A little over a week ago, I praised Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) for working with Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) to come up with some bipartisan improvements to the financial regulatory reform package that Senate Banking Committee Chair Chris Dodd (D-CT) is looking to get through the Senate in time for Memorial Day. I may have spoken too soon. Corker said yesterday:
“I couldn’t support the bill in its current form,” Mr. Corker said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “I am absolutely not throwing in the towel. I have no plans to support the current legislation. I hope we’ll get back to the negotiating table.”
This is, of course, a familiar tactic. After a year of being actively courted by the administration and Democrats, congressional Republicans claimed they couldn’t support health care reform, but were willing to stall further by espousing an interest in negotiating. But despite Corker’s backing away from a bill that as recently a last week he said he thought was going to pass, it’s worth sticking to the principle of a bill with bipartisan ideas.
The big idea that Warner and Corker worked on was including an autonomous Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) as part of the Federal Reserve System. While sticking the CFPA in the Fed is an ungainly solution, it does have the benefit of giving the CFPA start-up funding through the Fed’s balance sheet. Additionally, creating a brand-new agency out of the parts of others does have the chance of echoing the struggles the Department of Homeland Security had getting off the ground, a fate a Fed-housed CFPA can avoid.
Senate Democrats shouldn’t bend over backwards and try to pass a flawed bill in the hopes of convincing Republicans to get on board. But neither should they give up on looking for broad-based support for meaningful reform.
Via TPM, I learned that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar went on CNBC today and said the administration would no longer be using the term “cap-and-trade” for its climate change proposals.
This decision does not appear to mean any change in the actual proposal, which would still presumably involve placing a “cap” on carbon emissions and then creating a system whereby credits for exceeding carbon goals could be “traded,” thus creating market incentives for pollution control efforts and technology. It’s the label that seems to be the problem, probably because conservatives have taken to calling it “cap-and-tax.”
I can sympathize with the rebranding effort (though it’s not clear what the new moniker will be). We at PPI — early proponents of “cap and trade” — spent years trying, without a lot of success, to find simple ways to explain the cap-and-trade approach to carbon emissions. It wasn’t as hard as, say, trying to write descriptions of the “revolution in military affairs,” another perennial head-scratcher, but it was never possible to capture it on a bumper sticker.
It probably doesn’t matter, so long as the administration and congressional proponents continue to make it clear that cap-and-whatever is a way to limit potentially catastrophic carbon emissions while employing market mechanisms to create incentives for private-sector innovations in clean energy technology. It is, indeed, the kind of market-friendly alternative to command-and-control environmental regulations that conservatives ought to find attractive, and often have in the past. But it’s the substance, not the politics, of this approach, that really matters, and that will remain regardless of the marketing.
Tuesday’s Moscow attacks may do more to define the path of Russia’s future as a democracy than any single event since 1991. In a worst-case scenario, Vladimir Putin could return to the presidency. A sunnier forecast sees popular sentiment rising against Putin – and the emergence of a wild card that could lead the way to real change in Russia.
Hyperbolic? Sure, but certainly within the realm of possibility. Three things worth noting:
First, after the tragic Beslan school attack in 2004, then-President (and current Prime Minister) Putin used the event as a catalyst to execute a political power-grab in the name of national security. Most glaringly, Putin canceled the election of regional governors and chose to appoint them himself, thus consolidating power in the president’s hands. This was, as I mentioned yesterday, akin to George W. Bush canceling all elections for state governor in the wake of 9/11. That’s downright crazy. So Putin has set the power-grabbing precedent following past acts of terror — might he do so again?
Second, anecdotal evidence suggests the public may be starting to tire of Putin’s act. Ilya Yashin, a self-described youth activist, makes the point that since Putin has concentrated so much power in his own hands, “he is responsible for everything that happens in our country” and should therefore be held accountable for the latest attacks. “Not long ago Putin promised an end to terrorist acts in Russian cities and a military victory over terrorism. For this we gave up our political rights and civil liberties. We gave up the right to elect governors,” Yashin said.
Will this gently percolating anti-Putin sentiment boil over once Russians add concerns over security to concerns over a stagnating economy, as Josh Tucker and I wrote last year?
And then there’s the wild card: President Dmitri Medvedev. Let’s not forget that Putin may have handpicked Medvedev as his presidential successor, but Medvedev has shown an inclination to be open and possibly more pro-Western, having never been involved with the ex-KGB cadre that surrounds Putin. What’s more, Medvedev has distanced himself slightly from Putin’s Caucasus strategy, saying (from NYT) that the government should aggressively hunt down the terrorists, but also focus on the poverty and government malfeasance that he contended nurtured extremism.
Weighing these factors, I can envision two distinct outcomes for Russian democracy.
1. Putin brazenly unmasks himself as Medvedev’s puppet master. He uses the Beslan precedent and Moscow bombings to justify another round of power consolidation, saying that the last round had clearly not been effective enough. He crushes any sort of domestic civil opposition and launches a drive to change the Russian constitution to allow him to run for another term as president. Medvedev proves powerless to object and is slowly moved off to the side.
2. Medvedev realizes he has a potentially strong domestic political constituency as a resolute but smart antiterrorism president. He offers a different strategy to Russians to deal with the threat and successfully distances himself from Putin while effectively holding off Putin’s attempts to grab power.
Much of the outcome rests with Medvedev’s desire and ability to be independent from the man who picked him. I’m hopeful for the second, but my money is on the first.
The craziness surrounding futile efforts to overturn health reform via lawsuits reached a new crescendo in Georgia yesterday, when Republicans in the state House introduced articles of impeachment against Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker. You see, Baker (a Democrat) refused to join Republican Attorneys General who are launching a suit charging that federal health reform is unconstitutional. He argued (very accurately) that the suits have no change of succeeding, and that pursuing them would be a waste of time and money. Republicans claim he’s required to file suit at the request of Republican Gov. Sonny Perdue.
By threatening impeachment on such transparently partisan grounds, GOPers are probably doing Baker a big favor: he’s running for governor, and has been trailing former Gov. Roy Barnes in the polls. In addition, there’s something a bit attention-grabbing about the spectacle of Republicans demanding that an African-American statewide official embrace neo-Confederate constitutional theories on “state’s rights” grounds.
As Eric Kleefield of TPM has noted, the “massive resistance” approach to health reform has already become a litmus test for conservative Republicans, right up there with criminalizing abortion and defending trust fund babies against “death taxes.” So get used to it; they just can’t help themselves any more.
How did America get to where it is today, a country with the slowest and most threadbare intercity passenger rail service of any advanced nation?
Not so very long ago, we were not in this humiliating position. In fact, we operated trains that amazed and impressed the rest of the world. These trains were called streamliners, and their very names – Silver Meteor, Flying Yankee, Rocky Mountain Rocket, Denver Zephyr – connoted speed and luxury. In the period between 1935 and 1950, the 10 fastest scheduled passenger trains in the world were all U.S. streamliners.
One of the great racetracks of this period was the New York Central Railroad’s four-track mainline between Buffalo and Cleveland. Paging through an old timetable, I counted 42 daily passenger trains running on this line in the 1940s. Such trains as the Commodore Vanderbilt, Fifth Avenue Special and the extra-fare choice of tycoons and Hollywood starlets, The 20th Century Limited, routinely topped 90 miles per hour on straightaways and averaged 60-65 mph, including station stops.
The 187 miles between Buffalo and Cleveland were covered in 3 hours then. Today, the sole passenger train traveling this route, Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited,takes3½ hours, if (and this is a big if) the train is on schedule.
The Rise and Fall of American Rail
What differentiated our streamliners from contemporary trains in Europe and Asia was advanced technology. American railroads and equipment suppliers had not only pioneered the diesel-electric locomotive in the 1930s – a quantum leap over from the old steam locomotive – but introduced lightweight cars with better wheel sets, couplers, braking systems and lower centers of gravity to negotiate curves at higher speeds.
The interiors of these streamliners abounded in creature comforts – wide double-paned windows, recessed fluorescent lighting, luxurious reclining seats and the first air-conditioning found in any commercial transport.
Streamliners attracted customers by the carload. In fact, they made money. Wall Street consultants Coverdale & Colpitts surveyed 58 streamliners in 1948 and found that they grossed $98 million and netted $48 million after out-of-pocket costs, for a return of 49 percent.*
And then almost as quickly as the streamliner era flourished, it ended. There were a number of reasons for the rapid decline of rail passenger service, but the overwhelming factor was the explosion of government funding for new highways and airports. In 1956, Dwight Eisenhower signed the Interstate and Defense Highways Act. First estimated to cost $27 billion, the Interstate system took more than 30 years and $200 billion to complete. At the same time, state and local governments bankrolled airport construction, while Washington subsidized air carriers by fixing artificially high rates for U.S. airmail contracts.
The twin impact of airways and roadways was devastating on American railroads, which, after all, were private companies that paid property taxes and ticket taxes on their operations. For example, between 1956 and 1969, a total of 28,800 miles of interstate highways were opened to traffic. In the same period, 59,400 miles of railroad were taken out of passenger service.
From 2,500 daily intercity trains in 1954 (that’s excluding commuter service), fewer than 500 trains were left when the National Railroad Passenger Corp., or Amtrak, took over intercity rail service in 1971. Outside of the Boston-Washington Northeast Corridor, America’s passenger train had virtually disappeared.
American Technology Goes Abroad
So carelessly tossed away by our policymakers and politicians, the American streamliner did not simply die during those dismal decades of the 1950s and 1960s. Instead, it rose from the ashes as its key technological features moved overseas, welcomed by a visionary group of railroaders.
An all-electric test train ordered by Louis Armand, head of the French national railway, shattered world records with 208-mph speeds in March 1955. This achievement proved the capacity of rail equipment using overhead electricity for propulsion to operate far above 100 mph on a sustained basis.
The French experiments inspired Japan’s Minister of Transport Shinhi Sogo. In 1956, the same year that President Eisenhower signed the Interstate Highways Act, Sogo began planning a rail line without sharp curves or up and down grades that would permit streamlined, all-electric trains to run at extremely high speeds with utmost safety
To operate the Shinkansen, or “New Trunk Line,” between Tokyo and Osaka, Sogo actively imported technology from America, including the two-axle trucks of the Budd Manufacturing Co. and dynamic braking pioneered by General Motors’ Electro-Motive Division. To top it off, the Japan ordered the most advanced computer used outside of military applications (built by yet another American company, Bendix) to operate the line’s signal and dispatching systems.
Remarkably, the U.S. government gave Japan foreign aid – money purportedly going to an underdeveloped country – to build a rail infrastructure far superior to our own. Opened in time for the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, the first Shinkansen train traveled at a maximum of 125 mph. The latest-generation Shinkansen runs at 188 mph, and its ancestor is in a museum.
Japan wasn’t alone. After developing moderately high-speed trains on mixed freight-and-passenger lines, France opened Europe’s first all-new railroad between Paris and Lyon in 1981. This route featured the now-famous TGVs, or “Trains of Great Speed.” Six thousand of 20,000 rail miles in France are now covered by TGV trains. High-speed service has expanded into Belgium, Germany, Holland, Italy, Switzerland and Spain in Europe and in China, South Korea and Taiwan in Asia.
Playing Catch-Up
Compared to these developments, we’re still in the horse-and-buggy stage. Amtrak’s self-declared high-speed line, the Northeast Corridor, does not even qualify as high speed by world standards. The Acela Express is designed for 150 mph, but only goes that fast for about 25 miles in Rhode Island.
Overall, Acela trains average only 67 mph between Boston and New York. South of New York, Acela operates at an average of 77 mph and can’t go faster than 125 mph anywhere because the overhead electric wires are obsolete and can slip off the train’s pantographs at higher speeds.
This is what happens when you starve a business for 60 years. It becomes stunted. Our passenger rail system is stunted today not because of some inevitable law of economics or natural outgrowth of competition. It’s stunted because of longstanding government policy that thoughtlessly, absentmindedly, let some wonderful American-made technology slip away.
This piece is an excerpt from Mark Reutter’s keynote address at the High-Speed Rail Summit last week in Erie, Pa.
* “Streamliners Earn More Than Ever,” Railway Age, March 4, 1950.
In the run-up to health care reform’s passage, many people (including yours truly) predicted that the president’s approval ratings would see a bump once the bill passed. Bill Clinton went out on a limb and forecast a 10-point bounce. And in the days immediately following passage, Obama’s approval ratings did seem to nudge up a little.
More than a week later, however, Obama’s approval ratings seem to have been little changed:
Democrats who held out hopes that President Barack Obama’s health reform win would mean a quick boost to the party’s political fortunes are getting a reality check — a reminder that it takes more than one good week to shake up a year of sliding polls.
Obama and his health reform plan did get a bump in several surveys immediately after the House vote eight days ago — but the numbers in some of those polls flattened out, showing how difficult it will be for Obama to capitalize on reform, even after his top legislative goal cleared Congress.
Even the bounce for the plan itself has proven evanescent. A USA Today/Gallup poll immediately after passage found 49 percent favoring it versus 40 percent against, an improvement from earlier polls. But the newest USA Today/Gallup poll now finds a 47-50 favor/oppose split. An aggregate of polls on health care finds little movement from the pre-passage days.
How to read the numbers? For one thing, it reveals just how divisive the health reform debate has been. After months of Republicans demonizing the plan as the next stage in Obama’s grand totalitarian scheme, it’s no surprise that a week-plus of good news cycles has done little to change public opinion.
But perhaps the more important lesson here is just how much the economy overrides everything right now. With the employment situation still dismal and the recovery yet to manifest itself on Main Street, the public mood is still understandably sour.
In a blog post yesterday, Charles Franklin repeated an observation he made earlier — that Obama’s public approval ratings, and the forces influencing it, track very closely with what we saw with Ronald Reagan:
The short version is both come in with inherited economic troubles that don’t turn around miraculously in the first 24 months. Both replace deeply unpopular predecessors, and suffer from high expectations in comparison. And both set out to dramatically change the direction of national policy. Reagan suffered substantial losses in the House in his first midterm (26 seats lost), and Obama looks headed to similar if not larger losses in 2010.
So how is the analogy holding up? In approval terms, still quite well. The two continue to track rather well. Obama has occasionally been slightly below and recently slightly above Reagan’s trend, but the parallel movement remains striking. Likewise, their relative location compared to other first term post-war presidents continues to drive home the point that these have been (so far) among the lowest approval ratings in the first 24 months.
One bright spot for Democrats is that the economy seems to be turning earlier for Obama than it did for Reagan. Even though unemployment has not yet begun its descent, the upward trend in GDP is a hopeful sign. (According to Franklin, GDP is “consistently a better predictor of midterm outcomes than is unemployment,” counterintuitive though that may seem.)
The other bright spot for Dems comes from a closer look at the polling numbers. Though the overall numbers have seen little improvement, Democratic enthusiasm seems to have been buoyed by health reform’s passage. In a midterm election, when traditionally low turnout puts even greater pressure on a party to bring its faithful to the polls, a depressed base would have been disastrous for Democrats. Obviously, the Republican rank-and-file will be fired up for November. But now, at least, the Democrats can make a fight of it with its own energized base.
Back at the beginning of the year, I wrote a piece suggesting that putative 2012 Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney might have a hard time overcoming his sponsorship of a form of health care reform in Massachusetts that was impressively similar to that great socialist abomination, ObamaCare. This has now become a pretty common refrain in the early 2012 handicapping (viz. this Jonathan Martin-Ben Smith item in Politico yesterday), to the point where the estimable Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic posted a rebuttal to the Mitt-as-toast hypothesis yesterday.
Ambinder made four reasonable points about Romney’s potential viability regardless of RomneyCare. Let’s consider them in order:
(1) RomneyCare may look more successful by 2012. I don’t think the problem with RomneyCare is that it’s unpopular on unsuccessful in MA; it’s that it bears a lot of resemblence to ObamaCare, which is by definition, regardless of public opinion or objective reality, a horror to the kind of people who participate in Republican presidential primaries.
(2) Health care may not be a transcendent Republican issue by 2012 (just as the Iraq War began to recede once the 2008 Democratic contest reached its climax). Sure, other major issues of importance to Republican primary-goers may emerge, but until such time, if ever, health reform is repealed, there is virtually no chance that it will be forgotten by 2012 (and it can’t be repealed before then unless Republicans win every single Senate race this year and also win two-thirds of the House). If the Iraq War is a suitable analogy, as Ambinder suggests, I think it’s indisputable that Barack Obama would have never emerged as a viable presidential candidate in 2008 if Hillary Clinton hadn’t voted for the war resolution and then refused to say she made a mistake by doing so. Other issues mattered, but that was the big threshold issue. (One of my fellow Mitt-o-skeptics, Jonathan Chait, did a response to Ambinder today that mainly focuses on his own belief that RomneyCare will actually be a bigger issue for Republicans in the future than it is today.)
(3) The Republican nominating process is “hierarchical,” and especially favorable to establishment favorites like Romney. This is something you hear all the time, and it’s valid in the very limited sense that the rules for awarding delegates in Republican contests don’t demand strict proportionality, and thus help front-runners consolidate early victories. But in 2012, as in 2008, Mitt’s problem could be getting out of the gate, not finishing off the field. Recall that in Iowa in 2008, he couldn’t survive what was basically a one-on-one contest with Mike Huckabee, despite a vast financial advantage and endorsements from most of the local GOP establishment, and even though he was running as the “true conservative” in the race. None of Romney’s problems from 2008 (a wooden speaking style, a history of flip-flops on cultural issues, his religion, his history as a corporate downsizer) have gone away, and it’s very likely the Iowa Caucuses will be even more dominated by cultural conservatives than ever, given the huge importance of the gay marriage issue to conservatives in that state. Add in RomneyCare, and the odds look pretty bad; skipping Iowa like McCain did is a possibility, but would also give another candidate a good chance to become the early front-runner, going into two states (Michigan and New Hampshire) that Romney can’t lose and still have a prayer for the nomination.
(4) Romney is just too reasonable and accomplished a candidate to get knocked out by one issue. Maybe so, but as noted above, he has more than one problem, and as it happens, “one issue” — in fact, one utterance — knocked Mitt’s father, George, out of the 1968 presidential contest, and his resume was if anything stronger than his son’s. If I were a Republican, I’d actually be worried that Mitt’s sitting there soaking up attention endorsements, and poll numbers that could go to some attractive darkhorse candidate, leaving the GOP with a very weak field if he does go belly-up. And you don’t have to be a total Democratic partisan to observe that Republicans aren’t disposed at the moment to be completely rational about their choice of candidates: a recent PPP survey suggested that nearly as many rank-and-file Republicans think it’s more important to nominate a candidate who is “conservative on every issue” as those who think it’s more important to nominate someone “who can beat Barack Obama.”
In any event, will all due respect to Marc Ambinder (who may simply be playing devil’s advocate), I’d say the burden of persuasion should be on those who think Mitt Romney’s stronger than he was in 2008 than on those who think he’s in very deep trouble thanks to RomneyCare.
While the Moscow bombings have brought out fighting words and suggestions of a scorched-earth response from Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin – a reaction that I cautioned against in my previous post – President Obama’s has been perfectly pitched. He has expressed solidarity with the Russian people and sympathy for the killed and injured. The president has made a notable attempt to distance himself from overly emotional Bush/Putin-style rhetoric about terrorism, reasoning (correctly in my mind) that pounding a fist on the table and screaming about revenge only plays into the terrorists’ hands.
I would urge one note of caution, however. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, appearing on Canadian television, compared the Moscow terrorist attack to those in the West: “We face a common enemy, whether you’re in a Moscow subway or a London subway or a train in Madrid, or an office building in New York, we face the same enemy.” I’d counsel the State Department to be a bit more nuanced here. True, one can argue that the ultimate motivation in all these attacks was to establish part of the Muslim caliphate that stretched from North Africa to Southeast Asia. But it’s a tricky argument to make when part of the history of that motivation is independence from Moscow (whether you’re a pure separatist or one motivated by Muslim ideology).
Endorsing a “common enemy” might encourage the Kremlin to continue heavy-handed tactics against its own people, not to mention attempting to retroactively justify, say, the invasion of Georgia by conflating it with terrorist motivations. Or, to continue Putin’s 2004-2005 precedent, throw language like this back into American faces when he uses it to justify another power-grab…like his return to the presidency. Seriously — he’s not above it, and this might be exactly what’s coming.
Foggy Bottom should be clear on these distinctions about a common enemy, particularly when there’s no evidence of direct al Qaeda involvement in the Moscow bombings.
Over the weekend Ron Brownstein wrote up the nightmare scenario for Democrats in terms of their appeal to white working class voters:
[P]olling just before the [health reform] bill’s approval showed that most white Americans believed that the legislation would primarily benefit the uninsured and the poor, not people like them. In a mid-March Gallup survey, 57 percent of white respondents said that the bill would make things better for the uninsured, and 52 percent said that it would improve conditions for low-income families. But only one-third of whites said that it would benefit the country overall — and just one-fifth said that it would help their own family….Obama has already been hurt by the perception, fanned by Republicans, that the principal beneficiaries of his efforts to repair the economy are the same interests that broke it: Wall Street, big banks, and the wealthy. The belief that Washington has transferred benefits up the income ladder is pervasive across society but especially pronounced among white voters with less than a college education, the group that most resisted Obama in 2008. Now health care could threaten Democrats from the opposite direction by stoking old fears, particularly among the white working class, that liberals are transferring income down the income ladder to the “less deserving.”
Brownstein calls this dynamic “an unusual populist crossfire.” The antidote, he suggests, might be two-fold: continuing to stress the benefits for the middle class, and to the country, of health reform, while spending more time reinforcing a Democratic message on the economy and the financial system that makes Republicans, not Democrats, defenders of Wall Street and the wealthy. The White House and congressional Democrats seem to be moving briskly on both those fronts, and how well they succeed could be fateful in November. At the same time, it wouldn’t hurt to make sure that perceptions (which Brownstein also documents) by poor and minority voters that health reform does in fact help them and help the country produce a greater willingness to vote this year than would normally be the case in a midterm election.
Nearly 36 hours after the attacks in Moscow’s subway system, reports indicate that nearly 40 are dead and more than 70 have been injured. As of this writing, no group has claimed responsibility, though heavy suspicion has fallen on Muslim separatist groups based in southern Russia’s Caucasus region, the primary source of terrorism in Russia since the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. More on that in a second.
There were two bombings, conducted quasi-simultaneously (about 40 minutes apart) at two busy metro stations in Moscow’s city center. The Lubyanka station is located near the headquarters of Russia’s Federal Security Service (the legacy organization of the KGB), which points to a message the attackers may have been hoping to convey; the second scene at the Park Kultury Station is located a few stops to the south along the same metro line. If you’d like to see some interesting citizen-journalism of the attacks’ aftermath, click over to the NYT’s The Lede blog.
Much has been made of the attackers’ identity — two women dressed in black robes with explosives and shrapnel packed underneath their garments. Female suicide bombers have been used by Chechen separatists dating back to 2002 and are commonly — and disturbingly — referred to as “black widows.” Furthermore, female suicide bombers are hardly a new phenomenon. If memory serves, they’ve been used as long ago as the early 1990s by the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. Terrorist groups — even those with no formal ties to one another — observe each others’ tactical successes and adopt the effective ones. The use of unsuspecting women has made the rounds in terrorist circles, even if Western audiences still find the tactic shocking.
It’s important to appreciate the dynamic nature and motivations of the Caucasus’ separatist groups over the last decade and the Russian government’s response to them. Boris Yeltsin first installed the then-little-known ex-KGB chief Vladimir Putin as prime minister in 1999, and Putin vowed to crush the Chechen separatist movement. In the early-to-mid 2000s, the group was a relatively structured militia that was responsible for mostly large-scale terrorist attacks. The group most famously conducted the 2004 siege at the Beslan school that killed over 300 people, many of whom were school children; it was also responsible for the 2002 siege at a Moscow theater.
In large part, Putin was responsible for successfully dismantling the organizational hierarchy behind those acts, killing leaders like Shamil Basayev and Abdul Khalim Sudalayev in 2006. He used victories like those to consolidate power behind the Kremlin, saying political power-grabs like eliminating the direct election of regional governors were necessary to defeat terrorism. Can you imagine if Bush had eliminated the election of state governors after 9/11? Just a bit of a stretch, right?
But as often happens with insurgent organizations, cutting off their head rarely kills them. Moscow’s success only caused the resistance to morph over the last four or five years from a top-down military-style structure to more of a flat, non-hierarchical, Islamic-based motley crew. Here’s an excellent run-down on the insurgency’s changing nature and motivation from WaPo’s Philip Pan late last year:
Russia has long blamed violence in the region on Muslim extremists backed by foreign governments and terrorist networks, but radical Islam is relatively new here. In the 1990s, it was ethnic nationalism, not religious fervor, that motivated Chechen separatists. That changed, though, as fighting spilled beyond Chechnya and Russian forces used harsher tactics targeting devout Muslims.
In 2007, the rebel leader Doku Umarov abandoned the goal of Chechen independence and declared jihad instead, vowing to establish a fundamentalist Caucasus Emirate that would span the entire region. After Moscow proclaimed victory in Chechnya in April, he issued a video labeling civilians legitimate targets and reviving Riyad-us Saliheen, the self-described martyrs’ brigade that launched terrorist attacks across Russia from 2002 to 2006.
It would appear on the surface that the Kremlin has failed to appreciate this change. In my mind, the new shape and motivations of the Chechen insurgency would call for more of a counter-insurgency style strategy that has been adopted by the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead, Putin has vowed a continued heavy hand, saying, “The terrorists will be destroyed!” This is of course what any national leader must say to placate a fearful and confused domestic audience, but may begin to ring a bit hollow in light of Putin’s similar rhetoric of 1999:
“Putin said [before these attacks], ‘One thing that I definitely accomplished was this [stopping the Chechen threat],’ and he didn’t,” said Pavel K. Baev, a Russian who is a professor at the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo.
“My feeling is this is not an isolated attack, that we will see more,” Mr. Baev said. “If we are facing a situation where there is a chain of attacks, that would undercut every attempt to soften, liberalize, open up, and increase the demand for tougher measures.”
In my next post, I’ll take a look at how the U.S. has responded to the attacks.
Something interesting is going on in Arkansas Democratic politics right now: a serious primary challenge to an incumbent senator, Blanche Lincoln, who is not mired in any sort of personal scandal, and is not, it would seem, mispositioned ideologically for a general election in her conservative state.
As Steve Kornacki notes at Salon today, Lt. Gov. Bill Halter’s primary challenge to Lincoln is hard to categorize as simply an ideological challenge to a wayward politician who has offended the party base, or as simply an “electability” challenge to a weakened incumbent who looks likely to lose in November:
Generally, it’s easy to categorize these primary challenges. There are two basic varieties: ideological, with an exercised party base seeking retribution for an incumbent’s dissent from the party-line; and pragmatic, with party members responding to the perceived electoral deficiencies of the incumbent. And then there’s the Democratic Senate primary now underway in Arkansas, which seems to be a perfect hybrid of these two types. With the latest poll showing Blanche Lincoln’s challenger, Bill Halter, within 13 points of her, that primary – now just seven weeks away – has become the hottest Democratic contest in the nation.
Lincoln, who’s in the final year of her second term, has managed to pull off a somewhat remarkable feat, infuriating both the left-of-center base of her party and her state’s right-leaning general election audience at the same time. Thus, the challenge she’s receiving from Halter doesn’t neatly fit into either of the above categories.
Kornacki goes on to examine prior examples of ideological primary challenges, and finds little evidence of any that were also based on evidence of superior electibility (absent some non-ideological factor like a personal scandal affecting the incumbent’s political standing).
Now it should be obvious that Kornacki’s premise would not be accepted by a fair assortment of people in both parties. Among both self-identified progressives in the Democratic Party, and most especially self-identified conservatives in the Republican Party, many have argued for decades that “centrists” aren’t really more electable, and that rigorously ideological candidates could actually, if given the chance, exert a superior general-election appeal (via better “frames,” or clearer messages, or by mobilizing non-voters, or simply by providing a “choice”), even in difficult partisan terrain like the one Democrats face in Arkansas. There’s definitely evidence that this proposition is true at times and in places where there are significant numbers of voters who are “mispositioned” by adherence to parties with ideologies alien to their own (e.g., southern conservative Democrats in the 1980s and 1990s, and northern moderate-to-liberal Republicans more recently). A subset of the “electability” argument for ideological rigor is that Democratic progressives or conservative Republicans can and will offer messages that have particular appeal to swing voters in a given constituency. That’s also sometimes true, as with antiwar Democrats in times of unpopular wars, or with anti-tax Republicans in places where some state or local tax revolt is underway.
But the Halter challenge to Lincoln is emphatically not in a state where there are liberals outside the Democratic Party ripe for the picking, and there’s not much evidence that Arkansans are generally receptive to any particular progressive arguments, notwithstanding the ancient claim that southerners are especially receptive to anti-corporate “populism” (a complicated topic which I won’t get into here, other than to say that I personally think the claim is vastly overstated since southern conservatives are conservatives on nearly every imaginable topic, including economics).
Lincoln is, however, an incumbent senator at a time when incumbency is not an advantage, and that alone could make Halter as competitive as, if not more competitive than, Lincoln in a general election. And it’s not as though Halter is running as the re-incarnation of Huey Long. His anti-corporate rhetoric, in fact, is pretty much indistinguishable from what we hear from Tea Party folk, opposing bailouts rather than promoting regulation.
It appears Lincoln’s strategy (other than touting endorsements from relatively popular Democrats like Bill Clinton) is to use Halter’s challenge as evidence that she’s not the raging socialist that Republicans make her out to be. If it works, this playing-off-the-left message would presumably boost her general election standing, thus making it easier for her to appeal to Democrats on electability grounds. But she doesn’t have much time to pull this off, and if she doesn’t, she hasn’t instilled enough loyalty in Arkansas Democrats to give her much confidence in a primary win absent an electability argument.
Arkansas will thus be an interesting test of the limits of tolerance for Democratic heterodoxy in tough terrain. And if Halter wins the primary, his performance in the general election will be watched closely for its broader implications as well. The last widely-discussed Democratic primary challenge to an incumbent senator, the Ned Lamont candidacy in Connecticut in 2006, involved a totally different situation: a blue state, a more famous incumbent, a red-hot issue where Joe Lieberman was horribly mispositioned with local opinion, and most of all, a third-party Lieberman general election candidacy that Republicans largely supported. The results of a Halter nomination in Arkansas would be sui generis.
PPI has long been a proponent of an economy-wide cap-and-trade system to confront the problem of climate change. But as the fortunes of cap-and-trade legislation in the Senate fade, we need to begin looking at other options before Congress. This post, on the Cantwell-Collins “cap-and-dividend” bill, is the first in a series of analyses of various alternatives to cap-and-trade.
You may not have noticedlately, but there are other major legislative initiatives, including climate and energy, on the Senate’s docket. One climate action bill that has received a lot of attention is the bill sponsored by Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Susan Collins (R-ME). When the bill, officially called the Carbon Limits and Energy for America’s Renewal (CLEAR) Act, was first introduced in December, it caught the eye of some in the enviroblogworld, but didn’t make much of an immediate splash in the Senate. Between the long build-up of the Kerry-Lieberman-Graham multi-partisan grab bag and the poorly understood Copenhagen outcome, however, it filled a vacuum with a poorly appreciated concept at the time: offsetting costs of climate legislation to consumers by cutting them a check.
The Basics
Also known as “cap-and-dividend,” the Cantwell-Collins bill is pretty simple: starting in 2012, it would mandate monthly auctions of pollution permits, called carbon shares, to the first seller (producer or importer) of fossil fuel carbon into the economy. The bill sets a floor price (shares can’t be sold for less) of $7 and a ceiling price (shares can’t be sold more) of $21 in the first auction in 2012, with the cap lowering — leading to rising prices — over time.
Most of the revenue from these auctions is distributed back to citizens in the form of a monthly check, while the rest is placed in a Clean Energy Refund Trust (CERT) fund established by the bill for use on a variety of different purposes: energy R&D, climate change adaptation, non-CO2 greenhouse gas reductions, international forestry and agriculture offsets, carbon capture and storage projects. First sellers cannot trade carbon shares and carbon derivatives are prohibited. In addition, the legislation has economy-wide emissions reduction goals of 20 percent below 2005 levels in 2020, 42 percent in 2030, and 83 percent in 2050.
The Good
Advocates of Cantwell-Collins praise it for being simple and transparent. As has been noted by others, it is a mere 40 pages, certainly an easier read than Waxman-Markey, the behemoth, 1,400-page cap-and-trade bill passed by the House last June. It regulates fossil fuel-related CO2 as far “upstream” in the economic supply chain as possible, meaning that whoever produces or imports a fossil fuel is on the hook for the CO2 content. Under Cantwell-Collins, coal mines and oil producers are responsible for paying for carbon, which means that only about 3,000 facilities need to be regulated. This upstream approach is administratively more streamlined, affecting far fewer parties than Waxman-Markey, which regulates electricity producers, natural gas distributors and manufacturers (over 75,000 regulated facilities).
The CLEAR Act also rejects the convoluted system of free and auctioned allocations in Waxman-Markey for a straight-up auction of all carbon shares. All regulated parties must participate in open monthly auctions, the revenue from which is split 75-25 percent: 75 percent is redistributed per capita to every American citizen and 25 percent is placed in the CERT. Whether you agree with the approach or not, offering to cut a monthly check for every U.S. citizen is not a bad way to gain some political support. Also, from the perspective of regulated firms, the use of price floors and ceilings, also known as a price collar, would reduce future price uncertainty and help them better predict investment needs.
Finally, the bill is co-sponsored by a Republican and a Democrat. That bipartisan provenance could certainly help its chances for passage.
The Bad
So with a bill that’s easy to read, easy to monitor and easy on the wallet, is there anyone who won’t like it? Well, anyone who favors hard targets for emissions reductions and anyone who believes in markets, for two. First, while the bill establishes economy-wide reduction goals as strong as Waxman-Markey, the auction system alone will not reach them. National emissions are capped at 2012 (note that it only caps CO2 emissions, unlike Waxman-Markey, which covered other greenhouse gases as well), and the cap doesn’t tighten until 2015, at which point it decreases by 0.25 percent that year, then by an additional 0.25 percent every corresponding year (so in 2016, the cap reduces by 0.5 percent, in 2017, 0.75 percent, etc).
This slow lowering of the cap will result in only five percent reductions below 2012 emissions by 2020, well short of the 20 percent reductions by 2020 goal. Even at that, the cap is not rock solid due to the price collar, which functions as a sort of safety valve. That is, if the auction price goes higher than the established ceiling price, then that essentially releases extra carbon shares for firms to bid on until the price falls back below the ceiling.
That means the remaining reductions to be met in 2020 will have to come from technology advances, land use offsets in forestry and agriculture, and reductions of non-CO2 gases, all of which are paid for by the CERT (which will be administered by the Department of Treasury). If we assume an initial carbon price of $15 in 2012 (a middle-range price, based on analyses done by the EPA and EIA), and the projected cap of roughly 7.2 billion carbon shares, then the CERT will get about $27 billion in the first year of the program.
That’s $27 billion to be split among all the uses listed above to help reduce emissions, as well as adaptation projects, energy efficiency efforts, and support for trade-sensitive industries and low-income families. The problem with a bill that’s only 40 pages is that it doesn’t have a lot of room for details — indeed, the CLEAR Act provides no guidance on how to prioritize uses of CERT funds. Although CERT funds will increase as the price of carbon shares rise, it will likely not even be close to enough to compensate for the majority of necessary carbon reductions.
A carbon market could mobilize private capital to help address some of these issues efficiently, instead of leaving all the choices and funding responsibility to the federal government. While it’s understandable that the public and politicians might still distrust markets in the wake of the recent financial collapse, the fact is that when it comes to finding inefficiencies and catalyzing innovation, nothing works better. But the “market” in Cantwell-Collins is simply an auction system. Unlike in Waxman-Markey, regulated firms can’t trade their permits, and carbon derivatives are strictly prohibited. These restrictions are going to severely limit the efficacy of the program to find the cheapest emissions reductions.
Also, there is a huge amount of risk in carbon markets (both in terms of accurate compliance and extreme events), so while they should be tightly regulated, derivatives are a necessary component because they allow firms to hedge against the risk of non-compliance or shifting standards. You will be hard-pressed to find any industry player who will advocate for a market without any trading, and there will need to be at least some industry support for any viable future climate legislation. Moreover, the monthly auction system may generate more carbon share price volatility than a continuous market, making it even more unattractive to firms.
The Upshot
Cantwell-Collins injects some great ideas into the climate policy debate that had not been prominently discussed before. If a policymaker wants to reduce the burden of increased energy costs on consumers, a direct rebate is an efficient and effective way to do it. The bill overall, however, is a somewhat naïve approach that does not fully appreciate the ability of markets to generate efficient emissions reductions and does not limit carbon emissions effectively. Its merits (simplified approach, upstream regulation, price collar) are outweighed by its limitations (extremely slow cap reduction, heavy reliance on CERT-funded reduction programs, draconian market restrictions). The CLEAR Act will continue to play a role in the climate debate of the Hill, but in its current form, it is unlikely to be the last bill standing.
The more I think about it, the fight over a Supreme Court nomination that we are likely to see begin in a month or so could be a major teachable moment for progressives about the underlying belief system of contemporary conservatives and of Republicans who have let themselves get radicalized to an extraordinary degreee since the latter stages of the 2008 presidential contest.
As we speak, conservatives all over the country are demanding legal action by states to challenge the constitutionality of health reform legislation (in my home state of Georgia, there’s even talk of impeaching the Democratic Attorney General, Thurbert Baker, for refusing to waste taxpayer dollars by launching a suit). Yet the basis for such suits — typically a denial of the power of Congress to legislate economic matters under the Commerce and Spending Clauses of the U.S. Constitution — is a collateral attack on the constitutionality of a vast array of past legislation, including the New Deal and Great Society initiatives, not to mention most civil rights laws.
And that questionable proposition is completely aside from other conservative efforts, many of them backed by major Republican officeholders, to “interpose” (to use the term for this strategy when it was deployed by segregationists in the 1950s) state sovereignty to block the implementation of health reform and other federal laws. And beyond that we have the even more radical nullification and secession gestures that have become standard features of conservative Republican rhetoric over the last year or so.
In other words, a debate that revolves around constitutional interpretation is not necessarily one that will help the conservative movement at this particular moment. Indeed, it could actually help progressives raise suspicions that Republicans are contemplating a very radical agenda if they return to power, one that could include (particularly given the stridency of their fiscal rhetoric lately) a direct assault on very popular programs like Social Security and Medicare.
Moreover, we can anticipate that a Court nomination fight will renew noisy efforts by the Christian Right, which has good reason right now to remind the news media and Republican politicians alike of its continuing power in the GOP, to advance its own eccentric views on America as a “Christian Nation” whose founders never intended to promote church-state separation, not to mention their demands for an overthrow of legalized abortion and same-sex unions. At a time when many conservatives are trying very hard to submerge divisive cultural issues and create a monomaniacal message on limited government, a Court fight will unleash cultural furies beyond control.
And finally, if it really gets vicious, a Court fight could cast a harsh spotlight on the drift of the conservative movement towards a general attitude of defiance towards the rule of law. As I noted in a post yesterday, the downside of the libertarian energy given conservatives by the Tea Party movement is its tendency to treat every major government institution, the presidency, the Congress, and the judiciary alike, with contempt as threats to liberty and “natural rights.” As much as Americans love liberty, they also love order and stability. They aren’t likely to react well to the spectacle of conservatives screaming for a virtual revolution against a popularly elected government, the social safety net, and constitutional doctrines that have been in place for 75 years.
So: bring on the Court fight, and bring it on with all the rhetoric Tea Party folk and other radicalized conservatives have been using about Obama’s “socialism” and the Nazi-like tyranny of universal health coverage! Before it’s over, Republicans may wish they had just picked a different fight.
In mid-February most of the chattering classes, left and right, lost interest in Sarah Palin after an ABC/WaPo poll that showed rank-and-file Republicans souring on her, or at least concluding she wasn’t qualified to be president. (I personally suspect that poll was an outlier, but that’s a subject for another day, when fresh evidence is available).
But now, in the wake of her twin appearances at a Tea Party Express event in Nevada, and on the campaign trail with John McCain in Arizona, Palin has become impossible to ignore again, and there’s now an interesting effort underway among conservative elites to denounce any dissing of St. Joan of the Tundra from their own ranks.
Today neoconservative patriarch Norman Podheretz appeared on that estimable right-wing bulletin board, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, to smite unnamed conservative critics of Palin, utilizing the Big Bertha of latter-day Republican rhetoric, the memory of Ronald Reagan:
Now I knew Ronald Reagan, and Sarah Palin is no Ronald Reagan. Then again, the first time I met Reagan all he talked about was the money he had saved the taxpayers as governor of California by changing the size of the folders used for storing the state’s files. So nonplussed was I by the delight he showed at this great achievement that I came close to thinking that my friends were right and that I had made a mistake in supporting him. Ultimately, of course, we all wound up regarding him as a great man, but in 1979 none of us would have dreamed that this would be how we would feel only a few years later.
Podhoretz goes on to suggest that liberal contempt for Palin is of a piece with liberal contempt for Reagan, and thus should never be echoed on the Right. This is all interesting because it’s the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party — heavily focused on foreign policy, disproportionately led by people who are secular, Jewish, or both, and suspicious of the influence of the Christian Right and of right-wing “populism” generally — where disdain for Palin is most visible. Podhoretz is trying to rein that tendency in.
And it looks like his argument is already getting traction. In its “Arena” feature, Politico asked a bunch of prominent gabbers, most of them conservatives, to react to Podhoretz’s piece, and they generally said he was right (with the occasional condescending reference to Palin’s need for a little more seasoning).
This doesn’t mean that neoconservatives are on the brink of shouting “Run, Sarah, Run!” or emulating the adulation she arouses among Tea Party folk or Right-to-Lifers, but it does represent a disciplinary reminder that the conservative coalition can’t brook any friendly fire. Podhoretz cites William F. Buckley’s famous quip that he’d rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculties of Harvard and MIT, and implies that the prospect of being governed by Sarah Palin rather than Barack Obama represents an equivalent choice (certainly the most back-handed of compliments to Palin).
But the choice, he says, is clear and must be made:
[A]fter more than a year of seeing how [Obama’s] “prodigious oratorical and intellectual gifts” have worked themselves out in action, I remain more convinced than ever of the soundness of Buckley’s quip, in the spirit of which I hereby declare that I would rather be ruled by the Tea Party than by the Democratic Party, and I would rather have Sarah Palin sitting in the Oval Office than Barack Obama.
So on behalf of neoconservatives, Podhoretz is taking the coalition oath anew, and inverting the old Popular Front slogan of “Pas d’ennemis a gauche, pas d’amis a droit” (no enemies to the Left, no friends to the Right). That’s not terribly surprising in the current Total War atmosphere of American politics, but it’s amusing that Palin is being treated as the acid test of conservative solidarity, and perhaps alarming that she passes.
It’s obvious that the Golden State isn’t golden anymore. As a new transplant here, the first state political event I watched up close was a May 2009 special election, featuring six ballot initiatives designed to avert a titanic budget crisis. California’s voters responded with what can best be described as snarling apathy. Turnout was 20 percent, which beat the previous California record for low turnout in a statewide election. The five initiatives that dealt with spending and revenue — which needed to pass in order to implement a major fiscal compromise — all went down, hard. (Most of them lost by two-to-one margins; a sixth initiative, denying legislators pay raises when the budget’s not balanced, passed.) Californians weren’t just experiencing a momentary fit of pique, either: In 2005, a similar package of eight budget deal-related ballot initiatives met the same fate.
As of March 21, the approval rating for Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger stood at 23 percent, which was where his Democratic predecessor, Gray Davis, was when he was recalled and booted out of office in 2003. But that level of support looks robust compared to that of the state legislature (controlled, if that’s not too strong a word, by Democrats), which stands at nine percent, not far from statistical zero.
California’s bad case of political self-loathing goes beyond a terrible economy, the state’s chronic monstrous state budget deficits, and the endless gridlock over virtually all major decisions in Sacramento. On the structural level, California’s permissive ballot initiative system has inserted voters — or, to be cynical about it, the special interests backing initiatives — into matters normally left to governors and legislators, resulting in constitutional limits on property taxes; excessive reliance on recession-sensitive income taxes; a crippling two-thirds vote requirement for legislative enactment of a state budget or for increasing taxes at any level of government; and a variety of spending mandates. Polls consistently show that a majority of citizens oppose tax increases and most spending cuts (they do favor cutting spending on prisons, which are operating under court rules and stuffed with inmates who have run afoul of the state’s many mandatory sentencing laws, some imposed by initiative). “Waste” is where Californians seem to want lawmakers to look for the massive savings necessary to balance the budget. Too bad California already ranks near the bottom among states in per capita state employees and infrastructure investment, and below average in per-pupil spending on education.
The obvious question is why anyone would want to be the next governor of California. But three viable candidates — two Republicans and one Democrat — are defying logic by offering themselves for this post. One Republican, state insurance commissioner and former tech executive Steve Poizner, is running on a systematic right-wing platform of massive spending cuts, new personal and business tax cuts, and, for dessert, another effort to ban access to public benefits for undocumented workers and their families. The second GOP candidate, former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, is running far ahead of Poizner, floating her campaign on an extraordinary sea of early money. Three months before the June primary, and eight months before the general election, Whitman (or eMeg, as local political journalists often call her) has already spent $46 million, mostly from personal funds on her campaign, and has threatened to spend up to $150 million if necessary. She has launched an astoundingly early series of saturation media ads, becoming ubiquitous on the California airwaves, as recently explained by David Crane of the influential political blog Calbuzz:
The campaign’s Gross Rating Point report, measuring total delivery of the current week’s broadcast ad schedule in 11 markets in California, shows that eMeg’s buy is comparable to what a fully-loaded campaign might ordinarily deliver in the closing weeks of a heated race — not three months before a primary that she’s prohibitively leading.“These are some big f****n’ numbers,” said Bill Carrick, the veteran Democratic media consultant after reviewing the report. “She’s buying the whole shebang.”
Whitman’s ads mainly convey, with numbing repetition, her claim to offer a fresh start for the state, delivered by a rock-star business executive committed to cuts in spending, tax cuts, and education reform. But she recently launched another batch aimed at primary opponent Poizner — whom she leads in the most recent Field Poll by 49 points — depicting the hyper-conservative as, believe it or not, a liberal who thinks just like Nancy Pelosi. (Poizner is reportedly planning to fire back using $19 million of his own Silicon Valley fortune, which may force Whitman to tack in a conservative direction on issues that she’d just as soon avoid, such as immigration.)
These assaults have raised some old concerns about her reputation in corporate circles for being ruthless in the pursuit of her goals, and a bit deranged — exhibiting an “evil Meg” alongside the “good Meg” of her press clippings — if denied her wishes. She’s also bought herself grief by refusing, until very recently, to answer press questions or elaborate beyond the happy talk of her biographical ads about her positions on various issues. All in all, she’s in danger of earning the reputation of being something of a robo-pol like her political mentor, Mitt Romney.
Indeed, Whitman’s overall strategy appears to be to clear the primary field by bludgeoning Poizner out of the picture with attack ads, and then to run as a can-do moderate conservative who’s worth a gamble for the relatively few voters who bother to show up at the polls. And she is reportedly spending hundreds of thousands of dollars building a library of negative information to use against her general election opponent, a guy named Jerry Brown.
That’s right, Edmund Gerald “Jerry” Brown Jr., who is, on paper, the least likely person imaginable to become the frontrunner for governor of a state that is so passionately disillusioned with politicians. The son of an old-style liberal Democratic governor who served two terms before being bounced from office by Ronald Reagan, Brown was first elected to statewide office 40 — yes, 40 — years ago. After a term as secretary of state, he was governor for eight years, and later state party chair, mayor of Oakland and, currently, attorney general of California. He also ran unsuccessfully, and somewhat fecklessly, for the U.S. Senate once and for president three times (coming second to Bill Clinton in 1992). Not many Californians can remember a time when Brown or his father wasn’t in office or pursuing office, and most can remember more than one occasion when Brown Jr. did something quirky, embarrassing or controversial. Indeed, Whitman may be wasting her money reminding them.
But that’s the funny thing about Jerry Brown’s candidacy. Instead of being the fattest target in America for a Republican opponent, Brown is even with or slightly trailing Whitman in recent polls, despite her massive unopposed spending on TV ads — and, given California’s Democratic registration advantage, he’s a good bet to win unless the effectiveness of Whitman’s spending significantly outstrips the likely backlash against it.
You see, Jerry Brown is a tough challenger because he is hard to confine to the standard political and ideological boxes. His long political career may be a handicap in some respects, but it has also helped him defy typecasting and create unusual coalitions. Long an ally of Democratic liberals — in the 1990s, he had a show on the lefty Pacifica radio network — Brown governed California as a fiscal hawk in the wake of the property tax-slashing Proposition 13 (which he had opposed) in 1978. Similarly, as mayor of Oakland from 1999 to 2007, he became known for a strong law-enforcement record, and for his championship of charter public schools, including one controversial military school. He can be broadly characterized as a social liberal and fiscal conservative, which is a good fit for his state. But his leitmotif as a politician has always been unpredictability and a knack for anticipating and sometimes embodying the zeitgeist.
What’s more, his unique form of personal charisma makes him freakishly appropriate for the contemporary madness of California politics. For instance, here’s a characteristic snippet from an interview that Brown conducted with the New York Times, just after he was elected attorney general in 2006:
Over the years, you have moved from being a fabled liberal to a centrist position.
I don’t know. I don’t use that spatial metaphor.
Then how would you describe yourself politically?
I’m very independent. There’s a great line from Friedrich Nietzsche: A thinking man can never be a party man.
Charming. Yet, despite his willingness to name-check Nietzsche, Jerry Brown prefers the idea that politicians should tamp down their own passions, in a way the philosopher might have abhorred. He seriously studied Zen Buddhism in the 1980s, underwent training for the Jesuit priesthood and worked with Mother Teresa in Calcutta. Not surprisingly, he conveys a certain aura of ironic detachment and self-control.
Indeed, over four decades of engagement in public life, Jerry Brown has developed a remarkable knack for displaying a sense of his own — and government’s — limits. He began his gubernatorial first term in 1975 with an off-the-cuff “address” that ran seven minutes; replaced the traditional inaugural ball with an informal dinner at a Chinese restaurant; traded in his gubernatorial limo for a 1974 Plymouth from the state car pool; rented a small apartment instead of living in the governor’s mansion; and reportedly slept on a mattress on the floor. (As governor, Brown was far more fiscally conservative than his predecessor, Ronald Reagan, who raised taxes and spending several times. His austerity, which created vast budget surpluses, prompted one Reagan aide to joke that the Gipper “thinks Jerry Brown has gone too far to the right.”) Appropriately, one of Brown’s publicly identified gurus was Small Is Beautiful author E.F. Schumacher, and he once described his governing style, using a strikingly Zen phrase, as “creative inaction.” That could be very handy if he gets the job he is running for, where limits have been placed on virtually everything a governor can do, and it also provides a strong contrast to Whitman, whose campaign screams hubris.
Short of having their own grossly rich and relentless attack dog in the race, Democrats are probably blessed to have Brown, who can be expected to shrug off Whitman’s certain assault on his record and land a few coolly delivered blows of his own. He’s already reminding voters that California hasn’t had a particularly good recent experience with “outsider” governors promising to come in and clean up Sacramento by sheer force of will. And, without a doubt, Whitman’s campaign will bring back bad memories of another California candidate who boasted of vast executive experience and spent money like water on unconscionable attack ads: Al Checchi, whose over-the-top 1998 campaign eventually elevated the most boring candidate in the field, Gray Davis, to the governorship.
Meanwhile, Brown will have the luxury of leaving the anti-Whitman dirty work to surrogates and supporters who are planning a half-million ad assault on the Republican. And it’s not exactly a bad time to run as something of an anti-corporate populist, as Brown is doing, talking up “the people who work for the people, the firefighters, the nurses, the hospital workers, the janitors.” I don’t have to spell out which billionaire CEO-politician might be caught in that rhetorical net.
And Brown’s other ace in the hole could well be the Latino vote. Dating back to his close association with pioneer farm-labor organizer Cesar Chavez — who backed Brown’s 1974 candidacy in hopes of finding a political solution to the United Farm Workers’ problems — Brown has longstanding ties to California’s Latino community. Even in polls showing Whitman in the lead, he is beating her badly among Latinos. If Poizner gains traction in the primary, she will be under heavy pressure to move closer to his harsh positions on denying state aid to undocumented workers. And it hasn’t escaped notice that one of Whitman’s closest advisors is former governor Pete Wilson, whose sponsorship of the anti-immigrant Proposition 187 back in 1994 decisively alienated Latino voters from the GOP and materially contributed to the state’s current Democratic majority.
It’s a long time until November. The Brown-Whitman tilt will have to share media attention and airtime with a Republican challenge to Sen. Barbara Boxer and, before that, with a close and entertaining Senate primary battle between Carly Fiorina and Tom Campbell. At the state GOP convention two weeks ago, Fiorina, like Whitman an “outsider” business executive, was the star of the show. Her quirky web ads going after Campbell (the “demon sheep” ad, already a cult classic) and Boxer (a new ad unveiled at the GOP gathering that showed the senator morphing into a hot-air balloon) are as imaginative and attention-grabbing as Whitman’s TV spots are shrill and heavy-handed. The high point of Meg’s appearance was a press conference where she finally answered press questions. Her leaden convention speech and an over-produced Mitt Romney endorsement provided a glimpse of how poorly her act could wear on Californians over the long haul.
And it’s not as though Jerry Brown is likely to present Whitman with an unmoving target. As protean as California itself and as wily as any other 40-year veteran of political wars, Brown nicely defined himself in an interview with Calbuzz just after officially announcing his candidacy: “Adaptation is the essence of evolution,” he explained. “And those who don’t adapt go extinct.”
Indeed, such adaptivity may be the only thing that can serve California’s needs right now. With the state no longer in its political golden age, the harsh reality of running — and governing — in a place with such baleful political realities will require a truly kaleidescopic ability to make the best of a hostile environment. And, in a contest with a Republican who seems determined to prove that she and her checkbook can win it her way or no way, I wouldn’t place any bets against Jerry Brown becoming California’s right-man-in-the-right-place, one last time.
On this one, I stepped out of my comfort zone. While I normally write about national security, foreign policy, and the military, yesterday I placed an op-ed in the Washington Post about none of the above. Rather, the piece was about my experience as a “mentor” (a term that seems funny) to my friend, Tim Cofield. We met through a charity called the Welcome Home Reentry Program. As that title might suggest, Tim is an inmate in the D.C. jail, and has been for a good chunk of his life — 13 out of 54 years. The only upside to that is that he essentially missed the Bush years. But as of right now, he’s still there, despite being scheduled for release last Friday.
The point of my article is pretty simple — Tim keeps ending up in jail (he’s been convicted four times, by my count), but he’s not necessarily getting any better. Unless he gets high-quality and consistent mental health and substance abuse care, not to mention a stable place to live and a steady income, Tim is almost certainly going to find himself back in jail soon.
This is a difficult issue for politicians, particularly those on the state and local level who control budgets. Fearful of looking “soft on crime” (hello, California’s three strikes law), politicians promise to throw any transgressor behind bars without paying attention to the consequences. State budgets go bust, and overcrowded prisons are eventually emptied, even though prisoners’ behavioral patterns haven’t been altered.
Here’s an excerpt:
If all goes according to plan, my friend Tim Cofield will be a free man by the time you read this. He was scheduled to get out of the D.C. jail Friday. Despite having spent more than three months in an orange jumpsuit, Tim would probably disagree with Eric Holder’s February speech to the National Symposium on Indigent Defense, in which the attorney general called for more funding to fulfill Americans’ right to competent defense. While I’m sure Holder is correct that “in some parts of the country . . . basic public defender systems simply do not exist,” Tim — whom I mentor through the fantastic Welcome Home Reentry Program — would tell you D.C. public defenders are actually quite good.
In the District, money would be better used to improve post-release rehabilitation and mental health programs. Without better support for parolees, we cannot break a cycle that leads to the reconviction of two-thirds within three years. This astonishing statistic is due to many factors, but here are two big ones: According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 74 percent of inmates enter state prisons hooked on drugs or alcohol and 56 percent have a significant mental health problem. Tim checks both boxes.
[…]
We’re at a crucial point. Tim has probably (though not certainly) stayed clean in the prison’s rehab program. I visited him in jail, and he seemed clear-headed and resolved. He is being released into a halfway house that also serves as a drug treatment program. The quality of these programs varies wildly, but regardless, I know he needs much more than just rehab.
His chances to salvage any semblance of a productive life depend on a combination of high-quality substance counseling, consistent therapy and stable housing.
A little over a week ago, I praised Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) for working with Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) to come up with some bipartisan improvements to the financial regulatory reform package that Senate Banking Committee Chair Chris Dodd (D-CT) is looking to get through the Senate in time for Memorial Day. I may have spoken too soon. Corker said yesterday:
Tuesday’s Moscow attacks may do more to define the path of Russia’s future as a democracy than any single event since 1991. In a worst-case scenario, Vladimir Putin could return to the presidency. A sunnier forecast sees popular sentiment rising against Putin – and the emergence of a wild card that could lead the way to real change in Russia.
How did America get to where it is today, a country with the slowest and most threadbare intercity passenger rail service of any advanced nation?
Back at the beginning of the year, I wrote a 
Nearly 36 hours after the attacks in Moscow’s subway system, 
Something interesting is going on in Arkansas Democratic politics right now: a serious primary challenge to an incumbent senator, Blanche Lincoln, who is not mired in any sort of personal scandal, and is not, it would seem, mispositioned ideologically for a general election in her conservative state.
You may not have 
The more I think about it, the fight over a Supreme Court nomination that we are likely to see begin in a month or so could be a major teachable moment for progressives about the underlying belief system of contemporary conservatives and of Republicans who have let themselves get radicalized to an extraordinary degreee since the latter stages of the 2008 presidential contest.
It’s obvious that the Golden State isn’t golden anymore. As a new transplant here, the first state political event I watched up close was a May 2009 special election, featuring six ballot initiatives designed to avert a titanic budget crisis. California’s voters responded with what can best be described as snarling apathy. Turnout was 20 percent, which beat the previous California record for low turnout in a statewide election. The five initiatives that dealt with spending and revenue — which needed to pass in order to implement a major fiscal compromise — all went down, hard. (Most of them lost by two-to-one margins; a sixth initiative, denying legislators pay raises when the budget’s not balanced, passed.) Californians weren’t just experiencing a momentary fit of pique, either: In 2005, a similar package of eight budget deal-related ballot initiatives met the same fate.
On this one, I stepped out of my comfort zone. While I normally write about national security, foreign policy, and the military, yesterday I