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Republicans By the Book

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The American Prospect‘s Paul Waldman has done us all a great favor by reading and interpreting the latest batch of “campaign books” from prospective 2012 presidential candidates, including Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee and Tim Pawlenty. And after duly noting the relatively low political value of such books, and the low standards governing the genre, he offers some key insights about what they reveal about the Republican zeitgeist of the moment:

Despite their surface differences, the books raise some common questions. How do we answer key policy questions? How important is God to our politics? Is Barack Obama merely wrong about everything, or is he actively attempting to destroy our country? Just how great is America?

Actually, that last question is something the candidates all agree on: America is stupendously great, awesomely great, so great that “great” doesn’t begin to describe its greatness — and Obama just doesn’t get it.

Aside from a peculiar emphasis on “American exceptionalism” that appears to exempt this country not only from healthy self-doubt but from ordinary logic and the lessons of human history, notes Waldman, the books are dominated by an equally unreflexive attitude towards the 44th president, who is always wrong:

In their attempts to understand Obama, the candidates again and again reach the conclusion that when Obama does or says something they like, he’s either shrewdly hiding his real intentions or has been cornered by political reality. When he does or says something they don’t like, he has revealed his true self. So Romney can claim, without any supporting evidence, that “another of President Obama’s presuppositions is that America is in a state of inevitable decline,” just as Palin avers that Obama “seems to see nothing admirable in the American experience.” How do they know this? Well, they just do. None of the candidates provides any quotations in which Obama apologizes for America because he never actually has. And don’t bother bringing up the hundreds of speeches in which Obama has lavished praise on this country, because as Romney says, “President Obama is far too gifted a politician to say in plain words that America is merely one nation among many.” However, if we take some things Obama has said out of context and make a series of absurd leaps in logic to arrive at the worst possible interpretation of them, then we will learn the truth.

America is great, and Obama wants to destroy it. That’s the overriding theme of proto-candidates working in the most expansive format they’ll ever use.

As it happens, I was involved as a “ghost” in a “campaign book” for a candidate running against an incumbent president in 2004, and I can tell you that George W. Bush’s sins and shortcomings were in the background, not the forefront, of the policy-heavy tome. And while the book was full of invocations of America’s greatness, they were deployed not to congratulate Americans for their superior virtue, but to encourage them to meet common challenges, most of which have yet, seven years later, to be seriously addressed.

It’s an open question as to whether GOP presidential candidates can make it all the way through the nomination process–and for the winner, all the way to November of 2012–on a message that essentially tells Americans there is nothing wrong with their society that firing Barack Obama can’t fix. I guess if you get all your information from Fox News, that’s a credible argument. But for everyone else, a positive agenda that goes beyond telling a suffering nation and world that they need to shut up and salute the flag (and oh yes, cut taxes and regulations allegedly afflicting their economic masters, from whom all good things come) might prove necessary.

 

Crossposted at The Democratic Strategist

Failing the Right Side of History Test in Bahrain?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Though it would be fair to say Obama administration has struggled to keep pace with the groundswell of popular protest from Morocco to Yemen, the White House’s rhetoric and actions have thus far enshrined it on the proverbial “right side of history.” That is, through the lens of historical scholarship, the president’s course of action in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya will be judged as just in the face of non-democratic and violent forces.

Then there’s Bahrain.

The small island nation — home to a non-democratic Sunni ruling family and allied with the U.S. as host to the Navy’s 5th Fleet — has had a steady stream of pro-democracy demonstrations since January. While paying lip service to Shi’ite Bahrainis’ grievances, last week the royals called in Saudi and Emirate military muscle to quash a popular uprising before it gained steam. Pearl Square — the protesters’ main gathering place — was shut down immediately after the foreign troops’ arrival; at least eight people have been killed and dozens are reported missing.

As it stands, the Obama administration runs a serious risk of ending up on the wrong side of history in Bahrain. Until the weekend, the administration had said and done comparatively much less than the multiple statements on Egypt, issuing just one quiet statement from a (relatively) lowly National Security Council spokesman. Secretary Clinton reiterated the original statement on Saturday, saying:

We have made clear that security alone cannot resolve the challenges facing Bahrain… Violence is not and cannot be the answer. A political process is. We have raised our concerns about the current measures directly with Bahraini officials and will continue to do so.

Fair enough — sounds good enough, right? But whereas statements regarding Tunisia and Egypt, as well as the UN resolution and subsequent military action on Libya outpaced events (if barely), the White House’s attention to Bahrain may be too little, too late.

Are the U.S. Navy base and Saudi/ Emirate support for the Libyan situation complicating factors in America’s flat-footed response? Of course. But rather than sitting on its hands, the White House would do well to channel former Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel’s mantra — never let a crisis go to waste — and use the opportunity to start reorienting American policy that corrects over 30 years of an inherently unstable Faustian bargain with Arab despots. I’ll pass on the specifics of “how” for now, but getting on the right side of history in Bahrain through tougher and earlier public diplomacy is a good start if the protest movement beats the odds and rekindles itself.

U.S. Needs to Stay the Course on Libya

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The Obama administration has tried to keep a low profile in the Libyan crisis. When the shooting starts, however, it’s hard for a superpower to avoid the limelight.

Having unleashed U.S. cruise missile and B-2 bomber attacks on Libya’s air defenses, the administration faces incoming criticism on all sides – from Arab leaders who are getting cold feet after having initially called for a no-fly zone, and from Republicans who want to know what America’s “endgame” is. Meanwhile, Muammar Gaddafi wasted no time playing the anti-American card, accusing the United States of scheming to steal Libya’s oil.

Most disappointing was the criticism from Amr Moussa, secretary general of the 22-nation Arab League. The League’s call for a no-fly zone only a week before was widely interpreted as a sign of political maturation; an acknowledgement that tyrants like Gaddafi pose a bigger threat to Arabs than U.S. “imperialism.” After the Libyan regime made what appeared to be spurious claims about civilian casualties, however, Moussa changed his tune: “What has happened in Libya differs from the goal of imposing a no-fly zone and what we want is the protection of civilians and not bombing other civilians.”

Continue reading at Real Clear World

Wingnut Watch: Confused Obama-haters

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Recent events in Libya have left conservative Obama-haters a bit confused. Up until this week, conservative gabbers frequently took easy shots at the president for inaction on Libya; you didn’t have the sort of divisions on the Right often seen during the Egyptian crisis, when some (notably John Bolton) defended Mubarak as a stout U.S. ally and many others warned that Egyptians rebels were or would eventually be dominated by radical jihadists. Qaddafi has no conservative fans.

In the wake of the administration’s support for a U.N. resolution authorizing the use of force in Libya, and the robust U.S. participation in the first stages of the multinational military campaign, virtually no conservatives have gone so far as to praise Obama, other than backhanded “better late than never” comments. The prevalent sentiment is that the administration has demonstrated its fatal weakness once again by flip-flopping into an internationally led and insufficiently clear military commitment, too late to secure a rebel victory. Among the 2012 presidential possibilities, no one has even bothered to make the ritualistic “salute the flag” gestures of vague support owed a current commander-in-chief by prospective future commanders-in-chief.

One very specific and highly characteristic right-wing complaint has been that Obama sought sanction for military action from the United Nations but not from the current conservative power lode, Congress. A Washington Times editorial went so far as to call it “Obama’s illegal war:”

The president cannot be seen as a mere instrument of the United Nations, which would relegate the U.S. Constitution to second-class status behind the U.N. Charter. If U.S. troops are going to be put in harm’s way, the authority must come from elected representatives in Washington, not from a bunch of international bureaucrats hanging out in Turtle Bay.

The editorial (like many other conservative commentaries on Libya) stressed George W. Bush’s pursuit of congressional approval before launching the Iraq War. They seem to have forgotten how long the Bush White House resisted this step, or the arguments Bush’s defenders never stopped making that congressional approval was unnecessary in light of the president’s inherent national security powers.

If the Libya intervention devolves into a difficult passage wherein Qaddafi is stopped from destroying the rebels yet cannot be dislodged from control of much of the country, you can infallibly expect many conservatives to default to their traditional claim that liberals like Obama always increase the risk associated with military interventions by using insufficient force and worrying about the opinions of Europeans and Muslims.

Ironically, the Libya crisis comes at a time when the longstanding Republican united front favoring ever-expanding military commitments and ever-rising defense spending is showing some cracks. Last week probable 2012 presidential candidate Haley Barbour made a speech in Iowa calling for greater scrutiny of the defense budget as part of an overall deficit reduction effort, and also suggested he might favor winding down troop levels in Afghanistan because of an insufficiently clear mission.

While Barbour may back down on this provocative message, it could well blow open a long-implicit conflict between the GOP’s Tea Party rhetoric on federal spending and the party’s long pro-defense-spending posture, often posited as the glue that held economic and social conservatives in harness. Last summer Sarah Palin made some noise about convincing the Tea Folk to explicitly place defense spending off-limits to cuts. And for the most part, conservative appropriations and budget schemes have let the Pentagon alone, aside from a disputed acceptance of the elimination of weapon systems the Pentagon itself no longer wants. Certainly the Ron Paul/Rand Paul wing of the GOP has long been eager to pare back overseas commitments as a matter of isolationist principle as much as fiscal probity. But Barbour is the most prominent Conservative Establishment figure to drop hints in this direction.

It was almost certainly no coincidence that immediately after Barbour’s speech in Iowa, Tim Pawlenty told an audience in South Carolina that he didn’t favor defense cuts, and also didn’t favor any troop draw downs in Afghanistan unless they were asked for by Gen. David Petraeus. And then predictably, neo-con pundit William Kristol poured gasoline on the embers of the dispute with a column entitled, “T-Paw Versus Hee-Haw,” a not very subtle dig at Barbour’s Boss Hawg reputation, compounded by additional insults:

This is a) childish, b) slightly offensive, and c) raises the question of how much time Barbour has spent at the Pentagon—apart from time spent lobbying for defense contractors or foreign governments.

Nasty as it was, this is probably a pale echo of the kind of pounding Barbour will receive from other precincts of the conservative movement if he persists in talking about treating defense like other forms of federal spending or cutting short the U.S. commitment in Afghanistan. It will be interesting to see what other proto-candidates for president say if this suddenly evolves from being the Great Unmentionable among conservative posing as maximum deficit hawks, into a regular topic on the campaign trail. Mitt Romney has long sought to make toughness on foreign-policy-and-defense issues his calling card for 2012, and Newt Gingrich is clearly preparing to depict himself as a visionary Churchillian figure determined to defend America from the Islamic hordes. So this could turn into a white-hot fight pretty quickly, unless Barbour shuts up about defense spending and goes back to savaging Medicaid and offering to remake the U.S. economy to resemble Mississippi’s.

Too High Or Too Low, There Ain’t No In Betweens

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Book Review: Going to Extremes, by Cass Sunstein

Back in 2005, a trio of researchers conducted a little experiment on deliberative democracy. They assembled groups of six citizens and asked them to get together to talk about a few politically charged issues (civil unions, affirmative action, global warming). Half the groups were made up exclusively of political conservatives, and half were made up exclusively of political liberals. The result: in almost every group, the individuals took on more extreme positions after talking with the folks who already agreed with them.

Similarly, a study of judicial decision-making found three-judge panels that were all Republican rendered more conservative decisions and three-judge panels that were all Democrat rendered more liberal decisions.

The above experiment and study form the take-off point for Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide, by Cass R. Sunstein, a smart book (now available in paperback!) that sets forth a pithy summary of how group polarization happens. It’s an especially useful guide to the obstacles to open-minded thinking for those of us who are trying to chart a course toward a more moderate politics, and so worth understanding.

The quick takeaway point is that what matters most is information. If you only hear one side of the argument, you are likely to strengthen your convictions that the one side you hear is the correct side. And the more your convictions are strengthened, the more you are likely to seek out only that one side and disregard anyone who comes to you with alternatives. In short, a powerful reinforcing feedback loop.

“A great deal of what we believe, like, and dislike,” writes Sunstein, “is influenced by the exchange of information and by corroboration.”

Sunstein explores a number of entry points into these kinds of reinforcing cascades of corroboration. A surprisingly large number of the entry points have more to do with social instincts than anything else. Individuals defer to other individuals who are of higher status; they defer to family and friends and social groups. Most people want to be liked, and most people have an intuitive sense that a good way to be liked is to agree – or sometimes to even do those whose respect they wish to gain one better. Groups are particular prone to follow confident people – even if those confident people are wrong.

Once people start in on a particular belief path, they tend to be on the lookout for information that confirms what they already think: “Consider the well-established finding that after purchasing a product, people tend to seek out information confirming that their purchase was a sensible one.” And once caught in a cascade of confirmation, it’s hard to get out of it. Sociologists call it “homophily” – a process by which people feel more connected to that which is similar to them.

The problem, Sunstein argues (borrowing a phrase from Russell Hardin) is that most people have a “crippled epistemology” – they know very little to begin with, and if what they know supports their extremism, they have no way to know that their position is extreme.

Worse, “people often ignore powerful contrary evidence,” writes Sunstein. “When people’s false beliefs are corrected, they might become even firmer in their commitment to those beliefs.” (One famous example of this is described in Leon Festinger’s 1956 book When Prophecy Fails, about how members of a UFO cult become more resolute in its beliefs after the group leader’s prophecy that aliens from the planet Clarion would rescue cult members from an earth-destroying flood on December 21, 1954 did not come to fruition)

Sunstein worries that in the modern media environment, self-selection into different camps is easier than ever before. “Many people appear to be hearing more and louder versions of their own views, thus reducing the benefits that come from exposure to competing views and unnoticed problems…The Internet creates more dramatic ‘stratification.’”

The way out of polarization, of course, is the standard bromide of entertaining alternative viewpoints. Sunstein urges “humility and curiosity.” In fact, after reading this article, you should probably immediately go seek out a perspective you disagree with, entertain it, and let it create a slight sense of doubt in all your previous certainties.

But the truth is, you probably won’t go seek that out. Or even if you do, it’s unlikely you will come to doubt your previous ideas. One reason is that what you find will probably be written from a completely different perspective, meaning that it won’t have much to say to somebody who isn’t already a true believe from the opposite perspective.

At the very least, it is helpful to have a certain amount of self-awareness. Sunstein’s analysis of how easily and almost effortlessly one can get caught in a self-reinforcing feedback process of one-sidedness is a little bit scary. What’s remarkable is just how easily the mind closes, and how much constant work is required to fight against it. In other words: those of us who care about moderation have our work cut out for ourselves.

“All Necessary Measures”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Like a governor issuing an 11th hour stay of execution to a death row inmate, the United Nations has intervened dramatically in the Libyan crisis. Now the world has all the authority it needs to prevent a bloodbath in Libya, and in doing so revive the faltering momentum of the Arab political awakening.

The U.N.’s decisive action was doubly surprising. First because it happened at all; many observers—including me—figured either Russia or China would veto any resolution authorizing military intervention in Libya. Maybe Moscow and Beijing were swayed by the Arab League’s unprecedented endorsement of a no-fly zone, or by Moammar Qaddafi’s bloodcurdling and fully credible promises to obliterate regime opponents.

The second surprise is the sweeping scope of the Security Council resolution, which authorizes “all necessary measures” to protect Libyan citizens. That allows the international community to go beyond imposing a no-fly zone, which wouldn’t stop Qaddafi’s ground assault on rebel strongholds, to a “no drive” zone, which would.

In practice, “international community” means Europe and the United States, probably with some token support from Arab countries. In any case, this coalition needs to act swiftly to stop Qaddafi’s offensive in its tracks. At the same time, we should be arming and training the rebels, as the U.N. resolution also seems to permit, so that the Libyan people can finish the job of liberating themselves from a vicious tyrant.

Another striking aspect of the U.N. vote was that it was not engineered by Washington. The Obama administration was visibly ambivalent about a no-fly zone or anything else that might smack of U.S. unilateralism. It stayed in the background, letting France and Britain take the lead in pressing the Security Council to act.

Perhaps this was tactically adroit, in that a more aggressive U.S. stance might have evoked opposition not only from Russia and China, but also from abstainers like Brazil and India. But Obama’s aloof and passive stance didn’t exactly burnish his leadership credentials, and will undoubtedly fuel conservative criticisms that he is more inclined to apologize for American power than wield it with conviction to support freedom.

In any case, if followed up by decisive military action, the U.N. resolution is a brush-back pitch to Middle East tyrants contemplating using force against their own people. This would embolden freedom movements percolating in the region, though it could also pose awkward questions about Saudi Arabia’s dispatch of troops to help Bahrain stifle Shia demands for political voice and participation.

Looking beyond the Middle East, the U.N.’s action breathes new life into the venerable doctrine of collective security, and reinforces new theories that the international community has a “responsibility to protect” not just states from aggression by other states, but peoples within states who are brutalized by despotic rulers or by anarchic violence in places where there is no central authority.

This is a new and compelling principle of progressive internationalism. Obviously, it has to be applied with care, lest the United States get dragged into one conflict after another because no other country or combination of them can do the job. But U.S. progressives—including President Obama—shouldn’t be reticent in defending the principle.

Who Believes in Sputnik?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Many parents can’t decide whether they love or hate the Tiger Mom. Either way, she has focused our collective attention on education in the United States. American students are falling behind students from other countries. In the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) testing of 15 year-old students from 65 countries, our children placed 17th in reading, 23rd in science, and a below-average 31st in math. The results from January’s National Assessment of Education Progress were equally dismal – only 21 percent of the nation’s 12th graders scored ‘proficient’ in science. In his State of the Union address, President Obama called this our “Sputnik moment,” a crisis moment in the history of our country that should shock us into action.

But is it possible to change our educational system in the US? Success in today’s world is based upon proficiency and innovation in science. Multiple factors contribute to our poor performance, but one glaring problem is the disregard of scientific facts by a large segment of our society. Science allows for a certain amount of dissent, but when ideological, political or religious beliefs automatically nullify reasonable scientific facts, there is potential danger.

Many American students are raised to disbelieve some of the bedrock principles of modern biological science, including evolution. A troubling report, published in Science (Jan 28), describes the concern that 13 percent of high school biology teachers actively teach creationism and an additional 60 percent avoid the controversy of evolution. That leaves less than one third of educators who teach the scientifically-accepted truth about evolutionary biology. To succeed in science, one needs to build knowledge from facts. If scientific facts such as evolution are taught to be false, what foundation then have we given our students? This is certainly not a solid one upon which to base innovation or the next great discovery.

Only 39 percent of Americans believe in evolution. Fifty-seven percent do not believe in global climate change. And only 38 percent believe there is no link between vaccines and autism. Solid bodies of literature separate fact from fiction on these topics, but the majority of Americans apparently disregards the truth. If this denial of scientific fact is then passed on to our children, the next generation of Americans will find difficulty not only with the PISA test, but also with the real world challenge of finding scientifically valid solutions to big problems like climate change and finding cures for disease. We need our children to be innovators, but America’s ideological constraints are holding them back.

Everyone has the right to their beliefs. The rub here is how to balance one’s religion, politics, or ideology with the validity of science. Is it not the responsibility of a religion or ideology to make its teaching compatible with scientific facts? Faith, as I understand it, should be enough to account for the unknowable or unexplainable. And it should be strong enough to accommodate scientific facts within its belief structure. This is not a new struggle, but the consequences are greater in today’s information age where the internet can spread data instantly. It took the Catholic Church almost 400 years to vindicate Galileo for his support of the heliocentric view of the universe, despite solid scientific evidence from Copernican times. Today, religions and ideologies not only harm their own credibility by not accepting evolution but potentially contribute to the flawed science education that seems so prevalent in the United States now. In Galileo’s time, some scholars tried to harmonize the new data with Scripture and Church teachings, but were not able to carry the day. Eventually, it became untenable to deny Galileo’s claims; now is that time for evolution and science in general. We cannot wait another 400 years or we will be overtaken by cultures that advocate real science.

Last December, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in December. Near the end of her comments, she called the K-12 education problem in our country a national security issue. “There are a lot of problems,” she said. “Proliferation, Afghanistan, the Middle East. But the US needs internal repair more than it needs anything else.” Now is the time to start that internal repair. We must teach true science to our children, before another country seizes our Sputnik moment.

Gut Check Time For Progressives on Libya: Use of Force

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Qaddafi’s hired mercenaries are closing in on the rebel stronghold in Benghazi. If they overrun the city, two things will almost certainly happen: Any hope for a democratic Libya will die (for now), and thousands of innocent bystanders — women and children among them — will perish as Qaddafi fights to his self-proclaimed “last drop of blood.”

Before Libya’s tyrant launches his final push, there’s news that the international community, including the United States, is preparing, albeit tardily, to act.  U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice said today that “We are discussing very seriously and leading efforts in the Council around a range of actions that we believe could be effective in protecting civilians… The U.S. view is that we need to be prepared to contemplate steps that include, but perhaps go beyond, a no-fly zone.” [bolding mine]

In the most likely scenario, that would mean allied missile strikes at strategic military assets.

It’s clear that the West needs to change Qaddafi’s military calculation, in effect telling him, “advance on Benghazi and there will be consequences.” It appears to be more than just bluster designed to scare Qaddafi into a stalemate — Secretary Clinton has vowed a Security Council vote no later than today. Only a vote will separate those countries that stand with the oppressed from those who are content to tolerate military force used against those yearning for free expression.

This all begs the question: Progressives, are you comfortable with using military force — including airstrikes against strategic military targets — in Libya? Even when Qaddafi tries to pretend that he’s going to be a nice guy by giving the rebels a chance to surrender?

There are clear and compelling reasons to use force in this case, in concert with a progressive internationalist worldview, the belief that America can best defend itself by building a world safe for individual liberty and democracy.  The progressive internationalist now has little choice but to act militarily to stop the mass, indiscriminate killing of Libyans who hold those values.

Here’s why:

1. There will be an international mandate. This operation is hardly one of George W. Bush’s hamfisted “coalitions of the willing”. The key is to ensure legitimacy that avoids putting and American face on intervention.  The U.S. would be a participant, along with Arab League, the Organization of Islamic Conference, and the Gulf Cooperation Council who have all approved a no-fly zone at a minimum, and would very likely up the ante to endorsing a limited strike (which a NFZ implies anyway).

2. Major American allies like the U.K. and France have been stalwart supporters of action, and in concert with the U.S., likely bring along other major world powers.  While China and Russia remain hard sells, they’re not exactly democrats interested in this stuff anyway.

3. Protecting democratic movements is a core American national interest. Gen. Wesley Clark staked a dangerous claim in an op-ed that oil was the only core worth protecting, and that while humanitarian disasters were terrible, they were hardly worth getting your hands dirty.  Wrong. I’ll side with Anne Marie Slaughter, who tweeted, “Supporting accountable, open, rights-regarding governments in the Middle East = U.S. strategic interest. Will keep US safer than war in Afg.” And that, in addition to her piece in the NYT, clearly meant she would support military action.

4. The United Nation agreed that the international community has a “Responsibility to Protect” innocent civilians in times of “genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity, as well as their incitement.” UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon said it plainly: “We can save lives.”

5. The international community’s strategic goals are clear, if not bold. At this point, the consensus goal is to protect human life in the face of a humanitarian disaster. While members of the international community may have divergent goals — Secretary Clinton has said “he should go” — Qaddafi’s indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians who desire simple freedom of expression is enough to justify the use of at least minimum use of force to avert that outcome.

Am I a Race-Baiter?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

On Tuesday, I put together some data highlighting the fact that there was a strong correlation between how much Democrats’ partisan identification had declined in the last two years and how white a state is. Since then, I’ve received many comments accusing me of saying that Democrats’ problems exist only because white people are racist.

One comment was extremely aggressive: “The race-baiting on display by Mr. Drutman shows the void of his intellect and his morality since he is deliberately unwilling to find the real reasons Democrats are failing everywhere.” Here’s another: “Yet another incident of failure of the intellectual left in the US. Barack Obama was elected by white voters as well as non-white in 2008; rather than look at what changed to disgruntle these voters (INCLUDING ME!) they play the race card.” And a third (sarcasm alert): “But, here we have it. Solid facts! Whites are racist!”; and a fourth: “Keep playing the race card. Please do.”

First of all, this may seem obvious, but I was merely reporting the data. There is an undeniable correlation between the percentage of whites in a state and the decline in Democratic partisan ID advantage. It also doesn’t take a genius to look at the polling data and see that Democrats and Obama are doing poorly among white voters, especially especially southern and rural whites.

But what impresses me about these comments is how quickly they went straight to the “race card” and “race-baiting.” It’s clearly a sore spot.

Of course, as far as I can tell, there are plenty of honest reasons that one would no longer want to identify as a Democrat that have nothing to do with race. There are plenty of reasons to be frustrated with the Democrats, and plenty of honest philosophical disagreements over what policies would serve the country best. As I wrote in the initial post, statistically speaking, whiteness of a state explains only 13 percent of the decline in Democratic partisan identification advantage. What this strongly suggests is that there are many factors.

But as Ron Brownstein has argued, there is also an emerging “New Color Line” that may have more to do with policy preference than with race, even if the two are sometimes hard to disentangle: “From every angle, the exit-poll results reveal a new color line: a consistent chasm between the attitudes of whites and minorities. The gap begins with preferences in the election.” In particular, the white voters seem to be particularly concerned with the size and role of government.

And it then follows that there are must be ways to address the concerns of white voters without making it about race. America may be becoming a more diverse nation, but it’s not a majority-minority country yet, and whites generally vote at greater rates than minorities. So Democrats need to take this seriously. As my colleague Will Marshall recently noted:

Progressives need to engage white voters more directly on questions about the size and role of government. We should be serious about making government more accountable, about enabling citizens and communities to do more for themselves, and about reining in runaway federal deficits and debts. But we should also stand firmly for public activism to rebuild America’s productive capacities, particularly our run-down infrastructure, curb out-of-control medical costs and make the promise of equal opportunity real for all citizens.

In one sense, the comments I received are quite instructive. They suggest there are white voters out there who feel accused of racism if they vote Republican, and they don’t like that. But they are also quite depressing. They suggest that there are too many Republicans out there who can’t respond to a presentation of empirical data without accusing me (a white who remains a Democrat and Obama supporter) of implicitly accusing them of racism.

I’m a number-cruncher. I’m not a race-baiter.

A Decade of Labor Market Pain

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In February 2001, nonfarm payrolls hit their business cycle peak of  132.5 million. Ten years later, the latest data pegs February 2011 payrolls at 130.5 million, a 1.5% decline. To put this in perspective, the ten-year period of the Great Depression, 1929-39 saw a 2.3% decline in nonfarm employment, roughly the same magnitude.

But even that 1.5% understates the extent of the pain for most of the workforce. I divide the economy into two parts. On the one side are the combined public and quasi-public sectors, and on the other side is the rest of the economy. Public, of course, refers to government employees.  ‘Quasi-public’, a term I just invented, includes the nominal private-sector education, healthcare, and social assistance industries. I call them ’quasi-public’ because these industries depend very heavily on  government funding. For example, social assistance includes ‘child and youth services’ and ‘services for the elderly and disabled’, which are often provided under government contract.

The chart below shows employment growth in the public/quasi-public sector, compared to employment growth in the rest of the economy, with February 2001 set to 100. We can see that public/quasi-public employment rose steadily over the past ten years, and is now up 16%. By comparison, the rest of the private sector  is down 8% in jobs over the past 10 years.

Once again, we look at the Great Depression for an analogy. From 1929 to 1939, government employment rose by about 30%. If we back that out, then private sector non-ag  jobs fell by 6%  over the Depression decade. That compares to the contemporary 8% decline in private non-ag non-quasi-public jobs since 2001.  So by this measure, the past 10 years have been worse for the labor market than the decade of the Great Depression.

Now let’s look by state. I put the chart beneath the fold, because it’s long and weird and I’m not sure if it going to come out right.

Here it is. This chart reports on the percentage change of private employment by state over the past ten years, leaving out the quasi-public sector.

The worst hit states, not surprisingly, are Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana. Massachusetts has a big decline as well, though I’m not sure that it’s fair to remove healthcare and education, which have always been primary drivers of the MA economy.  Then we have some surprises, including CT and NJ.  NY,  At the other end, some of the natural resource states show job gains over the decade, as did DC, even after removing govt jobs.

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

Wingnut Watch: The House Conservative Budget Revolt is (Almost) All About Healthcare

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In a fairly predictable development, the Republican Party and the conservative movement are showing some signs of division over strategy and tactics, if not much in the way of ideological diversity.  The latest indication of underlying fissures was the loss of 54 House Republicans in the vote to enact a second short-term continuing appropriations resolution.

Many observers will likely attribute those “no” votes to a Tea Party-bred determination to maximize budget cuts and intimidate Democrats, and there’s some truth to that.  But the real story is that much of the angst on the Right about budget and appropriations negotiations isn’t about levels of spending, or even the size of government, but about the ideological hobby-horses embedded in the earlier House-passed appropriations bill (H.R. 1) that the Senate quickly rejected.

Two of the ringleaders of the House conservative revolt on spending, the hardy duo of Michele Bachmann of MN and Steve King of IA, sent out an encyclical explaining their vote in advance.  They swore perpetual opposition to any appropriations measure that did not “defund” last year’s health reform legislation—not just money appropriated to implement it, but mandatory spending (e.g., through Medicaid and Medicare) required by it.  Bachmann and King, then, don’t even think the radical appropriations bill passed earlier by the House went far enough, because it did not accomplish their ideological goals.

Overlapping with the “ObamaCare” obsession on the Right has been the fear that House Republicans won’t follow through with the assault on family planning services and other cultural targets encompassed in the original House-passed appropriations bill.   Cultural conservative groups have been rattling sabers about this from the very beginning of the appropriations struggle, as noted by People for the American Way:

Religious Right anti-choice activists are continuing to draw a line in the sand, and dozens of them – including Tony Perkins, Tom Minnery, Penny Nance, Phyllis Schlafly, Charmaine Yoest, Richard Land, Marjorie Dannenfelser, Andrea Lafferty, and Bob Vander Plaats – have signed on to a new letter to Speaker Boehner and Rep. Eric Cantor to ostensibly thank them for supporting efforts to defund Planned Parenthood and remind them that this issue is “non-negotiable.”

Certainly some GOP pols are taking such threats seriously.  As Politico’s David Catanese explained, the more ambitious among them largely joined the rebels:

A breakdown of Tuesday’s vote on a three-week budget bill to keep the government operating shows that a slew of House members considering promotions to a statewide office in 2012 bucked their parties.

The fascinating floor count reveals the complicated and risky political implications across the country surrounding a vote that temporarily avoids a shutdown.

Nine Republicans currently running or seriously considering Senate or gubernatorial bids bucked House leadership and voted “no.”

They include Missouri Rep. Todd Akin, Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, Florida Rep. Connie Mack, New Mexico Rep. Steve Pearce — all who have been mentioned as potential Senate candidates, as well as Arizona Rep. Jeff Flake, Nevada Rep. Dean Heller and Montana Rep. Denny Rehberg, who have each announced bids for the upper chamber.

Indiana Rep. Mike Pence, also a “no” vote, is likely to run for governor.

This dynamic should be duly noted by those who persistently think Republicans facing tough electoral competition wish to “move to the center” and cooperate with Democrats.  Even if that were the case, Republicans have to survive primary competition, and many now have become convinced by the 2010 results that harsh conservatism awakens a conservative majority in the general electorate.

In any event, as House Republicans, Senate Democrats and the White House struggle towards some sort of compromise on FY 2011 appropriations, it will be important to remember that numbers aren’t everything in this fight.  Many conservative activists view this as an ideal opportunity to grind axes and settle old scores, and a full-fledged revolt could ensue if Republican leaders sacrifice their pet causes in pursuit of an agreement .

Speaking of the views of conservative activists, Public Policy Polling has a new national survey of self-identified Republicans out, and it’s interesting in several respects.

First of all, the poll breaks out Republicans into the 69 percent who are regular viewers of Fox News, and the 31 percent who are not.   The non-Fox viewers are rather notably less conservative, and certainly less supportive of conservative pols, than their Fox-watching counterparts.  For example, Newt Gingrich’s favorable-unfavorable ratio among Fox-watching Republicans is 59-24.  But it’s 31-49 among non-Fox-watching Republicans.  That’s a very big swing.

The poll also shows exactly how big a problem Mitt Romney faces on his health policy problem.  Asked if they would “willing to vote for someone who supported a bill at the state level mandating that voters have health insurance for President,” fully 61 percent said no, while only 17 percent said yes. The very idea of a mandate, even without reference to Obama’s health reform initiative, attracts considerable hostility.  And there’s no way around the fact that Romney has supported and still supports a mandate.

But perhaps the most striking number in the PPP survey is that one-fourth of self-identified Republicans think that the community organizing group ACORN is going to steal the 2012 election for Barack Obama.  ACORN, of course, went out of business nearly a year ago.  It takes a special kind of determination to believe that this never-more-than-marginal group somehow represents a threat to democracy from the grave.

Arm Libya’s Rebels

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In endorsing a no fly zone over Libya, the Arab League has taken the extraordinary step of urging western intervention in the Middle East. Nonetheless, we should resist the invitation to make America the lead actor in the Libyan drama. Our task is to help Libyans win their own freedom, not to win it for them.

We may be running out of time. Over the past week, the tide of battle has turned decisively in favor of forces loyal to Muammar Qaddafi, who have dislodged rebels from several towns, opening the road to their Benghazi stronghold. By the time the ponderous machinery of United Nations consensus-building gets around to authorizing a no fly zone, if it ever does, the rebellion could be quashed.

The world needs to help the rebels check Qaddafi’s momentum now, not next month or the one after. It’s hard to see how that can be done without supplying the rebels with intelligence and the heavy arms — rockets, artillery and tanks — they need to match Qaddafi’s better equipped and organized forces. The rebels, a mélange of military defectors and valiant but inexperienced civilians, also need weapons and tactical training.

Continue reading at The Hill

Why High-Speed Rail Could Still Get Built in Florida

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Contrary to reports in the New York Times and elsewhere, high-speed rail in Florida is not yet dead. There’s a grassroots effort by municipal governments to revive the high-speed line between Tampa and Orlando that Gov. Rick Scott has so zealously tried to kill.

The cities of Tampa, Lakeland, Orlando, and Miami want to create an “inter-local” agency that would receive federal grant money and assume the responsibilities vacated by the state last month when Scott shut down Florida Rail Enterprise and dismissed its staff.

The cities have until the first week of April to create the new entity and bid for the $2.4 billion in federal money that Scott rejected. A major sticking point, once again, is the rookie Republican governor, who is threatening to forbid the Florida Department of Transportation from permitting rail construction along I-4 owned by the state.

The same kind of high-handed arrogance got Scott fired as CEO of Columbia/HCA in 1997 after the health-care giant was slammed with a criminal investigation of its billing practices. Scott insisted that nothing was wrong until several board members found out that the company was in deep legal trouble. Scott escaped the consequences of his actions, but HCA wasn’t so lucky. It paid over $2.6 billion to settle civil suits and federal fines.

So far, Scott has managed to roll over timid state lawmakers and beat back a lawsuit charging that he overreached his authority by rejecting rail funds approved by former Gov. Charlie Crist. A quirk in Florida’s government, however, may allow the rail program to go forward if other officeholders take a principled stand.

Florida is the only state to have three elected executives who serve collectively with the governor on the Florida Cabinet, the decision-making body for the state. This means that the Cabinet, not solely the governor, controls the right-of-way needed for the rail project. So a yes vote by Attorney General Pam Bondi of Tampa, Commissioner of Agriculture Adam Putnam of Lakeland and Chief Financial Officer Jeff Atwater of Palm Beach could re-start the project over the governor’s protestations.

New developments are undermining Scott’s case. The governor said that he rejected the rail project because he believed it would not attract enough ridership and that state taxpayers could be “on the hook” for operating losses. But a study released last week by Florida DOT estimated that ridership would actually be one-third higher than an earlier estimate and that the line would be profitable, earning $10.2 million in its first year of operation.

Scott also expressed concern that construction cost overruns could add as much as $3 billion to the project, which he said he could not let taxpayers absorb during the current fiscal crisis. But in his self-righteous claims of prudence he forgot to mention that private enterprise – not government – was stepping in to build the railway.

Eight international firms had expressed interest in bidding on the project. Several were expected to cover all potential construction overruns. But before they had a chance to bid on the project, Scott pulled the plug and rejected the federal funds. That’s when the municipalities decided to take ownership of the project.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has done Florida a favor by asking for bids next month on the federal funds rejected by Scott rather than handing the money over to California, New York and other states. This gives Florida another chance.

Make no mistake, Scott’s opposition to fast trains is ideological, not fiscal. If he were on a crusade to rein in all transportation spending in tough economic times, that would be one thing. But Scott is proposing to spend billions of dollars to expand highways (including I-4) and dredge the Port of Miami for supercargo ships that are likely never to dock there, while denouncing “Obama rail” as imprudent.

His maneuvering is as transparent as Gov. Scott Walker’s bid to undercut unions and generally turn back the clock in Wisconsin. It should be recalled that Walker rejected federal rail funds last fall. Now Rick Scott wants to make a bigger splash by denying Obama credit for creating thousands of construction jobs in a swing state in time for the 2012 election.

In a recent letter the four mayors (two Republicans and two Democrats) outlined the economic benefits of fast rail linking world-class tourist attractions, top medical and educational centers and other institutions in central Florida. The Tampa-Orlando line would be a starting point for a comprehensive train system, with 170-mph-plus trains eventually linking Orlando with Miami and Jacksonville.

And what would happen if the project does not go forward? “The decision will not contribute one bit to reducing the federal deficit or lowering the federal taxes Floridians pay,” the mayors noted. What it would demonstrate is how devilishly difficult it’s become to build innovative public works in an era of sound-bite politics.

Tehran Seizes an Opening in Bahrain

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

On the surface, Bahrain’s invitation to Saudi forces is really bad. A small but all-powerful ruling class is fearful that internal calls for democracy could reach the undesirable fervor of the masses’ brethren in Tunisia, Egypt, and in the extreme, Libya. When you dig deeper, it’s even worse: sidelined by 30 years of bankrupt policy in the Middle East, America’s relative ambiguity is providing a unique opportunity for Iran to — however absurdly — identify with its oppressed Shi’ite cousins across the Gulf.

In an effort to snuff out the Libyan option amid ever more vehement protest, the Bahraini monarchy has tried to forge an awkward policy. In near-perfect English, Bahraini crowned prince Saman Bin Hamad Bin Isa Al-Khalifa sought to appease at least the Western governments watching him:

We know that a significant portion of the electoral base feels that their voice is unheard. And they want the respect due to them by — to be given to them by the opposition. They want to sit with them and talk to them. So, you know, at the end of the day, we’re all going to have to live in the same country together. And we’re all going to have to talk to each other.

… while calling in the Saudi military in a desperate and potentially disastrous attempt at crowd control.

Stuck in the middle is the U.S., ally to both kingdoms and free democratic expression. It’s telling, for example, that Washington’s call for “restraint on all sides” was delivered neither from the presidential bully pulpit or Foggy Bottom, but from a lowly National Security Council spokesman. America’s relative inaction is due more to thirty years of bankrupt policy across multiple presidential administrations; while that may provide the White House a plausible excuse, there are still consequences.

Shi’ite Iran is filling the void left by a handcuffed and silenced United States. It’s a shameless and disingenuous target of opportunity, but could be ultimately effective: as the pro-democracy Shi’ite majority in Bahrain look abroad for apparently reform-minded backers, they see Tehran, not Washington, unambiguously standing with them.

It’s downright scandalous that this statement came from Iran’s Foreign Ministry and not the U.S. State Department:

The presence of foreign forces and interference in Bahrain’s internal affairs is unacceptable and will further complicate the issue… People have some legitimate demands and they are expressing them peacefully. It should not be responded to violently … and we expect their demands be fulfilled through correct means.

But it did. The Iranian government’s hypocrisy could not be more blatant — a scam 2009 election returned Mahmoud Ahmedinejad to power but brought the masses into the streets for weeks of protests. Dissent was ultimately crushed by the same repressive spirit fueling Bahrain’s rulers, a sentiment wistfully cast aside when the opportunism beckons.

The only question in my mind is whether Bahrainis see through Tehran’s lies or grasp on to any semblance of international support they can muster. The White House should speak up — and act — before they have to choose.

Kerry Builds A New Road To Infrastructure Bank

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Showing the kind of bipartisan leadership that has become all too rare these days, Senators John Kerry and Kay Bailey Hutchison have announced a new proposal to improve the way we fund infrastructure and unlock hundreds of billions in much-needed financing for new projects across the country. Their bill has one of those great acronym-friendly names that congressional staff labor to perfect: The Building and Upgrading Infrastructure for Long-Term Development Act of 2011, or for short: The BUILD Act.

Kerry and Hutchison announced the BUILD Act today in a packed Senate hearing room, flanked by the heads of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO, who both endorsed the proposal and spoke about the shared need that business and labor have for Washington to move beyond its political dysfunction to address the urgent needs for building and maintaining the backbone of our economy and help create jobs. Senator Mark Warner is as an original co-sponsor of the bill and also joined the press conference. Senator Warner issued a similar warning that he delivered at PPI’s infrastructure conference last fall, explaining that we must reverse the decline in U.S. infrastructure investment to make our country a more competitive place for attracting capital investment and jobs in the global economy.

The BUILD Act represents an entirely new approach to the idea of creating a National Infrastructure Bank, one that goes a long way to reconcile the huge levels of needed investment with the very real spending constraints facing the current Congress. Given the realities of the current political environment, their proposal launches the bank on a fiscally responsible scale, while preserving the best principles of political independence and economics-based decision making that make the bank worth doing in the first place. They do this by structuring their bank as a financing authority under the Federal Credit Reform Act, a model used by the U.S. Export-Import Bank and other existing federal lending entities, that allows the bank to shift enough lending risk to borrowers to keep the burden on the government and taxpayers low, which avoids the large capital requirements of traditional infrastructure bank proposals.

By combining a smart financing structure with a 50% cap on the federal share of any project’s total funding, the BUILD Act avoids the high price tag that other infrastructure financing bills often carry. That makes it an innovative approach that needs to be a part of the upcoming debates on the already underfunded transportation bill. As Chamber President Tom Donohue said today, it’s an invaluable part of the solution to how we pay for maintenance and improvements that we can’t afford to ignore, but it can only work if added to a strong foundation of spending in the transportation bill, which he said will also require increasing our 17 year-old gas tax, to meet our current needs and adjust to lower fuel consumption by more efficient vehicles.

PPI has long supported the idea of a National Infrastructure Bank, including the current House bill sponsored by Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the long-time champion for infrastructure in Congress. DeLauro joined other top political, business, and labor leaders to discuss the bank proposal at our infrastructure conference last fall. Economist and infrastructure heavyweight Ev Ehrlich released an excellent paper at that conference laying out some of the key benefits to the bank approach. The experts who participated in that conference agreed that there were many approaches to structuring a bank that would be acceptable and achieve the benefits Ehrlich described, with the caveat that we could not afford to abandon the principles of independence and project selection based on economics, not political logrolling. Senators Kerry and Hutchison have managed to apply those principles in crafting a workable proposal during this time of fiscal austerity, and we at PPI applaud them for their resourcefulness and leadership.

Why Dems Are Doing Worse in Some States than Others: It’s Race, Not the Economy

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In 2008, Democrats enjoyed a solid advantage in partisan identification. By 2010, that advantage had largely evaporated. As I detailed in a previous post, in every state, the Democratic partisan ID advantage has declined, and by an average of nine percentage points.

But the decline has not been equal across the nation. In fact, there is a good deal of variation in the change in Democratic identification across states, ranging from a ranging from a drop of 22.2 percent in New Hampshire (from +13.2% to -9.0%) to a drop of just 1.6 percent in Mississippi (see this table for state-by-state numbers).

Why should these changes vary so much from state to state? Are there demographics that might explain this?

As it turns out, the only statistically significant predictor of the decline in democratic partisan affiliation advantage is the percentage of white people in the state. Surprisingly, the state economy (at least as measured by unemployment rate or change in unemployment rate) doesn’t seem to matter.

Unemployment

Let’s begin with the unemployment rate, since a good deal of the analysis around the 2010 election was an “it’s the economy stupid” story: voters blamed Democrats for high unemployment, and voted Republican to express their anger and frustration.

Yet, what’s remarkable about this scatterplot (above) is that the story doesn’t hold up. If anything, the relationship seems to be slightly opposite what the conventional wisdom would lead us to expect: the Democrats appear to have lost more support in states that have relatively lower unemployment rates. However, it is not statistically significant.

Still, it’s possible that what matters is not the absolute unemployment rate, but rather the change. Yet, once again, the scatterplot (below) shows that this is not the case. The more unemployment dropped between November 2008 and November 2010, the less the average decline in Dems’ partisan ID advantage. Though the relationship is actually stronger than above, it is still not a statistically significant one.

These numbers just don’t fit with the story of voters turning against Democrats for a failing economy. Take Nevada: Unemployment jumped from 8.0 percent to 14.3 percent, yet Democrats partisan ID declined by only; Similarly, California: Unemployment goes up from 8.4 percent to 12.4 percent.

On the other side, consider New Hampshire: Unemployment goes up from 4.3 percent to 5.4 percent (both among the lowest in the nation), but Democrats lose 22.2 percentage points in partisan ID advantage; Or South Dakota: Enemployment up from just 3.4 percent to just 4.5 percent, but the Dem partisan ID advantage falls up 10.4 percent.

Manufacturing

Another possibility is that what matters is the economic make-up of the economy, and in particular, perhaps states that rely disproportionately on manufacturing are more likely to have a lot of anxious voters, since manufacturing is a dying industry. But if we plot the decline in Democratic partisan ID and the manufacturing as share of the state GDP, there is no relationship.

Seniors

Another possibility is that Democrats are losing out in states with more seniors, since senior citizens are reportedly turning against Democrats. A scatter-plot shows a clear relationship, though not quite a statistically significant one (but close!). Generally, the more seniors in a state, the more Democrats have lost in their partisan ID advantage. However, the number of seniors explains only three percent of the variation in the Democratic vote share decline.

Whites

Finally, we come to the share of white voters. Here we have a consistent pattern, and one that is statistically significant (and explains 13 percent of the state-level variation). For every ten percent increase in white voters as a share of the electorate, the predicted decline in Democratic ID advantage is almost one full percentage point (the one outlier in the lower left is Hawaii, which is highly Asian. Without that outlier, the relationship would be even stronger).

This re-emphasizes the problems that Democrats seem to be having with white voters. (Democrats have not enjoyed parity with Republicans among white voters in 20 years, but 2010 was especially bad, with white voters breaking 62-to-38 for Republicans in the mid-term elections.)

This explains why the Democratic decline in diverse states like California (47 percent white) and Nevada (66 percent white) is less than in lily-white states like South Dakota (90 percent white) and New Hampshire (95 percent white), even though California and Nevada have much higher levels of unemployment.

These results exist regardless of economic circumstances (these findings are robust even in a statistical model that controls for all the other possible factors discussed).

Conclusions

The brief summary of this analysis is that race may matter more than the economy for  why voters have been identifying more and more as Republicans for the last two years.

Of course, there are obvious caveats to this interpretation, most significantly the fact that I am playing around with state-level data, as opposed to individual-level data.

But the patterns are discouraging for Obama and the Democrats. Much prognostication has argued that the number one factor for 2012 will be the unemployment rate, because historically, the unemployment rate has been a very strong predictor of whether the incumbent party wins or not. This analysis suggests that something else is going on as well. Democrats are having a hard time with seniors and particularly white voters, and it’s not just a story about the state of the economy.  Democrats ignore these scatterplots at their peril.

Update: I’ve written a response to some of the comments entitled “Am I a Race-Baiter?”