Here's a dose to consider.  The yet-unreported chatter among New York financial people these days is that commercial real estate could be on the edge of the kind of crash suffered last year from home mortgage-backed securities and derivatives.  To make matters more dismal, the volume of commercial real estate securities and derivatives dwarfs last year's home mortgage market.  Moreover, commercial real estate lending and securitization are the business of not only Wall Street, but thousands of regional and local banks.  So, if that market goes south, the economic carnage will begin on Main Street.  The New York analysts who talk among themselves about thousands of banks going under in the next year may be suffering from their own kind of post traumatic stress.   But if they're right and the President and his brilliant advisors haven't planned for it, the blame will fall on them; and the most progressive presidency since LBJ could be left in the sort of ruins that can drive a political party and its agenda from power for a long time. 

Even if commercial real estate doesn't melt down - and sovereign debt defaults don't start springing up in Asia and Europe - a rosy forecast isn't the only economic trap waiting for the President and his indisputably brainy advisors.   During the last expansion, job creation fell by half even as GDP generally grew at healthy rates, and the strongest productivity gains since the 1960s didn't stop average real wages from falling.   President Bush and his less than brilliant economic advisors certainly mismanaged the run-up and onset of our current crisis, but we cannot also pin these new structural problems on their mistakes.

Yet, the administration agenda seems to depend on some faith that decent growth and productivity gains in the near future - which both remain problematic - will drive healthy job creation and income gains again as they did in the 1990s.   It's time to put aside that best-case scenario, too, and focus on reforms that might make a difference for these dynamics.  The President could get behind a proposal he supported as a senator, to make free computer and Internet training available to all American adults through community colleges.  He also could redirect the early stages of his energy and health care programs to restraining those costs for businesses.  For the last decade, intense competitive pressures from globalization have prevented businesses from passing along their higher costs in higher prices - the secret of our long, low inflation - but it also forces them to cut jobs and wages. 

If the President and his advisors can live with less than best-case scenarios, they can still achieve their agenda over time, as the economy and people's incomes come back.  In that way, they can escape the trap that snared LBJ and Robert McNamara. 

A July 3 Gallup poll release was headlined the "Obama honeymoon continues." A few days later two Quinnipiac surveys showed the president's approval rating in Ohio and Virginia, two former red states that Obama carried in 2008, had fallen below 50% for the first time. That same week, Senate Democratic majority Leader, Harry Reid, reportedly asked Montana Senator, Max Baucus to break off efforts to engage his Republican counterpart, Iowa's Chuck Grassley, in a bipartisan healthcare reform bill and instead to work on maintaining sufficient Democratic unity to put a bill on the president's desk during the current congressional session. This move toward a more clearly partisan approach on healthcare and other crucial legislation may be the key to sustaining the Obama honeymoon and Democratic congressional strength, both of which are closely linked and ultimately inseparable.

 Gallup defines a presidential honeymoon as the number of consecutive months at the start of a new administration during which the president's job approval score remains above 55% (the average approval score for all presidents in Gallup's polling since the Truman administration). Since his inauguration, President Obama's approval score has never fallen below 55% and, with a few scattered and brief exceptions, remained above 60%. During the first six months of this year his approval score averaged 63%. As a result, the Obama honeymoon has already exceeded those of Gerald Ford, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. As Gallup points out, "if [Obama] can maintain ratings above 55% through the summer, his honeymoon will match the length of those for Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan" and, as a result, will equal or be longer than those of most presidents since Richard Nixon.

Fundamental changes in America's attitudes toward government as well as the arrival of a new civic generation in the American electorate help explain much of the durability of President Obama's positive job performance ratings. As Morley Winograd and I pointed out in our book, Millennial Makeover, the 2008 election marked the passage of the United States from an "idealist" to a "civic" political era. Driven by the emergence of a large new civic generation, Millennials, born 1982-2003, much about American politics changed. As indicated in the following table, during civic eras Americans have more positive attitudes toward political institutions and personalities.  The data depicted below was drawn from surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center in 1994, the year in which Newt Gingrich led the Republican Party to control of both houses of Congress at the height of the last idealist era, and in 2009.

Across all of these questions, the American public is now more positive, or at least less negative, about government and how it operates than in 1994. America's newest civic generation, the Millennials, is driving these improvements in perceptions of government. The last time a civic generation, the GI Generation (born 1901-1924) dominated American life, in the 1940s and 1950s, sizable majorities held favorable attitudes toward government and other political institutions. This is likely to happen again as the entire Millennial Generation (only about 40% of whom were eligible to vote in 2008) comes of age politically.

These positive civic era attitudes toward government and politics are reflected in presidential approval scores over the decades. The four presidents who served during the previous GI Generation-dominated civic era (Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson) had honeymoons that averaged 29 months, a number that was reduced significantly by Truman's abbreviated post-war 11 month-long honeymoon. In the idealist era that began in 1968 with the emergence of the sharply divided Baby Boom Generation and the election of Richard Nixon, presidential honeymoons averaged only 8 months. George H.W. Bush's was the  longest  (21 months) and the shortest were those of Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton (one month each). Even Ronald Reagan, an ultimately popular and successful president, had only an 8-month long honeymoon, the average for the era.

The electorate  also looks far different now than it did during  much of the idealist era that is receding into history. From 1990 through 2004 the national party identification balance between Republicans and Democrats was fairly even. According to Pew, the largest Democratic advantage (9 percentage points) occurred in 1992 when Bill Clinton won the presidency; twice (1994 and 2002) the two parties were dead even. By contrast, since 2006 the Democratic advantage has steadily grown. It is now about 16 percentage points. Overall, a bit more than half of the electorate identifies with or leans to the Democrats while around a third say they are Republicans or lean to the GOP.

At the end of June, Gallup data indicates that 90% of all Democratic identifiers, 92% of liberal Democrats, 88% of moderate Democrats and 84% of conservative Democrats approved of the president's performance. Obama's marks remained very high, and if anything, increased in June among such key groups such as Millennials (73%), African-Americans (96%), and Hispanics (81%). Obama's support among the increased number of Democrats and Democratically oriented demographic groups provides a buffer for his approval scores that presidents in the recent idealist era did not have.

But, in politics, as in physics, what goes up seems eventually to come down. Even in civic eras, presidential honeymoons end. Dwight Eisenhower's lasted 41 months, about three-quarters of the way through his first term. John F. Kennedy's continued for 32 months, almost to the end of his tragically truncated presidency. Lyndon Johnson's continued for 30 months, through his landslide reelection, until controversy over the Vietnam war and societal unrest ended it, ultimately setting the stage for the election of Richard Nixon and the end of the New Deal civic era.

And, so, Democrats and progressives must at least notice and pay heed to poll results that suggest the diminishing of the Obama honeymoon. The two Quinnipiac polls indicating the president's approval level had fallen to 45% in Ohio and 48% in Virginia could be canaries in the coalmine warning of future disasters.  While the president's marks have held together better in consistently blue states like Michigan and Pennsylvania than in these more purple states, the most recent Gallup tracking surveys also indicate that President Obama's national approval evaluation has fallen to 57%,  perilously close to falling below the "honeymoon level." .

That is why Senator Reid's dictum to Senator Baucus to cease efforts to find a bipartisan approach to healthcare reform is important and encouraging. Another characteristic of civic eras is that most voters prefer unified rather than divided government. A CNN survey taken about a week before the 2008 election indicated that a solid majority of voters (59%) wanted the Democrats to control both Congress and the Presidency while only 38% preferred divided government. When questioned about this preference, voters told pollsters that they wanted unified government to "get things done." They want one of the parties to control both the presidency and congress so that institutional barriers will be overcome and the major problems facing the country will be confronted and resolved.

A continuation of the Obama honeymoon provides the president and congressional Democrats (whose political fates are inextricably linked) an opportunity and the political capital to heed the wishes and votes of the electorate and "get things done." If they succeed, they will prosper together. If they fail, they will go down together.

Time and time again, we've seen President Obama go around the world's leaders to speak directly to its people. This emphasis on the politics of the bottom up, which Simon has written about as a global phenomenon, has gone from a hallmark of the Obama campaign to a hallmark of his foreign policy. Today in Russia, he addressed the power of these new politics:

We not only need a "reset" button between the American and Russian government, but we need a fresh start between our societies -- more dialogue, more listening, more cooperation in confronting common challenges. For history teaches us that real progress -- whether it's economic or social or political -- doesn't come from the top-down, it typically comes from the bottom-up. It comes from people, it comes from the grassroots -- it comes from you. The best ideas and solutions come from ordinary citizens who become involved in their communities and in their countries. And by mobilizing and organizing and changing people's hearts and minds, you then change the political landscape. And oftentimes politicians get the credit for changing laws, but in fact you've created the environment in which those new laws can occur.

In celebration of the Fourth, President Obama used his weekly address to speak about patriotism and the power of the American spirit. President Obama explained that throughout history, each generation of Americans has faced its own set of unique challenges. But just as each generation faced tough times, each generation found the strength to overcome them by believing that, in America, anything is possible. It is this sense of pride in America and in our fellow Americans that President Obama asks us to bring back as we confront our contemporary challenges.

Our list is long and continues to grow everyday:

We are facing an array of challenges on a scale unseen in our time. We are waging two wars. We are battling a deep recession. And our economy – and our nation itself – are endangered by festering problems we have kicked down the road for far too long: spiraling health care costs; inadequate schools; and a dependence on foreign oil.

The length and nature of this list explains the need to act now. We can't wait and we can't listen to the naysayers who defend the status quo. To those people, our ever-eloquent POTUS had this to say:

These naysayers have short memories. They forget that we, as a people, did not get here by standing pat in a time of change. We did not get here by doing what was easy. That is not how a cluster of 13 colonies became the United States of America.

On this distinctly American holiday, I hope you'll join me in doing what President Obama asked by celebrating not only the birth of our nation but also what it means to be an American.

You can read the full text of the transcript or check out the full video address below.

Yesterday, the President held what was by all accounts a very good first meeting on immigration reform.  As Andres and I wrote earlier this week we remain optimistic that a bill can make it through Congress by the end of the year, or early next.   It won't be easy, but nothing of significance is in Washington.  And of course the votes "aren't there yet," but at this point neither are they for health care reform, cap and trade or financial regulatory reform.   So with this event the hard work begins, and we are at NDN are prepared to work along side many groups across a broad political spectrum to make progress on this issue in the months ahead. 

At the end of the meeting the President made remarks which are worth repeating here, as in a very Obama fashion he makes it clear that he is ready to go and already moving ahead: 

THE PRESIDENT:  Hello, everybody.  We have just finished what I consider to be a very productive meeting on one of the most critical issues that I think this nation faces, and that is an immigration system that is broken and needs fixing.

We have members of Congress from both chambers, from parties, who have participated in the meeting and shared a range of ideas.  I think the consensus is that despite our inability to get this passed over the last several years, the American people still want to see a solution in which we are tightening up our borders, or cracking down on employers who are using illegal workers in order to drive down wages -- and oftentimes mistreat those workers.  And we need a effective way to recognize and legalize the status of undocumented workers who are here.

Now, this is -- there is not by any means consensus across the table.  As you can see, we've got a pretty diverse spectrum of folks here.  But what I'm encouraged by is that after all the overheated rhetoric and the occasional demagoguery on all sides around this issue, we've got a responsible set of leaders sitting around the table who want to actively get something done and not put it off until a year, two years, three years, five years from now, but to start working on this thing right now.

My administration is fully behind an effort to achieve comprehensive immigration reform.  I have asked my Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Secretary Janet Napolitano, to lead up a group that is going to be working with a leadership group from both the House and the Senate to start systematically working through these issues from the congressional leaders and those with the relevant jurisdiction.  What we've heard is through a process of regular order, they would like to work through these issues both in the House and in the Senate.

In the meantime, administratively there are a couple of things that our administration has already begun to do.  The FBI has cleared much of the backlog of immigration background checks that was really holding up the legal immigration process.  DHS is already in the process of cracking down on unscrupulous employers, and, in collaboration with the Department of Labor, working to protect those workers from exploitation.

The Department of Homeland Security has also been making good progress in speeding up the processing of citizenship petitions, which has been far too slow for far too long -- and that, by the way, is an area of great consensus, cuts across Democratic and Republican parties, the notion that we've got to make our legal system of immigration much more efficient and effective and customer-friendly than it currently is.

Today I'm pleased to announce a new collaboration between my Chief Information Officer, my Chief Performance Officer, my Chief Technologies Officer and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Office to make the agency much more efficient, much more transparent, much more user-friendly than it has been in the past.

In the next 90 days, USCIS will launch a vastly improved Web site that will, for the first time ever, allow applicants to get updates on their status of their applications via e-mail and text message and online.  And anybody who's dealt with families who are trying to deal with -- navigate the immigration system, this is going to save them huge amounts of time standing in line, waiting around, making phone calls, being put on hold.  It's an example of some things that we can do administratively even as we're working through difficult issues surrounding comprehensive immigration.

And the idea is very simple here:  We're going to leverage cutting-edge technology to reduce the unnecessary paperwork, backlogs, and the lack of transparency that's caused so many people so much heartache.

Now, we all know that comprehensive immigration reform is difficult.  We know it's a sensitive and politically volatile issue.  One of the things that was said around the table is the American people still don't have enough confidence that Congress and any administration is going to get serious about border security, and so they're concerned that any immigration reform simply will be a short-term legalization of undocumented workers with no long-term solution with respect to future flows of illegal immigration.

What's also been acknowledged is that the 12 million or so undocumented workers are here -- who are not paying taxes in the ways that we'd like them to be paying taxes, who are living in the shadows, that that is a group that we have to deal with in a practical, common-sense way.  And I think the American people are ready for us to do so.  But it's going to require some heavy lifting, it's going to require a victory of practicality and common sense and good policymaking over short-term politics.  That's what I'm committed to doing as President.

I want to especially commend John McCain, who's with me today, because along with folks like Lindsey Graham, he has already paid a significant political cost for doing the right thing.  I stand with him, I stand with Nydia Velázquez and others who have taken leadership on this issue.  I am confident that if we enter into this with the notion that this is a nation of laws that have to be observed and this is a nation of immigrants, then we're going to create a stronger nation for our children and our grandchildren.

So thank you all for participating.  I'm looking forward to us getting busy and getting to work.  All right?  Thank you.

For Washington pundits not otherwise engaged in dissecting the strength and effectiveness of Barack Obama's reaction to events in Iran or the extent to which he still might use tobacco, the chief topic of conversation during the past week has been about how political independents may be deserting the president, thereby accounting for a modest dip (a fair amount of which already seems to have been restored) in his job approval marks.

One of those writing about the presumably crucial role of independents is the normally highly astute Wall Street Journal columnist, Gerald Seib. According to Seib "independent voters are the canaries in the coal mine of American politics, telling a leader whether the air is safe or starting to fill up with some toxic gases. Bearing that in mind, President Obama and his team ought to start worrying about the health of those canaries."

Citing Wall Street Journal/NBC surveys, Seib indicates that the president's job approval rates among independents fell from 60% in April to 45% in June. What makes this particularly important, according to Seib, is that independents "tend to decide most elections, and they went for Mr. Obama by a 52% to 44% margin" last November.

Independents, in fact, may have been less decisive in the president's victory than, for example, members of the Millennial Generation (voters 18-27) who in 2008 comprised slightly less than one-fifth of the electorate, voted for Obama by a 66% to 32% margin, and accounted for 80% of his popular vote margin over John McCain.

But, the biggest flaw in Seib's commentary is that his portrayal of independents is narrowly focused and shallow. It does not fully account for the demographic, behavioral, and attitudinal diversity of those who tell pollsters that they are "independents" rather than Republicans or Democrats.

As indicated in last week's posting on this site, the large majority (about 80%) of self-identified independents actually "lean" to one or the other of the two parties. Consequently, most independents (and by extension, the electorate) are far more partisan than a cursory overview of poll findings might suggest. Currently, the Democrats hold a solid and increasing lead over the Republicans among the majority of independents who lean toward a party. About six in 10 "leaners" now tilt to the Democrats. Pew Research Center data for the past three months indicates that a majority of the electorate (51%) identifies with or leans to the Democratic Party. A third (34%) is Republican identifiers and leaners. Only 14% (not quite the 20% cited by Seib) is completely unaffiliated or "pure independents." Rather than being the decisive center as Seib and others suggest, non-committed voters actually comprise a small minority of the electorate.

Of course, all of this would simply be interesting trivia if those who lean to one of the parties were not different in important ways from those who lean to the other party and from "pure independents." In fact, the differences among these groups are profound.

Demographic Differences

The following table, based on data drawn from Pew's Political Values and Core Attitudes survey, conducted every two years with a large than normal sample, compares those who identify with, lean to, or are completely unaffiliated with one of the two parties on key demographic attributes.

Much about this data will not surprise anyone who has followed American politics during the past half-century. Democratic identifiers, particularly Strong Democrats, are disproportionately female, ethnic, and reside in the Northeast. In addition, over the past several election cycles younger voters have increasingly affiliated with the Democrats. Republican identifiers are more likely than average to be male and white, especially from the South. Republican identifiers are now also a bit older than their Democratic counterparts, a gap that is likely to grow as greater numbers of solidly Democratic Millennials come of age during the next decade.

But what is most important, and perhaps may be most surprising to DC observers, about these survey results are the differences between independents who lean to the Democrats and those who say they are closer to the GOP. While a majority of both groups are male, the Independent Republicans contain a greater number of men than any of the party identification subgroups (59%). In addition, the Independent Democrats contain nearly two and a half times as many African-Americans and Hispanics than do the Independent Republicans (30% vs. 13%). The Independent Republicans also contain the largest percentage of Southerners and the Independent Democrats the smallest. On the other hand, voters from the Northeast contribute disproportionately to the Independent Democrats. Finally, nearly two-thirds of the Democratic leaners (65%) are under 50 while, by contrast, nearly half (44%) of those who lean to the GOP are 50+. In other words, demographically those who lean to a party look a lot like those who identify with that party.

Voting Behavior Differences

They also vote very much like them. The following table, using data collected by the Millennial Strategy Program of Frank N. Magid Associates about a week before Election Day 2008, displays the presidential and congressional vote intentions of party identifiers, independents who lean to a party, and unaffiliated independents.

* Less than .5%

These results lead to a number of clear and important conclusions about the voting behavior of independents, both those who lean to a party and those who don't.

• The independent leaners are decisively partisan. Upwards of eight in 10 of them indicated the intent to vote for the presidential candidate of the party to which they lean. In fact, they were more likely to do so than those who identify weakly with a party. About two-thirds of independent leaners said they would vote for the congressional candidate of the party to which they lean. Almost none expressed any willingness to cross party lines and vote for opposition candidates.
• On one level the uncommitted independents are indeed nonpartisan. The choices of those "pure independents" that had made one at the time of the survey were divided fairly evenly. A significant number of them had not yet determined for whom they would vote. However, it is a clear misperception to portray the "pure independents" as voters who were closely observing the political process and carefully weighing their choices. In the face of the social desirability of wanting to appear concerned about a crucial election at a time of major national stress, only about 60% of the uncommitted independents (in contrast to nearly 90% of the other groups) said they were very interested in or that it was very important to them who was elected president. Many, if not most, of the uncommitted independents were nonpartisan simply because they had too little interest in and knowledge of politics to make a choice.

Attitudinal Differences

The clear and persistent partisanship of Independent Republicans and Independent Democrats is also strikingly evident in their political opinions. The table below, containing data collected by Pew in May 2009, portrays favorable attitudes toward a number of political figures and the two parties. 

 Again the implications are clear.

• Independent leaners hold strikingly partisan attitudes. Solid majorities of them have positive impressions of politicians from the party to which they lean and of that party itself. Only a minority of them express favorable opinions about the opposing party and its politicians. While the independent leaners may not be as firmly positive about "their" party as are strong identifiers, they do have a solid sense of partisan connection. They are clearly not uncommitted and easily malleable centrists.
• The non-leaning independents are indeed broadly nonpartisan in their attitudes. Fewer than half express positive opinions about any political figure other than the president and first lady or toward either party. But this is as much a matter of limited political knowledge and involvement as it is of conscious weighing of options or firmly divided opinion. This is evidenced by the fact that while almost all of the uncommitted independents were able to say whether or not they like Barack and Michelle Obama as people (or celebrities), a third were unable to rate the president's job performance in the same survey.

In sum, almost nine in 10 American voters are currently attached, in varying degrees, to one or the other of the two political parties. Some of those are indeed independents that lean toward a party rather than identifying with that party outright. But in their demographics and, importantly, their voting behavior and political attitudes, these independent leaners more closely resemble committed partisans than they do the small minority of "pure independents."

Together those who identify and lean to the Democratic Party now comprise a majority of voters. This is the first time since the mid-1960s that either party can make that claim. This puts President Obama and his Democratic congressional colleagues in position to break the gridlock that has dominated Washington for the past four decades. To do that, however, they will have to take a new, outside the Beltway, look at the electorate and all of its component parts. They will have to recognize that voters have moved America into a new era and have the fortitude to follow.