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Bayh: Filibuster Must Be Reformed

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Last week, Evan Bayh came under fire from some progressives for leaving the Senate and likely handing his seat to a Republican in conservative Indiana. But this weekend, some of those same critics have some kinder words for the Indiana senator.

Bayh wrote a lengthy op-ed for the New York Times taking on a subject that’s been very much on the minds of Democrats these days: the filibuster. After offering some suggestions to improve cross-party relations, he presents some concrete proposals to end the abuse of filibusters:

For this reason, filibusters should require 35 senators to sign a public petition and make a commitment to continually debate an issue in reality, not just in theory. Those who obstruct the Senate should pay a price in public notoriety and physical exhaustion. That would lead to a significant decline in frivolous filibusters.

Filibusters should also be limited to no more than one for any piece of legislation. Currently, the decision to begin debate on a bill can be filibustered, followed by another filibuster on each amendment, followed by yet another filibuster before a final vote. This leads to multiple legislative delays and effectively grinds the Senate to a halt.

What’s more, the number of votes needed to overcome a filibuster should be reduced to 55 from 60. During my father’s era, filibusters were commonly used to block civil rights legislation and, in 1975, the requisite number of votes was reduced to 60 from 67. The challenges facing the country today are so substantial that further delay imperils the Republic and warrants another reduction in the supermajority requirement.

These are good ideas. Having sat in the Senate for 11 years now, Bayh has had a courtside view of the transformation of the filibuster into a tool for obstructing routine business by a minority party determined to grind government to a halt. As the chart below (from Norm Ornstein) demonstrates, the number of cloture motions to end filibusters took a dramatic jump in the 110th Congress:

Keep in mind: that chart only goes up to the end of the previous Congress. Updated through this one, it won’t look much better.

When Bayh announced his retirement, there was some skepticism about his stated reason for leaving, which he said was an increasingly dysfunctional Senate that prevented public problems from being solved. If you care so much, some said (with justification), why don’t you stay there and fix it? Well, it seems Bayh was, in fact, serious about his concerns. And now, it looks like he’s using the attention that his retirement has attracted to shine a spotlight on a procedural tactic that’s impeding our government’s ability to govern. If he keeps up the pressure and builds momentum toward an enduring fix of the filibuster, then that’ll be quite the twist to this drama: Evan Bayh had to leave the Senate to save it.

The Dalai Lama Does Democracy

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

It’s not hard to understand China’s angry reaction to President Obama’s meeting yesterday with the Dalai Lama. Beijing claims that Tibet’s spiritual leader is a “separatist,” but he has never demanded independence. Instead, the Dalai Lama has become a living symbol of ideals that China, for all its burgeoning strength, deeply fears: human rights, free expression, religious liberty and democracy.

Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, is unquestionably a thorn in Beijing’s side. Since being forced into exile in 1959, he has been a gentle but relentless opponent of China’s attempts to suppress Tibetan cultural and spiritual identity. The “simple Buddhist monk,” as he calls himself, won the Nobel Peace Prize for espousing nonviolence in the struggle for Tibetan autonomy within China.

The Dalai Lama is cut from the same mold as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., great moral leaders who rose to prominence by fusing the spiritual and the political. But where Gandhi and King couched their demands for justice in values honored (if in the breach) by their oppressors, the Dalai Lama confronts a Chinese regime that rejects liberal ideals as exclusively Western. On the contrary, it vaunts the superiority of  “Asian values” of order, social harmony, and deference to authority.

Of course, the Dalai Lama’s rejection of violence, his refusal to foment ethnic hatred, and his calls for dialogue with Beijing, are prudent as well as grounded in the values of Tibetan Buddhism. After all, there are only six million Tibetans living in close proximity to over a billion Han Chinese. But as Carl Gershman noted today at a packed ceremony at the Library of Congress, the Dalai Lama’s approach also has “preserved the moral integrity” of the Tibetan cause and left open the door to a future reconciliation with a less insecure, more tolerant Chinese government.

Gershman, president of the National Endowment for Democracy, presented the Dalai Lama with NED’s Democracy Service Medal. The award is intended to highlight what Gershman called an underappreciated dimension of the Dalai Lama’s work – his staunch support for democracy. Over the years, Tibetan exiles in India have developed representative institutions and held elections to select political leaders. Such efforts, of course, only aggravate China more by giving the lie to its claims that democracy isn’t for Asians. In this sense, Gershman noted, Tibet is not a mere sideshow; its fate is linked to that of China’s intrepid dissidents and democracy activists.

They too deserve recognition and moral support from U.S. political leaders, even if that too chafes China’s ruling elites.

CPAC: Delighted to Be United?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The annual Conservative Political Action Committee conclave in Washington got underway yesterday, and it’s not surprising there’s a tone of excitement bordering on triumphalism as the participants celebrate both the Democratic Party’s political troubles and the rightward lurch of the GOP. Much of the press coverage of the event will revolve around this weekend’s traditional straw poll of attendees on their preferences for the 2012 presidential nomination (which usually favor potential candidates who show up to speak at CPAC; this year it’s Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty and Rick Santorum, but not Sarah Palin or Mike Huckabee).

But underneath the surface is a complex dance between old-school conservatives who served in or lionized the Bush-Cheney administration, and a newer breed that purports to despise the Bushies as sellouts. The Washington Independent’s Dave Weigel is covering CPAC will a keen eye on that dance, dramatized by the surprise appearance of Dick Cheney and a few nostalgic references from the podium to Bush’s superiority to Obama:

Conservatives who winced at the Bush-Cheney record were out in force, but serious disagreement with the back-to-Bush conservatives was hard to find. Two years ago, Ron Paul’s presidential campaign was lacking a booth in the CPAC exhibit hall until Mitt Romney dramatically quit the presidential race and opened up space for their back-to-1776 brochures. This year, Paul’s Campaign for Liberty occupied a larger section of the exhibit hall than any group except the NRA, with reams of fliers, copies of Young American Revolution magazine (with an illustration of Paul taking the presidential oath on the cover)….

The once-extreme obsessions of Paul’s fans bled into the rest of the convention. They were present in speeches from mainstream figures like Romney, and they were present in lectures that filled large rooms to overflowing. Tom Woods, the author of “The Politically Incorrect History of the United States” and a sometime ghostwriter for Paul, spoke to a packed room on the subject of nullifying federal laws.

In most respects, it’s probably safe to say that the oldsters have quickly moved towards the Ron Paul revolutionaries and some of the hard-core Christian Right cultural warriors, not to mention the Tea Party Movement which features elements of both. After all, the one thing that most unites all of them, other than hatred of Obama, is retroactive opposition to TARP and the other “bailout” policies initiated by Bush (with Bush’s Medicare Rx drug entitlement ranking a close second). Cheney complicates the picture, since his ferocious national security and civil liberties stances remain very popular with many of the conservatives who now denounce Bush administration domestic policies (though not with the Paulists, of course).

Still, there are plenty of ideological tensions on the contemporary Right, even if they tend to be muted at gloat-and-attack-fests like CPAC. You have to wonder how many of the attendees who cheered Mitt Romney’s attacks on Obama have really forgiven him for championing a Massachusetts health plan that’s eerily similar to what they all savage as “ObamaCare.”

Ideological fault lines tend to get exposed and widened in presidential nominating contests. No matter who wins the straw poll this weekend, it’s likely that the 2012 battle for the GOP nomination will show that the post-Bush pirouette-to-the-right of the Republican Party and the conservative movement wasn’t as elegant as it looks at CPAC.

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

Creating American Jobs, Generating American Energy

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

A new policy memo from Third Way offers 23 ways to create clean energy jobs and lay down the foundation for a green economy. The memo breaks down its proposals into short-, medium-, and long-term ideas for generating new jobs. Among the proposals include a small-business energy efficiency loan program; advanced energy manufacturing tax credits; transitioning diesel heavy vehicles to natural gas; nuclear workforce training; and the creation of a National Infrastructure Bank.

USA Today: Among Democrats, a conflicting consensus on Massachusetts

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Will Marshall in USA Today:

Centrist policy activist Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, says it’s “gut-check time for Democrats.”

Marshall is urging the White House and congressional Democrats to push forward on health care reform. He says Obama is caught in a “progressive paradox,” in which Americans still support the president’s goals but believe he hasn’t delivered fast enough.

“What surprises me most about the Massachusetts vote and the inchoate popular anger that it seems to reflect is this judgment that Obama has moved too far to the left,” Marshall said. “By and large, I don’t think that’s true. By and large, I think he has been quite pragmatic in his approach to the issues. That is why you hear a lot of moaning and groaning on the left, even talk of betrayal.”

Marshall was a key policy adviser to Bill Clinton when the Democrats lost Congress after a health care reform initiative failed in 1994. After the ’94 defeats, Clinton moved to the ideological center, cut deals with Republicans on welfare reform, and even ran against fellow Democrats in Congress when he sought re-election in 1996.

But Marshall says today is fundamentally different for Democrats. […]

“The president ought to get the (Democratic) leaders, shut them in at the White House and say, ‘We are going to pass (health care reform) because I won an unambiguous mandate for it and so did you in 2008,'”Marshall said.

Clinton, he said, “won 42% of the popular vote so he had to work with the other party.”

But Obama and the Democrats, Marshall said, “have majority support for their biggest initiative, and they ought to show a ruthless determination to govern.”

“One argument that should be rejected out of hand is that somehow a Massachusetts Senate race is somehow a national mandate on health care,” Marshall said. “It isn’t.”

Read the full article.

The Beginning of the End?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The news yesterday that the U.S. Federal Reserve raised the discount rate 25 basis points (to 0.75 percent from 0.50 percent) is being interpreted as an indication of a fundamental change in how the Fed views our economic crisis. The hike in the discount rate could signal the beginning of the end of our economic crisis.

The discount rate is not to be confused with the more prominent Fed funds rate. The Fed funds rate is the rate at which banks lend money to each other in overnight loans for regulatory and liquidity requirements. The discount rate is the rate at which the Fed lends money to private retail banks — traditionally at a percent above the Fed funds rate — in short-term loans aimed at easing liquidity constraints. But in recent decades borrowing from the so-called discount window had been seen by large banks as the financial equivalent of pulling over to ask for directions — you can do it, but it’s seen as a sign of weakness. The aftermath of 9/11 was the last time the discount window had seen serious activity prior to the 2008 economic crisis.

The Fed met the current crisis in part by making the discount window more available to banks. The terms of loans through the discount window went from being overnight to ultimately 90 days. The discount rate was cut from being 100 basis points (one percent) above the Fed funds rate to 50 basis points. And in a move that underscored the gravity of the October 2008 liquidity crisis, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley turned themselves into bank holding companies — a technical change in their operating structure that required much more oversight — in part to be able to access the discount window in case they faced a liquidity crunch.

This opening of the discount window was part of a larger project by the Fed — which involved pumping liquidity into the economy by buying up almost two trillion dollars in assets — to prevent the crisis of fall 2008 from leading to a global depression. But now that the worst seems to be over from a monetary perspective, the Fed is beginning to step away from the crash position it assumed almost two years ago.

Newly reappointed Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke laid out a plan for unwinding the Fed’s position in the economy last week, testifying to Congress that “when the times comes,” the Fed will move to sell that two trillion in assets (in an orderly fashion) to a stronger market. This would give the Fed more room to manage the economy to bring us out of recession. The raising of the discount rate would be the first step in that process.

The phrase “when the time comes,” however, makes all the difference in the world, and many wiser people than I are expecting the Fed to go easy on its plan to shrink it’s balance sheet and raise rates. With unemployment hovering at 10 percent, this recession isn’t over for a lot of Americans. And, despite last quarter’s strong headline number, there is no obvious driver of GDP growth (like exports) on the horizon, so it may not be over for the rest of us, either. So it may be too soon to call the recession over and begin raising rates. The fear is that this may not be the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning.

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

The World Without Obama

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

If you’ve been watching the cult TV show “Lost,” then you’re familiar with the concept of parallel universes. That is, alternate realities in which history turned out differently, because people made different decisions.

It’s a useful concept when it comes to thinking about President Obama’s current predicament. On a variety of fronts, the Obama administration is suffering from an inability to show Americans the parallel universe in which its past policies were not enacted — and the future that will result if its current proposals bite the dust.

That’s most obviously true with the early, fateful decisions to continue TARP and bail out the auto companies. They arguably averted the collapse of the global financial system, the virtual extinction of consumer and business credit, and 1930s levels of unemployment (especially hard-hit would have been the upper Midwest). Nevertheless, no matter how often the president tells us his actions kept a deep recession from developing into a Great Depression, it remains an abstract proposition for the people who are currently unemployed. The same is true for the 2009 economic stimulus package, which virtually all experts, public and private, credit with saving about two million jobs. The continued job losses reported each month make it hard to claim that one has succeeded by avoiding even greater unemployment.

The problem of “proving a negative” is even more daunting when it comes to prospective policy proposals. Critics savage Obama for a health care plan that doesn’t do enough to limit costs. Obama responds that health care costs are going up anyway, without a plan. But it’s not easy to convince people that the status quo is riskier than a large and complicated series of changes in how Americans obtain health insurance. That’s why the White House has made such a big deal out of Anthem Blue Cross’s gargantuan premium increases for individual policyholders in California. It is, they argue, a sign of where the status quo is headed absent reform. They do not, unfortunately, have such a convenient example that will help them explain the need for climate-change legislation, as conservatives, stupidly but effectively, cite this winter’s heavy snowstorms as disproof for the scientific consensus about global warming trends.

There is one way to deal with Obama’s dilemma. Although it’s difficult to prove that American life under the president’s policies is better than life without them, it should be easier to point to another parallel universe: life under Republican policies. But such an effort requires a basic strategic decision. Should Democrats point back to the reality of life under George W. Bush, which most people remember pretty vividly, and simply say today’s GOP wants to “turn the clock back”? Or should they focus on current Republican proposals, such as they are, which in many respects make Bush policies look pretty responsible? It’s hard to take both tacks simultaneously, since the extremism of contemporary Republican politics is in no small part motivated by a determination to separate the GOP and the conservative movement from association with that incompetent big spender, Bush, who failed because he “betrayed conservative principles.”

It appears the White House is increasingly inclined to take the second, forward-looking approach to highlighting the GOP’s desired alternate reality, rather than the first, backward-looking one. As much as some Democrats wail about the “bipartisanship” rhetoric that surrounds Obama’s outreach to Republicans, which he’s employed while challenging them to direct debate over health reform and economic recovery, the president’s main intention is clear. He wants to force the opposition to help him present voters with a choice between two specific courses of action — or simply admit that their strategy is one of pure gridlock, obstruction, and paralysis (which, as my colleage J.P. Green has pointed out, spells “G.O.P”).

The stake that Obama and the Democrats have in convincing Americans to consider these parallel universes couldn’t be much higher. This November, if voters remain fixated on the current reality, rather than the terrible alternatives, then the midterm elections really will be a referendum on the status quo and its Democratic caretakers. Explaining life as it would be without Obama, and as it could be under Republican management, is not easy. But Democrats must do it or face catastrophe at the polls.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Obama’s Deficit Commission

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The present era of polarization may have reached its nadir on January 25, 2010. That was the day Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell led a filibuster to kill a deficit reduction commission — something he’d loudly demanded earlier. All it took was President Obama’s endorsement to turn McConnell and the six Senate Republicans who co-sponsored it against the bill.

Senate Republicans, have you no shame? Well, keep in mind that this is the same gang that’s now posturing as the saviors of Medicare, which Obama proposes to cut to help pay for health care reform.

Undeterred by the flight of the GOP’s fiscal chicken hawks, President Obama today unveiled an 18-member special commission to tackle the nation’s budget crisis. Named to lead the panel were Democrat Erskine Bowles, chief of staff to President Clinton, and former Senate Republican leader Alan Simpson.

It’s easy to be cynical about such “blue ribbon” commissions. They are supposed to signal that political leaders are serious about solving intractable problems, but often convey the opposite — a craven desire to punt tough decisions to retired dignitaries who don’t have to face the voters.

And setting up a commission by executive order is distinctly inferior to enacting one into law, since the president can’t compel Congress to give his panel’s recommendations an up-or-down vote. Speaker Nancy Pelosi has offered distinctly unenthusiastic assurances that the House will consider the commission’s suggestions.

Still, such commissions are sometimes the only way to break a political impasse — recall the 1983 Greenspan Commission for Social Security reform, or the congressionally mandated military base-closing commission. Such action-forcing mechanisms give politicians just enough bipartisan cover to embolden them to vote for reforms everyone knows are necessary if unpopular.

In a bow to political reality, the president’s commission will report its recommendations after the midterm election, before the end of the year. Presumably, that will tee up the debate for the next Congress, while giving the economy this year to gain strength and whittle down the unemployment rate.

That’s the right timing, and it belies claims by Obama’s liberal critics that highlighting the urgent need to put America on a more sustainable fiscal course is antithetical to economic recovery. After all, only about $300 billion of Obama’s $800-plus stimulus package has been spent, and Congress is crafting a jobs bill intended to give a smaller but more targeted boost to employment.

But here’s what really irks Obama’s critics on the left: they see the commission setting the stage for an assault on entitlement programs. They are not entirely wrong: it’s the unsustainable growth of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security that’s driving America’s long-term fiscal woes. But progressives ought to have more confidence in Obama’s ability to take a balanced approach to reforming the Big Three. It’s better, and safer, to do that now rather than risk handing off the job to some future Republican president who may be hostile to the idea of social insurance.

The president’s commission must do what lawmakers in Washington won’t — craft a balanced program of benefit cuts and tax increases to slow the growth rate of health and retirement benefits and move them toward solvency. Otherwise, those programs will consume the equivalent of every penny Washington now raises in taxes, necessitating unprecedented tax hikes, or borrowing at levels that will jeopardize America’s growth and fiscal stability.

But the commission shouldn’t just look at the Big Three, it should also look at the federal government’s massive spending on tax entitlements. Washington spends over $1 trillion a year on tax breaks and subsidies, including such popular items as the mortgage interest deduction and exclusion of employer-paid health benefits, crop subsidies, and a raft of special bennies for politically influential industries, aka, corporate welfare. There are also lots of important breaks for low-income Americans, like my own favorite, the earned income tax credit. All of these tax expenditures have rationales and constituencies, none should be regarded as sacrosanct.

This will raise hackles among Republicans, just as talk of benefit cuts (which should be focused on upper income beneficiaries) makes Democrats nervous. Both the left and the right will have to give ground to cut a responsible, and politically sustainable, deal that can restore out nation’s fiscal health.

Where Have All the GOP Moderates Gone?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Peter Beinart has a must-read in Time on the rise of what he calls “vicious-circle politics”: the Republican strategy of using government gridlock and failure to win control of government. Beinart points out that GOP obstructionism in the Obama era has its roots in the Gingrich Congress, when congressional Republicans turned into an art form the use of polarization to stymie government and make the case to a frustrated public that they needed to evict the party in power.

He tracks its origins to the “great sorting-out,” the post-’60s alignment of party, region, and ideology that purified both parties, with conservative Democrats from the South and moderate Republicans from the North gradually switching sides.

But it wasn’t until the Republicans were knocked out of power in the 1990s that vicious-circle politics became an active GOP strategy. Beinart writes:

In the Clinton years, Senate Republicans began a kind of permanent filibuster. “Whereas the filibusters of the past were mainly the weapon of last resort,” scholars Catherine Fisk and Erwin Chemerinsky noted in 1997, “now filibusters are a part of daily life.” For a while, the remaining GOP moderates cried foul and joined with Democrats to break filibusters on things like campaign finance and voter registration. But in doing so, the moderates helped doom themselves. After moderates broke a 1993 filibuster on campaign finance, GOP conservatives publicly accused them of “stabbing us in the back.” Their pictures were taken off the wall at the offices of the Republican Senate campaign committee. “What do these so-called moderates have in common?” conservative bigwig Grover Norquist would later declare. “They’re 70 years old. They’re not running again. They’re gonna be dead soon. So while they’re annoying, within the Republican Party our problems are dying.”

In Clinton’s first two years in office, the Gingrich Republicans learned that the vicious circle works. While filibusters were occasionally broken, they also brought much of Clinton’s agenda to a halt, and they made Washington look pathetic. In one case, GOP Senators successfully filibustered changes to a 122-year-old mining act, thus forcing the government to sell roughly $10 billion worth of gold rights to a Canadian company for less than $10,000. In another, Republicans filibustered legislation that would have applied employment laws to members of Congress — a reform they had loudly demanded.

With these acts of legislative sabotage, Republicans tapped into a deep truth about the American people: they hate political squabbling, and they take out their anger on whoever is in charge. So when the Gingrich Republicans carried out a virtual sit-down strike during Clinton’s first two years, the public mood turned nasty. By 1994, trust in government was at an all-time low, which suited the Republicans fine, since their major line of attack against Clinton’s health care plan was that it would empower government. Clintoncare collapsed, Democrats lost Congress, and Republicans learned the secrets of vicious-circle politics: When the parties are polarized, it’s easy to keep anything from getting done. When nothing gets done, people turn against government. When you’re the party out of power and the party that reviles government, you win.

In the Obama era, with the congressional Republican caucus smaller and purer than it has been in a long time, the GOP has pursued vicious-circle politics on steroids. It’s a depressing — and depressingly familiar — picture that Beinart paints.

While Beinart acknowledges that Democrats might one day use the same strategy to stonewall a Republican administration, he notes correctly that the tactic fits better in the GOP playbook: “Winning elections by making government look foolish is a more natural strategy for the antigovernment party.” That observation raises another frightening prospect: absent filibuster-proof majorities, can major legislation only pass now with a Republican administration and Congress? Because all the moderates are now on the Democratic side, and because progressives — moderate or liberal — are less likely to see gumming up the works as a desirable end in itself, is it possible that only Republican-driven initiatives that could get moderate support will be the only way major legislation gets passed?

Beinart offers some solutions to break the vicious circle: opening more primaries to independents (like in New Hampshire); more Crossfire-style programs to counteract the ideological ghettoization on cable news; more Ross Perots who can light a fire under both parties to break the gridlock.

Whether you think them effective or not, those proposals will take years to enact. The Democrats need to govern now. And here’s the thing: they can. There are 18 more of them in the Senate, over 70 more of them in the House — not filibuster-proof, but certainly enough to get some things passed through reconciliation. Here’s what it all boils down to: In the face of a unified opposition bent on making sure they don’t get anything done, will Democrats band together, fight back, and govern proudly? Or will they shrink from the challenge and, in fact, get nothing done?

Another Top Taliban Bites The Dust… For Now

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The English language online version of Der Spiegel is reporting that Mullah Abdul Salam — a big-fish Taliban commander who has been responsible for recent attacks against German forces stationed in northern Afghanistan — has been arrested by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Salam has been described by both Der Spiegel and the LA Times as the “shadow governor” of province of Kunduz. While Salam doesn’t appear to be the critical lynch-pin that Mullah Baradar was, the LAT explains:

In Kunduz, a once-quiet corner of Afghanistan, Salam presided over a major buildup of Taliban forces over the last 18 months. The insurgents took over entire districts, repeatedly attacked Afghan security posts, harried NATO troops in the province — who were mainly Germans — and menaced a NATO supply line running through Kunduz.

One of the worst civilian-casualty episodes of the war occurred in August after suspected Taliban fighters hijacked a fuel truck. The Germans, fearing the vehicle would be used for an attack on their main base in Kunduz, called in an airstrike that killed dozens of insurgents — and also dozens of civilians.

Late last year, a series of raids, carried out mainly by U.S. special forces, drove the insurgents underground in Kunduz, but their presence remained a threat.

What in the dickens is going on here? As is eloquently detailed in Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars, the ISI essentially started and supported the Taliban throughout the ’90s, and has an institutional culture that has been loathe to crack down on its own project.

Why now? Why has the ISI suddenly decided to wrap-up two significant Taliban commanders in two days, a batting average that makes them look like Ted Williams compared to their standard impersonation of the 1987 Cleveland Indians’ Otis Nixon (I’ll spare you the click — .059 BA).

Consider this: By arresting these guys, the ISI is amassing credit and power. Sure, you could say that the Americans have finally convinced the Pakistanis that it’s in Islamabad’s interest to side with Washington. In the long-term, it definitely is.  But as the strategic landscape shifts and there may be some sort of negotiation with the Taliban (ill-advised though that may be, in my opinion), the ISI is simply collecting all the big cards in its own hand.

The bottom line is that nothing’s for certain just yet — the ISI could continue to cooperate with the Americans, or simply look the other way during an escape attempt, just like the Yemenis.

“Moderates” and “Independents”–Not the Same Thing

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

One of the frustrating things about contemporary political analysis is the frequency with which key terms get used in a very sloppy manner that reflects highly biased or inaccurate assumptions. A perpetual example is the use of “independent” and “moderate” as interchangeable words for unaffiliated voters. Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling explains why this can be so misleading:

One of the media mistakes that drives me the most nuts is when ‘moderates’ are conflated with ‘independents.’ This is most commonly a foible of TV news.Democrats are in trouble with independents right now. They are not, however, in trouble with moderates.

Independents as a group of voters are somewhat conservative leaning. Our last national poll found that 56% of independents were moderates but that among the rest 33% were conservatives to just 11% liberals. Overall independents were planning to vote Republican for Congress this year by a 40-27 margin. But break that out a little further and while conservative independents are tending toward the GOP by a 68-7 margin moderate independents are tied up at 33. And among all moderates — since moderates continue to identify more as Democrats than Republicans — Democrats lead 46-31 on the generic ballot.

It’s a similar story when it comes to moderates and independents and Barack Obama’s approval rating. Independents are split 48/48 on Obama. But moderates approve of him by a 62/34 margin.

Now there are also inherent problems with conducting political analysis based on self-identification of party or ideology; many “conservative” independents actually favor progressive policy views but call themselves conservatives for some essentially non-political reason; and many “independents” are actually reliable partisans who don’t like to be thought of as such. But if you are going to use such terms, Jensen is right, it’s important to keep them straight. And in terms of current political conditions, people who consider themselves “moderate” don’t seem to think President Obama is some crazy socialist.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Champion Enterprise, Not Paternalism

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The following piece was written for a conference on progressive governance being held this week in London by the Policy Network, an international think tank dedicated to promoting progressive policies:

For many on the left, the near-collapse of America’s financial system during the winter of 2008-2009 was irrefutable proof of the failure of free market ideas. The new consensus — let’s call it the anti-Washington consensus — was solemnized by business and political elites in Davos last month. Fittingly enough, French President Nicolas Sarkozy delivered the eulogy for neoliberalism.

The Anglo-American model is dead. Long live state capitalism!

Not so fast. In America at least, popular attitudes have not lurched in a more interventionist or social democratic direction. If anything, there’s been a backlash against the emergency measures the Obama administration has undertaken to unlock credit, bail out big banks holding worthless securities, reduce home foreclosures, and keep big U.S. auto companies afloat.

That has perplexed and frustrated Democrats, who believe the government should get more credit for again saving capitalism from the capitalists, just as it did in Franklin Roosevelt’s day. But Wall Street’s fall from grace doesn’t automatically translate into rising public receptivity to a more active state. Anti-business and anti-government attitudes can and do co-exist easily in the American mind.

President Obama maintains, quite plausibly, that Washington’s decisive intervention kept the economy from tumbling into the abyss. But unprecedented public deficits, the government’s effective takeover of large finance and auto companies, and, yes, Obama’s push for comprehensive health care reform, also seem to have resurrected old fears about “big government.”

One likely reason is the sheer, pharaonic scale of government spending to rescue the economy: nearly $4 trillion when you add the Federal Reserve’s efforts to pump liquidity into financial markets, aid for failing banks, last year’s $787 billion “stimulus” plan, and another $100 billion jobs bill for this year. And many in middle America are barking mad that political elites have used tax dollars to shield economic elites from the consequences of their own greed and ineptitude. This is especially true of the independent voters who helped Obama to win a solid majority in 2008, but whose defection over the past year has fueled Republican victories in elections in Virginia, New Jersey, and, most shockingly, the liberal bastion of Massachusetts.

Meanwhile, the U.S. economy is growing again, by a gaudy 5.7 percent of GDP in the last quarter of 2009. There’s been little crowing at the White House, however, not when many small businesses still can’t get credit, people continue to lose their homes, and unemployment remains stuck in double digits.

For Obama and the Democrats, the central economic challenge is not to sell some new model of state-managed capitalism to a public already worried about government spending and overreach. It’s to rebuild the American economy’s capacities for brisk innovation and job creation. That will require striking a careful balance between new regulation and entrepreneurial risk-taking.

With Wall Street again reaping huge profits (and dishing out fat bonuses), some sort of financial regulation likely will pass soon. The key tasks here are reducing moral hazard by ensuring that no financial institution becomes too big or interconnected to fail, raising capital requirements to curb excessively leveraged speculation, and creating transparency in the trading of exotic financial products like derivatives.

But what the country needs even more is a progressive opportunity agenda that emphasizes technological innovation, small business creation, American competitiveness, fiscal discipline, better schools, and middle-class jobs. Such an agenda would include the following elements:

An aggressive infrastructure initiative. Washington must reverse decades of neglect and double or triple spending aimed at modernizing America’s aging and inadequate public infrastructure. Even that, however, won’t be nearly enough, which is why progressives are calling for a National Infrastructure Bank to leverage private investment in high-speed rail, intelligent transportation systems, a smart electricity grid, and next-generation broadband.

A big boost for clean and efficient energy. The United States needs to put a price on carbon, which would raise billions to invest in developing clean fuels and technologies. Unfortunately, Obama’s “cap and trade” proposal is languishing in Congress, a victim of Republican obscurantism on climate change.

More exports. Obama wants to double U.S. exports, but the White House has not pushed Congress hard to pass the U.S.-Korea trade pact. Nor has it confronted China and other Asian nations whose currency manipulations keep U.S. (and European) goods at a competitive disadvantaged.

Fiscal restraint. America’s heavy borrowing from abroad weakens the dollar and deepens our reliance on foreign creditors. To maintain the nation’s fiscal integrity and independence, Obama must walk a fine line between winding down our enormous public deficits and debts and continuing to pump up domestic demand. The key is to reduce the unsustainable growth of public health care costs, which is why Obama is right not to give up on health care reform this year.

An entrepreneurial climate. Over the last three decades, firms less than five years old have accounted for nearly all net job creation in the United States. U.S. progressives should embrace policies that foster innovation and entrepreneurship: more public spending on research, a light-handed approach to regulating and taxing new enterprises, fiscal discipline to keep capital costs low, dramatic improvements in education and preferences for skilled immigrants.

In the ideological hothouse of Washington, it’s natural for Democrats to argue that the financial crisis has discredited market fundamentalism. But the antidote isn’t more government, it’s a progressive model for innovation-led growth that champions individual enterprise and middle class aspiration.

The Mount Vernon Statement: The Fifty-Year Reunion

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

A variety of luminaries representing various “wings” of the conservative movement joined together today near George Washington’s Mount Vernon home to sign—with appropriately atavistic flourishes—a manifesto they are calling the Mount Vernon Statement. The allusion made in the title is to the 50-year-old founding statement of the long-forgotten ‘60s right-wing youth group Young Americans for Freedom, the Sharon Statement (so named because it was worked out at William F. Buckley’s estate in Sharon, Connecticut). And that best illustrates the insider nature of the whole exercise, since most rank-and-file conservatives have probably never heard of YAF and don’t much need manifestos to go about their political business.

Three things immediately strike the reader about the document itself: (1) it’s very abstract, with no policy content at all; (2) it’s overtly aimed at reviving the old-time “fusionism” of economic, cultural, and national-security conservatives; and (3) it’s overlaid with Tea Party-esque rhetoric about terrible and longstanding threats to the Constitution. It’s sort of like a 50-year high school reunion at a homecoming game (which fits, because the statement was released on the eve of this year’s Conservative Political Action Committee conference in Washington).

It’s the third aspect of the document that’s most peculiar. Consider this passage:

In recent decades, America’s principles have been undermined and redefined in our culture, our universities and our politics. The self-evident truths of 1776 have been supplanted by the notion that no such truths exist. The federal government today ignores the limits of the Constitution, which is increasingly dismissed as obsolete and irrelevant.

Hmmm. This has happened in “recent decades,” not just during the Obama administration. And ‘smatter of fact, that’s true: the landmark Supreme Court cases that paved the way for the expansion of the federal government to its current scope of responsibilities date back at least to the civil rights era, and in some respects, to the New Deal and even earlier.

That’s interesting in no small part because most of the original signatories of this document were powerful and enthusiastic participants in the political and policy enterprises of several Republican administrations that made robust use of expanded federal power—most notably the administration of George W. Bush, which championed virtually unlimited executive powers, aggressive preemption of states laws that were thought to hamper businesses, and extensive limitations on individual liberty. In addition, the choice of the estate of the notorious isolationist George Washington to issue a manifesto that endorses a foreign policy of “advancing freedom and opposing tyranny in the world” is a mite strange, as Daniel Larison has pointed out.

Still another anomaly is the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins signature on a document that does not mention the rights of the “unborn” or “marriage” or “traditional families.” But you figure he was bought off by the reference to the Declaration of Independence as virtually coequal to the Constitution as a founding document, and presenting “self-evident truths based on the laws of nature and nature’s God.” This is Christian Right code for suggesting that natural law and biblical principles, which conservatives interpret to mean things like bans on abortion and homosexual behavior, have been incorporated into the Constitution.

All in all, this statement represents an effort by yesterday’s and today’s hard-core conservative establishment to stay together and try to be relevant to the political discourse in an era in which the Republican Party is considered dangerously liberal, and the Constitution is thought to clearly ban everything “liberals” espouse. We’ll see how this works out for them.

China and the Cyber Threat

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

James Fallows of The Atlantic has an excellent piece on China and the cyber threat (as well as some other points on the Chinese military). A few excerpts about cybersecurity:

China has hundreds of millions of Internet users, mostly young. In any culture, this would mean a large hacker population; in China, where tight control and near chaos often coexist, it means an Internet with plenty of potential outlaws and with carefully directed government efforts, too. In a report for the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission late last year, Northrop Grumman prepared a time line of electronic intrusions and disruptions coming from sites inside China since 1999. In most cases it was impossible to tell whether the activity was amateur or government-planned, the report said. But whatever their source, the disruptions were a problem. And in some instances, the “depth of resources” and the “extremely focused targeting of defense engineering data, US military operational information, and China-related policy information” suggested an effort that would be “difficult at best without some type of state-sponsorship.”

[…]

[Cyber authorities] stressed that Chinese organizations and individuals were a serious source of electronic threats—but far from the only one, or perhaps even the main one. You could take this as good news about U.S.-China relations, but it was usually meant as bad news about the problem as a whole.

[…]

This led to another, more surprising theme: that the main damage done to date through cyberwar has involved not theft of military secrets nor acts of electronic sabotage but rather business-versus-business spying. Some military secrets have indeed leaked out, the most consequential probably being those that would help the Chinese navy develop a modern submarine fleet. And many people said that if the United States someday ended up at war against China—or Russia, or some other country—then each side would certainly use electronic tools to attack the other’s military and perhaps its civilian infrastructure. But short of outright war, the main losses have come through economic espionage. “You could think of it as taking a shortcut on the ‘D’ of R&D,” research and development, one former government official said.

And Fallows adds one general extraordinarily striking cautionary note that has little to do with China, but that all policy makers should pay attention to:

[N]early everyone in the business believes that we are living in, yes, a pre-9/11 era when it comes to the security and resilience of electronic information systems. Something very big—bigger than the Google-China case—is likely to go wrong, they said, and once it does, everyone will ask how we could have been so complacent for so long. Electronic-commerce systems are already in a constant war against online fraud. [emphasis added]

The entire piece is worth your time, but those are the big highlights. From my perspective, I’ve seen first-hand how the Pentagon is well-aware of the threat and is devoting substantial assets to detect and disrupt the intrusions. I’m not just talking about the NSA’s new cyber command either — cyber is the hot, new frontier and that creates incentives for every agency under the sun to grab a few million smackers from the budget for working the issue. But where’s the line between effective cyber defense and too many agencies tripping over one another?

Where Today’s Large Deficits Come From

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

One year after the passage of the Recovery Act, the Obama administration continues to come under fire from Republicans over the size of the deficit. The administration’s propensity for spending, these critics argue, are behind the eye-popping deficits we see today. But as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities makes clear in a new report, that is simply not true. Analyzing debt projections based on Congressional Budget Office estimates, the report found that the recession that began in 2008 battered the budget by driving down tax revenues and forcing an increase in government spending programs. In the near-term, the Obama administration contributed to the deficit with its financial rescues and stimulus plan, which economists agree saved the country from plunging into a deeper recession. But the effects of those programs pale in comparison to the long-term harm done by the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the CBPP.

Do Americans Hate Free Speech?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Looking for a “wedge issue” that will separate Republican politicians and interest groups from their rank-and-file, and from independents?

Check out this newly released finding from the most recent ABC/WaPo poll:

Americans of both parties overwhelmingly oppose a Supreme Court ruling that allows corporations and unions to spend as much as they want on political campaigns, and most favor new limits on such spending, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. Eight in 10 poll respondents say they oppose the high court’s Jan. 21 decision to allow unfettered corporate political spending, with 65 percent “strongly” opposed. Nearly as many backed congressional action to curb the ruling, with 72 percent in favor of reinstating limits.

The poll reveals relatively little difference of opinion on the issue among Democrats (85 percent opposed to the ruling), Republicans (76 percent) and independents (81 percent). …

Nearly three-quarters of self-identified conservative Republicans say they oppose the Supreme Court ruling, with most of them strongly opposed. Some two-thirds of conservative Republicans favor congressional efforts to limit corporate and union spending, though with less enthusiasm than liberal Democrats.

What makes this finding so interesting, of course, is that Republican politicians and conservative intellectuals have fallen over themselves praising the Citizens United decision not just as a Good Thing, but as a heaven-sent vindication of First Amendment free speech rights. This is particularly true of the solon who is supposedly well on his way to becoming Majority Leader of the United States Senate, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who said of the decision:

Any proponent of free speech should applaud this decision. Citizens United is and will be a First Amendment triumph of enduring significance.

So I guess Mitch is saying that 80% of Americans don’t care much for free speech. And that may even be true if you think money talks.

The good news in this poll is that it shows a very strong base of bipartisan popular support for the legislative efforts of Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Chris Van Hollen to fence off some of the more deplorable implications of Citizens United. But unfortunately, “fencing off” is about all Congress can do in the way of “reinstating limits” on political spending, which is what Americans manifestly want to happen. Unless Citizens United is actually overturned by a future Court (possible if Democrats hang onto the White House for a while) or a constitutional amendment (rarely a real option), the only practical counterweight to massive corporate political spending would be a system of public financing for congressional campaigns. It would have been nice if the ABC/WaPo pollsters had asked about that option. But I strongly suspect this isn’t exactly the best political environment for politicians to ask taxpayers to pay their campaign costs.

Still, the yawning gap between public opinion and the GOP on Citizens United should draw immediate and sustained attention from Democrats. And particularly at a time when the advantages of power in Washington have been so visibly minimized by structural obstacles, Democrats should open up a broader front in supporting political reforms. The status quo isn’t working for anyone other than those who don’t want government to work at all.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.