Category: Uncategorized

Progressives Need to Slam the Right With the Zazi Case

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Najibullah Zazi pled guilty yesterday in what should be a major coup for the administration. Right now, they’re not exploiting it for all it’s worth.

First, some background: Zazi traveled from Colorado to New York with explosives in his car and the intention to detonate them in the New York subway, potentially killing hundreds of innocent Americans. The NYT is reporting that Zazi copped to it after DOJ pressured him into cooperation out of fear that the inquiry might widen to include other members of his family. As a part of the deal, prospectors believe he’ll prove a valuable source of information about his contacts in Pakistan, where he met with al Qaeda and learned to make the devices.

Though Zazi’s plea has been sealed by the judge, he has admitted to conspiracies to use weapons of mass destruction, to commit murder in a foreign country, and to provide material support for a terrorist organization. In exchange, he’ll reportedly be sentenced to a life term in a June 25th hearing. Leaving Zazi to anonymously rot in jail is a win-win for the USA in the worldwide PR battle with al Qaeda, too. Sentencing him to die denies terrorists the sickening prospect of using Zazi as a “martyr” in recruiting and financing propaganda. This is worth remembering when KSM’s sentencing comes around.

The case demonstrates that the intelligence community can partner with law enforcement agencies to provide swift, effective justice to those who would harm us. The American security apparatus “connected the dots” to prevent a major terrorist attack. What’s more, it shows that the Obama administration is committed to defeating terrorism and can apply the civilian justice system as part of that effort.

The bottom line is that this is an absolutely huge win for a sound, progressive worldview on national security. The good news is that Attorney General Eric Holder is out making the case. The bad news is that he’s making the case in the wrong way. Here’s a telling statement on the usefulness of the civilian court system from his press conference:

To take this tool [civilian courts] out of our hands, to denigrate this tool flies in the face of facts and is more about politics than it is about facts.

It’s a perfectly sound and correct argument. It’s also one that most Americans ignore.

It would be much more effective to frame the national security argument in terms of emotion, not wonkery. Americans want to hear that their country is strong, that we’re beating terrorism, and that we’re on the offensive in that fight. Using civilian courts shouldn’t be referred to as a “tool”; rather, the entire case should be framed as a “strong victory over those who are dedicated to killing us.”

Conservatives don’t care about facts. They fight these ideological battles on emotional grounds, and for decades their arguments have resonated more with Americans than progressive ones. I would rather have the AG preempting conservative attacks using the Zazi case by projecting an image of staunch, fist-pounding resolve to defend the country, not wonkishly responding to conservatives’ false assertions that civilian courts are weak.

Think I’m wrong? Look no farther than this WaPo/ABC poll that shows the only category that conservatives are “winning” on national security right now is the civilian courts vs. military courts argument, despite the civilian courts’ effectiveness in the Reid, Moussaoui, and, now, Zazi cases. Why? My hunch is that the emotional idea behind a military court simply projects a better image of strength, irrespective of the justice it may deliver.

Now is the time to go on the offensive. Progressives should use this very tangible example of progressive strength and smarts on national security and show that conservative approaches continue to be reckless. Or we could continue fighting this battle on conservatives’ terms and keep wasting our breath.

Don’t Tread on My Medicare

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

To continue some thoughts about the growing contradiction between conservative policy predilections and the GOP’s violent anti-spending rhetoric, there’s a specific political factor that’s intensifying the dilemma: the heavy, heavy reliance of Republicans on support from seniors.

Several smart commentators (Chait, Douthat, and Larison) have drawn attention to a new Pew survey on generational political attitudes which shows the exceptionally geriatric nature of the Republican Party’s current base of support. That’s a good thing for Republicans in the very short term, since seniors tend to vote at disproportionately high levels in midterm elections. But it’s not easy to be the Party That Hates Government Spending when your most important constituency is receiving Medicare and Social Security benefits. Here’s how Ross Douthat puts it:

[Y]ou can win an awful lot of elections just by mobilizing the over-65 constituency — they’re well-informed, they turn out to vote, and there are more of them every day. But the easiest way to do it, as the Democrats proved for years and years and years, is to defend Medicare and Social Security like McAuliffe at Bastogne. This means that while the energy of activists may be pushing the Republicans to the right on size-of-government issues, the concerns of their central constituency could end up pulling them inexorably leftward on entitlements….

This wouldn’t be a terrible thing if Social Security and (especially) Medicare accounted for, say, ten percent of the federal budget. But where the size of government — and if we ever want to cut the deficit, the burden of taxation — is concerned, they’ll be the whole ballgame soon enough. And if the Republican Party depends too heavily on over-65 voters for its political viability, we could easily end up with a straightforwardly big-government party in the Democrats, and a G.O.P. that wins election by being “small government” on the small stuff (earmarks, etc.) while refusing to even consider entitlement reform.

Now that’s how it looks if you are simply considering the fiscal numbers. But from a psychological point of view, there’s another problem for conservatives: how to rationalize a posture of maximum defense of Social Security and Medicare with a general hostility to transfer payments. The only obvious way to do that is to treat senior entitlements as benefits earned by virtuous old folks, as opposed to unvirtuous younger folks whose demands for “welfare” are to be resisted and demonized at all costs. You don’t have to hold a negative view of conservative motives to see how this can lead to highly invidious, and perhaps semi-racist, political appeals. Indeed, the current position of Republicans all but demands that they encourage seniors to view public life as a struggle to keep their own public benefits and their own private wealth against rapacious efforts by “elitists” and welfare “looters” to reduce their share of federal spending while increasing their taxes. And that’s a temptation Republican politicians don’t seem inclined to resist, illogical and immoral as it might be.

It’s not clear how long GOPers will continue to maintain this odd mixture of pro-government policies and anti-government rhetoric (a contradiction that extends, of course, to conservatives lust for ever-higher defense spending and foreign policy adventurism). But at present, they might as well emblazon on their Tea Party banners the legend: “Don’t Tread On My Medicare!”

Update: One obvious way around the GOP’s dilemma on entitlements is simply to “grandfather” current beneficiaries and introduce radical changes for younger generations. That’s how Rep. Paul Ryan’s Medicare Voucher proposal — central to the congressional Republican “plans” for both health care and the budget — operates. And that’s explicitly what Tim Pawlenty is talking about doing with both Medicare and Social Security.

It remains to be seen if this approach, which for all the talk about “keeping promises to seniors” sure looks like a cynical effort to buy off a demographic group that favors Republicans at the expense of groups less inclined — will fly with seniors or with anyone else. It does nicely comport with the “I’ve got mine! To hell with the rest of you!” spirit that Republicans are carefully cultivating among older white voters.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

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

The Bipartisan Jobs Bill

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The big political news of the day was the Senate’s passage of a $15 billion jobs bill with not one, not two, but five Republicans on board. The five Republicans who voted for it were the three Northeasterners (Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, both of Maine, and Massachusetts’ Scott Brown) and two retiring members (Sens. Kit Bond of Missouri and George Voinovich of Ohio). In other words, considering the bill was largely made up of tax cuts that the GOP would normally vote for, it was still an astoundingly weak show of Republican support.

But it’s undeniable that the appearance of Republican Senate votes is a change from the dismal pattern of recent months. Does the vote herald a new day for the Senate? Too early to tell, of course — but it does give a hint of how Senate Democrats’ plan to break up their job-creation initiatives into smaller pieces and forcing Republicans to vote against them could work.

Brown, in a statement following his vote, said, “I came to Washington to be an independent voice, to put politics aside and to do everything in my power to help create jobs for Massachusetts families.” How did Brown’s vote go over with conservatives? Take a guess. In the months to come, the breakup between Brown and the Tea Partiers — because, let’s face it, Brown is a moderate Republican — will make for compelling political theater.

More important than Brown’s vote is what effect it might have on the Maine senators. You may recall that Collins and Snowe were two of three GOP votes for the stimulus bill. Snowe also gave a vote to the Senate Finance Committee’s health bill. Will the appearance of another Northeastern moderate Republican embolden them to break off more often from their party’s obstructionist game plan? If so, then bipartisanship actually comes back into play for Democrats in the Senate.

While the jobs bill is too small to have much of an effect, it is, in the words of economist Mark Zandi, a “good first step.” Reid’s idea was to have votes on a succession of job-creation measures that would force Republicans to either keep saying “no” on bills that should be popular with the public or join Democrats in getting something done. The question now is whether the Democrats can follow through. To be continued.

A Push Into the Abyss

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Glenn Beck”s weird tutorial that ended this weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference seems to have been a big hit among attendees. Yes, it’s a bit ironic that he expressed views highly similar to those of Ron Paul, whose student-driven victory in the CPAC straw poll was heavily panned and booed by the “regular” conservatives at the conference. Yes, some may have been put off by his constant use of Alcoholics Anonymous metaphors (people who need any form of government assistance are apparently just like alcoholics who haven’t “hit bottom” yet). But there really didn’t seem to be much dissent in this crowd with the idea that “progressivism” dating all the way back to Wilson and TR has been demonic, or that Republicans have to repudiate all forms of activist government if they want to get back on the paths of righteousness.

I was particularly struck by John Fund’s analysis of Beck’s appearance for the Wall Street Journal, which treated it as a constructive warning to Republicans against the temptations of governing.

It’s true that people like Beck and Paul, and most obviously the Tea Party Movement, are encouraging Republican politicians to take an ever-more-rigid position against government spending which, in combination with perpetual demands for both fiscal discipline and major new tax cuts, suggest a level of government retrenchment far beyond anything Americans have experienced since Hoover. But it’s surprising how few observers on the Right seem to be aware of the exceptionally perilous political direction of such talk.

Chris Bowers recently offered a useful summary of recent polling on specific cuts in government spending. And the bottom line is that Americans really, really don’t want them except in small categories like NASA and non-defense foreign assistance. And this is why symbolic anti-spending measures like never-to-be-enacted constitutional balanced budget amendments (Tim Pawlenty’s favorite panacea) and various “freezes” have always been so popular among GOP politicians. It’s probably poetic justice for conservatives that decades of anti-government demagoguery have convinced so many people that it would be easy to slash spending by attacking “waste” or “bureaucrats” or “welfare” or “foreign aid,” but the reality is that any serious attack on federal spending will have to include major cuts in defense; very popular domestic entitlement programs; or very popular domestic discretionary programs like public education and law enforcement.

So all the white-hot rhetoric about spending you hear from GOPers these days carries some pretty interesting implications, particularly for the bulk of Republicans who also favor a big escalation of the Afghanistan War (and perhaps a new war with Iran), and who have no prescriptions for economic growth other than still more tax cuts. I’m sure that Beck and Paul would have no problem calling for the abolition of Medicare and Social Security as they exist today, but are GOP politicians ready to follow? I don’t think so. And this is the real reason they struggle to articulate a governing agenda for 2010 and beyond.

Maybe John Fund thinks it’s good for Republicans to regularly get a kick in the pants from right-wing figures whose own views, if put to a vote, wouldn’t get support from more than a quarter of the electorate. But it looks to me more like a push into a political abyss. Maybe they can get away with fierce-but-vague rhetoric and opposition to Democratic initiatives for a while, but ultimately they will have to come right out and admit that the fiscal arithmetic of their own “thinking” would lead to a federal government more like that of the Coolidge administration (Beck’s favorite) than that of the Reagan administration. If they do, it won’t be Beck or Paul who has to pay the political price.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

The “Obama Plan”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

So, it’s finally out there: the “President’s Proposal” for health care reform which Obama will explain and defend in the “summit” with bipartisan congressional leaders on Thursday.

It’s unclear to what extent this plan reflects completed House-Senate negotiations on various sticking points between the bills each chamber has already passed. But it certainly addresses many of them. Think Progress has a useful chart comparing House, Senate, and Obama provisions. The biggies in terms of “improvements” to the Senate bill that would be enacted via reconciliation include a significant watering-down of the excise tax on high-cost insurance plans; bigger subsidies for insurance purchases; a sizeable increase in the federal share of costs associated with Medicaid expansion (accompanied by elimination of the special deal for Nebraska that the Senate included to get Ben Nelson on board); and the closing of the so-called “donut hole” in Medicare prescription drug coverage. These do represent the most often cited problems House Democrats have cited in the Senate bill, aside from the more fundamental failure to include a public option.

The two “surprises” in the proposals were that it did not authorize national health insurance exchanges (probably because of fears that such a step could trigger an adverse parliamentary ruling as non-germane to a reconciliation bill), which could be a serious issue for some House members; and a new provision that would enable federal regulators to stop large health insurance premium increases, which was almost certainly motivated by the recent big Anthem premium increases in California.

Republicans, of course, have immediately denounced the proposal as “partisan,” and appear ready for total war at the summit. Interestingly, the only spurned Republican “ideas” specifically mentioned in House Minority Leader John Boehner’s official response to the Obama proposal were interstate insurance sales and a total ban on private abortion coverage for people receiving federal subsidies (the Obama proposal tracks the Senate bill on abortion, which requires separate accounts for supplemental abortion insurance, but doesn’t try to outlaw it outright like the House bill’s Stupak Amendment does).

For those readers most concerned with a late revival of the public option, it should be noted that this possibility remains strictly contingent on progress towards getting 50 Democratic senators signed on. At this point, including it in the Obama proposal would have probably been counter-productive, even among Senate Democrats, while creating a new distraction going into the summit.

So we’re now ready for some serious Kabuki theater on Thursday. Obama’s objective will be three-fold: to rekindle some momentum for final action on health reform; to explode some of the Republican “ideas” like interstate sales; and to force Republicans to show the back of their hands while identifying them with potentially very unpopular proposals like voucherizing Medicare.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

The Not-So-Independents

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

This is becoming a pretty old story (Alan Abramowitz wrote about it definitively last year, as did John Sides), but since it hasn’t much sunk in amongst mainstream media political observers, its worth repeating ad infinitum: Mark Blumenthal makes the case that most “independent” voters aren’t very independent. The general consensus is that of the 30 percent to 40 percent or so of Americans who call themselves independents, no more than 10 percent are independent voters in any meaningful sense of the term. And “pure independents” are also less likely to vote than partisans.

This is important for a whole lot of reasons. For one thing, the idea that “independents” are a third force in politics positioned in some moderate, bipartisan space equidistant from the two parties is entirely wrong. They are not a bloc of voters who think just like David Broder or David Brooks, spending their days pining for deficit reduction and “civility.”

More immediately, the high percentage of Tea Party activists who call themselves “independents” obscures the fact that most of them are in fact highly partisan Republicans who are close ideologically to the right wing of the GOP. Here’s how Blumenthal puts it:

Remember the 52 percent of Tea Party activists who [in a recent CNN poll] initially identify as independent? It turns out that virtually all of them lean Republican. According to CNN, 88 percent of the activists identify or lean Republican, 6 percent identify or lean Democratic and only 5 percent fall into the pure independent category.Remember that CNN pollster Holland reported that 87 percent of the Tea Party activists would vote Republican if there were no Tea Party-endorsed third-party candidate running? That makes perfect sense for a group that is 88 percent Republican.

Why do functionally partisan, and sometimes quite ideological, people self-identify as independents in such large numbers? Some of it is just fashion: many folk conflate “independence” with “intelligence” or “thoughtfulness.” Some of it reflects short-cuts by pollsters, who often give respondents the impression that voters who have ever split a ticket should call themselves “independents.” In the case of the Tea Party activists, there is undoubtedly some mistrust of the godless moderate “GOP establishment” and its Beltway habits–mistrust that will not, however, keep them from voting uniformly for Republican candidates in any two-party contest, and which in any event may not last long given the rightwards trajectory of the party as a whole.

In any analysis, wherever possible “independents” should be broken down into D and R leaners and “true” independents, and the vast array of “independent” ideological tendencies should be explained. Better yet, pollsters should ask follow-up questions to determine actual voting behavior and specific views rather than self-identification by partisan or ideological labels. Otherwise, we’re allowing those labels to distort reality in major ways.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Scaling Up Natural Gas

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Here at PPI, we’ve long argued that for the U.S. to meet its carbon reduction targets, we need to assume a “Leave No Fuel Behind” outlook. Currently, coal — the most polluting and the cheapest of sources — accounts for half of all power produced in the U.S. There’s no doubt that we need to scale back our use of coal. But replacing that base-load capacity will be a tall order.

Ramping up renewable sources like wind and solar should, of course, be a priority, but they simply won’t be reliable energy sources for decades to come. We’ve also argued for an expansion of nuclear power and more research into carbon capture and storage, and we applaud the administration’s recent efforts to jumpstart our nuclear industry. But let’s not forget the quickest interim source we can use to begin cutting back on coal emissions: natural gas.

In a column last Friday, the Washington Post‘s Steven Pearlstein makes a compelling case for scaling up natural gas:

The silver bullet: Decommission about two-thirds of the electric-generating capacity fueled by cheap and plentiful coal, and replace it with power generated from cheap and plentiful natural gas, which emits half as much carbon for each megawatt of electricity.

Pearlstein points out that a confluence of events — the overbuilding of gas-fired plants in the ’90s and an increase in supply thanks to new drilling techniques — has made natural gas a feasible substitute for base-load electricity generation. A Congressional Research Service study found that if our currently underutilized gas plants were to double their production, about a third of coal-fired power would be displaced — a major step toward meeting our emissions reduction targets.

In trying to wean ourselves off coal, the most effective method would still be to put a price on carbon. This week, the Senate is back from recess and will make a “last-ditch attempt” to put together a compromise cap-and-trade bill. But as legislators try to break the gridlock over cap-and-trade, they should keep their eye on alternatives that can begin to ease the grip of coal on our economy. Nudging utilities toward natural gas seems like a good start.

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?