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On Fiscal Reform, Can Pragmatists Trump Ideologues?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In a piece published this Sunday, Edmund L. Andrews and Eric Pianin serve up a profile in Fiscal Times of an odd couple who will be crucial to the effort to restore fiscal sanity to the country.

On one side is Andy Stern, labor firebrand and former head of the Service Employees International Union, the nation’s fastest-growing union. On the other is David Cote, chairman and CEO of Honeywell, a global technology firm. Both are members of President Obama’s deficit commission tasked with issuing recommendations to address the nation’s fiscal crisis. Both consider themselves pragmatists who believe they can bridge the partisan gap and help engineer lasting solutions to our budget problems.

But even the appearance of comity can’t hide the basic ideological differences between the two sides:

Cote emphasizes that economic growth is the key to fiscal stability, and Stern politely contends that it’s unrealistic to bank on economic growth alone as the solution. “There are some people who say, ‘Let’s grow our way out of it,’ ” Stern said. “Okay. Tell me how much growth we’re going to need? Has it ever happened before?”

The subtext of their exchange is clearly about the broader clash. Republicans warn that higher taxes will imperil economic growth and focus on the need for spending cuts. Democrats argue that some of the biggest GOP targets — safety-net programs — need to be protected and that deficits are too big to be closed without at least some tax increases.

That elemental difference looms in the background of any feel-good story of bipartisan agreement on fiscal reform. It would be tragic if the commission’s work and the administration’s efforts to forge a consensus on budget reform crash on the shoals of ideology. Everyone can agree that the country is on an unsustainable path. What everyone should also be able to agree on is the need for reform on both sides of the ledger. New streams of revenue need to be found. Entitlement reforms need to be made. And yet denial prevails over too many folks on both sides of the ideological divide.

Stern has a good record of reaching out to unlikely allies — see his work with Wal-Mart and the Business Roundtable on passing health care reform. But even his efforts might fail in the face of calcified dogmas and a lack of urgency among political and policy elites. How the commission’s efforts play out — it’s aiming to release its findings in December — will be one of the most compelling policy dramas in the coming months. Stay tuned.

Photo credit: Center for American Progress Action Fund

Haley Accuser Endorses…Haley; Tuesday Primaries in NC, Utah

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

If you want a pretty good indication of the power of ideology in today’s Republican Party, check out the latest endorsement of front-runner Nikki Haley for the Republican gubernatorial nomination just before next Tuesday’s runoff:

So let’s get this straight … we know for a fact that S.C. Rep. Nikki Haley is lying through her teeth every time she denies our founding editor’s claim that she had an “inappropriate physical relationship” with him in the Spring of 2007. On top of that, we also know for a fact that her political career could very well go down in flames if (and more likely “when”) this ticking time bomb goes off …

And yet we’re endorsing her for the 2010 S.C. Republican gubernatorial nomination anyway?

Correct….

[T]he bottom line for S.C. taxpayers is that Haley would vote the right way on the S.C. Budget and Control Board, use her veto pen to reduce the size and scope of government and sign a universal parental choice bill which would (at long last) provide parents with real options and our flawed system with real, market-based accountability.

Yes, Haley has been endorsed by the web page of South Carolina blogger Will Folks, whose allegation of an affair with Haley turned the gubernatorial race upside down. Unless you buy the theory that Folks and Haley actually cooked up the whole J’accuse to preempt rumors about her sex life and make her a martyr, Folks’ endorsement looks like a powerful validator of the notion that being Right is more important than being right to today’s conservative activists.

There haven’t been any public polls on this race released since the June 8 primary, but a pre-primary poll by PPP that asked about a hypothetical Haley-Gresham Barrett runoff showed her up 51-35. This was before third-place finisher Henry McMaster endorsed Haley.

In North Carolina, where Democrats are having a Senate runoff on Tuesday, the only post-primary poll (again, by PPP) showed first-place primary finisher Elaine Marshall and DSCC favorite Cal Cunningham even at 36 percent with a large undecided vote. But that was more than a month ago, and given the likelihood of very low turnout, anything could happen. Marshall was endorsed by third-place finisher Ken Lewis, buttressing her advantage among African-Americans, and also by MoveOn.

And in Utah, whose primary is also on Tuesday, a poll taken for Mike Lee’s campaign showed him leading Tim Bridgewater in the Republican Senate race 39-30.  Bridgewater, a hard-core conservative but in better standing than Lee with the GOP establishment, has been endorsed by defeated incumbent Sen. Bob Bennett and also by fourth-place finisher Cherilyn Eager.

Poll Watch

In polling news, it’s a sign of the trouble that the long-time front-runner in the Florida Republican gubernatorial race, Bill McCollum, is experiencing with free-spending late-entering candidate Rick Scott that McCollum has released a poll showing them running dead even.

A new Sooner Poll of the Oklahoma Democratic gubernatorial race (the primary is on July 27) shows Attorney General Drew Edmondson holding just a one-point lead over Lt. Gov. Jari Askins.

Rasmussen has three new general-election gubernatorial polls out. In Texas, they show Rick Perry with a 48-40 lead over Bill White, although White has a somewhat better approval-disapproval ratio than the incumbent. In Tennessee, they show all three major Republican gubernatorial candidates with double-digit leads over Democrat Mike McWherter. And in Arkansas, Democratic incumbent Mike Beebe enjoys a 57-33 lead over Republican nominee Jim Keet, a slightly higher margin than he had in May.

Just Cops or Teachers, Too?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

A debate among Republican gubernatorial candidates in Georgia this week illustrated just how far the GOP (particularly in the South) has drifted from the impulse that led George W. Bush and John McCain to support comprehensive immigration reform back in the day. Now it’s all about deporting the undocumented pronto, and the only difference of opinion is over how many public employees need to spend their time in the dragnet for illegals.

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Jim Galloway, candidate Eric Johnson, who’s struggling to land a runoff spot, came out for requring both teachers and hospital employees to verify the citizenship status of their patrons. Candidate Nathal Deal professed frustration that few cops in Georgia viewed themselves as immigration enforcement officers, but did draw the line at teachers being enrolled in the chore.

All the GOP candidates, of course, supported the idea of Georgia enacting a law like Arizona’s; this is a position that’s becoming as much a litmus test for southern Republicans as attacking unions. That will become significant nationally in 2012 when the Republican presidential nomination contest moves south.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

“We Know the Kids Can Achieve”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The following is an excerpt from Rep. Jared Polis’s (D-CO) remarks at the PPI Capital Forum — Turnaround Schools: Rising to the Challenge:

Let me start by thanking the Progressive Policy Institute for their pioneering work, their work that led to the explosion of the charter school movement…as well as the support of PPI for education reform generally, which truly is a civil-rights issue. This is an issue of how does our society achieve equality, equality of opportunity, regardless of your race, your income bracket, your geography. The fact that you should have equality of free public education, regardless of your ZIP code, is the civil-rights issue and challenge for our current generation.

On the current blueprint for the administration: I’d give it an A-minus….If you’re asking me how to get it to an A, I would say, more of a focus on early childhood, as well as a focus on the continuum of early childhood all the way through higher education. And Colorado and other states are doing great things around access to higher education at the high-school level, moving to dual-enrollment options. I would love to see more of a federal emphasis on some of these programs that are successful on a state-by-state basis.

Two, I personally would like to see more explicit preservation and support for what had been done under No Child Left Behind with supplemental services and after-school programs, some of which have been proven effective, some of which haven’t been — but letting the data drive the process, in terms of making sure quality after-school programs are available in schools where the kids need it, be they provided by private providers or the school district itself.

…Personally, I would also like to see as much focus on career readiness as college readiness. I think that the plan gives short shrift to what we traditionally call vocational education in favor of college readiness, which, of course, is critical….But there is the reality that half of our kids or more will not necessarily be matriculating for a four-year university. Let’s look at what real, employable skills they can get from our public education system, even if those services are delivered by community colleges at our high school campuses or the kids are taking college courses while they’re there. Let’s look at that career-readiness piece at the same level as the college-readiness piece.

Kids really need to graduate and a diploma needs to mean both career and college readiness. They always put the career and college readiness piece in the verbiage, but really, everything below it is about college readiness, not career readiness. So that’s a personal issue that I would have….

Clearly, the turnaround area is one of the most topical and important areas. These provide a toolbox approach for capable and competent superintendents to take the reforms that they need at the schools that are persistently failing. Now, first of all, we need to acknowledge there is no excuse for a persistently failing school. People love to make excuses.

They say, well, they’re all – you know, none of them speak English or they’re all from poor communities or none of them have good home lives – and those are all very real challenges, and we all support a holistic approach to public policy. I think our health-care bill that the Congress recently passed will go a long way toward making sure that families from all economic background have the kinds of health care they need.

But again, we have seen models succeed with kids from diverse demographic backgrounds. We have seen schools in my district in Colorado, a charter school, Ricardo Flores Magon Academy, third-grade, 80 percent ESL, 90 percent free and reduced lunch, and yet, they reached 95 percent proficiency on the state test in reading and 100 percent proficiency in math. Again, you look at the demographics and you can say, why is this school succeeding, whereas another school that serves the exact same demographic – low-income, ESL, has almost, you know, the reverse, with only 10 to 15 percent of the kids proficient at grade level?

So no excuses. We know the kids can achieve. Let’s make sure that they have the opportunity to attend a school that allows them to fulfill their potential.

For a full transcript of the event, click here (PDF). For the video, click here.

So Much for Market Mechanisms

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

If, as appears likely, cap-and-trade legislation is not going to be enacted this year or any other time soon, it represents more than a setback for the Obama administration (or for the environment). It’s also another blow to the high concept of using market mechanisms rather than direct government control to address major public policy challenges.

Cap-and-trade was originally designed, after all, as an alternative to command-and-control environmental regulations, which is why it was once championed by Republicans, particularly during and after its successful use in reducing acid rain in the 1990s.

But as the New York Times‘ David Leonhardt (with an exclamation point from Jonathan Chait) explained this week, Republicans have abandoned cap-and-trade just when it might be most useful, with some former advocates, ironically, embracing command-and-control:

[T]he great economic strength of market systems like cap and trade also happens to be their political weakness. They set prices and allow people to react. In the process, market systems acknowledge that reducing pollution may actually cost a little bit of money.Politicians don’t like to admit this, because voters don’t like it. Accepting higher costs is especially hard when the economy is weak. So Congressional Democrats have been repackaging their energy bills to make them look less and less market-oriented. Senator John McCain, who supported a permit system for carbon as the Republican presidential nominee, no longer does. Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, has reversed his position as well.

What does Mr. Graham now favor? A series of command-and-control regulations. He has introduced a bill with Senator Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican, that would mandate specific standards for cars, trucks, homes and offices. It would also give the energy secretary the power to award loans to companies he thought could do a good job of setting up programs to retrofit buildings. State officials would do the same for factories. The bill, in short, puts more faith in government than the market.

Leonhardt clearly believes that the transparency of cap-and-trade when it comes to costs is its major political flaw. That’s definitely a factor, but I’d argue that something more fundamental is going on. Once Democrats embraced cap-and-trade, Republicans began retreating from it as a simple matter of politics. And this distancing effort has been immensely reinforced by the rightward trend in the GOP during the last few years, in which leaders who simply denied there was any climate change problem, and/or that government had any useful role to play on the issue, have been in the ascendancy. So “cap-and-tax” was demonized and essentially placed off-limits for Republican politicians, to the point where those like Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) and Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) who weren’t quite in the “denialist” camp found it easier to just support direct federal regulation.

We saw a similar dynamic play out on health reform, where a market-based managed competition model long supported by Republicans, and championed quite recently by Mitt Romney, became toxic the moment it was fully advanced by Barack Obama. And even as they savaged ObamaCare as “socialized medicine,” Republicans saw little irony in posing as last-ditch defenders of Medicare, a relic of an earlier Democratic drive for a government-run single-payer system.

On both health care and climate change, it’s not surprising that many progressives are impatient with Obama’s determination to promote market-based approaches that the supposed party of market-based policy, the GOP, will no longer support. But nobody should for a moment mistake the identity of the prime mover in shifting the political ground away from the once-promising “centrist” convergence on using market mechanisms to address public sector challenges. The GOP could have declared partial victory and celebrated the Democratic Party’s abandonment of big government solutions, and then fought it out over the details. Instead, Republicans have burned down every structure on the potential common ground that Americans seem to crave. They may be able to succeed for a while in opportunistically deploring the inability of Democrats to get anything done. But if and when Republicans regain power, they may well discover that the GOP policy arsenal has been emptied by their own hands.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Photo credit: Magnera

A Talking Head Dishes on Fox’s Fair and Balanced Farce

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Jim Arkedis on Fox NewsEvery so often, I’ll get a call from someone over at Fox News to appear as a talking head.

Now, before you scream out a collective “EEEEWWW! GROSS!” let me explain. I work at a smallish think tank, and as the old saying goes, any publicity is good publicity. My connection to Fox was established through a good friend (and conscientious journalist) who works on Fox News Sunday. He introduced me to a handful of other bookers, all of whom have been very courteous, friendly and genuinely appreciative of my contributions.

This started just over a year ago, and I’d estimate that Fox offers me a slot as a talking head on national security issues (oh, and on pirates. Fox LOVES pirate stories) perhaps once every two weeks. Due to scheduling conflicts and the last-minute nature of many of the requests (it’s not unusual to get a 9:00 a.m. call for a 10:30 a.m. appearance), I can do only perhaps half of them. (Click here to see a clip of me talking with none other than Geraldo Rivera [best line from Geraldo, “I agree with Jim”], or here to see me drop some knowledge on an “expert” from the Heritage Foundation [whom several of my friends suggested I ask out. I demurred].)

In the beginning, I was just really happy to get on TV. Call it narcissistic, call it what you will, but I was generally under the impression that I was providing Fox’s viewers with an alternate viewpoint. I understood that “Fair and Balanced” was a joke, but I always believed that I might be able to connect with a small percentage of the ardently conservative audience and give them some honest food for thought. When the White House froze out Fox a few months ago, I thought it was a bad move to all but give up on reaching a large percentage of the news-viewing public. (The White House has since backed down from that stance.) It’s from that perspective that I’ve been engaging Fox. But over the last few times I’ve gone on, I’ve come to realize that in some circumstances, it’s a futile effort.

Just yesterday, I received a request to discuss this op-ed from Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT). In the article, Lieberman dings the Obama administration’s recently released National Security Strategy because it uses the term “violent extremism” to define one of America’s enemies, rather than “violent Islamic extremism.” Lieberman took the omission of one word and turned it into an entire opinion piece.

Here’s where we run into problems. I am happy to go on Fox and discuss the big issues of the day when we’re starting from a neutral position. If the topic is “Let’s discuss Obama’s national security strategy,” that’s fine. But this time, the point of departure was, “Joe Lieberman, who’s a credible voice on national security to Fox’s viewership, says Obama’s national security strategy sucks. Jim, it’s your job to explain why it doesn’t suck.”

That’s a fairly clear illustration of Fox’s m.o. Instead of having an honest debate, Fox chooses an angle on a story (i.e., Lieberman’s critique of the National Security Strategy) that establishes a frame for the discussion. Those frames, more often than not, will have the progressive on the defensive from the start. But by having a progressive on TV, Fox can claim to be “fair and balanced.”

When I objected on these grounds, my Fox booker, whom I like a lot, reiterated that going on TV still provided me the opportunity to get my viewpoint out there. I replied that the interview was framed in such a way that did not allow their audience to be persuaded – and yet my appearance would validate their claim to be fair and balanced. I closed by saying,  “[I]f there are big issues framed from a neutral point of view, I love to talk about them. I just don’t want to be the punching bag on pre-determined outcome.”

So how did the slot I refused to go on turn out? Click here and see for yourself — they only had one guest, from the center-right Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

Consider that my little contribution to unfair and unbalanced.

What’s a President To Do?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As President Obama struggles though a host of problems, from the Gulf oil spill to the refusal of the Senate to support a new jobs bill or a cap-and-trade system, you can hear Republicans repeating a strange refrain that first became prominent in their rhetoric during the health reform fight: this president is arrogant and perhaps even tyrannical for trying to enact the policy agenda that he campaigned on in 2008 in the teeth of Republican and (in some cases) popular opposition.

Jay Cost of RealClearPolitics has been particularly insistent on this line of argument, with “bully” being the latest unlikely epithet employed to attack this embattled president:

For somebody who seems detached from the details of policy and largely uninterested in legislative wrangling, Barack Obama sure does come across sometimes like a political bully. But this is not bullying some obstinate backbench legislator. Instead, this is bullying the American people. With health care reform, he basically told the country that he didn’t care what it thought. The fact that people opposed the bill was proof they didn’t know what they were talking about. Now, apparently, the evolving strategy on energy is the same. Don’t like cap-and-trade? That’s your problem, not his. Plan to vote out Democrats in favor of the idea? Like he cares. He’ll pass it anyway….

Instead of passing unpopular bills through questionable methods over the opposition of the people, maybe the President should get behind proposals that can actually sustain popular support.

Okay, fine, let’s say that Obama should ignore the fact that he was elected on a platform to do all these outrageous things that Jay Cost objects to, and go with the polls which make 2010 “likely voters” the arbiters of what he should do right now. What are those “proposals” the president should “get behind” that “can actually sustain popular support?”

Should he, as he has often been urged by Republicans, forget about “irrelevant” issues like health care costs or climate change and focus strictly on the economy? Let’s say he should; what, specifically, can he do that Republicans in Congress won’t fight tooth and nail? Best I can tell, the GOP’s “strategy” for improving the economy is to slash upper-end taxes while eliminating deficits and debts. This cannot, unfortunately, be done without radical reductions in defense spending, which Republicans do not, by and large, support, or alternatively, big changes in Social Security and Medicare that the public is certain to reject by much bigger margins than health reform or cap-and-trade.

The dirty little secret of Washington right now is that the policies Republicans would follow if they were running things are considerably less popular than those being promoted by Democrats, and as the events of the last year have graphically demonstrated, there is no “half-loaf” compromise approach on major issues that Obama can take that Republicans will accept. So Obama can do what he’s doing, or do nothing. If he’s a “bully” for rejecting complete inaction, then bully for him.

Photo credit: Jurvetson’s Photostream

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Dealing With a Different Wheel

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As we await the next step on energy legislation in the Senate, Ezra Klein makes an extremely important if fairly obvious point about the Obama administration’s apparent determination to get something passed even if it doesn’t include a cap-and-trade system or some equivalent carbon pricing mechanism. If the Senate won’t pass such provisions now, it won’t pass them later, either:

There’s nothing magic about [a House-Senate] conference that allows controversial policies that couldn’t pass the Senate the first time around to pass on the second go. The advantage of a conference report is that it can’t be amended, which means you might be able to sneak in some small concessions to the House that aren’t important enough for anyone to sink the whole bill over. But it can be filibustered. So if you add anything major to the bill that would’ve killed it on the pre-conference vote, it’s a good bet that it’ll kill it on the post-conference vote as well.

Carbon pricing almost certainly falls into that category. It’s not a side policy or a bit of pork. It’s the core of a climate bill. If it doesn’t pass in the original Senate bill, that’s because it can’t pass the Senate. Adding it in during conference won’t change that. It’ll just mean the conference report can’t pass the Senate, either. I can’t see any permutation of this in which a conference strategy for carbon pricing makes any sense.

This doesn’t, of course, mean that Congress can’t pass worthwhile energy legislation this year. But it’s not going to magically become a real climate change bill somewhere down the road, particularly with Republicans now monolithically opposing a cap-and-trade approach they once championed.

It’s fine to wheel and deal on legislation, but sometimes the only deal available is one that turns the wheel to an entirely different outcome. That’s probably where things are headed on energy this year.

Photo credit: Rob Crawley’s Photostream

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

A Deafening Silence on Pricing Carbon

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The president had a gilt-edged opportunity last night to show leadership on energy and climate policy. Most everyone who has written about the speech agrees that he let it slip through his fingers.

The president started, of course, with a discussion of the Deepwater Horizon spill and cleanup efforts, only linking the spill to larger questions of energy, energy security and climate towards the end of the speech:

When I was a candidate for this office, I laid out a set of principles that would move our country towards energy independence.  Last year, the House of Representatives acted on these principles by passing a strong and comprehensive energy and climate bill—a bill that finally makes clean energy the profitable kind of energy for America’s businesses.

Now, there are costs associated with this transition. And some believe we can’t afford those costs right now. I say we can’t afford not to change how we produce and use energy—because the long-term costs to our economy, our national security, and our environment are far greater.

Great so far.  The president then added:

This is why I’m confirming the commitment I made as a candidate to securing America’s future by putting a price on carbon. Doing so would end our dependence on foreign oil, reduce the environmental risks of oil drilling, protect our children from the risk of climate change, and reduce the burden of debt we will pass on to them. Nothing else we can do as a nation would address so many critical problems. For too long we have allowed this policy to be written off because it is politically risky. That must end today. I am calling on the Senate to follow me, the House, and the American people in demanding action. Expedient half-measures will no longer do.

Except he didn’t actually say that, of course. Instead of ending his speech with the call to action it was crying out for, he punted, promising to look at “other ideas and approaches from either party” like new building efficiency and renewable energy standards.

Listening to ideas is a good thing, of course, but disregarding far and away the best one — pricing carbon — is not. The most striking difference between this speech and Obama’s “energy speech” before the 2008 election is the failure to mention a price mechanism for carbon. None of the measures Obama mentioned will do much to address any of the problems he raised, and to the extent they do anything, it will be more costly than achieving the same results with a carbon price. As Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) said before the speech, trying to achieve climate and energy security results without a carbon price “would be the equivalent of President Kennedy launching our national effort to put a man on the moon without building a rocket.” (Side note: Whatever those on the left think about Lieberman, he deserves credit for the grunt work and political stand he has taken this year on climate).

I’m unsympathetic to the meme that the president’s reaction to the oil spill itself has been somehow weak — there is only so much he or anyone can do about the unfolding disaster. I do think, however, that he has shown a lack of political courage in passing up the opportunity to call for meaningful action on climate and energy. It’s likely that Rahm Emanuel, ever mindful of votes, simply does not think that there is enough support in the Senate for a real climate bill. He’s probably right, but the president’s failure to go out on a political limb for a carbon price ensures that support won’t materialize, since there’s a climate/energy leadership deficit in the Senate as well (looking at you, Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC)). The bully pulpit is a powerful tool to move and shape debate. Emanuel should listen to his own advice here and not waste a crisis that presents such a resonant illustration of the value of reducing carbon emissions. This kind of opportunity may not come again.

However cynical it may appear, Emanuel is right that politics only really changes in response to crises. Climate is a slow problem that will generate obvious crises only when it is too late. The only crises we are going to get while there is still an opportunity to act are those that are indirectly related to climate change (like the oil spill) or illustrate its dangers (like Katrina). If even disasters of this scale are not enough to get us to move — and if even leaders of President Obama’s caliber are unwilling to use them as an opportunity to lead — then maybe we have already lost.

Photo credit: Roberthuffstutter’s Photostream

The War on Oil?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

President Obama firmly took charge of the Gulf oil disaster last night. That was something he needed to do. But am I the only one who found his martial tone off-putting?

There were even moments when I flashed back to his predecessor’s portentous declarations about the war on terror.

More than most of President Obama’s major speeches, this one seemed like a performance aimed at achieving a particular political result: belying a media narrative that says he’s lost control of the crisis. His histrionic address from the Oval Office suggested an actor who has read too many critical reviews.

It’s one thing to have the media whip itself into a frenzy over an oil spill that nobody seems to know how to stop. But it’s unnerving when this usually unflappable president loses his sense of proportion. The oil spill already has done immense ecological and economic damage, and it isn’t done yet. The president was right to mobilize his administration to mitigate the damage, and to put the onus on BP to make whole those whose livelihoods have been destroyed by its reckless disregard for safety.

But there really was no need for the president to sound like Churchill after the fall of France. The situation just isn’t that dire. The leaking well will be plugged, possibly in the next several weeks; nature will demonstrate its amazing resilience and self-healing properties once again; and the shrimpers, fishermen, and hospitality workers devastated by the spill will be compensated.

If his hyperbolic language seemed forced and unconvincing, the president at least drew the right lessons from the Deepwater Horizon disaster. He challenged Americans to embrace the tough measures necessary to reduce our dependence on cheap fossil fuels, which Obama rightly identified as the real nub of the problem. But when it came to specifics, the president was dismayingly vague. Unaccountably, he did not repeat and drive home the crucial point which he made last week: putting a price on carbon is the sine qua non of kicking our oil addiction.

The president made it amply clear last night that he will not let BP off the hook. But that’s the relatively easy part. Would that he had been as resolute with the U.S. Senate, which has been backpedalling furiously away from the comprehensive energy/climate bill the House passed last year. The smart money in Washington says that any kind of carbon cap or price can’t muster 60 votes in the Senate, and so is dead for this year. That likely means it’s dead for next year too, since Democrats will have, at best, reduced margins in the House and Senate.

Before a national audience, the president missed an opportunity to call out Republicans for their monolithic opposition to pricing carbon. Their stance, a noxious blend of scientific ignorance and anti-tax demagoguery, condemns America to even more abject reliance on fossil fuels, with all the risks that entails, including deep water drilling and a worsening energy trade balance. The president could also have used the occasion to stiffen Democratic spines to take a firm stand for clean energy, and to acknowledge that America will also need more nuclear power to meet rising energy demand without increasing carbon emissions.

Best of all, the president could have threatened to veto any bill that doesn’t include pricing carbon to more accurately capture the true economic and environmental costs of burning fossil fuels.

Fortunately, the game is far from over and the president will have other opportunities to make his stand. Despite all his talk of oil “invasion” and “siege,” kicking America’s oil habit isn’t the moral equivalent of war; nothing is. But as the Gulf calamity reminds us, it’s an urgent imperative for presidential leadership.

Photo credit: Marinephotobank’s Photostream

How to Handle North Korea

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Loss of the CheonanThe following is an excerpt from Will Marshall’s column in today’s U.S. News & World Report:

Engagement with North Korea has been a bust—at least in South Korea’s eyes. In sinking the South Korean warship Cheonan, the regime in Pyongyang also torpedoed the South’s “sunshine policy” of humanitarian aid and economic investment in the North. Let’s hope the incident also shatters some illusions in Washington.

South Korean President Lee Myung Bak said the attack, which killed 46 sailors, has awakened South Koreans to “the reality that the nation faces the most belligerent regime in the world.” Seoul moved swiftly to seal the border, freeze trade, ban North Korean ships from its territorial waters, and designate the North as its archenemy. Bak’s militant response, however, seems to have rattled many South Koreans. Instead of rallying around the government, voters last week handed his Grand National Party a stinging defeat in local and regional elections. The prosperous South may no longer believe that Pyongyang can be tamed by economic blandishments, but young Koreans especially want to defuse the crisis.

The Obama administration is standing in solidarity with South Korea and pressing China to support new United Nations sanctions against North Korea. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was recently in Seoul, where she reaffirmed the U.S. policy of “strategic patience.” Officials traveling with her said there will be no push to restart nuclear disarmament talks. “What we’re focused on is changing North Korean behavior,” the Washington Post quoted one official as saying.

Patience, no doubt, is a virtue in dealing with North Korea’s volatile dictator, Kim Jong Il. But it is not a policy. The United States has been trying to change the regime’s behavior since the Cold War ended, with little to show for it. Despite periodic bouts of U.S. engagement, multilateral diplomacy, and economic assistance, things have gotten worse. North Korea has developed and tested nuclear bombs, aided Syria’s clandestine nuclear program, sold missiles to Iran, and run a counterfeit-dollar racket, all while starving millions of its own people.

So what should be the strategic aim of U.S. policy toward North Korea?

Some foreign policy “realists” seem to believe that, if only the United States and its international partners can cobble together the right mix of economic incentives and diplomatic pressure, Pyongyang will eventually come to its senses. But North Korea offers a perfect illustration of realism’s blind spot—its inability to grasp the connection between the nature of regimes and their external conduct.

Read the full column at U.S. News & World Report.

Photo credit: US Army Korea – IMCOM

Divorce Washington at Your Peril, Silicon Valley

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Silicon ValleyWashington, D.C. and Silicon Valley are separated by 3,000 miles and vastly different cultures. But if the Valley itself and, more broadly, the U.S. economy are to thrive, then Washington and Silicon Valley need to appreciate each other more than they currently do. From my perch inside the Beltway, I’d like to offer some words of advice for the Valley.

First, I salute your entrepreneurial and organic spirit. It has helped transform the world and create jobs and wealth. But while Washington doesn’t always understand what Silicon Valley does or needs, you need to abandon the myth that Washington had nothing to do with your creation.

Remember: the Internet emerged from the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). Oracle got started doing work for the Central Intelligence Agency and Intel sold much of its early output to the Pentagon. Sergey Brin was working on bibliographic research with an National Science Foundation (NSF) grant when he conceived Google. The founders of Genentech and other Bay Area biotech firms relied in part on federal research money to universities. Granted, these and many other companies became forces in the market independent of government, but does anyone really think that the federal dollars that flowed into Stanford, U.C. Berkeley and the Lawrence Livermore Lab had nothing to do with the Silicon Valley of today?

Second, whatever tangential role the feds played years ago, many in Silicon Valley agree with Michael Arrington, editor of the widely read blog Tech Crunch, that it was time for Washington to “just leave Silicon Valley alone.” Oh really? No need for a more generous research and development tax credit? What about intellectual-property infringement? Are the busy people creating and running the companies in the Valley going to lead the charge for cracking down on IP theft in countries like China? What about federal funding for research? I don’t need to tell you that a lot of the best minds and ideas that end up in your companies were trained and/or nurtured at these prestigious California institutions, where federal money flows in from NSF, the Department of Energy, the National Institutes of Health and others. Imagine where the Valley will be in the future without the public private/partnerships and government research dollars. The countries with the fastest broadband are the ones in which government invested in the networks.

Third, don’t kid yourselves — while success in the IT industry in the past might have depended on private companies simply commercializing and marketing their good innovations, success going forward depends on robust public-private partnerships. Intelligent transportation systems, the smart electric grid, mobile payments, digital signatures, health IT and, of course, broadband all represent transformative changes in how we live and work. The commercial opportunities for private companies will be huge, but can companies alone lead the way? Probably not. As we have shown in a report, other nations are ahead of us in all these areas and it is because of smart public private IT partnerships. Only when government commits to the historic redesigns of how we travel, communicate, share data, conduct commerce and use energy will the vast commercial opportunities become accessible for Silicon Valley companies.

Fourth, don’t assume that if government simply loosens up H-1B visa restrictions and lowers taxes, everything else will take of itself. Yes, we need to be able to attract and retain the best minds in the world so we are not starved for talent in the U.S. And yes, we should lower corporate taxes to compete for mobile, high-value-added jobs with countries that have lower effective corporate tax rates. We need to make our R&D credit more generous (we now rank 18th among OECD countries) and should explore tax incentives tied to investment and workforce training workers. But it’s important to note that these countries are matching tax cuts with proactive government efforts to marshal resources to establish leadership in IT and other key economic sectors. Silicon Valley is hanging its fate on a very narrow reed by focusing on worker visas and taxes, and giving short shrift to the many other ways where government plays an integral role in its future.

That leads to the fifth and final piece of advice: Play a more active role in shaping policy in Washington that is good for the country and good for Silicon Valley. Rather than wishing the government would simply cut taxes and leave, get behind government efforts to make innovation a more central part of economic policy. Support more robust investments in national laboratories and university research. Stand up for government efforts to kick start the development of “platform technologies” like the smart grid and intelligent transportation systems. Lead the charge for a better trade policy that defends U.S. innovators against foreign technology mercantilism. Silicon Valley has been the chief beneficiary of Washington’s research and vision, and stands to gain the most from these policies going forward.

Photo credit: caccamo

Alabama Primary Saga Continues

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

After the cornucopia of primaries on June 8, the electoral schedule is slowing down for a bit. The next votes are on June 22, with three statewide runoffs (South Carolina, North Carolina and South Dakota) and the Utah primary.

But perhaps the most interesting set of developments over the last few days involves Alabama’s Republican gubernatorial contest, where the extremely narrow margin between second-place finisher Robert Bentley and third-place finisher Tim James has created a legal and political mess.

Alabama is one of those states with a relatively decentralized election system, particularly for primaries. There’s no automatic recount system, and technically, no such thing as a statewide recount. So a candidate like James, who is looking for 167 votes to overtake Bentley, must pursue a recount county-by-county, through county party committees utilizing volunteers, all at his own expense.

As James was gearing up for that effort last week, along came Attorney General Troy King — a Republican who got trounced in his effort to get renominated on June 1 — with an opinion holding that no challenge to the primary results could be launched until a nomination had actually been made — i.e., after the runoff. This Catch-22 situation didn’t persuade James to abandon his recount effort, but it appears that if the recount does put him into the lead, the best party leaders could do for him is to schedule a runoff after the runoff — essentially a round-robin — where he’d face the winner of the contest between Bentley and first-place finisher Bradley Byrne. As Chuck Dean of the Birmingham News says:

That scenario is keeping Republican Party state Chairman Mike Hubbard from getting a good night’s sleep.

“It’s a potential mess,” said Hubbard. “All we can do at this point is follow what the attorney general says is the law and the rec­ommendations of the secre­tary of state and then see what we see. If the recount shows Bentley still in the lead, then I guess this is all over. If the recount shows James pulling ahead, then all I can say is, hold on.”

The only person enjoying this mess is probably Democratic gubernatorial nominee Ronnie Sparks.

In other runoff news, third-place finisher Henry McMaster has endorsed all-but-certain South Carolina Republican gubernatorial nominee Nikki Haley in her runoff against Rep. Gresham Barrett (R-SC).

Poll Watch

In polling news, Magellan Strategies has a new Louisiana survey out that illustrates the dominance of the oil and gas industries in that state’s economy, with respondents favoring an expansion of offshore drilling by a 72-15 margin.

PPP has released the first major survey of the Illinois Senate race since Rep. Mark Kirk’s (R-IL) issues with his military record emerged. It shows Democrat Alexi Giannoulias edging back ahead of Kirk by a 31-30 margin with a big undecided vote.

And a new Battleground poll for NPR, jointly conducted by the Democratic firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner and the Republican firm Public Opinion Strategies, focuses on 70 competitive House districts, sixty of which are currently held by Democrats. It shows Republicans with an overall 49-41 lead in these districts, including a 47-42 lead in Democratic districts. As Stan Greenberg put it: “In a year where voters want change and in which Democrats are seen to be in power, this is a tough poll — about as tough as you [can] get.”

Report: High-Speed Rail Will Accelerate Economic Growth in Surveyed Cities

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

A report released yesterday concludes that high-speed trains would significantly boost economic activity and job creation over sped-up conventional Amtrak service. Released by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the report examines how the introduction of different types of train service would impact business activity and jobs in two midsized cities – Albany, N.Y., and Orlando, Fla. – and a regional hub, Chicago.

Its findings clarify that the current debate over train speeds is not a dispute over “complementary means to the same end,” but a basic question of national aspirations that goes straight to the heart of 21st-century transportation and economic development.

Simply put, does the country want to pay less for an infrastructure that will make marginal improvements or does it want to spend more in order to multiply its gains?

Incremental vs. High Speed

Incremental improvements on existing railroad rights of way would cost about $15 million-$20 million a mile to build, whereas full high-speed rail (HSR) – with a dedicated right of way – might cost $40 million or more a mile.

Currently only Florida and California are pursuing the full HSR option. Some 15 states are developing projects that would result in what can best be called “higher speed rail” or “improving Amtrak on-time-performance rail.”

Joseph Szabo, head of the Federal Railroad Administration, has thrown his weight behind incremental improvements, saying in recent congressional testimony that trains that operate at 200 mph aren’t really necessary.

The calculations of the Boston consultancy, Economic Development Research Group, who prepared the new report, point to a different conclusion.

For Albany, the report looked at three scenarios in year 2035 – the introduction of marginally improved train speeds (79-90 mph), medium speeds (maximum of 110 mph) and full high speeds (maximum of 220 mph).

The report estimated that annual business sales would increase in the range of $358 to $534 million a year (in 2009 dollars) for incremental and medium-speed service, but would jump five-fold to $2.5 billion a year with full high-speed service.

The employment impact similarly varied, from 3,200 to 4,700 permanent jobs added for incremental and medium-speed service, compared to 21,360 jobs with HSR. Because the quality of jobs would increase with a more mobile workforce, roughly $1 billion a year would be added to Albany wages by 220-mph service.

Transformative Effect

The report attributed fast rail’s transformative powers on Albany to the fact that it would bring the region within the orbit of New York City. The two cities are separated by 140 miles, but Amtrak service currently takes 2 hours 35 minutes.

Reducing travel time to under an hour – possible when reaching a maximum 200 mph balanced with slower speeds in the urban districts – would spark a huge travel flow and make Albany a destination for commuters as well as tourists and business travelers. Connecting Albany to Buffalo, Boston and Montreal with fast trains would create additional opportunities.

This in turn would “support the growth of office activities and services that support state government, emerging nanotechnology, clean energy and computer chip-related industries,” the report concluded.

Growth projections for the three other cities studied:

  • In Chicago, 220-mph trains radiating to St. Louis, Detroit and St. Paul-Minneapolis would nearly triple yearly business activity to $6.1 billion and more than double employment to 42,200 new jobs compared to 110-mph service.
  • In Orlando, 220-mph trains from Tampa-St. Petersburg and Miami would bring $2.9 billion in yearly business sales, including 27,500 new jobs, compared to $2.1 billion in sales and 19,900 jobs from service operating at 168 mph.
  • In Los Angeles, 220-mph service to San Diego and San Francisco would generate $7.5 billion in new sales, including 54,000 new jobs. Because California is only planning a high-speed line, there was no economic comparison to slower service.

The economic benefits of HSR would grow over time as the new service was fully implemented and savings in travel time, expenses and congestion reduction were realized.

The new report is titled “Connecting America with High Speed Rail” and can be downloaded at https://www.usmayors.org/highspeedrail/.

Photo credit: Beto’s Photostream

Head Scarves, Minarets and the Arizona Immigration Law

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

I’ve been following the story of a Muslim French woman who was given a ticket in April for driving while wearing her hijab, or veil.  She was issued the ticket for driving with obscured vision. Yesterday, it jumped into mainstream American media over at the Washington Post. The story is the high water mark in a public debate on Islam in France that’s been brewing for over a decade.The incident underscores France’s uneasy relationship with its sizable Muslim minority. Depending on your source, 10 to 12 percent of French citizens are of Arab or Muslim extraction, or nearly six million total (it’s difficult to verify these numbers because the French census, rigidly adhering to the country’s secularism, does not permit racial or religious background information from being collected).

French Muslims’ growing prominence has become particularly notable in the south, for obvious geographic reasons. Jean Marie Le Pen’s racist and xenophobic National Front consistently draws its base of support in this region (it’s no coincidence that Le Pen calls Marseille home). If you’re not terribly familiar with French politics, don’t write them off — they’ve been around a lot longer and are much better organized than America’s far-right Tea Party. In the regional elections this March, the party took home 12 percent of the total vote and over 20 percent in Le Pen’s home base.

The National Front creates problems for center-right French President Nicolas Sarkozy, son of Hungarian parents and a first-generation citizen himself. Essentially, Sarko wants to channel France’s xenophobia through a different mechanism — his. Sarko’s ruling UMP party in January offered a draft law to ban the veil and partial ban on burka (the entire Islamic dress for women), which he champions as defending France’s secularism and women’s rights. Sure, that’s plausible, but the debate is really a sop to racists.

What’s difficult about the issue is that I actually think there is a public safety concern. I can see how wearing a veil while driving might reduce your vision in ways a helmet would not — the hijab is loose cloth and could cover one eye while turning your head. A concerted effort should be made to balance religious freedom and public safety, while being mindful that bans on clothing are distinctly ill-liberal.  Even conservatives should have a problem with the government telling you want to wear.

France is unfortunately not alone — Belgium passed a similar law (25 percent of Brussels follows Islam, five percent countrywide), and Switzerland (five percent) voted last year to ban construction of minarets on mosques. It would seem, therefore, that Europe is developing something of a trend in largely symbolic anti-Islamic legislation.

But what do head scarves and minarets have to do with the recently signed “immigration law” in Arizona? Just substitute “Hispanic” for “Muslim” and “U.S.” for “Europe” and you’d get the picture. With 15 percent of the country now claiming Hispanic origin, the Arizona law is the same type of symbolic legislative effort that channels voters’ racism. The thing is, some 60 percent of Americans support it nationally.

So where do we go from here? If progressives scream “racism” at the top of their lungs, the legislation’s supporters will concoct non-racial justifications. The best answer, in the U.S. at least, is to pass comprehensive immigration reform before we tread too far down Europe’s path.

Photo credit: DVIDSHUB’s Photostream

More Protection for Money Talking

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

One of the more pernicious if deeply entrenched constitutional doctrines in this country is the idea that spending money on political campaigns is inherently an exercise of first amendment free speech rights whose regulation requires the strictest judicial scrutiny. It’s why we do not have any effective national system for campaign finance limitations, and indirectly why at any given time about half the country thinks our politicians have been bought and sold for campaign contributions. Most fundamentally, self-funding candidates can pretty much do whatever they want, and despite the hard economic times, we are seeing self-funders arise this year in extraordinary numbers, particularly on the GOP side of the battlelines.

Unfortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court seems determined to undo every effort to provide candidates who face self-funders with anything like an equalizer. In 2007, in Davis v. F.E.C., a 5-4 majority of the Court struck down the so-called “Millionaire’s Amendment” to the Feingold-McCain campaign finance law on grounds, basically, that it discriminated against millionaires by allowing the opponents of self-funders higher contribution and spending limits.

By the same dubious logic, the Court may be about to strike down “equalizer” provisions in six state public financing systems (Arizona, Connecticut, Maine, New Mexico, North Carolina and Wisconsin). In a case involving Arizona, the Court has issued a stay on the collection of “extra” public money from candidates facing self-funders until it can hear a constitutional challege to the system. Given the Davis precedent, campaign reform advocates are bracing for a bad result.

Photo Credit: Dbking’s Photostream

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.