The New York Times Building
43rd Floor (offices of Covington & Burling LLP)
620 Eighth Avenue
New York, NY 10018
To RSVP, please e-mail your name, position, affiliation, and contact information to rsvp@commongood.org. If you have any questions, please contact Andrew T. Park at apark@commongood.org.
This event is the first in a series titled “Fixing Broken Government.”
Common Good is a nonpartisan, nonprofit legal reform coalition.
With all the numbers and hyperbolic rhetoric being thrown around about potential Republican gains this year, it’s sometimes helpful to look more closely at the patterns. We are often told, for example, that this is going to be some sort of day of reckoning for House Democrats generally, or for House Democratic incumbents in particular. But what, exactly, is the nature of those House seats Republicans are poised to win?
For purposes of this analysis, I’ll use Nate Silver’s House ratings, which are more precise than those of most of his competitors. Nate shows 27 districts where Republicans are “likely” (defined as an 80 percent or better probability) to win Democratic seats. Do many of these contests involve longstanding Democratic bastions where incumbents are being ousted by the righteous wrath of an angry voting public? No. Eleven of these seats are open. Another thirteen are seats wrested away from the GOP in the “wave” elections of 2006 and 2008. And 22 of the 27 have a pro-Republican PVI (Partisan Voting Index), which means they tilted Republican more than the national average in the last two presidential races.
In other words, these are seats that would inevitably be ripe for the plucking in the first midterm after a Democratic presidential victory, even if you don’t consider the factors (especially age-related turnout patterns and the condition of the economy) that make this an especially promising GOP year.
Looking at Nate’s next category, fifteen “lean takeover” seats where the probability of a switch to the GOP is in the 60-80 percent range, there are far fewer open seats, but plenty of other factors indicating low-hanging fruit for Republicans. Aside from the two open seats, there are twelve that Democrats picked up in 2006-08, and eleven of the fifteen have pro-GOP PVIs.
It’s only in a third category, twenty “even” seats where the probability of a Republican takeover is 40-60 percent, that you start getting into a significant number of contests involving entrenched incumbents. Even there, half the seats were taken over by Democrats in 2006 or later. But 14 of them have pro-Republican PVIs, and many of the Democratic “entrenched incumbents” typically represent strongly pro-Republican districts as measured by PVI: Gene Taylor of Mississippi (R+14); Lincoln Davis of Tennessee (R+13); Jim Marshall of Georgia (R+10); Ben Chandler of Kentucky (R+9); John Spratt of South Carolina (R+7); Baron Hill of Indiana (R+6); John Salazar of Colorado (R+5); and Mike McIntyre of North Carolina (R+5).
Remembering that Democrats will probably win some of these close races, it seems likely that Republican House gains this year will represent more a reversion to the norm than some sort of electoral tsunami—and more of a partisan “correction” than any revolt against Democratic incumbents–particularly if you consider the structural factors that make this particular midterm difficult for Democrats.
Now it’s always possible that Republican gains will be even larger than Nate Silver and most others consider probable, and if so, it will be necessary to reconsider everything I’ve said above. But it’s equally appropriate to demand a reconsideration of all the apocalyptic advanced spin coming from Republican circles if the House results turn out to be relatively predictable. Based on current evidence, the idea that this election is going to usher in some sort of extended era of conservative domination of American politics is no more credible than the belief exhibited by some Democrats two and four years ago that Republicans wouldn’t enjoy power in Washington again for the foreseeable future.
How much anti-government feeling is really out there? Perhaps less than you might think.
Consider a fascinating new poll in which Gallup listed 11 functions of government and asked respondents how much responsibility they think government have for each, one a scale of one to five. For five of the 11 functions, at least 48 percent of Republicans said the government should have more responsibility (giving these functions a four or five on the five-point scale).
“Protecting Americans from foreign threats” not surprisingly got strong support from 96 percent of Republicans. But “Protecting consumers from unsafe products” (66 percent), “Preventing discrimination” (54 percent), “Developing and maintaining the nation’s transportation systems” (52 percent), and “Protecting the environment from human actions that can harm it” (48 percent) also did better than you might expect from all the government-bashing rhetoric dominating the airwaves.
Even 37 percent of Republicans think the government should have more responsibility for “making sure all those who want jobs have them.” And perhaps shockingly, a third (32 percent) think government should have more responsibility for “making sure that all Americans have adequate healthcare.” As one would expect, Democrats rate the responsibility of government 20 to 30 percentage points higher on all of these issues.
The lessons from this poll are simple, but important. While Republicans keep bashing “big government” as a general concept, it’s different when it they are asked about specific government functions. Even as trust in government is at all-time lows, it’s not the case that this means that most voters – even supposed government-hating Republicans – don’t want government to do anything.
Rather, it’s more likely that the anti-government feeling is more about voters not trusting the current leaders in Washington to do what’s right.
To understand this better, consider another recent Gallup poll asking respondents “Do you think the federal government poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens?” Fully 66 percent of Republicans say it does pose a threat, while only 21 percent of Democrats do. But four years ago, when Republicans controlled Washington, the numbers were nearly reversed: 57 percent of Democrats were afraid of the federal government, compared to just 21 percent of Republicans. In other words, this has more to do with who is in power than about the federal government per se.
What this means is that all this anti-government rhetoric needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Most voters (even Republicans) still want the federal government to take responsibility for major things like protecting consumers, the environment, maintaining transit, preventing discrimination, and even ensuring adequate healthcare and making jobs available.
It’s easy for Republicans as the party out of power to bash big government in the abstract and to demonize Democrats for running government poorly. But in the end, the supposed anti-government frame is probably more about personally frustrated voters looking for something and someone to blame. The vast majority voters don’t want government to go away anytime soon – they just want it to operate better and solve public problems intelligently. Though it’s easy to confuse the two, this is an important distinction. Elected leaders, especially extremist government-bashing Republicans, ignore this at their peril.
There’s been quite a bit of buzz over the last few days about a TNR article by Sara Robinson of Campaign for America’s Future that argues progressives need to emulate conservative “brand-building” through professional marketing techniques and institution-building.
It’s not exactly a new argument. At TPM Cafe, Todd Gitlin, who strongly agrees with Robinson, notes:
I mean no disrespect when I say that some version of this piece has appeared during every election cycle of the 21st century, and a lot of good books have sounded the theme.
Sometimes, of course, arguments for “branding” or “promoting frames” for progressives are less about using savvy marketing techniques or paying attention to basic values and themes, and more about insisting that the Democratic Party enforce the kind of ideological consistency that has made “branding” a more mechanical undertaking for Republicans, at least since Reagan. Robinson acknowledges that progressives don’t have the sort of level of consensus as conservatives, but argues that disagreements must be submerged in the interest of projecting a clear message.
Personally, I’m all for using smart techniques in politics, and have spent a good chunk of my own career in training sessions aimed at helping Democrats unravel and articulate their values, policy goals, and proposals in a way that promotes both party unity and effective communications.
But it’s important to understand that conservatives have an advantage in “branding” that I don’t think progressives can or should match. The best explication of this advantage was by Jonathan Chait in a justly famous 2005 article (also for TNR) entitled “Fact Finders,” which argued that conservatives, unlike progressives, have little regard for empirical evidence in developing their “brand,” and thus can maintain a level of simplicity and consistency in political communications that eludes the more reality-minded. Here Chait makes the key distinction:
We’re accustomed to thinking of liberalism and conservatism as parallel ideologies, with conservatives preferring less government and liberals preferring more. The equivalency breaks down, though, when you consider that liberals never claim that increasing the size of government is an end in itself. Liberals only support larger government if they have some reason to believe that it will lead to material improvement in people’s lives. Conservatives also want material improvement in people’s lives, of course, but proving that their policies can produce such an outcome is a luxury, not a necessity.
Thus conservatives are entirely capable of arguing that deficits don’t matter if they are promoting tax cuts, while deficits matter more than anything if they are trying to cut social spending; that tax cuts and deregulation are essential if the economy’s good, and tax cuts and deregulation are essential if the economy’s bad; and that particular totems like, say, missile defense, should be a top national priority both during and after the Cold War. Their agenda rarely changes, no matter how much the world changes, or how little evidence there is that their policy prescriptions work. The continued adherence of most conservatives to supply-side economics, that most thoroughly discredited concept, is a particularly important case in point.
As Chait notes, the refusal of progressives to ignore reality creates a real obstacle to consistency (and by inference, “branding”):
[I]ncoherence is simply the natural byproduct of a philosophy rooted in experimentation and the rejection of ideological certainty. In an open letter to Roosevelt, John Maynard Keynes called him “the Trustee for those in every country who seek to mend the evils of our condition by reasoned experiment within the framework of the existing social system. If you fail, rational change will be gravely prejudiced throughout the world, leaving orthodoxy and revolution to fight it out.” Note how Keynes defined his and Roosevelt’s shared ideology as “reasoned experiment” and “rational change” and contrasted it with orthodoxy (meaning the conservative dogma that market economics were self-correcting) and revolution.
What progressives gain in exchange for this sacrifice of the opportunity to pound in a simple message and agenda for decades is pretty important: the chance when in power to promote policies that actually work. And of all the “brands” that are desirable for the party of public-sector activism, competence is surely the best. Indeed, the most ironically perilous thing about the current political environment is that Democrats are paying a high price for the consequences of ideologically-driven incompetence–not to mention very deliberate efforts to destabilize the planet and promote economic inequality and social divisions–attributable to the last era of conservative control of the federal government.
The best news for progressives right now is that conservatives are engaged in another, and even more ideologically-driven, effort to promote their “brand” at the expense of reality. Indeed, one way to understand the Tea Party Movement is as a fierce battle to deny Republicans any leeway from the remorseless logic that will soon lead them to propose deeply unpopular steps to reduce the size and scope of government, while also insisting on policies virtually guaranteed to make today’s bad economy even worse, certainly for middle-class Americans. I’m willing to grant conservatives a “branding” advantage and keep my own political family grounded in the messy uncertainties of the real world
Just like their crazy-as-a-FOX cousins, the Wall Street Journal editorial page has indulged yet again in a spectacle of tragicomical self-victimization. An especially shameless recent raving targets the Democrats’ efforts to expose the furtive corporate backing behind their array of political front groups, of the sort that Rupert Murdoch, the brothers Koch and their band of aspiring overloads have nearly perfected. Naturally, the Journal gets it wrong across the board.
Their charge was that Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus engaged in a “liberal abuse of power” against right-leaning “issue advocacy” groups recently when he asked the IRS to investigate whether “certain tax exempt 501(c) groups had violated the law by engaging in too much political campaign activity.” But Baucus did not target “certain” groups—his request to the IRS was broad, and intended to give them wide rein to go where the facts led them and report back.
Senator Baucus, as chairman of the Senate committee responsible for the tax code, has the obligation to examine how his committee’s laws work in practice, and whether they ought to be revisited. The examples in his letter, one of which cited a local financier who paid for a pro-development referendum campaign in Washington State, represented the results of investigations by the New York Times and Time, not part of any partisan hit list as the Journal would have us believe.
Even if the IRS investigation ends up disproportionately impacting conservative groups, that is because these groups’ “issues” just so happen to coincide squarely with their backers’ financial interests, calling into question their tax-exempt status.
This is not the case with conservative bogeymen such as George Soros. While Soros and other wealthy progressives also contribute to issue advocacy groups, their personal fortunes do not turn on the agenda they espouse. Soros would in fact be even better off financially were the Republicans to gain power and, say, extend Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. Contrast that with the Koch brothers, whose sprawling empire is one of the top ten air polluters in the United States, and who have been called the “kingpins” of climate change denial. One can just imagine how much they have to lose from stronger environmental regulations or a cap-and-trade bill.
Now, it is all well and good if the Kochs and Co. want to keep pumping dollars into elections and carbon into the air. That is their right under the law. But they should have to be honest about it so that the American people can judge whether this agenda coincides with their own. We all know that the Supreme Court in the case Citizens United upheld the right of corporations to spend freely on behalf of issues and candidates they believe in. Less well known is the court’s decision, in the same term, in Doe v. Reed. In it, the 8-1 majority held that there is no categorical First Amendment right to anonymous political speech.
In Doe, finding against such a right to privacy was critical, said the Court, to “fostering government transparency and accountability.” Perhaps Justice Scalia explained the rationale best: “Requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed…” That is what the tax code provisions the right is abusing are supposed to reinforce, and which Senator Baucus is charged with overseeing.
Would that the Journal had Scalia’s spine. Instead it complains about businesses being made the “targets of vilification with the goal of intimidating them into silence.” But why should consumers unwittingly support businesses that advocate interests potentially at odds with their values? This contrast is especially striking when those same businesses can covertly advance their interests through a tax-exempt organization. Only in the Journal’s circular world, where what’s good for the golden gooses is good for the gander, could this somehow square. But such misdirection and obfuscation, as we well know, is the only way the far right can still pretend to have the interests of the American people at heart.
Individual elections have consequences beyond their immediate results, mainly in terms of the strategic lessons that are drawn from them by leaders of the two major parties and the news media. This may be particularly true in this midterm election, given the certainty of Republican gains after two big Democratic cycles. But it is entirely possible to over-interpret elections as well, and I strongly suspect that will happen with this one.
Republicans and their media allies have a vested interest in exaggerating the “swing” that will have occurred from 2008, reinforcing their line that the 2006 and 2008 results were simply a referendum on the Bush administration’s policies—including their alleged heresies from “conservative principles”—and not an indictment of conservatism generally.
We will hear a lot on November 3 about the basic center-right nature of the country, and the punishment of Democrats for trying to implement their own platform without any sort of real mandate to do so. And without question, some Democrats will exaggerate the results as well in order to argue that the Obama administration and congressional Democrats either failed to pay attention to the concerns of swing voters, or (more often) failed to keep the Democratic base engaged by compromising too much with Republicans or worrying too much about Wall Street.
But it’s important to keep in mind two crucial points about the arithmetic of this and other elections: (1) relatively small swings in public opinion can produce pretty big changes in results, particularly in the U.S. House, and (2) there is, and has always been, a different electorate participating in midterm as opposed to presidential elections, with the particular composition of the Democratic base making it particularly vulnerable to a midterm turnout swoon, regardless of any other factor.
On the first point, the current Democratic margin of 39 seats in the House could all but vanish if Republicans simply break even in the national House popular vote, and an advantage of five percent could swing 50 seats. A variety of factors have vastly increased the number of competitive House seats this year (roughly doubling the number as compared to 2008), creating a larger “pool” of potential wins for Republicans.
But it’s the second point that matters most: turnout in midterm elections is inversely related to the age of voters, which is a big deal since the 2008 Obama vote varied very directly with age. The dependence of Democrats in 2008 on Hispanics, another demographic famous for poor midterm voting, is also a problem. But based on turnout patterns alone, it was a virtual certainty the very day after the 2008 elections—long before the Obama administration was in a position to do anything that offended a single voter–that Republicans would make significant midterm gains. This reality is reinforced by current “likely voter” polls showing an electorate that gave a majority of its 2008 votes to John McCain.
Why does this matter in terms of interpreting what happens on November 2? Well, aside from reducing the real “swing” among participating voters, the turnout factor will reverse its effect going into 2012, creating an electorate a lot closer to the one we saw in 2008, and considerably improving Democratic prospects then. Republicans who assume they can behave the same between 2010 and 2012 as they did between 2008 and 2010 may be in for a rude shock. Additionally, Democrats who assume their disadvantage in midterm turnout is attributable to the administration’s failure to “energize the base” with more progressive policies or aggressive political tactics are missing the point that key components of the current base never, ever turn out for midterm elections in numbers matching older white voters.
Another result that is likely to be over-interpreted is the swing in independent voters, which most Republicans and many media pundits will attribute to some sort of swing-to-the-right among Independents or “overreaching” by Democrats. Among the many problems in comparing the views and votes of self-identified independents over time is that this cohort is by definition a function of shifts in the number of people identifying as Democrats and Republicans.
Any “shift-to-the-right” among Independents is at least partially attributable to a profound reduction in the ranks of self-identified Republicans from 2006 on, which has only marginally reversed this year; this has the effect of making a lot of regular Republican voters of conservative outlook “Independents” by assertion. Naturally they are going to vote Republican this year, because they just about always do.
The final area ripe for over-interpretation will be the perceived ideology of the two major parties. Without question, hard-core conservatives will claim any GOP gains this year as final, definitive proof of their longstanding argument that only rigorous, consistent conservatism can create a Republican electoral majority.
There will be a less visible, but still distinct, argument by some progressives that Democrats need to move to the left (or at least move to a “populist” ideology and message) to win, emulating the Republican tactic. Such arguments from either direction almost certainly overestimate the extent to which voters pay close attention to the issue positions and ideological character of candidates, particularly in lower profile House races.
Yes, there will be a few races—notably the Senate races in Nevada and Kentucky—where the extremism of Republican candidates is so clear and notorious that ideology will be impossible to ignore in interpreting the results. But by and large, the main consequence of this year’s lurch to the right in the GOP will be to push the party towards policies in office that will indeed backfire disastrously, both politically and in terms of their real-life effects. That’s actually what happened to the GOP during the Bush years, even though conservatives want to believe it was insufficient conservatism that undid them.
And that gets back to my initial point: many people in politics use election results not to enlighten themselves and others, but to grind old axes. Separating real from disingenuous post-election arguments will be an essential task for the reality-minded in both parties.
That number today is 8 percent, which is about what you would expect, given the ubiquitous anti-government rhetoric. It’s a remarkable loss of any faith in government by one of the two major political parties. (By contrast, 42 of Democrats now rate government “A” or “B” – slightly less than the 47 percent in 2000, but not as significant a decline.)
But here’s the question that sticks with me: What happens if the Republicans take back the House or at least make significant enough gains to have ownership over the government again? Will the anti-government rhetoric explode in their face?
Having spent so much energy disparaging Washington, can Republicans maintain popular support if they take back some share of the federal government and are forced to make hard choices of actually governing? It’s easy for Republican voters to have no faith in Washington when it’s controlled by Democrats, but what happens if Republicans again have a share of governing responsibility?
Consider another telling item in the same poll highlights a problem that Republicans are going to face: Half of the country thinks that the budget can be balanced with only cuts to “wasteful spending.” But as Jon Cohen and Dan Balz note: “Eliminating waste in the budget would do very little to bring down the size of the deficit.” Republicans have, as many opposition parties are wont to do, peddled excessively simple solutions to excessively difficult problems.
In today’s Times, Kate Zernicke notes that “33 Tea Party-backed candidates are in tossup races or running in House districts that are solidly or leaning Republican, and 8 stand a good or better chance of winning Senate seats” – In other words, a there will be a sizeable caucus of firethrowers who will continue to amp up the anti-government rhetoric within the party.
But how long before the Tea Party faithful loses faith in the Republicans who they’ve elected on the bold revolutionary promises to tear down government when those promises go unfulfilled – as they inevitably must, given the dramatic mismatch between their platforms and what is actually possible to accomplish in Washington?
Republicans are essentially saying: Elect us to do things that we are incapable of doing. Elect us to run an institution that we have encouraged you to be thoroughly frustrated with, so that we can ultimately be in charge and be accountable for your frustration.
Of course, that’s not to say that Republicans can’t continue the Janus-like pose of both being responsible for governing and bashing the very idea of government. Reagan did it successfully. And even if Republicans take back the House, they will still have Obama and the Democratic-controlled Senate to bash.
But ultimately, it’s a self-negating electoral strategy. Republicans are never going to succeed in drastically shrinking the size of government or even repealing healthcare reform for the simple reason that when it comes down to it, there’s much less fat to trim than most people think, and certainly no fat to trim painlessly.
So I do not envy the new crop of Republicans who will be picking up seats this November. They’ll have been elected as part of an anti-incumbency, anti-government mood that they’ve done much to foment. But that mood takes on a life of its own. It may not be so useful when they become the incumbents and are part of the government.
How should the United States handle the case of an American citizen encouraging jihadist-style violence against his countrymen? It’s easy for the US to launch Predator drone strikes against foreign al Qaeda members in holed up in Pakistan, but what legal precautions are necessary when other Americans are in the Predator’s crosshairs? This is the twisted legal issue at the heart Anwar al-Aulaqi, the American cleric based in Yemen who has served as the ideological inspiration behind the Ft. Hood and Christmas Day attacks (amongst others).
Back in January, the government added Anwar al-Aulaqi to a “kill list” that authorized the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command to target him with lethal action. In August, the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a suit seeking to stop the US government from lethally targeting Anwar al-Aulaqi. This case was filed on behalf of al-Aulaqui’s father, on the grounds that al-Aulaqui is an American citizen. And furthermore, the complaint argues, the executive branch decision to place him on the “kill list” without judicial oversight allegedly violates his Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights.
The government has filed a brief seeking to dismiss the case on several grounds: That al-Aulaqi’s father is not the proper party to file the suit (only al-Aulaqi can); that the judicial system has no power to second-guess the executive branch on this call; and that arguing this might expose top secret information.
The government’s arguments are solid. And to be clear: there is no doubt that al-Aulaqi poses a threat to national security by promoting violence against Americans.
However, there are important practical and legal issues here: Many would argue that the federal government cannot simply kill an American citizen without regard to the citizen’s Constitutional rights, which have no greater value to a citizen than when they protect him from his government’s ability to take his life. Further, as the complaint notes, the decision to place al-Aulaqi on the kill list was made with no judicial process at all.
What to do? Should there be a special process to deal with a dangerous jihadist inspirer like al-Aulaqi?
Yes. The legal framework for the process could be partially adopted from national security litigation procedures that already exist, such as the Guantanamo Bay habeas corpus cases. The process should be as expedited as quickly possible, and should require the government to show a judge that a person poses an imminent threat to the national security of the United States. It should also have to prove that it has exhausted all other means of resolving the situation and that lethal action is the only viable option left. The hearing can be closed off to the public so that classified information will be protected.
Providing the accused with some form of representation is difficult because those like al-Aulaqi will be inaccessible, hiding in a foreign country. But an attorney representing the target’s interests should be present to make sure that the process is balanced. This could be done with military JAG officers or through a stable of civilian attorneys with top secret clearances.
Constellation Energy announced last weekend that it is pulling out of negotiations with the Obama administration over its pending application for Department of Energy loan guarantees to build a new reactor unit at its existing Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant in Maryland. This means that for now, Constellation has scrapped all plans to expand the plant, which would have brought 1600 megawatts of low-carbon power to the market and thousands of jobs to the local economy.
What drove Constellation to walk away from further negotiations is the position taken by the White House Office of Management and Budget over the cost of the “credit subsidy fee” Constellation must pay for the guarantee. OMB set the fee at $880 million, or 11.6 percent of the total guarantee. OMB says this fee accurately reflects the risk to taxpayers of default by Constellation, which may or may not be accurate, even presuming that shielding taxpayers from 100% of the default risk is an appropriate goal. The problem is that no one ever expected the loan guarantee program to be priced so high, most notably the energy companies that have spent years now tied up in the application process. Constellation had argued for a fee closer to 1-2 percent, and DOE had previously made statements that indicated it was basically in agreement with that fee level, before the Obama White House got involved in the program and indicated it needed greater protections against the risk that the company won’t repay its loans. OMB has demanded a price for those protections that is basically what private lenders would charge (which is high considering the regulatory and cost risks associated with a nuclear power plant–hence the need for the loan guarantee program in the first place).
If you are an opponent of expanding nuclear power, this is great news. It means that after years of hard-fought legislative and regulatory battles in which the nuclear industry made significant headway toward getting the federal government to clear the way for a “nuclear renaissance” in the U.S., yet another battleground has been found to effectively scuttle the entire program for nuclear loan guarantees for the time being. Apparently that new battleground is the arcane world of credit scoring within the federal budget bureaucracy, most notably OMB.
By throwing sand in the gears of this final stage of the bureaucratic approval process, the White House has let the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program grind to a halt after years of promises of support to the industry for badly needed new projects. By all accounts, this controversy appears to be simply a fight between budget bureaucrats that needs to be hashed out publicly and resolved. But a less benign interpretation might suggest a deliberate bias among those in the administration in favor of spending loan guarantee dollars on renewable energy at the expense of nuclear projects. In either case, it is a problem that President Obama could easily fix with leadership from the White House, by making it clear that nuclear power is a national priority that is too important to lose new projects over bureaucratic delays.
Instead of leadership, the White House has responded with unfortunate lack of credible commitment to addressing this issue. According to Bloomberg news, OMB’s spokesperson said administration officials were surprised that Constellation gave up on negotiations. It’s hard to believe they could really be that clueless. Everyone following the nuclear loan guarantee process knew this was a potential deal-killing problem for Constellation and other applicants, especially anyone who read Constellation’s executives say so specifically in the New York Times almost a year ago. This issue was raised in Jack Lew’s recent confirmation hearing to take over OMB, and Senate Energy Chairman Jeff Bingaman openly criticized the administration in a hearing on September 23 for holding up these loan guarantees. These complaints have been heard coming from several different corners in Washington and the energy industry for months. If I knew enough not to be shocked by Constellation’s move, how did OMB and the White House did not see this coming?
The administration’s handling of the Constellation loan application raises an important question that needs to be answered: just how committed is President Obama and his administration to expanding nuclear power? The president has said nuclear energy is part of his vision of America’s energy future (most notably in a speech ironically delivered in Maryland announcing a nuclear loan guarantee approval), but we have not seen many tangible results that the members of his administration are fully committed to making that vision a reality. After all, the Constellation announcement comes during the same week when the president was stumping for more infrastructure spending and his own economists released a report arguing that now is an ideal time to build large capital projects, both in terms of economic stimulus and low project costs for financing and labor. In the last week, the administration also cleared the way for two new solar energy projects on federal land and, even more notably, announced a $1.3 billion DOE loan guarantee approval for a massive new wind power project. All of these other initiatives this week are important and deserving of the president’s leadership in making them a national priority. But with the news from Constellation coming amidst all this other administration support for new energy and infrastructure projects, the overall picture is too easily misconstrued as the administration coordinating to put a thumb on the scale in favor of everything but nuclear energy.
Given the energy realities we are facing and the president’s own acknowledgments that nuclear energy needs to be part of a low-carbon response to meeting growing demand, President Obama can not afford to let a bureaucratic bean-counting snafu tie up billions of dollars in new investment and tens of thousands of jobs. Hopefully, this issue is essentially a policy glitch in the administration’s energy agenda, rather than something more problematic. But regardless of the cause, if President Obama is serious about including nuclear in our energy mix, then he needs to use the power of his office to take a hard look at these problems–and fix the glitch.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates used his turn at the podium at a conference of Asian defense ministers yesterday to insist on “freedom of navigation” in international waters, a sharp rebuke to Beijing’s creeping attempts to control the South and East China Seas. China’s recent clashes with Vietnam and Japan over shipping issues highlights Beijing’s intention to assert a sphere of maritime influence.
Regional dominance is a top priority on China’s long-term plate as a part of an “anti-access/area denial” strategy. Though it may not be able to compete with, say, the U.S. Navy in a straight-up force-on-force battle, by “owning” waters off its coasts, China can make Washington think twice about getting involved in, say, a conflict over Taiwan.
PPI has an in-depth look at China’s “anti-access/area denial” strategy thanks to Naval War College Professor Mike Chase. We released Chase’s paper on the topic just last week, which makes for timely reading following Gates’ trip. Click here to read it, and here’s a synopsis:
How and why did China’s approach shift in this new direction?
What are the most potent anti-access and area denial capabilities in Beijing’s arsenal?
And what are the implications for U.S. interests in the Asia-Pacific region?
Chase concludes:
Beijing responded by increasing its defense budget, deploying conventional ballistic missiles across from Taiwan and working on a variety of capabilities intended to target American aircraft carriers. In short, Beijing embraced technologies designed to limit America’s access to critical battlefield areas.
[…]
An AA/AD strategy has limits. Though AA/AD raises the barrier on a decision to use force, once a decision to use force is made, China could not count on prevailing quickly or at low cost.
Then, he offers the following recommendations for U.S. policymakers:
Developing new military capabilities like long-range carrier-based unmanned aerial vehicles and new operational concepts like “Air Sea Battle”—an emerging concept that the military is studying to sustain power-projection in AA/AD environments.
Ongoing diplomatic attention to decreasing tensions within the U.S.-Sino relationship over the Taiwan and South China Sea issues.
Increased attention to the global commons of cyber and space. America must continue to develop defensive and offensive capabilities to ensure network continuity in case of an information offensive, and practice operating without the full range of cyber and space assets.
Sensitivity to China’s sensitivities. Perhaps most important, attempts to strengthen deterrence must be carefully calibrated so that they will not inadvertently fuel China’s worst fears about U.S. intentions, which would only risk further exacerbating the mutual strategic suspicion that is already threatening to make one of the most important bilateral in the world a rocky one.
This post is the fifth in a series about the Progressive Military
I knew my entire life that I was going to join the military at 18. There was never a time where I can recall I thought anything else. It wasn’t pushed on me; it was just something I always understood. My father and several of my uncles are Vietnam vets, my cousin is a Gulf War vet, and my grandfather and his brothers were in World War II. Iraq is my own particular war. In my family, we serve in the military. Many other American families share the same story.
I was always good academically and very active in school activities. As my high school graduation approached people would ask me or my parents where I was going to college and what I was going to do. Doctor? Lawyer? Architect? The answer was no, he’s shipping off to be a Private in the U.S. Army. The looks were telling. Someone even offered ‘there’s other ways to pay for college, you know.’
For many there are not. I served with guys in the Army who will tell you that if they hadn’t joined they would be in the poorhouse, in jail, or dead in some alleyway. My father was a tough Chicago kid who volunteered at the height of the Vietnam War because he wanted better than sketchy factory jobs. He got it. After ‘Nam, he used the GI Bill to get a degree and a job. He just retired after thirty years of looking out for abused kids with the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services. The opportunity the military gives has paid dividends not only for my father, but for me and my family, not to mention the thousands of kids my dad helped over the years.
Thirty years after him and at exactly the same place, Ft. Leonard Wood, Missouri, I started my military career. I could look out of my barracks window and see across the drill square the same building he had lived in. They shaved my head, gave me a uniform, and a job with a steady paycheck, medical and dental care, a retirement system, and other benefits. I grew up in rural southern Illinois, where the unemployment rate today ranges between 9 and14 percent. A lot of people I grew up with haven’t fared as well, even some of those that went to college.
I had to work hard for it, but I did it, me and over 26 million other American veterans, many of whom might not have otherwise had such opportunities. Today, communities around military posts are more prosperous than industrial cities, tech centers, and college towns. The opportunities granted by military service help Americans of all kinds; studies have found military communities are among the least segregated in the country.
The military not only put money in our pockets, but it has given us work experience we couldn’t get elsewhere. Only around 15 percent of our troops are actually ‘trigger-pullers’; over half work in technical and medical fields and another third work in administration and logistics. These military jobs more often than not have a direct equivalent in the civilian market. It’s no secret that military life creates disciplined, principled, and dedicated workers, an asset to any employer or a good basis for starting a business.
Almost a quarter of Americans have a college degree today and the increasing demand for and availability of degrees to the larger population owes much to the GI Bill. Since 1944, it has helped over 21 million veterans join the educated workforce. The Post 9-11 GI Bill will help hundreds of thousands of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans not only get an education, but help pay their cost of living while doing so, something the GI Bill hasn’t done since the 1980’s. It has been touted as part of the economic recovery program by providing the opportunity for many former troops to qualify for better jobs than the currently scarce entry level positions available to those that have only a high school diploma. This is especially important while unemployment among young veterans is estimated at 21 percent. If you can’t find a job, at least you can go to school.
I didn’t join the military just to go to college or for the opportunities. There are many that did and there’s nothing wrong with that. They have earned the thanks of the nation. The GI Bill is a progressive policy that does just that for Americans that might not otherwise have had the opportunity. Serving in the military gives many Americans the chance they need for a career or a good start in life. As for me, I have decided to study law in the end. Without the opportunity the military has given to me and to my family, I would not have been able to. Millions of other Americans share the same story.
Recent belt-tightening (forced or otherwise) in education has resulted in major casualties to after-school programsaround the nation. As funding priorities shift to privilege teacher prep and accountability, after-school programs have been among the first to get the funding axe.
The 21st Century Community Learning Centers, a federal framework to support programs that target under-served or at-risk populations, provide academic support to struggling students and create opportunities for exploring arts, sports, and music. They are emblematic of after-school programs everywhere—in what they do, what they don’t do, and how we understand after-school time at large. So a proposed budget increase of almost $100 million to the 21st CCLCs should come as good news, right?
Not necessarily, according to some in the broader education community. The proposed appropriations bill bundles 21st CCLC support with money to “expand learning time” by extending the school day, or year. A recent Education Week article notes the ambivalence among after-school providers, citing “fears that opening the program to extended-learning-time initiatives could come at the expense of high-quality after-school efforts.” The Afterschool Alliance, a national advocate for after-school programs, has taken up a standing opposition to the bill.
So, what’s going on here under the surface conflict of too many line items and too few dollars? Why wouldn’t the nation’s biggest after-school supporter want a huge network of after-school programs to receive more funding?
Even more buried than the defensive concern about diverted support, there is also a surfeit of competing ideas about what education could or should be—and not enough space, consideration, or funding to follow each of those ideas to any sort of fruition.
Current funding strategies are furthermore pushing after-school and other interventions (extended-day included) to fit themselves into the ever-more restrictive reform rhetoric of increased academic achievement. If programs can’t be shown to improve kids’ test scores, they’re passed over, slashed from the budget, and relegated to the “tried and failed” pile.
The expectations placed upon after-school programs in recent years (increasingly, say, with the advent and legacy of No Child Left Behind) have reflected this slow constriction of values. After-school hours are expected to be as academically enriching as the classroom hours from which children are directly coming—if not moreso, as after-school has increasingly been incorporated into NCLB’s “supplemental services” for remediation.
Once valued primarily as a safe space in the hours between school and home for kids in at-risk areas or circumstances, or as an outlet for the abundant energy and creativity that accompanies and overwhelms adolescence, after-school time has steadily been re-appropriated as school-time in a slightly different setting.
Research, however, has shown that after-school programs are perhaps not as up to this new task as their proponents (and funders) would like to imagine. Even among the 21st Century Community Learning Centers, research has shown the programs have “few impacts” on participating students’ academic performance. Reports from 2004 to the present, available through the Department of Education’s website, show that fewer than half of participating students’ grades improve, and less than one-third of students’ state assessment scores improve after spending time in a 21st CCLC.
Presumably, someone, somewhere is gearing up to use this data to add fuel to the competitive fire of education reform—and that might be what the Afterschool Alliance really fears. If these programs don’t work, toss them out, forget about ‘em, and bring on the extended day (or value-added teacher assessment, or private tutoring services, or those helper-monkeys they’re using at the Commonwealth Games)! But before we throw the babies out with the after-school bathwater, let’s look a little deeper. There is, in fact, research on the obvious flipside of the issue: what are after-school programs good at doing?
Robert Halpern of the Erikson Institute has spent significant time wrestling with this very question, in part by asking: why aren’t after-school programs good at academic enhancement?
Citing the heterogeneity of after-school programs, the lack of a cohesive professional “field” for providers, the mixed backgrounds of staff, and unstable or unsustainable relationships with the resources upon which they so heavily depend, Halpern argues that after-school programs are poorly equipped to take on academic remediation. In Halpern’s view, after-school programs are not extensions of schools, and shouldn’t be viewed as such. They should provide what schools can’t, not simply make up the difference.
Re-assessing after-school programs along these lines, as first and foremost spaces for acceptance, socialization, and exploration – a new spectrum of possibilities for after-school hours begins to emerge.
The strengths of after-school programming, in Halpern’s estimation, suggest to me the same rubric of what’s being variously defined as “deeper” or “student-centered” learning, or as “21st century skills”: self-guided learning, collaboration, problem-solving, and communication. The basics beyond the academic basics, if you will.
Furthermore, the development of many of these skills or competencies is in conflict with many of the institutional particularities of the modern school system (as Richard Halverson and Allan Collins suggest in their work on technology’s place in learning and education).
The debate over 21st century skills assessment is almost as hot as the debate over what exactly to call this skill set. But advances are being made, and indicators outside of test scores have also been tracked in after-school programs for as long as such programs have been assessed. In 2004, 21st CCLC after-school programs were shown to have some positive effects on student-adult interaction, parental outcomes, and feelings of safety and security among participating children.
The most recent 21st CCLC report, from 2007, shows the target goal of three-quarters of participating students “demonstrating improved homework completion and class participation,” has nearly been met. Other unexplored after-school indicators could include: increases in school attendance, elective or extracurricular participation patterns, creative output, community involvement, and perhaps eventually job placements and earnings.
After-school programs may be as necessary an experiment in improving American education as anything else—including the extended day, and value-added assessments (probably not those security monkeys, but who’s to say?). And we should be looking for ways to both support and improve that experiment by enriching the after-school field, creating professional development opportunities for staff, creating standards to which providers can reasonably be held accountable for their successes as much as their failures. We shouldn’t be blocking after-school support because we’re not sure if another solution is as valid—saying no to something that works because we’re not as sure about something else that could also work.
If education reform is really more of a series of parallel structures rather than a single declarative (to draw from my 8th grade grammar lessons)—if we have to try this, and this, and this, and this, to try to arrive at some answers, then after-school programming, 21st century skill development, and an extended school day or year all deserve both attention and funding. Otherwise we lose $100 million for after-school programs and an untold amount of intangible support for experimentation and innovation within a reform that will only, ultimately, be more than the sum of its parts.
Three weeks out from Election Day, it’s increasingly unlikely that any news event, economic development, or overall party message is going to have a major effect on the outcome. Yes, long-planned GOTV efforts—beginning with early voters—will come to fruition, and actual events, including candidate debates, could swing close individual races. But to an extent that would depress most candidates (who naturally tend to think their fate is in their own hands), a lot of what we are doing now is trying to predict results that are pre-ordained, and even anticipating some of the post-election debates within the two parties.
The exceptions to this predestination rule are close statewide races, for two reasons. First, statewide candidates simply get greater exposure, if not from ads then from media coverage. And second, gubernatorial candidates are affected to some extent by their own political dynamics, particularly if they belong to the party in power at the state level, and thus represent the “wrong track.”
The implications of the first factor are explained by PPP’s Tom Jensen in a post about Democratic prospects in House and Senate races:
I think Democrats are going to lose the House, with Republicans quite possibly picking up a lot more seats than they even need for a majority. At the same time I think Democrats will hold onto the Senate and that it may be by a larger margin than people are expecting, with the party perhaps holding onto its seats in places like Illinois, Colorado, Nevada, and West Virginia where the party lucked out because the GOP nominated weak candidates.
That’s a reminder that candidates matter- but they matter a lot more in Senate elections where voters really get to know them than in House elections that are much more likely to be determined by the national tide. We’ve seen time and again in Senate races this year that the better voters get to know the Republican candidates the less they like them. But unfortunately for Democrats I don’t know that voters ever get to know the House candidates well enough for that same effect to occur.
Jensen’s point reflects past experience, as well. In 1972, 1984, and 1990, one party made gains in one chamber of Congress while losing seats in the other. The most famous example was in 1972, when despite the Nixon landslide over McGovern, Democrats actually gained two net Senate seats. And even where one party has made gains in both Houses, they haven’t always been congruent in size or sweep (e.g., 1982, when the two parties broke even in the Senate even as Democrats gained 27 seats in the House).
The ideological sorting-out of the two parties may have reduced the likelihood of such variable results, insofar as ticket-splitting has become less common, particularly in congressional races. But the higher profile of statewide races does give candidates greater opportunities to make news—or make costly mistakes—and down-the-stretch financial advantages can have a greater impact as well.
Having said all that, the precise results to be expected on November 2 remain unpredictable, not so much because of candidate behavior, but simply because an unusually large number of races are competitive. This is particularly true in the House. As Nate Silver explained at some length in a post on his own and others’ projections of House results:
According to just about every objective and subjective indicator, then, the number of competitive House districts is roughly twice as high as in recent years. This is why the margin of error on our House forecast is very wide. If the polling is off by just a little in one direction or another, it could have profound consequences for the number of seats that Republicans are likely to gain. Likewise, there are a great number of districts in which both parties have viable candidates who could over perform or underperform the trends present in the national environment.
Why are so many races competitive? That could merit an article on its own. I suspect much of the reason is that the deterioration in the political environment for Democrats was evident quite early in the cycle — certainly by around August or September of last year — leaving both parties with plenty of time to prepare. The fact that the Internet has made fundraising much less burdensome, and allowed name recognition to be built through a variety of “nontraditional” means, may also play a role.
With more seats in play, the odds of missing the exact post-election count go up quite a bit. Cutting in the other direction is the fact that there is a lot more public polling data available than in the past, so projections are less likely to depend entirely on past performance or some sort of vague, thumb-on-the-scales estimates of national trends.
As Election Day approaches, the likelihood of major surprises will naturally go down. But there are more than enough razor-close races to ensure considerable mystery on Election Night.
President Obama’s call yesterday for $50 billion in new transportation spending is politically risky, given public worries about government spending and debt. But if linked to a strategic and sustained strategy for modernizing the nation’s infrastructure, it could signal the start of America’s economic comeback.
Even more important than the money, however, is an Obama initiative that didn’t get as much media play: a proposed National Infrastructure Bank. It is the key not only to leveraging business capital – U.S. companies are sitting on $2 trillion in potential “private stimulus” money – but also to making sure we invest that money wisely.
The president said he would ask the lame-duck Congress next month to approve the $50 billion measure, which would front-load money that otherwise would be spread over the life of a six-year surface transportation bill. He left little doubt his immediate goal is to goose the pace of the agonizingly slow economic recovery.
“Nearly one in five construction workers is still unemployed and needs a job. And that makes absolutely no sense when so much of America needs rebuilding,” Obama told reporters at the White House on Memorial Day. Attempting to preempt Republican objections that infrastructure spending is simply stimulus is drag, Obama noted that “Investing in infrastructure is something members of both parties have always supported.”
Maybe so, but it’s worth noting that the word “infrastructure” appears nowhere in the GOP’s 48-page Pledge to America. What’s more, Republicans are likely to over-interpret likely midterm gains as vindication of their attacks on Obama as a big spender, so good luck getting them to vote for infrastructure in the lame duck.
That’s a shame, because spending on infrastructure is both stimulus and investment. It could get more Americans working now, but it is also essential to building our country’s long-term capacity to compete in fast growing global markets for high speed rail, civilian nuclear energy, clean cars, intelligent transport systems and renewable fuels.
The federal government, of course, is constrained by enormous deficits and a growing national debt. That’s why we need a National Infrastructure Bank, which would structure public-private deals to fund big capital projects that can generate real economic returns. As noted by an economic analysis the White House released yesterday:
“There is currently very little direct private investment in our nation’s highway and transit systems due to the current method of funding infrastructure, which lacks effective mechanism to attract and repay direct private investment in specific infrastructure projects. … A National Infrastructure Bank would also perform a rigorous analysis that would result in support for projects that yield the greatest returns to society and are most likely to deliver long-run economic benefits that justify the up-front investments.”
An infrastructure bank, along with new public seed capital and a third element of the Obama infrastructure initiative – merging the many stovepiped “modal” transportation funding streams so public dollars can be used strategically – begin at last to push the economic debate in a constructive direction. The two great challenges America faces now are reviving our economic dynamism and shrinking a massive overhang of public debt. To meet them, the Obama administration needs to fashion an ambitious, “cut and invest” strategy aimed at slowing health care and entitlement spending generally, and using public dollars to leverage massive private investment in productivity-enhancing infrastructure.
That’s why President Obama should press ahead with his infrastructure plan, despite the political fallout from the midterm election. If Republicans want to frame the economic debate as a choice between more tax cuts and rebuilding the common foundations of American prosperity, so much the better. That’s one progressives can win.
The night that President Obama won the presidency, I was distracted by a looming deadline for New Republic piece I was already writing warning the left not to misinterpret the election results. Democratic Congressional victories were primarily the result of voters continuing to grow sour on the way Republicans ran the House and Senate. Obama’s victory owed its magnitude to the financial crisis and McCain’s response to it. Essentially, I warned that the 50-50 Nation was alive and well and that moving too aggressively could backfire.
The piece was largely ignored at the time, but it is looking pretty good today. Democrats successfully enacted landmark health care legislation, shepherded the financial system through a harrowing period when fears of another depression were widespread, passed an enormous stimulus package, and pushed through financial reform. In the process, the deficit soared to worrying levels, unemployment continued to rise, the government became the owner of FannieMae and FreddieMac and part owners of the automobile companies, the economy limped along, and public opinion turned against them.
In a sure sign that in its own way, the left is as out of touch as the conservative tea party activists, liberals lamented the supposed timidity and corporate-coziness of the Administration, and the base grew depressed. This despite the unprecedented scale of federal spending and intervention into the workings of the economy, the near death of health care reform (the biggest progressive victory since Medicare’s enactment), and loss of support among independents and moderates. Progressives thought they had a mandate for aggressive change. Apparently they still don’t realize that they didn’t.
Ironically, one of the left’s leading pundits, E. J. Dionne, argued in a sharp book in the 1990s called They Only Look Dead that the way to understand the 1992, 1994, and 1996 elections was to view the first two years as a period of liberal overreach and the second two years as a mirror image on the right. Despite all the evidence that the country is even more closely divided today, liberals such as Dionne cannot see the same dynamic of partisan overreach playing out over the past decade. But it was there during the Bush years on the right, and it has been there over the past two momentous years on the left.
Yes, the economy is surely the driving force behind voter dissatisfaction with Democrats, and Obama was damned if he did (spend hundreds of billions to avoid a depression) and damned if he didn’t. But health care was supposed to be a game changer—if voters were so keen on a massive disruption of the health care sector, as progressives have argued for twenty years now, why hasn’t this trumped the economy? The electorate is fundamentally moderate and as poorly served by liberals who want to circumvent that moderation as by tea-party conservatives who are convinced Obama is a socialist Muslim foreigner. It will be interesting to see which party—if either—gets it between now and 2012.
This post is the fourth in a series about the Progressive Military
The smell that will always take me and many other vets back to the old Army days is diesel exhaust fumes. When you spend many years of your life rolling around the muddy trails of military training areas in 5-ton trucks or the bumpy roads of Iraq and Afghanistan in armored Humvees, the smell brings on instant nostalgia. It is my hope, and the hope of many senior military leaders, that our next generation of servicemembers won’t know that smell because they won’t be using oil.
There is widespread agreement by institutions onallsides of the political spectrum that energy independence, security, and planning for the repercussions of climate change must be addressed. Former CIA director James Woolsey has called this “the first war since the Civil War that America has funded both sides.” However there is still opposition, mostly from the GOP Congressional minority, to taking real comprehensive steps. Their opposition to a comprehensive energy and climate bill, such as the American Power Act, has stifled momentum on the issue. Too many in Congress want to ensure nothing get done on the issue for quite a while.
Despite Congressional impasse, the military is looking at the issue from top to bottom and pushing forward. The Army is investigating using the safflower as a biofuel and began its Fuel Efficiency Demonstrator (FED) program to develop new vehicle technologies in response to battlefield calls for the need to reduce the number of dangerous convoys that use and transport fuel. The effort doesn’t extend solely to vehicles and equipment; it also extends to the power grids on it installations at home and downrange.
Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, strongly committed to the issue, has promised that the Navy and Marine Corps will get less than half of its power from fossil fuels within ten years. As far as new energy and combat power are concerned, the electric hybrid ship USS Makin Island and the hybrid-fueled FA-18 “Green Hornet” fighter jet have already made their maiden voyages. The Navy is also committed to making all of their installations energy self-sufficient by 2020.
Not to be outdone, the Air Force has developed an A-10 “Thunderbolt”, a ground attack aircraft, that also runs on a biofuels mixture and plans to test at least three other aircraft models this year. This is a significant development as the Air Force is the military’s top energy consumer. On the ground, Langley Air Force Base has installed a geothermal energy system as part of the Air Force goal to reduce its energy consumption 20% by 2020.
The Pentagon has begun to “wargame” the consequences of climate change that the military may be called upon to address. As resources become scarce, it may lead to conflicts on several continents. U.S. bases may be threatened by rising sea levels. It may also lead to conflict between allies and destabilize stable states and further ruin already shaky ones. It is also no secret that American dependence on oil from unstable regions leaves us vulnerable every time there is a hiccup in the supply caused by unrest or terror attacks.
There may be continued debate as whether we have already or will reach “peak oil”, whether the alarms raised about “foreign” oil are an overreaction, or, most of all, whether climate change is actually happening at all. The U.S. military doesn’t seem to be willing to take the chance that these things aren’t or won’t happen. In the words of energy security advocate and retired Army Chief of Staff General Gordon Sullivan, “We never have 100 percent certainty. If you wait until you have 100 percent certainty, something bad is going to happen on the battlefield.”
If Congress and the American people trust the military to keep them safe, hopefully they will trust the military on energy independence and climate change. General Anthony C. Zinni, retired U.S. CENTCOM commander, has said, “We will pay for this one way or another. We will pay to reduce greenhouse gas emissions today . . . or we will pay the price later in military terms and that will involve human lives.”
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates 
I knew my entire life that I was going to join the military at 18. There was never a time where I can recall I thought anything else. It wasn’t pushed on me; it was just something I always understood. My father and several of my uncles are Vietnam vets, my cousin is a Gulf War vet, and my grandfather and his brothers were in World War II. Iraq is my own particular war. In my family, we serve in the military. Many other American families share the same story.
Recent belt-tightening (forced or otherwise) in education has resulted in 
