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Palin’s Saturday Night Live

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

If you didn’t watch Sarah Palin’s speech at the National Tea Party Convention on Saturday night, you should definitely give it a gander. It was in some respects an unprecedented opportunity for her: a prepared text (obviously her best format), but not one scripted by a campaign (unlike her 2008 Republican Convention address), and guaranteed major media attention. As a private citizen, she was in a position to say pretty much whatever she wanted. Yes, the venue was a bit tricky, because of the widespread criticism of the Tea Party Convention itself, but not remotely as perilous as her resignation speech as governor of Alaska.

She used her own Saturday Night Live opportunity to perform four tasks: general cheerleading for the Tea Party Movement (while making it clear the immediate venue and the controversial for-profit organization that sponsored it was a small piece of that Movement); a quick tour d’horizon of global hot spots to begin addressing one of her most glaring weaknesses, a lack of foreign policy chops; an assortment of crowd-pleasing snarky attacks on the Obama administration, not very original but pretty well-delivered; and an extremely conventional recitation of time-honored conservative themes, punctuated by ritual invocations of the Holy Name of Ronald Reagan.

Anyone who thinks the Tea Party Movement is vastly at odds with the dominant conservative wing of the Republican Party should observe that this speech could have been delivered at a Lincoln Day dinner pretty much anywhere in the country, and would have received the same rapturous audience reaction.

Indeed, the speech is a good illustration of why Palin creates such dramatically different perceptions among different groups of politically active people. To most progressives, every other line in the speech was something of a howler, thanks to the exceptionally unselfconscious way in which she glides over self-contradictions. She genuflected at the altar of constitutional supremacy even as she mocked the president as a law professor. She called for a radical attack on budget deficits while she demanded more tax cuts, often in the same sentence. She repeatedly assaulted the lack of transparency in Democratic policy formulation, but failed to offer any policy prescriptions other than minor (and frankly, stupid) conservative pet rocks like interstate health insurance sales or her own well-rehearsed pet rock of expanding fossil-fuel exploration. She redundantly assailed Wall Street bailouts that she endorsed when they were actually happening. And with every breath, she posed as just another citizen-activist fighting against political elites and media persecution, even though she was a professional politician lifted from obscurity by Washington-based Republican political professionals and then made a national celebrity by constant media attention.

But to conservative ideologues, Palin is simply expounding Revealed Truth, in the uncomplicated manner attributed to the sainted Reagan, and her red meat attacks on Democrats, her allusions to persecution by “elites,” and her pose of independence from the GOP establishment, are all projections of their own feelings, cultivated over many years.

And that’s why having watched Palin’s act in Nashville, I disagree more strongly than ever with those who assert she can’t possibly launch a viable campaign for the presidency in 2012. No, I don’t think she will be elected president, but yes, I think it’s possible she could win the Republican nomination.

To assess this question, you have to appreciate the psychology of movement conservatives at this particular moment of political history. Most of them have believed all along that there is a “hidden majority” of conservatives in America that can only be crystallized by the most rigorous conservative candidates and messages. After 1964, at least, conservatives have attributed every single Republican presidential defeat to a combination of RINO machinations, “moderate” policy prescriptions, and an unwillingness to exploit the opposition’s vulnerability by any means necessary–all mistakes imposed by Republican “elites” who contemptuously betray conservative interest groups and causes. These are the kind of people who started showing up at McCain rallies in the autumn of 2008 to upbraid their candidate for failing to talk about Jeremiah Wright and ACORN, and who empathized viscerally with Palin’s public frustration about the campaign’s unwillingness to “take the gloves off” (a frustration she alluded to in her Nashville speech).

I don’t think most progressives fully appreciate how vindicated conservative activists feel right now. Since the 2008 elections, their party has executed the most remarkable turn away from the political center any losing party has probably ever undertaken. RINOs have been intimidated and silenced; Republican Members of Congress have been whipped into highly disciplined submission; policy positions on issues ranging from health care to climate change to foreign policy that were highly respectable in GOP circles just a few years ago are now “socialist” anathema. And in consolidation of earlier conservative victories within the GOP, legalized abortion is now almost universally considered murder; “moral relativism,” including homosexuality, is regarded as an abomination inflicted on a suffering “real American” population by decadent elites in Sodom and Gomorrah enclaves on the coasts; and any suggestion that Islamic jihadism is less than an Cold War-level existential threat is treated as “hate-America” semi-treason.

And lo and behold, even as Republicans finally take hard-core conservative advice, their electoral prospects are blossoming. A Tea Party ally has won Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat! Even liberal media villains expect a big Republican victory in 2010! With every day, more American are beginning to blame Obama and the Democrats for the economic crisis, and Republican discipline in the Senate ensures he can’t do much about it. And moreover, the most vibrant popular political movement in the country, the Tea Party Movement, is pushing Republicans (and perhaps the country) even further to the right, aiding materially not only in the savaging of Obama, but the ongoing purge of RINOs and “moderate” squishes.

This is the context within which any assessment of Sarah Palin’s immediate political future needs to be conducted. It’s a context in which vast and largely sympathetic media coverage is devoted to an amateurish, financially-questionable convention in Nashville where people like Tom Tancredo and Roy Moore really don’t stand out. It’s a context where Sarah Palin is firmly in the mainstream.

So why wouldn’t this sudden mega-celebrity, who believes her career is the object of divine favor, and who is surrounded constantly with adulation made even more intense by any mockery of her misteps, run for president? Why not take a chance on completely eclipsing Mike Huckabee and utterly destroying Tim Pawlenty in the Right-to-Life dominated caucuses in Iowa, a state where a new Des Moines Register poll shows one-third of all voters supporting the Tea Party Movement?

That’s all a long way off, and a lot could change. 2010 may not after all represent the great gittin’ up morning that conservative expect. At some point, conservative activists may finally get tired of Palin’s maddening lack of specificity, or tumble to the fact that Democratic horror of Palin does not actually represent fear of her general-election appeal. Maybe she really doesn’t want anything other than her current level of fame or her very manageable political work-load. And perhaps her fans will find a new, or old, champion (her Fox colleague Glenn Beck, for example, seems to think Rick Santorum is The Bomb).

But it’s far past time to stop pretending that Palin is just a joke. If her performance in Nashville was taken seriously by the kind of people who tend to dominate the Republican nominating process–and it was–then she’s got a political future that she can only enhance by continuing to pose as the personification of grassroots conservative activism, “you betchas” and all.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

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

Blueprint America: Beyond the Motor City

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

A viewing tip for this evening: Filmmaker Aaron Woolf, director of the acclaimed King Corn (2007), turns his camera on America’s dilapidated infrastructure system. Blueprint America: Beyond the Motor City explores how the plight of Detroit, long the emblem of American manufacturing might, now its most damning symbol of urban and infrastructure disrepair, is actually a microcosm of a larger national failure.

Perhaps the most compelling takeaway from the film is its gentle suggestion that the country is missing a vision for infrastructure. Harking back to Albert Gallatin in the 19th century and the Interstate Highway System in the 20th, the movie makes the point that the absence of a unifying and coherent vision for binding the nation together with infrastructure lies at the heart of American decline.

Beyond the Motor City also puts the issue of global competitiveness front and center. Some of the film takes place in Spain, home to one of the world’s most advanced high-speed rail networks and to six of the world’s top 10 public works companies.

The movie airs tonight at 8:00 pm on PBS, though check your local listings. Here’s a preview:

Obama Calls a Big Play

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

An onside kick to start the second half may have been the biggest play call of the night, but President Obama’s audacious gambit to jump-start the stalled health care reform effort was not far behind. In an interview with Katie Couric, the president announced that he would like to hold a bipartisan health care summit in front of TV cameras at the end of the month.

Perhaps emboldened by his masterful performance at the televised House GOP caucus retreat — by consensus one of the most compelling pieces of political theater this country has seen — the president goes to the well for the second time in a month.

It’s a brilliant but risky move. The risk comes in putting health care at the forefront of the public agenda when the public would rather fixate on one thing: jobs. That impatience translates into Democratic jitteriness, which could lead to a further decline in legislative support to get something passed. Plus, Obama’s talk of bipartisanship could incense some progressive allies, who at this point are so fed up with Republican obstructionism that they see any attempt to reach out across the aisle as a sign of naivete, even weakness.

But I’m betting that Obama’s play will actually pay off. As Steve Benen notes, it’s a “call-the-bluff moment.” For months now, Republicans have complained that they have been shut out of the process. (False — remember the interminable Senate Finance Committee deliberations? And, let’s be clear, to the extent that they not been included, Republicans themselves closed the door from the outside.) Well, here’s their chance to participate, in as high-profile a setting as they can ask for. Obama’s basically saying, “Fine — you like your ideas so much? Let’s sit down and talk about them for all of the American people to see.”

It has the makings of a no-win situation for the GOP because a) they don’t really have a workable and realistic idea to reform health care and b) it’s much easier to lie about the other side when the other side isn’t there to call you on it. And as Obama demonstrated at the GOP caucus, he has the ability to confront GOP mendacity with equal measures of assuredness, intelligence, and good faith.

You can tell the Republicans are worried — and that they already have the outlines of a strategy. House Minority Leader John Boehner (OH) said in response to the president’s announcement, “The best way to start on real, bipartisan reform would be to scrap those bills and focus on the kind of step-by-step improvements that will lower health care costs and expand access.” But starting over is not an option for Obama. As a White House official said, “We are coming with our plan. They can bring their plan.” And that is how they should continue to frame it.

I wouldn’t put it past the GOP to keep humping the scrap-the-bill note and demand that the only way they can agree to a sit-down with the president is if he starts from scratch. Of course, Obama should call their bluff. Could there be a better image of Republican irresponsibility than a bipartisan summit on health care called by the president, with Democrats and the president exchanging ideas, and all those empty chairs where Republicans should be? Then again, considering how utterly uninterested they are in governing, and how the risk of revealing that fact in a nationally televised forum is too high, not showing up for the game might actually start looking like the less painful option.

Making Airport Screening Smarter

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The following op-ed ran in today’s Cleveland Plain Dealer:

One homeland security item that jumps out in the president’s 2011 budget is $700 million to buy an additional 1,000 full-body scanners for airports. The decision underscores the new politics of security in the wake of the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a U.S.-bound Northwest Airlines flight.

The scanners will help for now, but it’s only a matter of time before a terrorist comes up with a way to get around them. A cheaper and more effective alternative exists — smart screening. And smart screening doesn’t take naked pictures of everyone trying to board a plane.

First, we have to understand the failings of the system. Following the bombing attempt, the intelligence community came under fire for failing to “connect the dots” that could have stopped Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. But that’s not right — there weren’t any dots to connect.

To be sure, “signs” existed that Abdulmutallab could pose a threat to American citizens. But “signs” are very different from “dots.” Signs are vague indicators of potential danger based on sources of unknown credibility, while dots are corroborated pieces of intelligence.

Think Abdulmutallab’s father’s visit to the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria was a “dot”? In hindsight, it sure looks like one, but it was a sign.

That’s because “walk-in” informants will nearly always be evaluated as noncredible sources of intelligence. Why? There are hundreds upon hundreds of walk-ins to American embassies worldwide every day. More than 99 percent are lying, confused or not knowledgeable about the issue at hand. Dedicating limited resources to verify every walk-in would severely hamper ongoing investigations involving other, more credible intelligence operations. Relatives, like the father, can be the worst transgressors. Can’t settle that intra-family dispute? Ratting out your kin to the Americans might make the problem vanish.

Then there was the NSA intercept about the Yemen-based al-Qaida affiliate using a “Nigerian” in an unspecified attack. Dot? Nope. Sign? Yes — but still a very vague one. Without specific details like the alleged attacker’s name, location or itinerary, there’s little an analyst can do aside from lump the information within the general threat environment. This is assuming, of course, that the intercepted callers aren’t speaking in code.

The bottom line? There is not — nor will there ever be — an analyst within the intelligence community who would have read a report of unknown credibility and concluded that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was an urgent priority, especially considering the many other confirmed bad guys under investigation.

It’s time to construct a security apparatus that intelligently accounts for signs of potentially dangerous passengers while balancing risk, passenger inconvenience and privacy concerns — and saves money in the process.

Rather than purchase enough body scanners to take naked pictures of everyone boarding a flight, the TSA and National Counter Terrorism Center should review one of the least discussed but potentially most effective devices it already has on the books: the “selectee” list.

This differs from the 4,000-person “no fly” list, whose members are permanently barred from flying. Those on the selectee list can fly, but only after additional on-site screening. The problem is that the screening generated by the current the selectee list is inefficient — the entry “Elizabeth Kennedy” gets all Elizabeth Kennedys searched every time, no matter their destination or threat environment.

It’s time to let the selectee list think for itself. With technological innovation, the list could be transformed into a “smart” anti-terrorism tool: Allegedly dangerous individuals would be added, but additional passenger screening is triggered only when an algorithm connects potential attackers to a suspect travel itinerary and during periods of elevated, if vague, threat levels. Individuals selected for additional screening must be shared with the airlines.

For example, if an allegedly dangerous Elizabeth Kennedy is set to travel from Dublin to the United States, her profile would trigger additional screening only when the list automatically connects her name, travel itinerary and an ongoing Ireland-based threat. If the threat is based out of, say, France, or once an analyst determines it has lapsed, she would undergo standard security procedures.

America’s security apparatus can’t become airtight against vague and unsubstantiated threats. When compared to the expense, invasive delay, and certain obsolescence of a full-body scanner, the “smart selectee list” is a winner. It costs less, protects privacy concerns, and reduces security wait-times by eliminating needless searches.

Read the column at the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Obama’s Regulatory Accomplishments

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute
Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Administrator Cass Sunstein

While virtually all national attention has been focused on the difficult straits of the higher-visibility items of the Obama administration’s legislative agenda (and even there, according to the Brookings Institution’s Thomas Mann, his record has been vastly underappreciated), on the domestic matters that a president actually has some control over, the federal government’s regulatory apparatus, the administration has quietly undone many years of Republican mischief.

That’s the message of an important piece by John Judis that appeared in The New Republic earlier this week.

Judis places Obama’s accomplishments on the regulatory front into three main categories. First he’s appointed (where Republicans in the Senate have allowed him) officials who actually believe in the missions of the agencies they work for, and are qualified for their jobs.

Given the habits of Republican administrations, that’s no small thing:

Reagan chose Thorne Auchter, the vice president of a construction firm, to head OSHA. Bush appointed a mining company executive to head the Mine Safety and Health Administration and a trucking company executive to head the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. To lead OSHA, he named Edwin G. Foulke Jr., a longtime foe of the agency who had advised companies on how to block union organization. Some of the Republican appointees weren’t business types, but ideologues or hacks who were utterly unqualified for their positions. Anne Gorsuch, whom Reagan nominated to head the EPA, was a rising member of the Colorado House of Representatives, where she was part of a conservative group known as the “House crazies.” Michael Brown, whom Bush appointed to run the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), had previously been commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association.

Obama’s approach, says Judis, couldn’t be more different:

[T]he flow of expertise into the federal bureaucracy over the past year has been reminiscent of what took place at the start of the New Deal. For instance, as a replacement for Foulke at OSHA, Obama chose David Michaels, a professor of occupational and environmental health at George Washington University. In 2008, Michaels published a book, Doubt is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health, detailing how businesses had delayed regulations by “manufacturing uncertainty” about scientific findings.

To manage the EPA, Obama appointed a slew of highly experienced state environmental officials. (As Bill Becker of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies explains, state officials are ideally suited for the EPA because they have firsthand experience in how regulations are enforced and how they work.) Obama’s choice to run the agency was Lisa Jackson, a chemical engineer who led the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. Her deputies include the former secretary of the environment in Maryland, as well as the former heads of the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection, the Massachusetts Bureau of Resource Protection, and the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality.

Meanwhile, Obama chose as his Food and Drug Administration (FDA) chief Margaret Hamburg, who achieved renown during the 1990s as health commissioner of New York City, where she developed a program for controlling tuberculosis that led to a sharp decline in the disease. Her number two is a former Baltimore health commissioner who, in 2008, was named a public official of the year by Governing magazine.

Second, says Judis, Obama has decisively reversed the Reagan-Bush 43 habit of undermining regulatory agencies by starving them of administrative funds and personnel:

Even in the face of the recession, he proposed and got funding increases for numerous regulatory agencies–some of them dramatic. He asked for $10.5 billion for the EPA for 2010–a 34 percent jump over 2009, and the first time in eight years that the budget had increased. He also requested a 19 percent increase in the FDA’s budget, the largest in its history; a 10 percent increase for OSHA, which will allow it to hire 130 new inspectors; and increases of 5 percent, 7 percent, and 9 percent for the Federal Trade Commission, the SEC, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Finally, Obama has ended the application by Republican administrations of a skewed approach to cost-benefit analysis of proposed regulations that makes short-term costs to businesses an overriding consideration. His most important step was probably appointing progressive law professor Cass Sunstein to head up the White House “super-agency” that reviews federal regulations, which under Bush became a major obstacle to the ability of regulatory agencies to do their work.

Judis warns that continued progress on this front is one of the little-appreciated stakes involved in this November’s elections:

In 1993, Clinton, too, attempted to revive the regulatory agencies by appointing well-qualified personnel and increasing funding. But, after Republicans took control of Congress in 1994, they managed to cut Clinton’s budget proposals and delay or block the implementation of regulations. If Democrats lose Congress this November, the same thing could happen again.

That’s something for progressives “de-energized” by the events of the last year, and inclined to sit on their hands this election cycle, to keep in mind.

Human Rights Really Is the Key

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Here I sit in my soon-to-be snowbound DC office, preparing for the certain doom that lurks behind the next menacing cloud. I should be standing in line with 542 of my neighbors at Safeway, buying two weeks’ worth of bread, milk, frozen pizzas, and Miller Lites for this 36-hour storm, but instead, I’m too busy brooding on the notion that the Obama administration has to do a better job on human rights.

A few days ago on Iranian television, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad let it slip that after months of heel-dragging, outright refusal, and/or disinterest, he was suddenly intrigued by a long-dead international uranium swap, designed to remove low-enriched uranium from Iran in exchange for higher-enriched uranium needed by Iran’s medical facilities. I’m brushing over the details, but the goal of the exchange was to provide Iran with uranium required for humanitarian purposes while denying Tehran the practice of performing the enrichment — an experience that could be applied to making a nuclear bomb.

Ahmadinejad isn’t really serious about suddenly embracing the international community’s offer, of course. But by appearing interested in continuing dialogue, Iran was attempting to drive a wedge between members of the UN Security Council as talk of new sanctions against the regime are discussed. Guess what? It’s working. China, a veto-wielding member of the Security Council that isn’t too hot on punishing a fellow despotic regime, has reacted positively to Ahmadinejad’s overtures, calling any discussion of sanctions now premature in light of a possible diplomatic solution.

It’s a critical juncture — any diplomat worth his salt knows that the international community shouldn’t back away, but should keep pushing sanctions to force Tehran to prove its seriousness. But China is letting them off the hook. Why? In part, it’s because China has the U.S. back on its heels.

Consider two recent events: The U.S. agreed to sell $6.4 billion of military equipment to Taiwan, and President Obama set a meeting with the Dalai Lama. The Chinese continue to warn that such actions endanger U.S.-China relations and they profess to be deeply offended. The pattern of events is clear — the U.S. does something, China gets offended, and the U.S. is thrown on its heels.

It’s time to level the playing field. Instead of having to explain or apologize for American actions, the Obama adminstration should knock China off the offensive by opening another diplomatic front: human rights. Every time China is offended for something we’ve done, the Obama administration has to hit right back, and hard, about China’s disregard for basic rights and freedoms. Secretary Clinton’s speech on Internet freedom was a good start, but the issue needs to be highlighted every time the Chinese take offense at an American decision. It puts China on the defensive by having to explain their actions, and would free the White House to pressure China on other issues, like Iran — another candidate for the same human rights treatment.

A Fiscal Dr. Strangelove

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Paul Krugman wants Americans to stop worrying and learn how to love the bomb – the fiscal bomb that is.

Just as Dr. Strangelove in the eponymous film classic assures the president that America can survive thermonuclear war, Krugman professes blithe disregard for the impact of massive government borrowing on U.S. fiscal stability.

The public and a good many economists may beg to differ, but what do they know? Voter concern about deficits has grown salient over the past year, as Washington has spent trillions to prop up the economy. Last March, a slight majority approved of President Obama’s handling of the federal budget deficit; in January, a CNN/Opinion Research poll found that 62 percent disapprove.

Krugman dismisses such concerns as “hysteria” and puts them down to a combination of economic ignorance and Republican propaganda.

On one point, the intensely partisan Krugman is dead right: GOP credibility on fiscal discipline is shot to pieces. The Bush Republicans squandered the budget surplus President Clinton bequeathed them on tax cuts and profligate spending. In 2003, they rammed through Congress a trillion-dollar prescription drug benefit for Medicare recipients but somehow forgot to pay for it. Quite a contrast to President Obama, who took pains to insist that Congress fully offset the costs of his health reform plan – with Republicans all the while hooting inanely about “socialism” from the peanut gallery.

But on the fundamental question – whether progressives should ignore America’s huge and growing fiscal imbalances – Krugman is flat wrong. GOP hypocrisy aside, plenty of progressive economists are sounding the fiscal alarm.

Jeff Garten, for example, believes America’s ballooning national debt will lead to “the slow but inexorable decline of the U.S. dollar,” undermining a key source of U.S. prosperity and influence in the world.

In a compelling Time essay, Jeffrey Sachs argues that the mounting public debt is symptomatic of a breakdown in political responsibility in Washington that stymies the nation’s progress. Republicans won’t abandon their anti-tax fetish, Democrats won’t rein in spending, especially on fast-growing entitlements, and the result is paralysis. “Until both political parties make a serious effort to improve the performance of government while shrinking its swelling deficits, Americans will watch both their quality of life and their country’s standing in the world erode,” he maintains.

Liberals, says Sachs, are wrong to cite deficit spending during the New Deal as proof that Americans shouldn’t worry about government borrowing today. During the height of the Depression, he notes, the federal government was running deficits of around about 5 percent of GDP as opposed to 10 percent today. Back then, he notes, we financed our debts domestically. Today about half of our national debt is held by foreign creditors, especially China and Japan.

Now, Sachs is neither an economic ignoramus nor a Republican stooge. He believes, as Krugman does, that public investment is an imperative to create jobs, rebuild U.S. infrastructure, and restore shared prosperity. But unlike Krugman, he recognizes that Washington’s unwillingness to defuse the public debt bomb is relentlessly squeezing out fiscal space for such investment.

President Obama gets it too. He is trying to strike a balance between massive, short-term spending (although not massive enough for Krugman) to stimulate the economy, and the need to restore fiscal discipline over the long haul by freezing domestic spending and creating a bipartisan commission to tackle entitlement reform.

That’s not easy, and he deserves more help than he is getting from liberals like Krugman who pose a false choice between progressive reform and fiscal responsibility.

Another Teachable Moment

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) has done a very irresponsible thing that nonetheless offers Democrats a classic “teachable moment” about the true fidelity of Republicans to fiscal discipline. Shelby put a hold on all presidential appointments (70 are pending at present ) until he gets his way on a couple of big projects — one involving a Shelby appropriations “earmark” — benefiting Alabama.

Some may recall that during the 2008 presidential campaign, Republicans talked as though earmarks were the primary cause of the federal government’s budget problems. And here’s one of their own gumming up the entire executive branch over one of them, while also trying to control the exact language of a federal contract on another project to steer money to his own state.

Shelby’s action could also help draw attention to the disgraceful pattern of Republican obstruction of presidential appointments, which has left dozens of federal agencies without key personnel.

“Holds” by senators are an atavistic tradition in the first place. Democrats should not let Shelby get away with the unprecedented step of a “blanket” hold, in order to shake down the administration for earmarked money, even as his party demagogues endlessly about runaway spending. Congressional Republicans should finally begin to pay a political price for their hypocrisy and cynicism on fiscal issues.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Why It’s Too Soon to Worry About Wireless Net Neutrality

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Last week’s Verizon/Google joint FCC filing on net neutrality contained a substantive idea that was worth discussing – a proposal for “Technical Advisory Groups.” But there’s an item that’s also worth discussing because of its incompleteness: net neutrality in the wireless space. Google and Verizon apparently consider it an important enough issue to include, even though they couldn’t agree on anything more specific than to encourage the FCC to “examine specific market and technical factors before applying any general oversight or specific rules to wireless broadband networks.”

But while the issue of wireless network neutrality is important, it’s the wrong one to fixate on at the moment. Wireless is, in fact, different from wired, and the issue of neutrality does not transplant as cleanly from one to the other. Neutrality opponents have, in general, greatly overstated the technical case against regulation. But in the wireless arena as it exists today, their dire warnings are far more plausible.

As with the points of agreement in the Verizon/Google brief, this comes down to the participants’ market positions. Verizon is the country’s most powerful wireless operator, while Google is at the center of the Open Handset Alliance, the organization behind the Android platform and the effort to diminish carrier control that it represents.

Getting a Handle on Wireless Net Neutrality

But what does network neutrality mean in the wireless context? As with the larger debate, people have varyingly expansive ideas about where to draw the line. A good place to start is Tim Wu’s 2007 Wireless Carterfone paper. Wu, at least, is quite specific about what network neutrality involves, basing his criteria off of then-FCC chairman Michael Powell’s “four network freedoms”: choice of applications, choice of devices, choice of content and service plan transparency.

As you might imagine, the wireless carriers don’t like some of these ideas — particularly the first two — saying that they’re technically unworkable. And though I’m hardly a cheerleader for America’s wireless carriers, in this instance, they do have a point. Roger Entner makes the case, pointing out that wireless cells are a shared resource with limited capacity. Wu anticipated this criticism:

The problem with this argument is that scarcity is an economic feature of not just wireless networks, but wireline networks as well. Both wireless and the local loop are last-mile networks of limited available bandwidth, and, in fact, the bandwidth available on a copper local loop is considerably less than on some of today’s wireless networks. For both products, it can be claimed that third parties cannot be trusted to make products that respect the shared needs of the network. In the Hush-a-Phone case, for example, AT&T claimed that third parties would bear “no responsibility for the quality of telephone service, but [be] primarily interested in exploiting their products.” Similarly, local carriers for years complained that modems abused the scarce resources of the phone network (by maintaining long connections). But as Judge Robert Bork argued in another context: “All economic goods are scarce… since scarcity is a universal fact, it can hardly explain regulation in one context and not another. The attempt to use a universal fact as a distinguishing principle necessarily leads to analytical confusion.”

But this is an oversimplification. There are spatial constraints on wireless operators that don’t apply to wired networks. Two cables running side-by-side will not typically interfere with one another; two cell towers operating on the same portion of spectrum and space will. And mobile data users are just that — mobile. A bad DSL modem or heavy Bittorrent user with a cable connection might impact the service of those on the same local loop, but the size of that loop can be controlled by the network operator, and the customers on it can be easily tracked and, if necessary, sanctioned. The number of users impacted by a malfunctioning wireless modem or handset-spewing packets is primarily a factor of population density.

And on cellular networks, tracking down network malefactors is harder and sure to be more expensive than the example cited by Wu. In the Hush-a-Phone case, a commercial entity existed that AT&T could sue. If the manufacturers of the Hush-a-Phone device were to lose such a lawsuit, they risked losing their capital investment. It was in their own interest to produce a device that worked well enough with the AT&T network to satisfy consumers and avoid the network operator’s wrath. The incentives for individuals to use wireless networks gently are much weaker: a canceled contract? A stern letter? This wasn’t enough to discourage those who participated in Operation Chokehold, a deliberate effort by iPhone users to cripple the AT&T network in protest of new bandwidth restrictions.

A More Pressing Wireless Issue

Of course, Chokehold proved to be something of a bust — unsurprising, perhaps, given that even its creator was urging people not to participate by the time the event actually rolled around. Still, the capacity of individuals to damage other wireless users’ service shouldn’t be ignored. I’m in no position to judge the legal merits of Judge Bork’s assertion that scarcity is an incoherent rationale for regulation, but surely it makes practical sense to demand that people stop watering their lawns during a drought. The FCC considered Operation Chokehold a real threat; anyone who’s tried to share wifi on a discount bus line with someone watching video — or just tried to use their iPhone during business hours in San Francisco or New York — intuitively understands how cramped the data portion of cellular networks currently is.

One obvious response is that the networks should be expanded. This is undeniably true: the nation’s demand for wireless data is sure to increase dramatically. The carriers must find fairer ways to charge for access, and begin paying more attention to infrastructure and less to marketing gimmicks. But it’s still the case that the operators must prioritize reliable voice service over data service; that spectrum is a scarce resource; and that there is a tension between expanding existing infrastructure and investing in coming generations of technology.

There’s reason for optimism. WiMAX promises to deliver a wireless network designed for data, and is close to widespread deployment. The transition to digital television also promises to deliver useful spectrum for wireless data (though much of it is currently being used to broadcast reruns of Magnum P.I. and redundant weather channels, thanks to an indefensible giveaway to incumbent broadcasters). Once new wireless networks and technologies remove the tight constraints currently facing mobile data users, protecting and enhancing users’ network freedoms should become a priority for the FCC. Until then, ensuring those networks’ viability must unfortunately remain their focus.

The Right and the GOP: Pushing On An Open Door

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In any highly fluid political situation, you will always find some observers determined to argue that it’s not fluid at all–that underneath the surface, the status quo prevails, and anyone thinking otherwise is naive or poorly informed.

Tuesday night, you just knew that Mark Kirk’s U.S. Senate primary victory in Illinois would be interpreted in some circles as proving that the much-discussed rightward trend in the Republican Party, sped along by pressure from the Tea Party Movement, was actually a mirage. And sure enough, Politico‘s Jonathan Martin published an article today entitled: “Tea leaves: Republican establishment Still Rules.”

Aside from Kirk’s win (more about that in a moment), Martin’s main bits of evidence for his hypothesis are that the Republican National Committee recently rejected an effort to impose an ideological “purity test” on candidates seeking party financial support, and that recent GOP winners like Scott Brown and Bob McDonnell didn’t campaign on divisive cultural issues.

The “purity test” argument would be more compelling if not for the fact that many hard-core conservatives opposed it as insufficiently rigid, ham-handed, or unnecessary. Nobody, but nobody, in the conservative movement is more preoccupied with driving RINOs and “squishes” out of the Republican Party like whipped curs than Red State proprietor Erick Erickson. Yet he opposed the “purity test” as offering ideological heretics a phony seal of approval:

Rome long ago stopped selling indulgences, but conservatives keep right on selling them. Look, for example, at NY-23. The moment Dede Scozzafava signed ATR’s [Americans for Tax Reform] no new tax pledge, she was absolved of all her sins, including voting for 198 tax increases in the New York legislature.

Therein lies the inherent problem with candidates signing off on well meaning pablum — there are no teeth and the party will not serve as its own enforcer.

While I applaud the desire of conservative RNC members to try to put the train back on the tracks, I am afraid this will do what the ATR pledge did in Scozzafava’s case — give a lot of candidates cover to pretend to be conservative.

Plenty of other conservatives opposed the “purity test” on grounds that “grassroots Republicans” were best equipped to police candidates. Some interpreted such rhetoric as indicating a big-tent willingness to tolerate regionally important ideological variations. But as the recent DK/R2K survey of self-identified Republicans illustrated, “regional differences” in the GOP are pretty much a relic of the past in a monolithically conservative party. And nowadays the “grassroots” means conservative activists, who are indeed avid to conduct ideological purification rituals. If there is a significant body of “grassroots activists” fighting to protect the interests of Republican “moderates,” it’s an awfully quiet group.

In general, the “purity test’ furor reminds me of a quip I heard during the Jim Crow era about the relative weakness of the John Birch Society in the South: “Nobody sees the point in joining an organization standing for things everybody already agrees with.”

The argument that the success of hyper-opportunist Scott Brown and stealth theocrat Bob McDonnell “proves” the ideologues don’t have much real power in the GOP strikes me as almost self-refuting. Sure, Brown had a “moderate” reputation in the MA legislature, but that’s not why he became the maximum hero of the Tea Party Movement, whose themes he adopted wholesale. By contrast, McDonnell didn’t need to reassure social conservatives of his bona fides by campaigning on “their” issues; he had proven himself to be “one of them” for many years.

As for Mark Kirk, it’s true that conservative activists don’t like him, and there’s even a chance his Senate campaign will be immensely complicated by a Tea Party inspired third-party effort. But it’s also true he spent much of the primary campaign tacking steadily to the right, flip-flopping on the Gitmo detainee issue, and more dramatically, promising to vote in the Senate against the climate change legislation he voted for in the House. He’s hardly a good example of the weakness of conservatives in the GOP nationally.

More generally, it’s increasingly obvious that what passes for a “Republican Establishment” these days is focused heavily on surrendering to the most immediate ideological impulses of Tea Party and conservative movement activists (who are in fact the very same people in many places) and then coopting them for the 2010 and 2012 campaign cycles. In attempting a takeover of the GOP, the hard right is in many respects pushing on an open door. The RNC chairman, supposedly a “moderate” of sorts, never misses an opportunity to identify himself with the Tea Party Movement. Sarah Palin, who was the party’s vice presidential candidate in 2008, has called for a merger of the Movement and the GOP. Republican Sen. Jim DeMint has argued that they have already more or less merged.

In his piece Martin suggests that the longstanding Republican pedigree of Florida Tea Party hero Marco Rubio somehow proves the “establishment” is still in charge. I’d say it shows that “establishment” is in the process of rapidly surrendering to the “conservative coup” that Martin scoffs at. Charlie Crist, whom Rubio seems certain to trounce in a Republican Senate primary later this year, was without question a major “GOP establishment” figure just months ago, and Rubio was considered a nuisance candidate. Now he’s the living symbol of a “purity test” being applied to Republicans by the “grassroots” to dramatic effect.

Yes, many Tea Party activists continue to shake their fists at the “Republican establishment,” just like unambiguously Republican conservative activists have done for many decades, dating back to the Willkie Convention of 1940. But with some exceptions, they are choosing to operate politically almost exclusively through the GOP, to the “establishment’s” delight.

The emerging reality is that the Tea Party activists are the shock troops in the final conquest of the Republican Party by the most hard-core elements of the conservative movement. It’s apparent not just in Republican primaries, but in the remarkable ability of Republican politicians to repudiate as “socialism” many policy positions their party first developed and quite recently embraced (Mark Kirk’s support for cap-and-trade would have been considered relatively uncontroversial just a few years ago). You can certainly root around and find a few exceptions to this trend, but they are few and far between. And the implicit assumption of Martin’s piece–that the “adults” of the Republican “establishment” will once again tame the wild ideological beasts of their party–is actually dangerous.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Charters and Civil Rights

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Gary Orfield, a UCLA education professor, has long been the nation’s foremost chronicler of racial segregation in schools. According to today’s Washington Post, a new study by Orfield’s Civil Rights Project shows that public charter schools are less racially diverse than traditional schools.

“As the country continues moving steadily toward greater segregation and inequality of education for students of color in schools with lower achievement and graduation rates, the rapid growth of charter schools has been expanding a sector that is even more segregated than the public schools,” the report concludes.

This assertion seems suspect on several grounds, and it illustrates the pitfalls of viewing the public charter school movement through the frame of the nation’s great school integration battles of the 1960s and 1970s.

For one thing, minority families are freely choosing charter schools. In the bad old days of Jim Crow, they were forced to attend segregated schools. Later, as many whites fled the cities to avoid sending their children to integrated schools, black families were left behind and had no choice but to attend their local district school. As Orfield and others have documented, this “re-segregation” in impoverished urban neighborhoods was a disaster for big city school systems.

Public school choice arose in Minnesota in the late 1980s to give parents the option to send their children to schools outside their local districts. The charter school idea was conceived in part as a way to bring innovative public schools to the students, rather than forcing them to travel to other districts to find them.

The Charter Record in D.C.

 

As it happens, Washington is in the vanguard of the public charter movement (full disclosure: I’m a member of the D.C. Public Charter School Board). About 84 percent of charter school students here are black, compared with 78 percent in traditional public schools. Why have so many charters located in poor and working-class minority neighborhoods? Because it is precisely the kids in those communities who urgently need better education options. The city’s regular public schools have historically ranked near the bottom in comparisons of major urban education systems, although Mayor Adrian Fenty and Chancellor Michele Rhee have launched a determined effort to lift their performance.

The city’s 58 charter schools have given low-income black and Latino children something they never had before: a choice of where to attend school, as well as an array of innovative learning programs tailored to diverse interests and learning styles. That 28,000, or 38 percent, of D.C.’s students have exercised that choice — in effect voting with their feet — attests to the need for new options. And the shrinking of the traditional school sector’s “market share” was no doubt a big factor behind Fenty’s decision to take it over.

The important question, as Charter School Board Vice Chairman Brian Jones observed to the Post, is not the racial composition of charters, it’s whether they are providing a better education than traditional schools.

The answer is fiercely contested in the research community. Here the evidence is mixed: Many of the District’s best schools are charters, but not all charters are performing well. That’s why our Board has shut down four schools and accepted the voluntary surrender of charters from seven more since 2003.

Why Segregation Is Not the Issue

 

There’s considerable irony here. When I was advocating for charter schools back in the early 1990s, many Democrats in my native Virginia and other southern states were suspicious. Given the region’s bad racial history, they feared that charters would become a new, publicly funded version of the old “segregation academies” – private schools to which white families turned to avoid sending their children to school with blacks. That’s one reason Virginia has lagged in charter school innovation.

In this respect, the Orfield report indirectly raises a very interesting question: Why aren’t there more charter schools in white neighborhoods in Washington and other major cities? Given that the dismal reputation of urban education is a chief catalyst for suburban flight, more charters might be a good way to keep more middle-class families (white and black) in the urban core.

If charters are less racially diverse than other public schools, it’s largely because they are cropping up in the urban communities that desperately need school innovation and choice. Since many charters aim at closing the educational achievement gap between white and minority students, it seems perverse to cast them as agents of school segregation.

There is a civil rights issue here, but with all respect to Gary Orfield, it’s not segregation. It’s that too many low-income black, Latino, and immigrant students are trapped in dysfunctional urban school systems.

The State of Play on Cap-and-Trade

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Remember cap-and-trade? Progressives now speak of it in hushed, glum tones, the way we do of the recently departed. If the bill was already unlikely to be passed in the wake of a difficult 2009 for Democrats, then Scott Brown’s win all but guaranteed that it wouldn’t be so much as a blip on the Dems’ political agenda in 2010.

Yet there are some out there who continue to hold out hope. Some are even Republicans. Here’s Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) speaking at a D.C. event yesterday:

I don’t think you’ll ever have energy independence the way I want it until you start dealing with carbon pollution and pricing carbon. The two are connected in my view—very much connected. The money to be made in solving the carbon pollution problem can only happen when you price carbon in my view.

So if the approach is to try to pass some half-assed energy bill and say that is moving the ball down the road, forget it with me.

Now, Graham has come out against both the House-passed cap-and-trade bill last year and the bill that passed out of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. But he, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), and Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) are trying to cobble together a compromise that results in some sort of carbon-pricing scheme and, no less important, can get 60 votes.

It’s indisputable that a system that prices carbon is better at curbing greenhouse gas emissions and spurring clean energy development than a stand-alone energy bill with the usual cocktail of subsidies to energy companies – something that some in Congress are now actively pushing. As Bradford Plumer has pointed out, “without a cap on carbon, such a bill might even end up increasing emissions – especially if the proposed new transmission lines merely gave coal-fired plants access to new markets, allowing them to boost output.”

Where’s the administration in all this? President Obama’s budget pointedly left out revenue that an emissions-trading program would have brought in. (Last year’s budget, by contrast, included a revenue forecast of $646 billion over several years from a cap-and-trade system.) The administration insists that the omission shouldn’t be read as a signal of where things stand on cap-and-trade — but it’s sure hard not to. Then again, the budget also includes a $43 million increase for the EPA’s implementation of its carbon endangerment finding, certainly a signal that it intends to move ahead with a Supreme Court-mandated regulatory effort to confront the carbon problem in the absence of legislation.

For his part, President Obama in a town hall appearance in New Hampshire earlier this week gave a strong defense of the concept of pricing carbon to drive incentives for clean energy investments. But he also acknowledged that the Senate might separate the subsidies for clean energy in an energy bill from a carbon-pricing mechanism – which realistically means no cap-and-trade at all.

I understand that the president can’t throw around words like “half-assed.” But a stronger push would be nice. Graham called out an energy-bill-only route for what it is and stood firm on the issue of carbon pricing. It seems like there’s an opening there for the president to make the same argument and embolden Congress to do what’s really needed to spur a clean energy economy and curb greenhouse gases: pass a cap-and-trade system.

Stand with Westphalia

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The “aught” decade that just ended was bracketed by 9/11, perpetrated by al-Qaeda terrorists who had enjoyed havens in Sudan and Afghanistan, and a thwarted Christmas 2009 airline bombing by a Nigerian terrorist, who learned his craft in Yemen. The years were filled with a running, halting effort to prevent the Taliban from re-taking the Afghanistan government. Throughout the millennial decade, a postmodern theme dominated: terrorists virtually taking over weak states that should have been eliminating them.  Today, as we enter a shiny new decade, we should embrace a cozy and decidedly pre-modern tradition: the system of sovereign states that has served us well since the 17th century.

The world has been governed by an arrangement of sovereign nation-states with fixed boundaries since the Treaty of Westphalia was signed in 1648. But that system faces threats today. In a fascinating article in Foreign Policy, Atlantic staff writer Graeme Wood described today’s worrisome “quasi-states”—ethnic enclaves that have currency and governments, yet are not officially recognized by the United Nations. Wood includes Abkhazia, an entity of 190,000 that separated from Georgia after a war in the early 1990s; Somaliland, a refugee enclave from a Somalian dictator’s brutality in the late 1980s; and Kurdistan, which stamps visas “Republic of Iraq-Kurdistan Region.”

No less worrisome are weak nation-states that are currently facing threats to their sovereignty from terrorist groups within their borders. The attempted airplane bombing by a Nigerian disciple of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which has taken root in Yemen, is only the latest reminder.

Like termites eating away at a building’s foundation, a weak commitment to states ultimately threatens to topple the internal and external order provided by the Westphalian system, with America and our allies directly in the path of collapse. The system’s bad actors—groups who refuse to respect states per se—have perversely, if predictably, turned on the greatest state of them all, the United States. And so the system needs to defend itself, with the U.S. at the lead.

The destabilization latent in both quasi-states and weak nation-states is aggravating already dangerous conditions in many of the world’s hotspots. In Lebanon, Hezbollah currently controls two cabinet seats and 11 seats in the 128-member Parliament; the cabinet recently voted to defy a UN order for Hezbollah to disarm. In Gaza, Hamas took official governmental powers through elections in 2006, yet has failed so far to provide decent government services, while clashing with Fatah—previously the best hope for progress and stability—and fighting progress with Israel.

Prior to last year, Pakistan had essentially conceded the northwest Federally Administered Tribal Areas to al-Qaeda and the Taliban; today, violent clashes occur in the region, but the terrorists are far from subdued. Meanwhile, in Yemen, al-Qaeda operatives are moving into formal positions in the government. And in Afghanistan, the Taliban is marching again on Kabul; President Obama’s new strategy aims principally to “degrade” the Taliban, in the hopes that the Afghan state can save itself.

With almost a year to review, discussion is now beginning about what President Obama’s foreign policy doctrine exactly is. As the inevitable fray begins, here’s one big doctrinal idea: let’s dedicate America’s resources, both hard and soft, to nurturing strong states around the world, undergirded by constitutionalism and the rule of law, and pressing those actors who would otherwise create sub-states and quasi-states either to put down their weapons and join states, or suffer the oblivion that recalcitrant terrorist methods deserve.

In the coming decade, the U.S. must focus like a laser on the threat non-state actors pose to the world order.  The fronts spread throughout the world.  We need to pressure warlords in Afghanistan to join the government by making private militias unacceptable and illegal.  We should push Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza to forgo violence, recognize Israel, and become legitimate.  We need continually to support and reform the government in Yemen, while fighting al-Qaeda’s intrusions.  In our own hemisphere, we need to render illegitimate the paramilitary groups who are currently re-arming in Colombia and threatening the government there.

In all of these cases, we should employ all the multilateral instruments at our disposal, working with NATO and the UN and also organizations like the IMF and the World Bank to deploy both carrots (including trade and other economic incentives) and sticks (sanctions and, in the case of aggression or imminent threats, force).

There is also much we can do unilaterally.  The FY 2010 omnibus spending bill passed by Congress shows we’re on the right track in using our “soft power” to help consolidate states.  For instance, the budget increases monies to the Millennium Challenge Corporation, which incentivizes governments to undertake democratic reform, 26%, to $1.105 billion.  And in Yemen, the FY 2010 budget nearly doubles our FY 2010 economic support funds from $21 billion to $40 billion, which should help strengthen the government there.

However, there are flaws that demonstrate the need for a more systemic approach.  In Pakistan, under Congress’s 2010 budget, our military assistance will drop, from $300 million in FY 2009 to $238 million in FY 2010, and economic support barely rising, from $1 billion to $1.04 billion.  These decisions risk undermining a Pakistani government that has recently made promising steps toward finally confronting the non-state actors within its borders.

All in all, disparate strands including Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Colombia need to be woven into a coherent, international approach, led by the United States. The issue isn’t so much quasi-states like Abkhazia and Somaliland, as interesting and troubling as they are. More urgent are non-state actors seeking to become states that directly threaten our security. And so the past should be prologue: we should stand with Westphalia, now more than ever.

Can Republicans Win the Senate?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

With yesterday’s easy primary victory by Mark Kirk in IL, and with the news that former Sen. Dan Coats will leave his lobbying gig to take on Evan Bayh in IN, Republicans are now getting excited about the possibility of retaking the Senate this November.

They should probably chill a bit. Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post breaks down the 10 Democratic seats Republicans would have to win — without losing any of their own — to regain control of the Senate. And while anything’s possible if this turns out to be a “wave” election, running this particular table will be very difficult.

To start with the least likely Republican victories, Chris Dodd’s retirement makes Democratic attorney general Richard Blumenthal a solid front-runner in CT. Republicans must negotiate a difficult primary and then take on one of the most popular politicians in recent Nutmeg State history. Similarly, CA Republicans must get through a tough primary before taking on Sen. Barbara Boxer, one of the more popular politicians in a state that really hates its politicians (in both parties) these days.

Bayh will hardly be an easy mark. The never-defeated former Boy Wonder of Hoosier politics, he’s sitting on $13 million in campaign cash, and has a history of winning big in good Republican years. Meanwhile, Coats has to deal with bad publicity over his 10 years of DC lobbying work, including representation of banks and equity firms. And he’s been voting in Virginia, not Indiana, all that time.

A lot of Republicans seem to be assuming that Mark Kirk will win easily in IL. Only problem is: he’s currently trailing Democratic nominee Alexi Giannoulias in early polls, and will also have to explain some major flip-flops he executed to survive his primary.

I’m probably not the only observer in either party who remains skeptical that former Club for Growth chieftain Pat Toomey is going to win in PA against the eventual winner of the Sestak-Specter primary. Toomey is certainly the kind of guy who will make sure that intra-Democratic wounds heal quickly.

And then there are states which are absolute crapshoots at this point, such as CO, where either appointed Sen. Michael Bennet or former state House Speaker Andrew Romanoff will probably face former Lt. Gov. Jane Norton. The same is true of an open Republican seat in MO, where Democrat Robin Carnahan has been running essentially even with Roy Blunt.

Republican open seats in NH, OH, and KY are hardly safe for the GOP, either.

All in all, it would take an odds-defying “wave” indeed to deliver the Senate to Republicans. And by the very nature of Senate races, which match high-profile politicians usually well-known to voters, “waves” are less likely to control outcomes than in House races. The only real precedent for what GOPers are dreaming of came in 1980, with Republicans improbably won every single close race.

In many respects, the Senate landscape will be much improved for Republicans in 2012. But then we will be dealing with a presidential year, different (and more favorable for Democrats) turnout patterns, and the little problem that the Republican presidential field doesn’t look that exciting (with the possible exception of Sarah Palin, who’s a little too exciting).

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Simmer Down, America

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The headlines make it sound like we’ll all be dead by July…

WaPo: “Officials warn of looming terror risk”
NYT: “Senators warned of terror attack by July”
CBS News: “CIA Chief: Al Qaeda Poised to Attack U.S.”

…but I’d still go ahead planning that BBQ on the 4th, because even if there is an attack, the headlines portray a threat environment that — while serious — probably isn’t as menacingly “looming” as they make it seem.

Here’s the actual exchange between Senate Intelligence Chairwoman Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, CIA chief Leon Panetta, and FBI Director Robert Mueller:

Senator Feinstein: What is the likelihood of another terrorist attempted attack on the U.S. homeland in the next three to six months? High or low? Director Blair?

Blair: An attempted attack, the priority is certain.

Sen. Feinstein: Mr. Panetta?

Panetta: I would agree with that.

Sen. Feinstein: Mr. Mueller?

Mueller: Agree.

That’s a little bit more nuanced than the writers would have you believe. The journalists’ apparent ironclad certainty about an impending terrorist attack distorts the intensely political context surrounding the issue and ignores the degraded threat al Qaeda central poses.

It’s important that the issue was raised during Senator Feinstein’s questioning and not during the intel chiefs’ opening statements. If they brought it up right off the bat, that would imply there was specific intelligence about an ongoing plot. Given the context of this exchange, security heads don’t appear to have anything concrete that is specific and imminent. They’re hedging their bets.

Now Senator Feinstein is right to ask tough questions like this — that’s her job. But if you’re a high-ranking intelligence official, and the senator overseeing your department asks you about the possibility of an attempted attack, who in their right mind would ever say, “Naaah, I think it’s all good. Nothing to worry about here…”? If that’s your answer and there is even a small-scale attempt (like the one on Christmas), then you can kiss your job goodbye.

Finally, we need to put al Qaeda’s attack capabilities in context. Senator Feinstein correctly qualified her question to ask about an attempted attack; it’s a critical word that gets ignored. Because over the next six months, I don’t believe that either AQ’s senior leadership or its international affiliates will regain the logistical competence to attempt a massive attack on the scale of 9/11. Far more likely is the small-time attempt perpetrated by individuals who, as Director Panetta mentioned, have “clean” histories and are — by definition — more difficult to collect intelligence on.

Or to reinterpret the security chiefs’ answers, “Yes, there is the high probability that someone we could never hope to know about will attempt a minor terrorist attack in the United States. It may or may not be successful, depending on how competent and lucky the operator is. To say otherwise would ignore such individuals’ patterns of recent behavior. But another 9/11 — though possible — is far less likely.”

Haiti After the Quake: Nation-Building Next Door

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Download the report.

As the tragedy in Haiti plays out in nightly newscasts, Americans can be proud of their contribution to the relief effort. With over 16,000 U.S. forces already deployed and $100 million in reconstruction money pledged from the government — on top of over $500 million donated privately — America’s commitment is firm.

Following the earthquake, President Obama wrote, “[I]n times of tragedy, the United States of America steps forward and helps. That is who we are. That is what we do.” America’s can-do spirit and a large supply of humanitarian resources are certainly a promising start, but all the good intentions in the world won’t stabilize and rebuild our ravaged neighbor. In undertaking this mammoth task, Americans should embrace the implications of the president’s words: the United States’ and international community’s effort in Haiti is nothing short of a long-term nation-building exercise.

And that’s good news. Helping Haiti firmly stand on its own over the long term — both with reconstructed buildings and a functioning government — is not only the right thing to do but will lead to a more stable region.

In a time when U.S. military deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan evoke uncomfortable associations with the term “nation-building,” it’s important to note that America’s troops have been unquestionably welcomed with open arms in Haiti. “It’s high time for those troops to have been deployed. They are crucial to help restore security in our devastated towns,” said Yvon Jerome, mayor of the hard-hit Carrefour district on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince.

On a day-to-day level, any major disaster relief effort will face a set of serious yet known problems: controlling the spread of infectious disease, staving off immediate hunger and dehydration, establishing basic order in a chaotic situation. Since we’re not on the ground in Haiti, we’ll leave decisions like where to put aid stations and which neighborhoods to secure first to responding disaster relief experts.

Though immediate relief is of course today’s pressing need, this memo takes a longer view to highlight potential roadblocks along the way to a robust and effective nation-building effort. First, we prioritize steps required to bring good governance to Haiti, both within the international chain-of-command and the Haitian government. Second, we identify reconstruction priorities and funding issues that must be addressed now to give Haiti a chance at meaningful recovery once the immediate humanitarian crisis is controlled.

Thousands of lives will be saved by the massive international effort underway. But the consequences of an ineffective reconstruction effort could be huge: If the main players in Haiti don’t figure out who’s in charge and plan for the next set of challenges, the international community could do as much damage as good, and billions of dollars and thousands more lives could be lost.

Who’s in Charge, Anyway?

The U.S. military (with 16,000 troops), United Nations (12,000 soldiers), and thousands of international non-governmental organizations have arrived in droves since the earthquake. Coordinating roles, missions, and even arrivals at Port-au-Prince airport between these groups has been confusing. Continued lack of clarity could hamper aid distribution and ultimately cripple reconstruction efforts in the long term.

Broadly speaking, the UN’s Blue Helmets have taken charge of street-level security in a peacekeeping role. U.S. Southern Command has control of the major ports of entry and supply routes that distribute relief aid throughout the city and region. NGO’s have undertaken a variety of humanitarian missions in accordance with their respective specialties.

These missions evolved on an ad hoc basis from mandates or delegated authorities in the panicked aftermath of the quake. For example, Haitian President René Préval signed over air traffic control to the U.S. military in order to better manage the arrival of relief supplies.

But the UN’s mandate is to conduct the Stabilization Mission in Haiti (the UN’s presence is most often referred to by its French acronym MINUSTAH), established in April 2004 under Resolution 1542. In the post-earthquake context, its mission — supporting the Haitian government and enforcing public safety — appears constrained. MINUSTAH originally provided for a maximum of 1,622 civilian police and 6,700 soldiers. Since the earthquake, the only modification has been in MINUSTAH’s number, not its role — the Security Council has approved an increase in force size to 12,000 soldiers.

Friction between competing missions has hampered efforts. In one anecdote that typifies these complications, French Secretary of State for Cooperation Alain Joyandet implied that the Americans were giving preferential landing rights to U.S. planes and called on the UN to clarify the American role in Haiti, saying the priority was “helping Haiti, not occupying Haiti.”

Fixing the Authority Problem

Such bureaucratic infighting decreases trust between international partners working toward the same goal. The lack of a unified command will slow the relief effort as governments and institutions must constantly cross-check with one another before taking meaningful action. We make the following recommendations for beginning the long struggle to rebuild Haiti:

  • Establish Meaningful Governance: In its current incarnation the UN mission lacks the capacity to address what needs to be done, missing the mandate to deal with post-earthquake reconstruction. MINUSTAH should be upgraded to become a full “nation-building” program, designed to last 10 years. The UN and EU missions in Kosovo offer the best model. The UN’s experience in Kosovo shows that just “peacekeeping” isn’t sufficient to help rebuild a society. The UN Interim Administration in Kosovo (UNMIK) had four pillars—policing and justice, civil administration, institution-building, and reconstruction and development—that can be adapted to address the multiple problems Haiti faces as it rebuilds from the earthquake.Edmond Mulet, the former and now interim head of MINUSTAH, should be elevated to Special Representative of the Secretary General to give him a clearer mandate. (He replaced his successor, Hédi Annabi, who perished in the quake.) In addition to the “peacekeeping” pillar currently in place, other duties of development, civil administration, and institution-building should be added and all international troops on the ground, including America’s, should be brought under its chain of command. A beefed-up MINUSTAH would work with the remaining Haitian government, by assisting with oversight and capacity building.
  • Police, Not Peacekeepers: Under the pre-earthquake MINUSTAH, Brazil led 7,000 troops — mostly from the Americas — in Haiti. Immediately after the quake, Brazilian Defense Minister Nelson Jobim was in Port-au-Prince to oversee his troops and committed to doubling them and having them stay for at least five more years. While a peacekeeping role will be vital in the months to come to get Haiti back on its feet, the role of Brazilian and other blue-helmeted troops will need to change.Once order is established, the UN mission will essentially become a national police force in the absence of a Haitian alternative. To transfer power back to the local government, the UN mission should be tasked with building an effective security force and justice system. That means in addition to cops, the UN may solicit prosecutors and judges in a proxy judiciary. It’s a tall order, but it may be the only way that allows the remaining Haitian government to fully concentrate on reconstruction.
  • Consider Moving the Capital: Port-au-Prince has been reduced to a rubble heap. To solve an immediate problem, we recommend that the government consider transferring its functions and offices from Port-Au-Prince to Cap-Haïtien, per George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen’s suggestion. The new capital would also serve as the new base for MINUSTAH. A move would allow the government to focus on core issues of governance in the wake of the disaster. Cap-Haïtien, Haiti’s second-largest city, was relatively untouched by the earthquake. It has a harbor and the longest runway outside of Port-au-Prince, allowing for reconstruction efforts to be staged from there.

Priorities for Haitian Reconstruction

Beyond the complex and immediate issues surrounding relief aid, the international community must already begin work on second-order concerns once immediate humanitarian priorities are brought under control.

Front and center is economic stabilization. Though signs are emerging that basic economic activity is returning, it must be solidified. International institutions and donor countries are set to meet again at the UN in March to discuss funding for reconstruction. It would be useful to come up with a battle plan for rebuilding by establishing priorities among competing interests in government, business, and communities.

    • Remittances: Haitians need cash in hand, and quickly. It’s the best hope of sustaining any meaningful economic activity when banking has slowed dramatically and business within the Port-Au-Prince region is struggling to survive. With the announcement that Haitians can take advantage of TPS (Temporary Protective Status) from the U.S. Immigration Service, upwards of 200,000 undocumented Haitians will be able to join 600,000 Haitians working legally in the U.S.That diaspora, along with similar groups in Canada and elsewhere, sent home at least one-third of Haiti’s GDP last year. To capitalize on the outpouring of goodwill by the Haitian diaspora, money must flow directly to individuals. Wire services expect to get money transfers going to Haiti in the short term. However, with the banking sector of Haiti already fragile, and many local money transfer agents (i.e. the local corner store) wiped out by the earthquake, making sure remittances arrive will be key. Here a simple technological solution can meet the challenge. Sub-Saharan Africa has adopted programs like M-PESA to allow people to use their cell phones as checking accounts. The time and effort necessary to establish a similar system in Haiti would be worthwhile.Credit can be transferred to individual phone numbers — including from overseas — and that credit can then be used for purchases from other phone owners who have a similar plan (including prepaid) from their provider. Cell coverage is one of the few institutions that covers all of Haiti. It is also an institution that has worked through the crisis, and that the American military is working to make sure stays running. But only 30 percent of Haitians have cell phones — so in addition to cell phone credit transfer, increasing cell phone penetration should be another priority.
    • Empower the State Department: The U.S. military’s presence cannot and should not be sustained at 16,000 troops. Once the humanitarian crisis is controlled, American troops should be withdrawn, and the American component of the UN mandate should be headed by the State Department. The State Department should focus on building long-term civil institutions through accountable governance programs. Further, it should actively engage the NGO community to build the unions, a free press, and political parties. Haiti’s fragile democracy has been unable to respond to this crisis, and long-term American involvement in the country’s civil institutions will better enable it to do so in the future.
    • Debt Relief: Many have suggested that the key to Haiti’s fortunes is finishing the “Highly Indebted Poor Country Initiative” debt-forgiveness process by getting France, Venezuela, and the Inter-American Development Bank (Haiti’s three largest creditors) to wipe out Port-Au-Prince’s debt. But this is hardly a panacea. Haiti’s debt amounts to service payments of only $50 million per year. In other words, debt forgiveness will help, but it will not be significant enough to alleviate any real suffering.
  • Infrastructure: Infrastructure investment offers the quickest way to rebuild Haiti. Rebuilding the roads, bridges, and major points of transportation benefits individuals, businesses, and government. The international community should work with the Haitian people to make sure that building codes are drawn up and, more importantly, enforced. The destructiveness of the earthquake was magnified by the fact that almost no rebar was used to reinforce concrete structures in the country. This turned Port-au-Prince into a rubble field instead of a quake-struck city. Building-code enforcement would also protect against the hurricanes that frequently lash the country. To rebuild Port-au-Prince, the idea of acknowledging squatter’s rights may be the most effective way to rebuild quickly, by recognizing the tools for development that individuals already have at hand.
  • Funding: Given France’s colonial past with Haiti, the Obama administration and UN should invest significant political capital to press Paris to take the lead in funding infrastructure development. The colonial relationship between France and Haiti has been historically strained as France demanded — and received — compensation for its lost colony from a newly independent Haiti. Since it took Haiti 122 years to clear the books, France should seize the opportunity to right this historic wrong. Even in the aftermath of this disaster, the French have been shamefully outpaced by the British in the initial round of pledges, but they can rebound by making a more sizeable pledge at the Haiti donor conference in March.
  • Renew and Expand the CBI: But while France can take the lead on the debt-forgiveness front, the U.S. can take the lead on fostering development. The Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI), a trade-preferences act signed by President Reagan in 1982 is designed to promote development in the Caribbean countries – including Haiti. Its expiration — set for September 30 of this year — would be a further blow to the economic redevelopment of Haiti. In addition to just renewing it, however, the Congress and administration must expand the CBI to remove tariffs on Haiti’s agricultural production, specifically sugar. Allowing these vital drivers of the Haitian economy to be competitive in its largest export market would go far in giving Haitians a chance at sustained economic growth.

The rebuilding of Haiti after such a devastating event will be a long and difficult process. Local factors (corruption, lack of infrastructure, poverty) and international circumstances (the global recession, lack of focus by the international community) could forestall recovery. But firm resolve behind a nation-building project is critical if Haiti is to stand again. These prescriptions for both relief and reconstruction offer Haiti a meaningful chance to overcome the worst of the disaster and give the Haitian people hope for a better tomorrow.

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