Category: Uncategorized

Speedy Elections

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As noted yesterday, the 2012 presidential election cycle is already informally underway, and will get very real the day after the midterm elections on November 2.

By comparison, check out our older cousins in the United Kingdom. Today Prime Minister Gordon Brown set the date for his country’s next general election: 30 days from now.

Now obviously, electioneering in Britain is not totally confined to the formal period of the campaign, but much of it actually does take place in the sprint to election day, and that’s the case in most other democracies as well. It helps illustrate one of the major drawbacks of our own system, in which constitutionally fixed general election dates allow campaigning for major offices to creep back through the calendar relentlessly.

As for the likely outcome of the UK elections, the Conservatives have long led in the polls, which is unsurprising given the long tenure of Labour control (13 years), and the condition of the economy. But the Tory gap over Labour has been shrinking lately, and if it continues to shrink, what looked like an almost certain Tory victory a year ago could turn into a narrow advantage producing a “hung parliament” — i.e., where no party has a majority in the House of Commons. That scenario could create a minority government in which either the Tories or Labour form a coalition with the third-party Liberal Democrats, or if negotiations with the LibDems fail, another quick election.

American Republicans looking to the British elections as a possible harbinger of good things to come here at home should take note of Tory leader David Cameron’s repeated pledged that protecting the National Health Service — a.k.a., “socialized medicine” in the real, not (as with ObamaCare) imaginary sense — will be his “top priority.” Tories have also been blasting Brown for exceesively austere fiscal policies. So a Tory victory, if it happens, wouldn’t exactly be transferable to the U.S.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/secretlondon/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Airline Screening, See-I-Told-You-So Edition

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

About two months ago, I wrote an opinion piece for the Cleveland Plain Dealer‘s website on the virtues of a “smart selectee list.” My point was that Americans are essentially programmed to throw money at terrorism, but that more effective and cheaper measures are available.

For example, following the Christmas Day bombing attempt, the Obama administration announced that it would spend some $700 million on full-body screening machines. Sure, they’ll be effective for a while, but it’s only a matter of time before someone somewhere finds a way to either beat the machine or to blow up an airline that doesn’t involve explosives smuggled onboard by a passenger. If terrorism over the last 20 years has taught us anything, it’s that terrorists adapt to beat new security measures.

Instead, here’s how my “smart selectee list” would work:

It’s time to construct a security apparatus that intelligently accounts for signs of potentially dangerous passengers while balancing risk, passenger inconvenience and privacy concerns — and saves money in the process.

Rather than purchase enough body scanners to take naked pictures of everyone boarding a flight, the TSA and National Counter Terrorism Center should review one of the least discussed but potentially most effective devices it already has on the books: the “selectee” list. …

It’s time to let the selectee list think for itself. With technological innovation, the list could be transformed into a “smart” anti-terrorism tool: Allegedly dangerous individuals would be added, but additional passenger screening is triggered only when an algorithm connects potential attackers to a suspect travel itinerary and during periods of elevated, if vague, threat levels. Individuals selected for additional screening must be shared with the airlines.

For example, if an allegedly dangerous Elizabeth Kennedy is set to travel from Dublin to the United States, her profile would trigger additional screening only when the list automatically connects her name, travel itinerary and an ongoing Ireland-based threat. If the threat is based out of, say, France, or once an analyst determines it has lapsed, she would undergo standard security procedures.

It seems like the administration is starting to come around:

Before Dec. 25, airlines were given the no-fly list of people to be barred from flights altogether and a second “selectee” list of passengers to be subjected to more thorough screening. Those lists have been expanded considerably this year and now contain about 6,000 and 20,000 names respectively, officials said.

The new system will send the airlines additional names of passengers not on either the no-fly or selectee list but identified as possible security risks because of intelligence about threats. Only the names of the passengers selected for extra screening, not the underlying intelligence, will be shared with airlines and foreign security personnel, officials said.

The details of this program remain a bit sketchy, but it would appear that the administration is linking threat-based information to travelers who share the same name as the potentially dangerous. Potentiality is an important concept in this process — the intelligence community was faulted for the Christmas attempt because it failed to “connect the dots” even though intelligence is designed to only link together credible dots. And I’d argue that in the case of that incident there weren’t credible dots to connect. There was a lot of possibly credible stuff out there, but none of it was ironclad.

This new system appears to trigger additional screening when information of unknown credibility is linked together at the point of attack. It’s a smart method that’s in stark contrast to the indiscriminate body screening of passengers. For passengers whose names come up under the new selectee process, undergoing additional screening would be a relatively minor inconvenience. But the targeted patdown would be an effective security measure that doesn’t trample civil liberties and minimizes the inconvenience for most passengers.

Presidential Field Hockey

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The 2012 presidential cycle doesn’t officially begin until November 3, but the Republican field will start being seriously shaped this week down in New Orleans, at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference. Confirmed speakers include no fewer than nine people who have been “mentioned” as possible presidential candidates: Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, Ron Paul, Mike Pence, Rick Santorum, Haley Barbour and Bobby Jindal. Tim Pawlenty will address the event by videotape. Mitt Romney, who may be playing the traditional front-runner’s game of avoiding appearances with his lilliputian rivals, will be missing; he’s off hawking copies of his book in — two guesses where! — New Hampshire.

Other than the usual straw poll of attendees (with the main question being whether Ron Paul’s young supporters will flood the event like they did at the CPAC conference in February), and the usual informal assessments of the speeches, here are some other sources of intrigue: (1) Will any or all of Mitt’s rivals blast him for prevarication on similaries between RomneyCare and ObamaCare? (2) How many of the presidentials will claim close kinship with the Tea Party Movement? (3) Will any of them formally disclaim candidacy? (4) How bloody will the rhetorical red meat get? (5) Who if any of them will try to get media plaudits for a calm, substantive approach? and (6) Will any new “true conservative” limus tests be laid down?

The New Orleans event could represent quite a presidential field hockey match. And in case you think it’s crazy to be talking about the 2012 presidential race, remember this: it’s just 21 months til the Iowa Caucuses!

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

End of a Delusion

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

It’s certainly taken a while, but as we head towards the Tea Party Movement’s holy day of April 15, it seems to finally be sinking in among the commentariat that these people did not come out of nowhere or arise spontaneously from an aroused populace, but are instead simply the same old conservative Republicans who used to be so boring back in the day. A new poll of the Tea Folk by Gallup seems to have spurred this realization along, though some gabbers may persist in being baffled by the high number of Tea Partiers who self-identify as independents. The Atlantic‘s Marc Ambinder explains it to them:

[I]t’s true that just half of those Tea Partiers surveyed called themselves Republicans. Yes, the lion’s share of the other half say they’re independent. But they’re not: they’re Republican-oriented conservative voters who are dismayed by the direction of the GOP and who don’t want to identify with the party’s brand. That’s not surprising, given how tarnished that brand is. Only 8% identify as Democratic; 7% identify as liberal; 70% percent identify as conservative; two-thirds are pro-life; nearly 90% were opposed to the health care bill.

This is a very old story, one that arguably goes all the way back to the 1940s. At any given moment, a significant number of conservative Republicans don’t want to call themselves Republicans because their leadership is not, in their view, conservative enough. This is one reason why Republican self-identification numbers have chronically undershot Republican votes in actual elections. At particularly difficult moments, conservative Republicans have even threatened to form a third party — as in the mid-1970s, when National Review publisher William Rusher argued that conservatives should leave the GOP to it’s “elitist” establishment and make common cause with Wallacites and other social conservatives in a “producer’s party.” Such threats today are no more unusual, or credible, but do help encourage Republican office-holders to follow their own inclination to hew to the Right.

As the (apparent) novelty of the Tea Party wears off, its familiar outlines should become apparent, except to those with a strong bias in favor of misunderstanding the phenomenon. In an interesting column today, Mark Schmitt of The American Prospect discusses those left-progressives who persist in helplessly hoping for a “populist” alliance with the Tea Folk. Part of the allure, he suspects, involves some progressive self-loathing:

[F]inding allies among Tea Partiers is the equivalent of what finding a black friend was to liberals in the 1960s. It’s a way to get in touch with the real America, to feel a little superior, a little less elitist or isolated, less wimpy, less conformist.But the real America is at least as likely to be found in the 205 million voting age adults who aren’t Tea Partiers as the few hundred thousand who are. And the rest of that real America, with its own passions and anger and economic pain, is probably a more fruitful area to look for allies on real liberal goals that include inclusion and fairness.

In any event, I’m with Ambinder: If pollsters want to keep examining the Tea Folk, it’s time for them to drill a little deeper:

Next time, I’d love for Gallup, or any other pollster, really, to ask self-identified Tea Partiers for their vote histories, for their views on immigration and race, for their views on questions about Obama attributes (is he a socialist?), for their specific views on policy matters (do they support a “fair tax?”).

Moreover, instead of asking Republicans and independents over and over if they might be tempted to vote for a hypothetical Tea Third Party candidate, pollsters might want to focus on the actual major-party preferences of Tea Partiers, since in all but a few scattered contests, that’s what they are going to face at the polls. I say that mainly because of all the delusions surrounding the Tea Party Movement, the one that suggests Democrats will be saved by a mass of third-party candidates associated with said Movement is among the most fanciful. The Tea Folk are systematically dragging the GOP to the Right, and that’s the development that Democrats need to think about exploiting in November and beyond.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

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

Outlook for Russian Democracy: Not Pretty

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Last week, I wrote that the terrorist events in Moscow meant that Russia was about to choose between two distinct paths for its democratic aspirations. Either Vladimir Putin would reincarnate his 2004 persona and use the attacks to further retard Russian democracy, or new President Dmitri Medvedev would leverage the blasts as a catalyst that liberates him from Putin’s yoke and parries his attempts at a new power-grab. At the time, I was hopeful for the second outcome, but betting on the first.

Unfortunately, this op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times slid me more towards the Putin-power-grab outlook. I had failed to appreciate that, well, there’s a different political culture in Russia that protects the “czar” and blames his underlings:

In other countries, leaders might pay a political price for not preventing a startling attack like the suicide bombings in the Moscow subway last Monday. Not here, at least not so far. If anything, terrorism and unrest in Russia’s predominantly Muslim regions have long served to strengthen Mr. Putin’s hand.
[…]
He plays on a piece of Russian folk wisdom that is roughly translated as “the good czar, bad advisers” — the belief that, throughout history, a Russian leader with the right intentions is often betrayed by underlings. That is why Mr. Putin, the prime minister and former president, is often shown in public scowling and lecturing other officials.
[…]
“When it comes to terrorism, Putin knows how — and this is a very important aspect of his political mastery — to protect himself from what might otherwise be considered his responsibility,” said Sergey Parkhomenko, a political commentator and radio talk show host in Moscow.
[…]
On Thursday night, he headed to Venezuela to see President Hugo Chavez for a visit that was intended to display the Kremlin’s muscular foreign policy and its warm relations with an antagonist of the United States. It was less than two days after a Chechen extremist had claimed responsibility for the subway attacks, and had promised there would be more.

It’s an important reminder that learning what’s in the political DNA of our partners and rivals is essential if the U.S. is to craft effective long-term partnerships and exert its influence wisely on the global stage.

Why the New CAFE Standards Are Good – But Hardly the Best Climate Policy

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Cars and trucks sold in the U.S. will have to be a little more efficient, according to new Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards released last week by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Transportation.

The new standards are largely a product of a compromise between states, the federal government and auto manufacturers last year. (Is it still a compromise if one party—the feds—owns a big chunk of another—the U.S. auto industry—and has Supremacy Clause powers over another—the states? Just asking.) They are also the end product of the Supreme Court’s Massachusetts v. EPA decision requiring the EPA to address impacts of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. The requirements appear relatively modest: the existing requirement of 35 mpg fleet average fuel economy by 2020 is moved up to 2016 and increased by 0.5 mpg.

That apparently small change can have a big impact when you consider how many cars and trucks there are in the U.S. and how long those vehicles will remain on the road. The EPA claims that the standards will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 960 million metric tons and cut U.S. auto emissions by 21 percent over business as usual by 2030. The EPA also estimates that increased up-front vehicle costs of about $1,000 will be offset over the course of each vehicle’s life by reduced fuel costs, resulting in a savings of about $3,000.

That’s good news for the environment, and good news for consumers, right? The auto industry is (at least for now) OK with the new standards, and the environmental community is generally happy as well. I think the positive spin is broadly correct — we’re better off with stricter CAFE standards than we would be without them.

That said, I’m skeptical about the size of the benefits estimated by the EPA. Performance standards, and in particular efficiency standards, are flawed policy tools — emissions benefits may be lower, and costs higher, than with the best alternative: a carbon price.

The largest problem with efficiency standards is that they encourage increased use of whatever is being made more efficient. If your car is more efficient, it’s cheaper to drive it, and you’ll probably do so more often (and for longer distances). You might even move farther away from work or make other choices that increase your fuel consumption (but not your cost — remember, you’re more efficient now). This is great for you since you get increased utility from driving more, but your vehicle emissions won’t go down as much. Even if you “save” more money over the life of the car, the added cost per unit of emissions reduction goes up. Other social costs, like traffic congestion and increased risk of accidents, go up as well. This is called the “rebound effect,” and estimating its size is the subject of significant research among economists.

The EPA is aware of this effect and, as you might expect from an 837-page rule (with a 475-page regulatory impact analysis and 215-page technical support document), accounted for it in its analysis. Both the EPA estimates of emissions reductions and of costs to consumers assume that owners of new, more efficient vehicles will drive more. Good job by the EPA, right? Maybe.

Digging deeper suggests that while the EPA is accounting for the rebound effect, it might be underestimating it. The EPA assumes the effect will be 10 percent — that is, increased driving will erase 10 percent of the emissions reductions that would otherwise be achieved. This estimate, the EPA admits, is lower than that suggested by most studies of the effect for vehicle efficiency standards in the U.S. These studies give estimates from seven percent to 75 percent, with the average around 22 percent — more than double the 10 percent the EPA chose. The EPA bases its choice on other studies that suggest that the effect declines over time and then projects that trend into the future. It’s possible the EPA is right here (they are relying in part on the most recent and well-regarded work on the subject), but it still seems like a relatively optimistic estimate. Because of this, I think it’s more likely that the EPA will have overestimated the benefits of the new standards than underestimated them.*

The EPA’s analysis has other limitations as well. For example, fuel prices are projected to increase in the future due to rising global demand and other factors. This will lead to demand for more fuel-efficient cars independent of any standards, possibly making CAFE requirements superfluous. Emissions would still go down, but CAFE standards might not deserve the credit.

For me, the worst part isn’t that the EPA might have overplayed an obscure (but important) assumption, or taken credit for something that might happen anyway. Even if they haven’t done either of these things, none of this is necessary. Pricing carbon, whether through an economy-wide cap-and-trade system, a transportation-sector only cap, or (hide the children) a higher gasoline tax, could achieve emissions gains without these perverse effects and estimation problems. These policies would increase the cost of gas — which is the point. If your reason for buying a more efficient car is a higher fuel price, there’s no incentive to drive more — there would be no rebound effect. In fact, there is a powerful incentive to drive less, reducing carbon emissions even further and giving other benefits: less congestion, fewer accidents, better air quality, etc. A gas tax or trading scheme would also be simpler, easier to administer and more transparent. It need not even hurt consumers: the revenues from permit auctions or taxes can be returned to households through lower taxes elsewhere, rebates or investments in public goods.

The reason CAFE standards, with all their problems, are and have long been our only policy option for controlling vehicle emissions has nothing to do with efficiency or good government — it’s politics. It’s not politically possible (or politicians think it’s not politically possible) to support a policy that increases prices at the pump. Instead, we hide costs in suboptimal and inefficient programs like CAFE. While it’s true that our cities and in some ways our society are built around driving, often long distances, that doesn’t mean we should hide the costs of those choices, or use second-rate policy tools because we can’t handle the truth. The politics behind CAFE are a shame, whatever benefits last week’s regulations will have.

* If you’re interested in the EPA’s decisionmaking process on the rebound effect, it’s candidly explained in Section 4.2.4 of the Technical Support Document.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/joelogon/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

When Democrats Unite

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Despite the enduring popularity of the “Democrats In Disarray” meme in certain precincts of the chattering classes, the truth is that the enactment of health reform reflected a degree of Democratic unity, resolution, and yes, accomplishment that is becoming a bit hard to ignore. Ron Brownstein’s latest National Journal column gets it straight:

After Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown’s victory in January’s Senate special election, Democrats appeared shaken to the point of panic. But, from President Obama on down, the party has rapidly regrouped–enacting health care reform, virtually daring Senate Republicans to filibuster tougher regulation of financial institutions, and challenging the GOP with last weekend’s White House announcement of recess appointments for 15 nominees stalled in the Senate. Pundits may be pelting the party with predictions of doom in November, but Democrats have apparently decided that the best defense against a resolute Republican opposition is a good offense.

More importantly, improved Democratic morale has made it easier to get some perspective on the last turbulent year, when Democratic defections in Congress were largely limited to House Members from districts that Barack Obama lost in 2008 (defections that shouldn’t be that surprising).

The governing core of the party’s House majority has been members elected from districts that Obama carried in 2008. House Democrats who represent such districts voted 199-8 for final approval of the Senate health care bill last month. Last year, they voted 201-1 for Obama’s stimulus plan, 194-1 for federal tobacco regulation, 191-8 for financial reform, and 189-15 for climate-change legislation. The Democrats elected in districts that preferred Republican presidential nominee John McCain haven’t supported Obama nearly as reliably, but Pelosi has corralled enough of them each time to pass the president’s priorities.In the Senate, the governing core is the 33 Democratic senators elected from the 18 “blue wall” states that have supported the party’s presidential nominees in at least the past five elections. In 2009, these senators collectively recorded a stunning 97 percent party unity score on the index calculated by Congressional Quarterly. Around that axis, Democratic leaders have assembled shifting coalitions of Democrats from states that are more closely divided. On the most-momentous votes — the stimulus plan and the initial health care reform package — every Senate Democrat from either camp backed Obama.

Brownstein concludes that for all the strom and stress of the last year, Obama and congressional Democrats have put together the most impressive record of accomplishment by any Democratic administration since Lyndon Johnson’s, and a degree of party unity that rivals that of Republicans in the early years of George W. Bush’s presidency. Interestingly enough, a considerable proportion of Democratic criticism of Obama has been from those arguing that he is too committed to bipartisanship in the face of ever-more-radical Republican opposition to his entire agenda. This was not a criticism made very often of George W. Bush and his political guru Karl Rove.

The problem for Democrats this November is not so much disunity as it is distraction and disinterest among voters who don’t often show up for midterm elections and who in this difficult period of American history understandably have other fish to fry. That’s why upcoming fights like financial reform and a Supreme Court nomination could be especially important: not only adding to this administrations legacy, but providing relatively unmotivated Democratic and swing voters with a graphic illustration of what could happen to the country if the GOP returns to power.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Iran Sanctions, Round 4

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

America’s hot-and-cold relationship with China just blew a little warmer. Last Wednesday, Beijing for the first time agreed to take part in drafting a UN Security Council resolution for new sanctions against Iran.

This would be the fourth round of UN sanctions aimed at pressuring Tehran to halt its nuclear program. So far, efforts to give those sanctions real bite have foundered on the implicit threat that China (and perhaps Russia) would veto them in the Security Council. Both countries have extensive economic ties with Iran, and China, invoking its own unhappy experience with European imperialism, traditionally has championed “non-interference” in other countries’ internal affairs.

So it may be significant that, having tried and largely failed to “engage” Iran on the nuclear standoff, the White House has apparently successfully engaged China to deepen Tehran’s international isolation. But there are already signs that Beijing is not quite ready to jump this particular Rubicon.

Iran’s nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, wasted no time in jetting off to Beijing for meetings with Chinese officials. “Many issues came up in talks on which China accepted Iran’s position,” Jalili told reporters. “We jointly emphasized during our talks that these sanctions tools have lost their effectiveness.”

The Chinese Foreign Ministry issued a statement that offered no hint that Beijing has changed its attitude toward Iran’s drive for nuclear capabilities, instead calling on all parties to “step up diplomatic efforts, and show flexibility, to create the conditions to resolve the Iranian nuclear issue through dialogue and negotiation.”

All this suggests we’re in for protracted haggling in the Security Council over language that, in the end, probably won’t induce the Islamic Republic to stop enriching uranium in defiance of UN strictures. The fundamental problem is not that China is indifferent to nuclear proliferation or intent on “protecting” a valuable trading partner. The fundamental problem is that China doesn’t seem ready yet to assume the responsibilities of global leadership, as we would define them.

From Sudan to Iran, China puts the amoral pursuit of its own interests – in these cases, assuring access to the energy it needs to fuel its rapid growth – ahead of larger conceptions of international cooperation and order, or even its own undoubted interest in stemming nuclear proliferation. The idea of “enlightened self-interest” that underpins U.S. internationalism has an unnatural and vaguely sinister ring to officials in the Middle Kingdom. For now at least, it’s hard to imagine the historically self-contained and inward-looking Middle Kingdom spending trillions of renminbi, say, to support a Pacific analogue to NATO, or an architecture of international institutions dedicated to collective problem-solving.

The Obama administration nonetheless deserves credit for nudging Beijing toward an outward view of global obligations commensurate with its growing geopolitical weight. But in the crunch – pressuring Iran to forsake nuclear weapons – we’d do well to have realistic expectations of how far China is really prepared to go.

Lessons from New England on a Clean Economy

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

On March 22, the Progressive Policy Institute’s E3 Initiative hosted an event in Boston, Massachusetts on New England’s best practices on stimulating and building a clean economy sector. At the event, Massachusetts Secretary of Energy and Environment Ian Bowles shared remarks on how state and federal governments and clean energy entrepreneurs can collaborate to build a vibrant clean economy.

Speakers:

The Honorable Ian Bowles
Massachusetts Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs

Will Marshall
President, Progressive Policy Institute

Mike Signer
E3 Initiative Chair and Senior Fellow, Progressive Policy Institute

New Fuel Efficiency Rules a Historic Turn for Climate Policy

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Energy and climate legislation may be stalled in Congress, but President Obama is pressing forward on another crucial, clean energy front.

In a historic first, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Transportation yesterday issued rules regulating greenhouse gas emissions from cars and light trucks. In 2007, the Supreme Court had ruled in Massachusetts v. EPA that the EPA had the authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases. That decision paved the way for last year’s determination by the agency that CO2 and other greenhouse gases were dangerous pollutants. The rules announced yesterday combine traditional efficiency standards with direct regulation of CO2 emissions from vehicles (a proxy for fuel consumption).

Under the new standards, by model year 2016 vehicles must get an average of 35.5 miles per gallon. The requirements — which represent the administration’s most significant achievement in reducing global warming pollution — are expected to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from cars by 21 percent by 2030. The announced rule was the final implementation of a deal made by the Obama administration with the auto manufacturers last year, whereby the industry would get the certainty of a national standard in exchange for dropping their extensive litigation meant to prevent California from mandating similar tailpipe emissions standards (and having a dozen or so states follow suit).

Not to take any credit, but back in 2004, Jan Mazurek and I wrote a paper for PPI titled “Clean Cars – Kicking America’s Oil Habit,” in which we argued for adopting a strong tailpipe emission approach to fuel economy. In addition to compelling environmental and national security arguments for stricter fuel efficiency rules, our motivation was to suggest a new framework beyond the broken and stale political battles over CAFE standards – the Corporate Average Fuel Economy rules that had not been raised in a generation in large part because of firm opposition from Detroit and its protectors on Capitol Hill.

We and others argued that by focusing capital and political resources on lawyers, lobbyists and the short-term political objective of defeating annual meager attempts by the environmental community to increase CAFE standards, Detroit was missing the larger vision that global automotive competiveness would be shaped in the future by innovation around fuel economy and environmental performance. We felt that the exigencies of climate change and the inevitable structural rise in fuel costs stemming from increasing global demand and the rising marginal costs of production meant that the “clean car innovators” would have an advantage in the global marketplace.

The Bush administration, after a costly “head fake” over hydrogen that caused many to take their eye off the fuel-economy ball, did propose some modest increases in CAFE standards, but they were far short of what was needed to restructure our national approach to competitiveness in the international auto marketplace, or to seriously address the economic, environmental and security threats posed by our addiction to oil.

Ultimately, it took a prostrate domestic auto industry and a high-flying new Democratic president to take serious action. The result should be seen by nearly all as a true win-win. Automakers get a national standard, we finally have a policy aimed squarely at both greenhouse gas emissions and oil dependence, and – we hope – Detroit will lay off some lobbyists while creating jobs for smart engineers.

Of course, nothing is so simple. We now see that the ultra-conservative attorney general from Virginia, in yet another pander to tea party types, has vowed to file a lawsuit challenging the new rules. (I thought it was liberals who were supposed like frivolous lawsuits?) God knows what his arguments will be, but let’s hope he comes up with a clever basis for being against jobs, innovation, increased national security and a more stable climate. Bring it on.

Iran’s Role in Iraq

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Tom Ricks, author of Fiasco and The Gamble, the two definitive contemporary histories of the Iraq War, has long said that Iran has been the biggest winner since Shock and Awe.

I’ve always been inclined to agree with him, even if there was scant overt evidence to support the claim. Sure, the U.S. military would parade allegedly Iranian-made explosives out to the media to “prove” Tehran’s support of Shi’ite Iraqi militias. And it has long been assumed that the leading figure of those Shi’ite militias, Muqtada al-Sadr, put his tail between his legs and decamped to Iran as soon as the U.S. figured out what it was doing in Baghdad. But for the first time, we have unquestionable evidence of Iran’s waxing influence on the new Iraqi government: They invited (almost all of) them over to play. Or their Shi’ite cousins anyway:

The ink was hardly dry on the polling results when three of the four major political alliances rushed delegations off to Tehran. Yet none of them sent anyone to the United States Embassy here, let alone to Washington. … The Iranians, however, have shown no such qualms, publicly urging the Shiite religious parties to bury their differences so they can use their superior numbers to choose the next prime minister. Their openness, and Washington’s reticence, is a measure of the changed political dynamic in Iraq.

The uninvited fourth major political party was Iraqiya, the largest vote-getter in last month’s election, a largely Sunni party (headed by Ayad Allawi, a secular Shia), which has the first crack at forming a government with Allawi as the new prime minister. This is, of course, provided they can stave off the latest round of politically motivated witch-hunting. Incumbent PM Nouri al-Maliki is fighting for his political life, and has come out swinging. He’s trying to make it as difficult as possible for Iraqiya to capitalize on its victory by having the national election commission — a body Maliki essentially controls — begin to disqualify other Iraqiya candidates on the shaky grounds that they were members of Saddam Hussein’s old Ba’ath Party. When combined with Iran’s efforts to broker peace between the Shi’ite parties, this is the best hope Tehran has of getting a large, friendly, Shi’ite majority and prime minister in Baghdad.

Will it work? It’s obviously way too early to say. The U.S. is trying to toe a razor thin line between respecting a democratic process they created and cultivating the new government (no matter who runs it) against Iranian influence. But while Tehran’s overtures are worrisome to say the least, the U.S. will continue to hold plenty of cards in the poker game of Iraqi politics. That’s because if Mr. Allawi isn’t the next prime minister, the current one will be.

That leads to two consoling final thoughts: the U.S. will continue to have strong pull with whoever is in charge, and is legally scheduled to get out anyway. In essence, Iran’s influence may be increasing, but that doesn’t mean it’s coming at the expense of America’s.

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

Exploding a Stimulus “Study”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

It’s considered gospel truth in many conservative circles that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, a.k.a. the “economic stimulus package,” was just a porkfest aimed at buying votes or rewarding Democratic constitutencies at the expense of good, virtuous taxpayers and their grandchirren. In support of this hypothesis, Veronique de Rugy of George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, and a regular contributor to conservative and libertarian magazines and web sites, recently wrote a “study” designed to show that ARRA dollars went disproportionately to districts represented by Democrats and/or that voted for Obama in 2008, regardless of their actual economic needs. De Rugy helpfully touted her study at National Review’s The Corner yesterday, for the edification of those who look to that blog for talking points.

Looks like she should probably have kept the paper to herself. Nate Silver of 538.com took a look at it, and pretty much demolished it today.

Turns out that de Rugy didn’t notice, or didn’t mention, that most of the “Democratic districts” that show up in her study as the top recipients of ARRA dollars happen to contain state capitals. Thus, ARRA spending designed to benefit states as a whole (the Medicaid super-match, school improvement incentives, state infrastructure grants, the state “flexibility” funds, etc.) are attributed by her to individual districts. She also ignored economic indicators showing poverty and local unemployment, which may or may not be correlated with Democratic voting habits, but which certainly indicate actual need.

I hear through the grapevine that de Rugy plans to respond to Nate’s demolition job at some point. If she manages to climb out of this crater, I’ll certainly be impressed.

The larger point, though, is that without Nate’s intervention (and perhaps even after it), conservatives would be gleefully citing de Rugy’s bottom line “findings” as “proof” that ARRA was what they always said it was. She is, after all, an academic thinker, and her “study” is impressive-looking, with lots of footnotes and scatter plot charts. I’m not saying that conservatives are alone in conducting this sort of skewed and deeply flawed “research,” or in citing it without examination. But that doesn’t excuse it for even a moment, particularly when the “researcher” is out there circulating the stuff as agitprop for the chattering classes before the ink is even dry.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

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

To Have and to Have Not

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Longtime political reporter Tom Edsall has a long and fascinating piece of analysis up at The Atlantic on the present and future shape of the two major party coalitions. While none of the data he discusses is terribly surprising, he does suggest some real internal problems with the emerging Republican coalition, which is increasingly made of up married white folks, but includes those who are “haves” only because they “have” government benefits that are perceived as vulnerable to budgetary competition from “have-nots”:

It’s entirely possible that, if the deficit forces continued zero-sum calculations, the definition of the center-right coalition of “haves” will be expanded beyond its original boundaries, stretching past the wealthy, the managerial and business class, the gun owners, the anti-taxers, the home schoolers, the property rights-ers, the Western ranchers, Christian evangelicals, and the self-employed to begin to include members of what conservative operative Grover Norquist called the “takings” coalition — men or women who get federal benefits. A Republican Party hungry for victory would welcome as new members Social Security and Medicare recipients  — “takers” who simultaneously consider themselves part of the universe of “haves” and of Norquist’s “leave us alone coalition.”

Add in people who are self-consciously dependent on federal defense spending, and you can see how a Republican coalition of public- and private-sector “haves” could be formidable if not terribly stable.

Demographic trends, though, are very dangerous for the GOP, as this Edsall nugget shows:

While there is no doubt that the increase in the number of racial and ethnic minority voters works to the advantage of the liberal coalition, white voters remain a wild card. In 2008, whites made up 74 percent of the electorate, and McCain carried them 55-43. There are precedents for much higher Republican margins: in 1972, Nixon carried 67 percent of the white vote, and in 1984 Reagan won 64 percent. Conversely, Bill Clinton only lost the white vote by one percentage point to George H. W. Bush in 1992. The one clear conclusion to draw from these figures is that if the GOP is unwilling to make major policy shifts, especially on immigration reform, a crucial issue to many Hispanics, the party will have to drive its margins among white voters back up to the Nixon-Reagan levels.

If anything, the current pressure on the GOP from its rank-and-file, including the Tea Party Movement, is in the opposite direction from any position on immigration policy that could attract Hispanics. So there will be a strong temptation on the Right for indulging heavily in what might be called White Identity Politics. In light of Edsall’s insight on the “haves” in the GOP coalition who are dependent on government spending, White Identity Politics could involve racially tinged distinctions between the “deserved” government benefits received by white middle-class retirees and the “undeserved” government benefits received or sought by poorer or darker folk. That’s a dynamic that’s already been abundantly apparent in the Republican assault on health reform.

Looks like today’s political turbulence will be with us for quite a while, particularly if relatively high unemployment and budget deficits persist, accentuating the zero-sum politics of group competition that Edsall sees in the data.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Greenhouse Gas Permits Won’t Be Required Until 2011

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) this week announced that it would not require greenhouse gas emitters to get permits until 2011, a decision that sets the stage for the administration’s regulation of greenhouse gases in the absence of climate change legislation. I posted recently on the EPA’s reconsideration of the “Johnson Memo,” a piece of regulatory arcana that determines when pollutant emitters have to get permits under the Clean Air Act for new plants or major upgrades to existing plants. The EPA’s final version of the memo (cheat sheet here) shows an agency that’s attempting to juggle several imperatives: congressional concerns, industry pressure, and its own mandate to regulate greenhouse gases as a pollutant.

Under the Clean Air Act, major emitters — those that release more than 250 tons of pollutants into the atmosphere — have to get permits that include analysis of all the pollutants they emit. With the EPA’s endangerment ruling — which classified carbon dioxide as a dangerous pollutant — big emitters will soon have to include greenhouse gas analysis in their permit applications. These permits are time-consuming and expensive, and industry is very concerned about their impact.

As always, politics plays a role. Strictly interpreted, the Clean Air Act would impose big burdens on lots of emitters through a permit process that isn’t really set up to deal with the scale and volume of greenhouse gas permits required. Industry is spooked by the process, but so are the state regulators who would have to issue many of the permits. The EPA itself also doesn’t think a full-scale, immediate permit requirement is workable.

The result is a series of compromises. The most well-known is the “tailoring rule,” in which the EPA is limiting the permit requirement to big emitters (really big emitters, according to the EPA’s latest statements). The Johnson memo revision strikes another compromise by delaying the permit requirement until 2011, when the EPA claims its new mobile-source rules will enter into effect.*

I think these recent moves are partly in response to pressure from Congress. Congress, in proposals by Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), has threatened to take away the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases (for mobile sources, stationary sources, or both). Part of this is driven by fears among industry and on the Hill that the EPA would wreak havoc on the economy with greenhouse gas permit requirements. By moderating the impact of these requirements, the EPA is trying to comply with the Clean Air Act and achieve its environmental goals while appeasing the congressional dragon. To be sure, the EPA and state agencies are probably concerned about their own ability to handle the permit requirements and would benefit from more time, but I think congressional pressure is a big factor. One piece of evidence is that EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announced these moves first in a letter to Sen. Rockefeller.

You could characterize this series of events as influence by special interests behind the scenes, undermining an EPA regulatory program without a congressional vote. I think there’s a more benign balance-of-powers story, though. In regulating air pollution the EPA has used Clean Air Act powers delegated from Congress, and it has now followed the Supreme Court’s Massachusetts v. EPA decision affirming that those powers extend to greenhouse gases. This has led to a problem, however: it was hardly realistic to regulate every single emitter of carbon in the economy. The agency realized that to do so would create problems for itself and would be a political non-starter. Congress aside, it’s unlikely even Administrator Jackson or her boss, President Obama, would find much value in a draconian permit scheme, so the EPA proposed a solution — the tailoring rule. Congress continued to push back with some legislative saber-rattling, and the EPA moderated its approach a little further by expanding the tailoring rule and delaying the permit requirement. Time will tell whether that is enough to forestall congressional action against EPA, but it appears to be sufficient for now.

This isn’t ideal, but it’s regulatory government at work. In a real way, however awkward, politicized and bureaucratic, the three branches of government have had a conversation of sorts on climate policy. A compromise seems to have been reached. Of course, new climate legislation would be much better — not only because of its Schoolhouse Rock clarity but because of the superior policy mechanisms that Congress has the power to implement.

* This is because the rules apply to model-year 2012 cars and trucks. A 2010 rule applies in 2011 to 2012 vehicles. Only in Washington…

“About” Race

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

A perennial issue that’s been bubbling up a lot since the rise of Barack Obama has been whether and when it’s fair for progressives to suspect racial motives in conservative political appeals. Obama’s race has made the subject pretty much unavoidable, but the special ferocity of conservative reactions to Obama’s candidacy, presidency and policies has raised the possibility that something a bit unusual is going on. But if the subject ever comes up, conservatives now angrily accuse their accusers of “playing the race card,” as though the issue is by definition illegitimate or demagogic.

Frank Rich of the New York Times stirred up the latest contretemps with a column that suggested the heat behind much of the grassroots anger towards Obama comes at least in part from “fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country” — e.g., white men. At RealClearPolitics, a noted analyst of and sometimes advocate for the political views of white men, David Paul Kuhn, issued a response that accused not only Rich but “liberal elites” of perpetually playing the race card in order to ignore or dismiss legitimate discontent with liberal policies.

I have no interest in adjudicating the Rich/Kuhn dispute, other than to say that Rich is clearly imprecise in his attribution of semi-racist motives to conservatives, and that Kuhn trumps that mistake by pretending that Rich has accused every single white person who doesn’t approve of Obama’s job performance of being a racist.

I am interested in Kuhn’s broader argument, which is pretty characteristic of conservative “race card” rhetoric. His standard on this subject seems to be that if there is any possible non-racial motive for a political posture, then it’s irresponsible to impute any racial motives, not just today, but in the past:

For decades, leading liberals explained white concerns about urban upheaval, crime, welfare, school busing, affirmative action and more recently, illegal immigration, as rooted in racism. Not safer streets or safer schools. Not concern about taxes for welfare, as working class whites (like all races) struggled in their hardscrabble lives. Not regular men who never knew “white male privilege” but were on the losing end of affirmative action (recall Frank Ricci). Not job competition or economic class. Instead, leading liberals constantly saw the color of the issue as the only issue.

I don’t know which “leading liberals” he’s talking about, but generally speaking, that’s just not true. “Liberals” have typically viewed conservative appeals on issues like crime, welfare, busing, affirmative action, welfare and immigration as designed to play on both racial and non-racial fears and concerns. Kuhn, however, seems to think so long as there is an available non-racial motive for a “concern,” then examining possible racial motives is out of bounds. It’s got to be one thing or another — all race, or all something more noble-sounding or at least less disreputable.

It doesn’t take a lot of deep thinking, or “liberalism,” for that matter, to understand the folly of this approach. Self-conscious, highly-motivated racists do not often proclaim their racism these days, precisely because it is disreputable and does not win friends or influence people. And even back when open racism was more common, racists often denied racism as a primary motive (viz., Confederate and neo-Confederate claims that secession was not “about” slavery, but about states’ rights, constitutional protections for private property, southern “culture,” anti-capitalism, or regional honor — anything other than the ownership of other human beings). And during the more recent period of southern resistance to civil rights, which I experienced personally, and whose constitutional “theories” have been so avidly seized upon by many of today’s conservative activists, you didn’t hear much talk about segregation as a means of subjecting black folk as inferior. It was all about “racial peace,” and “the southern way of life,” and again, state’s rights and constitutional protections for private property. And it didn’t fool a soul.

If David Paul Kuhn really believes that antagonism to busing, affirmative action, welfare and immigration did not have any racial content, or that conservative appeals on these issues (which, as far back as George Wallace’s 1968 presidential campaign, always avoided overt racial language) did not count on racial resentment as one factor for their success, he’s living in a land innocent of actual experience with human beings.

If he doesn’t believe that, and has at least one foot in the real world where racial motives coincide with others, then the issue is not some sweeping effort to delegitimize the “race card,” but an examination of when political appeals cross the line into deliberate efforts to promote white racial resentment.

I’d say, for example, that the strange centrality of the (now-defunct) inner-city advocacy group ACORN in recent conservative demonology is hard to understand as anything other than a deliberate dog whistle to racist sentiments. According to an awful lot of right-wing rhetoric, ACORN’s housing advocacy for poor and mainly black people helped create the mortgage finance crisis, which led to the financial collapse, which in turn led to demands by poor and minority people for relief, which then led to a wholesale socialist agenda, promoted by a black politician who worked with ACORN in Chicago, who counted on ACORN-secured fradulent votes for his election. Elements of this ACORN Derangement Syndrome made it into McCain-Palin campaign ads and speeches, and also fed the Republican-led drive in Congress to “defund ACORN” last year. Polls have shown a remarkable degree of rank-and-file Republican fixation on ACORN.

Is it possible to believe or promote these preposterous things about ACORN’s vast and sinister influence while being innocent of racial motives? I guess so, but it’s most unlikely, given the organization’s inner-city focus, inner-city staffing and inner-city clientele. Why pick ACORN as the center of this conspiracy if you don’t want to paint it black? Beats me.

A closer call is the return of conservative “anti-welfare” rhetoric, generally abandoned after the 1996 national welfare reform law. It popped up first in Republican (and McCain) attacks on Obama’s campaign proposals (particularly for an increase in the Earned Income Tax Credit for the working poor), and then during the health reform fight. Recent conservative discussion of the the EITC as “welfare,” enabling people to vote for more benefits without paying taxes (not really true, since working poor families still pay heavily regressive federal payroll taxes), has been interesting because that rhetoric was rebuked by none other than George W. Bush when Tom DeLay raised it back in 1999. Combined with the “welfare queen” treatment of minority families who supposedly took out mortgages they couldn’t afford, triggering the mortgage crisis, the 2008 “anti-welfare” rhetoric sure looked suspiciously racial. And there’s nothing illegitimate, either, about wondering if the “undeserved” beneficiaries of mortgage relief or health care benefits might look a little dusky in the eyes of resentful middle-class voters who are being encouraged to oppose this sort of socialist looting.

The bottom line is that anti-Obama appeals aren’t just “about” race, but it’s naive to think they are just “about” everything else. He is, after all, the living embodiment of the elite-underclass “liberal alliance” that conservatives have been warning white middle-class folks about for several decades now. At an absolute minimum, conservatives ought to accept responsibility for the racial sentiments their rhetoric can sometimes stimulate, and try to avoid such appeals, instead of simply intoning “race card” and trying to shut down any discussion of the subject.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

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