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No Compromise from Obama on Bush Tax Cuts, Except Dividends

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

President Obama stood his ground on his tax plan during Monday’sCNBC town hall forum, arguing that he can’t make the math work for both keeping the deficit in check and giving away tax breaks to the richest two percent of Americans.  When asked about possibilities for compromise, including cutting rates for households with incomes between $250,000 and $1 million, Obama didn’t flinch and stuck to his talking points.

So it sounds like the President’s position on the Bush tax cuts is one he’s taking to the people on Election Day, rather than taking to the Hill for negotiation and deal-making.  He also brushed off a question about a payroll tax holiday, so it doesn’t sound like that idea will be on the table between now and November either.

Obama did make a strong statement about keeping a portion of the Bush tax cuts that would apply to the wealthiest Americans: reduced rates on income from corporate dividends.  He emphasized that he has proposed a 20 percent cap on both dividends and capital gains taxes

If the Bush tax cuts expire without this change, the highest income brackets would pay 20 percent on capital gains, but dividends would be taxed at marginal rates of 39 percent for the top bracket.  So when Obama mentions this 20 percent cap on dividends, he’s actually proposing a sliver of compromise in the tax cut debate. This appears to be the only part of the Bush tax cuts that he’s willing to extend for the top 3 percent of taxpayers.

I have to think that emphasizing the dividend cuts was one of the key messaging items the White House planned for this forum today.  First, it’s CNBC, so the business and investment audience is going to like the idea.

Second, it’s a cut that Republicans can’t possibly oppose, except as part of their pouting-in-the-corner strategy of demanding all the Bush tax cuts or nothing.

Third and most significant is that this isn’t a new position for the administration, but it’s new that Obama himself is talking about it.

It’s the first time I know of that Obama has really spoken out loud about this issue, even though it was included in hisbudget plan for 2011.  The only time other the administration has said anything about that proposal was when Treasury Secretary TimGeithner mentioned it on CNBC in July.

On the merits, the idea is a good one.  There are some decent arguments for taxing dividends at the same rate as capital gains to prevent the kind of investment bias that might result from taxing one at nearly twice the rate as the other, as I have briefly argued before. And because the bulk of total dividend payments go to those in the top brackets, their tax rates have a disproportionate impact on investment incentives.

Congress has for the most part ignored dividends in the debate about extending the Bush tax cuts, and the administration has done nothing to inject it into the discussion.  Until today, that is.

It will be interesting to see whether the White House actually pursues a legislative push for this cut, or if this is merely defensive posturing without follow-up to appear more business-friendly before a business audience.  Since it doesn’t have any real champions in Congress, my guess is that we may not hear much more about it, unless a prominent member or two decide to latch on to the idea as a moderate position and call the President’s bluff.

It’s Time to Repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

A few events over the last few weeks continue to highlight the importance of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, a policy the Obama administration is on the verge of repealing – that is, provided members of his Senate caucus don’t flip out before Tuesday, when the Senate Armed Services Committee is set to vote on the measure in the defense authorization bill and move it to a full Senate vote.  The swing votes in committee may be Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe (Rs-ME), who have said they’re unsure how they’ll vote.

DADT was always meant as a transitional policy from the Clinton era, born out of a fight the 42nd president picked (and essentially lost) with the military brass.  It’s time to move our military into the 21st century — Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has endorsed its end, as has Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen.  So has Colin Powell.

I worked for the Pentagon for about five years, and I know and worked with homosexual members of the armed forces.  Their orientation never affected their ability to serve, or their subordinates’ ability to respect them.  Countries including Britain, Denmark, and Israel have all realized that being gay and being in the military is a simply a non-issue.

Last week, Jonathan Hopkins, an Army captain honorably discharged this August for being gay, had this to say in the NYT following his forced separation from the military services:

In my case, after the military learned from others that I was gay, I served for 14 more months during investigations and administrative actions to discharge me. Everyone knew, so, essentially, I lived for more than a year in a post-D.A.D.T. work environment.

…

Amid all of that, the unit continued to function and I continued to be respected for the work I did. Many, from both companies I commanded, approached me to say that they didn’t care if I was gay — they thought I was one of the best commanders they’d ever had. And unbeknownst to me, many had guessed I was probably gay all along. Most didn’t care about my sexuality. I was accepted by most of them, as was my boyfriend, and I had never been happier in the military. Nothing collapsed, no one stopped talking to me, the Earth spun on its axis, and the unit prepared to fight another day.

John Nagl, president of the bipartisan CNAS, commented on Hopkins, his former charge, in Defense News:

Jonathan is the third combat veteran I personally know who has left the Army under the terms of DADT. Collectively, they represent almost a decade of combat experience, a big handful of Purple Hearts and Bronze Stars, service as aide-de-camps to general officers and as platoon leaders and company     commanders in combat, and the investment of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds. They have offered blood, sweat, and tears in defense of a nation that discriminates against them for no good reason.

This policy must end.

The cause has even received the attention of Lady Gaga, heretofore known as the spokeswoman of our times, who called for an end DADT at a rally in Collins’ Maine. She’s the most followed person on Twitter, and if she can motivate a few fans to show up, Tweet, and call the Senator, it might just make a difference

The House has already voted to repeal this highly discriminatory policy, and the Senate hangs in the balance.  If the issue is left to the next Congress, there’s no telling if a more conservative Senate would ever get around to it, which is why tomorrow’s vote is crucial. With the rise of the Tea Party and general rightward slant of the conservative movement today, it’s little wonder that Senator Collins is gun-shy about reiterating her support of a DADT repeal.  One hopes she musters the courage to do what’s right.

Photo credit: Enrico Fuente

Lashed to the Mast

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Weeks before the November elections, leaders of the Republican Party’s increasingly dominant right wing are spending nearly as much time fretting over the potential squeamishness of their own party about implementing a radical agenda as they are ensuring they get the opportunity to enact one.

In a CNN interview yesterday, Sen. Jim DeMint, the one-time kooky loner who’s now a Very Big Dog in the GOP, said the GOP would be “dead” if it didn’t keep its promises to repeal health care reform, balance the federal budget and radically reduce spending. Remember he’s the guy who thinks Social Security and Medicare have ensnared Americans in socialism, and likes to call public schools “government schools.”

Another fringe figure who’s suddenly become very relevant, congressman Steve King of Iowa, is frantic in his fears that a Republican House would fail to shut down the government as part of a strategy to repeal health reform. Indeed, he’s asking would-be Speaker John Boehner to sign a “blood oath” to include a health reform repeal in every single appropriations bill, which would have the effect of shutting down the government, just as Republicans tried to do, unsuccessfully, in 1995, in order to impose a budget on Bill Clinton.

This is a sideshow well worth watching. People like DeMint and King are trying to lash their fellow Republicans to the mast of their ship and make them immune to the siren song of the massive popularity of the public programs and commitments they aim to attack: Medicare, Social Security, federal support for educational opportunity, environmental protection, and on and on. It’s an interesting approach on the brink of what many expect to be a big Republican electoral victory, and says a lot about the gap between what Republicans are campaigning on and how they actually intend to govern when in office.

This piece is cross-posted at the Democratic Strategist

Photo credit: Mark Hyre

A Discouraging Vote on School Reform

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee has a well-deserved reputation for not mincing words.  She wasted no time last week in calling D.C. Council Chairman Vincent Gray’s primary victory over Mayor Adrian Fenty a “devastating” blow to children in Washington’s traditional public schools.

That pretty much scotched any talk of Rhee staying on as Chancellor under Gray. In truth, however, that was never in the cards because the Democratic primary race was in significant measure a referendum on Fenty’s signature initiative: his decision to take over the city’s troubled public schools and bring in the hard-charging Rhee to oversee their transformation.

Fenty’s defeat has delighted reform skeptics and the American Federation of Teachers, which pumped nearly $1 million into Gray’s campaign. The Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt opined today that the outcome was more a repudiation of Fenty’s aloof style than school reform per se. But it’s hard for me to disagree with Natalie Hopkinson’s gleeful characterization of the vote as a “resounding rejection” of Fenty and Rhee’s struggles to dramatically improve D.C. public schools.

The Fenty-Rhee reforms proved deeply polarizing in Washington, with voters splitting along racial lines. According to a pre-election poll by the Post, 68 percent of white voters said Rhee was a reason to support Fenty, while 54 of black Democrats cited her as a reason to oppose the Mayor. What in one community looked like a bold attempt to shake up a deeply dysfunctional education bureaucracy in another looked like a callous effort to foreclose opportunities for middle class employment.

Gray played shrewdly to public discontent over Rhee’s firings of hundreds of teachers and many principals for poor performance. And it wasn’t just schools: Critics also slammed Fenty for not awarding enough high city posts to blacks, and for building bike paths and dog parks prized by affluent D.C. residents while neglecting poor neighborhoods. In last Tuesday’s primary, Gray won more than 80 percent of the vote in predominately black wards 7 and 8, while Fenty did nearly as well in mainly white Ward 3.

But what of Rhee’s charge? Will Fenty’s loss condemn tens of thousands of D.C. children to substandard public schools?

There’s no doubt that Rhee’s departure will slow the momentum of school reform in Washington. With unswerving backing from Fenty, the blunt and often impolitic Rhee imposed real accountability on the school system for the first time. She won national acclaim for making student testing more rigorous, closing failing schools, attracting outside talent (like private foundations and the Teach for America volunteers Hopkinson dismisses as “cultural tourists”), and firing incompetent administrators and  teachers.

Under Fenty and Rhee, D.C. public schools moved from the cellar of urban education into the vanguard of reform. The schools opened on time, with books and accurate counts of students. And test scores rose: Over the past three years, Washington was the only big city to show double-digit increases in state reading and math scores for the 7th, 8th and 10th grades.

Rhee also negotiated among the most innovative teacher’s contracts in the country, which offers teachers the chance to earn extra pay in exchange for loosening tenure rules. There’s worry in reform circles that her departure could induce foundations to withdraw $65 million in pledges to fund $25,000 performance bonuses for teachers under the next contract. And since Rhee was a virtual poster child for the kind of education reforms the Obama administration is pushing, there’s also speculation that D.C. would lose a $75 million “Race to the Top” grant from the Department of Education if Rhee leaves.

So now the spotlight turns to Gray, whose victory in November is a given in overwhelmingly Democratic Washington. If Fenty and Rhee failed to win support from black voters for their reforms, what will Gray do differently?

It should be noted that he is not uniformly hostile to school reform. As Council Chairman, he has been a strong supporter of D.C.’s robust public charter school sector, which now enrolls about 38 percent of the city’s students. (Full disclosure: I’m a member of the board that oversees D.C. charters).

Still, Gray faces a dilemma: continue reform and disappoint key allies, especially the teachers’ union, or slow things down and risk abandoning Washington’s hard-won progress toward raising school standards.  And it’s not just Gray’s challenge. In fact, this is a moment of truth for the city’s black establishment.

Can the city’s new leaders really find a kinder, gentler way to fix D.C.’s chronically underperforming schools?  Or will they revert to the traditional practice of regarding education as a kind of patronage or public jobs program for adults?

The city’s economic vitality, not to mention hopes for raising living standards in its poorest communities, hinge on the answer.

Photo credit: from-the-window

Jon Stewart, Michael Bloomberg, and the Resurgent Center

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Over the last few days, I’ve become cautiously optimistic about the future of the political center. Something seems to be happening. Maybe it was Christine O’Donnell’s surprise Tea Party victory over moderate Michael Castle in the Delaware primary, but it feels like maybe, just maybe, the dormant defenders of moderation and reason are being roused from their slumber.

In particular, I’m encouraged by three developments: Jon Stewart’s decision to hold a “Rally to Restore Sanity” on the National Mall on October 30, Michael Bloomberg’s decision to be very public about his widespread support of centrist candidates, and the fact that independents are really starting to turn against the Tea Party.

First Stewart’s decision to hold a rally: “We’re looking for the people who think shouting is annoying, counterproductive, and terrible for your throat,” advertises the website advertising the rally, “who feel that the loudest voices shouldn’t be the only ones that get heard; and who believe that the only time it’s appropriate to draw a Hitler mustache on someone is when that person is actually Hitler.” (I was impressed that Stewart’s announcement went after both Tea Partiers and 9-11 Truthers, attacking extremism on both sides)

Such a rally at first seems like an unusually public move for somebody who has made a career out of skewering from the sidelines. But could it be that Stewart looked around, realized that he was one of the few partisans for reason and moderation left with a large and enthusiastic following, and felt a sudden pang of responsibility?

Perhaps Stewart actually can give voice to a many Americans who share the Daily Show’s conceit that our current politics is fundamentally fodder for satire. But if comedy is tragedy plus distance, perhaps the increasing tragedy of American politics is making it feel less distant. Is the Tea Party as funny when it forms a meaningful voting block in the U.S. Senate?

Then there is New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s decision to speak to the New York Times (his first newspaper interview in several years) in order to grab the lead story in the Sunday paper to highlight his systematic attempt to back moderates – raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for candidates that hew to a moderate vision of politics.

Bloomberg’s decision to make a public show of his plans may partly be an attempt to raise his profile as the leader of the radical center. But it also an encouraging development: a public signal that the political center is worth defending and supporting, and perhaps, just as Jon Stewart’s rally might be a clarion call to previously apathetic moderate voters, perhaps Bloomberg’s decision will be a similar call to disengaged moderate donors who are equally concerned about the increasingly extreme ways in which the current electoral season is shaping up.

The final encouraging development the latest CBS/ New York Times poll, in which the Tea Party’s unfavorable rating has risen from 18 percent in April to 25 percent (compared to 20 percent favorable, 18 percent undecided, and 36 percent saying they haven’t heard enough). Moreover, independent voters now have a more negative view of the party (30 percent unfavorable, to 18 percent favorable). These are small changes, admittedly, but they are in the right direction, and hopeful portents of a steady waking up to just how crazy the tea party is becoming.

Hopefully this confluence of factors – Jon Stewart’s empowering cheerleading of moderation, Michael Bloomberg’s aggressive financing of moderates, and sinking public support for the tea parties – are legitimate reasons to be optimistic that the center might indeed hold, and maybe even start to feel vital again.

Christine O’Donnell Upsets Republican Plans for the Senate, and Other Tales from This Week’s Primaries

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

What looked to be a reasonably predictable final Tuesday of the 2010 primary season was taken over by the shock of the chattering classes at the victory of Christine O’Donnell over Mike Castle in the Delaware GOP senatorial contest.  Indeed, the interpretation of Christine O’Donnell’s win has become as interesting as the win itself.

It’s not as though there were not abundant warnings: PPP released a poll the Sunday before the primary showing O’Donnell ahead.  But I suspect that what’s shocked Republican observers in particular was the failure of a last-minute effort by the Delaware GOP and the state’s leading newspaper to destroy O’Donnell by exposing her history of financial malfeasance.

As voters went to the polls on Tuesday, the buzz around Washington was that Castle would be just fine.  The probable assumption was that Tea Party supporters would subordinate their ideological concerns about Castle to horror at O’Donnell’s “irresponsibility,” so like the “deadbeats” that many conservatives think brought on the housing and financial crises.  It didn’t happen.

In any event, as even more stories of O’Donnell’s personal and ideological wackiness spread, and as national GOP figures began publicly to write her off (Democrat Chris Coons has assumed a big lead in post-primary polls), the Senate landscape has shifted, with more pressure than ever on Republicans to win close races in Wisconsin, Washington, Colorado and California, and perhaps put Connecticut or West Virginia into play.

The dog that didn’t quite bark on Tuesday was in New Hampshire, where Ovide Lamontagne, who was receiving some of the same (minus Sarah Palin) last-minute national right-wing support enjoyed by O’Donnell,  missed upsetting Kelly Ayotte in that state’s Senate primary by less than one percent.  My guess is that the collapse in support for a third candidate, rich businessman (and “proudly pro-choice”) Bill Binnie, saved Ayotte, which is ironic since Binnie made this race competitive in the first place by running heavy attack ads on Ayotte throughout the summer.  Lamontagne would not have been in as hopeless position as O’Donnell in a general election, in part because NH is a lot more amenable to Republicans than DE, but Ayotte’s a better bet for Republicans, though Democrat Paul Hodes was relatively close in the first post-primary poll.

In Wisconsin, longtime front-runner Scott Walker put away Mark Neumann by a surprisingly large 20% margin in the Republican gubernatorial primary.  He will now be in a competitive general election contest against Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett.

Meanwhile, in New York, where no one really expects the Republican gubernatorial or senate nominees to have much of a prayer against Andrew Cuomo, Kirsten Gillibrand, or Chuck Shumer, the GOP suffered an embarrassment when party stalwart Rick Lazio got trounced for the gubernatorial nomination by the rather eccentric self-funder and Tea Party favorite Carl Paladino.  As the New York Times put it:

It put at the top of the party’s ticket a volatile newcomer who has forwarded e-mails to friends containing racist jokes and pornographic images, espoused turning prisons into dormitories where welfare recipients could be given classes on hygiene, and defended an ally’s comparison of the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, who is Jewish, to “an Antichrist or a Hitler.”

In House races, Delaware was again the state that supplied the major upset, as another Tea Partier, Glenn Urquhart, defeated the NRCC-recruited candidate, Michelle Roberts, for the state’s at-large House seat.  Former Lt. Gov. John Carney, the Democratic nominee, has now become one of a very select group favored to win Republican-controlled House seats.

In NH-2, in one of a smattering of competitive Democratic House primaries, Ann Kuster crushed former Lieberman for President chairman Katrina Swett by more than a two-to-one margin, and will face former Rep. Charlie Bass for the seat Bass lost to Paul Hodes in 2006.  In NH-1, ethically challenged former Manchester Mayor Frank Guinta turned back a challenge from self-funder Sean Mahoney for the chance to take on Democratic Rep. Carol Shea-Porter.  National GOP forces got the candidate they wanted in another vulnerable Democratic district, MA-10, where Jeff Perry won a shot at Democrat Bill Keating in the district vacated by Bill Delahunt.

And of course, in DC, mayor Adrian Fenty lost pretty badly to DC Council Chairman Vincent Gray in a contest where support was highly correlated to race.  Much of the local political discussion in Washington since Tuesday has focused on the question of whether Gray will continue or reverse the education reforms initiated by Fenty and his school chief, Michelle Rhee.

We’re now down to just two primaries: an October 2 runoff in Louisiana, and tomorrow’s primary in Hawaii.   The marquee contest in the Aloha State is the Democratic gubernatorial primary matching former congressman Neil Abercrombie, who upset a lot of Democrats in Washington by resigning his House seat just before the vote on health reform, with a Republican winning the special election to replace him, and former Honolulu mayor Mufi Hannemann, who is a bit conservative by Hawaii Democratic standards.  Hannemann has a financial advantage, but Abercrombie has maintained a small but steady lead in the available polls.  The winner of the primary will be favored in November to defeat Lt. Gov. Duke Aiona, and flip the state from R to D governance.

Did Enviros Overreach in Ecuador?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The plot is generic Hollywood, straight out of an airport potboiler:

U.S. oil company drills in Amazon, leaves behind contaminated pools of sludge. Activists sue on behalf of rainforest Indians ravaged by disease. Environmentalists and rock stars rush in to show solidarity with the victims. Not hard to tell how this story ends; we’ve seen this movie before.

Except that in this drama, the actors don’t quite play to type. It turns out that the “good guys” cheat, manipulating an Andean countries’ weak and corrupt judicial system in a bid to extract a king’s ransom — $27.3 billion -– from the U.S. oil company. Meanwhile, that company’s claims to be a victim of a political shakedown is getting a sympathetic hearing in U.S. courts.

So maybe this murky saga is not Hollywood material after all. In any case, here’s the real story, courtesy of Roger Parloff on CNNMoney.com:

Ecuador ended its long-time oil exploration partnership with Texaco in 1990. Texaco worked out an agreement to help clean up sites in the Amazon, and was formally absolved of further liability by Ecuador’s then-government in 1998. Nonetheless, a lawsuit was filed subsequently on behalf of Indians who said they had suffered higher rates of cancer and other diseases as a result of exposure to toxic waste. A new Ecuadoran government led by Rafael Correa, a socialist and fiery champion of impoverished indigenous peoples, strongly backs the suit.

According to Parloff, there’s strong evidence that lawyers for the plaintiffs helped to write the report of an allegedly impartial “expert” appointed by an Ecuadoran court that found Texaco – since acquired by Chevron – liable for further damages. A U.S. magistrate recently issued a scathing ruling that said the plaintiffs’ apparent collusion with Ecuador’s judicial system “would be considered fraud by any court. If such conduct does not amount to fraud in a particular country, then that country has larger problems than an oil spill.”

The plaintiff’s misconduct has overshadowed the important questions: how badly did the Indians suffer from exposure to toxic waste, and who is responsible for cleaning up the sites? It’s alleged that Texaco’s remediation efforts were inadequate, even if a compliant Ecuadoran government approved them. Yet Ecuador’s state-owned oil company has continued to drill in the area since Texaco pulled out 20 years ago.

This episode yields at least three morals. First, oil exploration is hazardous, and its full environmental and health costs must always be accounted for. Second, the end doesn’t justify the means, even if the end is to bring justice to people harmed by the effects of oil drilling. And third, it pays to greet overly familiar plot lines, with stock villains and heroes, with an extra measure of skepticism.

photo credit: Rain Forest Action Network

Schwarzenegger Takes the Asian Express

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

With his own state government deep in the red, Schwarzenegger needs cash to build a $40-billion high-speed railroad between San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sacramento. Instead of resigning himself to critics’ attacks that now is not the moment to spend money on rail, the governor went abroad to strengthen California’s ties with overseas train builders and bankers. At a time when folks in Washington are scratching their heads over how to pay for high-speed rail, the Governor’s trip offers an instructive way forward.

On the first leg of his journey, Schwarzenegger cut a deal with the Japan Bank for International Cooperation to loan California funds for the rail project. (The exact amount was not revealed.) In return, the governor dangled the prospect that California would choose Japanese trainsets and a Japanese operator to run the railroad.

With this understanding in hand, the ex-actor marched to Beijing and struck what may be a better deal with the Chinese Rail Ministry. The agency announced that it could offer California a “complete package,” including financing, to build the high-speed railway. “What other nations don’t have, we have,” bragged a ministry spokesman. “What they have, we have better.”

Then it was off to Korea, where the governor rode on Korea’s fastest train, the KTX, with Hyundai executives and met with President Lee Myung-bak. Afterwards, he offered the assessment that Korea and California would “be a terrific partnership” and asked his hosts to be sure to bid on the California project.

Schwarzenegger is on to an old idea. In the 19th century, European governments, as well as private investors, helped finance America’s railroads. Competition was often ferocious between the different syndicates, which kept overall costs down while enriching the Wall Street middlemen who set up the investment tranches.

Schwarzenegger’s strategy of letting experienced rail operators propose financial deals to California in return for potential entry into its market comes in sharp contrast to the approach in Washington.

Ever since it proposed a high-speed rail program in April 2009, the Obama administration has kept foreign rail builders at arm’s length and peddled the notion that American manufacturers can upscale their expertise and produce their own state-of-the-art train systems.

So far, no domestic company has even remotely stepped up to this task. Pullman-Standard, the last U.S. manufacturer to build rail passenger cars, exited the business 25 years ago. General Electric makes world-class locomotives, but these are freight locomotives unsuited for speeds above 90 mph.

Schwarzenegger realizes that having invested tens of billions of dollars in their high-speed-rail industry, governments in Asia and Europe are ready to fight for a chunk of his state’s $40-billion project. Jobs and manufacturing opportunities in California will flow naturally from the demands of the new service – as long as it gets started.

Right now, nobody in Washington seems to know how to pay for high-speed rail. A paralysis is taking shape as the federal debt grows, with no long-range funding set up. Maybe the “governator’s” shrewd negotiations with Asian officials this week will bring some fresh ideas to policymakers.

Photo credit: Hyundai

What Becomes of Michael Castle?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

“My politics fit Delaware’s politics. They appreciate the fact that I’m independent.”

That was Michael Castle, long-time Republican congressman from Delaware, quoted in CQ’s Politics in America.

Did Castle’s moderate politics fit Delaware’s politics? His strong re-election record would suggest so.  The man had never had a close race since first being elected to the seat in 1992, consistently winning by 20 or 30 points, even as Delaware went from a state that voted 60-40 for Reagan in 1984 to a state that voted 62-37 for Obama in 2008.

And sure, he was a Republican, but he was the kind of Republican who could vote for all six of the Democratic majority’s signature bills in the 110th Congress (one of only three Republicans to do so) and who would regularly break with the Republican orthodoxy to support, for example, embryonic stem cell research.

But popular as Castle might have been statewide, the Republican primary was decided by just 57,582 voters, or 6.5 percent of Delaware’s 885,000 residents. Of those, 30,561 preferred Christine O’Donnell. That’s just 3.5 percent of Delaware’s residents – not enough to fill a single major league  baseball stadium.

It is now widely assumed that Democrat Chris Coons will win trounce Christine O’Donnell in the general election, mostly owing to the fact that O’Donnell is a certified nut job.

But what I wonder is this: what happens to somebody like Michael Castle? And what happens to the many Republican moderates in Delaware who liked voting for Castle, year after year?

What happens to the Lisa Murkowksis and the Bob Bennetts as well, also forced out of their seats by a handful of insurgents for even more minor tilts towards moderation? (Bennett, to his credit, has been quite public in his criticism of the Tea Party, criticizing them for lacking a governing philosophy.)

As more and more moderates are swept away in the Tea Party tide, what becomes of them and their supporters? Presumably, many are adrift, feeling like the Republican Party no longer represents them.

For Democrats this should be a tremendous opportunity, a moment to reach out to disillusioned Republican voters who no longer see a home for themselves in the increasingly extreme party.

Republicans are rapidly forfeiting the center, gambling that an angry and energized base is a surer path to victory than a wide appeal. That may indeed be the case in 2010, but there is good reason to believe that this moment is fleeting.

What this means is that Democrats have an opportunity to seize and secure the vital center, to lay a firm claim on the politics of reason and moderation, and to provide a welcoming environment for the Michael Castles of the world.

But it’s a chance that won’t last forever. Eventually, Republicans will get wise to the fact that becoming more extreme is not a sustainable majoritarian strategy. Democrats ought to more aggressively seize this opportunity, while it lasts.

Photo credit: Lou Angeli

Lessons From Political Science

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Does political science matter? On Sunday, Ezra Klein, one of the rare journalists who seems genuinely interested in what political scientists have to say, wrote a column distilling some key lessons from political science, all of which revolve around the fact that most of what politicians do doesn’t actually make much of a difference, at least in the face of broad underlying forces: Presidential speeches don’t matter. Elections are determined by underlying economic conditions. Lobbyists aren’t as important as people think.

Over at the Monkey Cage, John Sides, who is also quoted in the article, argues that this lack of control should be good news to politicians: “Political science really does empower politicians. It tells them to ignore a lot of gossip and trivia. It tells them not to sweat every rhetorical turn of phrase.”

I must admit, I’ve been asking myself this question of whether political science matters ever since I started a Ph.D. program six years ago (and completed it a month ago). And I have a few quibbles with the conclusions that both Klein and Sides draw, and a few warnings for politicians and journalists lest they over-extrapolate from the received political science wisdom.

Those who consume political science research need to understand that political scientists are largely interested in finding patterns and proving that two variables are correlated (which is a necessary but not sufficient condition for proving causation, the holy grail of political science). But patterns tend to be rough patterns, and there are always other forces at work.

Figure 1 shows a typical XY scatterplot with a regression line, the most basic graphical tool of the social scientist.  While journalists tend to be interested in the dots (i.e., the real-life cases), political scientists are interested primarily in the regression line (i.e., the underlying relationship). Both are important, and ignoring one at the expense of the other inevitably leads to a limited perspective.

Figure 1: A Typical XY Scatterplot

Also notice: While there is clearly a relationship between X and Y variables very few dots (the actual real-life cases) fall directly on the line, meaning other factors are at work.  Of course, very little social science takes place at the bi-variate (two variable) level. Most published models explain outcomes with multiple factors, which account for more of the deviations from the predicted values (i.e., the regression line).

But even the best models still are often unable to explain half of the deviations.  What this means is that while large structural forces do drive political outcomes, there is also almost always room for idiosyncratic forces to operate as well, and they can often be decisive.

Sometimes candidates win victories they shouldn’t because of opponent gaffes. Sometimes lobbyists do get what they want, and make their clients very rich in the process. Sometimes presidential speeches do make a difference.  Political scientists are interested in the general case, and are fond of couching their findings in the cautionary language of ceteris paribus (all else being equal). But all else is rarely equal.

The thing is, it’s very hard for political actors to know when something they are going to do will make a difference. Often the impact hinges on unpredictable timing and unanticipated resonances. Anyone who has spent time in politics knows that you never know when something is going to “pop.”  So it’s almost always worth gambling because they pay-off could be big.

For a lobbyist, for example, even if on average you won’t win, when you do win, you might just win big enough to make it all worthwhile. A scoring system that treats all wins and losses equally ignores the fact that some lobbying wins are very big wins indeed, wins that far make up for a long strong of losses. For example, getting Medicare prescription drug coverage was a huge, huge win for pharmaceutical companies, surely worth many losses.

Additionally, one of the reasons why many political actions may seem to NOT matter is because political actors on both sides think that they DO matter. Consider the empirical conclusion that presidential speeches do not move public opinion. One reason that public opinion is unlikely to move is because there is always an opposition to respond, and so citizens who are skeptical of what the president has to say can easily latch on to messages that are critical. Thus they remain unmoved.

But say conservatives suddenly followed this wisdom, decided that speeches didn’t matter, and therefore didn’t bother to respond to anything Obama said. My guess is that Obama’s unrefuted speeches would start having more of an impact. Or alternately, say Obama decided speeches didn’t matter, and stopped giving them. He’d be leaving it to the conservative opposition to define him, without speaking up for himself and giving voice to his supporters. My guess is this would also have an impact on public opinion.

Likewise with lobbying or campaigning. These things exist in a kind of equilibrium. Given a rough balance of power, actions on each side are countered with actions on the other side, and hence drained of their perceived impact. Lobbyists on one side respond to lobbyists on the other side, thus neutralizing their efforts (this seemed to me one of the most important points of “Lobbying and Policy Change: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why?”) Campaign contributions on one side are often matched by campaign contributions on the other side.

But were one side to decide outcomes were beyond their control and stop sweating, my guess is they’d very quickly prove the conventional political science wisdom wrong.

In short: there is a lot that political science can teach both politicians and journalists about underlying structural forces and general patterns that drive political outcomes. But politics takes place in specific cases, not general cases. Journalists and politicians ought to have a better appreciation for these general patterns, which will provide context for specific cases.

But politicians better not take political science wisdom too much to heart, lest they undermine it by upsetting the equilibrium that exists when they believe what they do on a daily basis actually DOES matter.

Voinovich Shows Leadership: Is There More to Come on Infrastructure?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The good news out of Congress yesterday is that the Senate actually broke through the infamous 60-vote barrier to move forward on the small-business relief bill.  The bill itself is a good thing, and no doubt good news for small businesses struggling to thrive in this sideways economy.  For me, the even bigger story is the leadership shown by Senator Voinovich (R-OH) in breaking the logjam that the Republican leadership had planned for this bill, and for anything else President Obama hoped to pass before the elections.

This vote was not just a one-shot deal for Voinovich—it can be a potential game-changer for the president’s economic agenda this fall, especially if the administration is serious about acting on its proposal for long overdue investments in our infrastructure.

When he announced his vote last week, Voinovich set an important precedent by acknowledging that the country’s economic needs should be more important this year than short-term campaign strategies.  As he put it, “We don’t have time for messaging. . . . This country is really hurting.”

That’s a huge step in the right direction, because it means there is a faint glimmer for hope that Washington will not remain paralyzed during this extremely critical moment for our economy.  As Bernard Schwartz and David Rothkopf wrote in the Financial Times last week, the next few months will be a pivotal time for us as a nation, and the response from Washington (or lack thereof) may have a profound and long-lasting impact on our economy and the world:

The US faces not one but two economic crises. One is that the current slump could easily take a turn for the worse. The second is even more unsettling: a long-term competitiveness crisis that, if unaddressed, raises questions about the country’s ability to create jobs, attract investment and maintain its international leadership.

For both these reasons, it is critical that America’s political classes set aside partisanship and focus on taking concrete action now – even if it comes when such political courage (which is to say responsible leadership) is most difficult, in the last months of an election cycle.

All of the president’s ideas are solid ones with broad potential benefits. In our view, among these, an infrastructure bank is particularly promising and has been misunderstood in many of the initial responses. It is so central to what the US requires at present that voters and leaders in both parties need to examine it carefully and find a way to bring it to fruition.

Senator Voinovich has not only shown he can answer this call to set aside partisanship, he has also made a similar case for investing in infrastructure now, rightly arguing that the focus on short-term stimulus has “miss[ed] the forest for the trees.”  He’s riding a different horse than the president, advocating for a strong highway bill funded by an increase in the gas tax, rather than the president’s proposal for an infrastructure bank.  However, this is a difference on which the two men should work together to bridge the gap between them.  Given the opportunity to do something meaningful for the economy, there should be plenty of room for Obama and Voinovich to find a common ground.

Senator Voinovich has taken a brave first step toward bipartisanship for the sake of recovery.  Now it is President Obama’s turn.  The president has a lot of bad choices he can make in the coming weeks, and there are other moderate approaches to breaking the impasse on infrastructure spending after the elections.  But chances for leadership like this are fleeting, and he should take advantage of the opportunity Senator Voinovich has given him to make infrastructure investment more than just campaign rhetoric.

Photo credit: Respres

Middle-Class Tax Cut: The No-Brainer

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

For all I know, by now House Democrats may have already made the informal decision whether or not to force a vote on extension of middle-class tax cuts and expiration of high-end tax cuts.

I understand that if the votes aren’t there, they aren’t there. But it will be extraordinarily disappointing if they decide against forcing the vote on grounds that it will make some of their Members “uncomfortable.”

This is clearly the last opportunity prior to November 2 for congressional Democrats to make an impression on voters, not only about their own priorities, but about what sort of policies we can expect if Republicans gain control of the House. The GOP has been able to disguise or draw attention away from their own agenda throughout this midterm election cycle. Making them vote against tax relief unless the bulk of it goes to upper-income Americans exposes their hypocrisy on taxes and on federal budget deficits at the same moment. And this strategy also happens to be very popular, as TDS Co-Editor Stan Greenberg is expected to personally explain to the House Caucus later today.

There are few true no-brainers is the complicated business of politics, but this may qualify. Having cynically enacted tax cuts scheduled to expire at a date certain in the future in order to disguise their impact on the deficit, Republicans are in no position to label that expiration a “tax hike,” particularly since millionaires will benefit like everyone else from the portion of their income that falls into the lower brackets.

No matter what happens in November, Democrats are going to have to begin forcing comparisons of the two parties and what they stand for going into the presidential cycle of 2012, lest that election become another “referendum” whereby Democrats assume total responsibility for an economic and fiscal situation they largely inherited. This tax vote is the perfect opportunity to begin that process.

This item is cross-posted at the Democratic Strategist

Photo credit: Andrew Higgins

Will Conservative Activists Win in Delaware and New Hampshire Primaries?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Today marks the last big primary day of the midterm cycle.  Following these eight contests, only Hawaii, this Saturday, and a runoff in Louisiana on October 2, remain on the calendar.

Most of the national attention during the week prior to these primaries has been focused on the two states with competitive Republican Senate primaries, Delaware and New Hampshire.  In both states, late surges by conservative candidates threaten not only to upset establishment-backed front-runners, but also to make these seats far more difficult for Republicans to win in November.

Delaware

The Delaware race has been particularly characterized by late dramatics.  From the day he announced for this contest, congressman Mike Castle has been the prohibitive front-runner, not only for the nomination but for the general election as well.  Castle has won a remarkable twelve statewide elections in Delaware and has never lost.  He has the solid support of both the state and national GOP.  His challenger, religious conservative activist Christine O’Donnell, is a relative newcomer to the state (though she did win the sacrificial-lamb Senate nomination against Joe Biden two years ago) and is mainly known for extremist positions on sexual ethics.  She also has a history of serious personal financial problems, and in fact, has no visible means of support at present.  On top of everything else, she’s run a campaign against Castle heavily laden with homophobic innuendoes about her opponent’s masculinity.

Yet according to the one recent poll, released by PPP late Sunday night, O’Donnell is actually leading Castle 47-44.  She’s received late endorsements from the NRA, Sarah Palin, and Jim DeMint, but only one endorsement, from the Tea Party Express, arrived early enough to give her any kind of material assistance.  She’s benefitting, it appears, from long-simmering conservative resentment of Castle’s voting record: he’s pro-choice; he’s regularly bucked the gun lobby; he voted for TARP; and he was one of a handful of Republican House members who voted for climate change legislation in 2009.  There may be a geographical factor as well; O’Donnell seems to be doing especially well in the southern portions of the state said to be fed up with the domination of Delaware politics by populous New Castle County (Wilmington).

O’Donnell’s late endorsements and particularly the PPP poll seem to have lit a fire underneath the Castle campaign, and his supporters have been pounding O’Donnell very aggressively as voters prepared to make their choice.  One piece of raw material they’ve used is a Weekly Standard article about O’Donnell’s gender discrimination lawsuit against a Delaware-based conservative campus organization.  “O’Donnell’s finances, honesty, and stability have been called into question in light of her false and strange claims,” the article suggests.

If she survives, O’Donnell will be the instant underdog against Democrat Chris Coons, the New Castle County Executive, who’s been running a stronger race than expected against Castle.  But even if Castle pulls it out, the bad feelings from the primary could help Coons make the race competitive.

New Hampshire

Meanwhile, a more conventional if equally close Senate primary is unfolding in New Hampshire, where another originally prohibitive front-runner, Attorney General Kelly Ayotte, is now hanging onto a small lead over “true conservative” activist Ovide Lamontagne, who was the GOP gubernatorial nominee back in 1996.  Ayotte does not have Castle’s kind of voting record to defend, and she’s been endorsed by Sarah Palin and some anti-abortion groups.  But she’s been caught in sort of a pincers movement. During the summer months, a self-funding businessman, Bill Binnie, spent millions attacking Ayotte’s competence and integrity, and lured her into a back-and-forth that boosted both candidates’ negatives.  Just as Binnie (who took the unconventional route of boasting about his pro-choice convictions) began to fade, Lamontagne took flight, particularly at the end of August when he secured the aggressive backing of that hardy conservative monolith, the New Hampshire Union-Leader.  The paper has focused particularly on undermining Ayotte’s conservative support, pounding her daily for agreeing to a financial settlement with Planned Parenthood over a lawsuit against the state’s parental notification law.

PPP’s last poll showed Lamontagne within seven points of Ayotte over the weekend, while another late poll, by Magellan Strategies, pegged her lead at only four points.  Jim DeMint offered Lamontagne a last-minute endorsement, and Sarah Palin’s done some robocalls for Ayotte, but the battle is pretty much between Ayotte and the Union-Leader.  As in Delaware, national party figures are unhappy with the prospects of an upset; Lamotagne is the one Republican candidate who’s trailed Democratic congressman Paul Hodes in general election polls.

Wisconsin

The other statewide contest of note is in Wisconsin, where Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker is in a heated battle with former congressman (and heavy self-funder) Mark Neumann for the Republican gubernatorial nomination to face Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett (D).  This race has mainly revolved around each candidate’s efforts to challenge the conservative credentials of the other, with Walker running last-minute ads attacking Neumann for voting for a large transportation bill in Congress back in 1998.  Walker’s been the front-runner all along, but Neumann’s money has made it competitive.

Washington, DC

DC Democratic voters will determine the fate of Washington Mayor Adrian Fenty, who’s gotten high marks from wonks for his efforts to deal with DC’s dreadful public schools, but has actually been trailing DC Council Chairman Vincent Gray in recent polls.  This contest has exposed long-standing racial rifts; while both candidates are African-American, Fenty’s strongest base of support is among the white gentrifiers whom some African-American voters blame for pricing black folks out of traditional neighborhoods; Gray has also unsurprisingly won backing from those who oppose Fenty’s controversial school reforms.  The outcome will probably depend on turnout patterns in DC’s very diverse electorate.

Overreactions to Terrorism Weaken Us

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Two good essays in the last few days reflect on America’s overreaction to terrorism. Ted Koppel, who in addition to having amazing hair, is one of this country’s most under-appreciated journalists. He writes:

Perhaps bin Laden foresaw some of these outcomes when he launched his 9/11 operation from Taliban-secured bases in Afghanistan. Since nations targeted by terrorist groups routinely abandon some of their cherished principles, he may also have foreseen something along the lines of Abu Ghraib, “black sites,” extraordinary rendition and even the prison at Guantanamo Bay. But in these and many other developments, bin Laden needed our unwitting collaboration, and we have provided it — more than $1 trillion spent on two wars, more than 5,000 of our troops killed, tens of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans dead. Our military is so overstretched that defense contracting — for everything from interrogation to security to the gathering of intelligence — is one of our few growth industries. …

If bin Laden did not foresee all this, then he quickly came to understand it. In a 2004 video message, he boasted about leading America on the path to self-destruction. “All we have to do is send two mujaheddin . . . to raise a small piece of cloth on which is written ‘al-Qaeda’ in order to make the generals race there, to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses.”

Fareed Zakaria, whose hair is less awesome but still pretty good, brings up the same issue:

This campaign to spread a sense of imminent danger has fueled a climate of fear and anger. It has created suspicions about U.S. Muslims — who are more assimilated than in any other country in the world. Ironically, this is precisely the intent of terrorism. Bin Laden knew he could never weaken America directly, even if he blew up a dozen buildings or ships. But he could provoke an overreaction by which America weakened itself.

Both are spot on and quickly shift the question to how to avoid overreacting.  Since much of the overreaction is born from political posturing (witness Pete Hoekstra’s bizarre comments in the wake of the Christmas Day attempt), it’s going to be tough.  How is any leader supposed to dismiss a charge that he’s not doing enough to keep the country safe?

Part of the solution is understanding the terrorist threat, and how successful our defensive measures will realistically be.  Zakaria’s column again hits the mark:  “[We] are not 100 percent safe, nor will we ever be. Open societies and modern technology combine to create a permanent danger.”

And while it is possible to contain the threat, permanently eliminating it is a long term project that must address terrorism’s root causes.  Beginning that national dialogue is a key to promote this understanding, which in turn, will calibrate more measured responses to terrorism.

Wrestling with the Kochtopus

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Ever since Jane Meyer put the Koch brothers’ political empire on display in the Aug. 30 New Yorker, there has been a vibrant debate over the propriety of the owners of the second-largest private company in the U.S. using their personal fortune (spawned from an enterprise that they inherited) to fund a variety of libertarian and anti-government causes, and not always in the most transparent ways.

For those on the left, that Koch-controlled foundations have doled out almost $200 million to conservative foundations over the past 10 years — including $12 million to Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks, a major force behind the Tea Party movements — offers the allure of an explanation for a disappointing political turn of events.

Why else would so many people be throwing in their lot with the foolish Tea Party? How else could someone be motivated to travel hundreds of miles to attend a Glenn Beck rally on the National Mall, let alone watch the guy’s television program? Surely, this movement must be manufactured anti-government populism, as fabricated as Koch Industries’ industrial polymers.

Here’s The New York Times’s Frank Rich, casting the attendees of the recent Glenn Beck rally in Washington as little more than the unwitting puppets of the so-called “Kochtopus”: “There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it.” Meanwhile, Obama adviser David Axelrod puts it this way in The New Yorker: “What they don’t say is that, in part, this is a grassroots movement brought to you by a bunch of oil billionaires.” (If only the people knew! Then surely they’d come around to the side of common sense!)

Yes, there is a lot of money behind this right-wing populist uprising. But regardless of funding, one still has to contend with the fact that the Tea Party movement has tapped a powerful nerve in the collective psyche of mostly older, almost entirely white voters suffering a lot of anxiety about their future and wanting a simple explanation for their troubles and a villain to blame for it.

Given the underlying demographics and socio-economic forces at work here, it’s unclear how much Obama and the Democrats could have done to make inroads here, but certainly they could have done more. At the very least, it’s largely defeatist to think that the masses are being thoroughly manipulated by wealthy industrialists.

Rather, it makes more sense to say they are being enabled. The problem for Obama and the Democrats is that after the election, the energy that put Obama in the White House simply evaporated, and nobody on the political left was there to enable alternative path. Into the void came the Tea Party and its generous benefactors.

As for transparency: Could and should the Koch brothers be more open about what they are doing? Absolutely. Slate’s David Wiegel has argued that “The Kochs should come out of the closet” — that is, that they should be loud and proud about their support of libertarian and anti-government causes. Indeed.

After all, if they believe in a true free market, they should also believe in a true free market for ideas. And as any economist will tell you, markets always work best when they are transparent and all parties have full information.

If the case for limited government can’t withstand full disclosure of its sustainers and messengers, it’s probably not much of a case. Understandably, there is a certain discomfiting hypocrisy when you have populist uprisings against corporate power funded by wealthy industrialists, and some valid concern that many of the Koch-funded causes conveniently advocate the kind of light regulation that would benefit Koch Industries’ empire, much of which is in the fossil-fuel sector.

One of the challenges of the marketplace of ideas is, as Matt Kibbe, the president of Tea Party promoter FreedomWorks (which is funded by the Kochs) and a former Republican operative, told The New Yorker: “Ideas don’t happen on their own. Throughout history, ideas need patrons.” This is the reality we live in. Ideas do need patrons.

But for the marketplace of ideas to function properly, it also needs patrons not ashamed to stand publicly behind the ideas that they advocate. The Koch brothers should do this. But the marketplace of ideas also needs participants on both sides who can and do engage fully and confidently — not defeatists who assume that the only reason somebody might support an alternate idea is because the proponents of that alternate idea are backed by more money.

This article was originally published in the Providence Journal

Photo credit: HA! Designs – Artbyheather

CyberSecurity: Preventing The Next 9/11

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

I remember the feeling I had when first visiting Pearl Harbor, and again years later when flying into Manhattan just after September 11, 2001. There’s an eerie quietness about the ships buried underwater, and I still see the faces of people I met in the World Trade Center.

We were warned about those attacks. We may not have known the exact details, but in retrospect, we could have done more – much more – to prevent them. Today, we face a similar threat in cyberspace.
While we don’t know the exact details, we know something is coming, and the devastation could be far more deadly.

A cyber attack – by terrorists or a state – could look like sudden power outages, scrambled data in financial systems, air traffic accidents, water contamination, and mass media propaganda about all of the above. All of this can be done on computers from halfway across the globe. We’ve already seen examples of it – tests, so to speak – in other countries and within smaller networks. In 2008, Russian hackers took down Georgian government websites in an effort to throw off the administration during turf conflicts. Hundreds of Lithuanian servers went down earlier in the year in a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack also by Russian hackers flexing their muscles in protest of the law banning public display of Soviet era artifacts. According to U.S. government sources, other countries have seen attacks on their power grids.

The nightmare scenario could involve air strikes with no warning systems enabled, missiles arriving from unknown origins. Dirty bombs could get through port security as logic bombs crush the remaining networks. Meanwhile, with financial systems crippled and damaged infrastructure, panic would ensue and local governments would be ill-equipped to deal with so many simultaneous problems. We could find ourselves with multiple major cities suffering from Katrina-like aftermaths – massive numbers of homeless, injured, without power or resources, while looters take to the streets.

Though no terrorist organization is yet known to have this capacity, most experts say we have less than five years before the first major cyber attack on U.S. soil. In a recent meeting with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand , she told a group of bloggers she thought five years would be a generous timeline. We know hacker cells operating in Russia and China already have the skills and the tools necessary, as do some in the Middle East. Terrorists may be next.

Over the past year, the Obama administration and the Pentagon have begun to take the issue more seriously, appointing a new White House Cyber Security Advisor and establishing the U.S. Cyber Command. While this marks a dramatic improvement, it is far from enough. We know logic bombs have already been placed into critical networks but what we don’t know is: when will they explode? And who put them there?

Fortunately, some members of Congress are working to address the situation. Both S. 1438, Fostering a Global Response to Cyber Attacks Act (Gillibrand) and S. 3193, International Cyberspace and Cybersecurity Coordination Act of 2010 (Kerry) address the international coordination necessary to seek and obstruct attackers. This is an important step in both preventing attacks and bringing the perpetrators to justice, although another more aggressive strategy of pre-emptive reactions to attacker stands on shaky legal ground.

We also must ready our military Cyber Command. Captain Daryl Hancock of the U.S. Fleet CYBERCOM (U.S. Navy 10th Fleet) spoke about their progress at the International Conference on Cyber Security recently, emphasizing they will be operational on schedule for next month. Still, we need more resources to manage future threats. H.R. 4061, The Cybersecurity Enhancement Act of 2010 (Lipinsky) and S. 773, The Cybersecurity Act of 2009 (Rockefeller & Snowe), attempt to address this, but training thousands of people to act as first responders to cyber attacks that could come in a variety of forms takes time and resources.

Since the Internet resides on a network of nodes owned and operated by a wide range of entities, our security rests in the hands of many people. Developing a nationwide attitude of awareness and preparation will reduce the likelihood that a large-scale cyber attack will have lasting consequences like the disasters of the past. We have the opportunity now to reduce the possible destruction that could result from these attacks. It’s in our hands, and in the hands of those who represent us.

Photo credit: The Egglepant