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Notes on the Hunger Problem and Volunteering

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Coming on the heels of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s recent report on food insecurity in the U.S., the New York City Coalition Against Hunger (NYCCAH) this week released its annual survey (PDF) of the city’s food pantries and soup kitchens. Its findings provide another vivid snapshot of the economic distress gripping the country, but also offer an encouraging sign of the federal government’s efforts to alleviate suffering:

In 2009, New York City’s emergency food providers (food pantries, soup kitchens, and brown bag programs) reported a 20.8 percent increase in need for their services, with the fastest growth in demand from families with children. While this comes as no surprise, given that the demand at such agencies has been rising for years and has only been accelerated by the recession, this year’s findings also show something new: a renewed potential to alleviate hunger through government action.

As need increased dramatically, for the first time in years, this survey showed a positive trend: although the economy continued to plummet in 2009 and increasing numbers of New Yorkers relied on soup kitchens and food pantries for help, such agencies had somewhat more ability to meet the growing demand than previous years, as Chart 2 shows. This is mostly due to increasing participation in the SNAP/Food Stamp Program and a surge in anti-hunger funding from the federal recovery bill.

The study credited the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act — the so-called stimulus bill — for providing much-needed support for aid efforts, and urged the government to renew stimulus funds to ensure that the neediest continue to receive the help they need in a challenging economic time. Moreover, as NYCCAH Executive Director and Progressive Fix contributor Joel Berg wrote here last week, “It’s a well-known fact that food stamps offer one of the best bangs for buck when it comes to stimulus,” another consideration in aid expansion’s favor.

The NYCCAH release also included this entreaty:

We, as Americans, also need to change our attitude towards volunteerism — instead of donating cans around the holidays, we need to be offering our skilled services to pantries and soup kitchens year round. While it may be gratifying to serve soup for a morning, it will do more good to help a pantry apply for a grant or develop a website.

As reported in this Sunday’s New York Times, food aid programs are besieged by would-be volunteers looking to ladle soup or load cans around Thanksgiving. In fact, most places have nowhere to put most of them. As Berg told the Times about food aid volunteering, “Please, please, please don’t do it just on Thanksgiving, and please, please, please understand, we have skills-based needs that are far more important than just food service.”

The need for skills-based volunteers at soup kitchens and pantries is a familiar plea from those on the front lines of the hunger wars. But, as Berg notes, it also underscores the importance of national service programs like AmeriCorps and the AmeriCorps VISTA. A vigorous volunteer corps, given proper training, can — and do — fill the skills-based gaps for these vital social service programs.

On this front, the Obama administration has given civil society actors another reason to cheer, with his expansion of AmeriCorps earlier this year. With that, the stimulus bill, and its vocal support for volunteerism, the administration has shown a keen understanding of the complementary roles national service, civic enterprise, and government action play in bolstering the public welfare. It’s reason to be thankful in a dreary time.

The Little Republic that Could

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Listening to the Scorpions’ “Wind of Change” while sitting in a restaurant in Pristina, the capital of the disputed Republic of Kosovo, on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, it hit me that Kosovo is an underplayed success story of nation-building. From an oppressed corner of Milosevic’s Yugoslavia, Kosovo has turned into a vibrant society. It has its share of problems, like all the other countries in the Balkans, but it has established itself as a case study for how Western democracies can work with a Muslim-majority country.

The fruits of this engagement were seen in the local elections held in Kosovo on November 15, the first held by Kosovo since it declared independence in February 2008. With the help of the Kosovo Democratic Institute (KDI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI), I was able to participate as an observer of the elections, up in the northern part of Kosovo. We were able to watch the elections from both sides of the Ibar River, the de facto dividing line between the Serb- and Albanian-controlled parts of Kosovo.

At the polling centers we went to in Mitrovica south of the river and in the town of Vushtrria, staffers conscious of the historic nature of the vote were more than eager to show us around. The major (Albanian) parties all had representatives at just about every station, who followed the election closely. And the aftermath of the election was like it is for most elections around the world — political negotiating behind closed doors. Like elsewhere, democracy works as far as it goes.

Still a House Divided

Anti-aircraft gun in front of the Kosovo Museum and mosque - PristinaThe key words in Kosovo, however, are “as far as it goes.” It doesn’t go up to the Serb-majority area in the north. As dusk started to gather in Mitrovica, we headed north of the Ibar into the Serb-majority areas. Polling stations were supposed to open, but the Kosovo Election Commission had left them closed in most locations out of safety concerns. Gangs of “Bridge Watchers” milled around election sites — Serbians who watched who crossed the bridges across the Ibar and pelted rocks on those with Kosovo plates. (Hence our choice of a rental Land Rover with neutral Macedonian plates.) A temporary polling center was run literally out of the trunk of a car at the “invisible border” between Serb and Albanian areas by a Brit and an Aussie – but no one showed up.

We drove up to Bistricë e Shalës, an enclave of 200 Albanians in the otherwise exclusively Serb Leposavić municipality. The last part of the drive to Bistricë was a five-mile ordeal on a dirt road over a mountain and down into a nestled valley. You could see why Serbs had failed to drive Albanians out of the location during the 1999 war — which made it all the more impressive that the Election Commission had a polling station set up, complete with party and NGO observers. But with Serbs in the north boycotting the election, all 146 votes for mayor cast in the nearly 20,000-person municipality came from that station. The most immediate issue the Mayor-elect of Leposavić faces is the fact that over 99 percent of his electorate doesn’t recognize his mandate.

The government of Kosovo has made strides towards solving this problem. A big step in the process is redistricting, creating new, Serb-majority municipalities to give the Serb minority more clout and buy-in to the process. While that has yet to make headway in parts of Kosovo that border Serbia, like Leposavić, it has worked in enclaves like Gračanica, home of a famous Orthodox monastery and over 10,000 Serbs. Despite Belgrade’s entreaties to boycott the Kosovo election, turnout in these enclaves was reputed to be around 30 percent, which compares favorably with Serb turnout for Belgrade-organized parallel elections last year. Mitrovica is scheduled to have similar, Pristina-organized elections next summer after a Serb-majority municipality is established there.

Posters for mayoral candidate, Ruzdhi Hexha. He did not win. – Prizren

But the solution to Kosovo’s relationship with Serbia is a tough one. Over the local Peja beer the night before the election, one observer familiar with both Serbia and Kosovo asked: “Why would the Serbs want it?” noting that Kosovo’s GDP per capita was less than one-third the rest of Yugoslavia’s 20 years ago. Certainly the beauty and cultural heritage of the Serb monasteries of Gračanica, Dečan, and Peć pull at Serbian heartstrings. But Belgrade’s lament that Kosovo is the heart of Serbia is met with the rejoinder that that heart beats in a foreign body. With Albanians numbering over 80 percent of Kosovo’s population a decade ago, and outnumbering Serbs in the country 10-to-1 now, Serbian claims need to be measured against the reality on the ground.

From a cynical perspective, Kosovo is an opportunity for Serbia — a small, poor Eastern European country — to get the focused attention of the U.S. and the EU. The foreign minister of Serbia, the young Vuk Jeremić, would be an unknown back-bencher if not for boosting his career by insisting on the indivisibility of Serbia and Kosovo. Both the president and prime minister of Serbia, considered strongly in favor of Serbian membership of the EU, would be tarred and feathered were they to publicly consider Kosovo anything short of an integral part of Serbia. As such, normalized relations will not come as long as this generation of politicians is in office in Belgrade.

Small Steps

A solution will have to come with the next generation. After visiting Bistricë, we went into the Serb part of Leposavić and met with an example of what that solution to the Kosovo problem will be. Savo is a Kosovo Serb who grew up in Leposavić and commutes into Mitrovica every day to go to school. A talented musician who, like most 18-year-old guys, has a fondness for Metallica and Green Day, Savo hopes to study music at the local university in Mitrovica. Over peach slivovica he and his brother home-brew, Savo explained that his parents consider themselves strictly Serbs. But, when asked, Savo conceded that he considered himself both Serbian and Kosovar. He was in fact dating an Albanian girl he met through a political awareness program NDI is sponsoring to integrate teens from both ethnic groups in Mitrovica. It’s this kind of incremental embrace of the opportunities in Kosovo — the opportunities that 30 percent of Serbs in smaller enclaves grasped when they went out to vote — that will lead to a solution that both Serbia and Kosovo can live with.

Gračanica Serbian Orthodox Monastery - GračanicaBut it’s a long road to get there. Helping both sides get down that road will be the carrot of accession to the EU. Both Serbia and Kosovo are part of the Western Balkan vacuum that exists within the European Union’s sphere. While Serbia is a full-on participant in the Stabilization and Association Process (SAA) that precedes EU accession, Kosovo has been part of the Stabilization Tracking Mechanism (which seems to be all the steps of the SAA, without the promise of EU candidacy at the end), with five of the 27 EU members, notably Greece and Spain, not recognizing its independence yet. Getting Serbia to the bargaining table with Kosovo as a prerequisite for EU accession would be a powerful motivator, much as the Greek Cypriot government in Nicosia was willing to talk to its Turkish counterpart before Cyprus’ EU accession in 2004.

For its part, Kosovo has so far been be willing to adhere to diplomatic niceties to assuage Serbia. The government in Pristina might want to consider another step of suggesting the exchange of “High Commissioners” with Belgrade. Taking a cue from the United Kingdom’s decolonization process in the 1950s and 1960s, such a move would acknowledge the special relationship between Serbia and Kosovo, allow Serbia to save face by not having to immediately accept a Kosovar ambassador, and — most importantly — give both countries a formal channel of communication to address their mutual concerns.

After dusk we went back to the Albanian part of Mitrovica to a school on the west side housing the biggest polling station in the city. As the clock ticked past seven o’clock and the polls closed, the polling station chairman asked for the door to the spartan classroom closed. I watched as polling officials, party representatives, and an observer from a local NGO gathered around the teacher’s desk. Opening the Election Commission’s booklet of directives, the chair began reading out loud the instructions.

As they went through the process the chair ordered one of the polling officials to retrieve the box of sealed disputed ballots to begin counting. A party official objected, saying that he interpreted the rules differently, and counting should proceed in a slightly different manner. After a couple of minutes of discussion, in which all had their say, the polling chair conceded the point, and ballots began to be counted. In that little corner of Kosovo, 500 miles behind the Iron Curtain that had lifted 20 years earlier, democracy slowly went to work.

Progressives Show Growing Acceptance to Nuclear

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In today’s Washington Post comes a good piece on the growing role of nuclear energy in the discussion over what to do about climate change:

Nuclear power — long considered environmentally hazardous — is emerging as perhaps the world’s most unlikely weapon against climate change, with the backing of even some green activists who once campaigned against it.

[…]

To be sure, many green groups remain opposed to nuclear energy, and some, such as Greenpeace, have refused to back U.S. climate change legislation. Groups that support the bills, such as the Sierra Club, say they are doing so because the legislation would also usher in the increased use of renewable energies like wind and solar as well as billions of dollars in investment for new technologies. They do not say they think nuclear energy is the solution in and of itself.

“Our base is as opposed to nuclear as ever,” said David Hamilton, director of the Global Warming and Energy Program for the Sierra Club in Washington. “You have to recognize that nuclear is only one small part of this.”

But Steve Cochran, director of the National Climate Campaign at the Environmental Defense Fund — a group that opposed new nuclear plants in the United States as recently as 2005 — also described a new and evolving “pragmatic” approach coming from environmental camps. “I guess you could call it ‘grudging acceptance,’ ” he said.

“If we are really serious about dealing with climate change, we are going to have to be willing to look at a range of options and not just rule things off the table,” he said. “We may not like it, but that’s the way it is.”

That position, observers say, marks a significant departure. “Because of global warming, most of the big groups have become less active on their nuclear campaign, and almost all of us are taking another look at our internal policies,” said Mike Childs, head of climate change issues for Friends of the Earth in Britain. “We’ve decided not to officially endorse it, in part because we feel the nuclear lobby is already strong enough. But we are also no longer focusing our energies on opposing it.”

The change in sentiment among progressives on nuclear energy is a welcome sign. As PPI has written in the past, supporting nuclear isn’t just smart policy, it’s also smart politics.

Last week, we published a policy memo by Andrew C. Klein, a professor of nuclear engineering at Oregon State University, on “Why Progressives Should Be More Open to Nuclear Energy.” Read the whole thing here.

President Obama Reportedly Settles on Afghan Strategy

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

McClatchy is reporting that the Obama administration has decided on a strategy that will involve sending at least 34,000 more American troops to Afghanistan. At present, this is a single-source story coming from at least two anonymous “U.S. officials” and has yet to be confirmed by the White House.

Separately, the Washington Post has reported that an announcement will be made “within days,” possibly in a prime-time address to the nation next Tuesday, December 1.

If the initial report proves to be true (and after all the leaks thus far in this process, it may not be), it’s unfortunate that the headline focused on the raw number of boots on the ground. The Obama administration’s primary objective has been to formulate and enact a strategy, and then resource it properly.

Though there has not been news of which strategy the Obama administration will embrace, the reported 34,000 troops strongly suggests that it will adopt many of the strategic recommendations offered in Gen. McChrystal’s August counterinsurgency (COIN) plan. Strategy sessions in the White House may have refined McChrystal’s plan by focusing the COIN on 10-to-12 major population centers and Ambassador Eikenberry’s last-minute objections have clarified the administration’s exit strategy, but 34,000 more forces would endorse the meat and potatoes of McChrystal’s strategic outline.

Here at the PPI, we understand the American public’s weariness and skepticism at this announcement. After eight years of war, many wonder why more progress hasn’t been made, and how many more American lives must be sacrificed. It’s a tough choice, but if this initial report proves to be true, we stand with the president in his decision to adopt much of Gen. McChyrstal’s strategy as the best choice to offer definitive and lasting security to the country.

The general’s plan is hardly a guaranteed success, but it offers the highest possibility of permanently denying al Qaeda the safe haven only the Taliban can provide in a difficult and complex operating environment. It also shows that the U.S. is committed to being a partner with the Afghan people against the Taliban, one of the most vile groups imaginable. They are fanatical ideologues who deny women basic rights and have been bent on enforcing a draconian interpretation of sharia law.

Even though it seems counterintuitive, it is our firm belief that adopting McChrystal’s plan now is likely to stabilize Afghanistan faster and ultimately permit American forces to come home sooner than if we remained strategically rudderless. Think of it this way: if al Qaeda somehow regroups and executes another mass-casualty attack against the U.S., then we’re essentially back to square one, deciding anew how many more troops to send.

Any announcement of troop levels is likely to send shockwaves through the Democratic Congressional caucus. The President will certainly have to make the rounds on the Hill to quell any impending revolt (including a possible war-tax). However, as Will Marshall and I have reminded Democrats, it’s crucial that they support President Obama’s decision:

Whatever course he chooses, the President will need his party’s understanding and support to succeed. If Democrats fall out over Afghanistan, he won’t be able to sustain a coherent policy, and the public will likely lose confidence in the party’s ability to manage the nation’s security.

Competence in national security is part of being a full-spectrum governing party, and failure to protect the country would be a key indictment against Democrats.

For all those reasons, if this initial report proves true, we welcome the president’s steadfast resolve and reasoned decision-making on this crucial national security issue.

Accounting Reform for…Biofuels?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

From yesterday’s Boston Globe comes an op-ed on the need for sound accounting guidelines when it comes to bioenergy and greenhouse gas emissions:

The problem: treaties and laws now treat all forms of bioenergy as carbon neutral and therefore completely non-polluting. In reality, how much bioenergy reduces greenhouse gases depends on the source of the plant material. The right rules will encourage the development of fast-growing grasses and trees that can greatly increase the amount of carbon absorbed by plants on marginal land and thereby reduce global warming. The wrong rules will encourage clearing of forests, which releases carbon dioxide and may even increase greenhouse gases while also threatening biodiversity.

[…]

[T]he climate bill working its way through Congress shares this error.

If the error continues globally, it gives oil firms or electric utilities that must reduce their greenhouse gas emissions a false incentive to switch to those forms of bioenergy that result from clearing forests. Several studies predict they will do so on a large scale. By contrast, the right accounting will give entrepreneurs the incentive to commercialize the great technical innovations in generating more carbon from the earth’s land and converting it efficiently into useable fuel.

The op-ed was co-written by Vinod Khosla and Tim Searchinger, both big names in biofuels, for different reasons. Khosla, cofounder of Sun Microsystems, is a big investor in bioenergy.

Searchinger, meanwhile, is known as a skeptic of biofuels. In 2008, he co-authored a study that found that, taking into account the conversion of forest and grassland into new cropland (as grain is diverted to biofuel production), biofuels actually increase greenhouse gas emissions. More recently, he co-authored a paper in the journal Science that looked into the failure of the Kyoto Protocol and U.S. climate legislation to account for emissions from biofuels.

The op-ed finds common ground in recognizing the promise of bioenergy, even as it calls for a more informed approach to its role in the global energy picture. All too often, the prefix “bio” lulls people into a false sense of enviro-comfort. But as Khosla and Searchinger suggest, if the biofuel you’re putting into your car came from crops planted on — or that eventually led to — a cleared forest, then chances are you’re not helping the climate much at all.

It may seem an obscure area of cap-and-trade, but the op-ed actually underscores the importance of rigorous research and strict accounting in developing a climate bill. Khosla and Searchinger urge policy makers working on cap-and-trade to distinguish bioenergy by its source and production process. The last thing we need is a climate bill that ends up wiping out swathes of forestland, all because of that misleading prefix.

(h/t to NRDC’s Switchboard blog)

The ACORN Derangement Syndrome Goes Viral

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

When you’ve been away from blogging, and from regular access to political news, for more or less a month, as I have, there’s a lot of stuff to catch up on. But I have to say, the thing I missed that amazes me the most, while confirming some of my own uncharitable fears about conservatives, was last week’s PPP poll showing that a majority of self-identified Republicans think the struggling and marginal grassroots organization ACORN stole the 2008 election for Barack Obama.

Matt Compton, Adam Serwer and Eric Kleefield all offered some thoughts on this poll, and Jason Zengerle compared it to the Democratic belief that Bush stole the 2000 elections. (Ed. note: I wrote about the poll here.) But I somehow don’t think most progressives are fully grasping the centrality of ACORN to the conservative world-view these days.

I’ve written about this several times over the last thirteen months, but bear with me: ACORN has assumed an all-purpose demonic role for Republicans. They were, in the lurid view of Fox News enthusiasts (embraced on at least one occasion by the McCain-Palin ticket) the cause of the mortgage crisis and the financial meltdown, thanks to the alleged help they provided to shiftless people to obtain mortgages they couldn’t or wouldn’t pay. They then demanded bailouts for their clients. And because a whole lotta socialism was necessary to keep them afloat, they stole the election for their close ally Barack Obama. Coincidentally, of course, and irrelevant to the narrative of ACORN running the country, was the fact that the group is one of the most visibly minority-oriented organizations in national public life.

The fact that there is virtually no empirical evidence for any of these contentions about ACORN (particularly the election-stealing stuff, which is an absolute hallucination by any standard) hasn’t much mattered; the group was far, far too convenient a scapegoat for everything that displeased conservatives since September of 2008.

But in talking about this so many times, it never really occurred to me that a majority of Republicans bought into the ACORN Derangement Syndrome, with only a quarter of them rejecting the idea that this group stole the 2008 elections. Analogizing this to the Democratic reaction to Florida 2008 is ludicrous; Gore did win the popular vote, Florida was incredibly disputed, and the Supreme Court did shut down the recount to get Bush across the finish line. There is not a shred of evidence that Obama didn’t legitimately and decisively win the election, and no significant Republican spokesman doubted it at the time. It took a full year of conservative shrieking about ACORN to instill this crazy theory into the consciousness of rank-and-file Republicans, nicely validating their hatred of Obama and their bizarre claims that he’s some sort of totalitarian revolutionary determined to destroy the Constitution.

It’s a case history in viral demagoguery of the most toxic sort, and reputable Republicans should be even more upset about it than I am.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

The Proper Context for Afghanistan

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Over at Democracy Arsenal, Michael Cohen — with whom I spent an interesting, accidental 48 hours in Dubai trying to get to Afghanistan as election monitors — attempts to place American foreign policy in context:

Sometimes it’s worth putting American foreign policy — and the military decisions we have made and continue to make since 9/11 — in a proper and sobering context.

Eight years and two months since America was attacked on September 11th, and 3,000 Americans were killed, the United States has approximately 168,000 soldiers stationed in two Muslim counties. In neither of these countries is there any al Qaeda presence — and there has not been any such presence since 2002. Indeed, since the fall of 2001, al Qaeda has not launched a single major attack on U.S. targets or the U.S. mainland.

Yet, instead of having a national debate on how we got ourselves into such a bizarre and pointless predicament — and squandered so many lives and so many billions of dollars in the process — the current debate in Washington is focused on how many more troops we will send into harm’s way to pursue an enemy that is down to about 200 core operatives.

Do you ever get the queasy feeling sometimes that somewhere in a cave in Pakistan, Osama bin Laden is having a bit of a chuckle about this?

But Michael’s “proper…context” leaves out too much. And the irony is that I have to engage Michael on the topic he wants to debate – “how we got ourselves into such a bizarre and pointless predicament” – in order to explain why he’s missing the point.

Michael seems preoccupied with wanting to debate the past, but it’s the past – the Bush administration’s extraordinary mismanagement and poor decision-making – that compels the Obama White House to revisit discussion of strategy and resources in the first place.

Michael and I had a heated discussion about all this in a cab in Dubai, and here’s the point we’ve differed on: Al Qaeda has not attacked the U.S. since 2001 due to a variety of factors, but al Qaeda’s current weakness is, I contend, temporary, and if the Obama administration fails to choose the most effective strategy (and match it with the sufficient military and civilian resources), the group could rejuvenate itself in the Afghan hinterland.

So, when the time comes and we feel confident that the large-scale terrorist threat to the U.S. is definitively a thing of the past, then we can have the debate Michael wants. In the meantime, a debate over troops and strategy in Afghanistan seems exactly the kind of discussion we should be having.

Progressives and the Filibuster-Round 2

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

One of the functions of The Progressive Fix is to not only to provide an online outlet for “pragmatic progressives” but also to demonstrate that their antipathy to ideological litmus tests extends to their own ranks.

In that spirit, I will take issue with a post published here on Friday by Scott Winship, who is an esteemed friend and colleague, and my predecessor as managing editor over at The Democratic Strategist. Scott offered a defense of the Senate filibuster on traditional, anti-tyranny-of-the-majority grounds, and then suggested that the real problem in the Senate is partisan polarization, with the solution being reforms in primary laws to reduce the power of the “ideological extremes.”

To be clear, my disagreement with Scott on this issue is only partial. I am not hell-bent on eliminating the filibuster as a possibility under the Senate rules (though not opposed to that step in principle, either). But what I object to categorically is the routinization of filibuster threats in recent years, to the point where the Senate has come perilously close to creating an entirely new, non-constitutionally-sanctioned 60-vote requirement for the enactment of all significant legislation (other than provisions taken up under specified exceptions to the usual rules, like the Congressional Budget Act).

Since the Senate already has a built-in red-state bias, a supermajority requirement would basically represent a death sentence for progressive initiatives in the near future.  Yes, I know some Democrats (though not me) celebrated the filibuster when the shoe was on the other foot a few years back, but on the other hand, nobody was excoriating Republicans for demanding that their own senators vote for cloture, were they?

All Filibuster, All the Time

And that’s the crux of the matter today — not the possibility of filibusters, but the elimination of any disincentive to engage in a filibuster on every single piece of legislation. Some senators are acting as though the right to vote one’s conscience or interests on a bill is identical to the right to obstruct it by denying it a floor vote, meaning that the normal practice of party discipline on procedural matters somehow does not extend to the most important procedural matter: votes to end a filibuster — i.e., cloture votes. So even if Democrats have (as they do right now) an improbable and (probably) unsustainable 60 Senate votes, that’s not enough unless they also have 60 votes for a specific bill. That particular shoe has not been on the other foot in living memory, but even if it had been, I certainly think Republicans should have been free to sanction their members for combining with the opposition to bring the Senate, and the country, to a standstill.

If Joe Lieberman or Ben Nelson considers it a matter of deep principle to vote against cloture to block final passage of health care reform (probably for the next decade or so, given the precedents on this topic), that’s well and good, but they should have to pay a price — such as losing a rung on the seniority ladder.

Scott, as noted above, argues that the current situation in the Senate is the product of “polarization,” which he seems to blame equally on both parties, and offers the remedy of electoral reforms to reduce that polarization. By this I assume he means some form of open primary. Scott is a very smart man who knows, I am sure, that “polarization” hasn’t simply been produced by closed primaries. Much of it has resulted from a gradual process of ideological sorting-out between the two major parties that is entirely healthy and natural, as compared to the longstanding dependence on ethnic, religious, and regional factors for party identification that may have made “bipartisanship” technically easier but didn’t really offer most voters (e.g., southerners choosing between Democratic and Republican conservatives and northeasterners choosing between Democratic and Republican liberals) more choice than they have today. If you look at the Senate right now, it’s hard to identify more than a few senators whose behavior would change if they were exposed, say, to primary voting by registered independents (many hard-core southern conservative Republicans are from states with no party registration at all).

Dealing with the Party of No

More to the point, the unity of Senate Republicans right now flows less from the fear of primary opponents from the hard right than it does from a corporate decision by the GOP as an institution that it must destroy the Obama administration by any means necessary. A contributing factor to this decision is the strange but overwhelmingly maintained belief of Republicans that the only way to distance themselves from the hyper-partisan Bush administration’s disastrous record is by claiming it was too liberal! When it comes to big-ticket issues like health care reform and climate change, Republicans have clearly shifted to the right during the last few years, even as Democrats have consistently sought middle ground (e.g., market-based carbon cap-and-trade and a “premium support” approach to universal health care).

So in my opinion, the immediate solution to the polarization of the Senate isn’t an impossible effort to reach accommodation with more than a very few Republicans, or letting a few “centrists” write every bill. Instead, there ought to be a reasonable insistence that Democrats reject the supermajority requirement and support the party on cloture votes as a matter of course. We can then maintain our big-tent party by letting heterodox Democrats stray on final passage of key legislation as they wish. And we can also invite Republicans to go to the country with a stirring, populist campaign slogan of “throw the cloturers out.”

RIP Compassionate Conservatism

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The Republican message on extending health care coverage can be summed up in two words: “Bah, humbug.”

In taking a purely obstructionist stance, the GOP has evinced scant empathy for tens of millions of fellow Americans who lack basic protection against illness or injury. So much for compassionate conservatism.

On Saturday, not a single Republican voted to allow the Senate to even consider a bill to expand coverage and reform health insurance markets. When the House passed its version of health reform, just one Republican voted aye. He is Rep. Joseph Cao, a freshman from normally Democratic New Orleans.

Republicans, of course, are under no moral or political compunction to support Democratic proposals for health reform. But since they haven’t offered any credible alternatives of their own, it’s reasonable to conclude that they don’t care all that much about fixing America’s broken health care system.

Sure, House Republicans proffered their version of “reform” earlier this month. It would spend just $61 billion over 10 years and leave the percentage of uninsured Americans in 10 years exactly where it is today – at 83 percent. Thanks to population growth, there would actually be more uninsured people than today.

In opposing serious efforts to expand coverage, Republicans say they are trying to protect Americans against runaway deficits, not to mention death panels, publicly financed abortions and other confected horrors. They rail against President Obama and the Democrats for proposing to pile a costly new health care entitlement atop others we don’t know how we’ll pay for.

That’s actually a valid concern, one that progressives should take more seriously. But the GOP’s newfound fiscal piety would be more convincing if President Bush and party leaders had not muscled through Congress a massive new Medicare drug entitlement just six years ago.

Showing their customary solicitude for America’s haves – Medicare offers all seniors the basic health coverage the uninsured lack – Republicans insisted on creating a universal entitlement, rather than targeting help for truly needy seniors. At first projected to cost $534 billion over 10 years, revised estimates in 2005 put the bill’s price tag at $1.2 trillion. That’s several hundred billion dollars more than the bill passed this weekend by Senate Democrats. David Walker, former U.S. comptroller general, called the 2003 prescription drug bill “probably the most fiscally irresponsible piece of legislation since the 1960s.”

In contrast, the Senate Democrats’ bill is paid for. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that it would cut the federal deficit by $130 billion in the first decade and by more than $500 billion in the second decade.

But there’s a hitch, and it’s a big one. Cutting future deficits refers only to the public costs of expanding medical coverage and reforming U.S. health care markets. That’s not at all the same thing as “bending the curve” of health care cost growth. Slowing the unsustainable pace at which medical costs in America are growing requires confronting the perverse incentives and inefficiencies that plague health care delivery. It also means rebalancing the big entitlement programs, as retiring baby boomers swell the number of people receiving Medicare benefits.

This is the big piece of unfinished business facing both health care reformers and President Obama. The Senate bill expands coverage and cuts the federal deficit. According to some leading budget analysts, however, it doesn’t do enough to slow down the rising health costs that plague the vast majority of U.S. workers and that handicap many U.S. firms in global competition.

They deserve some compassion, too.

The Progressive Challenge in Afghanistan

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Lorelei Kelly at the New Strategic Security Initiative issues a thoughtful challenge to progressives over at the Huffington Post:

If progressives really want to help forward the policy discussion, they should develop a set of alternatives premised on enduring commitment and solidarity with the Afghan people (local grants through the National Solidarity Program is a good example), and not pose them as a tradeoff for troop levels. Heck, even the commanding general in Afghanistan says this conflict has no military solution. Take that and run with it. But doing so means exercising forbearance when talking about the military presence. Uniforms are going to be part of the picture for a while. What the alliance is actually doing on the ground will determine the outcome. Tactics are already changing. But prioritizing civilians will mean that soldiers bear more of the risk.

We need to come to terms with that.

Any success must also include a significant shift in resources and coordination to make sure Afghans actually receive support to own their future. This kind of partnered consultation can start despite Karzai in office. The Afghan people know who isn’t corrupt. We need to go national and local at the same time because promising upstarts exist at both levels. The goal is a process — and so will be tough to measure, which is why a commitment is important. All sorts of policies here at home provide illustrations. From building the national highway system to public education, broadly distributed achievement through time take time. The laser-focused message the Afghan people need to hear is “we’re on this path with you.” We need to commit.

[…]

The president will put forward his decision soon. It will involve a troop increase. If progressives stay in full opposition mode, they will exist on the margin of the debate right when we need them setting the agenda. Exit to the sidelines will also undercut future efforts to advocate a new strategy for U.S. security. We are moving from a time when we could contain threats to one where we must minimize them. This can only happen through sustained engagement.

The progressive community would do well to consider Lorelei’s words before blindly opposing a troop increase. Even Code Pink has recognized the need for engagement and moderated its position. After all, America’s military is in Afghanistan to protect the Afghan population and promote peace. Those are progressive values.

How Litigators Tried to Sneak a Pet Earmark into Health Reform

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As the full Senate debate over health care reform legislation finally gets under way following Saturday’s vote, Democratic leaders in Congress should continue fending off special-interest amendments that could be added to what promises to be an enormous piece of legislation. One such provision almost made it into a House committee’s bill earlier this year: a “litigation earmark,” as some in the business community termed it, that had nothing to do with improving America’s health care or cutting health costs but would have opened the door to speculative, mass litigations against American businesses. Alert legislators yanked the amendment, but it could very well sneak into the final bill if progressives are not vigilant.

Health care reform has proven to be challenging to enact and could well stall if this kind of legislative chicanery rules the day. Pharmaceutical companies, personal physicians, and other groups have understood the need for compromise and have offered up important cost savings to help achieve reform. To further cut costs, the president asked his administration and Congress to explore medical liability reform, which the Congressional Budget Office recently estimated could save $54 billion over 10 years. Liability reform is also popular among some Democrats and Republicans needed for the bill’s passage. But expanding liability by creating independent standing for high-dollar, industry-wide lawsuits, as the “litigation earmark” would have done, takes the bill in the exact opposition direction: it would drive up costs – both in the health care industry and throughout the American business community.

The offending act came in July when the House Ways and Means Committee unveiled an 800-page amendment to its health care bill that included a 10-page provision to completely alter the purpose and scope of the Medicare Secondary Payer Act (MSP). The MSP Act is an existing law that is solely intended to punish people who owe Medicare money but have yet to pay their debts. Under the amendment proposed in July, however, the MSP Act would have been transformed to give any freelance lawyer independent standing to file a lawsuit by merely alleging that a company’s product or conduct wrongfully contributed to a condition for which a Medicare beneficiary sought treatment. Moreover, the lawyer would be allowed to aggregate all such claims. The end result would be a mass action for all monies Medicare has spent or will spend on the health care of beneficiaries involving that product or conduct.

A Potential Windfall

The big money potential in these speculative mass Medicare recoupment actions is undeniable. The first targets would likely be product manufacturers, namely makers of cigarettes, guns, alcoholic beverages, sodas, and snack foods, for the health effects of their products, as these industries have been the object of other speculative, industry-wide theories of liability in recent years. Pharmaceutical companies and medical device manufacturers would also be in the cross hairs, as they too have been targeted using similar theories under existing laws.

The reforms could have adverse consequences on America’s health care options. Prescription drugs and medical devices, while providing valuable benefits to consumers, can fail or cause unavoidable side effects for some people, necessitating additional care. If the proposed changes were made, a freelance lawyer could file an expensive mass MSP action focusing on the costs of such treatments without any regard for the practical impact the suit would have. The litigation could raise product costs and limit the availability of medicines and devices for those that benefit from them.

Medicare would be powerless to stop such MSP lawsuits. Because the MSP lawyers would have independent standing, Medicare would have no oversight authority to assure that new MSP suits would be in the nation’s health-care — let alone Medicare’s — interest. The same goes for the allegedly injured beneficiaries. They would not be involved at all, so it would not matter if the beneficiaries believed that the product or conduct did not cause them any harm. The proposed amendments also raise privacy concerns because they require Medicare to turn over patients’ private health records to help the lawyers advance their claims.

Fortunately, a bipartisan group of legislators pulled the amendment from the House Ways & Means Committee’s health reform bill. As a Democrat, I rarely give kudos on civil liability issues to my party’s leadership, but they deserve it for recognizing that such a broad expansion of industry liability has nothing to do with improving health care.

What the Earmark Would Have Done

The idea of using the little-known MSP Act for mass Medicare recoupment suits appears to have been born in the tobacco litigation wars. MSP claims for the costs of treating smoking-related ailments were tried a few years ago as add-ons to existing suits. As Chief Judge Gladys Kessler of the D.C. Circuit wrote, those lawsuits failed because “Congress did not intend the MSP to be used as an across-the-board procedural vehicle for suing” companies.

Rather, the scope and purpose of the MSP Act has always been debt collection, and it should remain so. The law is properly limited to punishing those who do not pay existing debts to Medicare. Once there is a pre-determination that someone owes and has not paid a debt to Medicare, the MSP Act authorizes a private cause of action against the debtor for twice the original debt. If the suit is successful, the claimant gives Medicare the amount of the original debt and keeps the other half as a collector’s fee.

The Ways & Means language, through five core changes, attempted to shift the focus of the MSP Act from debt collection to speculative mass Medicare recoupment actions. The bill:

(1) eliminated the requirement of a pre-existing determination that the defendant owes money to Medicare. This change allowed an MSP action against anyone that might be responsible for costs associated with treatment of a Medicare beneficiary;

(2) authorized actions based on all items and services furnished to all Medicare beneficiaries related to a product or service;

(3) gave standing to anyone, even if not injured, to bring this newly created class-type action. The bill, however, did not provide any class action safeguards to keep the lawsuits in check;

(4) allowed the MSP lawyer to prove causation through generalized evidence, including statistical and epidemiological studies. As a result, the lawyer may never have to show that the defendant caused any beneficiaries’ actual injuries; and

(5) increased liability to include funds Medicare already spent on a beneficiary’s injuries, as well as funds that might be spent in the future and a bounty equal to 30 percent of the recovery.

The Need for Progressive Vigilance

A new effort to change the MSP Act is likely to arise again. Prior to this past July, similar reforms were floated in the Senate Finance Committee in 2007. Both provisions were mislabeled, as one was called a “clarifying” amendment and the other an “enforcement” provision. They also were drafted to look like whistleblower actions.

Progressives should continue to oppose such attempts. Allowing random people to speculatively sue companies for Medicare expenditures violates core tenets of American jurisprudence. The suits do not allege product defect, do not hold a company liable for causing individual harm, and try to get rid of true cause-and-effect liability. Also, by eliminating the requirement of a pre-existing determination of debt to Medicare and lowering the standards for causation, the reforms could lead companies absolved of wrongfully causing anyone’s actual injuries to be held liable nonetheless to the MSP lawyers.

When President Obama addressed the nation to rally Americans behind health care reform, he challenged those in the health care system to put America’s needs above their self-interests. Putting the client’s interest above others can be a virtue for lobbyists and lawyers, but cynically attempting to use reform legislation to push through a litigation provision having nothing to do with health care is an unwelcome move. Today’s debate is about improving our health care system and reducing costs. Progressives in Congress should remain vigilant and continue to put America’s health care first.

Dispatches from the Republican Self-Immolation, Vol. 2

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Another week, another dozen reminders of the insanity that has engulfed the Republican Party.

First is this absolutely astounding poll from Public Policy Polling:

PPP’s newest national survey finds that a 52% majority of GOP voters nationally think that ACORN stole the Presidential election for Barack Obama last year, with only 27% granting that he won it legitimately.

Wow. The mind reels.

Then there was this gem from House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) from yesterday, responding to the release of the Senate health reform bill: “What is even more alarming is that a monthly abortion premium will be charged of all enrollees in the government-run health plan.” That’s right – Boehner’s claiming that everyone in the public plan will be charged a monthly fee for abortions.

If that’s sounds a little fishy, that’s because it is. There is no such fee. In fact, the Senate bill requires insurance plans that offer abortion coverage to segregate their funds so tax money isn’t used to fund that coverage. The bill also states that every state’s health exchange must also offer one plan that doesn’t cover abortion. No consumer would be forced to fund abortions with their premiums. Not that the facts stop congressional Republicans these days.

And finally there was the bow heard round the world. Earlier this week, all conservatives could talk about was President Obama’s shocking bow to the Japanese emperor. Sean Linnane at Frum Forum, applying his expertise on bowing protocol, concluded that Obama “went WAY too low; it is only one step above a kow tow.” He added, “Compare Obama’s bow with how he conducted himself in the company of the Queen of England, and then contrast this with the way he leaned forward to bow and scrape before the King of Saudi Arabia; this certainly leaves a lot of room to wonder about which direction this man’s sentiments lie.”

That’s what conservatives have been reduced to: close textual readings of trivial moments. (And remember – this is from a conservative blog that’s supposed to be more moderate.) As if the right needed reminding of how out of step they are, a Fox News poll found that 67 percent of Americans approved of Obama’s bow — not that we needed a poll to underscore how inane the conservative obsession with the Obama bow is.

These reminders of the freak show on the right should remind progressives of what’s at stake. To put it simply: we are the only grown-ups in the room. We may be a fractious coalition, but the prospect of the other side coming back to power should be impetus enough to get us all to pull in the same direction.

Lieberman and Ft. Hood, Cont’d

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Yesterday, I railed on Joe Lieberman for convening a witch hunt over the Ft. Hood shootings. One man’s witch hunt is another’s “responsible statesmanship,” per Jamie Kirchick over at TNR’s The Plank. He makes two points:

Given the gravity of this incident and the potential for future such attacks, it makes eminent sense that such a hearing would occur, in order to find out how such clear and visible signals of impending danger were ignored by the Army hierarchy….It’s not “Going Rogue.” It’s responsible statesmanship.

The point Jamie misses is that though the Army’s performance evaluations clearly indicated that Nidal Hasan was a very poor psychiatrist (so poor that, as NPR’s Daniel Zwerdling’s excellent reporting indicates, Hasan’s boss had at least one discussion about the possibility of discharging him) with significant other problems, Lieberman’s witch hunt will be unable to find “clear and visible signs of impending danger.”

Why? Based on the evidence, the red flags just weren’t there. Only in hindsight could you connect Hasan’s questionable, disturbed past with a propensity for extreme violence. I worked at the Navy’s internal criminal investigation agency (NCIS), which examines threats to crimes against the Navy and Marine Corps. If I had to make a decision on resource allocation to the Hasan case one month ago based on what we know, I would have recommended no additional surveillance and that his file be reviewed perhaps six months down the road.

The Pentagon’s internal reviews are better equipped than Lieberman’s hearings to comb through the Army bureaucracy and propose mechanisms to address sub-standard performers with probable mental fragility. That said, even that investigative process can hardly be a guarantee of preventing another Ft. Hood.

The Washington Independent reports that Lieberman has determined that Ft. Hood was a “terrorist” attack, and that he has called Hasan a “lone wolf.” That’s subtle code for the controversial provision in the USA Patriot Act that allows the FBI to eavesdrop on individual “terrorists” who plot without outside assistance. The provision was removed in a recent House mark up in part because the Justice Department had a hard time making the case it was actually necessary. The constant invocation of Hasan as a “lone wolf” – which the Independent’s Daphne Eviatar argues actually doesn’t fit Hasan – could well serve as a pretext for re-authorizing the provision, and suggest some clues into Lieberman’s motives.

But that’s all speculative. At the very least, Lieberman should allow the military and FBI investigations to be completed before jumping in with his own highly public process. Leaping in front of the cameras to assign blame for Ft. Hood before the formal probes have concluded seems like something a politician, not a statesman, would do.

Drive Like a Jetson

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When you watch an episode of “The Jetsons,” what gets you isn’t so much that Elroy wore an antenna on his head or that the family spent their time in cars that levitated. What still resonates about the show is the extreme ease of transportation — they always just seem to get up and go. For many of us in the modern world, where gridlock and wincing at gas pumps are facts of life, the Jetsons seem spectacularly free of commuter woes. But it’s a cartoon.

Ambitious clean technology schemes have usually been condemned as the province of dreamers. But this week, a new organization threatened to convert Jetson-esque schemes for powering electric cars from futurism into reality through a network of charging stations and new fleets of affordable electric cars. The Electrification Coalition is a group of prominent companies who have committed dollars and workforces to creating the infrastructure to make electric cars. (We previously wrote about electric cars here.)

At a lavish launch in D.C. featuring New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND), and Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) were some old — and new — captains of industry: Carlos Ghosn, the president & CEO of Nissan Motor Company; Frederick W. Smith, chairman, president & CEO of FedEx; Peter L. Corsell, the young and dynamic CEO of GridPoint, a successful company in Arlington that builds software applications that integrate, aggregate, and manage distributed sources of load, storage, and generation to connect utility customers to the smart grid.

The Future: Closer Than You Think

The coalition’s goals are at once ambitious but practicable. By 2013, they hope to put approximately 700,000 “grid-enabled vehicles” (GEVs) — vehicles with lithium-ion batteries that you can plug into either a 110-volt or 220-volt outlet to recharge — on the road. Through economies of scale and government tax credits and other incentives, the coalition thinks it can put 14 million GEVs on the road by 2020 and more than 120 million GEVs by 2030. Ultimately, they would like to have 75 percent of all vehicle miles traveled by 2040 be electric.

How to visualize this? Ghosn, Nissan’s CEO, put it crisply: “How do you imagine an electric car? There is no tailpipe, no emissions.” He repeated himself: “NO tailpipe.”

A full fleet of silent, tailpipe-less cars is ambitious and could lead even the sane to skepticism. Friedman moderated a panel with several of the coalition members and led with a question: “I want you to sell me on the efficacy and the reality of implementing this roadmap.” The coalition members answered quickly and confidently, relying on actual business plans, dollars invested, consumer habits and charging infrastructure already in place, and cars already in production.

David Crane, president and CEO of NRG Energy, said, “The service station of the future is in your garage.” Ghosn talked up the vastly improved efficiency of new lithium-ion batteries, saying, “We can make batteries today that were not possible 20 years ago.”

Corsell of Gridpoint, the software designer for smart grids around the country, said, “We’ve learned that you can leverage technology…to give consumers benefits.” In response to the oft-raised concern about whether too many drivers charging their cars at once would burden the grid, Corsell said, “The power is there — we have all the power we need. You can incentivize people to use power at the right time by building technology into the car.” Other participants stressed that cars will essentially become “grid appliances” — simple technology will allow charging mechanisms in cars to be controlled through the Internet. In Chicago, one pilot program even pays drivers per day to hook their cars up to the Internet.

The Next Step

What’s needed is policy — leadership by federal and state governments to push electrification through incentives. In the short-term, the coalition’s policy goals include significantly increasing plug-in electric drive vehicle tax credits, establishing tax credits equal to 75 percent of the cost to construct public charging infrastructure, extending consumer tax credits for home charging equipment, and providing tax credits equal to 50 percent of the costs of the necessary IT upgrades for utilities or power aggregators to sell power to GEVs.

These common-sense but aggressive measures would put electrification within the free market by investing, as government can, in providing technology with the threshold it needs for manufacturers to achieve economies of scale. It’s now, not the Jetsons — and nobody will have to wear antennas on their head.

The Real Reason to Support a Financial Transaction Tax

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Thanks to Gordon Brown’s support, the idea of a financial transaction tax has been gaining a bit of attention over the last couple of weeks. The idea is simple: place a small tax (say, 0.25 percent or less) on all financial transactions.

Partially, it’s a way to raise a little revenue from those who can most afford to pay to create an insurance fund against future bailouts, which is how it is being billed. And just yesterday, it was reported that House Democrats have discussed using it to fund a jobs bill. (Dean Baker has estimated that the tax could bring in $100 billion.)

But mostly, it’s a good idea because it throws a little sand in the gears of the giant financial speculation casino.

Wall Street banks make a good deal of money by running very sophisticated computer programs, looking for tiny (and supposedly risk-free) arbitraging opportunities, and then making those opportunities pay off by investing with incredibly high volume. These trades are something like the equivalent of buying a bunch of dollars for 99.75 cents each. It’s a great deal if you can do it en masse, and an even better deal if you can also borrow almost all of the money you are investing.

But if banks had to pay a 0.25 percent tax on every dollar they sold, then it suddenly wouldn’t seem like such a good deal to buy dollars for 99.75 cents each. This is what a transaction tax would do.

This would mean that Wall Street banks would spend less time looking for short-term opportunities to buy dollar bills for 99.75 cents. This a good thing, because it’s hard to see how having some of the smartest people and most sophisticated computer programs dedicated to this kind activity helps the economy. Something is wrong when 40 percent of all U.S. corporate profits are coming from the financial sector, as they were for much of the 2000s.

A transaction tax would mean that banks would instead devote more time to investing their capital in good, long-term investments. This seems to me what a banking sector is supposed to do — allocate capital to the most promising business ventures, which then sometimes actually spur innovation and improve the standard of living for everyone, not just those who happen to be clever enough to take part in the big casino.

Unfortunately, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is against such a tax, and his support is pretty important, since any transaction tax would require an international agreement. This is not surprising, since Geithner is and always will be a creature of Wall Street.

Still, it’s hard not to marvel at the latest round of bonuses on Wall Street and wonder how it is that these guys are making $30 billion while the economy continues to stumble. Slowing down the Wall Street speculation machine might help channel some energy elsewhere — maybe into actual productive recovery.

Knowing Your Juncker from Your Van Rompuy

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Pop quiz, hot shot:  Who are Jean-Claude Juncker and Herman Van Rompuy?

If you answered, “Two guys I met studying abroad in Florence my sophomore year,” you’d be close…but wrong. And according to the BBC, you wouldn’t be alone in your ignorance — a smattering of man-in-the-street interviews produced hardly better results.

Mr. Juncker and Mr. Van Rompuy are the prime ministers of Luxembourg and Belgium, respectively (and if you trivia buffs need some extra ammo to entertain Aunt Betty around the dinner table on Turkey Day: Juncker, in power since 1995, is the longest serving head of state in Europe).  Both are in the running for the post of EU President, a new position created by the European Union when Ireland, the Czech Republic, and Poland finally ratified the Lisbon Treaty over the last several weeks.

The treaty’s backers argue that Europe has long-needed to speak with one voice on the world stage, thus the desire for a permanent president. Up to now, the EU has had a rather ridiculous six-month rotating presidential term, filled by the EU’s member states’ leaders. It’s a thankless job — at 27 members, there are only a handful of issues that truly unite Europe’s political classes. And some — like the Iraq war — are so divisive that they tear at the very fabric of European integration.

In most free and democratic countries, major offices are chosen by the electorate. Oddly, the first EU president won’t be. Tonight, the EU’s 27 heads of state will lock themselves in a room, dine on the continent’s finest delicacies, sip (or slosh, if you’re one Mr. S. Berlusconi) its most prized wines, and pick one of their peers to hold the post. All without a campaign poster in sight, or a public debate to be had. That’s right — Europe’s first president will be chosen in the manner of Popes and politburos, not democracies.  With no hope for this presidency, let’s hope the next one is chosen by the voters. After all, the EU’s parliamentarians are.

Tony Blair is also in the running for the post, but don’t expect him to get it. When 27 extraordinarily powerful men and women sit down to choose someone to be — in one convoluted sense, anyway — their boss, they aren’t likely to pick a charismatic home-run hitter. A quiet, controllable technocrat from Luxembourg or Belgium like Juncker or Van Rompuy is much more likely.

That tactic could backfire — look at Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki. He was chosen in 2005 as a compromise candidate by ethnic powerbrokers; weak at first, al-Maliki has grown to be the most assertive force in Iraqi politics. But then again, don’t count on it in Europe — megalomaniacs like Nicolas Sarkozy aren’t eager to be outshone by the new prez.

Update: Rompuy FTW!

Herman Van Rompuy, the quietest, least-offensive choice in a field of quiet candidates, has been selected as Europe’s first president.