Category: Uncategorized

Let’s Not Just Read the Constitution, Let’s Actually Discuss It

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Sign calling for people to get the "Constitution Flu"So the House Republicans are planning to get their “People’s House” show started today by reading the U.S. Constitution, that beloved document that our constitutional law scholar of a President has apparently never bothered to read.

It’s clearly symbolic politics, but I’m not as offended as, say the New York Times editorial board (who thinks it is a “a presumptuous and self-righteous act”). Rather, I think that Akhil Reed Amar, author of “America’s Constitution: A Biography” and a constitutional scholar at Yale Law School, has it right. Here’s what he told the Washington Post:

I like the Constitution. Heck, I’ll do them one better. Why only once in January? Why not once every week?… My disagreement is when we actually read the Constitution as a whole, it doesn’t say what the tea party folks think it says.

For the political right and especially the Tea Party, the Constitution has taken on the quality of a holy relic, a symbol of a lost America. Running through the Tea Party mythology is a familiar decline-of-civilization narrative: America was once an Edenic land of limited government and personal liberty. If only we return to the lost and mythic Constitution, we can somehow Restore America. (Apparently, in this story, Congress has been recklessly passing un-Constitutional laws without anybody even noticing – not even the most conservative Supreme Court in 80 years!)

Tea Partiers certainly have great fun making oh-so-clever signs about America’s lost constitution, but I’d happily wager that very few of them could actually pass a basic test about what’s in the hallowed document. (Surveys show that Americans actually know depressingly little about what’s in their beloved Constitution: a remarkable 49 percent think the President has the power to suspend the Constitution; 60 percent think the President can appoint judges without Senate approval; three-quarters of Americans think the Constitution guarantees a high school education; 45 percent of Americans’ think the Communist manifesto slogan  “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” is found in the U.S. Constitution. Could you name all Ten Amendments?)

 

In this respect, a public conversation about what’s actually in the Constitution would probably be a very good thing. We might actually have a more informed discussion, and, as E.J. Dionne and Greg Sargent have both noted, there’s plenty of reason for progressives to welcome it. Rather than ceding it as a symbol of the political right, maybe we should discuss the broad federal powers to provide for the “general Welfare of the United States” (Article I, Section 8).

Unfortunately, the great likelihood is that the Constitution will be read once, and then promptly tossed aside. The words, in all their 18th Century legalese, will go in one ear and out the other (assuming anybody is actually listening). And life will pretty much be the same as it was before, with the majority of Tea Partiers still desperately clinging to their particular fantasy of what they believe the Constitution represents without any better understanding of what is actually says.

How Reckless Islamophobia Undermines the Struggle Against Radical Islam

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The brutal Egyptian suicide bombing at a church on New Year’s Day has rightly outraged the world. And yet, rather than focus on those specifically responsible for this brutal attack (most likely some splinter group of Al Qaeda), some – including many right wingers – are using the opportunity to stoke anti-Islamic sentiment. Islam-hater Robert Spencer laments that “Islamic jihadists and Sharia supremacists continue, with ever increasing confidence and brutality, to prey on the Christians in their midst, while those who should be working to protect them make excuses and look the other way.” “A disproportionate share of religious persecution happens in Muslim-majority countries,” writes Gary Bauer. Marty Peretz wrote that “already in the new year there is already news of Islamist terror.”

While there certainly is a problem with jihadist violence towards minorities in the Middle East, the right’s outrage would have a lot more credibility were it not part of a broader anti-Islamic campaign. The hysterical campaign against Park51 in New York City last year was a turning point in American conservatism’s relationship to Muslims, illustrating beyond a reasonable doubt the sheer Islamophobia on the right.

“Muslim life is cheap,” Peretz infamously wrote during the Park51 non-controversy. He apologized for another line in the same article, wherein he called for Muslims to be stripped of their First Amendment rights. But about Muslim life being cheap, well, it was “a statement of fact, not value,” he said later.

The astonishing thing about Park51 was that powerful figures in the conservative movement revealed themselves as concerned with Islam, suddenly and selectively. Sarah Palin called on “peaceful Muslims” to reject the planned Islamic center, as if erecting such a building were a statement of violence. John McCain said Park51 would “harm relations, rather help.”

Here’s an idea: avoiding sweeping statements about Islam’s supposed propensity towards violence would help relations. It’s something those who claim to be so concerned with Islamist violence might want to consider.

Where Regulation Did and Did Not Intensify, 2000-2010

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As Republicans go on the attack about excessive regulation under the Obama Administration, it’s worth noting two things. First, the regulatory state started growing under President George Bush, as I showed in my posts The Age of Regulation Started Ten Years Ago and Homeland Security and the Regulatory Burden.  Homeland Security accounts for roughly 90% of the increase in federal regulatory employment over the past ten years.

The second point is that the growth of regulation over the past ten years has been quite uneven, even outside of Homeland Security. Take a look at the chart below.

You can see that workplace and the environment has lagged in terms of regulatory employment. Just something to keep in mind.  Some of the big gainers were the FDA, the SEC, and the NRC.

This piece is cross-posted at Mandel on Innovation and Growth

Memo To Obama: Rise Above Party

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As you think about how to regain public support for your administration, Mr. President, one political imperative looms above all others: winning back the independents who voted for you in 2008 but abandoned the Democratic Party in 2010.

Independents are a motley political crew. Most habitually vote for one party or the other. But as many as a third of those who self-identify as independent really are nonaligned. How you can reach these true swing voters is a subject of endless debate in progressive circles. Centrists argue that you should move to the center. Liberals insist that by standing firm for progressive principles, the center will move to you. Persuading independents, however, is less a matter of political positioning than effective governing.

What these voters are looking for can be summed up succinctly: a more prosperous economy, a more disciplined government, and a more responsive political system that yields results, not partisan deadlock. These voters are upset not because they think you’ve gone socialist, but because they feel you haven’t delivered on these three fronts.

Read the entire article in Washington Monthly

Kicking Off the 112th Congress

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The 112th Congress convenes this week, amidst considerable maneuvering in both parties to set an agenda for the year.  Unsurprisingly, most developments involving Republicans are centered in their new stomping grounds in the House, and most involving Democrats are happening in their Senate redoubt.

The big headline for the GOP is its plan to hold a House vote next week on total repeal of the Affordable Care Act of 2010, a.k.a. ObamaCare.  This is expected to pass the House easily; with the decimation of Blue Dogs last November, it’s not clear how many Democratic votes the gesture will attract.  But it is clear the repeal will go nowhere in the Senate, leading to the next phase of the GOP effort to disable ObamaCare through some combination of appropriations denials, state obstruction, and selective congressional forays against the least popular elements of the law (especially the individual mandate and anything that can be construed as a restriction of Medicare services).  Lurking in the background, of course, is the slow march towards litigation of constitutional attacks on ACA, which will eventually make their way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

A less visible but potentially more dramatic House GOP development is the announcement of investigatory plans by the new Oversight and Government Reform chairman, the veteran conservative provocateur Darrell Issa of California.  Here’s the Washington Post’s description of Issa’s initial plans:

Issa, who will have power to subpoena government officials to appear before the committee, said he intended to conduct inquiries into the release of classified diplomatic cables by Wikileaks; recalls at the Food and Drug Administration; the role of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the foreclosure crisis; the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission’s failure to identify the origins of the meltdown; as well as business regulations and alleged corruption in Afghanistan.

Item five on this six-item list could be the most interesting, since Issa has penned an encyclical to corporate lobbyists asking for examples of government regulations that are allegedly preventing a revival of economic growth.  This is the legislative equivalent of ringing a dinner bell.  But item two is revealing as well, given the high likelihood that Issa will veer from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into  full-scale airing of the common Tea Party theory that ACORN and other “radicals” caused the housing crisis and then the financial meltdown by encouraging poor and minority folk to take out mortgages they couldn’t afford.

The buzz among Democrats (aside from the struggle of House Members to adjust once again to the second-class citizenship of minority status) is over plans in the Senate to enact filibuster reforms as part of the first-day adoption of Senate rules, which requires only a majority vote.  Despite public claims by all 53 surviving Democrats that they support filibuster reform, the exact nature of what they will support remains something of a mystery, though almost no one thinks such major steps as lowering of the threshold for cloture will be enacted.  Senate Democrats have already announced their package will not be unveiled, as originally planned, on the first day of the session (tomorrow); since the Senate will quickly recess, the “first day” when Senate rules can be adopted will technically not conclude until January 24.  That gives Democrats nearly three weeks to figure out what they can actually accomplish on filibuster reform.

Meanwhile, aficionados of political theater are enjoying the long and painful process that is almost certain to conclude in the dismissal of Michael Steele as chairman of the Republican National Committee. Steele surprised many observers by announcing over the holidays that he would pursue another term in the post; his tenure has been characterized by chronically poor fiscal stewardship and embarrassing gaffes, but Republicans can’t be too happy with the spectacle of firing an African-American who presided over the best GOP midterm election cycle in decades.  At present, the front-runner to succeed Steele is Wisconsin Republican chairman Reince Priebus, who can boast of a midterm election in which his party picked up a Senate seat, the governorship, and both state legislative chambers, perhaps the best GOP year in Wisconsin since Joe McCarthy’s heyday.

Elsewhere this week, state legislative sessions are gearing up amidst nearly universal fiscal crisis alarms, with Republicans in a vastly stronger position nationally than in the recent past.  As the two parties circle each other in Washington, state capitals could be where the real action occurs.

Framing the Fiscal Battle

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Republicans are convinced they have a mandate to cut government down to size. That’s hard to do when you only control one House of Congress, and harder still when your fiscal plans are fraught with internal contradictions.

It’s not even clear, for instance, what Republicans really want to accomplish. Senator-elect Kelly Ayotte, delivering the GOP’s weekly address Jan. 1, said that “Job one is to stop wasteful Washington spending.” At the same time, she said that “Congress must get serious about meaningful debt reduction.”

So which is it—cut public spending or cut public deficits? That’s a distinction with a difference, especially to investors worried about the basic soundness of the U.S. economy. To them, deficits are simply the arithmetic result of government spending too much, taxing too little or both, as is clearly the case today. Last month, Republicans struck a deal with President Obama on a tax cut package that will add $950 billion to the nation’s debts. Key GOP House leaders have made it clear they will oppose any tax hikes to solve the budget crisis, which they pretend is purely a matter of overspending.

Ayotte seemed closer to the mark in saying Republicans come to Washington to “make government smaller, not bigger.” In practice, however, that ideological goal may not be compatible with what the public seems to want. Independent voters especially have focused on narrowing the enormous deficits that force America to get deeper and deeper in hock to Chinese and other foreign lenders.

And if Republicans are serious about taking taxes off the table, they’ll have to make even deeper cuts in public spending—including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—to close our yawning budget gaps. It will be interesting to see which GOP bravos are willing to walk that plank. Thus far, House Republicans are proposing only cosmetic cuts, like trimming the House budget by $25 million. It’s a good idea for the House to discipline its own spending, but in a $3 trillion budget, that’s chump change.

Meanwhile, the GOP is planning to vitiate budget caps imposed by the previous Congress. Under the caps, any new spending or tax cuts would have to be offset by equivalent spending cuts or tax hikes. Republicans would eliminate the later requirement, so that tax cuts too would trigger deeper spending cuts. This of course is a formula for a deepening fiscal crisis and intensifying polarization between the two parties. And House Republicans will take a run at repealing Obamacare, which would certainly reduce federal spending but actually increase future budget gaps. In any event, it’s not happening

Some of the more fervid Tea Party types are even threatening to vote against raising the debt ceiling in March if Democrats don’t agree to new spending cuts. If they are serious, this could mean America would default on its debts for the first time in history. It would be, as Obama’s chief economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee, said yesterday, an act of political insanity, the equivalent of taking yourself hostage and threatening to shoot.

Finally, there’s the crucial question of timing. Incoming House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan reportedly is planning a package or rescissions aimed at cutting about 21 percent from 2011 spending Congress approved last year. The aim is to return domestic spending to its 2008 level, before Obama took office.

The risk is that withdrawing a significant chunk of fiscal stimulus could abort an economic recovery that at last seems to be getting traction. There’s no question that Americans want to restore fiscal discipline in Washington, but what they want even more is for the economy to grow and unemployment to start falling.

Goolsbee hinted that Obama’s next budget also will contain some spending cuts. But the GOP’s ideological zeal to cut government gives Obama an opportunity to offer a more pragmatic approach that puts jobs growth first, while taking balanced and gradual steps to put the federal government on a fiscally sustainable course.

Progressives do need to get serious about getting federal spending under control. But by framing the coming fiscal battles as a choice between a more robust economy and a smaller government, they can speak directly to Americans’ number one priority and thereby regain the political initiative.

How the War Looks From Al Qaeda’s Perspective

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In the new issue of Vanity Fair, journalist Peter Bergen argues that we are, in fact, winning our war against Al Qaeda. “[I]t is not the West that faces an existential threat, but al-Qaeda,” he writes. “Above all, we need to keep al-Qaeda in perspective, remembering that its assets are few, and shrinking.”

Now, Bergen is one of the few Western journalists to meet Osama Bin Laden, and among the world’s foremost experts on Al Qaeda. He also opposed the Iraq War for the same reason President Obama did, as a distraction from the hunt for Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. In other words, Bergen is not just another hawk or war cheerleader, reflexively supporting military action divorced from any realistic aim. He does not claim progress in this war because he always mistakes militarism for wisdom, as, say, Republican hack Bill Kristol does. So it’s very worth taking what Bergen has to say very seriously.

Even if he is wrong about the astuteness of continuing to fight in Afghanistan, as I think he is, Bergen points to a larger truth about the vast majority of commentary and analysis about Al Qaeda: most of it focuses not on Al Qaeda but on us. Our blunders, our costs, our misguided decisions and our weaknesses. Very little looks at developments from Al Qaeda’s point of view. And from Al Qaeda’s point of view, things don’t look so pretty.

Bin Laden imagined Muslims rising up worldwide and overthrowing their oppressors after 9/11, so inspired by the attacks would they be. That obviously hasn’t happened. Al Qaeda imagined the U.S. ceasing its support for Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and other un-Islamic regimes in the Middle East. That hasn’t happened, either.  Bin Laden’s right-hand man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, believed his organization could gain control of a state and expand its Taliban-like rule outward. Nope. In fact, all of Al Qaeda’s larger goals of restoring the caliphate and ushering in a period of worldwide ultra-Islamic rule have failed to materialize.

Nearly 10 years after the 9/11 attacks,  Al Qaeda is much further away from achieving its primary aims than it was before the attacks, when it could at least claim to have a mini-state within Afghanistan. Yes, the U.S. has expended great resources, lost thousands of soldiers, and traded away many valuable liberties and values. I think Bergen understates these costs when he writes, “During the past decade, misguided actions taken in the name of the War on Terror—notably the invasion of Iraq, the bungled war in Afghanistan, and the heavy-handed approach to the treatment of prisoners—have bought bin Laden and his allies some time.”

But for Al Qaeda, bruising America is only a means to an end. The point of hurting the United States was for it to crumble, not for it to carry on in a wounded state. After America broke apart easily, like a spider web, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and Israel would surely follow, bin Laden thought. Taking over those lands was the purpose of attacking the U.S. in the first place. What good are spectacular terrorist events against infidels if they don’t lead to the outcomes you want?

True, Al Qaeda still exists, and arguably might even still be able to execute another attack on the American homeland. But it has not done so in nearly 10 years, and not for lack of trying. The ultimate way to defeat Al Qaeda is not just to prevent it from killing Americans—though of course that is a major sub-goal of ours—but to kill or capture its current members, and convince prospective future anti-American jihadis not to join its cause. Preventing Al Qaeda from achieving its larger Islamist aims is a prime way to do that. Even the most committed ideologues can only fight for so long without making significant progress towards its goals, after all.

All of which is to say that things probably aren’t as bad as they seem. Things probably aren’t as bad as they always seem. Al Qaeda has a fundamentally unrealistic goal and a deeply unappealing ideology. As long as the U.S. and its allies refrain from making too many too mistakes, as long as we play the long game and keep Al Qaeda isolated, as long as we protect the American homeland, we will win this war. We already are.

Standing Up to the Chinese Threat

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Maybe it’s just the growing pains of an adolescent superpower, but China has begun to flex its newfound muscles in ways inconsistent with its “peaceful rise.” Its bullying behavior demands a firm pushback from the United States – starting next month when Chinese President Hu Jintao comes to Washington for talks with President Obama.

The unmistakably imperious trend in China’s conduct has definitely caught the world’s attention. Take its recent arm-twisting campaign to prevent nations from participating in a Nobel Peace Prize ceremony for Liu Xiaobo, a prominent democracy activist serving an 11-year sentence for subversion. Nineteen countries caved shamelessly to China’s demands. In a display of insecurity worthy of Burma’s insular and paranoid junta, the government also cracked down on domestic dissidents and barred travel to Oslo.

read the entire piece at RealClearWorld

 

Will American Exceptionalism Sink or Save Obama?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

A new Gallup poll out today highlights what could be a problem for Obama going into the 2012 election: his reluctance to embrace the idea of American exceptionalism. According to Gallup’s polling, 37 percent of Americans think that Obama does not “believe the U.S. has a unique character that makes it the greatest country in the world.”

What makes this dangerous is that Americans are in an anxious and insecure mood these days, seeing a world that doesn’t match up with well-established ideas about American greatness. These days, only 20 percent of Americans think the U.S. has the strongest economy in the world, and only 34 percent expect Americans can get back to the world’s top economy in 20 years. Only 17 percent of Americans are satisfied with the way things are going in the United States.

And yet, despite all this, 80 percent of Americans still believe in America’s unique greatness (73 percent of Democrats, 91 percent of Republicans).

There is a gap here. American exceptionalism is part of our cultural heritage and our self-identification. We believe there is something special about our nation. And yet, something is preventing us from achieving its full potential. What is it? No wonder there is so much anxiety.

The danger is the temptation to blame the wrong causes. The political right has increasingly spinning stories about how big government socialism is preventing America from achieving its true potential, and as The Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty recently noted in an excellent round up of Republican talking points on American exceptionalism, “Lately, it seems to be on the lips of just about every Republican who is giving any thought to running for president in 2012.

But there is an upside here too, which is that despite the mood of declinism, there is also an underlying base of confidence and resilience. Americans still feel there is something special about this country, which means that there is a narrative on which to build a story of recovery. We’ve done it before, and we can do it again. This is America. We can roll up our sleeves and make hard choices about our future.

Can Obama be the leader to make that pivot? The good news is that 58 percent of Americans actually do think Obama believes in America’s unique greatness, including 57 percent of Independents (not surprisingly, 83 percent of Dems but only 34 percent of Republicans think Obama believes this). Not overwhelming, but at least it’s a start.

As numerous commentators have noted, the Obama administration is in need of an overarching narrative, a coherent and aspirational story about the direction in which he is trying to take the country. Recently, Obama tried out a “Sputnik Moment” trope in speeches. Though it hasn’t exactly caught on (and the analogy is a bit strained), at least he’s thinking along the right lines.

American greatness does not have to be a jingoistic tool of the political right. It can also be a powerful set of ideas for Obama to tap into about how we don’t have to give into declinism, and how we can indeed get America moving again because always have. We’re special like that.

Too Soon to Tell About FCC Rules

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

I had hoped to write a simple post giving thumbs up or down to yesterday’s FCC ‘net neutrality’ rule-making. Alas, I can’t, yet.

Let me explain. I judge their actions by applying the principle of countercyclical regulatory policy: In recessions, the government should refrain from imposing heavy-handed regulations on innovative, growing sectors. The goal is to keep the communications innovation ecosystem growing and healthy.

From that perspective, the three basic rules that the FCC approved are fine: Transparency, no blocking of legitimate websites, and no “unreasonable discrimination” by wired broadband.

The key here is the transparency provision, which gets little attention. If we look back at the wreckage of the financial boom and bust of the 2000s, the big problem was not financial innovation. Rather, the big mistake made by the financial regulators was not pushing for more information about the decisions being made by Wall Street. That would have enabled regulators to put up a stop sign before things got out of hand.

Learning from that bad example, an intelligently-enforced transparency provision for broadband providers—requiring them to release “accurate information regarding the network management practices, performance, and commercial terms of its broadband Internet access services”—would go an awfully long way to deterring abusive practices without interfering with innovation.

If the FCC had just stopped with its three rules, we could be heading for the best of all possible worlds …where the communications innovation ecosystem keeps growing, the providers earn enough profits to allow them to keep investing, but where transparency helps encourage them to be good stewards and not to be too greedy.

But not content to leave well enough alone, the FCC appears to have added a lot of extra verbiage to the order that muddies the waters,  to the point where I can’t even figure out what they are trying to achieve. I say ‘appears’ because all we have so far is excerpts from the text, rather than the full text itself.

If regulators can’t make rules that are clear and straightforward, it’s a sign they shouldn’t be doing it. I wait eagerly for the actual text of the order.

This piece is cross-posted at Mandel on Innovation and Growth

Where the U.S. is Building Knowledge Capital

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

I’ve been posting about knowledge capital writedowns, so now it’s time for a post on where the U.S. is building knowledge capital.

Let’s start with research and development: R&D is not the only type of knowledge capital investment, but it’s one of the more important parts.  In my upcoming paper “Biosciences and Long-Term Economy Recovery”, I wanted to compare biosciences R&D  in the U.S. with infotech R&D.  (Biosciences, by my definition, includes pharmaceuticals, medical equipment makers, and biotech).

Now, these numbers are not published by the government,  but I was able to take a decent shot  using NSF data. Take a look at the chart below:

By my calculations, the U.S. R&D effort, outside of defense, is divided into thirds–one third biosciences, one third infotech, one third everything else.

I estimate that  biosciences accounts for  approximately $100 billion a year in domestic R&D spending. This includes domestic business spending, nondefense federal spending and nondefense academic spending.

U.S. domestic infotech R&D totals roughly $95 billion, outside of defense. However, my calculations don’t pick up the portion of the government defense R&D that goes into IT-related projects, which would gross it up to $100 billion. For all intents and purposes,  domestic IT R&D is roughly equal to biosciences R&D.

In these two areas–biosciences and IT–it’s likely that the rate of U.S. knowledge capital creation exceeds the rate of knowledge capital writedown. Other areas of R&D? Much dicier.

Note: These are preliminary estimates. I will likely update them in the full version of the paper.

This piece is cross-posted at Mandel on Innovation and Growth

What to Look For in 2011

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The 111th Congress is still a few days from concluding, but with Saturday’s Senate vote repealing the military’s Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell policy, it can boast a record of progressive accomplishment that may give pause to liberal critics of the Obama administration.  Ratification of the START treaty just before Christmas would be a nice capper before the difficult period begins with the Republican takeover of the House and the official burial of any filibuster-proof Democratic Senate Majority.

Since this is my last memo for 2010, it’s as good time as any to examine the political mood of the country going into 2011.

It’s worth noting that there’s really no consensus interpretation of what ultimately happened in the midterm elections.  Democrats remain divided between those who view the November setback as primarily a structural phenomenon attributable to a bad economy and inevitable shifts in the turnout patterns, and those who believe strategic and tactical errors by the President and congressional leaders invited the defeat. Liberal activist criticism of Obama for his conciliatory public attitude towards Republicans, conservative Democrats, and “big business,” while familiar to anyone who remembers the Clinton years, reached a sharp new point near the end of the year, nearly producing a revolt in the House against the Obama-McConnell tax deal.

But it’s unclear whether this hostility among opinion-leaders is widely shared in the actual “base” of Democratic voters.  The latest Gallup tracking poll does show Obama’s job approval rating among self-identified liberal Democrats dipping below 80 percent for the first time, but 79 percent approval is still a pretty high number. Anyone fantasizing about a left-bent primary challenge to the president should look at last week’s Magellan poll of NH, which showed Obama trouncing any potential rival there, even though it should be one of his weakest states.

Republicans, meanwhile, have largely taken a triumphalist view of the midterms as indicating a conscious conservative “turn” in the electorate that has rejected Obama, Pelosi and their “socialist” policies.  The major topic of dissension among conservative commentators is whether the risk to be most avoided is an ideological rigidity that prevents Republicans from taking advantage of Democratic missteps, or instead a return to the “big government conservatism” and ideological laxity that, in their view, doomed the Bush administration.

Since the air is often full of warnings to party leaders from both sides of the spectrum against compromise with the satanic opposition, it’s interesting to look a little more deeply at Democratic and Republican attitudes on the subject of bipartisanship.  A recent analysis by Pollster.com’s Mark Blumenthal reaches the striking conclusion that poll numbers showing high public support for “compromise” can be misleading:

For many partisans, “compromise” is really a disguised expression of partisanship. They want to see the leaders of both parties working together, but mostly in support of their preferred policies. A larger number of Democrats — a third to half — are open to their leaders compromising with the Republicans, and that difference helps tilt the overall numbers in favor of compromise.

In other words, support for “compromise” is lower than it looks, but for all the progressive angst about Obama betraying his base, he appears to have more maneuverability when it comes to compromise than does his Republican counterparts.  Certainly the base-dominated 2012 presidential nominating process is likely to exert a strong rightward influence on the GOP.

Five key things to look for early next year:

  • Most obviously, the economy: Is it recovering in a way that will be tangible to voters in 2012? Will Republicans at the federal and/or state levels take actions that essentially sabotage recovery by depressing consumer demand?
  • Redistricting: How aggressively will Republicans pursue their midterm advantage in the states, and how much leeway will courts give them in legislative gerrymandering?
  • The deficit debate: Will it develop in a way that encourages cooperation at the risk of premature austerity policies, or that sharpens partisan differences?
  • Afghanistan: The one thing that could turn liberal grumbling about Obama into serious intraparty opposition would be the perception that he’s dragging his feet on withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan.
  • Republicans: Will the GOP finally secure visible leadership that helps rather than hurt the party’s political prospects?  Can they do better than McConnell and Boehner, Gingrich and Palin?

The dynamics of the 2012 election cycle will depend on all five of these factors, aside from the nuts and bolts of money and organization and candidate personalities.  Whether the two parties—or barring that, the president alone via executive action—can accomplish much while jockeying for future position is another question entirely.

Will 2011 Be a Banner Year for IT Hiring?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The water is building up behind the dam.  More and more, it’s looking like 2011 could be a banner year for IT hiring…isn’t that amazing?

The key piece of evidence:  Online help-wanted ads for computer and mathematical occupations are up 56% over a year ago, and well over their pre-bust peak.  That’s according to data from The Conference Board. *

 

This category of help-wanted ads includes companies looking for the full range of IT occupations: computer software engineers, computer support specialists, network administrators, web developers, computer programmers and the like.**

On one level, this rise in labor demand is not surprising, since  the communications boom–including mobile, video, social networking, online shopping, and  all sorts of other applications–is driving a commensurate boom in IT spending.   With business spending on computers, software, and communications equipment is now almost 10% above pre-bust levels,  it’s no wonder that companies have an absolute crying need for more skilled IT workers.

So far, however, businesses have been holding off from actual hiring. Data from the BLS suggests that the number of people actually employed in IT occupations has not risen as fast as the want ads.  Employment in computer and mathematical occupations now stands at 3.4 million, well below its recent peak.

My intepretation, though, is that the hiring pressure is gotten strong enough to break the dam, especially with Obama having just signed the new tax bill. Companies have just been waiting to make sure that  the global economy doesn’t fall back into a deep funk again, and a hefty dose of fiscal stimulus is just the thing.

I’m predicting a big jump in IT hiring as soon as the new year starts…and it’s about time.

*The labor demand data is from The Conference Board Help Wanted OnLine (HWOL) data series, https://www.conference-board.org/data/helpwantedonline.cfm

This piece is cross-posted at Mandel on Innovation and Growth

Tom Friedman’s Reading My Stuff on Green Tech and the Military!

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Look, I realize that Tom Friedman gets a lot of guff from the liberal intelligensia.  Matt Taibbi over at Rolling Stone has practically made a second career out of eviscerating Friedman’s sometimes tortured contortions of the Queen’s Tongue.  Certainly, Taibbi scores the odd point: “It’s OK to throw out your steering wheel,” Friedman once wrote about George Bush’s Middle East policy, “as long as you remember you’re driving without one.”  What?

Fair enough.  But Tom, a long-time friend of PPI no less, is an insightful writer who, more often than not, is on the right side of history.  Take his column this weekend on the “U.S.S. Prius“:

Spearheaded by Ray Mabus, President Obama’s secretary of the Navy and the former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, the Navy and Marines are building a strategy for “out-greening” Al Qaeda, “out-greening” the Taliban and “out-greening” the world’s petro-dictators. Their efforts are based in part on a recent study from 2007 data that found that the U.S. military loses one person, killed or wounded, for every 24 fuel convoys it runs in Afghanistan. Today, there are hundreds and hundreds of these convoys needed to truck fuel — to run air-conditioners and power diesel generators — to remote bases all over Afghanistan.

Mabus’s argument is that if the U.S. Navy and Marines could replace those generators with renewable power and more energy efficient buildings, and run its ships on nuclear energy, biofuels and hybrid engines, and fly its jets with bio-fuels, then it could out-green the Taliban — the best way to avoid a roadside bomb is to not have vehicles on the roads — and out-green all the petro-dictators now telling the world what to do.

Let’s just say I’m happy Tom’s reading my stuff.  Yep, on October 12, I wrote the following piece in the Los Angeles Times on the same topic to mark the 10th anniversary of the bombing of the U.S.S Cole in Aden harbor:

America forgets Oct. 12 as seamlessly as it remembers Sept. 11. Ten years ago today, 17 U.S. Navy sailors were killed and 39 injured in an Al Qaeda attack against the U.S. destroyer Cole in the harbor of Aden, Yemen. The Cole was relatively defenseless during a 24-hour refueling stop when suicide operatives pulled alongside in a small, explosive-laden boat and detonated a charge, ripping a 40-foot hole in the hull.

Though the lessons from 9/11 will be debated for years, Oct. 12’s message is succinct. It is best summed up by Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James T. Conway: “Energy choices can save lives on the battlefield.” The armed forces are searching for next-generation green energy technologies because they provide power at the point of its consumption, which decreases the military’s need to resupply with carbon-based fuels.
…
Mabus is setting big goals for an energy-independent military. He wants to sail a “Great Green Fleet” by 2016 — a full carrier strike group composed of nuclear and hybrid electric ships, as well as biofueled aircraft. By 2020, Mabus wants half of the Navy’s energy to come from alternative sources.

That’s why the Obama administration should consider a Pentagon innovation fund. A few well-spent dollars would help companies tackle the technological learning curve and reduce costs.

To get to where Mabus wants to go, ideas need cash. The Pentagon may have a truly out-of-control budget, but consider this: Radar, GPS and the Internet all started as military-funded projects. The next green technology could be sitting in a lab somewhere, begging for a few dollars to help produce it on a bigger scale.

With conservatives pushing this climate change denial nonsense, it’s an important point that the military is innovating on green-tech because it can’t wait for the political “debate”.  So much the better as more-and-more mainstream writers pick up on this narrative.

Impossible DREAM

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

One of Barack Obama’s finest moments as President came this past September, when he gave a speech to Congress urging passage of the health-care reform bill. In his closing remarks, he invoked the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, and what Kennedy had written him in his final days: “What we face is above all a moral issue; at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country.” Those words resonated with Obama. “I’ve thought about that phrase quite a bit in recent days – the character of our country,” he told the country that night.

Those same words stung with relevance this weekend. Overshadowed by the landmark repeal of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, a triumph of social justice, was a cruel development: the Senate’s failure to break the filibuster to pass the DREAM Act.

In more reasonable days, the DREAM Act would have been a no-brainer. The bill paves a path to citizenship for young undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. by their parents. It would grant permanent residency status to immigrants who graduate from high school and complete two years of college or enter the military. In other words, young men and women who were brought to this country illegally by their parents and who want to become more integrated into our national life would finally have the means to do so.

A good idea, and a bipartisan one too – once upon a time. In a period when our nation is in need of as many achievers and public servants it can get its arms around, the DREAM Act would seem to be a common-sense solution (not to mention a deficit-reducing one, as the CBO found).

But those days are long gone, and when the vote to cut off debate came up, the bill fell five short of 60. Three Republicans – Richard Lugar, Robert Bennett, and Lisa Murkowski – voted in favor, while five Democrats voted against. All this despite the fact that, under the Obama administration, there have been a record number of deportations, part of Obama’s effort to convince the bill’s holdouts that it is serious on enforcement.

The pictures that accompanied the news stories of the bill’s failure tell the story. Here’s how the Times described the scene:

Young Hispanic men and women filled the spectator galleries of the Senate, many of them wearing graduation caps and tassels in a symbol of their support for the bill. They held hands in a prayerful gesture as the clerk called the roll and many looked stricken as its defeat was announced.

For those young men and women, the rebuff must have been unfathomable: Why would this country explicitly deny them the opportunity to be productive contributors to our national life?

That the DREAM Act has gone from a pragmatic, consensus policy to anathema to not just the right but even a handful of Democrats speaks to a worrisome shift in American attitudes. Demagoguery is rife; resentments are in full bloom. It makes one worry for the character of our country.

Playing Out the End of the Lame Duck Congress

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The end-game of this congressional session has suddenly come alive with developments that could have a major political impact down the road, if not sooner.

Last night’s House approval of the Obama-McConnell tax deal is a case in point.  The White House survived its most emotional collision yet with the left wing of the Democratic Party, and managed to secure a majority (139-112) of House Democratic votes for the deal, despite an earlier Democratic Caucus resolution disapproving it.  It’s probably worth remembering that in his own disputes with House Democrats, Bill Clinton wasn’t always so successful: majorities of House Democrats voted against NAFTA in 1993 and welfare reform in 1996.

If you look through the roll call on the tax deal, the Democratic votes are generally not surprising: most “nays” came from the more liberal Members, including, interestingly enough, all members of the leadership other than Steny Hoyer and Nancy Pelosi (who didn’t vote).  There was, however, a smattering of deficit hawks among the naysayers.  The vast majority of true “lame ducks” (defeated or retiring Members) voted for the deal.

Approval of the deal will obviously create another big tax debate during the 2012 presidential campaign.  But more immediately, it will be interesting to see to what extent the deal and the debate over it has set back efforts to build bipartisan support for deficit reduction measures.  Without question, congressional Republicans will now be under more pressure than ever to cut “liberal” spending programs, but the very limited Democratic support for such steps probably got a lot weaker during the tax deal debate.

That brings me to the other big development yesterday: the defeat-by-threatened-filibuster in the Senate of an omnibus appropriations bill for the current fiscal year.  This outcome resulted from no fewer than nine Republican senators reversing earlier support for the bill, and was very heavily influenced by publicity over earmarks—many inserted by Republican senators—which is now officially a no-no for Republicans.

Tea Party types were actually upset not just by the earmarks, but by overall levels of spending.  And Republicans may have bought themselves some early trouble: after a short-term continuing resolution, they will bear new responsibility for drafting a House version of either individual or omnibus appropriations bills, and will finally have to admit that items more popular than waste, fraud and abuse would have to be cut to produce sizable savings.

On the other hand, as David Dayen has pointed out, by losing the omnibus appropriations fight, Democrats could have set the table for undoing the stimulative effect of the tax deal.  If Republicans succeed in securing major appropriations cuts—say, an across-the-board reduction attached to a continuing resolution—then that could indeed reduce aggregate demand, particularly in conjunction with the wide-scale spending reductions that will soon be initiated by state governments who can no longer count on the safety net dollars of the 2009 stimulus legislation.

Other bills kicking around the Senate at the end of this session also carry a lot of political freight: the DREAM Act, which was once an acceptable Republican vehicle for offering a hand in fellowship to Latinos, yet is now an opportunity for casting an angry anti-immigrant vote; the DADT repeal, which is inevitable, but is also still a source of great angst in Christian Right circles; and the START Treaty, which could determine whether anything like a bipartisan foreign policy can be carried out in today’s polarized atmosphere.

We’ll know a lot more after a frenetic weekend that could feature a DADT vote on Sunday.