Like many of you, I’ve been watching the health care summit, and can’t decide just yet if it’s a spectacle of complex drama, or just one of the longest congressional hearings to be broadcast in a long time. For those unfamiliar with congressional events, the preliminary throat-clearing and personal preening must be excrutiating.
The Republican strategy for this event is pretty clear already: act like the administration is doing something really outrageous by using reconciliation to finalize the health care legislation already passed by both Houses. As I mentioned yesterday, this is factually ludicrous, but repeating talking points does sometimes work.
It’s pretty interesting that tea partiers are protesting the very existence of the event outside Blair House. Appointing themselves representatives of the people, and making unconditional demands on their behalf, has been a hallmark of their movement all along.
Editor’s note: The summit is being webcast live on C-SPAN.
Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, a Canadian research organization, came out with an interesting new study (PDF) that makes a strong pocketbook case for high-quality public transit.
The study looked at seven major U.S. cities with high-quality public transit systems: Washington, D.C., New York, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.
The study’s findings shouldn’t surprise public transit aficionados. According to Litman, residents of cities with good public transit tend to own 10-30 percent fewer vehicles and drive 10-30 percent less than they would in more automobile-oriented communities.
But the study also calculated what exactly good public transit meant for residents’ wallets:
[P]roviding high quality public transit service typically requires about $268 in annual subsidies and $108 in additional fares per capita, but reduces vehicle, parking and road costs an average of $1,040 per capita. For an average household this works out to $775 annually in additional public transit expenses and $2,350 in vehicle, parking and roadway savings, or $1,575 in overall net savings…[emphasis added]
Those results don’t even take into account the other benefits a city can derive from a high-functioning transit system: a decrease in pollution, less congestion, fewer traffic accidents, and improved public fitness and health.
What’s striking about Litman’s study is that its conclusions are something that transit-using city-dwellers tend to grasp intuitively. Commuters know firsthand the benefits of not having to rely on a car to get around the city — not having to deal with parking, congestion, gas, upkeep and insurance costs, etc.
But as Litman points out, most American cities offer only basic public transit services that are used mainly by people who have no other alternatives. In cities with good public transit, even affluent residents use the system, as they recognize its benefits. It all points to a fairly obvious upshot: cities should place public transit higher on its list of funding priorities.
Studies like Litman’s also bring up another important dimension in all this: political will. Americans love their cars but — especially in tough economic times — would they love them as much if they were informed that a strong alternative would save them an average of $1,500 a year? Something tells me a citizenry informed of the considerable savings from a good Metro or bus system could be nudged toward supporting more robust funding for a well-developed transit infrastructure.
“Flip-flopping” on major issues can be hazardous to your political health. “Flip-flopping” when you’ve branded yourself as a brave principled “maverick” can be especially dangerous. And “flip-flopping” on grounds that you were confused about the issue in question is really, really bad, particularly when you are on the far side of 70.
That’s why John McCain may have ended his long political career the other day when he responded to attacks by primary challenger J.D. Hayworth on his support for TARP (popularly known from the beginning as the “Wall Street Bailout”) by claiming he was misled by the Fed Chairman and the Treasury Secretary into thinking the bill was about the housing industry, not Wall Street:
In response to criticism from opponents seeking to defeat him in the Aug. 24 Republican primary, the four-term senator says he was misled by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. McCain said the pair assured him that the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program would focus on what was seen as the cause of the financial crisis, the housing meltdown.”Obviously, that didn’t happen,” McCain said in a meeting Thursday with The Republic’s Editorial Board, recounting his decision-making during the critical initial days of the fiscal crisis. “They decided to stabilize the Wall Street institutions, bail out (insurance giant) AIG, bail out Chrysler, bail out General Motors. . . . What they figured was that if they stabilized Wall Street – I guess it was trickle-down economics – that therefore Main Street would be fine.”
What makes this claim especially astonishing is that McCain was rather famously focused on TARP at the time. He suspended his presidential campaign to come crashing back into Washington to attend final negotiations designed to get enough Republican support for TARP to get it passed. He was, by all accounts, a very passive participant in these talks, but it’s not as though he wasn’t there. And you’d think his memories of the event would be reasonably clear, since it probably sealed his electoral defeat.
It’s not obvious how McCain can walk this statement back. And in terms of the political damage he inflicted on himself, it’s hard to think of a suitable analogy without going all the way back to 1967, when Gov. George Romney (father of The Mittster) destroyed his front-running presidential campaign by claiming he had been “brainwashed” by military and diplomatic officials into erroneously supporting the Vietnam War. He never recovered from that one interview line. (Sen. Gene McCarthy, who did run for presidential in 1968, was asked about the Romney “brainwashing” by David Frost, and quipped: “I would have thought a light rinse would have been sufficient.”).
McCain has a more sizable bank of political capital than George Romney ever did, but in a primary contest where he was already in some trouble, the suggestion that he was brainwashed by a Republican administration into fundamentally misunderstanding the central national and global issue of the moment–not to mention the central current grievance of voters with Washington–could be fatal. It doesn’t help that it will vastly reinforce Hayworth’s not-so-subtle claims that McCain is a fine statesman whose time has come and gone, and is now losing it.
IRAQ’S March 7 national election, and the formation of a new government that will follow, carry huge implications for both Iraqis and American policy. It appears now that the results are unlikely to resolve key political struggles that could return the country to sectarianism and violence. If so, President Obama may find himself later this year considering whether once again to break his campaign promises about ending the war, and to offer to keep tens of thousands of troops in Iraq for several more years. Surprisingly, that probably is the best course for him, and for Iraqi leaders, to pursue.
[…]
The political situation is far less certain, and I think less stable, than most Americans believe. … All the existential questions that plagued Iraq before the surge remain unanswered. How will oil revenue be shared among the country’s major groups? What is to be the fundamental relationship between Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds? Will Iraq have a strong central government or be a loose confederation? And what will be the role of Iran (for my money, the biggest winner in the Iraq war thus far)?
Ricks goes on to advocate slowing down the U.S. withdrawal, which can really only occur if the Iraqis offer to re-open negotiations on the status of forces agreement (SOFA). It was signed in the waning days of the Bush administration and establishes December 31, 2011, as the date when “all United States forces shall withdraw from Iraq.”
While the future in Iraq certainly continues to look murky and Ricks’ suggestion should be kept in mind, I don’t think we’re quite at the point of seriously debating a change to the SOFA just yet. Let’s wait until the March 7th elections have passed and the mood of the country and new government shake out until we think about it. After all, it’s not our call anyway — as the SOFA clearly states, “The United States recognizes the sovereign right of the Government of Iraq to request the departure of the United States Forces from Iraq at any time,” and that’s a politically weighty sentence to revisit if you’re a brand new Iraqi government.
That’s why I don’t think the announcement of General Odierno’s contingency plan to delay withdrawal is much of a definite harbinger at this point. That’s what the military does — it plans for things. They’re the best Boy Scouts (motto: Be Prepared) in the world. And just because it plans, doesn’t mean the commander-in-chief is about to put those plans in motion. After all, we have a plan on the books to attack Iran. And I’ve got $20 that says we have a plan to attack Canada.
But then again, invading Canada would make winning the hockey gold medal a lot less fun.
Looking forward to tomorrow’s health care “summit,” Ben Smith of Politico has a pretty good summary of the five distinct audiences the president must think about in handling this event: House Democrats, Senate Democrats, the Public, the Fans of Bipartisanship, and Republicans. But there are obviously priorities in his messaging:
He’ll be making the sale, for the umpteenth time, to an American public that supports aspects of health care legislation but opposes the bill. He’ll be pitching Beltway graybeards obsessed, as always, with bipartisanship. He’ll be appealing to moderate Senate Democrats to back reconciliation.But most important will be his pitch to a handful of conservative Democrats in the House who will have to switch their votes and vote for the Senate health care bill for it to pass into law.
Smith’s right that the most important immediate audience is House Democrats. In the longer run, however, this summit is a very important landmark in his overall positioning of himself and his party for the midterm elections in November. The reality in Washington is that a Republican Party that is becoming more ideologically extreme each day is using every procedural tool and political trick you can imagine to avoid any real action on any significant issue. If that reality becomes more generally known because of the summit, then it will be a success for Obama and Democrats, regardless of how it plays with the Republicans, the pundit class, or Democrats who are wavering on health reform.
As the United States struggles to rouse itself from its economic slumber, the country is beginning to keenly feel the need to lay down a foundation for a new and vibrant economy. A concerted effort to modernize our infrastructure must top any checklist for recovery. The backbone of our economic system has suffered from years of neglect – budgetary, conceptual, institutional. With his recent request for $4 billion to create a National Infrastructure Innovation and Finance Fund, it’s encouraging that President Obama seems to understand how essential an infrastructure revival is to our prosperity.
But such a fund is not nearly enough to bring our infrastructure into the 21st century. And simply devoting money to projects will not lead to results unless we have a clear strategy for revitalizing and reinventing our roads, bridges, railroads, mass transit, and other structures and systems essential to sustaining productivity.
To put it plainly, our current infrastructure model is exhausted. We currently invest 1.3 percent of GDP in infrastructure; in 1980, we invested over three percent. Worse, we are investing in the wrong kind of infrastructure. Right now, we are barely covering replacement costs for a system designed 50 years ago — and which now badly needs updating just to keep up with the rest of the world.
For our country to be globally competitive, we will need to nearly triple our level of infrastructure investment each year over the next 10 years, from the current $150 billion level to at least $400 billion per year. And we will need to think differently about infrastructure, designing projects and promoting firms that are carbon neutral, highly innovative, and transformative.
These goals will require a fundamental shift in orientation, and a new conceptual framework for infrastructure. To see infrastructure through a new prism, we need:
bold leadership that inspires Americans to dream big about infrastructure again
an uncompromising competitiveness agenda that puts us on track to keep pace with — and lap — nations like China
From that perspective springs three specific ideas on how to get us on a course to an infrastructure revival:
a true National Infrastructure Bank
a new, NASA-equivalent agency for infrastructure
a new focus on the design and aesthetics of infrastructure projects
A Conceptual Framework for Infrastructure
First, the country needs a positive and unified infrastructure vision that ties together immediate job creation and long-term productivity. The last time the country had a grand vision for infrastructure was 60 years ago with the Interstate Highway System.
In a sense, we need to learn how to think about infrastructure again. Without an organizing vision, we are unmoored. In our current mindset, any project will be just as good as another. The discipline of setting priorities, and of creating and following budgets to reach toward an inspiring and ambitious vision, has disappeared. The Greatest Generation conjured up the last coherent vision for U.S. infrastructure. Now we need to create – and execute – a new vision for the next generation.
Second, we need to place the issue of competitiveness at the center of the debate. Like boiling a frog by gradually raising the temperature, the current catastrophe happened slowly, without our noticing until it was too late. For instance, China is investing $300 billion in high-speed rail through 2020, while we congratulate ourselves on a measly $8 billion down payment on a system that lacks vision, institutional support, or a budgetary glide path.
Now that we’ve noticed how far behind we’ve fallen, we have to look at infrastructure through the lens of global competitiveness. We need to be able to make, move, and deliver things much more cheaply. We need to give people better, cheaper, quicker, and cleaner options for moving themselves around the country. And we need to make sure that our water and air quality are measurably world-class. There are many ways to think about competitiveness, but having the right infrastructure, built and operated at a world-beating price, is the place to begin.
From Concept to Execution
But vision and motivation aren’t enough. We also have to execute – to get the mechanics right, and quickly. The third challenge that we need to overcome is that of funding. Specifically, we need a long-term source that will be reliable and impervious to changes in political administrations. Such an agency will also need the authority to select and seed priority infrastructure projects and systems.
A National Infrastructure Bank would fill this void. The bank would be capitalized through the sale of infrastructure bonds to middle-class Americans, who would triply benefit from their investments – contributing to better infrastructure, directly engaging in the creation of a stronger country, and individually benefiting from coupon returns on their investment.
The bank would cover all infrastructure sectors, from transportation to water to energy, and would need to be capitalized at a level of at least $400 billion over 10 years, yielding a minimum of $160 billion a year in strategic infrastructure investments. The National Infrastructure Bank would be a strategic and necessary complement to the Obama administration’s highly successful Build America Bonds program. Overall, this effort would create between two million and 2.5 million new jobs per year for the next 10 years.
We also need a high-functioningpublic sector – and one viewed as such by the public – if we are to rebuild our infrastructure. More than in most areas of the economy, there is a productive tension in infrastructure policy between the market’s ability to identify opportunities and the long-term wisdom the public sector can provide. Without a strong public sector, this necessary balance – identifying opportunities and creating jobs now, while ensuring benefits for the next generation – will fall out of balance. Private sector energy will never be unleashed on our infrastructure challenges unless there is a strong, high-functioning, and strategic public sector with which it can reliably and aggressively partner.
Today, the public sector – and particularly the infrastructure public sector – is neither seen nor treated as an indispensable arm of a successful state. A fretwork of agencies are involved in different fiefdoms of infrastructure, from the Federal Highway Administration to the Department of Energy to the Environmental Protection Agency. This needs to change. We need an equivalent of NASA for infrastructure, a powerful new federal agency that could drive vision and policy at all levels.
Fifth, we must bridge a design gap. The U.S. has fallen into a budget trap in infrastructure. We are so pressured by budget issues and the threat of cost overruns that we design our projects without much attention to the inherent grandeur of infrastructure. We seem to be governed by a belief that the aesthetically pleasing is more expensive than the pedestrian, when the reverse is actually true.
Bridges, airports, subway stations, highways, and high-speed rail stations are powerful symbols that define a country and its capacities. Projects and the networks they serve say something about how a nation views itself. Crumbling infrastructure, cut-rate design, and the absence of super projects all suggest not only a lack of confidence – they saddle us with inferior infrastructure well into the future.
Conclusion
We have to establish economic priorities to get ourselves back on our feet. Making strategic decisions on our infrastructure is essential to bring vibrant and equitable growth. The Obama administration needs to fill the voids in our infrastructure policy as soon as possible. Under the right leadership, a recalibration of our infrastructure outlook and priorities can create up to five million jobs in the short run, erasing the losses of the last two years and ensuring an extraordinarily productive future for the next generation.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated since its original publication.
Republicans are warning of ominous political consequences if the Democrats use budget reconciliation rules to help pass health care reform. It would be “a huge mistake,” averred Sen. Olympia Snowe, the chief object of Senate Democrats’ unconsummated quest for bipartisan cooperation on health reform.
Evidently, for the Democrats to resort to reconciliation would be an intolerable abuse of congressional rules, whereas the Republican habit of filibustering everything in sight is perfectly within bounds. Passing health measures by a simple majority vote, the GOP maintains, would be the political equivalent of nuclear war: It would pulverize what little remains of comity and good will in Washington.
It’s a little late for the GOP to be worrying about that. Nor are Republicans more convincing when they complain that it’s somehow illegitimate for President Obama to start the bidding in tomorrow’s health care summit with a plan derived from bills that have passed both houses of Congress.
“I don’t think the people like this any more than…the approach that came down the pike earlier,” House Republican Whip Eric Cantor said. “People are incredulous. I just think they are wondering, does the White House not get it?” He was referring, of course, to polls showing majority opposition to the main health care proposals before Congress.
Cantor seems to be arguing that shifting public attitudes matter more than election results, and that Congress shouldn’t pass legislation that doesn’t poll well. Does the House minority whip not get representative democracy? (It was a good thing he wasn’t around when Lincoln pushed Congress to enact a draft to win the Civil War.) And if Republicans really are so sure Democrats will self-destruct politically by passing Obamacare, why not lash them on?
One reason might be that the health care summit will highlight the embarrassing fact that Cantor and company offer no serious alternative to the president’s approach. (House Republicans last year labored mightily to produce a mouse of a bill that would cover just three million of America’s 40-plus million uninsured.) The real choice is between the president’s far-from-perfect health care reform, and none at all.
And in a way that’s too bad, because if we had a serious opposition, it might help the president push back against some of the bad ideas coming from his own party. An example: under pressure from labor and liberals, Obama has drastically scaled down and delayed an excise tax on expensive employer-paid health plans. Not only does that reduce revenue needed to pay for health reform, it also barely grazes an open-ended federal tax subsidy that economists believe contributes greatly to medical cost inflation. Rather than insist on limiting that government subsidy, many Republicans claim it’s a violation of Obama’s pledge not to raise taxes on the middle class.
In a similar vein, the Republicans have lambasted Obama’s proposal to cut hundreds of billions from Medicare to defray the expenses of expanding coverage. And so in its blindly partisan attacks on Obama’s push for health reform, the GOP has managed to 1) shred its credibility as a force for fiscal responsibility; 2) thwart efforts to rein in runaway health care costs; and 3) reinforce their well-deserved reputation as a party that measures compassion by the thimble-full.
On health care, the Republicans have hit the trifecta of demagoguery – which is why their complaints about parliamentary foul play ring hollow.
There are a couple of interesting articles out today offering meditations on the theatrics of the contemporary American Right. At TAP, Paul Waldman mocks the American Revolutionary trappings of the conservative movement in its efforts to get down with the Tea Party folk–most notably the staging of the Mount Vernon Statement, featuring a rogue’s gallery of old-school conservative power brokers:
What [former Attorney General Ed] Meese and his aging colleagues no doubt realized was that if you want to be relevant in the quickly changing conservative movement of 2010, you’d better pretend it’s 1776. Donning revolutionary regalia — sartorially or rhetorically — is becoming to today’s right what slipping on a tie-dye was to Grateful Dead shows back in the day. It tells other participants that you’re all part of the same tribe. It may seem silly to pretend to be a radical agent of change fighting against “tyranny” — the word you hear over and over again from conservatives these days — from a corner office in a corporate-funded D.C. think tank, but they’ll do their best.
Meanwhile, at Salon, Michael Lind characteristically sees something more profound going on, as the Right adopts a self-conscious counter-cultural stance similar to the one that got the Left off course in the 1970s. Lind notes how far conservatives have been backsliding in recent years towards the zaniness that kept them in the political wilderness before the rise of the organized conservative movement:
When [William F.] Buckley came on the scene in the mid-1950s, the American right was dominated by kooks: right-wing isolationists, Pearl Harbor and Yalta conspiracy theorists, anti-Semites and members of the John Birch Society like the palindromically-named Professor Revilo P. Oliver. Buckley and his movement conservatives, and later the early neoconservatives, struggled to purge the right of crackpots and create an intellectually serious movement capable of governing the country.And yet the right of 2010 looks like the fever-swamp right of 1950 instead of the triumphant right of 1980. The John Birch Society, which Buckley and Goldwater expelled from the conservative movement in the early 1960s, was a co-sponsor of this year’s Conservative Political Action Convention (CPAC). Folks who claimed that Eisenhower was a communist now insist that Obama is a socialist.
Calling tea partiers the “hippies of our time,” Lind goes on to compare today’s conservative counter-culture with its leftist forebears, noting a common anti-system radicalism, a Luddite tendency to disparage science and technology, a flair for street theater, and an underlying desire to secede from the broader society. This last observation is interesting; I suppose “going Galt” really is the contemporary equivalent to “getting back to the land,” and could portend a retreat from political activism by tea partiers if they become frustrated by the failure of Americans to embrace their cause.
In any event, Lind concludes, the counter-cultural tendencies of the Right may represent good news for progressives:
The rise of the conservative counterculture may provide the beleaguered Democrats with a stay of execution. A serious Republican counter-establishment, putting forth credible plans for addressing the nation’s problems and determined to collaborate with the other party to govern the country in this crisis, would be a greater threat to the new, shaky Democratic establishment than the theatrics of the right’s Summer of Love.Or should it be called the Winter of Hate?
I tend to agree with Lind on this point, and also think Waldman may not be taking the implications of the conservative movement’s flirtation with revolutionary rhetoric quite seriously enough. The tea partiers have seized on 1776 rhetoric and imagery not just because of the anti-tax nature of the original Tea Party, but because they argue with considerable consistency that the cure for America’s ills is a rollback of much of the country’s political and constitutional developments over not just years or decades, but centuries. It’s no accident that there’s been a remarkable revival of talk on the Right, even among elected officials, of such discredited nineteenth century theories as the “right” of states to nullify federal laws or even express their “sovereignty” by secession. And the prevailing school of constitutional “thinking” among conservatives is a sort of crude fundamentalist originalism that dismisses health care reform as unconstitutional on grounds that the Constitution itself does not mention health care (an argument Glenn Beck, among others, often makes).
This is powerfully radical stuff, and it will not be easy for Republican pols to whip up crowds by embracing it and then going back to the twenty-first century where the machinery of modern government depends on hundreds of Supreme Court decisions (not to mention a Civil War) that have modified the strict letter of the Constitution.
It’s not clear how long and far today’s counter-cultural trends on the Right will last; maybe Mark Schmitt is correct in predicting this is just another populist wave that will soon recede.
But in the mean time, these are some fine days for conservative-watching, whether it’s Ed Meese posing as a revolutionary or conservatives raptly listening to the deep jurisprudence of Glenn Beck.
One of the least heralded but potentially consequential initiatives by the Obama administration has been its steady campaign against child hunger and obesity. The administration has set an ambitious goal of eliminating child hunger by 2015. Meanwhile, Michelle Obama has spearheaded the Let’s Move! program, aimed at combating childhood obesity.
At an event at the National Press Club today, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack spoke in greater detail about the administration’s priorities as the Child Nutrition Act comes up for reauthorization. The centerpiece of the administration’s child nutrition push is an additional $10 billion over 10 years to improve school breakfast and lunch programs, increase child participation, and equip schools with the resources they need for student health.
One aspect of Vilsack’s presentation seemed familiar:
We cannot rest while so many of our children struggle with access to food, but the federal government will never solve this challenge alone. In the last year, educators have seen the difference that a national “race to the top” in education has made. I am pleased to announce my support for a new competition to eliminate hunger by 2015. We’ll provide competitive grants to Governors, working with stakeholders statewide, so that states can act as laboratories for successful strategies. We’ll let them be creative in experimenting with models that match program delivery with evaluation, so that we can learn what works and what doesn’t. Possible steps will include policy modifications to existing nutrition programs, enhanced outreach efforts, improved coordination between nutrition assistance programs and family supportive services, and work with community and non-profit organizations. Grants would be provided to States with prior accomplishments and commitments to reducing hunger, applications that target communities with higher prevalence of child hunger, and projects that reflect collaboration with a wide range of partners. It is only with these sorts of coordinated efforts that we will achieve our ambitious and important goals.
“Race to the Top” is, of course, the hugely successful program that the Obama administration has used to incentivize education reform across the country. By dangling the promise of federal funds, the White House has been able to push reforms in states and districts that for years had resisted change.
Vilsack’s proposal is especially familiar to us here at PPI. Our own Joel Berg and Tom Freedman, in a “Memo to the New President” last year, called for something like it:
State governments are often the testing ground for the nation’s most important policy experiments. Your administration could reward states for successful innovations in feeding the hungry and improving nutrition. For example, every three years, the USDA could finance bonuses to the five states that show the greatest reduction in the agency’s measures of food insecurity and hunger. These states could then use their winnings to expand and improve their anti-hunger programs. This would act as an incentive for other states to create truly effective hunger policies.
Vilsack’s proposal is another demonstration of the creativity with which the administration is tackling some of our pressing domestic problems. Initiatives like the one Vilsack announced today or Race to the Top may not get as much publicity on a day-to-day basis, but they may yet end up the most enduring of this administration’s accomplishments.
Najibullah Zazi pled guilty yesterday in what should be a major coup for the administration. Right now, they’re not exploiting it for all it’s worth.
First, some background: Zazi traveled from Colorado to New York with explosives in his car and the intention to detonate them in the New York subway, potentially killing hundreds of innocent Americans. The NYT is reporting that Zazi copped to it after DOJ pressured him into cooperation out of fear that the inquiry might widen to include other members of his family. As a part of the deal, prospectors believe he’ll prove a valuable source of information about his contacts in Pakistan, where he met with al Qaeda and learned to make the devices.
Though Zazi’s plea has been sealed by the judge, he has admitted to conspiracies to use weapons of mass destruction, to commit murder in a foreign country, and to provide material support for a terrorist organization. In exchange, he’ll reportedly be sentenced to a life term in a June 25th hearing. Leaving Zazi to anonymously rot in jail is a win-win for the USA in the worldwide PR battle with al Qaeda, too. Sentencing him to die denies terrorists the sickening prospect of using Zazi as a “martyr” in recruiting and financing propaganda. This is worth remembering when KSM’s sentencing comes around.
The case demonstrates that the intelligence community can partner with law enforcement agencies to provide swift, effective justice to those who would harm us. The American security apparatus “connected the dots” to prevent a major terrorist attack. What’s more, it shows that the Obama administration is committed to defeating terrorism and can apply the civilian justice system as part of that effort.
The bottom line is that this is an absolutely huge win for a sound, progressive worldview on national security. The good news is that Attorney General Eric Holder is out making the case. The bad news is that he’s making the case in the wrong way. Here’s a telling statement on the usefulness of the civilian court system from his press conference:
To take this tool [civilian courts] out of our hands, to denigrate this tool flies in the face of facts and is more about politics than it is about facts.
It’s a perfectly sound and correct argument. It’s also one that most Americans ignore.
It would be much more effective to frame the national security argument in terms of emotion, not wonkery. Americans want to hear that their country is strong, that we’re beating terrorism, and that we’re on the offensive in that fight. Using civilian courts shouldn’t be referred to as a “tool”; rather, the entire case should be framed as a “strong victory over those who are dedicated to killing us.”
Conservatives don’t care about facts. They fight these ideological battles on emotional grounds, and for decades their arguments have resonated more with Americans than progressive ones. I would rather have the AG preempting conservative attacks using the Zazi case by projecting an image of staunch, fist-pounding resolve to defend the country, not wonkishly responding to conservatives’ false assertions that civilian courts are weak.
Think I’m wrong? Look no farther than this WaPo/ABC poll that shows the only category that conservatives are “winning” on national security right now is the civilian courts vs. military courts argument, despite the civilian courts’ effectiveness in the Reid, Moussaoui, and, now, Zazi cases. Why? My hunch is that the emotional idea behind a military court simply projects a better image of strength, irrespective of the justice it may deliver.
Now is the time to go on the offensive. Progressives should use this very tangible example of progressive strength and smarts on national security and show that conservative approaches continue to be reckless. Or we could continue fighting this battle on conservatives’ terms and keep wasting our breath.
To continue some thoughts about the growing contradiction between conservative policy predilections and the GOP’s violent anti-spending rhetoric, there’s a specific political factor that’s intensifying the dilemma: the heavy, heavy reliance of Republicans on support from seniors.
Several smart commentators (Chait, Douthat, and Larison) have drawn attention to a new Pew survey on generational political attitudes which shows the exceptionally geriatric nature of the Republican Party’s current base of support. That’s a good thing for Republicans in the very short term, since seniors tend to vote at disproportionately high levels in midterm elections. But it’s not easy to be the Party That Hates Government Spending when your most important constituency is receiving Medicare and Social Security benefits. Here’s how Ross Douthat puts it:
[Y]ou can win an awful lot of elections just by mobilizing the over-65 constituency — they’re well-informed, they turn out to vote, and there are more of them every day. But the easiest way to do it, as the Democrats proved for years and years and years, is to defend Medicare and Social Security like McAuliffe at Bastogne. This means that while the energy of activists may be pushing the Republicans to the right on size-of-government issues, the concerns of their central constituency could end up pulling them inexorably leftward on entitlements….
This wouldn’t be a terrible thing if Social Security and (especially) Medicare accounted for, say, ten percent of the federal budget. But where the size of government — and if we ever want to cut the deficit, the burden of taxation — is concerned, they’ll be the whole ballgame soon enough. And if the Republican Party depends too heavily on over-65 voters for its political viability, we could easily end up with a straightforwardly big-government party in the Democrats, and a G.O.P. that wins election by being “small government” on the small stuff (earmarks, etc.) while refusing to even consider entitlement reform.
Now that’s how it looks if you are simply considering the fiscal numbers. But from a psychological point of view, there’s another problem for conservatives: how to rationalize a posture of maximum defense of Social Security and Medicare with a general hostility to transfer payments. The only obvious way to do that is to treat senior entitlements as benefits earned by virtuous old folks, as opposed to unvirtuous younger folks whose demands for “welfare” are to be resisted and demonized at all costs. You don’t have to hold a negative view of conservative motives to see how this can lead to highly invidious, and perhaps semi-racist, political appeals. Indeed, the current position of Republicans all but demands that they encourage seniors to view public life as a struggle to keep their own public benefits and their own private wealth against rapacious efforts by “elitists” and welfare “looters” to reduce their share of federal spending while increasing their taxes. And that’s a temptation Republican politicians don’t seem inclined to resist, illogical and immoral as it might be.
It’s not clear how long GOPers will continue to maintain this odd mixture of pro-government policies and anti-government rhetoric (a contradiction that extends, of course, to conservatives lust for ever-higher defense spending and foreign policy adventurism). But at present, they might as well emblazon on their Tea Party banners the legend: “Don’t Tread On My Medicare!”
Update: One obvious way around the GOP’s dilemma on entitlements is simply to “grandfather” current beneficiaries and introduce radical changes for younger generations. That’s how Rep. Paul Ryan’s Medicare Voucher proposal — central to the congressional Republican “plans” for both health care and the budget — operates. And that’s explicitly what Tim Pawlenty is talking about doing with both Medicare and Social Security.
It remains to be seen if this approach, which for all the talk about “keeping promises to seniors” sure looks like a cynical effort to buy off a demographic group that favors Republicans at the expense of groups less inclined — will fly with seniors or with anyone else. It does nicely comport with the “I’ve got mine! To hell with the rest of you!” spirit that Republicans are carefully cultivating among older white voters.
The big political news of the day was the Senate’s passage of a $15 billion jobs bill with not one, not two, but five Republicans on board. The five Republicans who voted for it were the three Northeasterners (Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, both of Maine, and Massachusetts’ Scott Brown) and two retiring members (Sens. Kit Bond of Missouri and George Voinovich of Ohio). In other words, considering the bill was largely made up of tax cuts that the GOP would normally vote for, it was still an astoundingly weak show of Republican support.
But it’s undeniable that the appearance of Republican Senate votes is a change from the dismal pattern of recent months. Does the vote herald a new day for the Senate? Too early to tell, of course — but it does give a hint of how Senate Democrats’ plan to break up their job-creation initiatives into smaller pieces and forcing Republicans to vote against them could work.
Brown, in a statement following his vote, said, “I came to Washington to be an independent voice, to put politics aside and to do everything in my power to help create jobs for Massachusetts families.” How did Brown’s vote go over with conservatives? Take a guess. In the months to come, the breakup between Brown and the Tea Partiers — because, let’s face it, Brown is a moderate Republican — will make for compelling political theater.
More important than Brown’s vote is what effect it might have on the Maine senators. You may recall that Collins and Snowe were two of three GOP votes for the stimulus bill. Snowe also gave a vote to the Senate Finance Committee’s health bill. Will the appearance of another Northeastern moderate Republican embolden them to break off more often from their party’s obstructionist game plan? If so, then bipartisanship actually comes back into play for Democrats in the Senate.
While the jobs bill is too small to have much of an effect, it is, in the words of economist Mark Zandi, a “good first step.” Reid’s idea was to have votes on a succession of job-creation measures that would force Republicans to either keep saying “no” on bills that should be popular with the public or join Democrats in getting something done. The question now is whether the Democrats can follow through. To be continued.
Glenn Beck”s weird tutorial that ended this weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference seems to have been a big hit among attendees. Yes, it’s a bit ironic that he expressed views highly similar to those of Ron Paul, whose student-driven victory in the CPAC straw poll was heavily panned and booed by the “regular” conservatives at the conference. Yes, some may have been put off by his constant use of Alcoholics Anonymous metaphors (people who need any form of government assistance are apparently just like alcoholics who haven’t “hit bottom” yet). But there really didn’t seem to be much dissent in this crowd with the idea that “progressivism” dating all the way back to Wilson and TR has been demonic, or that Republicans have to repudiate all forms of activist government if they want to get back on the paths of righteousness.
I was particularly struck by John Fund’s analysis of Beck’s appearance for the Wall Street Journal, which treated it as a constructive warning to Republicans against the temptations of governing.
It’s true that people like Beck and Paul, and most obviously the Tea Party Movement, are encouraging Republican politicians to take an ever-more-rigid position against government spending which, in combination with perpetual demands for both fiscal discipline and major new tax cuts, suggest a level of government retrenchment far beyond anything Americans have experienced since Hoover. But it’s surprising how few observers on the Right seem to be aware of the exceptionally perilous political direction of such talk.
Chris Bowers recently offered a useful summary of recent polling on specific cuts in government spending. And the bottom line is that Americans really, really don’t want them except in small categories like NASA and non-defense foreign assistance. And this is why symbolic anti-spending measures like never-to-be-enacted constitutional balanced budget amendments (Tim Pawlenty’s favorite panacea) and various “freezes” have always been so popular among GOP politicians. It’s probably poetic justice for conservatives that decades of anti-government demagoguery have convinced so many people that it would be easy to slash spending by attacking “waste” or “bureaucrats” or “welfare” or “foreign aid,” but the reality is that any serious attack on federal spending will have to include major cuts in defense; very popular domestic entitlement programs; or very popular domestic discretionary programs like public education and law enforcement.
So all the white-hot rhetoric about spending you hear from GOPers these days carries some pretty interesting implications, particularly for the bulk of Republicans who also favor a big escalation of the Afghanistan War (and perhaps a new war with Iran), and who have no prescriptions for economic growth other than still more tax cuts. I’m sure that Beck and Paul would have no problem calling for the abolition of Medicare and Social Security as they exist today, but are GOP politicians ready to follow? I don’t think so. And this is the real reason they struggle to articulate a governing agenda for 2010 and beyond.
Maybe John Fund thinks it’s good for Republicans to regularly get a kick in the pants from right-wing figures whose own views, if put to a vote, wouldn’t get support from more than a quarter of the electorate. But it looks to me more like a push into a political abyss. Maybe they can get away with fierce-but-vague rhetoric and opposition to Democratic initiatives for a while, but ultimately they will have to come right out and admit that the fiscal arithmetic of their own “thinking” would lead to a federal government more like that of the Coolidge administration (Beck’s favorite) than that of the Reagan administration. If they do, it won’t be Beck or Paul who has to pay the political price.
So, it’s finally out there: the “President’s Proposal” for health care reform which Obama will explain and defend in the “summit” with bipartisan congressional leaders on Thursday.
It’s unclear to what extent this plan reflects completed House-Senate negotiations on various sticking points between the bills each chamber has already passed. But it certainly addresses many of them. Think Progress has a useful chart comparing House, Senate, and Obama provisions. The biggies in terms of “improvements” to the Senate bill that would be enacted via reconciliation include a significant watering-down of the excise tax on high-cost insurance plans; bigger subsidies for insurance purchases; a sizeable increase in the federal share of costs associated with Medicaid expansion (accompanied by elimination of the special deal for Nebraska that the Senate included to get Ben Nelson on board); and the closing of the so-called “donut hole” in Medicare prescription drug coverage. These do represent the most often cited problems House Democrats have cited in the Senate bill, aside from the more fundamental failure to include a public option.
The two “surprises” in the proposals were that it did not authorize national health insurance exchanges (probably because of fears that such a step could trigger an adverse parliamentary ruling as non-germane to a reconciliation bill), which could be a serious issue for some House members; and a new provision that would enable federal regulators to stop large health insurance premium increases, which was almost certainly motivated by the recent big Anthem premium increases in California.
Republicans, of course, have immediately denounced the proposal as “partisan,” and appear ready for total war at the summit. Interestingly, the only spurned Republican “ideas” specifically mentioned in House Minority Leader John Boehner’s official response to the Obama proposal were interstate insurance sales and a total ban on private abortion coverage for people receiving federal subsidies (the Obama proposal tracks the Senate bill on abortion, which requires separate accounts for supplemental abortion insurance, but doesn’t try to outlaw it outright like the House bill’s Stupak Amendment does).
For those readers most concerned with a late revival of the public option, it should be noted that this possibility remains strictly contingent on progress towards getting 50 Democratic senators signed on. At this point, including it in the Obama proposal would have probably been counter-productive, even among Senate Democrats, while creating a new distraction going into the summit.
So we’re now ready for some serious Kabuki theater on Thursday. Obama’s objective will be three-fold: to rekindle some momentum for final action on health reform; to explode some of the Republican “ideas” like interstate sales; and to force Republicans to show the back of their hands while identifying them with potentially very unpopular proposals like voucherizing Medicare.
This is becoming a pretty old story (Alan Abramowitz wrote about it definitively last year, as did John Sides), but since it hasn’t much sunk in amongst mainstream media political observers, its worth repeating ad infinitum: Mark Blumenthal makes the case that most “independent” voters aren’t very independent. The general consensus is that of the 30 percent to 40 percent or so of Americans who call themselves independents, no more than 10 percent are independent voters in any meaningful sense of the term. And “pure independents” are also less likely to vote than partisans.
This is important for a whole lot of reasons. For one thing, the idea that “independents” are a third force in politics positioned in some moderate, bipartisan space equidistant from the two parties is entirely wrong. They are not a bloc of voters who think just like David Broder or David Brooks, spending their days pining for deficit reduction and “civility.”
More immediately, the high percentage of Tea Party activists who call themselves “independents” obscures the fact that most of them are in fact highly partisan Republicans who are close ideologically to the right wing of the GOP. Here’s how Blumenthal puts it:
Remember the 52 percent of Tea Party activists who [in a recent CNN poll] initially identify as independent? It turns out that virtually all of them lean Republican. According to CNN, 88 percent of the activists identify or lean Republican, 6 percent identify or lean Democratic and only 5 percent fall into the pure independent category.Remember that CNN pollster Holland reported that 87 percent of the Tea Party activists would vote Republican if there were no Tea Party-endorsed third-party candidate running? That makes perfect sense for a group that is 88 percent Republican.
Why do functionally partisan, and sometimes quite ideological, people self-identify as independents in such large numbers? Some of it is just fashion: many folk conflate “independence” with “intelligence” or “thoughtfulness.” Some of it reflects short-cuts by pollsters, who often give respondents the impression that voters who have ever split a ticket should call themselves “independents.” In the case of the Tea Party activists, there is undoubtedly some mistrust of the godless moderate “GOP establishment” and its Beltway habits–mistrust that will not, however, keep them from voting uniformly for Republican candidates in any two-party contest, and which in any event may not last long given the rightwards trajectory of the party as a whole.
In any analysis, wherever possible “independents” should be broken down into D and R leaners and “true” independents, and the vast array of “independent” ideological tendencies should be explained. Better yet, pollsters should ask follow-up questions to determine actual voting behavior and specific views rather than self-identification by partisan or ideological labels. Otherwise, we’re allowing those labels to distort reality in major ways.
Here at PPI, we’ve long argued that for the U.S. to meet its carbon reduction targets, we need to assume a “Leave No Fuel Behind” outlook. Currently, coal — the most polluting and the cheapest of sources — accounts for half of all power produced in the U.S. There’s no doubt that we need to scale back our use of coal. But replacing that base-load capacity will be a tall order.
Ramping up renewable sources like wind and solar should, of course, be a priority, but they simply won’t be reliable energy sources for decades to come. We’ve also argued for an expansion of nuclear power and more research into carbon capture and storage, and we applaud the administration’s recent efforts to jumpstart our nuclear industry. But let’s not forget the quickest interim source we can use to begin cutting back on coal emissions: natural gas.
In a column last Friday, the Washington Post‘s Steven Pearlstein makes a compelling case for scaling up natural gas:
The silver bullet: Decommission about two-thirds of the electric-generating capacity fueled by cheap and plentiful coal, and replace it with power generated from cheap and plentiful natural gas, which emits half as much carbon for each megawatt of electricity.
Pearlstein points out that a confluence of events — the overbuilding of gas-fired plants in the ’90s and an increase in supply thanks to new drilling techniques — has made natural gas a feasible substitute for base-load electricity generation. A Congressional Research Service study found that if our currently underutilized gas plants were to double their production, about a third of coal-fired power would be displaced — a major step toward meeting our emissions reduction targets.
In trying to wean ourselves off coal, the most effective method would still be to put a price on carbon. This week, the Senate is back from recess and will make a “last-ditch attempt” to put together a compromise cap-and-trade bill. But as legislators try to break the gridlock over cap-and-trade, they should keep their eye on alternatives that can begin to ease the grip of coal on our economy. Nudging utilities toward natural gas seems like a good start.
Todd Litman of the 
“Flip-flopping” on major issues can be hazardous to your political health. “Flip-flopping” when you’ve branded yourself as a brave principled “maverick” can be especially dangerous. And “flip-flopping” on grounds that you were confused about the issue in question is really, really bad, particularly when you are on the far side of 70.
Take a minute to soak in 
A National Infrastructure Bank would fill this void. The bank would be capitalized through the sale of infrastructure bonds to middle-class Americans, who would triply benefit from their investments – contributing to better infrastructure, directly engaging in the creation of a stronger country, and individually benefiting from coupon returns on their investment.
Republicans are warning of ominous political consequences if the Democrats use budget reconciliation rules to help pass health care reform. It would be “a huge mistake,” averred Sen. Olympia Snowe, the chief object of Senate Democrats’ unconsummated quest for bipartisan cooperation on health reform.
There are a couple of interesting articles out today offering meditations on the theatrics of the contemporary American Right. At TAP, Paul Waldman 
One of the least heralded but potentially consequential initiatives by the Obama administration has been its steady campaign against child hunger and obesity. The administration has set an ambitious goal of eliminating child hunger by 2015. Meanwhile, Michelle Obama has spearheaded the 
Najibullah Zazi 
To continue some thoughts about the growing contradiction between conservative policy predilections and the GOP’s violent anti-spending rhetoric, there’s a specific political factor that’s intensifying the dilemma: the heavy, heavy reliance of Republicans on support from seniors.
So, it’s finally out there: the 
Here at PPI, we’ve long argued that for the U.S. to meet its carbon reduction targets, we need to assume a “