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Help wanted: One second-chance job

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Back in March, I stepped out of my comfort zone and wrote this op-ed for the Local Opinion page in the Washington Post. For the first time in a good long while, I wasn’t writing about national security, foreign policy, or the military.  Rather, I penned a piece on a mentoring relationship I have with Tim Cofield, a 55 year old bipolar-schizophrenic with serious substance abuse and housing issues.  This weekend, the Post published an update to that piece about the last eight months of Tim’s life.  Here’s an excerpt:

Tim Cofield needed his public defender again way too soon.  After his release from jail in March, I wrote on this page that Tim would soon be back in front of a judge if he did not get consistent access to substance-abuse counseling, mental health care and stable housing. Tim, who turned 55 on Wednesday, is a bipolar-schizophrenic who has rotated in and out of jail, usually for narcotics and parole violations, for most of his adult life.

Eight months later, Tim still isn’t receiving the care he needs. The result has hardly been surprising. His latest incarceration was from mid-October, when he submitted “dirty urines” at substance tests, until last week. It was the cognac Courvoisier, he told me.

…

It might be unrealistic to think that counseling, mental health services or the long public housing list will be improved overnight, but they don’t have to be. The past eight months convince me that Tim needs to catch one simple break to have a chance at turning his life around immediately: a job.

…
[A] job would mean much more than a few extra dollars in his pocket. A job would give him a stake in his own life. It would build a sense of accomplishment, occupy time otherwise spent with questionable associates and create a reason to save money for long-term goals. Moreover, as Michelle Singletary wrote in The Post just this month, a job would reduce Tim’s and others’ recidivism and crime throughout the community.

Read the entire piece here.

Photo  credit: Rob

The Challenges of Coordinating Cybersecurity

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

It goes without saying that National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command are playing a significant role in defending military and government computer networks.  It appears they’re now playing a role defending domestic U.S. civilian computer networks as well.  In past statements, General Keith Alexander – head of NSA and Cyber Command – said that the DoD entities would not be involved in the protection of domestic civilian networks because it is the purview of the Department of Homeland Security.  Despite those statements, a memorandum of agreement released on October 13 announced that the DoD and DHS would coordinate their cybersecurity efforts, collocating personnel.

While the NSA and Cyber Command both fall under the purview of the DoD, their missions are different.  The NSA is a hybrid civilian/military entity whose main function is to gather signals intelligence from foreign communications and provide information assurance to prevent foreign adversaries from accessing classified materials.  Cyber Command is a new, purely military entity that is responsible for providing the U.S. military with both offensive and defensive capabilities in cyberspace.

Because the NSA was at the center of the Bush administration’s domestic wiretapping scandal in the years just after 9/11, its involvement with protecting domestic computer networks makes privacy advocates uneasy. They’re worried that the NSA might use its new role to monitor U.S citizens. However, it’s worth noting that the NSA’s participation with U.S. domestic computer networks is not unprecedented.  In February, the NSA assisted Google in investigating an attack against the company in which it is believed that Chinese hackers stole large amounts of intellectual property as well as information about Chinese human rights activists.  More recently, the NSA was tasked with executing  “Perfect Citizen,” a program that gives NSA access to U.S. critical infrastructure networks in order to detect cyberspace threats. This means NSA would deploy sensors on many large privately owned networks.

Meanwhile, General Alexander stated in September that he did not believe Cyber Command should operate in the civilian sphere. However, that statement contradicts the memorandum of agreement, which specifically directs Cyber Command to locate personnel at a DHS facility to provide support and “operational synchronization.”  It also instructs Cyber Command to coordinate operational and mission planning with DHS and NSA.  Moreover, Cyber Command’s involvement with civilian networks was presaged by the June 2009 DoD memorandum announcing its formation which specifically states that part of its mission would be to protect civilian networks.

The question now is: how much of a role will DoD play? How much of a role should it play? In 2003, a presidential directive established DHS as the agency in charge of coordinating the overall effort of securing civilian networks.  The agency has since written a strategy and will to hire large numbers of cybersecurity professionals over the next few years, indicating the agency will maintain a large role in protecting civilian networks.

But critical cyber experience and technical expertise lies with the military, which would be foolish to ignore.   Furthermore, DHS wants to work with the military, admitting that it has at least contemplated leveraging NSA assets in its efforts to put together a comprehensive plan to protect critical cyberspace assets.  Even so, it’s not that straight forward: as the NSA wiretapping scandal shows, DoD’s involvement in civilian networks would stir civil liberties controversy.

Currently, no overarching cybersecurity strategy exists that clarifies agencies’ responsibilities.  Despite sweeping cybersecurity legislation being proposed in Congress – particularly by Senators Lieberman, Carper, and Collins – the White House must step in to clarify these roles.

photo credit: Patrick Hoesly

The 2012 Campaign Begins

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The post-election interpretive wars have continued and even intensified, but with current and future events very much in everyone’s mind.

Voices of self-restraint among Republicans are very rare.  Highly typical is this take from University of Virginia professor of politics James Ceaser:

Of all the recent mid-term elections, 2010 is the closest the nation has ever come to a national referendum on overall policy direction or “ideology.” Obama, who ran in 2008 by subordinating ideology to his vague themes of hope and change, has governed as one of the most ideological and partisan of presidents. Some of his supporters like to argue in one breath that he is a pragmatist and centrist only to insist in the next that he has inaugurated the most historic transformation of American politics since the New Deal. The two claims are incompatible. Going back to the major political contests of 2009, beginning with the Governors’ races in Virginia and New Jersey and to the Senate race in Massachusetts, the electorate has been asked the same question about Obama’s agenda and has given the same response. The election of 2010 is the third or fourth reiteration of this judgment, only this time delivered more decisively. There is one label and one label only that can describe the result: the Great Repudiation.

Ceaser goes on to attack any Republicans who would urge a future course that eschews the sacking and burning of Obamaism in all its aspects.

So the triumphalist strain of conservative post-election interpretation is closely linked to a maximalist prescription for Republican behavior now.  That helps explain why Republicans have been generally negative about the Bowles-Simpson deficit reduction proposal that was released earlier this week, even though it was clearly tailored (with its heavy emphasis on spending reductions and its crafting of revenue-raising measures in the context of rate-reducing “tax reform”) to appeal to them.

One conservative reaction was especially revealing: that of James Capretta in National Review, which trashed the Bowles-Simpson report for failing to embrace the repeal of health care reform, and indeed, for building on some of the health care cost containment measures in that legislation.  The short-term goal of repealing “ObamaCare,” it seems, is more important to conservatives than the long-term goal of reducing deficits and debt.

But Capretta’s reaction illustrates another problem that will bedevil any bipartisan effort on spending and taxes: the Republican rejection, which began during the Bush administration but became endemic during the health reform debate, of neutral “scorekeepers” like the Congressional Budget Office, which enraged conservatives by accepting some of the cost containment claims of “ObamaCare.”

Among Democrats, as noted in the last political memo, those deducing major lessons from the midterms agree that the Obama administration should change its strategy and its public message, but sharply diverge along the usual ideological lines about which direction Democrats should take.  There is genuine alarm on the Left, on both substantive and political grounds, about the White House’s apparent decision to reach an accommodation with Republicans on an extension of the Bush tax cuts, and strong hostility to the Bowles-Simpson recommendations (for which the President is held accountable, even though he has not embraced the proposals).  For the first time, there is talk, though not that serious yet, of a protest candidate running against the President in the 2012 primaries.

Centrist Democrats seem divided between those who favor a decisive “move to the center” and support the Bowles-Simpson proposals pretty much as drafted, and those with more modest suggestions for changes in Obama’s approach to the opposition and to the major issues.

Aside from impending debates on taxes, health care, and the budget, the 2012 election cycle is already getting underway.  It is beginning to sink in for Democrats that there are structural aspects to the congressional landscape in 2012 that limit possibilities for a “rebound,” even if the economy improves and the expected change in turnout patterns occurs.  Two-thirds (23) of the 33 senators facing re-election that year are Democrats (by contrast, half (19) of the 37 Senate races in 2010 involved Democrat-held seats).  Large Republican gains in control of state legislative chambers means that the House landscape will be significantly tilted in the GOP’s election through redistricting; some estimates of the impact are as high as 25 seats.

The presidential landscape, however, is another matter entirely.  The ultramontanist mood among conservatives right now is not conducive to any trimming of ideological sails in the pursuit of a White House victory in 2012.   There is considerable talk of an Establishment conspiracy to block any nomination for Sarah Palin, which indicates how seriously Republicans take her prospects if she decides to run.  Another antagonist of said Establishment, Mike Huckabee, is in excellent position to once again win the Iowa Caucuses if Palin does not take the plunge.  Mitt Romney remains haunted by his Massachusetts health reform effort, a problem that will grow worse during the upcoming conservative drive to repeal “ObamaCare.”  And time is not on the side of the various dark horse possibilities (Daniels, Pence, Barbour) who may be famous in Washington but not so much in Des Moines or Manchester.

All in all, the impact of the midterms may fade faster than anyone expected as the future needs of the two parties, and of the country, take hold.

How Can the Obama Administration Help Lebanon’s Pro-Democracy Forces? It Can Start By Supporting Their Media.

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Just a few years ago, Lebanon appeared to be a foreign policy success for the United States. Outraged by the brutal assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri (likely at the hands of Syria and its allies), the Lebanese people, bolstered by international support, succeeded in expelling Syrian military forces and asserting Lebanese sovereignty in 2005 for the first time in decades. And again in 2009, the Lebanese affirmed their support for the pro-Western ruling coalition, awarding them a solid majority of seats in Parliament during the May general elections.

These days, however, the country looks headed for a frightening crisis. The March 14 coalition, as the ruling group is known, has been unable to capitalize on its popular mandate. This is due in large part to the overwhelming force wielded by Hezbollah – which is funded, trained, and armed by Iran and Syria. But it’s also because U.S. policy toward Lebanon has been unwilling to back up bold words with actions. Far from protecting America’s allies, consecutive U.S. administrations have not only failed the pro-Western government but also empowered its worst enemies.

The slow-burning confrontation is about to reach a boiling point over the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, charged with bringing Hariri’s killers to justice. The court, established by agreement between the U.N. Security Council and the Lebanese government, is expected to issue indictments against members of Hezbollah in the coming months. As the Wall Street Journal reported Monday, up to six members are slated to be indicted by the end of the year, including Mustafa Badreddine, a senior Hezbollah military commander and brother-in-law of the infamous Hezbollah mastermind Imad Mugniyah.

In an effort to preempt what would surely be a massive blow, Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah has launched a war against the tribunal, and U.S. officials believe that Hezbollah will stop at nothing to prevent indictments from being handed down. The risk of war is palpable, and if Hezbollah and its Iranian patrons — and their Syrian puppets — unseat the elected government and take control over Lebanon, it will be a grave blow to U.S. security and credibility around the world.

It would also bolster the reach and credibility of Iran. Fred Hof, deputy to U.S. Special Middle East envoy George Mitchell and point man on U.S.-Syria policy once put it bluntly: “Whether most of his organization’s members know it or not, and whether most Lebanese Shiites know it or not, [Nasrallah] and his inner circle do what they do first and foremost to defend and project the existence and power of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” (He was speaking to the Middle East Institute in the midst of the 2006 conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.)

The rise of Iranian influence in Lebanon is particularly dangerous at the present moment, when moderate Arab countries are desperately looking for the United States to contain Iran. From the perspective of the United States’ Arab allies, if the world’s superpower can’t contain the mullahs before they have a nuclear weapon, how could they be expected to contain them if they have the bomb?

Given the disturbing drift in American policy since the 2005 Cedar revolution, what is at stake, and the choices we must make to support those seeking our help, Hezbollah’s crimes against us bear repeating.

Accused of terrorism on virtually every continent, Hezbollah has killed more Americans than any terrorist group except Al Qaeda, and today they posses weapons of state.

They murdered 63 people, including 17 Americans and eight CIA officers in our Beirut embassy in 1982. They slaughtered 241 American marines in the Marine barracks’ bombing in 1983, and a year later killed another 18 American servicemen near the U.S. Air Force Base in Torrejon, Spain. Robert Stethem, a US Navy diver, was beaten to death and thrown on the tarmac when Hezbollah terrorists hijacked TWA flight 847. And of course the brutal kidnapping, heinous torture, and eventual murder of the CIA’s Beirut station chief Bill Buckley and Col. William ‘Rich’ Higgins were carried out by Hezbollah terrorists.

Fred Hof was a close friend of Col. Higgins and, at the time, part of a small team that worked every possible angle to free Higgins before his death. “I am one of a small handful of Americans who knows the exact manner of Rich’s death,” he explained years ago. “If I were to describe it to you now – which I will not – I can guarantee that a significant number of people in this room would become physically ill.  When [former Deputy Secretary of State] Rich Armitage described Hezbollah a few years ago as the “A-Team” of international terrorism and suggested that there was a “blood debt” to be paid, he was referring to a leadership cadre that is steeped in blood and brutality.”

It is that ‘leadership cadre’ of Iranian backed terrorists, who have been killing our allies and us for over 30 years, that is today working for Tehran, “maneuvering furiously”, according to the New York Times, to derail the tribunal, and destroy the native forces inside Lebanon seeking to restore self-determination for the Lebanese people.

Lebanon is again at a cross roads, and so is American policy.

How did the situation become so dire, so soon after the West finally helped the Lebanese people shake off the foreign forces driving thirty years of civil war and violence? Is it now too late to stop Iran from successfully exporting their revolution into a country as culturally diverse and multi-confessional Lebanon?

It’s difficult not to lay the blame at the feet of former President George W. Bush and his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice. The Bush administration was eager to hold up Lebanon as an example of its successful Middle East policy: “We took great joy in seeing the Cedar Revolution. We understand that the hundreds of thousands of people who took to the street to express their desire to be free required courage, and we support the desire of the people to have a government responsive to their needs and a government that is free, truly free,” Bush said at the time.  However, when push came to shove, the president did little to help our Lebanese allies when they needed him most.

Judgment day came May 7, 2008. An emboldened Hezbollah, alarmed that the government was moving to control the group’s illicit private communications network, invaded the streets of Beirut and the Chouf Mountains to the south, forcing Lebanon’s democratically-elected leaders to accede to a power-sharing agreement at the point of a gun. The result was yet another capitulation by the Bush administration, which signaled its acquiescence to the Doha Agreement, signed on May 21 of that year, formalizing Hezbollah’s veto over any government decision, including its own disarmament.

But if the Bush administration opened the door to Hezbollah’s takeover of Lebanon, Barack Obama’s administration is holding that door ajar, doing little to support America’s erstwhile allies in the March 14 coalition out of fear that such a move would damage any chance of engaging with Syria.

In an October 18 letter, Congressmen Gary Ackerman (D-NY) and Dan Burton (R-IN), chairman and ranking member of the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Middle East, protested the administration’s lack of support for moderate elements in Lebanon: “We remain concerned that your strategy of offering diplomatic overtures to hostile regimes has done little to provoke Middle East peace, and has only taken away leverage from our democratic friends and allies.”

For its part, the Administration continues to put the emphasis on reaching out to Damascus, and has gone only so far as to indicate there are limits to America’s patience. “Syria and the United States have taken some modest steps to see if we can improve the bilateral relationship, but this cannot go very far as long as Syria’s friends are undermining stability in Lebanon,“ explained Assistant Secretary of State Jeffrey Feltman, on a visit to Syria earlier this month.

It is vital that the United States reverse these years of drift and act decisively to help the Lebanese people reassert their right to self-determination — because it is in America’s national interest.  The alternative is to give in to the foreign agenda of the Mullahs in Tehran and their terrorist proxy at time when containing Iran’s expansionist ambition is the paramount necessity in the region. So what do we do?

The Obama administration must decide to resist the “resistance,” and lead the West in a program to further empower Lebanese civil society and aid the dormant democratic forces in the country. It is these courageous actors, with the proven ability to lead successful political and media campaigns and expose the Syria-Iran-Hezbollah axis, who were specifically targeted by Hezbollah in May 2008 — exactly because they are effective. The Lebanese people need to know that the president of the United States supports their pursuit of freedom and democracy, especially as Hezbollah’s role in attacking the state is on the verge of being exposed.

President Obama should immediately look to Lebanon’s pro-democracy media, which has largely been silenced over the last year, intimidated not only by pro-Syrian, pro-Iranian, and Hezbollah foes, but hobbled by Saudi patrons who mistakenly thought they could pull Syria away from Iran’s influence. That strategy, like our own outreach to Syria, has proven a disastrous failure, for Lebanon, the region and US national interests. The Obama administration can help take the muzzle off of these Lebanese patriots—like Prime Minister Saad Hariri and head of the Lebanese Forces party Samir Geagea—whose courageous voices are the first defense against Hezbollah’s “resistance.” Let Lebanon speak.

And, the Obama administration must ensure that the Special Tribunal goes forward, prosecuting those it indicts.  America’s $10 million contribution last week is commendable, but it is not enough.  No problem, other than stopping Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, calls as urgently for international focus as does the effort to stop Iran from expanding its sphere of influence and overpowering another people.

The United States must be willing to work with its allies in Europe and the Middle East to support those democratic elements who want to save their country. This policy will not be easy. It may require making the tough decision to give up on forces and programs that have failed to serve as a bulwark against Hezbollah, or it may require a deep reform of the same, but tough choices are what we face.

It was Harry Truman who said “it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” Those words are as true today under President Obama as when they were uttered in 1947 by a young former Senator thrust suddenly into power, forced to make some of this nation’s most fateful, difficult and ultimately, successful decisions. America is no less the leader of the free world today than we were then, unless we act otherwise.

If the Obama administration takes a bold stand in favor of Lebanon’s independence and starts pressing the Saudis to support Lebanese civil society, it will find that many figures in Beirut, and other countries with a stake in Lebanon’s stability will enthusiastically follow its lead.

But whatever methods it chooses, the administration must make a clear public signal that the United States will not sit on the sidelines while Iran, through its satraps Syria and Hezbollah, successfully exports the Iranian revolution to Lebanon. President Obama has spoken eloquently about the need to support democracy and tolerance in the Middle East. The time of decision has come. The President must now put America’s words into action.

A shorter version of this article appeared at ForeignPolicy.com

photo credit: Patrick Makhoul

Does More Volatility Mean More Democratic Accountability?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The last three elections have been the most volatile three elections in a long time. One has to go back to 1942-1952 to find so much consistent turnover in the U.S. House – that was the last time when at least three consecutive elections resulted in pick-ups of 20 or more seats by one party or the other (then it was five consecutive elections). And no single party has picked up as many as the 65 seats the Republicans will probably gain (once all the dust settles on still disputed races) since the Democrats won 75 seats in 1948 – after losing 56 seats in the prior election.

This is a remarkable change from what had been the norm. For 20 years, between 1986 and 2006, there was only one election (1994) in which one party picked up more than 10 House seats from the prior election. Incumbents who ran for re-election were winning upwards of 98 percent of the time, a state of affairs that led many onlookers to worry about the fate of democratic accountability:  Was something fundamentally broken when incumbency meant near certainty of re-election?

Over at The New Republic, David Fontana argues the new volatility is likely an improvement over the old incumbency safety net:

Whatever the explanation, the reduction in the number of safe House seats is probably good for American democracy: If the parties have to defend nearly all their seats every cycle, instead of concentrating on overstimulated swing districts, they will deliver more political information to voters across the entire country. Both major party candidates in many districts will have to run advertisements, host town hall meetings, and participate in debates. In addition, a Congress that changes hands more often is less likely to become complacent, staid, and corrupt—and it may be more open to experimenting with new programs and acting on new ideas.

Having just witnessed the last election, I’m not so sure a competitive election meant particularly high-quality debates and information, and it’s going to be hard to convince me that more advertising of the kind we were seeing would be a good thing.

Moreover, contra the “complacent, staid, and corrupt” thesis, I think there is something to be said for members of Congress who have been around a little while.  It takes some time to understand how things work on Capitol Hill, to build relationships, and to learn some of the policy substance. I’ve never been a big fan of term limits because I think that what it essentially does is further empower permanent special interests, who welcome each class of fresh, green lawmakers with a lesson about “how things work around here.” Lacking their own independent expertise and often dependent on an equally inexperienced staff, the new lawmakers become even more dependent on lobbyists and special interests than their predecessors, who they spent all election blaming for being captive to special interests.

Moreover, if the new members have to worry about re-election from the day they get into office, that doesn’t leave much time for actual policymaking.

One reason for the increased volatility may be the fact that increasingly polarized parties are making it harder and harder for middle-of-the-road voters to get what they want, and so they keep switching back between Republicans who are too conservative and Democrats who are too liberal, each time trying to correct for their past choices. It’s a process that Dartmouth political scientists Joseph Bafumi and Michael C. Herron have labeled “leapfrog representation.”

I’m not sure what the solution is. Fewer safe seats has its obvious pluses for democratic accountability. But I’m not so sure it’s meant that the quality of representation is improving, nor that it is going to improve. Nor does it necessarily improve democratic accountability if the volatility is driven by some combination of middle-of-the-road voters never being happy with their elected officials (too liberal! No, too conservative! No, too liberal!) and a “throw-the-bums” out mentality if the economy is doing poorly.

But probably one reasonable conclusion is that electoral competition by itself is not a sufficient solution to our democratic deficit of hyper-polarized politics and substance-free, talking-past-each-other campaigning.

Photo credit: Shreyans Bhansali

How Do You Define the Internet?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

One of the more interesting comments filed with the FCC in its recent Further Inquiry into Two Under-Developed Issues in the Open Internet Proceeding came from a group of illustrious computer industry stalwarts such as Apple hardware designer Steve Wozniak, computer spreadsheet pioneer Bob Frankston, Stupid Network advocate David Isenberg, and former protocol designer David Reed.

Their comments are worth noting not only because they come from such a diverse and accomplished group of people, but also because they’re extremely hard to follow (one of the signers told me he almost didn’t sign on because the statement was so unclear.) After reading the comments several times, asking the authors for clarification, comparing them to previous comments by a similar (but larger) group known as “It’s the Internet, Stupid,” and to an even older statement by a similar but larger group called the Dynamic Platform Standards Project (DPSP), I’m comfortable that I understand what they’re trying to say well enough to explain.

A Passion for Definition

The author of these three statements is Seth P. Johnson, a fellow from New York who describes himself as an “information quality expert” (I think that means he’s a database administrator, but it’s not clear.) Johnson jumped in the net neutrality fray in 2008 by writing a proposed law under the name of the DPSP and offering it to Congress.

The gist of the thing was to define Internet service in a particular way, and then to propose prosecution for any ISP that managed its network or its Internet connections in a way that deviated from the definition.  Essentially, Johnson sought authority from the IETF’s Internet Standards, but attempted to reduce the scope of the Internet Standards for purposes of his Act. The proposed Act required that ISPs make their routers “transmit packets to various other routers on a best efforts basis,” for example, which precludes the use of Internet Type of Service, Class of Service, and Quality of Service protocols.

IETF standards include a Type of Service (ToS) option for Internet Protocol (IP) as well as the protocols IntServ, DiffServ, and MPLS that provide mechanisms for network Quality of Service (QoS.) QoS is a technique that matches a network’s packet transport capabilities to the expressed needs of particular applications, ensuring that a diverse group of applications works as well as possible on a network of a given, finite capacity.  ToS is a similar method that communicates application requirements to one of the networks that carries IP datagrams, such as Ethernet or Wi-Fi. Packet-switched networks, from the ARPANET days to the present, have always included QoS and ToS mechanisms, which have been used in some instances and not in others. You’re more likely to see QoS employed on a wireless network than on a wireline network, and you’re also more likely to see QoS on a local network or at a network edge than in the Internet’s optical core; but the Internet’s optical core is an MPLS network that carries a variety of private network traffic at specified service levels, so there’s quite a bit of QoS engineering there too.

The purpose of defining the Internet as a QoS-free, “Best-Efforts” network was to prevent network operators from making deals with content providers that would significantly privilege some forms of sources of content over others. This approach originated right after Bill Smith, the former CTO of Bell South, speculated that ISPs might increase revenues by offering exceptional performance to select application providers for a fee. While the service that Smith proposed has a long history in Internet standards (RFC 2475, approved in 1998, discusses “service differentiation to accommodate    heterogeneous application requirements”), it’s not part of the conventional understanding of the way the Internet works.

Defining One Obscurity in Terms of Another

“Best-efforts” (BE) is a term of art in engineering, so defining the Internet in this way simply shifts the discussion from one obscurity to another. BE has at least three different meanings to engineers, and another one to policy experts. In the broadest sense, a BE network is defined not by what it does as much as by what it doesn’t do: a BE network makes no guarantee that any given unit of information (“packet” or “frame” ) transmitted across the network will arrive successfully. IP doesn’t provide a delivery guarantee, so the TCP code running in network endpoints such as the computer on your desk or the mobile phone in your hand has to take care of checking for lost packets and retransmitting when necessary. BE networks are appealing because they’re cheap to build, easy to maintain, and very flexible. Not all applications need for every packet to transmit successfully; a Skype packet that doesn’t arrive within 200 milliseconds can be dropped, for example. BE networks permit that sort of decision to be made by the application.  So one meaning of BE is “a network controlled by its endpoints.”

Another meaning of BE comes from the QoS literature, where it is typically one of many service options in a QoS system. In the Internet’s DiffServ standard and most other QoS systems, BE is the default or standard treatment of all packets, the one the network router employs unless told otherwise.

Yet another definition comes from the IEEE 802 standards, in which BE is the sixth of seven levels of service for Ethernet, better than Background and worse than all others; or the third of four levels for Wi-Fi, again better than Background. When policy people talk about BE, they tend to use it in the second of these senses, as “the standard treatment,” with the additional assumption that such treatment will be pretty darn good most of the time.

Johnson’s FCC filing insists that the Internet, properly defined, must be a best-efforts-only system; all other QoS levels should be considered “managed services” rather than “Internet.” The filing touts a number of social benefits that can come about from a BE-only Internet, such as “openness, free expression, competition, innovation and private investment” but doesn’t explain the connection.

Constraining Applications

One of the implications of this view is that both network operators and application developers must adapt to generic treatment and refrain from relying on differentiated services or offering differentiated services for sale as part of an Internet service.

Unfortunately, the advocates of this viewpoint don’t tell us why they believe that the Internet must refrain from offering packet transport and delivery services that are either better or worse than generic best-efforts, or why such services would harm “openness, free expression, competition, innovation and private investment” if they were provided end-to-end across the Internet as a whole, or where the authority comes from to support this definition. We’re supposed to simply trust them that this is the right way to do things, relying on their group authority as people who have been associated with the Internet in various capacities for a long time. This isn’t engineering, it’s religion.

There is nothing in the Internet design specifications (Internet RFCs) to suggest that providers of Internet services must confine themselves to BE-only, and there is nothing in the architecture the Internet to suggest that all packets must be treated the same. These issues have been covered time and again, and the FCC knows by now exactly where to look in the RFCs for the evidence that this view of the Internet is faulty. The Internet is not a packet delivery system, it’s a virtual network that only works because of the underlying physical networks that transport and deliver packets. This virtual network defines an interface between applications of various types and networks of various types, and as is the case in all abstract interfaces, it may provide least common factor services, highest common factor, or anything in between, all according to the needs of the people and organizations who pay for it, use it, and operate it. As Doc Searls said many years back, nobody owns the Internet, anyone can use it, and anyone can improve it. The capacity for constant improvement is the magic of the Internet.

Myth of the General Purpose Network

If we insist that the Internet must only provide applications with one service option, we doom application developers to innovate within narrow confines.  A generic Internet is effectively optimized for file-transfer oriented applications such as web browsing, email, and media streaming; it’s fundamentally hostile to real-time applications such as immersive video conferencing, telepresence, and gaming. Some of the best minds in the Internet engineering community have labored for past 20 years to devise systems that would allow real-time and file transfer applications to co-exist happily on a common infrastructure, and these efforts are perfectly consistent with the nature of the Internet properly understood.

The central myth underlying the view of the Johnson and his co-signers is the “general purpose network” formulation. This terminology is part of telecom law, where it refers to networks that can support a variety of uses. When adapted to engineering, it becomes part of an argument to the effect that best efforts is the “most general purpose” method of supporting diverse applications and therefore the “best way to run a network.” I think it’s wrong to frame the challenges and opportunities of network and internetwork engineering in this way. I’d rather that people think of the Internet as a “multi-purpose network” that can offer diverse packet transport services suitable for diverse applications.  We want network operators to build networks that serve all applications appropriately at a price that ordinary people can afford to pay. We don’t want consumers to pay higher prices for inefficient networks, and we don’t want to foreclose application innovation to the narrow bounds of legacy systems.

Segregated Systems are Harmful

Systems that allow applications to express their requirements to the network and for the network to provide applications with differentiated treatment and feedback about current conditions are apparently the best way to do this; that’s the general concept of Internet QoS. This has been the thinking of network and internetwork engineers since the 1970s, and the capability to build such systems is embedded in the Internet architecture. The technical people at the FCC who are reading the comments in this inquiry know this.

These arguments seem to endorse a disturbing trend that the so-called “public interest” advocates are now advancing, to the effect that advanced network services must be segregated from generic Internet service on separate (but equal?) physical or logical facilities. This is not good, because it robs us of the benefits of converged networks.  Rather than dividing a coax or fiber into two frequencies and using one for IPTV and the other for Generic Internetting, it’s better to build a fat pipe that provides IPTV and Generic Internetting access to the same pool of bandwidth. The notion of sharing a common pool of bandwidth among multiple users and applications was the thing that started us down the road of packet switching in the first place, and it’s very important to continue developing that notion; packet switching is the Internet’s enabler. Segregated facilities are undesirable.

Integrating Applications and Networks

What we need in the Internet space is a different kind of vertical integration than the kind that was traditional in the single application networks of the past. QoS, along with modular network and internetwork design, permits applications and end users to essentially assemble networks as applications are run that provide them with the level of service they need at the price they can afford. We get to that by allowing applications to explicitly state their requirements to the internetwork, and for the internetwork to respond with its capabilities. Application choice meets the needs of innovators better than by a rigid “one size fits all” formulation.

The Internet is, by design, a platform for both generic and differentiated services. That’s its true legacy and its promise. We don’t need to run into historical blind alleys of myth and prejudice when the opportunity faces us to build this platform out to the next level. As more Internet use shifts to mobile networks, it will become more critical than ever to offer reasonable specialization to applications in a standards-compliant manner. The Internet of the Future will be multipurpose, not generic.

Photo credit: Pixelsior

PPI to Host Media Teleconference Featuring Economist Michael Mandel to Discuss Policy Measures that Promote U.S. Job Growth and Innovation

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

PRESS CONTACT:
Steven Chlapecka—schlapecka@ppionline.org, T: 202.525.3931

Teleconference to take place in Advance of Release of Mandel’s Newest Policy Memo:
Reviving Jobs and Innovation: The Role of Countercyclical Regulatory Policy

WASHINGTON, D.C. – On Tuesday, November 16, 2010 at 11 a.m. EST, join the Progressive Policy Institute and economist Michael Mandel, former BusinessWeek chief economist and founder of Visible Economy LLC, to discuss a regulatory agenda for the new Congress. Mandel will outline findings from his upcoming policy memo and suggest a bipartisan approach to jumpstarting jobs and economic growth through countercyclical regulatory policy.

WHO:

Dr. Michael Mandel, Senior Fellow, Progressive Policy Institute; Founder, Visible Economy LLC; Senior Fellow, University of Pennsylvania Wharton School’s Mack Center for Technological Innovation.

WHEN:

Tuesday, Nov. 16, 11 a.m. EST

Media wishing to participate should RSVP to Steven Chlapecka at 202.525.3931 or schlapecka@ppionline.org.

Obama’s Chance to Lead on Trade

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

President Obama is in Seoul today for what promises to be a contentious meeting of the world’s leading economic powers. He probably won’t mollify China, Germany and other critics of the Federal Reserve’s plan to pump more money into the U.S. economy. But the President does have a chance to further his goal of doubling U.S. exports by bringing home an improved trade agreement with South Korea.

In addition to attending the G-20 summit, Obama is slated to meet with South Korean officials to finalize a bilateral free trade pact negotiated by President Bush. Congress has not ratified the treaty, which is snagged by concerns about U.S. auto exports to South Korea, as well as lawmakers’ eroding faith in the benefits of free trade.  The president said in June that he had instructed the U.S. Trade Representative to have all the outstanding issues “lined up properly” before he arrived for this week’s visit, so he could close the deal with Korea and present the agreement to Congress again in the coming months.

South Korea isn’t just a major trade partner, it’s also a key strategic ally and a counterweight to China’s growing heft in the Asia-Pacific. Since its tariffs traditionally have been much higher than ours, there’s little doubt that the agreement would spur U.S. exports and help offset weak economic demand at home. It requires South Korea to lower its high taxes on U.S. farm goods and open markets for insurance and other services to American firms.  As the treaty has languished in Congress, however, Seoul has been busy on other fronts, deepening economic ties with China and finalizing an important trade pact with the EU last month.

Although President Obama sounded an ambivalent note at best on trade during the 2008 presidential campaign, he understands that expanding U.S. exports is crucial both to creating jobs and shrinking America’s outsized trade deficits.  Now that he’s made the Korean deal a top priority, we’ll find out if the newly Tea Party-infused GOP will be more amenable to passing the treaty than Congressional Democrats were.

The agreement would lower tariffs on auto imports on both sides. South Korea’s are higher — 8 percent compared to 2.5 percent here. (The United States also would gradually lower a 25 percent tariff on imported pickup trucks.) Nonetheless, U.S. auto makers, especially Ford, have argued that the treaty would not bring down cultural and non-tariff barriers that have confined their sales to a sliver of South Korea’s lucrative auto market.

They have a point.  Seoul exports more than 400,000 vehicles (mostly Hyundais and Kias) to the United States each year, while manufacturing an additional 200,000 cars at U.S. plants. According the U.S. Commerce Department, U.S. auto makers sent a paltry 5,878 vehicles to South Korea in 2009. Ford’s Stephen Biegun notes that more than 70 percent of the cars made in South Korea are exported, while imports account for less than 10 percent of sales, well below the average of 40 percent in other economically advanced countries.

As an auto industry representative explained in testimony before Congress, Korea has an extensive web of non-tariff barriers that make it harder for foreign car makers to penetrate the Korean market.  Some of these are technical regulations like emissions standards and even license plate size. Establishing a clear link between such policies and the small U.S. market share in Korea isn’t always easy. But there’s no doubt that some of Korea’s policies reflect a well-entrenched hostility toward imports. For example, until recently anyone in Korea who bought a foreign car would automatically have their income taxes audited—a policy that chilled demand even after it was officially ended.

Ford, America’s healthiest car maker, sees itself as the chief victim of South Korea’s import-unfriendly policies. That’s because General Motors, through its Daewoo subsidy, makes cars in South Korea, selling more than 100,000 locally and exporting hundreds of thousands more elsewhere (including to the United States).

What can President Obama do to resolve the impasse over autos and get the U.S.-South Korea agreement through the Senate? He can’t reopen negotiations, but he can use the presidential jawbone to win binding side agreements with Seoul to remove non-tariff barriers to U.S. auto exports.  He could, in short, bring pressure on South Korea to fully liberalize its auto markets and embrace the reciprocal obligations that come with free trade.  Much like his powerful message in New Delhi that “India has emerged,” the president needs to make the case that South Korea has also fully emerged as a mature economy, and it can no longer justify the kind of protectionist and mercantilist trade policies that are more typical of poorer developing countries.

A more aggressive stance would show that the President is serious about doubling U.S. exports. But there’s a complicating factor: the global spread of auto production, design and supply chains. That makes it hard to say just how “American” any given car really is, or how many U.S. jobs are engaged in making cars.

Nonetheless, as long as the answer is “greater than zero,” the President has an obligation to ensure that major U.S. trade partners offer as much access to their domestic markets as we do to ours. And the Korean pact presents him with an opportunity both to restore U.S. global leadership on trade liberalization and to integrate America more deeply into the world’s fastest-growing markets in East Asia.

Photo credit: South Korea

Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere: Negotiations on Jerusalem Settlements

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flew to the States this week to try to break an impasse to the stalled peace talks. The visit, with VP Joe Biden in New Orleans, seems to have provoked the latest round of public bickering over the construction of settlements in Jerusalem.

This time, an international exchange between Bibi, Obama, and Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erakat makes it look like the sides remain miles apart.

Netanyahu: “Jerusalem is not a settlement. Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.”

Obama: “This kind of activity [settlement construction] is never helpful when it comes to peace negotiations.”

Erakat: “The international community must respond to Israel’s unilateral measures by instantly recognizing a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders.”

You know it’s bad if the three main players are barely talking about the same issue. I’ve argued that litigating these cases in the press is counter-productive, and in general I stand by that.  If you’re going public, it’s because you’ve lost the private battle.  In previous cases, it has proved particularly counter-productive when there’s public daylight between Obama and Netanyahu, necessitating a come-together meeting in July.

However, is it possible that the current round of public fighting is a coordinated attempt to provide the Israelis and Palestinians with room to compromise?

After all, Netanyahu’s rightist coalition partners will never permit a full suspension of settlement building. But the Palestinians have essentially made a suspension of settlements a litmus test for further talks. Is it possible then that Obama’s public push against settlement construction is designed as a foil for Netanyahu?  Will standing up to Obama in public on the settlement issue create enough goodwill within the more conservative caucus of Netanyahu’s coalition?

If the two sides sit down soon, the answer might be yes.

Photo credit: Premasagar

A Better Approach to Textbook Adoptions

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Until October, Texas owned the textbook debate. The Texas Board of Education, preparing last year for a book adoption, seemed determined to put a political spin into American history books Texas schoolchildren will be reading. That raised hackles and not just in Texas. A headline in England’s Guardian blared, “Texas school board rewrites US history with lessons promoting God and guns.”

Time and cool heads prevailed and the new Texas standards, adopted in August, are not much different from those in other states. The textbook hoopla calmed down. And then, last month, a Williamsburg, Virginia mother (who happens to be a history professor) noticed that her son’s 4th grade schoolbook was—well, outrageous. It stated that thousands of African Americans fought for the South during the Civil War, many led by Stonewall Jackson. This is not a view held by most historians.

The author of the book defended her work, claiming that she did her research on the Internet, where her source for information was the Sons of Confederate Veterans.  This created a bit of brouhaha. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James McPherson of Princeton University commented, “These Confederate heritage groups have been making this claim for years as a way of purging their cause of its association with slavery.”

Virginia has what is supposed to be a rigorous adoption system, books with agendas aren’t supposed to get through the process. This book was called “accurate and unbiased” by a committee tasked to read it. Virginia school districts, having spent a lot of money on the book, are now pulling it from classrooms.

Textbook nightmares are nothing new in the school world, and they are not unique to Virginia and Texas. But purchasing policies there, and in 20 other “adoption” states, determine content in textbooks for schools throughout the nation. Those books, routinely dull, are often error-ridden and biased. Actually the adoption process began with bias as a goal. After the Civil War, southern leaders didn’t want their children reading a northern version of that conflict. They set up their own school standards and the publishing industry complied with different books for Southern and Northern markets.

Today, in school districts in all 50 states, adoptions are usually a winner-take-all affair that leads to giant sales and huge profits for a few publishers. Those publishers spend their efforts—not on creating good books—but on promotion, gifts, and fancy presentations. Think of the power of lobbyists; textbook salespeople perfect lobby-like outreach to teachers and administrators.

This is not a minor affair: books are the intellectual meat and potatoes we feed our children. Shabby textbooks make a difference. They don’t have to be. Here are some suggestions:

  • Have closed adoptions. No salespeople allowed. Let books and other teaching materials speak for themselves to teachers and committees. Don’t limit choices to books from textbook houses. Have librarians share their expertise. Let a subcommittee of children read the choices and submit their thoughts. If a book doesn’t work for its potential readers, it shouldn’t be adopted. And call in experts: historians to comment on social studies texts, scientists on science texts.
  • If possible, do away with whole city adoptions.  The big bucks are just too tempting for those driven by bottom-line issues. Besides, given our diverse population, it doesn’t work for every fourth grade teacher in Los Angeles or Richmond to be forced to teach from the same history text. Have schools or even individual teachers pick books from a broad vetted list. Let some teachers, who can make a case for their decisions, pick volumes not on the list. Teaching U.S. history, or any subject, with good bookstore books, rather than texts, makes sense if a teacher wants to go that route. If we are to attract and hold sophisticated teachers we need to treat them as professionals rather than cogs in a bureaucratic wheel. Letting teachers choose their own books would not only support them and benefit kids, it might bring real competition to the schoolbook industry.

Some of our greatest thinkers have written books for children. Henry Steele Commager’s story of the Constitution is hard to top. Physicist Stephen Hawking is the author (along with his daughter Lucy) of a terrific physics adventure that is perfect for third graders. Why aren’t books like these read routinely in our schools?

Yes, the money-management folks will talk about the savings from mass purchases, an argument that doesn’t hold up. Most standard textbooks are outrageously overpriced.  Today’s massive adoptions bring billions of dollars in annual income to a few big publishers whose goal, as with most businesses, is to make money. Educating children is a minor consideration. Trade (bookstore) books are generally inexpensive.

How about assessments? Can they deal with a variety of books rather than one text? No problem if we assess ideas and what is usually the small number of essential facts that support those ideas. Currently our tests are shallow, dull, limited, and limiting. Detach them from specific textbooks and canned lesson plans and they can begin to test critical thinking tied to broad knowledge.

Some current conventional wisdom says the textbook issue has been solved. Books are out; technology is in. But, so far, online texts are aimed at test preparation, not deep thinking.  They promote skimming and browsing, not analytical reading. There’s a bigger issue here. We are giving up on whole book reading, which means losing our literary heritage as well as our national legacy. Right now, most schoolchildren have little access to what was once a shared body of heroes, villains, stories, and values.

As for our science scores, a recent study ranked us 48th internationally. “48th is not a good place,” said the New York Times. While hands on labs are exciting, without a story their concepts rarely stick. Only one state mandates science history. Ask your children: Who is Linus Pauling? How did we discover the atom? Chances are they won’t know.

Meanwhile, the current round of educational criticism is focusing on villainous unions and low performing teachers. Hardly anyone has looked in depth at factory-like education schools, administrator-heavy school systems, or the mental junk food we feed our children. All this is deeply discouraging to the good (and often great) teachers in our schools.

Photo credit: Judy Baxter

Did Democrats Lose for Structural Reasons, or Were They Punished for Mistakes?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In unfinished business from last Tuesday, there are still eight House races unresolved, after 11th district of Virginia Republican candidate Keith Fimian conceded to Rep. Gerry Connolly.   While Reps. Ben Chandler of KY and Jerry McInerny of CA hold leads with scattered ballots still out and recounts possible,  Republicans appear to lead in the other six races (involving Democratic incumbents Jim Costa of CA, Melissa Bean of IL, Tim Bishop and Dan Maffei of NY, and Bobby Etheridge of NC, and Solomon Ortiz of TX).  If all current leads held, Republican gains would come in at 65, but my guess is that one or two of the Democrats now trailing will pull out a win.

The unresolved gubernatorial races are now down to just one, in Minnesota, where Republicans still bitter about the outcome of the 2008 Senate race seem determined to delay certification of Mark Dayton’s election as governor as long as they possibly can.

As the vote counting winds down, of course, the post-election interpretation battles are just now warming up. There are, of course, partisan differences, with Republicans tending to treat the results as a historic and perhaps semi-permanent repudiation of Barack Obama, the Democratic Party, liberalism, socialism, the New Deal, elitism, progressivism, or you-name-it.

Democrats are more divided, with some drawing big (and often varying) lessons from the defeat, and others stressing structural factors that made the results inevitable and/or lessened its predictive value for the future.  The former, “big lessons” camp is itself divided between progressives who think Democrats lost because they discouraged the party base and compromised too much with Republicans and Blue Dogs (and/or failed to take the kind of radical steps that could have actually revived the economy), and centrists who think Democrats “overreached” by trying to implement an agenda that the economic emergency made undoable and unpopular.

The “structuralist” interpretation (which I happen to largely share) was succinctly summarized by Ruy Texeira and John Halpin of the Center for American Progress:

Why did the Democrats decisively lose this election? It’s not really a mystery. The 2010 midterms were shaped by three fundamental factors: the poor state of the economy, the abnormally conservative composition of the midterm electorate, and the large number of vulnerable seats in conservative-leaning areas.

Much of the argument over what happened and why will inevitably revolve around the big swing in self-identified independent voters between 2006-08 and 2010.   Are these the same voters, or different subsets of voters (i.e., was this a pure “swing” in voting behavior, or at least partly an illusion of changes in self-identification and turnout patterns?)?  Is the “swing” attributable to factors other than independent identity (e.g., age), or to a genuine change in ideology, or to a rejection of “Obamaism,” or to a continuing rejection of the status quo across administrations and party regimes, or to simple unhappiness about the economy?  The answers to these questions have a large bearing on how each party should act in order to improve its performance in 2012.

One thing that is relatively clear is that the Republican “wave” broke pretty evenly across the electoral landscape, at least in House races; regions where Democrats did relatively well (e.g., the Pacific Coast) are just more favorable to Democrats.   Here’s how Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight explained it:

Rather than a realigning election, then, 2010 served as more of an aligning election: congressional districts behaved less independently from one another, and incumbency status mattered less. Instead, they hewed tightly to national trends and the overall partisanship of each district. Most of the incumbent congressmen whose districts had been outliers before (mainly Democrats like Representative Gene Taylor, whose district gave just 31 percent of its vote to Barack Obama, but also a couple of Republicans like Representative Joseph Cao) were forced into early retirement.

In other words, there was a general, national shift in favor of Republicans that produced relatively predictable results.  That’s true whether you believe the shift involved a sea change in the ideological views of the electorate or just typical midterm turnout patterns and a typical reaction to a bad economy.  A similar shift towards Democrats in 2012 would produce similar Democratic House gains—with the exception of the advantages Republicans are now poised to achieve through redistricting.

So why do these post-election interpretive arguments matter?  Well, to state the most obvious factor, if Republicans accept a structuralist interpretation, they are likely to be very cautious about advancing a radically conservative agenda, since the likely 2012 electorate is going to produce semi-automatic Democratic gains, which may also be augmented by any improvements in the national economy.  If, to cite another example, Democrats accept a “big lessons to learn” interpretation, it would dictate a significant change in strategy for the Obama administration and congressional leaders; unfortunately, the progressive and centrist versions of this interpretation point in very different directions.

Photo credit: Leol 30

These Just May Be The Lunatics We’re (Not) Looking For: Conservatives on Conservatives

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Here’s how Bill Kristol, Fox News contributor and editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, summed up a panel discussion I attended at the conservative American Enterprise Institute:

This is a truly distinguished panel, and one I’m happy to say that’s fair and balanced.  We have (former Republican Senator from Missouri) Jim Talent, a responsible, respectable hawk.  We have a slightly crazed militarist in Tom Donnelly, and a really insane hegemonic imperialist… me.  It’s the correct spectrum of opinion.

The crowd chuckled its DC chuckle, and Wild Bill began. As it turned out, he was ironically prophetic – these people are batshit crazy. That tens of newly-elected Tea Partiers – folks who have never had much to say on national security and foreign policy issues – are now taking their cues from these jokers is downright terrifying.

But before diving into the political angles, here’s what makes these nutcases tick:

My suspicions were first aroused when former Senator Jim Talent (MO) blamed Bill Clinton for Iraq.  Would that I were joking! Indeed, Talent bemoaned Clinton’s decision to scale down the size of the military in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War. He correctly claimed that we were “fully deployed” during Iraq and Afghanistan, meaning that we simply didn’t have the numbers of troops necessary to properly resource both conflicts.  It’s painfully and unfortunately obvious that Talent learned exactly the wrong lesson from Iraq and Afghanistan:

How much money and how many lives would it have saved if we’d have had 14 divisions instead of 10 and had been able to do in Afghanistan at the same time as we were (doing) in Iraq? … The blood, the lives, the people who were dying… we could have been years ahead of that schedule!

In other words, not only was invading Iraq the right call, we should have gone bigger and harder. It’s just too bad that all those people had to die and we had to waste all that money there because Bill Clinton decided to cut the size of the military after the Cold War.

Is Jim Talent a co-author on Decision Points or something?  And here I was thinking that the decision to go to war without fully understanding what we were getting ourselves into caused all the slow progress.

Then there was Kristol’s fundamentally misguided view of defense spending. And that’s odd because he starts out with a correct general premise: “We should cut what should be cut and shouldn’t cut what shouldn’t.”  That’s all well and good, provided you think that there are things to be cut.  So over to you, Bill:

The best possible spending you can have is defense spending! We got out of the Great Depression by having a big defense build up…. The Pentagon has plenty of shovel ready projects!

F-22? No way! Foreign aid? Why not? It was deliciously ironic that while Kristol supported the idea of foreign assistance, he was open to restructuring its $45 billion budget; at the same time, Kristol lauded Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), incoming House Appropriations chairman, saying Ryan “knows how little can be saved in the defense budget — maybe $20 billion.”  Pssst: Bill, that’s almost half of the foreign aid budget you think is big enough to reexamine. It’s also half of State’s.

It all seems so obvious to Talent: The defense budget “is affordable. To argue that it’s not affordable just isn’t right.” It’s especially affordable if we keep cutting taxes, right Jim?

Talent wrapped it all up in a nice big Fox News bow by tying alleged American declinism to Obama’s nefarious plan to nominate Joseph Stalin’s ghost as Tim Geithner’s replacement: “A socialized economy will not let America remain a great power.”  But hold on there –- does a socialist want to “position our nation for success in the global marketplace” via a “strong, innovative, and growing U.S. economy in an open international economic system that promotes opportunity and prosperity”?  Then Talent has some explaining to do, because that’s what the president says in this year’s National Security Strategy.

Thankfully, there was one area these mental dwarfs didn’t completely screw up: New START.  Let’s be clear: Their partisan glasses won’t let them whole-heartedly endorse a very sensible treaty.  Instead, they’re holding it hostage to more missile defense spending.  But they’ll vote for it… hopefully.

Now, this all gets incredibly fascinating when you put it in a political context. The major take-away from this session is that the conservative establishment is pissing down their collective leg at the Tea Party’s soon-to-be dominant position on the Hill.  Their plan is to co-opt the Tea Party by supplying it with mainstream conservative positions in an area the Tea Party doesn’t spend much time thinking about.

Kristol liquored up new Tea Partiers in hopes of bringing her home after the prom:

I think the Tea Party gets a bum wrap. They don’t believe we should lose wars, they don’t believe we should weaken the military, they do believe the world would be safer if Iran didn’t have nuclear weapons.

Jim Talent poured a few shots into Kristol’s punchbowl by hitting the “DC Republican establishment” (note to Talent: you’re a member.)

People who sat around and didn’t do what had to be done in 2001-2004 (specifically: Don Rumsfeld)… it’s a little much for them to be all up in arms because one Tea Party candidate said something that sounded vaguely not quite correct from the point of view of a strong U.S. foreign policy.

They’re pandering, and hard.  Rand Paul doesn’t know it yet, but the Tea Party’s biggest spending hawk is about to vote for an ever-increasing defense budgets soon enough.

It was a mind-blowing Friday morning for yours truly, but was very reassuring in a way: The conservative establishment is as out of touch and irresponsible as always on national security, and they’re trying to take advantage of the strongest but most impressionable subset of their caucus.  That’s why now more than ever, progressives have to offer strong, smart, rational approaches to U.S. national security, military, and foreign policy challenges.

Explaining the Most Puzzling Exit Poll Result

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Yesterday, the New York Times Week in Review section devoted a whole page to time series exit polls, all of which showed how Democrats lost ground in almost every single possible demographic cross-slice this election: women, whites, Protestants, Catholics, old people, even young people.

But one demographic slice was especially telling. It was the 41 percent of the population who said that their family’s financial situation was worse today than it was two years ago. They voted for Republicans by a 65-to-35 percent margin. What’s remarkable is that in 2008, this group of voters (then 42 percent of the total) broke 71-to-28 percent for Obama. And in 2004, it broke 79-to-20 percent for Kerry! But in 1996 and 2000, this category broke solidly for Bush! These are remarkable swings – what can explain them?

Likewise, the shifts have been the same for the smaller slice of the electorate saying their financial situation has gotten better. These folks broke 60-to-37 percent for McCain in 2008 (and 80-to-19 percent for Bush in 2004), only to break 60-to-40  percent for Democrats in 2008.  Again: remarkable!

A number of possibilities seem implausible. One is that Democrats started doing much better financially with Barack Obama as President, and Republicans started doing much worse, leading a massive shift in the make-up of the “financial situation worse” category. This seems highly unlikely. A second possibility is that the demographic basis of this category is consistent, but just strongly, strongly anti-incumbent. This also seems highly unlikely, given what a large percentage of the electorate this makes up, and how much voting usually breaks down along partisan lines.

Rather, the most likely explanation, and one that is consistent with a good deal of political science research, is that voters’ perception of the how well they are doing depends largely on whether their party is in power. As one study notes: “a robust finding in the literature is that partisans evaluate the economy and its prospects more positively when the president is of their own party, and more negatively when the office is held by someone of the opposing party”

In many ways, this is remarkable. It is not particularly difficult to objectively compare one’s finances from two years ago to today. Yet, somehow having your party in power seems to change your evaluation.

In 2008, 24 percent of voters said their family financial situation was better today, 34 percent the same, and 42 percent worse; In 2010, just 14 percent of voters said their financial situation was better, 43 percent about the same, and 42 percent worse.

(Voters who say their family situation is about the same tend to be split much more evenly between the two parties: In 2008, they went 53-45 percent against the Republicans; In 2010 they actually voted 51-to-46 percent for Democrats)

So the declining economy has reduced the share of the electorate thinking their financial situation has gotten better from 24 percent to 14 percent, and this has hurt the Democrats. This may not be an entirely objective measure, but in a down economy, even partisan subjectivity is only so powerful. This has obviously hurt Obama and the Democrats.

But the larger issue here is that it’s very hard for partisan voters to assess the economy and even their own financial conditions objectively. There are real partisan filters at work here.

Which means that even if things are objectively getting better, there are still a large number of Republican voters who are going to think – in opposition to actual empirical evidence – that their own finances are getting worse, perhaps because they can’t conceive of an economy getting better with a Democratic president in charge.  (Though partisan Democrats would be equally guilty in thinking their finances were getting better when they actually weren’t.)

This poses obvious challenges for Obama. If the economy does pick up (as most predict it will), improving objective conditions should help Obama’s approval rating and 2012 prospects to some degree. But even objective improvement will not be enough to convince many voters. Maybe more rhetorical attention to this will help (I don’t know the literature on this in great detail). But even that will probably have limited impact, since most voters hear only what they want to hear (confirmation bias).

A maddening challenge indeed. Good luck, President Obama.

The Results, in Perspective

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

So Election Day is over (except, of course, in Alaska, Connecticut, Minnesota, and Illinois, which have statewide races in some doubt, and in eight states with a total of nine unresolved House races).

You probably know the basics.  Democrats held onto control of the Senate, their margin reduced from 59-41 to 53-47, and Republicans won the House, having gained at this point 60 seats, 21 more than they needed for a majority. Governorships flipped from 26D/24R to 29R/20D/1Chafeecrat.  Republicans took over control of 19 state legislative chambers, just in time for redistricting.

Republicans won the national House popular vote by a 52-45 margin, roughly the same margin by which Barack Obama defeated John McCain in 2008.  But it clearly was not the same electorate; exit polls reported that voters split evenly in their 2008 preferences.  Many observers explain that by an “enthusiasm gap” between the two parties, but much of it is a matter of normal mid-term voting patterns, producing an older and whiter electorate that happens to favor Republicans at the present time.

House losses by Democrats were, to a remarkable extent, concentrated among districts that are either pro-Republican or highly marginal according to recent presidential elections.  There were virtually no true upsets.  A significant share of Tuesday’s casualties involved long-serving members from southern and border states who finally succumbed to ever-increasingly hostile territory (e.g., John Spratt of SC, Jim Marshall of GA, Gene Taylor of MS, Chet Edwards of TX, Ike Skelton of MO; two similar Members from TN retired).  A much larger group, particularly from the Midwest and the mid-Atlantic states, were Class of 2006 and (especially) 2008 who got to Congress via close races and were extremely vulnerable to adverse trends in turnout and the overall political climate.

Trying to link these losses to any specific issues or controversies is probably futile, with the possible exception of climate change; support for legislation on this subject undoubtedly hurt Democrats in coal-producing states, most notably veteran VA Rep. Rick Boucher.  But generally, the results reflected a general partisan shift, which in turn reflected a general (if predictable) change in turnout from a presidential to a mid-term profile.

The Senate results were not terribly surprising, either.  What looked to some like a slight pro-Democratic trend in some of those races (notably PA and WI, where Democrats did better than expected, and in NV and CO, where Democrats won after Republicans led in late polls) were probably more the product of Republican bias in state-based polls, particularly those conducted by Rasmussen.  The Alaska situation, obviously, is very unusual; Lisa Murkowski’s apparent lead guarantees a count of write-in votes, but though a loss for Joe Miller would be deeply embarrassing to Sarah Palin and to the Tea Party Movement, it would not change the partisan balance in the Senate.

The net-five-gain in governorships by Republicans disguises a much more complicated picture in which Republicans took control of eleven Democratic governorships (ME, PA, TN, OH, MI, WI, IA, KS, OK, NM,); Democrats took control of five Republican governorships (CT, VT, MN, CA and HI); and independent Linc Chafee won a formerly Republican governorship in RI.  With all this churn, however, only two incumbent governors lost: Chet Culver of IA and Ted Strickland of OH.

The carnage created by Republican gains in state legislatures will take a while to sort out, but as Hotline noted:

The GOP holds the redistricting trifecta in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Utah, Texas, Tennessee, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma and Ohio – plus, as noted earlier, Nebraska and North Carolina [where the Democratic governor cannot veto redistricting plans].

Florida voters did approve a constitutional amendment imposing fairly strict conditions on redistricting to prevent gerrymanders; the state was already operating under a heavily pro-GOP plan.  California voters also approved an initiative placing congressional redistricting under a very independent commission composed partly of citizens chosen by lottery; this change could help Republicans or at least produce more competitive districts.

In other non-candidate ballot developments, California voters rejected two nationally significant initiatives, one (Prop 19) that would have legalized small-scale consumption and cultivation of marijuana, and another (Prop 23) that would have suspended the state’s unique carbon emissions control system.  In news of equal importance to locals, voters did approve a constitutional amendment getting rid of the two-thirds vote requirement for passage of a budget in the California legislature, which has all but paralyzed California government for years.  In Iowa, voters rejected “retention” of three state Supreme Court justices who supported the unanimous decision to legalize same-sex marriage.  This was  major goal of that state’s powerful social conservative faction.

We’ll get more into post-election interpretations, along with prescriptions for what both parties should do now, next week.

A Few Caveats on the Republican Mandate

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Now that the dust has cleared a little bit and the first round of post-election analyses are in, one emerging storyline is that the electorate has grown more conservative. But before Republicans go off and claim a mandate, a couple of caveats are in order.

  1. Beware the shifting independents. Much has been made of the shifting independents, who, according to exit polls, went from breaking 57-to-39 percent for Democrats in 2006 to breaking 55-to-39 percent for Republicans in 2010. Independents, who made up 28 percent of the voters in this election, are a difficult category to analyze, since many actually vote a lot like partisans even though they call themselves “independent” (for various reasons). As I’ve explained in an earlier post, it makes the most sense to think of independents in shades of independence, and the more truly independent the voter, the less ideological but also the less engaged and less politically informed the voter. All of which is to suggest that the independent voters who shifted from red to blue probably don’t really care much about ideology. Rather, they are most likely anti-politics and above all want to see more jobs and a recovering economy. They didn’t vote for an ideological crusade; they voted for the hope of a better economy and out of a need to blame somebody (the party in power) for their woes.
  2. Beware the shifting electorate. It’s pretty clear that the voters who turned out in 2010 were, on average, a bit older and a bit whiter than the voters who turned out in 2008. Had younger voters and African-American voters –who remain the most reliably Democrat demographics – turned out at 2008 levels, at least a few of the close House and Senate races might have flipped the other way. In part, this was entirely predictable, since voter turnout in mid-terms is historically two-thirds of what it is in presidential elections, and youth and minority voters tend to be most likely to not be paying attention for mid-term elections.  But if they turn out again in 2012 at 2008 levels (and as long as Obama is on the ballot, there is good reason to think they will), then a decent number of the Republican freshmen could be one-termers. Republicans should be careful of mistaking a more conservative voter turnout this time around for a more conservative electorate.
  3. Beware the pendulum. In 2006, Democrats picked up 21 seats, and in 2008, they picked up 31 seats. Many of those pick-ups were in solid Republican districts, and so of the Republican pick-ups on Tuesday, 22 were in seats that had been solidly Republican in 2002-2006, and 15 were in seats that had been solidly Republican in 2002-2004. In other words, almost two-thirds of the pick-ups were simply reversions to ideological-demographic expectations.  But Republicans also expanded into blue territory, picking up 22 seats that were solidly Democratic in 2002-2006, seats they might not be able to keep. As Ed Kilgore has explained, like all waves, this one “definitely has an undertow.”

America continues to be a 50-50 country, with a soft non-ideological middle of anxious, cranky, and sometimes fickle voters who don’t trust politicians and aren’t particularly happy with their choices. Majorities of voters now have an unfavorable view of both Republicans (52 percent) and Democrats (53 percent). Yet what’s remarkable is that even among those voters who had an unfavorable view of the Republican Party, almost one in four (23 percent) still held their nose and pulled the lever for the GOP. By comparison, only 10 percent of the voters who held an unfavorable view of Democrats voted blue anyway. Taken together, we now have more than a sixth of the electorate voting for a party of which they have an unfavorable view.

In short, this election can be explained simply by noting that older, whiter conservatives turned out in greater numbers than younger, more diverse voters, and non-ideological, performance-oriented independents decided to blame Democrats this time around. Neither of these reflect a dramatic change or are necessarily permanent conditions of American politics.

The Geography – and Demography – of Defeat

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

To fully appreciate the scope of the Republicans’ midterm victory – and the nature of the Democrats’ political predicament – look at the map.

In Congressional contests, Democrats flipped just three House seats across the whole, wide country, and they were in the traditionally blue bastions of Delaware, Hawaii, and New Orleans. They won two open Senate seats (in Delaware and Connecticut) but those have been held by Democrats for decades.

Republicans advanced everywhere except the West Coast, where they picked up just one House seat in Washington state. Their gains were mostly concentrated in the Midwest rustbelt and the upper South. With the exception of black belt regions of the South, Latino-dominated south Texas, a smattering of blue in Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota, and a few Rocky Mountain districts, America’s vast interior is solidly red.

The West Coast (including Hawaii) and New York/New England (excepting New Hampshire) are the only remaining Democratic strongholds. The geography of defeat lends credence to GOP claims to represent the American heartland against bicoastal elites.

Republicans also won a passel of governorships and state legislatures across the Midwest. Democrats, in short, got slaughtered in working class America.

Republicans won working-class whites by a crushing, 63 to 34 percent margin. “They have taken the brunt of this recession, particularly the men, but Obama looked as if he was not engaged with it,” pollster Stan Greenberg told the National Journal. “Health care created a sense that he was not focused on the jobs issues and economic issues, and they were very angry.”

The Journal’s Ron Brownstein notes that, “In all, 47 House Democratic losses so far have come in districts in which the level of white college attainment lags the national average; just 16 came in districts that exceed that average. Talk about blue-collar blues.”

But in fact Democrats badly underperformed with white voters in general. College-educated whites also backed GOP candidates, by 58 to 40 percent. Where Democrats held onto their seats, they ran closer to even among college-educated white women while rolling up huge margins among minorities.

Nonetheless, the political map sends Democrats an unmistakable message: you are not connecting with ordinary working Americans. This is only in part a reflection of the current economic crisis, and the evident failure of President Obama’s policies to spur recovery. After all, blue collar whites have been alienated from Democrats for a generation. That should be a source of constant embarrassment to the party of the people.

Many liberal commentators, echoing Thomas Frank, have argued that blue collar voters’ antipathy to Democrats reflects their cultural conservatism.  GOP demagoguery on “values” has blinded these voters to the reality that Democrats are on their side on economic issues. But the conspicuous absence of “God, guns, and gays” from the 2010 elections actually make them a pretty good test of this proposition.  This time, there’s no question that blue collar voters rejected Democrats on economics rather than values.

All this underscores President Obama’s core challenge: crafting a credible plan for rebuilding America’s productive base. This isn’t a cyclical challenge; it’s not a matter of more public spending to boost demand. It’s a structural challenge which requires modernizing U.S. infrastructure, removing obstacles to entrepreneurship and innovation, seizing leadership in clean energy, and revamping tax and regulatory policies to promote economic growth.

Incredibly, however, some liberals are contemplating a blizzard of new federal regulations with the purported aim of putting Democrats on the side of the middle class by demonizing Wall Street banks and big business. The last thing blue collar Americans need is an economic morality play in which they are cast as victims. What they need, and what progressives owe them, is not a condescending populism, but a practical plan for economic success.