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Obama’s Strong Push for Nuclear Power

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Yesterday, President Obama announced the approval of an $8.3 billion loan guarantee to break ground on two new nuclear reactors in Georgia — the first new nuclear plants to be built in the U.S. in three decades:

The commitment to Southern Co. was the latest — and strongest — signal yet that the administration is serious about making nuclear power part of the energy mix for a clean economy. It also reflects this administration’s resolutely pragmatic and reality-based approach to energy policy.

As we at PPI have argued, for the U.S. to achieve its goal of cutting carbon emissions and freeing ourselves from our dependence on foreign oil, all forms of low- and no-carbon fuel sources need to be considered. Nuclear currently provides 19 percent of the U.S.’s energy, making it by far the largest source of non-carbon emitting power. While solar and wind energy should also be scaled up, the fact remains that it will be a long time before those renewables become major energy sources.

The administration’s support will also mean jobs. The Georgia plants alone will create thousands of construction jobs and hundreds of permanent operation and management positions. With a promise of more loan guarantees down the pipeline, the administration is wisely framing the nuclear push as a jobs program as well.

By aggressively promoting nuclear, the administration is also seeking to call the Republicans’ bluff on energy policy. Longtime advocates of nuclear power, Republicans have been slow to accept the olive branch that the Obama administration has offered. In his speech, President Obama argued that nuclear would not get the boost it needed unless we created incentives for clean energy — in other words, a price on carbon. As long as there is no penalty for carbon pollution, fossil fuel sources will remain more cost-effective and profitable than nuclear and other renewables.

The Right Track: Improving President Obama’s High-Speed Rail Program

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

President Obama made a splash in Florida last month when he announced the award of federal stimulus money to start building a high-speed rail (HSR) line between Tampa and Orlando. “I’m excited. I’m going to come back down here and ride it,” he told a cheering audience at a town hall meeting.

The president certainly got it right when he said that we must break our dependence on the automobile and imported oil. Safe, reliable, and incredibly fast rail promises a breakthrough that people will be willing to pay for and private investors willing to operate. Passenger trains cruising at 150 miles per hour provide a decisive margin of superiority over highway travel and can compete effectively with commercial air in short- and medium-distance markets while cutting overall fuel consumption and greenhouse gases.

But for all the hype surrounding the president’s announcement, this exciting new mode of transportation won’t be arriving in America anytime soon unless the Obama administration and Congress make some “course corrections.” The crux of the problem is that the administration has begun a major civic work without laying down engineering and design protocols that match the standards of fast train lines built elsewhere in the world. Even worse, the distribution of funds from the stimulus package ensures that the most promising projects will remain underfunded.

Defining High-Speed Rail

One thing that’s been little understood by policy makers and the public is that HSR trains operate quite differently from conventional Amtrak trains. First and foremost, they cannot share tracks with much slower freight trains and must be walled off in their own protected corridors. They can climb steeper gradients than regular trains, allowing them to “hug” the landscape and minimize noise and environmental impacts. But in order to maintain top speeds, the lines they travel on must be built with the fewest possible curves. And where curves are unavoidable, they must use larger turning circles to change direction.

Trains running at more than 150 mph need to be far more powerful than conventional trains and use overhead electric lines for power rather than diesel engines. Trainsets are lightweight and based on aerodynamic designs that make for quicker acceleration and more economical braking.

A regular diesel-powered train running on track shared with freight trains is not high-speed rail. It never will be. It cannot and will not compete with highways and commercial air because it is stuck on a 19th-century right-of-way filled with curves and narrow clearances that reflect a period when trains ran no faster than 60 mph. And yet such projects, designated as “Emerging HSR” by the Obama administration, got far too much of the HSR stimulus pot last month.

A Smarter HSR Strategy Is Needed

Of the 29 rail projects that shared $8 billion in Recovery Act stimulus funds, only two – the Tampa-Orlando proposal in Florida and a projected San Diego-Sacramento line in California – qualify as high-speed rail by international standards. The rest can most accurately be called “higher speed rail” or “improving Amtrak on-time performance rail.”

The best of these projects, a $1.1 billion upgrade of the existing rail corridor between Chicago and St. Louis, will eventually permit Amtrak trains to achieve 110-mph maximums and 70-mph averages between the two cities. That’s far below the 150-mph standard set by the European Union. Several other corridor projects funded last month won’t even reach 100-mph speed maximums because they are limited by the curves and congestion on track they share with freight railroads.

The Florida and California proposals that we believed should have served as templates for an emerging HSR program got far fewer funds than they deserved. Both proposals call for lightweight, electrically propelled trains on dedicated guideways running at 150 to 220 mph. Each state got enough stimulus money ($1.25 billion for Florida and $2.25 billion for California) to begin construction, but without any assurance that a working segment can be finished and placed in revenue service. This is a big problem that needs to be remedied.

The Recovery Act provided the first-ever direct federal funds for passenger rail improvements outside of the Northeast Corridor. Responsibility for the program was handed to the Federal Railroad Administration, a small branch of the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) that deals primarily with railway safety. There was no precedent for what it had been tasked to do by President Obama. Awarding high-speed passenger projects was a new responsibility for which the agency was largely unprepared and unequipped.

Because it lacked personnel with backgrounds in HSR, the FRA fell back on what it knew best – conventional railway operations – to evaluate grant applications from the states. And the state applications were mostly dusted-off commuter-rail or incremental Amtrak projects, because most state DOTs have no more experience in executing HSR projects than the federal government.

Out of this confluence of modest state applications chasing humble FRA guidelines came a welter of small-scale upgrades – fixing signal systems here and adding a new siding there – that collectively do little to advance a new mode of intercity travel in America.

We have to do better. Minor upgrades of low-speed freight systems will give government critics a perfect target to paint HSR as a “runaway spending train” (as the Wall Street Journal dubbed it) that benefits only a small group of people. If the public’s current enthusiasm for HSR turns into disappointment, there will be little political support for the expenditure of hundreds of billions needed to construct real high-speed networks.

Getting it Right

To rectify this situation, we make the following policy recommendations to the administration and Congress:

  • use the $2.5 billion that Congress has authorized for HSR in 2010 to fully fund the Tampa-Orlando project and provide enough aid to the California project so that a segment of the system can be operational by 2015.
  • provide HSR funds only to projects that feature a dedicated, electric-powered system operating at 150 mph or higher. Adopt international standards for HSR design and construction to guarantee the highest-quality engineering.
  • define upgraded rail corridors as “CSR,” or conventional-speed rail, which could be funded by a separate aid program.
  • develop a sustained source for both HSR and CSR funding, such as a national infrastructure bank advocated by PPI, to ensure a regular and predicable source of funds outside of annual congressional appropriations.
  • set up a Federal HSR Administration, distinct from the FRA and comparable in staff and technical expertise to the Federal Highway Administration. An agency with a specified infrastructure-building mandate is necessary to move the program forward.
  • locate high-speed rail lines, wherever feasible, along highway corridors instead of privately owned freight railroads. The Florida HSR line will use an alignment alongside I-4 between Tampa and Orlando. In other areas, interstates pass through land that is often owned by the federal government, so land-acquisition costs are minimal.
  • encourage the private sector to invest in HSR-building by offering real-estate opportunities along the rights-of-way, such as reserving land near HSR terminals for companies that help underwrite rail projects.
  • open HSR train and station services to bids from private contractors to enhance the revenue stream from ticket sales.
  • encourage domestic manufacture of HSR cars and locomotives through well-targeted tax credits and “green” credits.

Moving Forward

There is no doubt that President Obama is committed to upgrading intercity passenger rail. But last month his administration failed to exert optimal leadership by spreading federal stimulus funds far and wide rather than concentrating on two or three corridors that would give us trains equal to those in Europe and China.

No one said that building a passenger rail network worthy of the 21st century would be easy or cheap. But neither was the transcontinental railroad nor the interstate highway system that transformed overland travel in America in the past. Each required a bold vision accompanied by smart planning, perseverance, and sustained financial support.

The administration’s current plans for HSR represent a welcome change from the neglect of years past. But unless improvements to our HSR strategy are made, we risk squandering the renewed momentum for building a true high-speed network.

What the Capture of the Taliban’s Commander Means

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The capture of Mullah Baradar, the Taliban’s top military commander, is indeed very welcome news. If you want the full scoop on Baradar, read Ron Moreau’s Newsweek profile of him from last August, which depicts Baradar’s role thusly:

Baradar appoints and fires the Taliban’s commanders and governors; presides over its top military council and central ruling Shura in Quetta, the city in southwestern Pakistan where most of the group’s senior leaders are based; and issues the group’s most important policy statements in his own name. It is key that he controls the Taliban’s treasury—hundreds of millions of dollars in narcotics protection money, ransom payments, highway tolls, and “charitable donations,” largely from the Gulf.

[…]

Baradar determines much of the Taliban’s grand strategy as well. In late 2007 he ordered Taliban forces to focus their attacks on disrupting the flow of U.S. and NATO military supplies, and to push closer to the cities, especially Kabul. U.S. military chiefs were dismayed by his success.

[…]

Partly because of Baradar’s strong roots among the Popalzai—Afghanistan’s largest and most influential Pashtun tribe—he could bring a number of tribal leaders onboard in the event of serious peace talks. But for now, Taliban leaders seem convinced that negotiations are merely a ploy to peel off elements of the insurgency, which U.S. commanders have more or less acknowledged. “We see no benefit for the country or Islam in such kind of talks,” Baradar told NEWSWEEK.

Taking Baradar into custody not only removes a critical operational commander from the field of battle, but also has the potential to be a treasure trove of intelligence about ongoing Taliban operations. And though I think that Pakistan’s security services will continue to play both sides, this operation is one piece of notable collaboration between the CIA and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

What should we expect? We should keep in mind a tried and true axiom — we can’t kill or capture our way to victory. As is the pattern after most high-value terrorist/guerilla arrests, Baradar will be almost immediately replaced, likely by a younger and less experienced operative who will maintain a substantial though degraded medium-term operational tempo. These are the kinds of arrests that prove the administration is serious about degrading the Taliban’s capabilities.

But based on this high-value pattern, I expect to see a near-term spike in Taliban attacks as the group attempts to prove its continued viability. It will be interesting to see what sort of effect the arrest has on the ongoing battle at Marja (a Taliban stronghold in the Helmund province), a joint U.S.-Afghan operation that could have been timed to knock the Taliban further on their heels during a period of internal instability.

Culture Wars Live On In Texas

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The CW these days is that with Americans having real (i.e., economic) problems to worry about, they’re no longer inclined to engage in “culture wars” over abortion, church-state separation, GLBT issues, etc. Aside from the rather insulting premise that struggles over personal freedom, equality, and for some combatants, the structure of the universe and the definition and meaning of human life are less important to people than real growth percentages, it’s not actually true. Cultural issues are less visible in Washington for the simple reason that Democrats control the congressional agenda (if not always the results), and are generally either uniniterested in or divided over cultural issues. (This doesn’t, of course, keep conservatives from claiming that health care reform legislation is actually designed to promote both abortion and euthanasia).

Outside Washington, however, the culture wars often rage on. For a good example, check out a long, fascinating piece by Russell Shorto that appeared in the the latest New York Times Magazine, on the Texas State School Board’s ongoing struggles over public school curriculum and textbook content.

As you may know, Christian Right leaders in the late 1980s, frustrated by the limited ROI from their involvement in national politics, encouraged their followers to run for local office, particularly school boards, in an effort to promote theocratic thinking from the ground up and from early childhood on. The bitter fruit of this strategy is most on display in Texas, where self-consciously Christian conservatives running as Republicans captured the State Board of Education in the late 1990s.

Shorto explains in detail how the Board’s Christian Right bloc pores over textbook content in periodic reviews, usually offering hundreds of amendments to recommendations made by expert panels (which are themselves being skewed towards theocratic views). He also notes that these activities have an impact far beyond Texas, since the state’s gigantic market heavily influences how textbook companies operate nationally. That the Christian Right bloc is interested in religio-political rather than educational goals is best exemplified by the presence on the Board of Cynthia Dunbar, who commutes once a week from Texas to Lynchburg, Virginia, to teach at the late Jerry Fallwell’s Liberty University School of Law. Among other things, Dunbar has publicly denounced the very existence of public schools, and said sending one’s children to them (she didn’t, of course) is like “throwing them into the enemy’s flames, even as the children of Israel threw their children to Moloch.” Just the kind of person you want supervising an entire state’s public schools.

Most interestingly, Shorto demonstrates that the ultimate goal of the Christian Right bloc on the Board goes well beyond such headline issues as the teaching of “scientific creationism” or church-state separation hot buttons. They are mainly, as Dunbar puts it, focused on embuing students’ understanding of American history and law with a “biblical worldview.” That means, in practice, emphatically teaching such distinctly non-biblical principles as “American exceptionalism” (which for these folks means America’s divine mission to Christianize the world, by military means if necessary), limited government, and absolute property rights. It’s a very political–one might even say secular–agenda that happens to coincide nicely with the long-range agenda of the secular as well as the religious Right. And it’s an excellent example of how in Conservativeland cultural and economic issues cannot be neatly separated. If God’s a hard money man, an anti-tax activist, and a neocon, then the whole idea of a “Christian Nation” has implications significantly broader than municipal Christmas creches, or even abortion and LGBT equality.

Shorto suggests that the extremism of the Texas State School Board has been controversial even among conservative Republicans, and points to a Republican primary challenge to Board member Don McLeroy (a dentist whose especially heavy hand with science textbooks led to his removal as Board chairman by the state senate) on March 3 as a bellwether:

If Don McLeroy loses, it could signal that the Christian right’s recent power surge has begun to wane. But it probably won’t affect the next generation of schoolbooks. The current board remains in place until next January. By then, decisions on what goes in the Texas curriculum guidelines will be history.

I’d say McLeroy’s defeat, if it happens, is more likely to produce a shift in Christian Right tactics than any real loss of power. But I’ll probably be watching his numbers on March 3 as avidly as I watch the gubernatorial primary battle between Tea Party favorite Rick Perry and U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchiston. In good times and bad, the culture wars abide.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Evan Bayh Packs It In

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

It is to Evan Bayh’s enormous credit that he never settled comfortably into the Washington political scene. His decision to pack it in, after 12 years, is a loss to his party, and even more to his country. Most of all, it’s a withering rebuke to Congress, which seems to have lost the knack for governing.

If anyone could have been expected to make a seamless transition to the national political stage, it was Bayh, the handsome, dutiful son of former U.S. Senator Birch Bayh. But from his arrival here in 1998, Bayh seemed frustrated with the ideological and partisan hothouse that is contemporary Washington.

Maybe that’s because Bayh was a popular, two-term governor of Indiana who built a solid record of progressive reform in a fairly conservative state. He isn’t the first ex-governor to bring an executive temperament to Congress, only to feel stymied in an institution where partisan power struggles and the evasion of hard choices often trump public problem-solving.

Bayh nonetheless has distinguished himself as a leader of his party’s pragmatic wing, as a former chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council and key organizer of an influential group of centrist Senate Democrats. In the Senate, he has championed the economic prospects of working Americans, like the many who have lost jobs in Indiana’s troubled manufacturing sector. He has been a stalwart for fiscal discipline, echoing the Jeffersonian view (best articulated by John Randolph of Virginia) that elected officials should spend every public dollar as if it were their own. And Bayh has filled a critical vacuum in the Democratic Party for credible, tough-minded voices on national security and foreign policy.

Bayh’s earnest centrism and refusal to put partisanship over considerations of national interest have not endeared him to the Democratic left. Some self-appointed commissars of ideological correctness are even saying “good riddance” to the Indiana Democrat. This is monumentally dumb.

If Democrats want to become the nation’s majority party again, it can only be as a broad coalition of pragmatic centrists and liberals, including a large dollop of the independent voters who have been drifting away from the party since the 2008 election. However overrepresented they may be in the chattering class, liberal purists constitute less than a quarter of the national electorate.

In fact, Democrats should worry plenty about Bayh’s decision. With the midterm election looming, the last thing they want to do is give the impression of a party hostile to pragmatic centrists and independents who have similar views. And the departure of a serious, public-spirited leader of Bayh’s caliber can only deepen the public’s jaundiced view of Congress.

“There is too much partisanship and…too much narrow ideology in Washington,“ Bayh said in explaining his decision not to seek reelection. “Even at a time of enormous national challenge, the people’s business is not getting done.”

That’s right, and it’s a big problem for the governing party.

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

The GOP on Terrorism: Hypocritical, Disingenuous, Ineffective

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

This is unbelievably rich. Check out this exchange from Dick Cheney’s appearance on the ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday:

DICK CHENEY: I think, in fact, the situation with respect to al Qaeda, to say that, you know, that was a big attack we had on 9/11, but it’s not likely again, I just think that’s dead wrong. I think the biggest strategic threat the United States faces today is the possibility of another 9/11 with a nuclear weapon or a biological agent of some kind. And I think al Qaeda is out there even as we meet, trying to figure out how to do that.

JONATHAN KARL, ABC NEWS: And do you think that the Obama administration is taking the necessary steps to prevent that?

CHENEY: I think they need to do everything they can to prevent, and if the mindset is it’s not likely, then it’s difficult to mobilize the resources and get people to give it the kind of priority that it deserves.

Every time Dick Cheney claims or infers that the Obama administration isn’t fighting al Qaeda as hard as the Bush administration supposedly did, repeat after me: Remember the Iraq War? If the Bush administration was as focused on al Qaeda as Dick Cheney misremembers, would we have gone into Iraq?

It’s even more astounding that Republicans are so desparate to criticize the administration on national security that they’re now claiming that the Obama administration is being too harsh. You read that correctly. Here’s Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO), the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee:

Over a year after taking office, the administration has still failed to answer the hard questions about what to do if we have the opportunity to capture and detain a terrorist overseas, which has made our terror-fighters reluctant to capture and left our allies confused. If given a choice between killing or capturing, we would probably kill.

If Senator Bond will take the flowers out of his hair for a second, he might remember an exchange with CIA Director Leon Panetta as Panetta revealed the cancellation of a legally questionable CIA program to kill al Qaeda operatives. Bond seemed far more in favor of killing AQ members back in July when he asked the director:

Why would you cancel [the program to kill AQ operatives]? If the CIA weren’t trying to do something like this, we’d be asking ‘Why not?’ “

I guess he was for it before he was against it.

Keep in mind that none of the Republican attacks on national security are working anyway, as evidenced by the latest polls.

Bayh and the Median Voter

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The big political news from the President’s Day weekend was the surprise retirement announcement of Indiana Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh. According to reports, the decision was so sudden that even some staff members were taken by surprise.

The peerless Nate Silver has come up with an analysis of what this means for Democrats:

Of the 59 Senate Democrats in the current Congress, he was the 2nd most conservative after Ben Nelson, according to the DW-NOMINATE database. Nevertheless, because he comes from a fairly red state, Bayh was reasonably valuable to his party, ranking about in the middle of the pack among all Democratic Senators based on his roll call votes.

Throughout his career, Bayh has come under fire from the left for his resolutely centrist positions. But such criticisms almost always leave out the political context in which moderates like him operate. As Silver points out, Bayh was representing a generally conservative state (it’s R+5 according to the Partisan Voting Index) in which the chances of a Democrat being elected are about 40 percent. And yet, according to Silver’s analysis, Bayh’s voting record was actually more liberal than the Indiana norm.

Complain all you want about his unreliability as a Democratic vote, but the fact is that Bayh was to the left of the median voter in his state. Considering the constituency that he had to represent, Bayh was actually a relatively valuable member of the Democratic caucus. Of course, it’s not impossible for Democrats to run a more liberal, populist candidate in Bayh’s place who could win. But the likelier possibility, especially in this environment, is that a Republican far more conservative than the incumbent will take the seat, and an iffy vote for Democrats now becomes a reliable “party of no” vote.

“[T]he fact is that over time, the median voter theorem tends to prevail, and that electing someone slightly to the left of center is usually a win for the liberal party in a slightly-to-the-right-of-center jurisdiction,” Silver concludes. That seems obvious, but it’s a lesson that progressives tend to forget. Indeed, Bayh’s departure has been met by cheers of “Good riddance!” from some progressives. If the objective is to make the progressive tent a little smaller and the conservative one a little bigger, then yes, good riddance indeed.

Is Obama Too Thoughtful?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The following is an excerpt from Mike Signer’s column published this weekend in the Daily Beast:

“[W]e need a commander in chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern.” That’s what Sarah Palin told Tea Partiers in Nashville last weekend, triggering uproarious cheers. A few weeks earlier, she had dismissed Obama’s State of the Union as “quite a bit of lecturing, not leading.” Meanwhile, John McCain just borrowed the “lecturer” line to attack Obama in the Financial Times.

Palin and her partners seem intent on turning one of Obama’s strengths—his thoughtfulness—into a liability. Such broadsides threaten to dominate political and policy debates not just in November’s mid-term elections, but the 2012 presidential election as well. The administration should take note and pivot quickly. The fact is that voters often need a bolder narrative, one whose plot turns on actions and victories, not just the calls to civil discourse and contemplation that have come to mark Obama’s presidency.

The intellectual has always held a hallowed, fraught place in American politics. In Saul Bellow’s novel Humboldt’s Gift, set in the 1950s, Bellow’s slightly ridiculous poet-hero Von Humboldt Fleisher showers praise on Adlai Stevenson, the “great souled” intellectual Democratic nominee for a president whose “chief of staff would know Thucydides.” “Intellectuals are coming up in this country,” Humboldt says. “Democracy is finally about to begin creating a civilization in the USA.”

The mirage of a “great-souled man” who can help “create a civilization in the USA” still promises water in the desert, particularly to progressives. It played a significant role in Obama’s stunningly inspiring 2008 campaign. But this vision also rubs a lot of people the wrong way. Since our nation’s beginning, many Americans have viewed overt intellectuals with suspicion and disdain, as memorably documented by the historian Richard Hofstadter in his 1963 volume, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.

We all know that Obama was a law professor. He deeply believes the lawyer’s idea that a thesis, brought into conflict with antithesis, will result in synthesis: truth. As president, Obama has demonstrated unheralded courage in his repeated attempts to use politics to help lead toward truth, rather than just a win. You might call this the “philosophical model” of the presidency, and it dominated his State of the Union address.

One example was a passage meant to make people reflect on their own responsibility to counter pessimism with a sort of voluntary optimism. Obama said, “As one woman wrote me, ‘We are strained but hopeful, struggling but encouraged.’ … It is because of this spirit—this great decency and great strength—that I have never been more hopeful about America’s future than I am tonight. . . . And tonight, I’d like to talk about how together, we can deliver on that promise.” Note that he says, “I’d like to talk about.” It’s as if Obama is inviting us to reason together. This is what Palin attacks as a “lecture.”

Read the full column at the Daily Beast.

A Better Glimpse at the Tea Party Movement

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Finally, someone has taken a public opinion survey that provides something better than a vague, distant glimpse of the Tea Party movement. A new CBS/Times poll drills down below the surface and reveals that the movement is not exactly the vastly popular political behemoth we have been led to believe it is. And it’s mostly composed of conservative Republicans and conservative independents who never liked Barack Obama to begin with, who dislike him now with an unusual intensity, and who have policy views that are well to the right of national public opinion.

The poll shows 18 percent of Americans identifying themselves as Tea Party supporters, with fully 43 percent saying they don’t know enough about it to have an opinion, or have never heard of it at all. (In a separate question, 55 percent of respondents say they know “nothing” or “not much” about the movement). There’s no straightforward report of party ID among tea partiers, but the composition of the various partisan components indicates they are roughly two-thirds Republicans, one-third independents, with a very small smattering of Democrats. For all the talk of tea partiers being equally hostile to both major parties, 62 percent of them have a favorable view of the GOP, while only nine percent have a favorable view of the Democratic Party. Eighty percent have an unfavorable opinion of President Obama.

Are tea party enthusiasts anti-corporate “populists” who could theoretically be attracted to a more left-bent, populist Democratic Party? Doesn’t look like it, since tea partiers are much more likely than Americans as a whole to oppose increased bank regulations, and nearly twice as likely to think Obama is prejudiced in favor of poor folks (not a compliment, given their general hostility to him). They are also much, much less likely to attribute the federal budget deficits they hate so much to the Bush administration. Nearly half of them erroneously believe the Obama administration has already raised taxes (again, not a good thing in their eyes).

There’s a lot more we could learn about tea partiers from a more detailed survey of their opinions on economic and cultural issues, and for that matter, on foreign policy. Since the activist-leadership of the movement includes both Ron Paul veterans and Christian Right culture-warriors, there may be less unanimity on some subjects.

But the more I learn empirically about these folk, the more I’m inclined to my original feeling that they are mostly very conservative 2008 McCain-Palin voters who have been radicalized by various events of the last two years. They are not anything new under the political sun, aside from the intensity of their beliefs, including counter-factual beliefs such as the conviction that Barack Obama has raised their taxes. As such, they mainly represent a force pushing the Republican Party to the right, which is where the Republican Party was headed anyway.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

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

In China, High-Speed Rail Cuts into Air Travel

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As our recent policy paper on high-speed rail (HSR) noted, China has emerged as one of the global leaders in HSR, recently unveiling the world’s fastest train — with top speeds of 245 piles per hour — and proceeding apace on a plan to build 8,000 miles of ultraspeed lines by 2020.

A story from Bloomberg (h/t Infrastructurist) puts Chinese HSR’s success into perspective:

China Southern Airlines Co., the nation’s largest carrier, and Air China Ltd. are slashing prices to compete with the country’s new high-speed trains in a battle that Europe’s airlines have largely already ceded.

Competition from trains that can travel at 350 kilometers per hour (217 miles per hour) is forcing the carriers to cut prices as much as 80 percent at a time when they are already in a round of mergers to lower costs. Passengers choosing railways over airlines will also erode a market that Boeing Co. and Airbus SAS are banking on to provide about 13 percent of plane sales over the next 20 years.

“There’s no doubt that high-speed rail will defeat airlines on all the routes of less than 800 kilometers,” said Citigroup Inc. analyst Ally Ma. “The airlines must get themselves in shape, increase their profitability and improve the network.”

As the lede states, HSR has had a similar effect in Europe. A few years ago, Air France dropped its five daily trips between Paris and Brussels as a result of the growing popularity of high-speed rail among travelers. The same thing happened with the routes between Paris and Stuttgart.

Not that the airline industry in China is necessarily hurting. The country’s explosive growth has led to an urgent need to expand all sorts of transportation infrastructure. This year, some 25 airports will begin construction, including a second one in Beijing. China ordered 160 Airbus airplanes in November 2007.

China’s experience offers an instructive model as we embark on our own push to revitalize our aging rail infrastructure. As travel demand has increased, HSR has offered greater choice, reliability, and price competition for Chinese consumers. Is there any reason why China can provide that kind of infrastructure upgrade for its travelers and we can’t?

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

A Proposed Compromise on the Filibuster

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Ezra Klein links to a Slate article by Ben Eidelson that, I think, is quietly devastating to the idea that the Senate filibuster has somehow destroyed the democratic process. Eidelson shows that from 1991 to 2008, in the typical successful filibuster, the senators behind the filibuster (i.e., opposing the cloture motion) represented states comprising 46 percent of the U.S. population. If filibustering Senators represented 51 percent of the population, then we would conclude that the typical successful filibuster was supported by senators representing a majority of Americans. In that case, at least by small-r republican principles, the filibuster would protect the will of the majority.

Forty-six percent is not 51 percent, of course. But here’s another way of thinking about the effect of the filibuster. It could be argued that, to account for the fact that most Americans’ views on most issues are only weakly held, we should have a higher threshold for legislation passing than support by a simple majority of senators, or even support by enough senators to represent a simple majority of Americans. Instead, for legislation to pass, we might decide that enough senators representing 55 percent of Americans should support the legislation. If that were the procedural guideline, then on average, the way the filibuster has worked has been consistent with that guideline.

For the practice of the filibuster when Republicans have been in the minority to be consistent with a procedural guideline, the rule would have to be that enough senators to represent 60 percent of Americans should support the legislation (see Eidelson’s table). Interestingly, however, despite the greater use of the filibuster among Republicans, in Eidelson’s data Republican minorities had an average of 20 successful filibusters per Congress, compared with 16.6 successful filibusters per Congress by Democratic minorities. That’s a fairly small difference, although the current Congress is not included in these figures.

Unlike most progressive bloggers, I remain ambivalent about the filibuster. Eidelson’s data shows that Republican filibusters are much more likely to be anti-majoritarian than Democratic filibusters (even if they are not dramatically anti-majoritarian). He proposes as a compromise, replacing the 60-vote rule for cloture votes with a 55-vote rule, which historically would have eliminated most successful Republican filibusters while retaining most successful Democratic ones. Another compromise that’s consistent with small-r republicanism and small-d democracy that might be more palatable to Republicans would be to implement instead something like a 55-percent-of-the-population rule for cloture votes (while still requiring a majority of senators too). This would set a higher threshold for support than simple majority-senator-rule, would ensure that small-state senators could not thwart the preferences of senators representing a solid majority of Americans, and would not have such dramatically partisan consequences compared with a 55-vote rule (meaning it would have a better chance of being implemented).

Obama and the Push for Middle East Democracy

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Francis Fukuyama is often derided in progressive circles because he was one of the architects of neoconservatism. Fair enough — when you’re one of the intellectual driving forces behind the Iraq War, that’s going to cost some credibility down the road. But Fukuyama’s shaky track record goes back even farther, when he predicted in 1992’s The End of History and The Last Man that the end of the Cold War essentially signaled the end of ideological struggle between civilizations. Someone forgot to tell that to al Qaeda.

With all that behind him, it’s understandable why some would be leery about paying him heed now. But Fukuyama’s most recent WSJ op-ed is actually worth your time. Fukuyama’s piece focuses on democracy promotion in the Middle East, a policy that has traction with groups across the political spectrum, including PPI, the National Democratic Institute, The Project on Middle East Democracy, and the International Republican Institute. And if a high-profile neoconservative acknowledges the failings of the Bush administration and smartly pushes the current administration on a sound policy, then we should pay attention. He says:

While Mr. Obama paid lip service to the need for greater Middle East democracy in his June 2009 Cairo speech to the Muslim world, he has done very little concretely to back this up in terms of quiet pressure for democratic change on the part of allies like Egypt, Jordan or Morocco. Indeed, the administration’s ramping up of military support for Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh in the wake of the attempted Christmas day airliner bombing suggests that we’ve gone back to the traditional U.S. policy of reliance on Arab strongmen.

This would be a big mistake. For the core premises of the Freedom Agenda remain essentially correct, even as its enunciation in the midst of the Iraq invasion undercut its credibility. Mr. Obama runs the risk of falling in bed with the same set of Middle Eastern authoritarians and alienating broad political populations in the region. …

The problem with the Bush administration’s Freedom Agenda wasn’t its fundamental analysis, but the way that it was articulated in the midst of the highly unpopular Iraq war. Democracy promotion was used from the start to justify the invasion, and in the eyes of many Arabs became synonymous with American occupation….

Mr. Obama arrived in office with none of this baggage, and therefore had an opportunity to recommit the United States to peaceful democratic change. But the window is rapidly closing as the U.S. draws closer to the region’s authoritarian rulers.

While I’m not sure that the Obama administration’s focus on Yemen undercuts the Cairo speech in the way Fukuyama suggests, I think the general point is valid. After all, the trick is protecting America’s immediate interests while encouraging openness over the long term. So how to strike that balance? I’d recommend checking out a few of POMED’s publications, like those here. Or, check out a paper Shadi Hamid wrote for PPI last year.

High Noon in Tehran

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Iranians are bracing for violent clashes in the streets of Tehran today, the Islamic Republic’s 31st anniversary. Both the government and the opposition Green Movement are calling for demonstrations to mark the occasion.

Reza Aslan, a PPI friend and contributor, says the regime’s increasingly brutal crackdown on domestic dissent has brought Iran to the verge of civil war. Other observers fear a Tiananmen Square-style massacre that could cripple the democratic opposition, which flared up after last summer’s rigged elections.

Meanwhile, Iran’s rulers are promising rude surprises for their external critics, too. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad warns of a “telling blow” Thursday, while Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, threatens a “punch” for the United States and other countries that have worked to end Iran’s nuclear program.

Such cryptic belligerence no doubt reflects the regime’s desire to distract the world’s attention from its increasingly shaky position at home. The mullahs’ old tactic of whipping up paranoia and striking defiant poses against supposed U.S. or Western plots is wearing thin. A broad cross-section of Iranian society seems focused instead on the Islamic Republic’s metamorphosis into an Islamic police state.

“The Islamic Republic is nothing but an economic-religious-military complex that applies its coercive power not through political institutions but through a military and security apparatus under the direct supervision of Ayatollah Khamenei,” said Mehdi Khalaji of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy at a congressional hearing last week. No “engagement” with opponents for this regime; instead, it has unleashed its vast security apparatus on Iranian society. Scores of anti-government protestors have been killed and hundreds more imprisoned. Prominent regime opponents have been subjected to totalitarian-style show trials, and the government has announced plans to execute nine protesters. The government is relentless in policing the internet, jamming foreign broadcasts and blocking contacts with the outside world.

Ahmadinejad underscored his contempt for global opinion last weekend in announcing that Iran will begin enriching uranium to higher levels, bringing it much closer to fuel that can easily be “weaponized.” He also threatened, implausibly, to build 10 more nuclear plants over the next year. In any case, Ahmadinejad’s latest antics should have been an embarrassment to China, which has been blocking tougher sanctions because, it claims, the regime is ready to deal on enrichment.

How should the United States react to these and coming provocations? Not by intensifying efforts to “engage” the regime in talks focused narrowly on the nuclear dispute. Washington needs to broaden its angle of vision to encompass the Iranian people’s struggle for freedom and democracy. Twice before, in 1953 and 1979, America failed to side with such popular aspirations, sacrificing our own ideals to the logic of superpower rivalry. It was a bad bargain then, and we can’t afford to make the same mistake again.

Leaders of the Green Movement have made it clear they neither expect nor need America’s help in their struggle. But without offering direct support to democratic reformers, the United States should be more vocal in defending human rights in Iran. And, together with our European partners, we should justify stricter sanctions on human rights grounds as well as nonproliferation.

And as Khalaji noted, “The threat to regional peace and Iranian democracy are the same: the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).” The Corps is in charge of Iran’s nuclear program, and is Khamenei’s chief instrument for political suppression. It also funnels Iranian aid and arms to extremist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as Shia militants in Iraq and other Sunni-majority countries.

Of course, Washington should keep probing for signs of Iranian tractability on the nuclear issue. But the United States should be wary of doing anything now -– either by overreacting to its bluster, or rushing to engage in high level talks –- that would boost the sagging prestige of the Iranian leadership and the IRGC. Over the long haul, political change inside Iran is our surest guarantee of safety.

Euro-zoned Out

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Things in Europe are looking grimmer than my chances of getting a taxi in blizzard-slammed New York City.

Today’s announcement that Germany and France are going to provide financial aid to Greece — with stringent IMF oversight — caps off weeks of speculation that the EU would have to bail out the Hellenic Republic. The newly elected left-wing government in Greece has come clean with what the previous conservative government had been hiding — Greece’s budget deficit for last year was a whopping almost 14 percent of GDP, and this year’s is looking not better. The new government, in a bid to reassure the markets — and the other members of the Eurozone that have all sworn to adhere to the deficit limits of the founding Maastricht Treaty — has promised to get government deficits down to three percent of GDP by 2012. Seeing the coming of severe austerity measures in the wake of what wags have been desperately trying to tag the “ouzo crisis,” Greek civil servants have unsurprisingly gone on strike.

The news is no better outside the Eurozone, where, to take the most latest example, Latvia is putting up numbers that are even grimmer. The Latvian economy shrank by 18 percent the past year, and it’s not likely to rebound anytime soon. (To put that in perspective, U.S. GDP fell by 30 percent over four years at the start of the Great Depression.) Latvia has pegged its currency, the Lat, to the Euro through the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), in hopes of joining the Eurozone like Slovakia did last year, and like its neighbor to the north, Estonia, might do as soon as this July. The Baltic countries want to join the Euro, as adopting a strong currency is a surefire way to control inflation and make it easier for the government to borrow on the international markets (this is why several small economies have unilaterally adopted the Euro or the U.S. Dollar as their currency).

These two cases are emblematic of the issues facing several European countries. Greece has been lumped in with Portugal, Italy, and Spain to form the “PIGS,” southern Europe’s sluggish economies (Ireland is occasionally added to the group as a second “I”: “PIIGS”). Latvia’s problems are similar to those seen all over Eastern Europe, with Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary all facing similar — if less dire — straits. But while it looks difficult all over the EU, if I were a small business owner (or finance minister), I’d rather be in Latvia than in Greece.

Why? Because it could be a lot easier for Latvia to get out of its situation than Greece’s. Latvia has been facing a choice: aim for the Eurozone or faster recovery. While the benefits of a small country joining the monetary union make sense over the long term, when faced with a recession a currency devaluation might make more sense. This would immediately make domestic products — now cheaper to make — more competitive, stoking exports and, with them, job and GDP growth. Leaving the ERM would postpone joining the Euro for several years, which could make inflation a problem, but other countries, notably the UK, have been forced to leave the ERM before, and in the UK’s case it helped fuel a strong decade of growth in the 1990s.

The alternative to devaluation is deflation, a painful process where you ratchet down the prices of everything in your economy, from raw materials to salaries, to the point where they become competitive. This is the prospect that Greece is facing. In the Eurozone, Greece cannot lower it’s exchange rate against the markets it exports to — they all use the Euro. Devaluation also makes local currency-denominated debt much easier to pay. And this is where Greece is also getting hammered. As it looks increasingly unlikely to be able to pay its obligations, the yield on Greek debt has jumped. Greek debt is trading for less in the secondary market because investors are less sure that the government will be able to meet it’s obligations. As Greek banks hold significant amounts of Greek government debt, they are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.

In the end, why should these issues in Europe be a concern to the U.S.? Surely problems in Athens will have limited impact on the largest economy in the world. Well, it’s worth remembering that the bankrupcty of Creditanstalt in Austria following the crash of 1929 was one of the sparks that turned a recession into the Great Depression.

Scott Brown for President? No Way.

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

A lot of dumb things get said in American political commentary, and I’ve undoubtedly said a few myself over the years. But one dumb thing that ought to be quickly exploded is the persistent talk that newly minted Republican Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts might run a viable campaign for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012.

Yes, Brown is a godlike figure to Republicans right now. Yes, various domain names connected with a Brown presidential run got snatched up the moment he won his Senate race. And yes, he’s the symbol of the “fresh faces” Republicans long for every time they look at the rather unexciting (or in the case of Sarah Palin, too exciting) field they will likely choose from in 2012.

But it ain’t happening. And that’s not because of his rather signal lack of experience since, as his fans love to point out, Barack Obama only had a year more of elected experience beyond the state senate when he was elected in 2008.

To mention the most important reason it ain’t happening: Brown is pro-choice. He explicitly opposes overturning Roe v. Wade, and in fact, his rhetoric on abortion is remarkably similar to that of the president. And this, boys and girls, has become an absolute disqualifier for Republican presidential prospects these days; just ask Rudy Guiliani. Or better yet, ask John McCain or Joe Lieberman, since McCain’s decision to put Lieberman on his ticket in 2008 was only abandoned when his advisors told him he’d face a potentially successful convention revolt if a pro-choice running-mate were chosen.

Sure, pro-lifers supported Brown’s Senate run, but there’s all the difference in the world between being a candidate in a blue state who can help disrupt Democratic control of the upper chamber, and being a candidate for national leader of the GOP and the person who makes Supreme Court appointments. Past Republican presidential candidates have gotten into trouble for failing to support a constitutional amendment recognizing fetuses from the moment of conception as “persons” endowed with full constitutional rights. Supporting Roe is an abomination to today’s GOPers; in a recent poll, self-identified Republican voters said they considered abortion “murder” by a margin of 76 percent to eight percent (nearly a third of them, in fact, want to outlaw contraceptives). This is not a negotiable issue.

If that’s not enough to convince you that Brown 2012 is a mirage, consider another problem: Brown was and remains an avid supporter of Massachusetts’ universal health plan, which is extremely similar to the national plan passed without a single Republican vote by the U.S. Senate. That wasn’t a problem for Brown in the Senate race; indeed, his main argument for his pledge that he would vote against any such bill in the Senate was that Massachusetts didn’t need help from the feds because they had already enacted the same reforms. But he’s still on record favoring a “socialist” scheme for health care, and specific items like an individual mandate for health insurance coverage, which most Republicans nationally consider unconstitutional, or perhaps even a form of slavery.

To be sure, this is a problem that Brown shares with Mitt Romney, who signed his state’s version of ObamaCare into law. But Romney has been inching away from the health plan since his 2008 presidential campaign, and will probably repudiate it entirely before long, while Brown’s hugs for the plan are very fresh.

Speaking of Romney: his own presidential ambitions are still another bar to a Brown candidacy. The Brown campaign kept the Mittster under wraps until Election Night, which was smart since Romney is not very popular in Massachusetts. But Brown’s political advisors are all Romney people, who presumably have some residual loyalty to their old boss. Will Romney, who probably first saw a future President of the United States in the mirror before entering kindergarten, step aside for this whippersnapper? Unlikely, and there’s definitely no room in a Republican presidential field for two socialized-medicine supporters from Massachusetts.

So you can forget about Brown for President in 2012, which will become apparent once he starts casting heretical votes in the Senate in order to position himself for a re-election run that same year. He clearly seems smart enough to understand that in 2012, he’ll be dealing with far less favorable turnout patterns, and can’t expect his opponent to run as feckless a campaign as Martha Coakley’s. Odds are, Democrats will run a candidate against Brown who has heard of Curt Schilling and doesn’t wait until the final week to run ads.

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

Turning Coats

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Some of you may remember that the very day after Scott Brown’s Senate victory in Massachusetts, Republicans began fantasizing about actually taking over the Senate this November, in no small part because former senator Dan Coats had announced he was coming out of retirement to take on the previously unassailable Democrat Evan Bayh in Indiana. Yeah, it was noted at the time that Coats had been living and voting in Virginia for the last decade, while working as a DC lobbyist, but GOPers figured Coats’ long political record in the Hoosier State would enable him to brush that off as a less-than-youthful indiscretion.

But since then, Indiana Democrats, accessing public records, have found out and loudly let it be known that Coats wasn’t just a lobbyist for banks and equity firms, but for foreign governments. He personally lobbied for India, but much more interestingly, his firm lobbied for Yemen. You know, Yemen, that al Qaeda stomping ground where “Christmas Day Bomber” Umar Abdulmutallab got his training.

Suffice it to say that Democrats have not kept this information to themselves. According to a piece in Politico today about the “nuking” of Coats:

“We just hit him with a freight train,” one Democratic official familiar with the anti-Coats effort said Monday. “It’s Politics 101: Frame the guy early.”

The effectiveness of the Democratic attack on Coats is probably best reflected by the fact that none of the Republicans previously in the race to challenge Bayh (including former U.S. Rep. John Hostettler, a fiery conservative) have pulled out. Coats’ proto-campaign has largely confined itself to whining about “mud” being thrown at their hero.

So maybe Republicans shouldn’t be quite so quick to mark Indiana down in the column of likely Senate wins this year.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.