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Earth Day at 40: Can Obama Outperform Nixon?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Today is the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, the first of which took place in 1970 at the beginning of the golden age of environmental legislation in the United States. It’s a telling statement that in the past four decades, the most successful environmental record belongs to Richard Nixon.

Our most disgraced president looks rather hippie-esque when you look at the achievements that passed during his administration: the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Marine Mammals Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Endangered Species Act all became law under his watch, and he established the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) soon after Earth Day One.

Since then, environmental policy has often meandered from favored conservative punching bag to a second-tier issue. President Barack Obama has a chance to cement a similar environmental legacy by acting on climate, energy and natural conservation legislation. How has he done so far? In his first term in office, President Obama has achieved notable environmental progress by simply not being President Bush.

Following arguably the most anti-environment administration since the 1970s, almost anyone would shine in comparison. Like on many other fronts, Obama does not lack for ambition. He included energy as one of his three top priorities during the 2008 campaign and has signaled that it will be getting his attention very soon. That being said, the Obama administration has not yet established an impressive or even cohesive environmental record. Many of the president’s actions have been piecemeal, either addressing specific policy problems or cleaning some of the messes left over from the previous eight years. He has yet to achieve a stout victory on the environmental front, but it has only been one year. He still has time to work.

Below is a list of the top five environmental actions that occurred in the first year of the Obama administration – and five other items on which he needs to do more work:

The Accomplishments

  • Endangerment finding: This finding, which said that carbon dioxide is a pollutant that endangers human health, gave the EPA authority to regulate it under the Clean Air Act. This is the most significant step toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions the U.S. government has yet taken.
  • CAFE standards: The EPA increased average fuel economy standards for cars and trucks in the U.S. fleet to be 35 mpg in 2020, the first increase since 1990. The regulation is estimated to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 960 million metric tons by 2030.
  • The stimulus package: The American Reinvestment and Recovery Act channeled $8 billion toward energy projects, mainly focusing on renewables and energy efficiency. It included another $6 billion in water and wastewater projects.
  • Copenhagen: Simply put, international climate negotiations would have collapsed were it not for the direct personal involvement of the president. He was instrumental in getting almost every country in attendance to commit to two-degree temperature rise targets, helped get important concessions from China on emissions monitoring and established long-term financing ($100 billion annually by 2020, $20 billion for the U.S.) for international adaptation efforts.
  • Executive appointments: Lisa Jackson at EPA. Steven Chu at Department of Energy. Nancy Sutley at Council on Environmental Quality. Ken Salazar at Department of Interior. John Holdren at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Jane Lubchenco at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Carol Browner as special adviser to the president on energy and climate change issues. These are all smart, competent, committed people who will help the president shape effective environmental policies over the course of his administration.

So what can Obama do for the environment in 2010 and the second half of his term? Here are just a few things:

The To-Do List

  • Climate: Above all, the president should push Congress hard to pass legislation that controls greenhouse gases by setting a price on carbon. The president already has a climate bill, Waxman-Markey, that had passed the House last year and was ready to go to the Senate. Instead of pushing this bill, he and the Senate leadership chose to focus on health care. That process consumed the heart of this Congress’ legislative calendar and much of its political energy. While that choice was understandable, it leaves action on climate and energy as the largest unfulfilled element of the president’s legislative agenda.Debates on climate appear set to start again in the Senate with the release of a new bill next week. The president should push the debate forward, hopefully resulting in a new law that sets economy-wide greenhouse gas controls before the November elections. This is admittedly an ambitious goal. If it proves impossible, Obama should dedicate as much energy in the second half of his term to climate as he did to health care in the first.
  • Air pollution: With so much focus on climate, traditional forms of pollution haven’t drawn much attention. Conventional pollutants like sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxides, mercury and ozone still pose significant health risks, and economists believe reducing emissions of these pollutants would result in substantial net benefits to the economy in life expectancy and quality of life. The EPA’s recent attempts to tighten regulations on these pollutants (both of which, it must be said, were authored by the Bush EPA) were struck down by courts. The Obama EPA should renew efforts to regulate these pollutants by issuing new versions of these rules (called CAIR and CAMR) as soon as possible. The president should throw his support behind proposed “3-pollutant” legislation on the Hill that would remove the legal barriers to stricter regulation of these pollutants, and follow that legislation up with action from the EPA. (More on that bill in a later post.)
  • Nuclear waste storage: The president has thrown his support behind nuclear power with $8 billion in loan guarantees for two new plants in Georgia. Regardless of your opinion of nuclear power as an energy source, you have to admit the storage of waste poses quite a problem. The president eliminated Yucca Mountain, the long-controversial water repository in Nevada, without proposing a specific alternative. He organized a blue-ribbon panel to look into solutions to the nuclear waste problem, and the commission is supposed to issue its recommendations sometime next year. They have their work cut out for them.
  • Environmental foreign policy: The president should also consider making environmental issues a more central part of his foreign policy. Whether it’s pushing China, India, Russia and others to agree to global cuts in carbon emissions, or calling Japan out for its cynical efforts to avoid limits on bluefin tuna fishing, ample opportunities exist for advancing U.S. environmental interests internationally and re-establishing our position as the global leader on environmental policy innovation. The president has made a good start in this area, but he can do more.
  • Future environmental dangers: Finally, the president can move beyond environmental issues that have been neglected in the past to examining possible future environmental risks. Many such risks, such as pollution of water with pharmaceuticals and the environmental impacts of nanotechnology, aren’t sufficiently understood. Government also lacks the tools to deal with these issues even if they are identified as dangers. The president should dedicate resources to investigating these and other future risks, and push Congress to give the EPA authority to regulate them when supported by the science. These are the kinds of forward-looking reforms that Nixon pursued, and which could give Obama an enduring environmental legacy.

Success on these fronts — and above all on climate — would not only fulfill President Obama’s environmental promises, but would put him in contention as the most environmentally successful president since Nixon, and likely ever.

As the Earth Turns: How Environmentalism Has Evolved

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

When Earth Day was first celebrated 40 years ago today, environmental distress was in our face. Rivers caught fire, oil spills fouled U.S. shores, toxic waste dumps proliferated, and Los Angeles seemed permanently wreathed in smog. Now we worry more about things we don’t see — runoff and waste from farms, growing carbon concentrations in the atmosphere, fish disappearing from the oceans.

This change underscores both the successes and the limits of the “first generation” of environmental law and regulation. Starting with the landmark Clean Air Act of 1970, Americans for the first time began to grapple seriously with the environmental havoc wrought by the industrial revolution.

We’ve made undeniable progress since then, as Gregg Easterbrook and other writers have documented. Our air and water are cleaner. This would be a good day, in fact, for environmentalists and their business antagonists not to indulge in the usual doomsday talk. What we’ve learned since the first Earth Day is that ecological calamity isn’t inevitable, that the damage we do to nature is often reversible, and that we can curb pollution without wrecking our economy.

Republicans still cling to the myth that a clean environment is a luxury we can’t afford, hence their refusal to take climate change seriously. And some environmental activists evidently believe that alarmism in the defense of ecological health is no vice. If the idea is to shake Americans out of their “denial” about global warming, the opposite seems to be happening. Polls show the public is growing more skeptical about the hazards of climate change. Allegations (unfounded, as it turns out) that British university researchers cooked climate data in an excess of environmental correctness haven’t helped.

Even discounting for some hyperbole, however, the new environmental challenges are real enough. Unlike the great industrial cleanup, which focused on specific “point sources” of pollution like smokestacks and drainage pipes, we’re faced today with damage from “non-point” sources like fields and hog farms, high-tech fishing fleets and the millions of cars, dry cleaners, lawnmowers and even cows pumping carbon and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

The top-down, “command and control” regulations of the first generation of environment activism could not cope effectively with these new problems. That’s why PPI back in the 1990s started advocating a “second generation” of policy tools for dealing with new and more diffuse ecological challenges. Examples include innovations like the Toxic Release Inventory, which allows citizens to find out about health risks posed by local polluters; market incentives like carbon pricing and the cap-and-trade system first set up in 1990 to combat acid rain; and “civic environmentalism,” which decentralizes decisions about, say, how to manage habitat vital to endangered species, from Washington regulators to local landowners.

Now it appears as though we’re heading into a third phase, in which environmental and energy policy merge into one. The environmental movement traditionally has aimed at mitigating the impact of industrial society on nature. Now we’re talking about something truly revolutionary – a shift from a dirty economy powered by cheap fossil fuels to a clean, low-carbon economy. This prospect beckons not only because of the environmental benefits, which would be large, but also because of the potential for immense economic and security gains. It would enable the United States to reduce its costly dependence on foreign oil suppliers, many of whom don’t have our best interests at heart. And it opens up broad new avenues for economic innovation and growth in the development of clean technology and fuels.

Some will use Earth Day to depict America as an energy wastrel and despoiler of the earth. Instead of donning hair shirts, progressives ought to stress America’s opportunity to lead the world toward its clean energy future.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/thomas-merton/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Dark Horses

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

On Monday I reported on an exchange I had with RealClearPolitics’ Jay Cost on my contention that the political landscape is likely to get a lot rockier for Republicans in 2012, no matter how well they do this November.

I don’t want to keep this exchange going perpetually, but Jay’s last update raises two issues that I want to mention before turning the page. First, he quite rightly argues that the governing record of the Obama administration, and the policy and message response of the GOP, could have at least as large an impact on 2012 as the demographic factors I stressed in my original piece. No question that is true, and that’s the sort of thing I write about nearly every day. But I don’t get the sense that Republicans are paying much attention to the changes in landscape that are going to occur semi-automatically as we move from a midterm to a presidential cycle — changes that will complicate every step they take. And that was the main point of my Salon article, which was by no means some sort of definitive personal manifesto on everything related to the 2012 elections.

But Cost makes an argument on another question where I am much less inclined to agree with him: How likely it is that a “dark horse” will emerge in 2012 to revolutionize the Republican presidential field? Sure, again, anything’s possible, particularly this far from Election Day 2012. But as I observed in my original piece, presidential campaigns these days almost have to develop long in advance, particularly for “dark horses” who have to establish name ID, raise a lot of money, and then perform the ritual of semi-residence in early primary and caucus states. (I suspect there may be some understandable confusion on Jay’s part based on the assumption that I was arguing that various “dark horse” candidates would be poor general election candidates, but my main contention was that Republicans had a weak field of leading candidates, and that none of the dark horses had the chops to get the nomination).

Jay thinks my lukewarm assessment of lesser-known potential Republican presidential candidates like John Thune, Mitch Daniels, Mike Pence and Tim Pawlenty is just a matter of partisan bias. He even makes the (to me) astonishing statement that Thune’s appeal is no more superficial than Barack Obama’s in 2008 (which I’d say reflects more than a little partisan bias). So let’s think about what makes a “dark horse” candidate formidable, at a time when there are no kingmakers to pluck a Warren Harding out of obscurity and lift him to the nomination. I’d say the minimum qualifications are one if not more than one of the following qualities: exceptional public renown; special identification with a major cause or new ideology; a particular appeal to important and previously underrepresented constituencies; a remarkable public personality; or a novel approach to presidential candidacy. To some extent, dark horses these days, unless they just get lucky, need a candidacy that is in some respect historic. Giant fountains of money also help, though none of the people being “mentioned” as dark horses in 2012 are named Michael Bloomberg. Geography can matter, too, but that’s usually not dispositive unless a candidate’s geographical origins are somehow “historic” or unique.

So let’s look at Cost’s list of potentially formidable 2012 dark horses with those criteria in mind. John Thune is a minor legend in Republican insider circles because he narrowly won a GOTV-driven slugfest in the heavily Republican state of South Dakota in 2004, thus beating Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle. This was a testament to Thune’s personal attractivenss, durability, and willingness to toe the party line, but these are not typically the qualities that vault someone from obscurity to a presidential nomination. So far as I can tell, he is not particularly known for any policy positions, issues, or personification of any underrepresented constituency group or geographical grouping. Yes, he is broadly acceptable to every major element of the GOP, but “acceptability” is a quality that matters only when one is no longer a dark horse, and in any event, who isn’t “acceptable” in these days of monochromatic conservative uniformity in the GOP? That is also the problem of Indiana Rep. Mike Pence, were he to run for president. He’s a guy beloved of movement conservative types for representing the movement conservative point-of-view in the House GOP Caucus. But are self-conscious “movement conservatives” really a voting faction in the GOP nominating process, and are they so aggrieved by the rest of the field that they will coalesece around Pence? There’s no particular reason to think so.

Mitch Daniels is another insider heart-throb, in no small part because he was a major Washington figure as OMB Director under Bush 43, and then successfully took his act mainstream by being elected and then re-elected governor of a usually Republican state where Republican statewide candidates have often struggled. I can see the argument that Daniels’ resume equips him to become the symbol of the suddenly preeminent conservative issue of fiscal discipline (though oppo researchers would have great sport with his responsibility for Bush budget deficits). But again: is that a quality that so separates him from the field that he can make it his own? And does he have other personal or representational characteristics that could give him the rock-star aura to come out of national obscurity, and, say, win the Iowa Caucuses? Maybe, but the evidence of that isn’t obvious.

And then there’s Tim Paw, and it is true that he coined a very interesting and serviceable slogan in talking about “Sam’s Club Republicans.” It is also true, as Jay notes, that Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat turned that slogan into a pretty unorthodox agenda for the GOP–so unorthodox, in fact, that it was generally rejected or ignored by conservatives, aside from its very orthodox endorsement of tax subsidies for marriage and child-bearing. But that has little or nothing to do with Pawlenty, who has been conventionally conservative in his proto-presidential campaign, and whose Big Idea seems to be the ancient and completely symbolic chesnut of a balanced budget constitutional amendment.

Is there anything about these putative “dark horses” that makes any of them particularly stand out, other than as “acceptable” alternatives to the front-runners if one of them happens to get a one-on-one contest? I don’t see it. And there’s certainly nothing about any of them that is comparable to the Democratic “dark horses” that Jay Cost cites in his own piece: John Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Kennedy was the first serious Catholic candidate for president since Al Smith; Carter was the first serious Deep South candidate since the Civil War; Clinton ran aggressively against the pieties of his own party; and Obama became a huge national celebrity as a state senator and went on to beat a legendary Democrat in virtually all-white Iowa.

Until someone emerges on the fringes of the Republican presidential field who can truly separate him- or herself from the field, anyone is entitled to some serious skepticism about the faith of many Republicans that they’ll wind up with a presidential candidate who doesn’t share the handicaps of the established field.

As for the weakness of that established field, check out Nate Silver’s 538.com post that comments on my exchange with Jay Cost and offers some objective evidence that the elephants running in 2012 don’t quite match the donkeys who ran in 2008.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Four Things Obama Needs to Do in the Middle East

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In a recent piece, I discussed the growing sense of “Bush nostalgia” among Arab reformers. Such nostalgia has less to do with George W. Bush and more to do with the period of democratic promise the Middle East experienced in 2004-5, partly a result of aggressive, but short-lived, efforts to put pressure on authoritarian regimes.

For its part, the Obama administration has shown little real interest in democratization in the Arab world, falling back on the “pragmatic” neo-realism of the Clinton and first Bush administrations. Compared to the destructive policies of his predecessor, President Obama’s approach seems a breath of fresh air. But his foreign policy vision, while certainly sensible, has so far been remarkably conventional and unimaginative. Perhaps that’s what was initially needed. Now, however, is the time for bolder, more creative policy making. Here are four things Obama can – and should – do in the Middle East to advance U.S. interests and ideals:

  • Recognize the region’s changing balance of power. Traditional allies like Egypt and Jordan (two of the world’s largest U.S. aid recipients) are losing influence. Increasingly authoritarian, erratic and perceived as excessively pro-American, they have little credibility with Arab audiences. On the other hand, emerging powers like Turkey and Qatar are pursuing independent foreign policies and maintaining positive relations with both the West and the “rejectionist” camp (Iran, Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah). Not surprisingly, both countries, seen as “honest brokers,” have played a major role in mediating regional conflicts and supporting dialogue efforts, including on the Syrian-Israeli, Israeli-Palestinian, Hamas-Fatah and internal Lebanese tracks. The U.S. should encourage their efforts, keeping in mind that they may be uniquely well-positioned to exert influence on Iran and Syria.
  • Promote Turkish accession to the EU. Turkey is the closest thing the Middle East has to a “model,” one of only two countries in the world led by a democratically elected Islamist party. According to a 2009 survey, 64 percent of Arab respondents in seven countries believe “Turkey’s EU membership prospects make Turkey an attractive partner for reform in the Arab world.” Considering its growing regional importance, the U.S. cannot afford for Turkey to turn inward and become embroiled in conflict between its secularist military and Islamist-leaning government. For a time, Turkey’s desire to join the EU provided incentives to implement wide-ranging legal and political reforms. However, as the EU drags its feet on accession talks, and Turks lose hope in EU membership, the reform process looks less encouraging than ever. Turkey must, however, remain enmeshed in Western institutions and partnerships. The Obama administration should use its leverage with European allies to ensure the accession process moves forward.
  • Begin strategic engagement with nonviolent Islamist groups. In most Arab countries, Islamist groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Jordan and Syria, are the largest, most influential opposition groups. But Obama has so far failed to engage them, despite his emphasis on “dialogue” with diverse actors. Engagement would serve several purposes, discussed in detail here, including information-gathering, improving our credibility with Arab publics and putting pressure on autocratic regimes to open up. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, or another senior official, could begin by giving a major speech on the U.S. and political Islam (something which the Clinton administration did on several occasions), stating unequivocally that the U.S. will accept democratic outcomes, even if that means the election of Islamist parties. The State Department should also issue a directive explicitly permitting State Department employees, including ambassadors in the region, to meet with and incorporate members of Islamist organizations in their programming.
  • Embrace “positive conditionality.” The U.S. gives hundreds of millions of dollars annually to Arab authoritarian regimes. Rather than cutting aid, which is unlikely to be politically viable, the U.S. could offer large packages in additional assistance, conditioned on meeting a series of explicit benchmarks on democratization. If the country failed to meet these benchmarks, the aid would be withheld and carried over to a reform “endowment” for the next fiscal year. This way, the more governments rejected the aid, the greater the incentive would be to accept it in future years.

None of these four “steps” are particularly revolutionary. But that’s the point: the Obama administration could take action immediately – if it had the political will. With the troop drawdown in Iraq, and the Iranian nuclear threat, there may be a temptation to wait for a better time. But, in the Middle East, the better time, sadly, never seems to come.

If anything, a confluence of factors appears to be converging, suggesting the time to act is now. There are critical elections in Egypt and Jordan coming up in 2010 (and 2011). For the first time in Egypt, there is an inspiring national figure, Mohamed ElBaradei, who seems capable of uniting a notoriously fractious opposition behind a common vision for reform. Egypt, along with Algeria and Tunisia, will be facing succession struggles sooner rather than later. Meanwhile, internal tensions in Turkey seem to be rising, with the threat of escalation looming in the background. In other words, this is a difficult time of transition in the Middle East and the U.S. will need to do considerably more than just tread water.

The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect those of the Progressive Policy Institute.

The Bridge We Are Still Crossing

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Few subjects create as much controversy as that of race, and that’s particularly true of any discussion of race and the 44th President of the United States. So it’s of considerable interest that the ever-estimable David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, has penned a new biography of Barack Obama, entitled The Bridge, that is focused primarily on Obama’s role as a major figure in the history of American race relations.

For those interested in this topic, I’ve written a pretty lengthy review of Remnick’s book for the Washington Monthly. I conclude that the racial conflicts raised and addressed by Obama’s rise to the White House remain, unfortunately, relevant to his presidency. I’m sure my review will eventually be added to the long list of material that conservatives object to as raising what they call “the race card.” Too bad.

Sources of the Rasmussen “House Effect”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

If you are a progressive political junkie, odds are that one of the most depressing features of your week is the release of new polls from Scott Rasmussen. By and large, the ubiquitous robo-calling firm yields results that are more encouraging to Republicans than others (e.g., the big advantage it shows for the GOP in the generic congressional ballot), and the sheer weight of its state polling can be mind-numbing and spirit-sapping.

It’s generally been thought that this “house effect” of Rasmussen polls is the result of the early and stringent use of “likely voter” screens, which tend to produce a more conservative electorate. According to that theory, the “house effect” would be reduced as we get closer to election day and people make up their minds whether or not they are going to vote (this also accords with Rasmussen’s good record of final-days accuracy in recent elections).

But Nate Silver, as is his habit, takes a closer look at Rasmussen’s operations, and reaches a different conclusion: the raw sample Rasmussen uses before applying a “likely voter” screen seems to bear a “house effect” as well:

Although Rasmussen rarely reveals results for its entire adult sample, rather than that of likely voters, there is one notable exception: its monthly tracking of partisan identification, for which it publishes its results among all adults. Since Labor Day, Rasmussen polls have shown Democrats with a 3.7-point identification advantage among all adults, on average. This is the smallest margin for the Democrats among any of 16 pollsters who have published results on this question, who instead show a Democratic advantage ranging from 5.2 to 13.0 points, with an average of 9.6.

Why would that happen? Nate doesn’t suggest any deliberate bias by Rasmussen; but the firm does use polling techniques that tend to skew the sample:

Raw polling data is pretty dirty. If you just call people up and see who answers the phone, you will tend to get too many women, too many old people, and too many white people. This is especially the case if you rely on a landline sample without a supplement of cellphone voters.Pollsters try to correct for these deficiencies in a variety of ways. They may use household selection procedures (for instance, asking to speak with the person who has the next birthday). They may leave their poll in the field for several days, calling back when they do not contact their desired respondent. An increasing number may call cellphones in addition to landlines.

Rasmussen does not appear to do any of these things. Their polls are in the field for only one night, leaving little or no time for callbacks. They do not call cellphones. They do not appear to use within-household selection procedures. In addition, their polls use an automated script rather than a live interviewer, which tends to be associated with a lower response rate and which might exacerbate these problems. So Rasmussen’s raw data is likely dirtier than most.

Add in the likelihood that Republican voters are a bit more enthusiastic about reporting their views to pollsters at present, and you can see how Rasmussen’s “house effect” could be baked right into the cake. But if that’s true, the assumption that Rasmussen’s numbers will get more reliable as we approach election day may be questionable as well. Silver thinks the Rasmussen “house effect” is a new development that has emerged during this election cycle. So, too, may be a pattern of inaccuracy unless the firm takes corrective action.

Thus, Democrats are not necessarily exhibiting their own biases by taking Rasmussen’s results with a large grain of salt or mentally shifting the numbers leftward a few points. That’s an inexact science, but so, too, is polling.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Will GOP Block Wall Street Fix?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As the Senate turns to financial reform this week, the big question is whether any Republicans will join in, or whether the party will stick to its new political doctrine of Maximum Feasible Obstruction.

This doctrine is predicated on the idea that Barack Obama, elected with nearly 53 percent of the vote, is a dangerous radical bent on extinguishing American liberties and importing Euro-style social democracy. It’s an idea so crazy on its face that many progressives are convinced that racism must lurk behind it.

Maybe, but some conservatives also convinced themselves that Bill Clinton maintained a secret airport in Arkansas to import narcotics from Central America. The right’s feral attacks on Clinton led a sympathetic Toni Morrison to dub him in a figurative sense “America’s first black president.”

Whether or not race is a factor, Republicans have evidently calculated that there is no political cost in withholding cooperation from Obama, at least on domestic issues. That may have been true of health care, which lost public support as the debate wore on. But fixing Wall Street is another matter.

The Pew Center for Research reported yesterday that Americans overwhelmingly favor (by 61-31) reform of financial rules, even as they evince growing skepticism of government activism. It’s pretty clear the public takes a “never again” stance toward bailing out Wall Street bankers, speculators and bonus babies.

That’s why Mitch McConnell, the GOP Senate leader, latched onto the theme that the bill crafted by Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) would actually make future bailouts more likely. President Obama blasted that “cynical and deceptive assertion” over the weekend, and McConnell yesterday seemed to back down.

Still, Democrats need Republican votes to bring a bill to the floor. The Washington Post reports this morning that Democrats are targeting Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine and Bob Corker of Tennessee. Bucking his party’s sullenly oppositionist temper, Corker has worked constructively with Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) to offer sensible improvements to the Dodd bill.

That bill is snagged on GOP opposition to a new regulatory body, to be independent but lodged in the Federal Reserve, that would protect consumers of credit cards, mortgages and other loans from deceptive or predatory practices. Dodd has signaled a willingness to compromise on another controversial provision, an industry-financed $50 billion fund to liquidate bankrupt firms. And the New York Times reports today financial sector lobbyists have lavished contributions on members of the Agriculture Committee, which is grappling with a key provision to regulate derivatives.

During the health care debate, Republicans did not appear to be moved by the plight of Americans with no medical insurance. But financial reform involves something Republicans traditionally care deeply about – money. Where are the sobersided conservatives of yesteryear, who understood that the safety and soundness of our financial system is fundamental to America’s economic health? Striking the right balance between regulation and innovation, security and risk, is an urgent national priority that ought to engage responsible leaders in both parties.

If Republicans aren’t willing to set aside reflexive partisanship long enough to stand up for American capitalism, we really are in a world of political hurt.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/epicharmus/ / CC BY 2.0

Khartoum Dispatch: Assessing the Sudan Elections

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

 

Millions of Sudanese have just finished voting in their country’s first multiparty elections in 24 years. Election officials estimate that, in a relatively peaceful process, turnout of registered voters exceeded 70 percent nationwide, including up to 55 percent in one state in war-ravaged Darfur. (Final turnout figures had yet to be announced at the time of publication.) The voting period was extended from three to five days due to a host of technical problems and irregularities. Sometime this week, the National Election Commission will announce the results.

Yet despite the higher than expected estimated turnout, the election should hardly be a cause for celebration among advocates for democracy. At the top of the ballot, Sudanese leader and indicted war criminal Omar al-Bashir’s name appeared as his party’s candidate for president. Bashir took power via military coup in 1989. In the years since, his regime prosecuted a war in the south from 1989 through 2005 and, more notoriously, has conducted a deadly policy of mass murder and displacement in Darfur since 2003.

On the surface, the Bashir government has made all the right moves, urging all Sudanese parties to participate and asking the international community to observe the process. But the facts on the ground show a government that has engaged in political repression and intimidation, and an election that fell short of international standards. Citing the restrictive environment, in the last week of the campaign period leading opposition parties announced a general boycott of the elections. As the results from the election are counted up, one thing is clear: A “democratically elected” Bashir government will be no less ruthless and oppressive than the Bashir military dictatorship.

Yet since last fall, the Obama administration has avoided directly challenging the credibility of Sudan’s elections, despite being heavily engaged in mediation efforts across Sudan. Many analysts feel that the U.S. merely wants to get past the elections in order to focus on the critical referendum for south Sudan scheduled for January 2011 — a vote that many expect will lead to the south’s secession from Sudan. It’s an outcome that the U.S. favors, predicting that the south will be a reliable, oil-producing ally in restive East Africa. In a bid to set the table for next year, the administration has seemed ready to accept the legitimization of the Bashir regime in this month’s vote in exchange for his cooperation on the referendum.

But with the election’s legitimacy in tatters, President Obama must be clear that the election of Bashir will have no effect on how the U.S. views those in power in Khartoum — as an unrepresentative clique that refuses to loosen their firm grip on the country. And regardless of the results, the administration must continue to pressure all parties to bring comprehensive and durable peace to Darfur, implement the final stages of the north-south peace agreement that mandates the 2011 referendum, and carry on the long process of democratization that serves as the most solid foundation for durable peace.

The State of Play

The elections were first put in place with the 2005 signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement between Bashir’s National Congress Party (NCP) and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM). That ended a civil war — Africa’s longest running — which pitted the mainly Muslim north, controlled by the Bashir regime, and the Christian south, ruled by the SPLM. The agreement also called for a referendum in the south, scheduled for January 2011, which would determine whether Sudan would remain united or the south would secede.

Bashir and his regime entered the 2010 election season with its autocratic rule intact. At the helm of a one-party state for two decades, they retained complete control of the security and media sectors, and possessed far greater financial and organizational resources than the SPLM and opposition parties in the north. Control of Darfur also remained assured, while it was thought that southerners would care less about the elections than the referendum in 2011. Given these advantages, Bashir, at campaign rallies and in formal interviews, had built up the elections as a milestone for the country. “No one forced these elections on us,” Bashir recently stated. “We want fair elections, we want clean elections.”

Despite such favorable conditions, the NCP has not restrained the National Intelligence and Security Services and other elements of the state security apparatus from committing human rights violations. Student activists have been their primary targets. Members of Girifna — a youth organization whose name means “we are fed up” in Arabic — have used social media tools to relay their encounters with state security. The most gruesome incident involved the arrest, detention and torture of a member in March. While in custody, the security agents threatened him with a picture of a well-known Darfuri student activist whose mangled body had been discarded a month earlier near the University of Khartoum.

Human Rights Watch has documented these and other numerous cases of arrests, detention and intimidation of activists and opposition party members; harassment of journalists; breaking up and prevention of public gatherings; and censorship. In Darfur, home to almost 20 percent of the population, opposition parties and citizens also face these challenges, as well as the day-to-day security realities of a place far from peace. Candidates themselves, for instance, have been violently targeted by unknown assailants, while whole areas of the region remain off-limits to election monitors, United Nations/African Union peacekeepers and humanitarian organizations. According to the International Crisis Group, the NCP also had its eyes on rigging elections in Darfur to secure millions of much-needed votes in the three Darfur states. In a recent report, the group highlighted the systematic ways in which the NCP has manipulated the census, influenced the delineation of electoral districts, limited voter registration, and co-opted and bought the loyalties of traditional leaders.

It’s not just Bashir’s government. The SPLM has been accused of harassment and intimidation against smaller opposition parties in the south and independent candidates that broke away from the SPLM after not receiving the party’s nomination. Equally worrisome for southerners, the elections are taking place during a period in which they have already seen the worst violence since the end of the war in 2005. Last year alone, over 2,500 people died in inter-communal violence, and many civil society leaders and analysts in the south fear even greater violence ahead of the 2011 referendum.

The result of the political chaos was an election whose legitimacy was already in doubt before a ballot was cast. With a week left before the elections, the SPLM candidate for president suddenly announced he was withdrawing from the race on account of the unfair conditions and the ongoing crisis in Darfur. Other leading parties within the alliance also announced their formal boycott of the vote. No major political figures challenged Bashir, and many of the other parliamentary and state-level positions in the north went uncontested in last week’s ballot.

What’s at Stake

For Bashir — who remains wanted by the International Criminal Court on seven charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his government’s policies in Darfur — the elections are aimed at one objective: restoring legitimacy at home and abroad.

For the people of Sudan, the stakes could not be any higher. Where will the elections leave the Darfuri people? Over two million out of Darfur’s estimated seven million people live in displaced persons camps, while Darfur’s rebel movements continue to clash with Sudanese government forces in hot spots across the region. Millions in Darfur boycotted the registration period because they did not want their participation to bestow credibility on an election process that left them with few candidates on the ballot representing their interests. With a new mandate on power supported by the participation of Darfur in the elections, many Darfuris and Sudanese fear that the NCP will likely abandon the peace process and instead seek to gain greater control of Darfur through the state and national leaders “elected” to serve their interests.

As for the people of south Sudan, they retain the option to secede from a newly legitimized government in Khartoum with the referendum in 2011. Yet these elections have demonstrated that political space in south Sudan is also quite restrictive, with the arrest and intimidation of independent candidates and detention of election monitors. As Alex de Waal wrote, “As the endgame of the [Comprehensive Peace Agreement] is played out, the fundamental question facing Sudan may not be whether it is one nation or two, but whether it is governed or ungoverned. The ongoing decline of trust and legitimacy has created a situation in which staying in power is the only task that either of the two ruling parties can achieve.” An American endorsement of — or, at the very least, silence in the face of — illiberal and even brutal behavior by both Khartoum and Juba, the southern capital, could have unintended consequences for the future.

The chief concern among southerners is that Bashir may attempt to use his new government to obstruct the referendum process. Perhaps signaling postelection plans to stop secession by any means necessary, Bashir, on the last day of campaigning, revealed the results of what he claimed was a confidential poll of southern Sudanese. This survey, he said, found that 30 percent of southerners would opt for secession in the referendum scheduled for January 2011, while 40 percent would choose unity. These numbers contradict all other assessments of public opinion that consistently show overwhelming support for secession. Southerners fear how Bashir will interpret his mandate to govern them over the next eight months before the referendum.

Meanwhile, the millions of Sudanese living in the north may share similar fates to the people of Darfur. Communities in eastern Sudan and the so-called Three Areas (South Kordofan, Blue Nile and Abyei) have also suffered decades of Khartoum’s neglect and oppression. Keeping the fragile peace in place in these regions will require intensive consultative processes with a variety of stakeholders. There has also been no discussion as to what will happen to the Interim Constitution, adopted after the signing of the peace agreement, if the south chooses secession. Sudanese human rights and civil society leaders fear that because of the lack of constitutional guarantees, there will never be another round of elections in Sudan.

Business as Usual or Change We Can Believe In?

In his inaugural address, President Obama declared, “To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” Unfortunately, in the case of Sudan, the hand remains extended, even as the fist remains clenched and poised to strike.

To handle the crisis in Darfur and fulfill the U.S.’s role as a guarantor to the peace deal, the Obama administration wisely chose to engage all parties in Sudan to find peaceful resolutions to the multiple challenges facing the country. U.S. Special Envoy Scott Gration and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton laid out the objectives of this approach in October 2009: a definitive end to conflict, gross human rights abuses and genocide in Darfur; the implementation of a north-south agreement that results in a peaceful post-2011 Sudan, or an orderly path toward two separate and viable states at peace with each other; and assurance that Sudan does not provide a safe haven for international terrorists. In addition to this plan, administration officials promised to balance the use of sticks and carrots, with benchmarks of verifiable changes in behavior by Khartoum and others who would block the path to durable peace.

The run-up to the elections, however, has shown an administration hesitant to call out the Bashir regime. Instead, it has argued that the elections — regardless of the political conditions — are a necessary step for peace. Rather than challenging the regime to follow through with its commitment to create a hospitable environment for free and fair elections, Gration has regularly downplayed and, in some cases, made excuses for the substandard electoral processes. In the chaotic weekend following the pullout of a number of parties and candidates, Gration exerted considerable effort to salvage the process, telling reporters that Sudanese officials had “given [him] confidence that the elections … would be as free and as fair as possible” and that they “have gone to great lengths to ensure that the people of Sudan will have access to polling places and that the procedures and processes will ensure transparency.” As a result, many opposition parties and civil society activists in Sudan have begun to lose confidence in the U.S.’s commitment to democracy and human rights.

It is not too late for President Obama to hold firm to his inaugural promise and declare his administration’s disapproval of politics as usual in Sudan. When the election results are announced this week, he can lead the international community in interpreting their significance. Rather than offering unearned praise, he should state that the administration still regards Bashir as an indicted war criminal on the wrong side of history. If the U.S. fails to stand up for its principles, advocates for democracy around the world will be disheartened, the Bashir government will continue to act with impunity, and the Sudanese people will lose faith in America, even as they face an uncertain and potentially dangerous future.

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Erie Times-News: Erie figures to be missing high-speed link

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Mark Reutter in the Erie Times-News:

Mark Reutter, a fellow for the Progressive Policy Institute who spoke at a recent high-speed rail summit in Erie, would like to see Erie rail service make a return trip to the future.

From 1935 to 1950, he said, the fastest trains in the world were streamliners that routinely topped 90 mph.

Some of the fastest were among the 42 passenger trains that passed through Erie daily during the 1940s.

Those trains eventually fell victim to the rise of the interstate highway system and declining ridership.

Will faster trains be more popular trains? Only 12,000 people — about 32 a day — board in Erie each year.

Read the entire article.

One Winner in the Aviation Crisis: Europe’s Railways

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The media’s blanket coverage of the travel chaos gripping Europe has overlooked just one thing — fast and frequent trains have gotten hundreds of thousands of travelers to their destinations safely and on time while airplanes sat on the tarmac.

In fact, if there’s any winner in the crisis that began when a cloud of ash from an Icelandic volcano drifted over the continent, it’s Europe’s railways. They have operated with few disruptions at the same time air flight was grounded by authorities over safety concerns.

Since trains handle a large portion of commercial traffic between many cities, the average European has not been hurt by the “transportation tsunami” breathlessly described by CNN and other media outlets.

Travelers most affected by the air ban have been international flyers, such as British tourists coming back from Easter vacations in the Mediterranean and passengers on transatlantic flights, who couldn’t land in northern Europe, Scandinavia or the British Isles.

Since last Thursday, high-speed Eurostar trains have been the only direct link between London and the rest of the world. Running through the English “chunnel,” Eurostar has added trains to its daily roster of 32 trains to and from Paris and 18 trains to and from Brussels.

An estimated 50,000 passengers took the trains between Thursday and Sunday, a 30-percent jump from normal bookings. Eurostar’s website says trains are sold out through the end of this week, but that special service will be added to accommodate still-stranded air passengers.

Elsewhere in Europe, trains have been packed. A EuroCity train from Italy to France was so crowded over the weekend that people could barely squeeze through the doors. A Swiss Federal Railways spokesman said trains have been reconfigured with twice as many cars as normal to handle the increased patronage.

Although airports across Europe are preparing to resume limited flights today along “safe air corridors,” it will take days, if not a full week, before normal operations are reestablished, according to aviation officials.

Much will depend on the status of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano. It continues to spew out thick clouds of ash, whose microscopic shards of rock, glass and sand can stop jet engines by melting and congealing in turbines.

The volcano’s unexpected activity — leading to the biggest flight ban in aviation history — is a stark reminder of the vulnerability of air travel and the necessity of having solid transportation alternatives in a crisis.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/kbs478/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

On Mideast Policy, We Can Walk and Chew Gum at the Same Time

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

A few publications over the past week continue to highlight the importance of democracy promotion in the Middle East. Some have done a better job than others.

First up is Jackson Diehl’s piece in today’s Washington Post. Diehl makes one excellent suggestion — then diminishes it with a faulty assumption. His premise is that the Obama administration fails to understand that diplomacy in the Middle East is inextricably linked to timing. Diehl believes current geopolitical conditions suggest the White House should push for a democratic opening in Egypt, with elections looming this year to replace an aging president, and former International Atomic Energy Agency chief Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei building a credible reform movement in the country.

But as a consequence, Diehl believes that the Obama administration should set aside the larger Israeli-Palestinian peace plan that the Obama administration is cooking up to focus on Egypt.

The former is an excellent initiative and should be pursued despite America’s tricky, decades-long relationship with Egypt that has centered far more on regional military hegemony and diplomatic stability than democracy promotion. But Diehl treats Middle East policy as a zero-sum game, with Israel-Palestine being thrown by the wayside. According to Diehl, rather than focusing on Egypt:

Obama has focused most of his personal energy and diplomatic capital on the Arab-Israeli conundrum — where, for a variety of reasons, there is no immediate opportunity. …[T]he big challenge for the president is to set aside his preconceived notions about what big thing he can or should accomplish in the region — and seize the opportunity that is actually before him.

I ran this by my friend Andrew Albertson, executive director of the Project on Middle East Democracy, and he dismissed the notion that we can’t walk and chew gum at the same time. In an email, he responded:

I certainly agree that the U.S. can and should be doing more in response to events in Egypt. Egyptians view this year as an opportunity to push for important political reforms in their country, and I think we need to support that. But no — I don’t think this is an either-or proposition. In fact, on the contrary, I think we will be more credible — and more effective — if we convey our support for the region’s people and basic issues of human dignity across the board.

The point is that both democracy and Egypt and big initiatives on Israel-Palestine are worthy endeavors. The former seizes on the opportunity available, and the latter attempts to create a bit of opportunity over the long run.

So how is the Obama administration doing on promoting democracy? Albertson’s POMED has just put out a new report by Stephen McInerney that takes a hard look at the Middle East democracy budget. McInerney finds that “total funding for democracy and governance is up” with important programs that promote Internet freedom, as well as aid to Afghanistan/Pakistan and Yemen, emphasized.

One of the big concerns, McInerney says, closely echoes Diehl’s original point:

Controversial changes in U.S. assistance to Egypt have been reinforced.• Funding for democracy in Egypt remains at levels sharply reduced in March 2009, which included disproportionate cuts in funding for civil society. The decision to provide USAID funding only to organizations registered and approved as NGOs by the Egyptian government remains in place. Finally, the administration is now exploring the establishment of an “endowment” proposed by the Egyptian government to remove congressional oversight over future U.S. economic aid.

By all means we should address these problems. But doing so need not come at the expense of other Mideast initiatives.

Reforming Government: Obama’s Next Task

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Public trust in the federal government, Congress and the political parties is scraping rock bottom, the Pew Research Center reports today. The findings don’t invalidate what President Obama and the Democrats have done over the past year, but they do underscore the need for a new direction.

According to Pew’s Andrew Kohut, only 22 percent of Americans trust the government in Washington to do the right thing. Anger at Washington has intensified and, most important for progressives, the public seems to be souring on activist government. “…[T]he general public now wants government reform and a growing number want its power curtailed,” he says. The important exception is regulation of Wall Street, which Americans continue to favor by nearly 2-1.

Obama’s first year was dominated by the economic emergency and the Herculean task of passing a landmark health care reform. The administration had no choice but to spend prodigiously to prevent a general financial collapse and pump up a stricken economy. If you think the polls look bad now, imagine how much worse they’d be had Obama failed to take decisive action on the economic front.

The health care push may have been the domestic equivalent of a war of choice, in that Obama could theoretically have deferred it until the economy recovered. But it was the right choice for a president with large reserves of political good will, and for a Democratic Party finally given undivided control of the federal government and a mandate to tackle big problems.

There’s no denying the rising public backlash against government intervention and spending, though it probably has as much to do with lingering economic anxieties as what Obama and the Democrats have been doing. In any case, public sentiment for a smaller federal government has risen, while Democrats’ favorable ratings have tumbled 21 points to 38 percent, about the same as the GOP’s, says Pew. At the same time, the poll also shows that voters aren’t hobgoblins of consistency. Even as they complain about the influence of special interests, 56 percent also say government does not do enough to help average Americans.

Progressives shouldn’t lose too much sleep over the Tea Partiers, who are hardcore conservatives and extreme libertarians. But independents are another question. The Pew study confirms the trend of recent elections, which saw independents from Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts abandon Obama’s winning 2008 coalition. This portends a difficult midterm election for Democrats, since independents seem highly motivated to turn out in November and, according to Kohut, express strong preferences for Republican candidates in their district.

What can progressives do to staunch the defection of independent voters? They should pass financial reforms, reduce home foreclosures and get as much of the bailout money back as possible. But the main emphasis for the rest of the year should be on stimulating economic innovation and growth. They should pay particular attention to relieving regulatory burdens on entrepreneurs and new enterprises – including onerous paperwork requirements in the new health care law — which are the primary generators of new jobs.

Progressives also must lay the groundwork for serious deficit reduction and entitlement reform next year as unemployment subsides. The Obama administration should press hard on health reform’s new cost containment measures, and produce concrete plans for closing Social Security’s funding gap. It’s vital for them to show they can discipline federal spending, not just raise taxes.

Here the administration can learn from Bill Clinton’s experience. He too faced an electorate worried about public spending and deficits, and skeptical about suspicious of bureaucratic overreach. He not only produced budget surpluses (a feat Obama won’t be able to duplicate), but also gave priority to downsizing and “reinventing” the federal government.

Obama doesn’t need to echo Clinton’s assertion that “the era of big government is over.”  But in this next phase of his presidency, he needs to be as ambitious in reforming government as he was last year in expanding government.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/wallyg/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

A Look at the Governors’ Races

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

With all the obsessive focusing on congressional races that is natural to Washington, it’s not a bad time to take a more comprehensive look at the 37 governors’ races that will be decided in November (if you happen to have a subscription to the Cook Political Report, their wizard on gubernatorial and Senate races, Jennifer Duffy, has a new overview out).

It’s quite an even playing field between the two parties: Democrats are defending 19 governorships and Republicans 18. More importantly, thanks to a combination of term limits and retirements, 22 of the 37 races are “open.” And quite a few of those are in states where the party controlling the governorship has not been the dominant party generally (thus creating a particularly ripe climate for a switch this year), ranging from “red states” with Democratic governors like Wyoming, Kansas, Oklahoma and Tennessee to “blue states” with Republican governors like Vermont, Connecticut, Minnesota, Hawaii and California. Absent a really massive Republican wave, we will probably see both major parties gain and lose more than a few governorships.

The other factor lending instability to governors’ races is, of course, the fact that state governments as a whole have been roiled by recession, revenue losses and automatic counter-cyclical increases in spending even more than the federal government (at least in all but a few fortunate, recession-resistant states), and nearly all have constitutional or statutory balanced budget requirements. It didn’t get much national attention at the time, but states didn’t really receive a lot of help from the 2009 economic stimulus legislation, with the exception of a temporary “super-match” for Medicaid (which is, along with mandates for expanded coverage, being continued by the new health reform legislation).

Most of the states are dealing with chronic budget shortfalls. And it’s all taking a toll on public confidence. A major new Pew survey just out today shows that the drop in the percentage of Americans saying government has a “positive impact” on their lives has dropped even more for the states (from 62 percent to 42 percent) than for the federal government (from 50 percent to 38 percent) since 1997. With voters viewing past state administrations somewhat nostalgically, it’s not surprising that there are no less than five former governors running for their old jobs this year (which, as Duffy points out, is really an unusual number): Democrats Jerry Brown of California, John Kitzhaber of Oregon, and Roy Barnes of Georgia; and Republicans Terry Branstad of Iowa and Bob Ehrlich of Maryland. All but Ehrlich have been out of office for at least eight years (Branstad for 12 years, and Brown for 28 years). Another wild card: there are presently three viable independent candidates for governor, all in New England (Maine, Massachusetts and Rhode Island), where weak Republican parties make indies a preferred alternative to Democrats for many voters.

Add it all up, and it’s very difficult to discern big national trends in governors’ races, aside from the fact that turnout patterns are likely to boost Republican prospects generally. Duffy currently rates an astonishing 17 races — close to half — as “toss-ups,” including seven governorships held by Democrats and ten by Republicans, with another seven races looking competitive. Some could be real barn-burners, with close, expensive races likely in big states like California, Texas, Florida, Illinois and Ohio. Others could produce upsets if the “wrong” candidate wins large, multi-candidate primary fields. This is particularly true on the Republican side, where the conservative/Tea Party upsurge could beat more electable Republican candidates in primaries ranging from Iowa to Alabama.

So buckle up the seat belts for a wild ride in gubernatorial elections this year.

Poll Watch

The most interesting polls to come out in the last few days involve highly competitive governor’s races. A new Quinnipiac survey shows Democrat Alex Sink significantly reducing Republican Bill McCollum’s lead in Florida; the race is now within the margin-of-error in that particular poll. Rasmussen now has incumbent Republican Rick Perry locked in a close race with Democrat Bill White in Texas. And Western New England College shows a close three-way race in Massachusetts among Democratic incumbent Deval Patrick, Republican Charles Baker and independent Tim Cahill.

Ed Kilgore’s PPI Political Memo runs on Mondays and Fridays.

Don’t Let Anyone Tell You Counterinsurgency Ain’t Tough

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

If you ever needed a reminder about the difficulties of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, Joe Klein’s piece in Time is it. Klein tells the story of Capt. Jeremiah Ellis, a 29-year-old Army officer leading 120 soldiers in Dog Company, the only American presence in the remote village of Senjaray. Though anecdotal, the piece is a highly detailed, pitch-perfect account of why stabilizing Afghanistan is so difficult.

Here are some of the highlights.

On the Taliban:

Unlike many of his fellow officers in Zhari district, and many of the troops under his command, Ellis really believed in counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine.

He still does, but he’s more skeptical now. The past four months in Senjaray have taught him how difficult it is to do COIN in an area that is, in effect, controlled by the enemy — and with a command structure that is tangled in bureaucracy and paralyzed by the incompetence and corruption of the local Afghan leadership. Indeed, as the struggle to open the school — or get anything of value at all done in Senjaray — progressed, the metaphor was transformed into a much bigger question: If the U.S. Army couldn’t open a small school in a crucial town, how could it expect to succeed in Afghanistan?

… [A]lmost any development project the Americans tried in Senjaray would end up benefitting the Taliban — except one: reopening the Pir Mohammed School.

On rules of engagement:

General McChrystal has issued a series of tactical directives and rules of engagement banning most forms of air support. There are also new rules governing when and how troops on the ground can use their weapons. “Look at these,” Ellis told me, tossing a fat sheaf of directives onto his desk. “Some of these are written by freaking lawyers, and I’m supposed to read them aloud to my troops. It’s laughable. We can’t fire warning shots. We can’t even fire pen flares to stop an oncoming vehicle. If a guy shoots at you, then puts down his weapon and runs away, you can’t fire back at him because you might harm a civilian.”

The troops hate the new rules. Indeed, a soldier from another of the 1/12’s companies sent an angry e-mail to McChrystal, saying the new rules were endangering the troops. The General immediately flew down to Zhari and walked a patrol with that soldier’s platoon. “It was a good experience,” McChrystal told me later. “I explained to them why we needed the rules. And I’ve been making it my practice to go out on patrol with other units ever since.”

Ellis understands the rationale for the rules — “It’s what distinguishes us from the Taliban” — but that doesn’t make them easier to enforce.

On internal military bureaucracy:

Lieutenant Reed Peeples, a former Peace Corps volunteer whose 2nd platoon patrolled the area around the school, put it more simply: “For months, we’ve been trying to win over the people of this town — and we haven’t produced anything tangible. They are sitting on the fence, waiting to see which side is stronger. We haven’t had much luck with development projects. We haven’t proved that we can take care of them. Reopening the school would be our first real win.”

It was unimaginable that the higher-ups — those in “echelons above reality,” as Ellis liked to say — would actually stop the Pir Mohammed project. He figured it would be delayed a day or two and decided to move ahead with his plan.

Read the whole article, it’s worth your time, and is a clear depiction of the challenges the U.S. military, including those they bring on themselves.

Now that we’re on the subject, I just want to remind readers of the arguments I made for counterinsurgency last year. In recent days I’ve been essentially accused of being a shill for the administration who would have blindly saluted and supported whatever the administration decided.

Wrong. While I certainly applaud the administration’s process in arriving at its policy, I’m on record as calling for a counterinsurgency strategy before the administration announced its plan. In an October column, Will Marshall and I made the case that administration should hew closely to the counterinsurgency strategy outlined by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, during a period when our Afghanistan strategy was very much up in the air.

When the counterinsurgency strategy was announced, I offered my praise for what I thought was the right call, calling it our “best choice to offer definitive and lasting security,” even as I warned that it was “hardly a guaranteed success.” If the administration had taken a different route, I probably would have offered my criticism, even as I praised the careful and thoughtful process behind it. I’d just like to think that good process tends to lead to good policy – and I think that’s what happened here.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/soldiersmediacenter/ / CC BY 2.0

Some Good News for Dems; All Eyes on Crist

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

It’s been a week of fog and shadows in U.S. politics — a lot of fiery talk, much of it surrounding the financial regulation bill in Congress and Tax Day beyond it — and a few real developments.

The best news for Democrats is that potentially formidable Republican candidates for two must-win Senate seats decided not to run: former governors George Pataki of New York and Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin. This makes the seats of Democrats Kirsten Gillibrand and Russ Feingold relatively safe, at least for now.

The other good news for Dems is that they easily retained the South Florida House seat of resigned Rep. Robert Wexler in a special election. That shouldn’t have been surprising, given the heavily pro-Democratic voting history of the district. But after Scott Brown’s victory, some Republicans began to imagine they could win anywhere. Moreover, the heavy senior and Jewish voting segments of the district fed some Republican hopes that senior unhappiness with health reform and Jewish anxiety over the president’s stormy relations with Israeli PM Bibi Netanyahu might produce a backlash. No such luck.

Also in Florida, the very tangled U.S. Senate race took another odd turn, as embattled Gov. Charlie Crist, badly trailing Marco Rubio in the polls for their Republican primary, ended days of suspense by vetoing a “teacher merit pay” bill that had created vast partisan polarization in the Sunshine State. The bill, which would have phased out teacher tenure and based half of teacher evaluation on students’ performance on standardized tests, was the apple of former Gov. Jeb Bush’s eye. In vetoing the legislation, Crist became more of a pariah to conservatives than ever, spurring rumors (which the governor and his staff have been routinely denying) that he might withdraw from the primary and run as an independent.

One other little tidbit from Florida: Guess who just registered to vote in the Sunshine State?  Mike Huckabee. It could be just a coincidence, but Florida is certainly a more important state in the Republican presidential nominating process than Huck’s native Arkansas.  It’s probably also easier to get flights from there to New York, where Huckabee’s weekly Fox show is taped.

In a number of states, candidates are gearing down for a very heavy month of May, with competitive statewide primaries, and many downballot contests, on tap in Indiana, North Carolina and Ohio (May 4); and Arkansas, Kentucky and Pennsylvania (May 18). There are Senate primaries in all six states, and a competitive Democratic gubernatorial primary in PA.

Polling activity is also picking up.  There were three new polls out of Arkansas this week, all showing Sen. Blanche Lincoln maintaining a steady but not overwhelming lead against primary challenger Lt. Gov. Bill Halter. With a third candidate in the field, the big issue there may be whether Lincoln can avoid a runoff in which almost anything could happen.

The very day that Charlie Crist cast his fate to the winds by vetoing a GOP education bill, Quinnipiac came out with a new poll showing him getting crushed by Marco Rubio more than ever in a Senate primary, but actually leading a three-way race with Rubio and Democrat Kendrick Meek if he runs as an independent.

And there’s been some, well, unusual polling results on trial heats of possible 2012 challengers to President Obama. Rasmussen showed Ron Paul running even with the president, which is a bit hard to believe. And PPP showed four different Republicans (Huckabee, Palin, Gingrich and Romney) running almost exactly even with Obama, despite wide differences in their own approval ratings, which is a bit hard to understand.

Finally, if you haven’t seen yesterday’s New York Times/CBS poll that includes the most thorough survey we’ve seen of tea party supporters, do check it out, along with my analysis of it. Long story short: I don’t care what Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell say in today’s Washington Post; if the tea partiers are indeed, as they argue, “swing voters,” then I’m the next American Idol, and not just in the shower.

Ed Kilgore’s PPI Political Memo runs on Mondays and Fridays.

Reality Check on Taxes

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Americans are increasingly alarmed by the nation’s massive deficits. Yet according to a new CNN poll, 60 percent favor making the Bush tax cuts permanent, instead of letting them expire this year. This doesn’t compute. If President Obama is to make any headway in restoring fiscal discipline in Washington, he will have to inject a note of realism into the debate over taxes and spending.

Here’s the blunt truth: the federal government faces a huge revenue hole – too big to be closed by spending cuts alone. Spending last year reached an astonishing 26 percent of national output, while revenues fell to 15 percent. Full economic recovery is expected to cut that yawning tax gap of 11 percent roughly in half.

Getting federal deficits down to a sustainable level – say 3 percent a year – will require both spending cuts and tax hikes. The president’s deficit-reduction commission will have to look hard at entitlement spending, but we will also need a sweeping overhaul of our tax system to solve our fiscal crisis.

Extending all the Bush tax cuts, of course, will only dig us in deeper. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that extending them through 2017 would cost $1.9 trillion. That doesn’t include the costs of servicing a bigger national debt, or the cost of adjusting the alternative minimum tax so it doesn’t offset the cuts.

Obama pledged during the campaign to keep the Bush cuts for households making under $200,000 a year. He will either have to break that very expensive promise, or turn to other possible revenue sources. What are the options?

The first, and most attractive, is to go after the hundreds of billions of tax subsidies that range from specific industry tax breaks to broader provisions – like the health care exclusion and mortgage interest deduction – that benefit all taxpayers. This is the essence of an intriguing bill crafted by Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), which would broaden the tax base by eliminating all itemized deductions except for mortgage interest and charitable deductions.

Another option is to look for new revenue sources. The best would be a charge on carbon, which would raise revenue, boost clean energy investment and protect the earth’s climate all in one fell swoop. The emerging Senate climate and energy compromise, engineered by Sens. Kerry (D-MA), Graham (R-S.C.) and Lieberman (I-CT), would cap carbon emissions, but it appears that the revenues would be rebated to the public. This approach would blunt Republican charges that putting a price on carbon is tantamount to raising taxes in a weak economy, but it wouldn’t close our revenue gap.

That’s why there’s rising interest in a value-added tax (VAT). Paul Volcker, the éminence grise of high finance, floated the idea recently. It’s also been endorsed by leading progressive thinkers like Isabel Sawhill and Henry Aaron of the Brookings Institution. A VAT has traditionally been seen as a harbinger of European-level taxes, but Sawhill believes it may be the only way to finance health care. She adds:

In the end, any tax increase will be a heavy lift in a country that seems allergic to paying its bills. But it will have to happen sooner or later and sooner would be much better. As Larry Summers once noted, Republicans don’t like value-added taxes because they are a revenue machine and Democrats don’t like them because they are regressive. We will get a VAT when Democrats realize they are a revenue machine and Republicans realize that they are regressive.

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