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State of the Union: Commander-in-Chief as Cheerleader

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In the most raucous and gutsy State of the Union I can remember — the president challenged Democrats to not run for the hills, thrust the onus of governance on Republicans, and stared down Chief Justice John Roberts — national security policy came and went with hardly a whimper. It’s not that the president didn’t spent a significant chunk of his speech on the topic (he did), but rather that what he said didn’t break new ground.

If there was a newsworthy tidbit of policy, it was the president’s call to secure all loose nuclear material within four years. It was a smart way to package the issue, tying nuclear terrorism to Obama’s repeated goal to eventually have a world without nuclear weapons. Republicans will no doubt jump at that line as the latest in a twisted attempt to paint Obama as naive and weak. It’s not true, of course — eliminating nuclear weapons is the right long-term goal, but their reduction will come in concert with other countries as part of a slow, negotiated, equitable drawdown over decades.

Otherwise, the president gave a set-piece rundown of the broad set of national security priorities. He vowed to continue the withdrawal in Iraq, even though the disturbing increase in violence over the last few weeks and barring of ex-Ba’athists from the March parliamentary elections are both cause for significant concern. He charted a path out of Afghanistan, framing the choice to send more troops there as one of the hard choices of governance that won’t make him popular. And he vowed to continue to take the fight to al Qaeda while acknowledging shortcomings within the intelligence community (that, if you’ve been buying what I’m selling, is a more nuanced problem than he’d have time to explain). On the AQ score, the administration actually deserves more credit than it has received — if the harshest critics examine the record, they’ll find that, for example, the White House was sending top officials to Yemen well before the Christmas attempt.

The policy implications aside, I thought the most impressive rhetorical flourish about American national security and foreign policy actually came in the first part of the speech that was dedicated to the economy. Extolling the virtues of American ingenuity and innovation, Obama compared America to China, India, and Germany — three countries the president said that weren’t waiting to revamp. He challenged Americans to beat those countries, saying he refused “to accept second-place for the United States of America.”

Bam. That’s what Americans need to hear from this president: that he’s ready to lead, that — just like we’re doing in Haiti — America acts internationally because “our destiny is connected to those beyond our shores,” and that the United States is the greatest country in the world. Now, if you’re reading this blog, chances are that you’re a progressive who might have some doubts about what America has done in Iraq, or questions about why we’re in Afghanistan. But regardless of any questionable past policies (and without getting into a debate about them here), Americans need to hear from this White House that America is a strong force for good in the world. I worry that the president hasn’t made that case strongly enough all the time. This was a good start.

Supreme Court Ruling Gives Boost to Public Funding Movement

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The recent Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC has put campaign finance reform back on the nation’s political agenda. Now more than ever, Americans are voicing concern over the corrupting influence of special interest money in politics and seeking long-term solutions that can tilt the balance of power in Washington back to the people. In recent days, we have seen new momentum for one such response: voluntary public funding of federal elections. It’s the ironic upside of a deeply disturbing ruling by the Court.

The Fair Elections Now Act for publicly funded elections (H.R.1826/S.752) was introduced in the House by Representatives by John Larson (D-CT) and Walter Jones (R-NC) and in the Senate by Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Arlen Specter (D-PA), gaining more than 130 co-sponsors to-date. These bills — championed by Americans for Campaign Reform and a broad, bipartisan coalition of business leaders, former members of Congress, and labor, environmental, religious, and civic organizations — would establish an innovative system of public funding of elections that rewards candidates that successfully attract small donors. These systems have been proven to work well in major cities like New York and Los Angeles and in eight states, from Arizona to Maine, where large majorities of candidates on both sides of the aisle have been elected with public funding.

As the New York Times wrote in an editorial on the heels of the Supreme Court ruling:

Congress and members of the public who care about fair elections and clean government need to mobilize right away, a cause President Obama has said he would join. Congress should repair the presidential public finance system and create another one for Congressional elections to help ordinary Americans contribute to campaigns.

Why is public funding of elections receiving so much attention in the wake of the Court’s decision? Quite simply, it’s the only meaningful reform that offers a long-term fix to the problem of special-interest money in our elections that also passes constitutional muster with this Supreme Court. Rather than restricting candidates and groups from spending money on political speech, it cherishes and expands free speech by ensuring that credible candidates without deep pockets will have the means to run competitive races. And because those who win elections using public funds have no special interest funders to pay back for their seat, they will be free to represent their conscience and constituents alone.

Empirical analysis of the effects of campaign spending on votes clearly shows that if we provide a candidate with sufficient public funds to get her message out and respond to attacks, excessive spending by opponents, their parties and special interest groups will have little determining effect on the outcome of the election. It’s a classic case of diminishing returns. And for a price of just $6 per citizen per year, a program to publicly fund all races in Washington is a bargain for taxpayers concerned with the billions in wasteful spending that goes to reward big donors.

In December, I wrote a policy memo making the case for the Fair Elections Now Act. The Supreme Court’s unfortunate decision has now pushed us into a new paradigm for campaign finance regulation, underscoring the need for new and innovative solutions. Real change in Washington cannot happen as long as corporations and other special interests dominate the debate on Capitol Hill and exercise undue influence over who runs for, and wins, public office. The Fair Elections Now Act offers our best chance at fixing our broken politics.

On Budget, Obama Must Walk a Fine Line

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As President Obama prepares to deliver his first State of the Union Address tonight, he is being tugged in conflicting directions. His dilemma is simple, and familiar: independent voters want different things than liberals.

Independents and moderate Democrats worry about big government and deficits. Liberals want more government spending and regulation, and they think fiscal discipline is the death of progressive reform.

These tensions were on display yesterday as the Senate squelched a bipartisan proposal, endorsed by President Obama, to set up a special commission to tackle the nation’s growing fiscal crisis. Offered as an amendment to legislation increasing the debt ceiling, the proposal by Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-ND) and Ranking Member Judd Gregg (R-NH) attracted a bipartisan majority of 53 votes. But under the Senate’s tyranny of the supermajority, it needed 60 to pass.

To the independents who have been defecting from Obama’s winning 2008 coalition, it looked like yet another victory for the status quo in Washington. The defeat sets up a confrontation with Senate moderates, who have threatened to vote against raising the debt ceiling unless Congress empowers a commission to rein in the nation’s runaway deficits and debt. It may also prompt President Obama to revive his idea for setting up the commission under executive order. House Blue Dogs yesterday endorsed a commission as part of their plan for fiscal reform.

On the other side of the fiscal divide, many liberals have recoiled from Obama’s call for a three-year “freeze” on non-security discretionary spending, seeing it as a cave-in to budget hawks that will crimp progressive ambitions and possibly forestall economic recovery. Since the bill envisions only modest cuts in spending ($250 billion over the next decade) — none of which go into effect until 2011 when it won’t hinder the recovery — such fears seem overwrought. And Obama cushioned the blow by unveiling a new package of middle-class tax cuts.

Nonetheless, the president has a fine line to walk tonight. He must convince the country that he is taking decisive action to control government spending and deficits. And he must convince his party that big progressive reforms can advance within a framework that restores long-term fiscal stability.

Even as the commission went down, the Congressional Budget Office yesterday released new budget forecasts that underscore why Congress must begin laying the groundwork for a return to fiscal discipline in Washington. CBO projects this year’s deficit at $1.3 trillion. At 9.2 percent of GDP, that is slightly less than last year’s whopping 9.9 percent shortfall, which was the biggest in U.S. peacetime history. But while these short-term deficits are enormous, the more fundamental problem is the nation’s cascading national debt. CBO sees the debt nearly tripling from $5.9 trillion to $15 billion by the end of the decade, or from 53 to 67 percent of GDP, and that estimate is based on very conservative assumptions.

America piled up a similar load of debt after World War II, but at least we owed the money to ourselves. Unchecked, today’s borrowing binge means more dependence on Chinese and other foreign lenders to keep our economy afloat, more tax dollars siphoned off to service our debts, and a growing squeeze on public investment as automatic spending on the elderly crowds out everything else.

Given the magnitude of the problem, Obama’s proposed freeze is exceedingly modest. What’s more, it’s a flexible freeze, not an indiscriminate swipe of the budgetary ax. Congress can boost vital public investments – say in technological innovation and clean energy, as long as it is willing to pass offsetting program cuts. As Ed Kilgore has pointed out, the proposal would basically restore the budget “caps” that effectively restrained spending during the Clinton years.

The deficit commission is a bigger deal because it aims at the core of America’s long-term fiscal challenge: the automatic and unsustainable growth of spending on Medicare, Medicaid and Society Security. Congress, polarized along lines of party and ideology, and intimidated by pressure groups, has repeatedly shown itself incapable of slowing entitlement cost growth. Hence the Conrad-Gregg proposal for a bipartisan commission to develop a package of tax and spending changes, and present them to Congress for an up or down vote.

The president tonight should challenge both anti-tax conservatives and pro-spending liberals to get serious about entitlement reform. And he should use the occasion to spell out for skeptical independents why health care reform is indispensible to controlling public spending. Coupled with a strong message on jobs, a forceful presidential commitment to restoring fiscal discipline in Washington will boost economic confidence and help to bring independents back into the progressive fold.

We Shouldn’t Negotiate with the Taliban’s Top Leaders

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The notion of integrating top Taliban commanders into the Afghan government is gaining traction among influential members of the Obama administration. Joe Biden likes the idea, as apparently does Richard Holbrooke, while Gen. Stanley McChrystal has indicated he could see a role for Taliban members in government.

On the surface, it’s an attractive solution. The administration is rightly skeptical of the election-stealing Afghan President Karzai, who continues to rule a corrupt regime. “(Sigh.) Fine. Let the Taliban into government,” you can almost hear war-weary NSC officials dejectedly admit, “at least it’ll help get us the #@*% out of there.”

Unfortunately, it’s a short-sighted solution that will ultimately undermine NATO’s many hard-won victories in Afghanistan over the last eight-plus years.

Before digging into the why, it’s important to clarify exactly what’s under consideration. Today, the WaPo reported that in an effort “energize the peace process,” the U.N. has lifted sanctions against five former Taliban officials who are prepared to renounce violence. These converts fall in a different category than what the White House is currently debating. While reconciliation with the likes of hard-core top Taliban elements like Mullah Omar is out of the question, an administration official conceded that the White House was discussing “above low- and mid-level fighters.”

Stop right there: Those low- and mid-level fighters are far enough. Above that pay-grade, the Taliban’s mid-tier officers are in it not just for the paycheck, but for steadfast ideological convictions that are much harder to genuinely convert.
And that ideology fundamentally rejects the pillars supporting government in Kabul. As Barbara Elias writes in a hard-hitting essay for Foreign Affairs, governing within an even partially Westernized democracy is out of the question:

Their [the Taliban’s] legitimacy rests not on their governing skills, popular support, or territorial control, but on their claim to represent what they perceive as sharia rule. This means upholding the image that they are guided entirely by Islamic principles; as such, they cannot make concessions to, or earnestly negotiate with, secular states.

In other words, we should be highly suspicious when the likes of Taliban leader Mullah Omar makes overtures about playing “our role in peace and stability of the region,” as he did in the fall. It’s a trap – the Taliban’s leaders want to join government to overthrow what it sees as a traitorous regime supported by infidel Western tyrants, not to act as a constructive governing partner. Once sharing power, the Taliban’s ideological resolve will only harden as its members refuse to accommodate otherwise constructive solutions forwarded by their more secular domestic or international partners.

It is far more constructive to remove the ideologues’ foot soldiers, which is precisely the aim of a potential $1 billion program for jobs and education for the Taliban’s grunts. Depriving the Taliban of its army is critical to removing its ability to peddle fear and repression outside of power. Integrating its non-contrite higher-ranking officers into the government just gives them a different kind of army.

That’s why it is yet again gut check time for the White House. Working with the most vile members of the Taliban is a great temptation, but will prove a fool’s errand.

Straining Tea

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As a follow-up to J.P. Green’s post this morning suggesting that the DSCC is trying to split the right from the far right, it’s kind of important to understand that the far right is really feeling its oats these days, particularly in the Tea Party Movement.

But anyone trying to understand the Tea Party phenomenon is constantly urged not to stereotype its participants politically or ideologically. It’s a grassroots movement, we are told, so no one in particular speaks for them. They hate both parties equally, it is said, so you can’t confuse them with conservative Republicans. There are former Obama voters in their ranks, we are told breathlessly.

Well, okay, after reading a long, impressionistic, nonjudgmental “life among the tea party activists” piece in The New Yorker by Ben McGrath, I won’t assume the author (after all, he’s writing for The New Yorker, at the very center of Wall Street/Liberal Enemy Camp, for God’s sake) gets the views of tea party activists accurately or fairly depicted. But it’s pretty clear that there are an awful lot of these folks who can only be described as harboring views considered, until just last year, about 90 degrees to the right of the right wing of the Republican Party. They are independent of the Republican Party only to the extent that they won’t support it fully until it moves further to the right another 90 degrees (which seems to be happening at a brisk pace).

Sure, there are probably all sorts of people in the mix, but here’s my question for them: please read the following passage from McGrath’s piece and tell me how much of this scenario sounds plausible to you:

An online video game, designed recently by libertarians in Brooklyn, called “2011: Obama’s Coup Fails” imagines a scenario in which the Democrats lose seventeen of nineteen seats in the Senate and a hundred and seventy-eight in the House during the midterm elections, prompting the President to dissolve the Constitution and implement an emergency North American People’s Union, with help from Mexico’s Felipe Calderón, Canada’s Stephen Harper, and various civilian defense troops with names like the Black Tigers, the International Service Union Empire, and CORNY, or the Congress of Rejected and Neglected Youth. Lou Dobbs has gone missing, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh turn up dead at a FEMA concentration camp, and you, a lone militiaman in a police state where private gun ownership has been outlawed, are charged with defeating the enemies of patriotism, one county at a time.

If you find yourself nodding your head at much of this stuff, then you are indeed living in a different conceptual world than I am, and I’m afraid I’ll have to stereotype you as a dangerous wingnut. Maybe a nice, patriotic, well-meaning wingnut, but a wingnut nonetheless.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Putting High-speed Rail on the Right Track

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The following is an excerpt from Mark Reutter’s op-ed in today’s Tampa Tribune:

The Obama administration will soon be announcing which states will be awarded funds from the $8 billion stimulus pot dedicated for high-speed rail (HSR) development.

Right now, 259 applications valued at $57 billion are chasing the recovery plan money. The administration’s decision to devote considerable resources to developing HSR underscores its commitment to bring bullet trains to the United States. But unless it makes the right decisions about where to put the money and what policies to follow, the new enthusiasm for HSR could be frittered away.

The choice that the Obama administration and Congress face is simple: modest incrementalism versus a truly transformative vision. The core problem is the apparent willingness of Obama transportation officials to use stimulus money to finance many small projects, such as adding sidings to existing railroad lines, to permit somewhat faster speeds by conventional Amtrak trains.

Read the full column at The Tampa Tribune.

New Report Charts Food Hardship in Every District

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

A new study by the D.C.-based Food Research and Action Center (FRAC) underscores the severe food hardship faced by Americans in this brutal economic climate. FRAC’s report compiles for the first time ever food hardship data in every one of the nation’s congressional districts and top 100 metropolitan areas.

In my home city of New York, the numbers are dismal. People in seven of the 13 congressional districts here faced severe food hardship in 2008-09. The 16th Congressional District in the South Bronx, where more than one in three residents could not afford enough food, had the highest rate of food hardship in the nation, and the 10th Congressional District in Central Brooklyn, where 30.8 percent faced food hardship, had sixth highest rate out of all the country’s 436 congressional districts. Considering that the city still has 56 billionaires, this is an appalling turn of events, which provides the latest wake-up call that all levels of government need to take immediate action to reverse the city’s growing hunger poverty, and inequality of wealth.

While key parts of the city face a particularly severe problem, I believe the most notable news from this data is just how widespread food hardship is in all corners of the city and nation. Even in the relatively least hungry congressional district in the city – Rep. Anthony Weiner’s district that has been traditionally thought of as a bedrock middle-class of neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens – more than one in 12 residents couldn’t afford enough food, a level likely higher than in the majority of industrialized Western nations of the world. Because America’s wages are now so low and our safety net so gutted, even the parts of New York City suffering the least are still in worse shape than most people in our competitor nations.

In the New York metropolitan region, including suburban Connecticut and New Jersey, 21.6 percent of households with children faced food hardship. The problem is so widespread that, even when you factor in some truly wealthy areas in Manhattan, Westchester, Long Island, and suburban Connecticut and New Jersey, more than one in five people in the metropolitan area couldn’t afford enough food. Statewide in New York, 17.4 percent of all state residents faced food hardship.

The new report only underscores the need for a Good Food, Good Jobs program that I proposed here in December. Low-income areas across America that lack access to nutritious foods at affordable prices — the so-called “food deserts” — tend to be the same communities and neighborhoods that, even in better economic times, are also “job deserts” that lack sufficient living-wage employment. A “Good Food, Good Jobs” initiative would be a good way to tackle our interrelated hunger, malnutrition, obesity, and poverty problems.

Obama’s “Theory of Change” Revisited

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

If you are interested in a deeper interpretation of what’s been happening in and to the Obama administration–deeper, that is, than conservative allegations of “radicalism” and “sociialism” and progressive complaints about “spinelessness” or “corporate influence”–then I highly recommend a colloquoy on The American Prospect site between TAP’s Mark Schmitt and historian Rick Perlstein. It’s in essence a lookback at the simmering debate among progressive observers that ran all through the 2008 election cycle about Barack Obama’s “theory of change,” and especially the tension between his progressive goals and his rhetoric of bipartisanship.

As it happens, Schmitt (along with Michael Tomasky and yours truly) was highly identified with the argument that Obama’s “theory of change” was aimed at offering the political opposition a choice between cooperation on progressive policy initiatives or self-isolation through obstruction and extremism. In other words, in a country unhappy with partisan gridlock, Republicans would either go along with key elements of a progressive agenda, or shrink themselves into an ever-more-extreme ideological rump that was irrelevant to the direction of the country.

Rick Perlstein was more of an Obama-skeptic, but he, too, began to feel that Obama might be luring Republicans into a big trap. As he recalls now, during the stretch drive in 2008:

Conservatives eagerly played to type — GOP congressional leaders called in Joe the Plumber for strategy sessions, and Newsmax.com started advertising a 2009 “Hot Sarah Calendar.” On my blog I labeled what Republicans had been reduced to as “Palinporn”: “material to help lonely conservatives retreat within their own cocoon of fantasy rather than participate in the actual conversations taking place to govern the country.” It was a very “Obama theory of change” insight: Obama could simply get on with governing. Republicans would conversely build ever more elaborate halls of mirrors that made it increasingly impossible for them to speak to America. In fact, around that time, I was exhilarated by the thought of Rush Limbaugh’s ratings exploding through the roof, from 20 million to 30 million listeners — 30 million Americans able only to speak to each other, sounding to the rest of the country like practitioners of esoteric Masonic rites.

Today, of course, Republicans haven’t gotten any less extreme–au contraire in fact–but their political prospects, for 2010 at least, look pretty good. What went wrong? Was Obama’s “theory of change” fundamentally flawed, making him look weak and unprincipled when talking about “bipartisanship?” Would Democrats have done better under the leadership of someone whose theory of change was based on “fighting” or constituency-tending?

You can read the whole piece, but both Schmitt and Perlstein agree that Obama underestimated the ability of Republicans to achieve almost total solidarity against the new administration, and overestimated his own ability to maintain the strong and excited coalition he put together in 2008, given the excrutiatingly difficult circumstances he face upon taking office. Moreover, they agree that going forward, Obama must find ways to “draw lines” with the Republican opposition without trying to abandon his natural style and tone. To put it another way, they suggest that Obama’s “theory of change” required, in practice, a more aggressive approach than trap-setting and jiu-jitsu. The strategy isn’t just falling into place naturally.

What I would add to their analysis is that this “line-drawing” should focus more on the present and future than the past. Yes, George W. Bush is responsible for a lot of the country’s current problems and even many of the policies that Obama was more or less forced to continue. Yes, Obama inherited two wars, vast long-term budget deficits, and an economic nightmare, and he should remind people of that now and then. But inevitably, fairly or not, with every day that passes more Americans will hold the current administration responsible for current conditions in the country. Moreover, what the “blame Bush” narrative misses is that Republicans have in no small part insulated themselves from responsibility for his record by moving harshly to the Right, implicitly criticizing Bush for not being a “true conservative,” and in particular, attacking the steps he took to head off a global economic collapse, which are deeply unpopular. And focusing on Bush distracts attention from the extremism, craziness and emptiness (depending on the issue) or the post-Bush Republican Party, which ought to be the source of comparison for voters this year and in 2012. Without an aggressive, presidentially-led effort to expose that extremism, you can’t really expect political independents to look past the mainstream media’s inveterate tendency to assume the political “center” is half-way between wherever the two parties happen to be at any moment, and to blame both parties equally for the climate of “partisanship” (or maybe blame Obama even more, since he was supposed to be “post-partisan”).

Presenting a choice not just to Republicans, but to voters, of two distinct courses in American politics and policy is the best chance the president and the Democratic Party has of negotiating the current climate, re-energizing the 2012 coalition, and eventually, getting a clear mandate for progressive governance that will include public support for overcoming Republican obstruction, especially in the Senate.

Obama’s “theory of change” hasn’t been refuted, just immensely complicated, and there’s no compelling evidence that a different strategy of dealing with a public wanting conflicting things, an opposition party that’s gone nihilistic, and the built-in obstructions to change in our system, would have worked better. But at some point, the theory has to be adjusted to current realities and past mistakes, and get visible results. Otherwise, the spectacle of the post-partisan president getting attacked for “socialism” while trimming his own policy sails and begging the opposition for cooperation really will look just feckless.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Cold Confusion

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The news that the president is going to propose a three-year “freeze” on appropriations for non-defense discretionary programs (with veterans and homeland security programs exempted) is creating a lot of consternation among progressives today.

But folded into this consternation is a significant amount of confusion. The term “budget freeze,” long the default-drive Republican fiscal austerity “idea,” usually connotes an across-the-board flatlining of spending in non-exempt accounts, a total commitment to the budgetary status quo that neatly allows its proponents to avoid separating sheep from goats and offending any constituency for any particular program. If that’s what Obama was proposing, it would indeed be inconsistent with any new jobs initiative, or indeed, with key elements of the “middle-class relief” agenda the administration just announced. But that’s not what he is proposing; it is instead really an overall spending “cap” under which specific programs could be increased or decreased, presumably depdending on their usefullness in creating jobs or other worthy social goods. It’s an approach that Bill Clinton, back in 1992, called “cut and invest.”

Since it’s Congress, not the administration, that will actually make appropriations decisions, and since members of Congress and the committees they chair which often serve as the most powerful constituencies for programs with little real justification, it can definitely be argued that any real “freeze” would look more like the across-the-board variety (indeed, that’s what happened to Clinton’s “cut and invest” budget when Congress got its hands on it in 1993). Alternatively, it can be argued that the whole thing is mainly rhetorical, given public concerns about government spending.

But in conjunction with the president’s push for a bipartisan “deficit commission” that would be empowered to make recommendations on long-term budget savings that would be submitted to Congress for an up-or-down vote, the “freeze” proposal, whatever it actually means, will definitely upset progressives fearing that Obama is “going Hoover” in economic policy. And make no mistake, there’s one objection to the “freeze” idea that’s not based on confusion: if you really do believe that the federal government needs to be running larger short-term deficits in order to provide Keynesian stimulus to consumer demand, then any domestic spending limits, however selective in application, will strike you as a very bad approach.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

On Net Neutrality, Google and Verizon Find Common Ground

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

It’s been about a week since the deadline for comments on the FCC’s notice of proposed rulemaking for net neutrality. Regulators are no doubt immersed in what promises to be an extremely long review process (in a somewhat unusual move, various advocacy organizations directed their supporters to submit comments directly — by at least one account, over 120,000 were submitted).

None of those comments attracted as much attention as the joint filing between Google and Verizon. An Internet service provider (ISP) and a content producer on the same side of this debate? It might not seem like a natural fit. It’s consequently tempting to look at the Google/Verizon proposal as an indication of what a possible net neutrality compromise could look like. But is it? And, just as important: would it be a good idea?

In truth, the partnership isn’t as unusual as one might think. Google and Verizon have collaborated on this issue before, publishing a joint blog post in advance of the FCC notice. It’s not entirely surprising: among the ISPs, Verizon’s current market position makes it uniquely amenable to the case being made by the content provider bloc. With DSL hitting technical limits and receding into a role as a budget broadband option, Verizon has undertaken a major infrastructure upgrade to FiOS — one that should leave them with a substantially higher-capacity network than the cable ISPs can offer. They’re also a new entrant to the digital-television marketplace. In short, Verizon is gunning for the Comcasts of the world, and doing so as a bit of an underdog. It has little reason to fight for a regulatory environment in which the network operators currently at the top of the heap can use their market power to entrench their positions.

So does the jointly submitted letter represent a good-faith common ground, free of the hyperbole and deliberate obfuscation that has characterized so much of this debate? Well, kind of. There’s a pleasant lack of “the FCC is about to accidentally break the internet!”-style fear-mongering. But there isn’t too much else on offer: some opening paeans to the Internet and consumer choice; an endorsement of transparency; a gentle reminder that neither party wants to be on the hook for enforcing intellectual property laws; and muted terror at the realization that the FCC is about to do… well, something.

From this flows the one really substantive idea in the letter: a proposal to create one or more “technical advisory groups” consisting of industry stakeholders, which would resolve neutrality-related disputes on a case-by-case basis, acting as a layer of mediation before the government became involved. Optimists will see this as an attempt to avoid the potential inefficiencies of regulation. Cynics will see it as a recipe for regulatory capture before the regulations are even written. And of course it’s not clear which stakeholders would have a say in these advisory groups. Would Joost? Or Sopcast users? It may be difficult to identify scrappy startups that deserve a seat at the table, particularly if they aren’t corporate entities.

More than anything, the letter serves as a reminder of how nebulous the net neutrality debate has become. What could the ISPs do to our society if they decided to press their advantage? It’s easy to let one’s imagination run wild and conjure net neutrality threats to virtually any cause or principle — hence the various framings of net neutrality as a fundamental economic/political/human rights/feminist issue.

But it’s worth keeping in mind that the only unambiguous violation of net neutrality that we’ve yet seen is Comcast’s decision to monkey with Bittorrent users’ reset packets — and, relatedly, some ISPs’ decision to throttle all encrypted traffic in an effort to fight Bittorrent (though this is still largely a Canadian phenomenon). That’s not to say that neutrality regulation isn’t worth pursuing. But whatever system is established should at least be able to deal with the one problematic case we’ve actually seen — and while the details could prove me wrong, the advisory group proposal doesn’t strike me as being up to the task. Verizon and Google’s common ground may indeed prove to be a useful preview of the FCC’s final vision of net neutrality, but it seems unlikely to be the whole picture.

Is the New Bin Laden Tape Really Him?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Nerd alert: My brother Bob and I have a long-standing competition to identify anonymous celebrity voice-overs on TV ads (and we’re pretty good — picking out Gene Hackman shilling for Lowes is amateur hour), but I don’t claim to ID celeb voices for a living. That’s why I can’t definitively say that the recently released Bin Laden tape isn’t him, but I suspect there’s a decent chance that it just might not be.

Last January, Bin Laden released a 22-minute tape on the eve of the Obama inauguration about everything from Israel to the economic crisis. The long-winded diatribe, replete with OBL’s standard Koranic references, was standard fare from al Qaeda’s chief taco. His tapes of May and March 2008 were also 22 minutes. That’s a far cry from this week’s version, which barely clocks in at 22 words (actually 144, but you get my drift), according to the Middle East Media Research Institute’s transcript.

Second, keep in mind that al Qaeda’s senior leadership has always had its eye on the big prize — the spectacular attack that generates either genuine fear or awe for its daring size, scale, or target. In 1998, they leveled two American embassies simultaneously; in 2000 they struck at the heart of the American military by blowing a massive hole in the side of an American Navy destroyer; and 9/11 speaks for itself. Even AQ’s latest significant attempt at a large-scale operation – the multi-flight Heathrow plot in 2006 – was an impressive feat of imagination. But in this tape, a man claiming to be Bin Laden embraces not a spectacular success that improves upon complex and sickeningly impressive plots, but a complete failure of an attempt that he likely had nothing to do with.

Then again, maybe even notable failures at small operations are enough these days. It’s possible that the combination of a tighter American safety net and the embarrassing overreaction of the pundit class has convinced AQ that small-fry attacks are sufficient to carry AQ’s fundraising and recruiting goals in the current climate. So if this was really OBL on the tape, it would signal a major degradation of AQ’s modus operandi and attack capabilities.

But the irregularity continues to bug me — it doesn’t make sense that Bin Laden would essentially admit al Qaeda is a shell of its former self. That’s why I keep thinking someone might be masquerading as the big man. By tying the Christmas Day attempt to Bin Laden, the real perpetrators of the plot — al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula — could gin up money and recruits in its aftermath.

It would be a serious scandal within Islamic extremist circles if the CIA came out in the next 24 hours and declared the tape fake, so I have to imagine that even uppity terrorists aren’t that stupid. Then again, perhaps the CIA should consider floating a trial balloon about the tape’s “questionable authenticity” just to see what sort of reaction it generates.

Discipline Government, Too

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Since last week’s shocker in Massachusetts, the White House has amped up the populist rhetoric in hopes of deflecting voter anger onto Wall Street bonus babies and health insurance companies. That might make progressives feel better, but it’s unlikely to mollify ornery independents.

For one thing, Barack Obama is no Huey Long. As president, his job is to point the way out of the nation’s dilemmas, not channel voter rage. What our jittery country needs now is his calm, penetrating intelligence, not hackneyed demagoguery that will unsettle markets and retard the return of economic confidence. A swifter economic recovery is the best elixir for what ails Obama and his party.

Besides, independents, who are now more numerous than either Democrats or Republicans, are as upset with big government as they are with big banking and business. Everything that has happened in the past year – from bailing out feckless bankers, home owners and auto executives, to stimulus spending that has failed (so far) to keep unemployment from getting worse, to the spectacle of lawmakers appeasing powerful interests as they cobble together a huge and complicated health reform bill – has aggravated their misgivings about government’s cost and intrusiveness.

President Obama needs to speak directly to independents’ qualms about big government. The first step is to acknowledge their validity. Then he must take forceful action to show that he is as determined to discipline government as he is to impose new rules on irresponsible capitalists.

On no account should he back down on health care reform. Rather, he should work to strengthen its ability to control health care costs, the issue that matters most to independent and working-class voters.

The right response to anti-government populism is to get serious about restoring fiscal sanity in Washington. That’s why the president’s decision over the weekend to support a bipartisan deficit reduction commission is a promising sign.

In theory, establishing a bipartisan commission to cut federal budget deficits is a terrible idea. It lets Congress off the hook, even while usurping the legislative branch’s Constitutional responsibility for the nation’s fisc.

In the real world, however, a commission may be the only way to force Congress to do its job. Lawmakers’ inability to find common ground on expanding health care coverage – something both parties claim they want – doesn’t inspire much confidence that they will take the tough steps necessary to close the nation’s yawning deficits.

That’s why 14 moderate Democratic senators, led by Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad and Sen. Evan Bayh, have threatened to withhold their votes for raising the nation’s debt ceiling – which allows the government to borrow to meet its obligations – unless Congress sets up a commission. As currently proposed, the commission would present its recommendations to Congress as a package for an up or down vote. This is how Congress managed to close unneeded military bases after the Cold War ended. According to the Washington Post, President Obama has endorsed the idea of setting up a commission by legislation, after previously pushing for a bipartisan panel established by executive order.

The moderates are right that a “statutory” commission would have real teeth. For that reason, however, it has drawn fierce opposition from both ends of the ideological spectrum. A coalition of 50 left-leaning pressure groups came out swinging on Wednesday, blasting a commission as “undemocratic” and “truly dangerous” to Social Security. Having invested time and money in acquiring influence in the legislative arena, the last thing they want is a change of venue.

For such groups, “protecting” Social Security benefits from cuts is more important than dealing with the nation’s fiscal crisis – just as many conservatives would sooner see America plunge deeper into the red than raise a penny in taxes. “A budget deficit commission is nothing more than a time-tested ploy to get Republicans to raise taxes,” the Wall Street Journal harrumphed last month.

So there we are: the left won’t cut spending, the right won’t raise taxes, and the two remain locked in a tacit conspiracy to bankrupt America. Maybe all those angry independents have a point.

It remains to be seen whether Obama’s decision back a statutory commission will sway congressional leaders, who have been skeptical. In any case, if the Senate moderates hold firm, Congress won’t be able to raise the debt ceiling to $14.2 trillion, which it must do by mid-February or the federal government will run out of money.

This sets the stage for some interesting brinkmanship, and for a determined push by President Obama to change the way Washington works. Stay tuned.

Bring On the GOP Health Policies!

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

I’m with Steve Benen on this one: after listening to Republicans say all weekend that the president needs to surrender on health care reform and start embracing theirpolicy ideas, maybe it’s time to draw a lot more public attention to all that fine GOP thinking on the subject.

So where to begin? I guess that would be with the “plan” that drew 176 Republicans votes in the House in a test vote in November of last year, the so-called “Boehner plan.” Dissed by an official Congressional Budget Office analysis that suggested it would cover almost none of the uninsured, while controlling costs far less effectively than the House Democratic proposal, this plan followed the usual conservative template of focusing on tort “reform,” “interstate markets” for private heath insurance (e.g., elimination of state regulations), elimination of the entire employer-based system, and a two-pronged strategy of subsidizing high-deductible individual health plans for healthy people, and state-run risk pools for sick people. It was, as Matt Yglesias put it, an “un-insurance” plan that would take health policy, in some respects, back to the 1950s.

Another example of Republican “thinking” on health care policy is the idea of “voucherizing” Medicare, which was the central health policy element of the official House GOP “alternative budget” offered last April by Rep. Paul Ryan of WI. While “Medicare voucher” proposals vary, they all at the very least aim at transforming Medicare into a system of federal subsidies for purchasing private health insurance, while capping expenditures regardless of the impact on benefits. To put it simply, seniors would march through the streets with torches to protest any such plan if it were taken seriously.

And then there’s the most fully developed Republican health care plan, the one developed and implemented by the front-runner for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination, and recently promoted by the party’s maximum “new star”: the Massachusetts health reform plan. How about allowing a vote on that in Congress? Oh, yeah, sorry, that’s pretty much the plan already passed by the U.S. Senate without a single Republican vote! It’s socialist!

Suffice it to say that while Democrats have been materially hurt by endless scrutiny and confusion about the substance of their ideas on health care, Republicans have massively benefitted from a total lack of accountability for their own ideas. Best I can tell, Republicans would probably be politically destroyed if people truly paid attention to GOP health proposals. So Democrats should find ways to help their GOP colleagues publicize their ideas.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Fast Track to the Future: A High-Speed Rail Agenda for America

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Download the full report.

In the next few weeks, the administration will be announcing which states will be awarded funds from $8 billion dedicated for high-speed rail (HSR) development in the stimulus package. Right now, 259 applications from the states valued at $57 billion are chasing the recovery plan money. The administration’s decision to devote considerable resources to developing HSR underscores its commitment to bring bullet trains to the U.S. But unless it makes the right decisions about where to put the money and what policies to follow, the new enthusiasm for HSR could be just the latest false start in a long, disappointing history.

Last spring, President Barack Obama unveiled his vision for a national HSR network. The president conjured up an image of a 21st-century train infrastructure, “a system that reduces travel times and increases mobility…reduces congestion and boosts productivity…reduces destructive emissions and creates jobs.” The administration also put forward a rail policy that, rather than laying track coast to coast, would concentrate on heavily populated corridors where short distances between cities would let faster trains compete effectively with cars and airplanes.

Since then, the administration has called on states to submit plans for HSR competitive grants. Congress, meanwhile, added $2.5 billion to the HSR pot for fiscal year 2010, and it remains possible that the House and Senate will add billions more in a second jobs stimulus, focusing on infrastructure, likely to be taken up this winter.

For decades, high-speed rail has been a fantasy, mired in bureaucratic, regulatory and market inertia. But with the renewed push for it by the administration, the high-speed rail future is beginning to take shape. The benefits of high-speed rail are enormous. For one, HSR is a big step toward energy independence and a post-carbon future. HSR corridors operated with nonpolluting electric locomotives could reduce carbon emissions by as much as six million pounds annually.

HSR also has a strong track record of jumpstarting economic development along its path. Fast, efficient transportation could revitalize depressed cities and transform regional economies. And while the creation of an HSR network lies in the future, it will put people to work immediately. Eighty percent of the cost of HSR is in infrastructure-building and land acquisition, while 20 percent goes for the trainsets and stations that passengers use. New rights of way need to be built now for HSR corridors that are projected to be operational in a few years – meaning tens of thousands of jobs that can’t be exported.

The question that we now face is: How do we get there from here?

The choice that the Obama administration and Congress face is simple: modest incrementalism versus a truly transformative vision. The administration’s commitment to fund high-speed rail is a step in the right direction, but it’s not the end of the process. Lest the allocation of stimulus funds to HSR become President Obama’s own “Mission Accomplished,” the administration needs to remain engaged, proactive, and forward-thinking in shepherding high-speed rail to completion.

With HSR, President Obama can leave a lasting imprint on the American landscape and economy. But that legacy can only be secured if the administration is willing to make bold decisions and confront a tired political culture. If we really are serious about making the high-speed rail future a reality, the old ways of doing business will not suffice.

Download the full report.

Fragile Consensus

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Everyone should read Matt Yglesias’s post,”How Close Were We, Really?” which makes a point that I’ve been mulling. The fact that health care reform blew up so quickly after the Brown win implies that whatever consensus had been achieved between the Senate and House, it was significantly incomplete, weak, or both. House liberals apparently were not prepared to pass anything coming out of conference that didn’t reverse the problems they have with the Senate bill. But it’s unclear whether moderate senators or representatives would have stayed on board in that event. If the last week shows nothing else it reveals that a whole lot of members of Congress were decidedly un-excited about supporting anything resembling either chamber’s bill.

This seems like a job for Keith Hennessey: knowing what we know now about the uneasiness of moderates and the stubbornness of liberals, what was the likelihood that reform would have passed if Coakley had won? (Keith had the probability of collapse given a narrow Coakley victory at 10 percent — and two percent with a big win — before the election.)

If this interpretation is right, it implies that many progressives haven’t given enough credit to how far out on the plank many moderates actually went (which isn’t that surprising given how many of them misread the polls). Pre-Brown, moderates were betting that antagonism toward reform wasn’t so strong that their job — their chance to work on all of their other legislative priorities — was in mortal danger. The Brown win provided new information that clearly affected the calculus (as did the initial freak-out by Massachusetts’s own Barney Frank).

Perhaps one big reason why the Obama team (and everyone else) was caught flat-footed after the election was that they were unaware of how much moderates already felt they had stuck their necks out.

All this said, I think the consensus that Democrats having second thoughts ought to accept that they have no choice but to vote for the final bill is correct. Actually, I think these Democrats have probably reached that conclusion too. But it’s important to note that that wouldn’t be enough to pass something — if House liberals won’t vote for the Senate bill, it doesn’t matter what moderates do. What progressive bloggers need to do is start working the liberal legislators in the House.