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A Conversation with an Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula Expert

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Sana, YemenChristmas Day would-be bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was connected to a group called Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, often referred to as AQAP. Since that attempted attack, I’ve found a disturbing lack of clarity in the public debate about who AQAP is, how they differ from AQ’s senior leadership, and what their ideological aims are. It’s very easy to say “Al Qaeda” on the news. Such generalized branding doesn’t allow the public to digest the fact that AQ’s regional branches operate very differently from the mother ship along the Af-Pak border.

So I put some questions on the issue to a real expert on the subject, my friend and ex-intelligence colleague, Hans Spielman. Hans is a former Navy lieutenant turned civilian DoD counterterrorism analyst. He studied AQAP for over four years, and his work is highly respected within the intelligence community. All of his information is backed by publicly available sources, so don’t think he’s spilling any classified material.

Q: Al Qaeda’s activities on the Saudi peninsula have long been independent of the Af-Pak based leadership. So what is Saudi AQ? What are their aims?

A: Al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia historically has shown the ability to carry out large-scale complex attacks against Saudi and foreign targets in Saudi Arabia. Saudi AQ was most active in the country during the 2003-2006 time period. Saudi-based extremists conducted several major attacks/operations, including bombings in Riyadh (2003), the Khobar Towers attacks (2004), Yanbu (2004), several assassinations/kidnappings (2004), and an attack on the Abqaiq oil facility (2006). There has been a lull in activity in recent years.

Concurrent with the rise in Saudi AQ’s activity during 2003-2006, Saudi authorities stepped up their counterterrorism efforts against the network. Several wanted lists of suspected terrorists were published and widely distributed during this timeframe. Saudi efforts resulted in the killing/capturing of multiple key network members and militants throughout the kingdom.  As mentioned above, there has been a notable lull in activity in Saudi Arabia in recent years.

Q: So first there was Al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia, now we talk about AQAP? Are they the same?

A: The press links the Dec. 25 failed airplane bombing to AQAP. However, it is unclear (in my opinion) if today’s AQAP network really can be considered a direct descendent of the Saudi al Qaeda network that was responsible for the spate of attacks during the 2003-2006 time period, although there was some sort of merger between AQ in Yemen and AQ in Saudi Arabia in January 2009 resulting in the formation of AQAP – now based in Yemen.

But I think you have to separate Saudi AQ 2003-2006 from today’s AQAP – it is apparent that AQ-affiliated extremists remain active and capable on the peninsula, but the players have changed and the focus may have changed somewhat as well.

 

Q: Why has Yemen become attractive?

A: Yemen is a logical base of operations given the Yemeni government’s inability to govern/police the entire country and the ready supply of weapons and potential recruits.

Q: Is AQAP’s future bright?

A: If the link to AQAP is valid, the failed Dec. 25 attack demonstrates that AQAP remains active and maybe capable of international attacks (not just regional).

This is all good stuff. I think it’s important to note that, as he stated, the Dec. 25th attack actually failed, so while he says that AQAP is “maybe capable” of international attacks, my read is that AQAP’s international attack capability is even more of an open question.

The State of State: A Proposal for Reorganization at Foggy Bottom

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The past decade has seen the U.S. government expand its activities around the globe in response to complex and stateless threats. In the face of these challenges, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen, and members of Congress have all called for increasing the resources and capabilities of the State Department to roll back what Gates has termed the “creeping militarization” of foreign policy. But efforts at reform are hindered by an institutional structure rooted in a 19th-century view of the world.

The days of traditional diplomacy conducted behind closed doors are over. The democratization of information and means of destruction makes a kid with a keyboard potentially more dangerous than an F-22. Addressing poverty, pandemics, resource security, and terrorism requires multilateral and dynamic partnerships with governments and publics. But the State Department has yet to adapt to the new context of global engagement. The diverse threats that confront the U.S. and our allies cannot be managed through a country-centric approach. For State to be effective and relevant, it needs to evolve and become both a Department of State and Non-State.

Currently, State’s structure impedes its efforts to develop coherent responses to pressing threats. The vesting of authority in U.S. embassies too often complicates interagency and pan-regional coordination and inhibits the effective request for and distribution of resources. No less significant, the structure also implicitly empowers the Defense Department’s regionally focused combatant commands, like Central Command, as alternatives to the State Department. Compounded by years of managerial neglect, and a lack of long-term vision, strategic planning, and budgeting, the State Department requires high-level patches and workarounds to do its job adequately.

State’s ineffectiveness has created voids filled by other agencies, notably the Pentagon. The Department of Agriculture (USDA) has also sought to move in on the space left by State. USDA in late 2009 asked that funds be transferred from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and State Department for projects in Afghanistan. Such a move would further dilute State’s efficacy, sow confusion, and widen gaps between requirements and actions in foreign policy.

Fixing the Old Hierarchy

The last major reorganization of the State Department was in 1944. That reshuffling was internally driven, and today’s change could occur within the bureaucracy’s walls as well. But the complexity of the department today likely requires a major realignment of fundamentals, something on the order of magnitude of the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986. That landmark legislation shifted the Defense Department’s operational focus from the services (Army, Navy, Air Force) to the regional commands (Central Command, Pacific Command, etc.).

Foggy Bottom’s regional bureaus are, on their face, like the Defense Department’s combatant commands. But in reality, they are merely support staff for the embassies (the “country teams”). If Defense were to mimic State’s structure, it would be akin to making European Command subservient to individual U.S. military bases in Europe.

Each of State’s regional bureaus are led by an assistant secretary who reports to the under secretary for political affairs. (The under secretary also has other responsibilities, such as overseeing development and implementation of U.S. government policies with the United Nations and its affiliated agencies, as well as the fight against international narcotics and crime.) The under secretary, in turn, reports to the Secretary of State. By contrast, the combatant commander, the assistant secretary’s ostensible counterpart in Defense, has a direct line to the Secretary of Defense.1

The State Department’s hierarchy was fine for another era when issues were confined within state borders by local authority, geography, and technology. But in recent years, the structure’s flaws have become conspicuous. The department’s ability to respond to crisis is fragmented and sclerotic. When successes do happen, they tend to be the result of individuals working around or outside the bureaucracy. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has circumvented the current system with crisis-specific czars called Special Representatives. These Special Representatives, like Richard Holbrooke for Afghanistan and Pakistan, operate like super ambassadors with regional powers that should reside – but don’t – in the regional bureaus.2

For State to be a viable national security actor, the old hierarchy must be flattened and power should be redistributed. It is hard to imagine isolating a combatant commander by reducing his rank to three-star general and having him report to a four-star general — who then decides what the Secretary of Defense should be bothered with.

Why do we allow such a structure at State? Instead, each regional bureau should be empowered with leadership from a dedicated under secretary who reports directly to the secretary. This would make regional bureau leadership functionally equivalent to combatant commanders in rank and access to senior leadership.

Recalibrating the leadership would help build congressional confidence toward increasing State’s resources, enhance the department’s interagency role, facilitate integration as interagency authorities are matched up, and ultimately begin a shift toward greater balance between State and Defense. The regional bureau under secretaries would act and be seen as the high-level authorities that the U.S. requires, and likely become viable alternatives to the combatant commanders.

The geographic breakdowns of the State Department and the Defense Department must also be synchronized to facilitate greater government coordination. State’s six regional bureaus – Western Hemisphere, European and Eurasian, Near Eastern, African, South and Central Asian, and East Asian and Pacific – only loosely align with the seven combatant commands (the Pentagon splits the Western Hemisphere into two commands).

There are a few, but significant, differences. For example, the State Department includes North Africa in its Near East Bureau, while Central Command, which covers the Middle East, includes only Egypt among North African countries (Libya, Algeria, and Morocco, among others, fall under the African Command). Another difference: the Near East Bureau’s eastern border is Iran, and thus does not include Afghanistan, Pakistan, or the other -stans, which fall under the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs; all those countries fall under Centcom in the Defense Department.

The under secretaries, like the Defense Department’s combatant commander, must be career officers. These positions require tremendous depth of experience within the State Department and across agencies and should not be politically appointed.

Some critics opposed to empowering the regional bureaus argue that only the ambassador can serve as the president’s personal envoy. Besides implying that the rest of the State Department does not represent the president, the distinction is a historical artifact from a time when communications were slow. Each regional bureau under secretary should be empowered with the same plenipotentiary authority to represent the president that America’s ambassadors possess.

The creation of new regional under secretaries should prompt the reevaluation of other under secretary and assistant secretary offices. Certainly the under secretary for political affairs, to whom the geographic bureaus would no longer report, should be downgraded. There will certainly be a ripple effect as roles and responsibilities are shifted and realigned.

To be clear, a macro-regional design must not result in the elimination of embassies or consular posts, or any other reduction in physical, diplomatic (public or traditional) presence abroad. Some may argue that international postings are redundant in an interconnected era, but any such drawdown would be a massive blow to our public diplomacy, as studies have shown that connectivity in the virtual world is stronger when reinforced by real-world interactions.3

Climbing the Hill

As with Goldwater-Nichols, Congress will likely need to be involved in any major shake-up of the State Department. But unlike the Pentagon, State has not actively cultivated and engaged key Hill leadership or staffs. The historic lack of communication between State and Congress is emblematized by the fact that State has one congressional liaison office on Capitol Hill (in the basement of a House office building) whereas the Defense Department has eight (four on the Senate side and four on the House side). The relationship between the Defense Department and the Armed Services Committees is substantially more interactive than that of the State Department and the relevant committees. As a result, the State Department is essentially a black box of unknown workings and products, inhibiting the cultivation of a congressional constituency.

Over the decades, Congress has at times been suspicious of the State Department. At the beginning of the Cold War, Congress restricted domestic dissemination of the State Department’s public diplomacy products because of concerns over the department’s “Communist infiltration and pro-Russian policy” (according to the Democratic chairman of the House Rules Committee in 1946) and the “drones, the loafers, and the incompetents” that comprised its staff (according to the Republican chairman of the House Appropriations Committee in 1947).

Since 9/11, the State Department has done little to earn the confidence of Congress, which resisted expanding the department until the election of President Obama. The department’s own inspector general has found significant systemic failures in many areas, including in its efforts to reorganize its nonproliferation bureau. Under the Bush administration, State’s senior leadership abrogated critical responsibilities that were subsequently taken up, if reluctantly and clumsily, by the Defense Department, notably in the areas of public diplomacy but also in reconstruction and development.

The State Department’s inaugural Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR), underway now, is a platform not only for changing the country focus but also engaging Congress. The QDDR is modeled on the Defense Department’s Quadrennial Defense Review, which examines the Pentagon’s strategic capabilities and requirements based on the threats and challenges today and tomorrow. The QDDR should take up the reorganization proposed here.

Realignment will not be easy. It requires the committed support of the president, the secretaries of state and defense, the National Security Council, and Congress. But the potential benefits are considerable. Adjusting the focus of the State Department from country to region would permit the secretary of state to exercise more effective leadership and oversight over the instruments of power. It’s the logical step to take in a new era of stateless challenges, and a demonstration to the world that U.S. power does not always have to wear combat boots.

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1 The under secretary for political affairs is the most senior Foreign Service Officer in the State Department and is the third-ranking official in the department, below the Secretary and the Deputy Secretary.

2 In addition to Special Representatives, the new senior advisor for innovation, attached directly to the Secretary’s office, should arguably reside within either the under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs or the under secretary for democracy and global affairs but understandably does not because of issues of capacity and capability.

3 See Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives (Little, Brown & Company, 2009).

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Public: Obama Handled Christmas Day Terror Attempt Well

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Turns out wild conservative accusations of Obama being “weak on terror” were greeted with a disinterested sigh by the majority of the American public. A new CNN/Opinion Research poll finds 57 percent of Americans approving of President Obama’s handling of the Christmas Day terror attempt. Furthermore, fully 66 percent have modest-to-great confidence that the Obama administration can protect the country from future acts of terrorism. That’s a three-percent increase since August.

Notably, only 37 percent opposed Obama’s handling of the situation, which is actually less than the 42 percent of Americans in Gallup’s tracking poll who identified themselves as Republican this past September. In other words, Republican tactics aren’t moving the public perception of Obama’s security credentials, and an argument could be made that Obama’s cool headed resolve has even won over a handful of conservatives. If Republicans run with the “weak” argument for mid-term elections, as my erstwhile “debate” foil did on a certain 24 hour cable news channel, it doesn’t look like the winner they thought it was.

Little Learned from “Game Change”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As readers may have discerned, if only from the Harry Reid “Negro Dialect” furor, the big whoop in Washington during the last few days has revolved around Game Change, a 2008 campaign chronicle by DC press veterans John Heilemann and Mark Halperin.

The people flacking this book have done a brilliant job of trickling out “juicy” insider anecdotes in which major campaign figures do and say deeply embarrassing things. The most notorious example is the Reid quote, but there are others: in particular, an excerpt published by New York Magazine that provides a hellish account of the Reille Hunter saga as seen from within John Edwards’ presidential campaign. The excerpt is getting particularly large play because of its unusually negative portrayal of “St. Elizabeth” Edwards, displayed as an erratic and abusive control-freak who used her knowledge of her husband’s infidelity as a weapon for leverage in the campaign.

You read this stuff and cringe, but in the end, wonder how much it really adds to our knowledge of the Edwards campaign, much less the 2008 elections generally. If you look very closely at the New York excerpt, buried in all the “juicy” bits, you can discern the real story of the Edwards campaign:

To Edwards, the pathway to the nomination seemed clear: beat Clinton in Iowa, where his surprising second-place finish in 2004 had catapulted him to national prominence; survive New Hampshire; then kill her off in the South Carolina primary, which he’d carried the last time around. Over and over, he proclaimed to his aides, “I am going to be the next president of the United States.”

To put some flesh on these bare bones, the Edwards campaign was a strategic gamble which heavily influenced everything the candidate did after 2004: his faithful adoption of the “crashing the gates” netroots narrative of the corrupt DC Democratic establishment, epitomized by the Clintons; his hiring of netroots veterans like Joe Trippi; his highly consistent anti-corporate rhetoric; his repeated assertions that only a southerner could win a tough general election; and his slavish devotion to nurturing his organization in Iowa.

It never worked out, of course, in part because he fatally underestimated Barack Obama, and by Caucus Night, the fiery populist was reduced to hoping for a low, senior-dominated turnout.

Now maybe it’s just me, but I find this story, which seems to get little attention in Game Change, to be as interesting and even dramatic as all the internal maneuverings around Rielle Hunter. Other accounts have suggested that Elizabeth Edwards played an outsized role in shaping the strategy for her husband’s campaign, and perhaps their weird relationship made that possible. But otherwise, aside from speculation about the explosive impact the Hunter scandal might have had if Edwards had actually won the nomination, it’s not that clear why it much matters to anyone other than the unfortunate immediate participants. And that may be true of other “revelations” in this book.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

To Fix Our Country, We Need to Fix Our Politics First

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

It’s the start of a brand new decade, but declinism hangs heavy in the air. And that, says writer Jim Fallows, is a good thing.

Having returned from three years in China, Fallows finds America in a funk. Bled by war and terrorism, beset by a lingering financial crisis and stubbornly high unemployment, facing stagnant wages and growing inequality, saddled with obsolete infrastructure and massive public debt, the United States today seems far removed from the confident “hyperpower” of a decade ago. Among the global commentariat, the “post-American world” is the cliché du jour.

But Fallows comes to challenge, not embrace, this glum narrative. In a lengthy Atlantic essay, he notes that premonitions of American decline have recurred frequently in U.S. history – and have just as often been proved wrong. He admits to having contributed himself to the “Rising Sun” hype in the 1980s, when many observers worried that Japan would soon overtake the U.S. thanks to its superior production techniques and state-guided economic strategies.

Instead, Japan sank into a long period of stagnation. But if the “jeremiad tradition” is a poor predictor of the future, says Fallows, it has the salutary effect of spurring Americans to rise to new challenges and prove the doomsayers wrong.

He attributes American resilience and adaptiveness to our inventive, entrepreneurial culture, a welcoming immigration policy and first-rate system of higher education. What’s holding us back, however, is a hopelessly dysfunctional political system that has lost the capacity to deal effectively with big national problems.

“This is the American tragedy of the early 21st century: a vital and self-renewing culture that attracts the world’s talent, and a governing system that increasingly looks like a joke,” he says. So far, so persuasive. But Fallows’ congenital optimism seems to fail him when the discussion turns to solutions. He’s no doubt realistic in dismissing great structural transformations, like a Constitutional convention to reorder our governing system, a parliamentary system or new rules that favor third parties. But concluding that “our only sane choice is to muddle through” under present arrangements ignores political reforms that are both powerful and attainable.

We could, for example, launch a frontal attack on Washington’s transactional culture and diminish the power of special interests by changing the way we finance Congressional elections. And rather than accept the inevitability of “rotten boroughs,” we could counter the worst abuses of gerrymandering by insisting that political districts be drawn by nonpartisan commissions charged with increasing rather than decreasing the number of competitive seats. We could also think seriously about addressing the abuse of the filibuster in the Senate, something that has sparked a great deal of commentary from progressives of late.

Such reforms would make it easier to overcome obstacles to the substantive changes that progressives favor, from affordable health coverage for all, to big investments in modern infrastructure and a new, low-carbon energy system. And where policy changes often expose philosophical cleavages and well as clashing interests within the Democratic coalition, fixing our broken political system is a cause that has the potential to unite all progressives.

Fallows has highlighted the right problem. But progressives should give high priority to fixing our broken politics as the prerequisite for renewing America.

Empowering the National Counterterrorism Center

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The following is an excerpt from Jordan Tama’s article in ForeignPolicy.com.

In the wake of the attempted Christmas Day airline bombing, some intelligence officials are sharpening their knives, planning to lay the blame for the failure to detect this plot at the feet of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). President Obama “knows where to look” when assessing blame for the government’s inability to connect the dots prior to the attack, claimed one anonymous intelligence official quoted in the Washington Post. In particular, the CIA, which opposed the 2004 reorganization that transferred some of the agency’s responsibilities to the ODNI and NCTC, “has barely restrained itself from shouting, ‘We told you so,’” the Postreported.

This chest-thumping is not surprising. The CIA has felt vastly underappreciated since 9/11, having been faulted by senior officials and blue-ribbon commissions both for the failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks and the intelligence community’s inaccurate prewar assessments of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities. Some CIA loyalists clearly relished the opportunity to affix blame to another part of the intelligence community after the Christmas attack.

But the charge that we would be better off without DNI and the NCTC is more than self-serving — it is also wrong, and dangerously so. The real lesson of the failure to keep Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab off a U.S.-bound flight is that intelligence reform has not gone far enough. Rather than restoring the CIA to its pre-9/11 role as king of the hill in the intelligence community, the administration should further empower the NCTC, in particular by bolstering its analytical and technological capabilities so that it can more effectively lead the government’s counterterrorism intelligence efforts.

Ultimately, the Christmas attack presents an opportunity for President Obama to put his own stamp on intelligence reform. As the Obama administration prepared to take office in the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression, Rahm Emanuel commented, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Now, we need to use the sense of crisis generated by the near miss on Christmas to give the NCTC the authority, resources, and technology necessary to inventory, analyze, and act on all of the information that washes through the intelligence system.

To read the full article, click here. The views expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect those of the Progressive Policy Institute.

Inequality, Living Standards, and the Middle Class, Part 2

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

My last post tackled inequality trends in the U.S. and how progressives ought to think about them. Now I want to look at middle-class living standards. In the course of basically agreeing with Dalton Conley that progressives should be more concerned with poverty than inequality, Kevin Drum argues that what got lost from the Conley analysis is the stagnation of the middle class (“sluggish middle class wages in a country that’s been growing energetically for decades”). And yesterday he endorsed the views of economist Raghuram Rajan, who blames the financial crisis on “the purchasing power of many middle-class households lagging behind the cost of living.”

Kevin has always been one of my favorite bloggers, but I have to disagree with him here—both in terms of the level of income the typical American has and in terms of recent trends, a careful look at the data implies that the middle class is doing pretty well. The common belief among progressives that this isn’t the case causes us to misdiagnose what the nation’s most pressing economic problems are and to put forth an agenda that doesn’t resonate as strongly as we think it does.

My friend Steve Rose really deserves the most credit for trying to draw attention to the reality of middle-class living standards being better than the left believes. In a much-circulated report for PPI and in his analyses for Third Way, Steve showed that, for instance, when measured correctly, the typical working-age American’s income is much higher than official statistics imply.

Many progressives thought that Steve was somehow pulling a fast one, a view with which I strongly disagree, but let me make similar points in a more transparent way here. First, consider what many progressives consider “the good old days”—the height of the pre-1970s economic boom. In 1973, the median inflation-adjusted income was higher than it had ever been and higher than it would be again until 1978—$45,533 (in 2008 dollars). Call this the gold standard before, in the conventional progressive telling, things started going south.

How much did things go south? Well, in 2008 the median was $50,303. That’s right—about $5,000 higher (after adjusting for changes in the cost of living). This improvement understates things because households also became smaller over time, and because the inflation-adjustment here probably overstates inflation. For instance, if one uses the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s Personal Consumption Expenditures deflator, the increase from 1973 to 2008 was about $7,700, or 18 percent. Not only does that still not adjust for declining household size, it also doesn’t include changes in taxes, non-cash benefits, the value of health insurance, and capital gains. Incorporating these adjustments shows an increase in living standards that is more like 40 percent.

Rather than household income, others on the left point to stagnation in men’s wages (women’s wages have increased dramatically by any measure). For example, the Economic Policy Institute estimates that the median male worker’s hourly wage was $16.88 in 1973 and $16.85 in 2007. However, EPI’s figures show that when fringe benefits are taken into account, the median male worker’s hourly compensation increased by somewhere between 5 and 10 percent over this period. And these estimates don’t use the PCE deflator. Nor do they account for changes in taxation and public benefits—the very means we use to mitigate low income.

To review, “stagnation” of household income or male wages means that after adjusting them for the rising cost of living, they are as high as they were in the glory days of the 1960s and early 1970s–they have actually increased. When analysts on the left concede these increases, they then move the goal posts and argue that wages have not grown as much as they should have. Typically, they contrast modest wage growth with more rapid productivity growth. But too often these analyses are done on an apples-to-oranges basis. Critics left, right, and center have all pointed out flaws with the kind of comparisons that EPI and others make. Careful analyses reduce the gap between productivity growth and wage and income growth, though they don’t necessarily eliminate it. At any rate, economic theory says that compensation will increase with productivity all else being equal, and all else has not remained static.

It is certainly true that wage growth has been slower since 1973 than in the two previous decades. But that isn’t a realistic bar to use. The U.S. was the only major economy left standing after World War II, and there was little foreign competition putting downward pressure on manufacturing wages and jobs. The period between WWII and 1973 was anomalous—it could not have been expected to have lasted.

The other way to judge middle-class living standards in the U.S. is to compare them to those in other countries. The Luxembourg Income Study shows that at most points in the income distribution (the 25th percentile, the median, the 75th percentile), income in the U.S. exceeds that in nearly all European countries, including Sweden, the model for many on the left. (The most accessible evidence on this is in a 2002 article in the journal Daedalus by Christopher Jencks.) Determining how to incorporate publicly provided benefits such as education and health care is very complicated, but the evidence we have indicates that American middle-class living standards are at worst comparable to those in European nations.

Trying to persuade the middle class that it is worse off than it is potentially has harmful side effects. For one, as economist Benjamin Friedman and sociologist William Julius Wilson have argued, people are more generous when they feel they are doing well. When they feel economically threatened, they are more inclined to protect what they have than to help others. What’s more, widespread economic malaise can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, preventing people from making the individual choices that ensure, for instance, a strong recovery from recession. In terms of policy, the belief that the middle class is doing poorly can lead to scarce public resources being diverted to those doing relatively well rather than being used to help those truly in need. And politically, it can lead to a tone-deaf and unpersuasive populism that does little to help Democrats win in swing districts and close elections.

Again, the point here is that progressives should care about the facts. Up next…the poor.

The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect those of the Progressive Policy Institute.

The Founders and the Filibuster

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Current defenders of the de facto 60-vote requirement for enactment of legislation by the United States Senate invariably argue that a non-representative and obstructionist upper legislative chamber was crucial to the Founding Fathers’ system of constitutional checks and balances. Without a cranky and institutionally conservative Senate, you see, popular majorities might run roughshod over minority rights, and/or enshrine highly temporary objects of popular enthusiasm into law.

Attorney/activist Tom Geoghegan blows up this line of reasoning very effectively in aNew York Times op-ed piece that appeared yesterday. His main argument is that by requiring Senate supermajorities in very select circumstances, the Founders made it clear they did not contemplate a universal, routine supermajority requirement for every circumstance. This is, in fact, a very recent development, accomplished through the abandonment of actual filibusters for threatened filibusters as an obstructionist tactic, and then the routinization of filibuster threats. What used to be an extreme and controversial measure–an actual filibuster–that was very difficult to deploy has now become the normal order of business in the Senate.

Had the Founders wanted the Senate to require supermajorities for all sorts of legislation, they would have placed it right there in the Constitution. But they did no such thing.

Geoghegan offers several avenues for challenging the Supermajority Senate outrage. But his best contribution is an argument that will leave constitutional “originalists” sputtering in confusion.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Reid and Lott

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The big toxic political news coming out of the weekend was the revelation, retailed in a new 2008 campaign book, that Harry Reid once speculated that Barack Obama might be electable as president because he was “light-skinned” and didn’t speak with a “Negro dialect.” Republicans immediately started demanding that Reid resign as Democratic Majority Leader, with many claiming his reported remarks were the equivalent of Trent Lott’s infamous wish-he-had-been-president praise for Strom Thurmond in 2002.

Ta-Nehisi Coates has the most sensible comment about Reid’s remarks and particularly the comparisons to Lott:

I think you can grant that, in this era, the term “Negro dialect” is racially insensitive and embarrassing. That said, the fair-mind listener understands the argument–Barack Obama’s complexion and his ability to code-switch is an asset. You can quibble about the “light skin” part, but forget running for president, code-switching is the standard M.O. for any African American with middle class aspirations.But there’s no such defense for Trent Lott. Lott celebrated apartheid Mississippi’s support of Strom Thurmond, and then said that had Thurmond won, “we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years.” Strom Thurmond run for president, specifically because he opposed Harry Truman’s efforts at integration. This is not mere conjecture–nearly half of Thurmond’s platform was dedicated to preserving segregation. The Dixiecrat slogan was “Segregation Forever!” (Exclamation point, theirs.) Trent Lott’s wasn’t forced to resign because he said something “racially insensitive.” He was forced to resign because he offered tacit endorsement of white supremacy–frequently.

Claiming that Harry Reid’s comments are the same, is like claiming that referring to Jews as “Hebrews” is the same as endorsing Nazism.

All I’ll add is a guess that Reid’s use of the word “Negro” probably represented a clumsy effort to find an adjective to modify “dialect,” which isn’t exactly the same as calling African-Americans “Negroes.” Frankly, I haven’t heard a white person use the term in close to three decades; racists don’t bother to clean up their own favorite slur, and everybody else generally follows the rule of adopting whatever a particular racial or ethnic group chooses to call itself.

But in any event, this idea that one race-related gaffe is equal in offensiveness to any other is plain stupid. Lott was expressing continued solidarity with the racist political system he grew up with and didn’t abandon until the last possible moment. Reid used offensive language to make a almost universally-recognized objective point about voter attitudes, in the process of encouraging an African-American to run for president. That’s hardly the same.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Inequality, Living Standards, and the Middle Class

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Happy New Year everyone! I am very late to this debate, but I wanted to weigh in on the conversation launched by Dalton Conley’s pre-holiday American Prospect article on progressivism and inequality. In case you missed it, Conley argued that progressives shouldn’t care that much about inequality and that we should instead care about the poor. Inequality, he showed, has grown between the rich and the middle, but not between the middle and the poor. Bruce Bartlett, weighing in from the right, agreed.

I’ll address the living standards of the middle class and the poor in subsequent posts, but let me add my two cents about inequality trends in this one. An analysis I conducted back in November showed that what has likely happened is that the very top—the top one-half of one percent—has pulled away from everyone else, though the increase from 1980 to 2009 has probably been fairly modest. Whether this has been a good or bad thing—or aside from trends, whether higher inequality in the U.S. than elsewhere is a good or bad thing—ought to depend on three questions, empirical and normative, none of which we have much of a handle on.

First, how does letting the rich get richer affect the absolute living standards of everyone else? As Alan Reynolds has argued, measures of inequality tend to reinforce a fixed-pie conception of national wealth—gains by the rich come at the expense of everyone else. But of course, the pie is not fixed in size, and it may be that allowing the rich to get a greater share of the pie makes for a bigger pie and bigger slices for everyone (a point made by Bartlett). Think about Rawls’s maximin rule—that any inequality that results in the worst-off being better off is just. It’s not necessarily the case that greater inequality must help out those who fall behind, but it’s certainly plausible.

Second, how does letting the rich get richer affect the relative deprivation experienced by everyone else? There are two questions here. When the rich get richer, people at the bottom and even in the middle may get priced out of certain goods and services, as prices get bid up by the wealthy. On the one hand, it may be that yachts become less affordable to the non-rich, which presumably no one would get too worked up about. On the other hand, if the price of an Ivy League education or prime neighborhoods becomes unaffordable to the non-rich, that would have bigger implications. Beyond the issue of being priced out of goods and services, inequality may make the non-rich feel less well off—even if their absolute living standards improve. If the Nissan Sentra you own is nicer than the Chevy Cobalt you used to have but feels no better since more people are driving Jaguars than in the past, then there’s room for debate about whether you are “better off”.

Third, if inequality makes most people better off in absolute terms (by making the pie bigger) but makes them feel worse off in relative terms (if their bigger piece feels smaller than before because of how much bigger others’ slices have gotten), then how much weight are we to give each effect? Unlike the other two considerations, this one has empirical and normative dimensions. You may think that being better off but feeling worse off is a net change for the worse, while I may think that it’s only being better off that matters. Robert Frank has made the case—not entirely convincingly, in my view—for the former view.

If you’re looking for the answer to these questions in a blog post, then my heart goes out to you. What I will say is that a situation in which the top 1 in 200 pulls away from the bottom 199 is quite a bit different than a situation in which the top 40 pulls away from the bottom 160, since relative deprivation is likely to be a bigger problem in the latter case.

More to the point, reflexive soak-the-rich tendencies among progressives are unjustified—the details and the facts matter, unless you simply are opposed to inequality regardless of whether it might help the bottom and middle.

Middle-class living standards next…

Update: Click here to read the next post in the series.

The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect those of the Progressive Policy Institute.

More On “The Base” and Obama

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Mark Blumenthal’s post the other day noting continued strong support for Obama among self-identified “liberal Democrats” attracted a nuanced dissent from OpenLeft’s Chris Bowers.

Bowers notes that there’s evidence liberal non-Democrats have soured on Obama pretty strongly, and that even among liberal Democrats, levels of support as compared to 2008 voting percentages have dropped more than for any other major voting category.

Blumenthal responds today by arguing that the levels of liberal disaffection from Obama are far too small to constitute a “revolt” by the “base,” and also suggests that approval ratings are a misleading barometer when it comes to liberal voters who would never consider pulling the lever for a Republican.

Aside from reporting the substance of this exchange, I would note that its tone represents something of a model for intraprogressive debates. Both Bowers and Blumenthal are respectful of each other’s opinion, try to stick to empirical data, and acknowlege this is a continuing subject for legitimate debate, not something on which one side or the other than claim any definitive “win.”

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Realistic Expectations About the Intelligence Community

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In today’s Washington Post, an anonymous intelligence official talked about the intelligence community’s role in the attempted Christmas bombing:

Anyone who believes that a relatively small organization like NCTC [National Counterterrorism Center] is going to connect every electron in each of those 30 databases is either disingenuous or naive, and certainly knows very little about how intelligence analysis actually works.

Bingo! We as a public have to reorient our expectations about the intelligence community’s ability to ensure 100 percent security on a 24/7/365 basis. That’s not a knock on intelligence pros. As a former intel analyst, I’ve seen time and time again just how unrealistic the expectations are.

While individual quotes that dumb down the intelligence community’s capabilities are illustrative, they fail to drive home how difficult intel work really is. I think it’s more useful to examine what it’s actually like to “connect the dots” in the case of a potential terrorist operative. From my own experience, here’s how it works:

I’d receive a lead from the CIA Station in Rabat, Morocco, about a potential bad guy. For the purposes of this explanation, let’s say he’s a Moroccan named Abdul Aziz Mohammed Abu Sayaf, but I don’t know anything else about him, such as his date or place of birth. (I chose that name not because I want to stereotype all “terrorists” as Arab or because he’s an actual bad guy, but because – as I explain in detail below – it will help illustrate a point about transliteration’s role in analysis of suspected terrorists specifically from Muslim countries.)

My goal is to find out everything we know about this individual and determine whether he’s a legitimate threat. This is no small point — in order to raise the alarm, I need definitive intelligence corroboration that the individual in question has a reported history that solidifies him as a potential danger. In other words, we don’t just arrest people because of a single report from a source of unknown quality. For the record, 99 percent of the time, walk-in sources to U.S. Embassies are of poor-to-unknown quality. That includes friends and family members who walk into the embassy and claim their relatives are potential dangers. Why? Family relations are tangled webs, and who really knows if your uncle just might want you arrested in revenge for that unsettled family land dispute.

Therefore, I’ll take his name and plug it into NCTC’s terrorism search, a database that stores more information about terrorism suspects than you could ever imagine. Most of the information is contained in reports from the CIA, NSA, DoD, State Department, and foreign intelligence services that have shared with us. The reports range in length from just a paragraph or two about a specific individual, to tens upon tens of pages long of names, aliases, and birth dates of “suspected” individuals about whom these suspicions are undefined (thank the Italians for this).

“Abdul Aziz Mohammed Abu Sayaf” goes in the old database, and presto-changeo, 27 reports come back. I tear through them for information that matches what I know about my guy. Say I can throw out 22 of the reports because they’re all about an “Abul Aziz Mohammed Abu Sayaf” who lives in Indonesia and was arrested in 2004 and is now in jail.

That leaves five reports. Four are about an Egyptian. Out. And the last one is about some guy of the same name in an unknown country who doesn’t appear to have really done anything wrong. I’m interested in the last one, but need much information on him before taking action.

Here’s where it gets fun. Since there may be more information out there, I start looking for variations of Abul Aziz Mohammed Abu Sayaf’s name, as names like Aziz, Mohammed, and Sayaf can be spelled several different ways when transliterated into English from Arabic. But rather than guess at which combination of the spellings works in our guy’s case, I would enter into the database, “Abdul Aziz* M*h*m*d Abu Say*af*,” which accounts for the different vowels and multiple consonants that may be used in variant spellings.

The result? 2,453 new reports to comb through!

I would logically cut that number down by entering what little other information I know about this guy. Next search: “Abdul Aziz* M*h*m*d Abu Say*af* AND Morocco.” Down to 372. Next search: “Abdul Aziz* M*h*m*d Abu Say*af* AND Morocco adj! 20,” which means all of the above words must appear within 20 words of one another. Down to 87.

I diligently read or skim through all the 87 reports looking for any nugget of information that could corroborate the suspicions about our man. Perhaps I find an additional report or two about an individual who might be the person in question, but I can only say that with 50 percent confidence.

The end result is that I write another report saying only what I can definitively conclude:

Abdul Aziz Mohammed Abu Sayaf is suspected of wanting to enter the United States to conduct a terrorist attack. Sources of unknown quality indicate Abu Sayaf is interested in traveling this month, though it remains unknown whether Abdul Aziz Mohammed Abu Sayaf is a credible threat to the United States.

I file my report, and the receiving officer – given limited resources to follow leads – deems my report interesting, but not urgent.

Two days later, an individual named Abdull-Aziz Muhammad Abou Sayyaff buys a ticket on a flight to Newark and tries to detonate an explosive belt on board. With hindsight, it’s easy to point out the flaws in my analytic process: Should the name spelling be uniform? Why did you limit your search so much? This is national security – you mean to tell me you can’t be bothered to read 327 reports? Shouldn’t we chase down every lead?  And etc… sigh.

These are easy and obvious criticisms. And certainly, some improvements can and will continue to be made. However, given the vast amount of American and internationally derived information, the pressing need to run down several searches like this on any work day, and the permanent resource constraints, these are also criticisms by those who don’t understand the tremendous complexity of intelligence work and the diminishing marginal returns of hiring thousands more additional analysts.

In short, finding bad guys is often like looking for grains of sugar on a beach. Unfortunately, we have to accept that we might not find them all.

Tea Party Convention: Third Force or Takeover Bid?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

For all the notoriety of the Tea Party Movement, it’s been difficult to get any reliable fix on its fundamental political objectives. Is it a “third force” in American politics that will either morph into a third party and/or burn itself out through ineffectual if incendiary protests? Or is it essentially a hard-right takeover bid aimed at turning the GOP into a mirror image of its ideological obsesssions, ranging from gun rights to anti-immigration sentiment to radical reductions in taxes and spending?

We may get a better understanding of the answer to that question next month, when a group called the Tea Party Nation puts on the first-ever national conventionof tea party organizers and activists at Nashville’s Opryland.

TPM’s Christina Bellatoni says the convention’s agenda “sounds a lot like an attempt to form an official third party.” I dunno; the announced speakers list looks a lot like a prayer meeting of the right wing of the Republican Party. The big keynote speaker is Sarah Palin, with Michele Bachman speaking at lunch. Other confirmed speakers include the U.S. House GOP leadership’s resident wingnut, Marsha Blackburn (you do have to admit the Tea Party folks are very good at achieving gender parity in their panelists); Christian Right warhorses Rick Scarborough and Judge Roy Moore; and assorted conservative TV and radio gabbers.

It’s now becoming standard for hard-core conservative candidates in Republican primaries around the country to identify themselves closely with the Tea Party Movement. Nowhere is this more evident than in Florida, where Marco Rubio’s senate candidacy is a cause celebre for Tea Party folk everywhere. There’s a long profile of the Rubio-Crist race by Mark Leibovich in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine that gives the distinct impression that Crist is a goner and Rubio’s about to become a maximum national conservative celebrity. And although there will be elements of the Tea Party movement who want to remain independent, the temptation of an opportunity to conquer, or at least intimidate into submission, one of the two major parties may prove irresistable.

Update: The intrepid David Wiegel reports some conservative grumbling about the cost of this event–$549 for registration, and $349 just to attend the Palin speech–and Palin’s own rumored speaking fee of somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000. Sure, big-name pols often command that much or a lot more for speeches, but it’s not what you’d want to charge to a grassroots activist group if you were thinking about running for president with their support. More generally, this kind of money-grubbing could undermine the legitimacy of the event.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

The Clinton Boom Was Real — Then Bush Happened

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Most progressives were happy to say goodbye to the “aughts,” as dismal a decade as America has endured since the snake-bitten 1970s. But they may be surprised to learn that the U.S. economy’s poor performance on George W. Bush’s watch was actually Bill Clinton’s fault.

So says Michael Lind, who rang in a new year with a retrospective blast on Salon this week against the “New Democrat” policies of the 1990s.

If you lived through the Clinton years, you might recall them as flush times. Some basic facts: The economy grew briskly, creating 18 million new jobs; rapid innovation, especially in information technology and online commerce, bred new businesses and helped to raise productivity in old ones; unemployment stayed low despite a steady influx of immigrants and women coming off welfare rolls; markets rose as the percentage of Americans owning stock jumped 50 percent; homeownership reached a record high (nearly 70 percent); the poverty rate shrank significantly; and the United States ran budget surpluses for the first time in three decades.

Not bad, right? Well, as reimagined by Lind, the 1990s were another “lost decade,” just like the Bush years, with their successive dot.com and housing bubbles, regressive tax breaks, zooming federal deficits and of course, the grand finale – the near-meltdown of U.S. financial markets in the fall of 2008 along with the worst recession since 1982. If the comparison seems, well, strained, no matter. Lind’s real target is what he calls the myth of the “New Economy,” an illusion conjured by Clintonites (PPI comes in for honorable mention here) to justify “neoliberal” policies.

Breaking Down the New Economy

Specifically, Lind takes issue with New Democrats’ claims that the IT revolution helped to spur more robust productivity growth. This is not a terribly controversial point among economists. For example, a 2003 review of over 50 scholarly studies (PDF) by Jason Dedrick, Vijay Guraxani and Kenneth L. Kraemer (cited in Rob Atkinson’s 2007 report “Digital Prosperity“) reached this conclusion: “At both the firm and the country level, greater investment in IT is associated with greater productivity growth.”

It’s true that economist Michael Mandel, a PPI friend and prominent advocate of innovation-centered growth, has argued that U.S. productivity gains after 1998 were overstated. But the fact remains that labor productivity, which grew at an average of only 1.46 percent per year between 1973 and 1995, grew to nearly three percent annually afterwards. That spurt helped to produce the prosperity of the second half of the 1990s, a period which saw incomes grow in a “picket fence” pattern, meaning that all segments of the population saw roughly equal advances. For those years, at least, relative wage inequality narrowed.

Yet rather than give Clinton credit for economic results in the years when his policies actually were in force, Lind invokes the poor performance of the 2000s to condemn the policies of the 1990s. George W. Bush, arguably the worst economic manager since Herbert Hoover, is oddly absent from this revisionist fable.

And what about all the money gushing into the United States during the ‘90s from foreign investors? In Lind’s telling, New Democrats naively assumed that money was chasing higher returns, when in reality foreign lenders were trying to drive up the dollar’s value to make their country’s goods more competitive. Currency manipulation, especially by China, is obviously a problem today. But in the 1990s, the U.S. was not only innovating furiously, it was also growing faster than Europe and Japan, making it a natural magnet for foreign investment.

Finally, Lind challenges the notion that skills gaps are related to wage inequality. There are reams of economic studies showing strong positive returns to educational attainment.  (For an excellent discussion, see chapter eight in Creating an Opportunity Society, by Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill.) He is probably right that skills disparities alone don’t account for the growth in income inequality over the last several decades, but it seems perverse to argue that Clinton and his allies, as well as President Obama, are mistaken in wanting to see more Americans attend college.

Blaming the New Dems for GOP Sins

As a quick perusal of our website will confirm, PPI in the latter part of the 1990s published a raft of reports that a) documented the rise in relative inequality and b) proposed an array of innovative policies aimed at “expanding the winners’ circle” to include more working Americans. And perhaps Lind has forgotten that Clinton, in his first budget, raised taxes on the wealthy to restore progressivity and thus reduce after-tax inequality. He also got Congress to pass a massive expansion of the “work bonus” (earned income tax credit) for low-wage workers.

The causes of inequality are a subject of lively dispute among economists, but Lind is not hobbled by doubts. The reasons, he asserts, are to be found in the decline of unions, an eroding minimum wage, and unskilled immigrants. Yet by his own account, inequality really took off in the 1970s, when unions were relatively strong. (Plus, it’s strange to blame Democratic policies for growing inequality since 1980, since Democrats controlled the White House for only eight of those 28 years). Moreover, it should be obvious that falling union membership is the consequence, not the cause, of a massive shift in the U.S. employment base from manufacturing to services.

Because it affects only a small proportion of workers (including lots of kids working at part-time jobs), the minimum wage is a slender reed on which to hang the revival of good, middle-class wages in America. And there’s scant evidence to support Lind’s claim that immigration, legal or otherwise, has exerted significant downward pressure on native workers’ wages. The tide of unskilled immigration does have an impact on workers who don’t graduate from high school, but not a very large one.

The problem with Lind’s attempted deconstruction of the “New Economy” narrative is that it ignores a whole herd of elephants in the room, namely big structural changes in what U.S. firms do and how work is organized. Consider this description by Rob Shapiro, a key architect of the Clinton economic policies:

For the first time ever, U.S. businesses have been investing more in the development and use of ideas and other intangible assets than in physical assets of property, plant and equipment. Moreover, most of the value the economy now produces comes from those intangible assets. In 1984, the book value of the 150 largest U.S. companies—what their physical assets would bring on the open market—accounted for 75 percent of their stock market value; by 2005, it was equal to just 36 percent of the their market capitalization. The idea-based economy has gone from metaphor to reality.

We are left at last with the question of motive. Why is Lind so intent on rewriting the history of the most successful Democratic president in our lifetime, and raising doubts about the economic competence of the first majority-vote winning Democrat – Barack Obama — in the White House since LBJ?

Some progressives find it hard to forgive Bill Clinton for forcing them to acknowledge past mistakes. But failing to recognize your own successes may be even worse.

This item is cross-posted on Salon.