Peter Baker:
Over the course of 48 hours, Americans will confront two starkly disparate views of Barack Obama’s America that will frame the debate over the future of the country in this election year and beyond.
The country described by the president on Tuesday night in his final State of the Union address is the most powerful nation on earth and on the rise again, with more jobs, better health care and stunning innovation. Although grappling with serious challenges, it is poised for greater progress.
By contrast, the country that Republican presidential candidates will depict on Thursday night in their next nationally televised debate is a darker place, a once-great power that has lost ground in a dangerous world, surrendered its authority and leadership with allies and enemies alike, and diminished freedom and opportunity at home.
Ezra Klein:
This is what makes Republicans and Democrats so different
Democratic presidents talk more about policy, propose more specific policy ideas, and pass more significant pieces of legislation. The numbers are stark. Since 1945, Democratic presidents have put forward 39 percent more policy proposals than Republican presidents, and 62 percent more domestic policy proposals.
"There is a good reason for this asymmetry," write Grossmann and Hopkins. "Democrats and liberals are more likely to focus on policymaking because any change that occurs is much more likely to be liberal than conservative. New policies usually expand the scope of government responsibility, funding, or regulation. There are occasional conservative policy successes as well, but they are less frequent and are usually accompanied by expansion of government responsibility in other areas."
This piece goes nicely with the Yuval Levin piece I linked yesterday: some respond positively to Trump’s diagnosis, some react negatively to his lack of solutions. People react differently to the same information.
Greg Sargent:
However, Obama’s own words indicated that he has come to understand that a large chunk of the country fundamentally disagrees with his definition of progress and with his vision of government’s role in promoting it — and that his efforts at persuasion have not been enough to overcome these differences. A big chunk of the country does not envision as robust a governmental role in promoting economic security and maintaining a minimum standard of health care; in acting to combat climate change; and in creating a path to legalization for undocumented immigrants to get right with the law.
That’s the America that Trump and Cruz are speaking to most effectively right now — the chunk of the country that remains hostile, or at least deeply skeptical, towards Obama’s vision of cultural inclusion, of what counts as progress, and of government’s proper role in promoting it. In pleading for all of these things — and in admitting that he’s failed to unite the country behind a shared vision — Obama implicitly conceded that when it comes to our biggest arguments, there still may be two Americas, after all. The unspoken truth that Obama could not openly acknowledge last night is that Democrats are betting their hopes for preserving this vision on the demographic gamble that their America is inexorably evolving into the larger one.
Speaking of seeing the same information and reacting differently, this from Reuters:
Iran freed ten U.S. sailors on Wednesday a day after detaining them aboard two U.S. Navy patrol boats in the Gulf, bringing a swift end to an incident that had rattled nerves shortly before the expected implementation of a landmark nuclear accord.
Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said it had released the sailors after determining they had entered Iranian territorial waters by mistake. IRGC Rear Admiral Ali Fadavi said earlier the boats had strayed due to a broken navigation system.
The quick resolution contrasted with previous cases in which British servicemen were held by Iran for considerably longer, in once case almost two weeks.
This is from IA Starting Line on Jan11, before today’s DMR/Bloomberg/Selzer poll:
Indeed, Sanders seems like a real candidate now, not just the unlikely leader of a progressive movement hoping to get economic inequality more into the national political discussion. He’s forcefully pushing back on potential weaknesses and taking sharp aim at the front-runner he needs to surpass here in three weeks.
A betting man should probably still put their chips on Clinton’s organization and lead in Iowa, at least right now. But many national reporters should be taking a closer look into Sanders’ momentum and Iowa operation. Because if you add Sanders’ newfound personal campaigning focus to his already strong and motivated base of supporters, we could be headed for a surprise upset on caucus night.
Nate Silver, featuring two separate models, polls alone and polls plus (including endorsements and other factors):
Iowa Democrats. Because public opinion can shift rapidly in the primaries, our models put a lot of emphasis on the most recent polls. That’s good news for Sanders, who has been neck and neck with Clinton in Iowa polls published this month after trailing her for most of last year. In fact, the race is nearly a tossup: He now has a 45 percent chance of winning Iowa according to polls-only, although the polls-plus model, noting Clinton’s dominance in endorsements, is more skeptical of Sanders, giving him a 27 percent chance instead.
New Hampshire Democrats. Here, there’s a split between the models. Sanders is a 73 percent favorite according to polls-only, while polls-plus — noting Clinton’s advantage in endorsements and that she’s favored in Iowa — gives Clinton the slightest edge, with a 53 percent chance to Sanders’s 47 percent. Essentially, she’d be following the path that Al Gore took over Bill Bradley in 2000, when an Iowa victory propelled him to a narrow victory in the Granite State. But the polls-plus model is designed to lower the effect of the endorsements variable to zero by election day in each state. So if Clinton keeps falling in New Hampshire and Iowa polls instead of rising, the establishment may not be able to bail her out, and she’ll have to contemplate the possibility of being swept in both states.