The never-ending story of health care reform took another turn for the weird this week.
It began with liberals working themselves into a lather over Sen. Joe Lieberman’s threat to scuttle reform unless the Medicare buy-in was dropped. Now Howard Dean, liberal paladin and former Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, is campaigning openly to kill a Democratic president’s top domestic priority. Vermont’s Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Senate’s sole self-avowed social democrat, warns the White House that he is not a certain vote for health reform, though it’s unlikely that he would cast a vote with the Republicans to filibuster it either.
Liberals believe, perhaps with some justification, that Sen. Lieberman has forced changes in the bill simply to spite them. But it has to be said that Lieberman, at least, makes no pretense of being a party loyalist. He crossed the political Rubicon by appearing at the Republican National Convention in 2008 to endorse his friend John McCain. His decision to caucus with the Democrats is a marriage of convenience, so charges of infidelity seem beside the point.
No good purpose is served by the left’s fixation on Lieberman as a kind of progressive Judas. It’s creepily reminiscent of the orchestrated venom directed against the fictional turncoat “Goldstein” in George Orwell’s 1984.
What prompted Dean’s scream on health reform was the decision by Senate leaders, backed by the White House, to drop both the public option and the Medicare buy-in in pursuit of the 60 votes needed for passage. In a characteristically self-righteous outburst in today’s Washington Post, Dean helpfully accused his fellow Democrats of selling out to the health insurance industry.
The rifts among Democrats, coupled with monolithic Republican opposition to the Senate bill, have fed growing public doubts about health reform. According to a new NBC-Wall Street Journal poll, more Americans oppose the legislation than favor it (44-41 percent). Other surveys show that voters are worried that they’ll actually wind up paying more for health care after reform.
The President’s Principles
Now, liberals are understandably angry that Senate filibuster rules effectively give a handful of moderates inordinate power to block progressive measures backed by a majority of Senate Democrats. That’s triggered an important debate – featuredhere on P-Fix over whether it’s time for progressives to change those rules to either circumscribe or abolish the filibuster.
But it’s also true that liberals should not have expected that the Senate bill include a public option or the provision allowing people as young as 55 to buy health coverage from Medicare. The Senate Finance Committee bill did not include them and Obama promised neither during the campaign. In fact, the president has explicitly ruled out a single-payer approach, instead echoing PPI’s call for a distinctly American approach to universal health care, a public-private hybrid based on the principle of “shared responsibility.”
Many single-payer advocates, however, apparently view the president’s stance as purely tactical; surely, deep down, he’s with them. They see the public option and the buy-in as incremental steps toward a “Medicare for all” approach that ultimately will displace private health insurance.
Obama, however, has been admirably consistent about his top-line goals: expand coverage through public subsidies and mandates; prevent insurance companies from denying coverage or dropping people who get sick; drive medicine toward higher quality and lower costs; and do it all in a way that adds nothing to the deficit. The Senate bill, though riddled with imperfections and compromises, does an acceptable job of advancing those goals and moving the process forward to the final stage: a conference to reconcile House and Senate versions of reform.
So liberals have a choice. They can torpedo a bill backed by a Democratic president and nearly all Senate Democrats, a bill that would cover 30 million uninsured Americans, discipline health insurance companies, and begin the challenging task of containing health care cost growth, in favor of alternatives that stand no chance at all of passage. Or they can pocket the undoubted progressive gains embedded in the House and Senate bills, help their party pass landmark legislation, and keep working to build support in the country for their vision of health reform. Congress meets every year and there will be ample opportunities to refine whatever emerges from today’s legislative scrum.
Despite the public infighting and fratricidal rending of garments, congressional Democrats are only one vote away from an historic victory on health care reform. So progressives should stop obsessing over Joe Lieberman, turn off Howard Dean, and help Barack Obama bring home the prize.
OK, to review the debate so far: I wrote a post suggesting progressives might want to think twice before jettisoning the filibuster. Ed thought twice and said, yup, still want to get rid of it. Ezra did the same. I wrote another post saying, oh well whatever nevermind and tried to shift the subject to polarization being the real problem. I said I’d follow up about whether increasing polarization has been a one-sided affair. Crickets chirped. All hell broke loose on the health care reform front.And here we are.
So….one-sided polarization….Ever since Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s Off Center, all good progressives know that the growing political polarization has been one-sided, with Republicans pulling public policy “off center” through various nefarious means. Right?
Well….yes and no. Hacker and Pierson argued that, as of 2005, Republican activists and legislators had grown more conservative, but Democratic activists and legislators had not grown more liberal (and had even moved to the right themselves in some regards). Along with this shift, Republicans had developed effective strategies to move public policy further rightward than the typical voter preferred.
Since the rightward shift of Republicans occurred during a period in which Hacker and Pierson showed the distribution of self-identified ideology had not changed, the implication was that the electorate was being deprived of the more progressive policies that it desired. But a closer look at their data and analyses shows that while the increase in polarization among legislators has occurred disproportionately among Republicans, the evidence hints that this is because it proceeded from a Nixon-era Democratic Congress that was well to the left of the electorate.
Rather than refuting the idea that policy reflects the preferences of voters in the middle (the “median voter theorem”), as Hacker and Pierson claimed, the evidence actually bolsters this view. Correcting their claims is important if progressives are to govern effectively. Republicans did not simply pull public policy to the right of where Americans preferred, and now that Democrats are back in control of Congress, progressives should not assume that the median voter is leftier than she really is.
Why Off Center Is Off
To argue their case, Hacker and Pierson turned to scores created by Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal that put members of Congress past and present on a common scale measuring ideological position. Hacker and Pierson report that the polarization of Congress between the early 1970s and the early 2000s was almost entirely due to growing extremism among Republicans. Democratic legislators had not moved nearly as far from the center. Because of the increasing conservatism of Republicans, Congress was, in the early 2000s, far to the right of the median voter, who had not grown more conservative over time. But Hacker and Pierson’s account is flawed.
Consider the Senate.* Poole and Rosenthal’s scores, using every vote by every member of every Congress through the 108th Congress (which ran from 2003 to 2004), indicate that the “center” as of 2003-04 was typified by northeastern Republicans such as Lincoln Chafee, then-Independent Jim Jeffords, and William Cohen; Arlen Specter (now, of course, a Democrat); and by red-state Democrats such as Ben Nelson and John Breaux. In 1971-72, the median senator had a score of -0.056, equivalent to Ben Nelson’s score in 2003-04. By 2003-04, the median senator had a score of 0.061, equivalent to Arlen Specter in 2003-04.
This small change in the median of the Senate as a whole only hints at the fact that, as Hacker and Pierson claim, Republican senators did move farther ideologically than Democratic senators. The evidence that Hacker and Pierson presented describes how the median in one year compared with then-recent senators’ scores. In the early 1970s, according to Hacker and Pierson, the median Republican senator lay “significantly to the left of current GOP maverick John McCain of Arizona—around where conservative Democrat Zell Miller of Georgia stood” [where the references to McCain and Miller are to their 2003-04 scores, italics in the original]. The median Republican senator’s score then “doubled” by the early 2000s so that it sat “just shy of the ultraconservative position of Senator Rick Santorum.”
These descriptions do not quite reflect what the Poole-Rosenthal scores show. The median Republican senator’s score in 1971-72 was equidistant between McCain in 2003-04 and Miller in 2003-04, not closer to Miller, and it was just as close to McCain as the median Republican senator’s score in 2003-04 was to Santorum.
This claim also raises a technical issue. The Poole-Rosenthal scores are not ratio scales with a meaningful zero point. The distance between 0.2 and 0.4 is supposed to be the same as that between 1.2 and 1.4, but 1.2 is not “six times as conservative” as 0.2, because a score of 0 does not indicate the complete absence of conservatism. The zero point is completely arbitrary. The doubling from 0.2 to 0.4 would become an increase of just 50 percent if we added 0.2 to all of the scores (from 0.4 to 0.6). We cannot know whether Republican senators grew twice as conservative between the early 1970s and the early 2000s. Indeed, the phrase “twice as conservative” has no obvious meaning.
More to the point, Hacker and Pierson’s interpretation of these results is an even bigger problem. Rather than the Republican Party drifting ever rightward (the whole time increasingly “off center”), if the Democratic Party was “off center” in the early 1970s, then the movement among Republicans could be interpreted as a restoration of an equilibrium reflecting voter preferences. This is exactly what appears to have happened.
First of all, the medians for the 2003-04 Senate were 0.379 and -0.381 for Republicans and Democrats – essentially identical. That means that after this great rightward shift by Republicans, the parties were equally “extreme” by historical standards. Furthermore, the median Democratic senator in 1971-72 wasn’t much less extreme than the median senator from either party in 2003-04.
Second, at least in terms of self-identification, the ideological distribution of Americans was unchanged over this period, with roughly twice as many people calling themselves conservative as calling themselves liberal.**
Taking these facts together – a rightward shift by Republican legislators, an end state where Democrats and Republicans are equally “extreme”, and an ideological distribution among voters that was static over the period (and right-leaning) – the conclusion that best fits is that the Democratic Congress of 1971-72 was off center rather than the Republican Congress of 2003-04. The median Republican became more extreme over time, but that was because Congress became more representative of the electorate, not less. The story on the House side is much the same, except that the median Republican was a bit more “extreme” than the median Democrat by 2003-04 (although no more extreme than the median Democrat was in 1971-72).
Comparing the Activists
Hacker and Pierson also argue that Republican activists grew more extreme while Democratic activists became less so (becoming even less extreme than Democrats in general), but these claims are also problematic. Hacker and Pierson began by defining an activist as someone who self-identifies as a Democrat or a Republican and who participated in three out of five election-related activities asked about in the American National Election Studies. They measured ideology using a combination of two “thermometer” items – one of which asks respondents how warm or cold they feel toward liberals and one inquiring about conservatives. These scales range from 0 (cold) to 97 (hot). (The scale ends at 97 rather than 100 because in some years, the NES used codes 98 and 99 as missing value codes.) The liberal score is subtracted from 97 (so that high numbers then signify cold feelings) and then added to the conservative score. This number is divided by two, 0.5 is added to it, and the decimal is dropped. The resulting measure ranges from 0 (extremely warm toward liberals and extremely cold toward conservatives) to 97 (extremely cold toward liberals and extremely warm toward conservatives).
To determine how far activists drift from the center, they compared the activist scores on this index to the scores for independent voters. The distance from independents is expressed in percentage terms (e.g., 10 percent more conservative or liberal). Hacker and Pierson plotted the average distance from independents for Republican and Democratic activists and then “smoothed” the trends by imposing curves to describe them. The result is a graph that I replicated, more or less:
The graph shows that Republican activists were more extreme than Democratic activists to begin with, that they became more conservative over time, and that after becoming more liberal, Democratic activists tacked back toward the center. The first important thing to note about this graph is how much the nice, smooth lines depend on fitting the data points to a quadratic equation. The original data – without the smoothing – looks much messier:
The upward trend among Republican activists is still readily apparent, but the trend for Democratic activists no longer points toward moderation. The bouncing around is partly due to different turnout patterns in off-year elections, but also a result of statistical noise, as the sample sizes for each group are less than 70 – and as low as 18 – in each year. Furthermore, Republican and Democratic activists are statistically the same distance from the center for much of the period between 1968 and 1992. To illustrate further how deceptive the smoothed trend lines can be, look what happens to them when 2004 data – which was not available when Hacker and Pierson created the graph – is added:
The Republican line hardly changes, but now Democratic activists appear to grow steadily more liberal. It still appears as though Republican activists drifted from the center more than Democratic activists did, and Republican activists look more extreme in all years.
OK, take a breather. Tomorrow I’ll wrap up with some revealing evidence about how Hacker and Pierson’s definition of “the center” affects these analyses of political activists.
* Following their recent book, Polarized America (McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal, 2006), I use scores on Poole and Rosenthal’s first DW-NOMINATE dimension (for details, see https://polarizedamerica.com/ and https://www.voteview.com). Hacker and Pierson report using “d nominate” scores, but these are only constructed through the 99th Congress, so I am inclined to believe that they too used the first DW-NOMINATE dimension scores.
** Hacker and Pierson (2004), page 38. Hacker and Pierson cite ANES data. According to Gallup data showing self-identified ideology, the breakdown among Americans as a whole in 2004 was roughly 20 percent liberal, 40 percent moderate, and 40 percent conservative (Wave 2 of the June Poll, Question D10). In 1972, it was 25 percent, 34 percent, and 37 percent (Poll 851, Question 14).
The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect those of the Progressive Policy Institute.
The following is a guest column by Rep. Jared Polis (D), who represents Colorado’s 2nd Congressional District and is a member of the House Education and Labor Committee.
For education reformers who care about extending opportunity to every American family, these are exciting times. Congress has approved unprecedented funding to support our public schools, while at the same time driving much-needed and long-overdue reforms in states and districts across the nation through competitive grant programs like Race to the Top. Change is in the air and the upcoming reauthorization of Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) offers a historic opportunity to do the right thing for all of our children, regardless of background.
As a founder and former superintendent of charter schools serving at-risk students, I am heartened by the strong, fresh leadership of this administration and Congress in support of charter schools and innovation in public education. Both President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have repeatedly called for federal investment in innovative programs with a proven track record of helping schools meet high standards.
The $4 billion Race to the Top program incentivizes states to embrace charter schools; the $3.5 billion Title I School Improvement Grants feature charter schools as a key strategy in turning around poor schools; and the $650 million Investing in Innovation Fund invites entrepreneurial charters to partner with districts to improve student outcomes. The House Committee on Education and Labor, on which I serve, held a very informative hearing in June highlighting the amazing results attained in top-performing innovative charter schools around the country.
For those of us who have been advocating the critical role that high-quality charter schools can play in helping to close the achievement gap – and kudos to the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) for being a pioneer in touting the potential of charter schools since the mid-1990s, well before they became widely recognized – the current push for reform is gratifying. But it also requires us to think about what’s next for the charter movement in the federal framework. Seventeen years after the first charter school opened in Minnesota, what have we learned and how should ESEA reflect those lessons?
The Next Step: Scaling Up Successful Innovation
I believe we need to develop the 2.0 version of federal investment in charter schools. While we should continue supporting the Charter School Program, which helps start-ups, we must now focus on scaling up successful innovation – the proven models that we know get the job done in schools across the country. That is why I have introduced H.R. 4330, the All Students Achieving through Reform or All-STAR Act, which will enable and encourage top-performing public charter school models to expand and replicate, and also strengthen public charter school accountability and transparency. The All-STAR Act:
Establishes a new competitive grant program for the expansion and replication of top-performing public charter schools to serve at-risk students who are currently in underperforming schools.
Encourages new rigorous levels of reporting, oversight, and accountability for charter school authorizers, including intervention in or closure of low-quality charter schools.
Focuses resources on areas that are most in need by giving priority to eligible entities that serve a large share of low-income students who are enrolled in underperforming schools.
Gives priority to states that do not have caps restricting the growth of public charter schools and have policies in place that support academically successful charter schools, provide autonomy to schools, promote strong authorizing policies, and ensure quality control through performance-based accountability.
The bipartisan ALL-STAR Act is supported by several major education and civil rights organizations, including the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, Education Equality Project, United Negro College Fund, National Council of La Raza, Thomas Fordham Foundation, Democrats for Education Reform, National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, National Association of Charter School Authorizers, Center for American Progress Action Fund, and of course, PPI. It is also backed by major charter management organizations like KIPP, Aspire, Achievement First, and others.
All-STAR reflects the need for us to build on what we already know works. As America keeps losing ground in the global competition for human capital development, we have no time to waste. While systemic reform is desperately needed, we must act now with the tools we have at our disposal. Let’s reward educational entrepreneurship, duplicate and expand success, and help close the achievement gap. America’s students deserve nothing less.
David Brooks, oh how you are a dying breed: the rational, thoughtful conservative who holds true to his core values while having the humility to actually grant the other guy a point.
He also may have a man-crush on the president. Which is why it’s perhaps not so surprising that Brooks’ most recent column follows up on a point I made a few days ago: that Barack Obama’s foreign policy is grounded in thoroughly progressive values. Here’s an excerpt:
In 2002, Obama spoke against the Iraq war, but from the vantage point of a cold war liberal. He said he was not against war per se, just this one, and he was booed by the crowd. In 2007, he spoke about the way Niebuhr formed his thinking: “I take away the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction.”
His speeches at West Point and Oslo this year are pitch-perfect explications of the liberal internationalist approach. Other Democrats talk tough in a secular way, but Obama’s speeches were thoroughly theological. He talked about the “core struggle of human nature” between love and evil.
More than usual, he talked about the high ideals of the human rights activists and America’s history as a vehicle for democracy, prosperity and human rights. He talked about America’s “strategic interest in binding ourselves to certain rules of conduct.” Most of all, he talked about the paradox at the core of cold war liberalism, of the need to balance “two seemingly irreconcilable truths” — that war is both folly and necessary.
Brooks used the term “liberal internationalism” to describe Obama’s approach, something not dissimilar from what we at PPI prefer to call “progressive internationalism.” Here’s what PPI said back in 2003:
Progressive internationalism stresses the responsibilities that come with our enormous power: to use force with restraint but not to hesitate to use it when necessary, to show what the Declaration of Independence called “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind,” to exercise leadership primarily through persuasion rather than coercion, to reduce human suffering where we can, and to create alliances and international institutions committed to upholding a decent world order.
The Obama administration has taken a lot of heat for being “too realist” in its approach to foreign policy. Certainly there’s evidence to support that claim: Brooks says the White House “misjudged the emotional moment when Iranians were marching in Tehran.” And there was the uncomfortable incident when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sidestepped the issue of human rights in China because they “couldn’t interfere with the global economic crisis” (which she recently tried to rectify in a speech at Georgetown). True enough, at least for now.
However, when books are written on the Obama administration’s foreign policy, I’d bet the prevailing narrative will be that of an administration that sought to identify and resolve discrete national security challenges while guided by keen attention to America’s values. Closing Guantanamo is perhaps the best example thus far.
As the Democrats try to pick up the pieces of the blown-up public option compromise and move forward on health reform, some on the left have thrown up their hands and claim that the bill as it stands isn’t even worth passing any more. Cue Howard Dean:
“The Senate version is not worth passing,” former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean told POLITICO, referring to plans to strip the latest compromise from the bill, a Medicare buy-in. “I think in this particular iteration, this is the end of the road for reform.”
Dean said there are some good elements in the bill, but lawmakers should pull the plug and revisit the issue in Obama’s second term, unless Democrats are willing to shortcut a GOP filibuster. “No one will think this is health care reform. This is not even insurance reform,” he said. [emphasis mine]
Does Howard Dean really think that Obama is a shoo-in for a second term — and, on top of that, will face a more favorable Congress then — if the health reform effort collapses? That the bill’s failure now would lead to better chances for passage later? As Kevin Drum wrote, “If healthcare reform dies this year, it dies for a good long time.”
The estimable Nate Silver offers some forceful policy commentary to shake some sense into his fellow progressives, comparing the different scenarios for a family of four earning $54,000 under the Senate bill, under the status quo plus inflation, and under the status quo plus inflation plus S-CHIP. The result, you won’t be surprised, is that the family by far fares best under the Senate bill. Some might rightly argue that the cost is still not so affordable if a member of the family gets sick. But the costs would be debilitating without health reform at all.
Ezra Klein, who’s been banging the drum for passage, gets it right:
“This is a good bill,” Sen. Sherrod Brown said on Countdown last night. “Not a great bill, but a good bill.” That’s about right. But the other piece to remember is that more than it’s a good bill, it’s a good start. With $900 billion in subsidies already in place, it’s easier to add another hundred billion later, if we need it, than it would be to pass $1 trillion in subsidies in 2011. With the exchanges built and private insurers unable to hold down costs, it’s easier to argue for adding a strong public option to the market than it was before we’d tried regulation and a new competitive structure. With 95 percent of the country covered, it’s easier to go the final 5 percent. And with a health-care reform bill actually passed, it’s easier to convince legislators that passing such bills is possible.
Let’s hope progressive activists maintain their perspective on the bill and listen to the wonks (a divide that Steve Benen wrote about yesterday). Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security all had their inadequacies when originally passed. But those shortcomings were addressed over time. The same would go for health care reform. But first you have to pass a bill.
The efforts by a handful of conservative commentators to steer the Republican Party from its Beck-Palin trajectory continue. Here’s Michael Petrilli writing in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal:
What’s needed is a full-fledged effort to cultivate “Whole Foods Republicans”—independent-minded voters who embrace a progressive lifestyle but not progressive politics. These highly-educated individuals appreciate diversity and would never tell racist or homophobic jokes; they like living in walkable urban environments; they believe in environmental stewardship, community service and a spirit of inclusion. And yes, many shop at Whole Foods, which has become a symbol of progressive affluence but is also a good example of the free enterprise system at work. (Not to mention that its founder is a well-known libertarian who took to these pages to excoriate ObamaCare as inimical to market principles.)
What makes these voters potential Republicans is that, lifestyle choices aside, they view big government with great suspicion. There’s no law that someone who enjoys organic food, rides his bike to work, or wants a diverse school for his kids must also believe that the federal government should take over the health-care system or waste money on thousands of social programs with no evidence of effectiveness. Nor do highly educated people have to agree that a strong national defense is harmful to the cause of peace and international cooperation.
He warns that the demographics don’t look good for the GOP – that, in addition to the party’s deficit among the young, blacks, and Hispanics, college-educated Americans are now trending Democratic as well. Unless the GOP changes, the country will leave it behind.
Petrilli’s column is worth noting not because it’s bad — it actually contains sound advice for his party — but because of how comically futile it is. Asking the Republican Party to renounce anti-intellectualism is like asking a fish to renounce water. The modern GOP eats, drinks, breathes, and lives know-nothingism. You might as well ask the Republican Party to disband.
I have no doubt that there are some moderate Republicans out there who cringe at the thought of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. I also have no doubt that there are plenty of independents who could be persuaded by a more moderate conservatism (or, failing that, fall for something that looks like it). And I should note that I’m pretty skeptical of the Democrats’ chances in November 2010 – the anti-incumbent mood combined with the narrower electorate in midterms seems to spell doom for Dems.
That said, the party that Petrilli dreams of doesn’t look remotely like the party that he actually belongs to. Here’s what the educated, independent voter thinking of becoming a Whole Foods Republican has awaiting them: a party now comprised of an all-time-high proportion identifying themselves as “very conservative”; whose majority thinks ACORN stole the election for Barack Obama; and whose rank-and-file honestly believe that Obama has a “secret agenda” to bankrupt the country and expand the government.
Having pegged so much of their party’s identity to a culture-war mentality pitting oppressive cosmopolitans versus red-blooded heartlanders, the GOP now finds itself stuck with the ones who brung ‘em. And the ones that brung ‘em don’t want to let anyone else in, unless they look and think exactly like ’em.
Three cheers for Dick Durbin, the senior senator from Illinois.
Rather than offering shrill, partisan talking points at the prospect of closing the Guantanamo prison—equal parts Islamic extremist recruiting tool and human rights stain on our national psyche—Senator Durbin has consistentlyoffered a pragmatic, progressive voice that is steadfast in its resolve to close Gitmo while ensuring the security of the country. The result is today’s announcement that the administration will likely open the detention facility in Thompson, Illinois as the destination for many of Guantanamo’s detainees.
Continuing Guantanamo, unfortunately, makes our troops less safe. The bottom line as I see it is Guantanamo should close in an orderly way. … The fact is that closing Guantanamo, that announcement by the president, as well as abandoning torture techniques and so-called enhanced interrogation, finally said to the rest of the world that it’s a new day. Join us in a new approach to keeping this world and America safe. I think it was a break from the past we desperately needed. …
[W]hen we checked with the director of FBI, Mr. Mueller, he said there’s no question that supermax facilities, not a single escape, we limit the communication of these detainees and prisoners, and we can continue to do that. …
I’d be OK with them in a supermax facility, because we’ve never had an escape from one. And as I said, we have over 340 convicted terrorists now being held safely in our prisons. I just don’t hear anyone suggesting releasing them or sending them to another country. That isn’t part of the prospect that we have before us. …
With this stance, Durbin shows how rational solutions are hardly mutually exclusive from either American values or safety: closing Guantanamo is a moral and security imperative, and the idea that America’s well-being is threatened by terrorists in supermax facilities is nothing more than a political scare tactic.
And as a result of Durbin’s sensible position, it looks like job-starved Illinois will be rewarded in the process. The state will retro-fit the empty Thompson prison to meet the new security standards, and then have to staff the facility once open. Thompson sits in Carroll County, IL, where unemployment rests at 11.1 percent; a refurbished facility could bring as many as 3,000 jobs.
And though this is anecdotal evidence, I asked Mike Satlak—my college buddy, an Oswego, IL resident, and in the interest of full disclosure, a Dick Durbin fan—about the prospect of moving prisoners to rural Illinois. “I’m not scared at all of any security threat, I live 120 miles from Thompson and it could really use the jobs.”
The big news out of Italy last weekend was the vicious assault on Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in Milan. The attack overshadowed the birth of a new center-left alliance determined to give Italians an alternative both to Berlusconi and a left mired in stale, social democratic dogma.
The launch of the Alleanza L’Italia (Alliance for Italy) in Parma over the weekend effectively dissolved the brief union of the two major opposition parties: the Democrats of the Left (the main social-democratic party) and the smaller, centrist Margherita (which in Italian means a daisy, not a drink). The two merged into the Democratic Party in 2007 in a bid to unify Italy’s fractious center-left.
But it was an unhappy marriage. The Democrats suffered a string of electoral defeats and leadership changes. Moderates chafed at the doctrinal rigidity of the dominant social democratic faction, which they believe has helped to polarize society while convincing many middle-class voters that progressives aren’t capable of governing. “We want to redress the balance toward the center,” explained Francesco Rutelli, the former Margherita chief and mayor of Rome who is the moving spirit behind the Alleanza. What Italy needs, he said, is a new center-left governing platform grounded in the values of “freedom, economic innovation and social cohesion.” (Full disclosure: I attended the Parma meeting as a guest of the Alleanza).
What apparently triggered the divorce was the Democrats’ decision to join the Socialist caucus in the European parliament. “Socialist parties in Europe are being defeated everywhere,” noted another key Alleanza leader, Gianni Vernetti. He’s right. In the 2009 European elections, center right parties led in 21 out of 27 European Union countries. In what many observers are calling the “European paradox,” the global financial crisis has given no boost to social democratic parties, despite their traditional skepticism toward free market economics.
One reason is that Europe’s center-right parties long ago made peace with the “social market,” which they promise to manage more efficiently. European social democrats, meanwhile, often seem more interested in defending the welfare state status quo than in modernizing their economies and politics.
Alleanza’s organizers repeatedly stressed the link between Italy’s political polarization and its economic stagnation. They promised pragmatic reforms intended to spur economic innovation and growth. And they framed their appeals to groups that have been cool to the center-left – small business operators, entrepreneurs and especially young voters, whose economic prospects are especially bleak.
The Alleanza also seems determined to break with the quasi-pacifist stance of many on the European left. Vernetti, deputy foreign minister in the last center-left government, emphasized Italy’s responsibility to contribute to security in an interdependent world. He urged progressives to rise above partisanship and approve the government’s request for funds to send 1,000 more troops to Afghanistan.
Seen from one perspective, the Alleanza’s birth marks yet another rupture in Italy’s fissiparous center-left. But from another vantage point – the need for Italian progressives to fashion a credible governing agenda for reform and renewal, to forge a new political center — it is a promising development indeed.
If you’ve been following the Copenhagen process this week, you may have noticed that the “debate” over climate change and what to do about it has regressed. Whereas, just a few years ago, George W. Bush acknowledged the human role in global warming and John McCain was a leading proponent of climate-change legislation, know-nothingism is now resurgent. The GOP pins its electoral hopes on slogans like “drill, baby drill” and “cap-and-tax”; McCain has soured on cap-and-trade; and on the nation’s airwaves and op-ed pages, climate-change deniers (and their more circumspect brethren, the “skeptics”) crow triumphantly at every snowstorm and every controversy, real or imagined, that puts climate scientists on the defensive.
Worse yet, many years of painstaking efforts to explain climate change to the American people and get them concerned about it seem to be gradually unraveling. As Chris Mooney notes in a piece on the ‘disastrous’ turn in the narrative, an October 2009 Pew report shows that, since April 2008, the number of Americans who believe there is “solid evidence the earth is warming” has dropped from 71 percent to 57 percent. During that same period, the proportion who accept the existence of climate change and attribute it to human activity has dropped from 47 percent to 36 percent–not exactly a robust constituency for immediate action. (There is a brand new poll from the World Bank that suggests more robust support among Americans for carbon emissions limits; I hope–but don’t believe, in the absence of more details–that it’s accurate.)
What is causing this apparent unraveling? There are three competing theories as to its source:
(1) The first and most obvious is that support for allegedly expensive or growth-threatening environmental action always declines during economic downturns. Gallupperiodically asks Americans which they value more: environmental protection or economic growth. Interestingly, from 1984–2008, a plurality (and usually a strong majority) of Americans always prioritized the environment over growth (even when their voting behavior indicated otherwise). But this tendency to prioritize environmental action does flag during recessions, as was evidenced by a steep slide in the “top priority environment” / “top priority growth” ratio from 70 percent / 23 percent in 2000 to 47 percent / 42 percent in 2003. After an uptick in support for the environment as a priority over the economy from 2004–2007, the ratio nose-dived during the most recent economic crisis, to the point where an actual majoritysaid the economy is more important in March 2009 (51 percent / 42 percent), the first time that has happened in Gallup’s polling.
(2) A second possibility is that the change in public opinion is largely a byproduct of the radicalization of the Republican Party. There’s certainly some support for that proposition in the Pew surveys. As recently as 2007, 62 percent of self-identified Republicans told Pew they believed there was solid evidence for global warming. That percentage dropped to 49 percent in 2008 and then to 35 percent this year. (There’s also been a similarly large drop in belief about global warming among self-identified independents—a group that includes a lot of people who are objectively Republicans. The drop among Democrats has been less than half as large.) It’s probably no accident that this change of opinion occurred during the 2008 campaign, when Republicans suddenly made offshore drilling their top energy-policy priority, and this year, when virtually anything embraced by the Obama administration has drawn the collective wrath of the GOP.
(3) Then, there’s the third factor that might explain the changes in public opinion: a determined effort by the hard-core anti-environmental right to dominate the discussion and change its terms. This is the main subject of Mooney’s essay, which focuses on the “statistical liars” like columnist George Will who have distorted climate data to raise doubts about the scientific consensus, and on the continuing brouhaha in the conservative media about “Climategate.” Matt Yglesias has gone further, arguing that climate-change deniers have scored a coup by convincing the mainstream media (most notably the Washington Post, which regularly publishes Will’s columns, and recently published a predictably shrill op-ed by Sarah Palin on the subject) to treat the existence of climate change as scientifically debatable.
I have no compelling evidence to demonstrate which of these factors has contributed most to the gradual ungreening of America, but there are ways to mitigate the negative impacts from all three. Fears that environmental protection is “unaffordable” in a poor economy are obviously cyclical, so unless we are in a recession that will endure for many years, this problem should at some point recede. What’s more, there’s some evidence that suggests efforts to sell action on climate change as “pro-growth” via investments in green technologies can help cushion the public’s skepticism.
Meanwhile, the second and third causes—GOP radicalization and the revival of a powerful denialist media presence—are clearly interrelated. Self-identified Republicans who spend a lot of time watching Fox News are obviously influenced by the torrent of “information” about the “hoax” of global climate change; while both conservative opinion leaders and GOP politicians are invested in promoting polarization on a historic scale. But this toxic environment would be largely self-contained if misinformation weren’t bleeding over into the broader discourse that includes Americans who don’t think Obama is a committed socialist or that environmentalists want to take the country back to the Stone Age.
And that’s why Yglesias is right: This is one area of public policy where “respect for contrary views” and “editorial balance” are misplaced. Sure, there are many aspects of the climate-change challenge that ought to be debated, and not just between those at the ideological and partisan extremes. But we shouldn’t be “debating” whether or not the scientific consensus on climate change actually represents a vast conspiracy to destroy capitalism and enslave the human race, any more than we should be debating whether “death panels” are a key element of health care reform.
This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.
Word hit the street over the weekend that senior CIA officials have been pushing the Obama administration to expand unmanned aerial drone attacks against targets in Quetta, Pakistan. In the spies’ cross hairs are top Taliban commanders based in that city, a massive regional population center.
If counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations aren’t your cup of tea, you may have missed the ever-expanding role that unmanned drones have played in Pakistan. While it’s true that President Obama has recently signed off on the program’s expanded use to now include more of Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas, the issue of targeting Quetta seems to have given the White House some pause:
A former senior CIA official said he and others were repeatedly rebuffed when proposing operations in Baluchistan or pushing Pakistan to target the Taliban in Quetta. “It wasn’t easy to talk about,” the official said. “The conversations didn’t last a long time.”
That sounds about right — attacking Quetta is a bridge too far in the drone war. Here’s why.
Many question whether we should have an unmanned drone program in the first place. There are strong and reasoned arguments from intelligent analysts who believe the costs of a drone program outweigh its benefits. The strongest argument is that by unintentionally causing civilian casualties with off-target or ill-timed strikes, the program agitates and alienates the population that the counter-insurgents are supposed to be protecting and winning over.
After this story first broke, I agreed with the basic premise of that argument, but said that drone attacks should be “extraordinarily limited, not stopped” because they were a “valuable tool in certain rare circumstances,” like when corroborated evidence places a senior Al Qaeda figure in a relatively remote location. Further, I developed five criteria as guidelines to determine when those might be. My fourth criterion is that it’s “unrealistic to say that drones won’t fire on population centers because then the targets would just hide in plain sight. However, the U.S. must carefully weigh the chance of civilian casualties and seek to avoid them — by using smaller missiles, modifying times of the strikes, etc. — at all costs.”
Quetta is a city of 850,000 people, and it is difficult to imagine that innocent civilians could be reasonably avoided in any single strike — no matter how good the intelligence is. Therefore, the administration is right to endorse the general practice while opposing its application in this specific instance.
Last week saw the release of a new report (PDF) from Kansas State University that compares and summarizes the findings of several cost-benefit studies of cap-and-trade’s impact on the agriculture sector. The report confirms what we’ve written in the past: that the farm industry is actually going to come out well if cap-and-trade as currently designed is implemented.
According to the study:
Overall, the research suggests U.S. agriculture has more to gain than lose with the passage of H.R. 2454. The bill specifically exempts production agriculture from emissions caps, provides provisions to ease the transition to higher fertilizer prices and fosters the development of carbon offset markets which likely will enhance agricultural revenues.
The report acknowledges that costs will rise as a result of setting a cap on emissions. But the size of the increase for farmers would be relatively small. Moreover, much of the cost would be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. In the short-run, per-acre profitability would see a dip, but the researchers claim it will be modest. And – a particularly important point with Copenhagen going on – if other countries adopt similar legislation, American farmers would not lose their competitive advantage, the market for agricultural commodities will adjust, and producer profits would return to pre-cap-and-trade levels in the long run.
That’s the cost side of the ledger. The benefits for farmers are potentially enormous. Income from carbon offsets (these could include methane capture, bioenergy crop production, and grassland sequestration) would more than compensate for the higher input costs under a cap-and-trade system. In addition, the increased demand for biofuels under cap-and-trade would also bring benefits, as the agriculture and forestry sectors are the main sources of stocks for bioenergy.
In other words, the creation of a new market brings new incentives and revenue opportunities. It’s the lesson that people who oppose cap-and-trade always seem to forget: as with any market, there will be losers and winners.
It’s been said that money is the mother’s milk of American politics. Congressional incumbents spend about a third of their time chasing after it in never-ending campaigns for reelection. Interest groups contribute it in ever-increasing sums to politicians as an investment in government policy, or at least as a cost of doing business. Political consultants and the broadcast media collect it by the hundreds of millions every two years, thanks to the epic, televised spectacle we call the modern campaign.
Difficult though it may be to imagine American politics unconstrained by big money in elections, that is hardly reason for pragmatic progressives not to think creatively about the sources, uses, and effects of private campaign cash. For those concerned about the distribution of political voice and power in our democracy — not to mention the nation’s ability to address an ominous set of economic, social, and environmental challenges — it may be the most important long-term question we face. And with the Supreme Court set to hand down a landmark decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission on the “free speech” rights of corporations to spend unlimited sums of money on political campaigns, the time for Congress to reconsider this question is now.
This policy paper endeavors to set the stage for meaningful campaign finance reform in the 111th Congress by providing an analytical framework that is better suited to the times. It begins with a critical examination of the dueling views of liberal reformers and their conservative adversaries over the role of money in politics, and posits that the old ways of “regulate and restrict” are out of date. Principles aside, such are the facts of life under a conservative high court.
It then proposes an alternative, two-part framework for reform: (1) a “more speech” approach that levels up rather than limits down speech opportunities for qualified candidates without added regulation; and (2) a more nuanced and evenhanded conception of political influence-peddling in Washington, which favors system-level accountability over anecdotal accusations of vote-buying and political corruption. It concludes with a discussion of legislation now before Congress, the Fair Elections Now Act (H.R. 1826 and S. 752), which would establish a voluntary public funding system involving small donors and matching public funds. With its emphasis on small donors and expanding participation, the legislation would go a long way toward achieving the goals of fairness and accountability in American elections.
PPI Senior Fellow Ed Kilgore reviews two new books on Ayn Rand in the newest issue of Democracy. Here’s an excerpt:
When the novelist, philosopher, and social critic Ayn Rand died in New York in 1982, her world had been reduced to a small group of sycophantic disciples, ironically dubbed “The Collective.” Twenty-plus years later, though, the circle of Rand’s influence is arguably wider than ever. While Rand has never lacked for book sales–the nature of her fiction virtually guarantees a self-renewing audience of underappreciated adolescents and self-righteous business executives–at present, her work is exerting far more political influence than it has enjoyed since the earliest days of American libertarianism. As Jonathan Chait of The New Republic and others have explained, Rand’s denunciations of government taxation and regulation as “looting” and her moral defense of capitalism are crucial to conservative rhetoric these days, especially within the militant “Tea Party” movement.
What a coincidence, then, that two well-researched, serious books on Rand should appear this year. Jennifer Burns, a University of Virginia historian, has penned a fine account of Rand’s life that particularly focuses on her place in the pantheon of the American Right, while veteran magazine editor Anne C. Heller (her resume ranges from The Antioch Review to Lear’s) has written a more conventional biography that thoroughly explores the heretofore darker corners of Rand’s life, including her childhood and adolescence in revolutionary Russia. While neither are Rand disciples (although Burns, unlike Heller, was given access to Rand’s private papers, zealously guarded by her institutional monument, the Ayn Rand Institute), both defend her philosophical originality and her literary talent, and both view her as a tragic figure whose greatness was spoiled by her intolerance for dissent and her abusive private behavior toward her closest associates and potential allies. They also think she has been vindicated by her posthumous impact on the libertarian movement and a variety of writers and entrepreneurs, including the founders of Wikipedia and Craigslist.
But much as Rand craved appreciation for her work (as sadly reflected in the worshipful eyes of The Collective and her bitterness about every negative book review she ever received), it’s hard to imagine that she would have been terribly happy about its current appropriation by a motley assortment of conservative populists, who mix quotes from The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged with Christian Scripture and the less-than-cerebral perspectives of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck. In her own view, Rand was nothing if not a systematic philosopher whose ideas demanded an unconditional acceptance of her approach to metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, psychology, literature, and politics.
Rand’s famous intolerance should not be dismissed as simply the psychological aberration of a flawed genius. She feared, for good reason, what lesser minds might do with the intellectual dynamite of her work when divorced from its philosophical context. The prophetess of “the virtue of selfishness” made rigorous demands of herself and all her followers to live self-consciously “heroic” lives under a virtual tyranny of reason and self-mastery, and to reject every imaginable natural and supernatural limitation on personal responsibility for every action and its consequences. Take all that away–take everything away that Rand actually cared about–and her fictional work represents little more than soft porn for middle-brow reactionaries who seek to rationalize their resentment of the great unwashed. This is why Rand was so precise about the moral obligations and absolute consistency demanded both of her fictional “heroes” and her acolytes. She hated “second-handers,” people who borrowed others’ philosophies without understanding or following them.
Stephen Hadley, George W. Bush’s national security advisor, has set forth some rather appalling revisionist history in this morning’s Washington Post. Though he supports President Obama’s surge, he effectively tries to wash his hands of any culpability for the entire Afghanistan mess.
Sorry Mr. Hadley, but that just won’t fly.
Hadley believes that everything was going just swimmingly until mid-2006, when those darned Pakistanis went and screwed the whole thing up:
As to security, the U.N. Security Council authorized an international military force in December 2001, put it under NATO command in August 2003 and expanded its writ to all of Afghanistan in October 2003. Afghan army and police forces were being recruited, trained and equipped. Most of the country was free of violence.
But in 2006, the situation deteriorated. Suicide bombings and attacks using improvised explosive devices spiked. Corruption and poppy production grew dramatically, and the central government failed to establish an effective presence in the provinces. The planned Afghan security force was simply too small to handle the escalating violence.
In September 2006, Afghanistan’s neighbor Pakistan embarked on a series of well-intentioned but ill-fated deals intended to entice local tribes to support the government in Kabul. The tribes were supposed to expel al-Qaeda and end Taliban attacks in exchange for economic assistance and the withdrawal of Pakistani troops. Instead, these badly executed agreements strengthened the terrorist havens.
Then, Hadley explains, Bush’s buddy Pervez Musharraf went and had himself a little constitutional crisis, which really put the well-meaning and allegedly competent Bush administration behind the eight ball:
Then Pakistan plunged into an 18-month political crisis, beginning in March 2007 when President Pervez Musharraf fired the country’s chief justice and ending with Musharraf’s resignation in August 2008. Consumed by political chaos, Pakistan could only watch as al-Qaeda terrorists and their Taliban allies launched attacks not only in Afghanistan but also in Pakistan — including the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.
Some argue that America could not respond to the deteriorating situation because its attention and its troops were all focused on Iraq. Yet despite troop demands for Iraq, President George W. Bush and our coalition allies launched a “quiet surge” in Afghanistan to meet the new challenge.
See? Isn’t it amazing how well the Bush administration handled everything and we just never knew about it?
Spare me. What Hadley chooses to selectively ignore is his administration’s failure to capitalize on Afghanistan’s relative calm in the 2001-2006 time frame. True, the initial Afghanistan war plan was successfully executed, and violence was significantly down (compared to, say, 2009 levels) across the country.
But instead of building on that initial military success by focusing on enduring security, infrastructure, and civil service capacities, Hadley shares responsibility for diverting America’s attention to a war of choice in Iraq launched under thin pretexts. In the process, billions of dollars and countless man-hours at the Pentagon, State Department, and White House (including Mr. Hadley’s NSC) that should have been spent stabilizing Afghanistan in 2003 were shifted westward.
The 10,000 additional troops that Hadley crows about later in the article are an embarrassingly weak and tardy prescription for an aggressive viral problem that was getting out of hand.
Too little, too late, Mr. Hadley. You should be ashamed.
The former chair of the House Agriculture Committee, Rep. Kiki de la Garza (D-TX), used to quiz audiences with a riddle: “When does a nuclear submarine need to rise out of the water?” People would guess that it would rise when it needed air, but he explained that it could turn the water into oxygen. Others would guess that it would rise when it ran out of fuel, but he would then explain that the nuclear fuel would last for years. When no one could guess, he would answer the riddle: “When it ran out of food.”
Given that food is a basic human need, it is amazing that people almost always failed to figure out his riddle. More broadly, it is astonishing how often food is overlooked in so many vital policy discussions. (The neglect spills over into pop culture: In the earliest version of the classic computer simulation game SimCity, you could decide where to put a football stadium or museum but not where food stores or markets should be.) For most of U.S. history, urban planners have usually ignored food issues in their grand schemes.
We need an entirely different mindset. Food should be a central organizing principle for neighborhood development, uniting residents through community gardens, farmers’ markets, supermarkets, food cooperatives, and food-related small businesses. Community gardens can reclaim empty lots from drug pushers. Food businesses can create jobs and raise community income. Farmers’ markets can give neighborhoods central gathering spaces and nurture a feeling of the “public commons” that is so often lost in today’s society. This new mindset will benefit both our economy and public health.
For a community to have good nutrition, three conditions are necessary: food must be affordable; food must be available; and individuals and families must have enough education to know how to eat better. If you don’t have all three legs of this stool, it will collapse. Yet all too often, projects only focus on one of the three. Many provide nutrition education, lecturing people that they should eat better, but make food neither more available nor more affordable. Sometimes, food is brought into low-income neighborhoods, but at prices too high for most people to afford. That won’t work either. The only way to truly succeed is to focus on all three aspects of this problem at once.
To read the executive summary, click here. To download the report, click here.
Whatever else happened politically in 2009 — and a lot obviously happened — one development that couldn’t quite have been anticipated was the erosion of public confidence in the case for doing something about global climate change.
Yes, recessions always diminish interest in environmental action, on the theory that it’s something we can only “afford” in prosperous times. But that’s not the half of it, as Chris Mooney explains at Science Progress:
Back in 2006, the year of the release of An Inconvenient Truth, it felt as though serious and irreversible progress had finally been made on the climate issue. The feeling continued in 2007, when Al Gore won the Nobel and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announced that global warming was “unequivocal” and “very likely” human caused. Mega-companies like General Electric were burnishing new green identities, and the Prius was an icon. The Bush administration was widely suspected of having deceived the public about the urgency of the climate issue, and journalists were backing away from their previous penchant for writing “on the one hand, on the other hand” stories about the increasingly indisputable science.Then came the election of Barack Obama, boasting a forward-looking policy agenda to address global warming and a stellar team of scientists and environmentalists in his cabinet and circle of advisers, including climate and energy expert John Holdren and Nobel Laureate Steven Chu. The United States, it seemed, would finally deal with global warming—and just in the nick of time.
Who could have known, at the time, that the climate deniers and contrarians had not yet launched their greatest and most devastating attack?
The “story” on this subject changed, says Mooney, thanks to two separate lines of argument from conservatives that exploited public doubts on climate science. The first was the hammer-headed approach of pointing to cold temperatures here or there as “proof” there was no global warming:
The new skeptic strategy began with a ploy that initially seemed so foolish, so petty, that it was unworthy of dignifying with a response. The contrarians seized upon the hottest year in some temperature records, 1998—which happens to have been an El Nino year, hence its striking warmth—and began to hammer the message that there had been “no warming in a decade” since then.It was, in truth, little more than a damn lie with statistics. Those in the science community eventually pointed out that global warming doesn’t mean every successive year will be hotter than the last one—global temperatures be on the rise without a new record being set every year. All climate theory predicts is that we will see a warming trend, and we certainly have. Or as the U.S. EPA recently put it, “Eight of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 2001.” But none of them beat 1998; and so the statistical liars, like George Will of the Washington Post, continued their charade.
The second prong of the backlash against a climate change consensus among Americans was all about the incident that delighted conservatives call “ClimateGate.” If you’ve somehow missed it, emails hacked and linked from the bowels of a British climate change institute allegedly show coverups of inconvenient data and other un-kosher practices. It’s not clear why this is supposed to make us all assume that climate science is a vast cesspool of conspiracy, but that’s how it has been used by climate change deniers, notes Mooney:
“ClimateGate” generated a massive wave of media attention, blending together the skeptics’ longstanding focus on undercutting climate science with a new overwhelming message of scandal and wrongdoing on the part of the climate research establishment. This story was not going to go away, and even as scientists put out statements (most of them several days late) explaining that the science of climate remains unchanged and unaffected by whatever went on at East Anglia, the case for human-caused global warming was dealt a blow the likes of which we have perhaps never before seen.
The timing of the ClimateGate furor, on the eve of international discussions on global climate change, isn’t coincidental, and has obviously been as destructive as it was intended to be.
It may well be that increasing public doubts about climate change in this country are just rationalizations for the normal fear that saving the planet is in conflict with saving jobs, and is thus a challenge best consigned to mañana.
But the aggressive campaign of denialists and skeptics, skillfully exploiting every bit of evidence and pseudo-evidence that the consensus on climate change is unravelling, is a factor too large to ignore.
This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.
Stephen Hadley, George W. Bush’s national security advisor, has set forth some rather 
Whatever else happened politically in 2009 — and a lot obviously happened — one development that couldn’t quite have been anticipated was the erosion of public confidence in the case for doing something about global climate change.