issue: Politics

Election Watch: The Political Cycle Heats Up

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The presidential contest executed a rare turn into foreign policy this week, with a flurry of controversy around the first anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden.

Having already made it clear that he would not be shy to claim this event as a personal and administration success story, the president and his team upped the ante with a web video (narrated by Bill Clinton, no less) that noted a 2007 remark by Mitt Romney dismissing any focus on the pursuit of bin Laden as a waste of time and money (Romney was at the time supporting the Bush administration’s “wider war on terror” policy and also responding to criticism from Democrats—including Obama—that the administration had diverted vital resources from Afghanistan in order to prosecute a failed war in Iraq). Romney and other Republicans reacted angrily to the ad, suggesting that Obama was “politicizing” the operation that killed Osama, and arguing that “even Jimmy Carter” would have given the order to proceed with it. After some shots back and forth, the president’s surprise trip to Afghanistan, and televised address on a new security pact with the Afghans, seem to have convinced Republicans they were simply drawing fresh attention to Obama’s top national security accomplishment, and so sought to change the subject.

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Will Marshall on the French Presidential Election

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

PPI President Will Marshall argues that the Socialist presidential candidate, Francois Holland, is unlikely to offer France what it really needs-a credible program of deep structural reforms-over at Real Clear World:

When Republicans call President Obama a ‘socialist,’ it says more about their lunge to the right than Obama’s policies. Besides, if they want to see what a real socialist looks like, they should turn to a country they love to hate: France.

Francois Hollande, the Socialist Party leader, has a substantial lead over incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy heading toward their second round showdown on May 6, and stands a good chance of becoming France’s first Socialist President in 17 years.

As Reds go, Hollande is not especially menacing – ‘bland’ is how he’s usually described. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the gruff socialist from Vermont, is scarier.

But bland is what the French seem to want after Sarkozy, who is widely reviled as a vain and vulgar celebrity-president with a trophy wife – a Gallic Donald Trump. Hollande promises to be ‘Mr. Normal’ and restore dignity in the Elysée Palace.

Read the entire article here

Election Watch: Upcoming Political Obstacles

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

It appeared that the 2012 Republican presidential nominating process would come to a formal close this week (given Ron Paul’s lack of interest in officially withdrawing until the Convention), and after Newt Gingrich broadly hinted he needed an upset win in Delaware to stay in the race. He subsequently lost by 29 points, and indicated he intended to withdraw quite soon. Instead, he decamped to North Carolina, and for all the world looked like he was continuing the campaign, albeit in a desultory manner. But now comes word that his Secret Service Protection has been withdrawn, making his continued campaigning look even more absurd, so he’ll probably pull the plug before running up even more debts.

Speaking of North Carolina, the president was in Chapel Hill this week in an appearance (subsequently attacked by Republican groups, in what was probably just a shot across the bow, that he was misusing official resources for a de facto campaign appearance) that illustrated the interaction of various issues in potentially close states this year. He spoke to a receptive campus crowd about his proposal to retain a freeze on student loan interest rates, currently the subject of complex partisan maneuvering in Congress. But he did not speak of an issue on the minds of many college students in the state: Amendment One, the draconian constitutional amendment banning not only same-sex marriage but legal recognition of all same-sex relationships, which will appear on the North Carolina primary ballot on May 8.

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Anne Kim on the Economics Behind the Mommy Wars

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Anne Kim, PPI Managing Director for Policy and Strategy, explains the economics behind the recent “Mommy Wars” at The Washington Monthly:

“By now, every mother in America has heard of Democrat Hilary Rosen’s recent charge that Ann Romney, the wife of presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney and mother of five grown sons, has “never worked a day in her life.””

“Yes, the mommy wars are back.”

“Setting aside the question of whether raising children is “work” (it very much is, by the way), the mommy wars are so divisive because they’re framed in terms of values and choice. Where a woman chooses to work (at home or for a paycheck) is a proxy for her stance on career versus family and which she considers more “important.” Hence, First Lady Michelle Obama’s declaration this week that “families are off-limits” in politics.”

“But treating women’s work as an issue for culture and values misses the boat in a big way. Not only is it elitist, it denies the underlying economic realities of many women’s lives.”

Read the entire article here

Will Marshall on Syria

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

PPI President Will Marshall explains why the U.S. should stop temporizing on Syria at Real Clear World:

“The tenuous ceasefire in Syria is a relief, but it also carries the risk that Bashar al Assad will manipulate the UN-sponsored truce to extend his lease on power. Russia, China and Iran favor that outcome; America shouldn’t. ”

“Yet Washington seems mired in ambivalence. On one hand, the Obama administration has called on Assad to step down. On the other, it has ruled out U.S. intervention and backed Kofi Annan’s UN-Arab League plan, which does not envision Assad’s departure, calling instead for regime-led negotiations with the resistance.”

“While Assad’s forces have stopped firing, they haven’t pulled back from population centers, as the Annan plan also demands. Resistance groups are planning street protests to test Assad’s supposed conversion to talks and reconciliation.”

Read the entire article here

How Unproductive Is Congress? It’s Not Even Naming Post Offices

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In just the latest sign of how gridlocked Washington has become, Congress is currently failing to pass even the most reliable of legislative standbys: naming post offices and federal buildings.

For each of the last several Congresses, naming post-offices has been a staple of Congress’s work. In the 109th Congress, for example, 98 of the 482 laws passed by Congress—or 1 in 5—were post-office naming bills.

But so far, the current Congress has managed to name just 17 post offices and federal buildings, plus one national refuge (the “Sam D. Hamilton Noxubee National Wildlife Refuge”).

Why the naming deficit?

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Election Watch: The End of the Beginning

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

So it’s finally, incontrovertibly over.

Rick Santorum’s withdrawal from the presidential race on Tuesday saved Mitt Romney and his friends many millions of dollars and additional heartburn from charges that he’s not a “true conservative,” and gave his campaign much more time to plan the convention and the general election. Even though Romney had the nomination all but locked, and might have knocked Santorum out of the race on April 24 with a big win in Pennsylvania, Santorum had a lot of incentive to stay in the race until May, when a bunch of primaries in states with large evangelical populations were to vote. One theory holds that the cold water the RNC poured on an effort by Rick’s allies in Texas to change that state’s delegate allocation from a proportional to a winner-take-all system was the clincher, since that was the only scenario under which Santorum might have denied Romney a majority of delegates.

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Will Marshall on the Marlins’ Misguided Decision

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

PPI President Will Marshall examines whether the Marlins caved to political pressure in Politico’s Arena:

“Baseball managers are entitled to the same Constitutional rights as anyone else. Period, full stop.”

“In fact, we ought to call an end to the all-too-common ritual of public humiliation, confession and absolution that follows whenever some celebrity says something stupid or offensive. It’s the closest thing our supposedly free society has to a totalitarian show trial.”

“To profess admiration for a tyrant like Castro – or a tyrant’s groupie like Hugo Chavez – is certainly obnoxious. But so is the idea that protecting people against “hurtful” speech, insults or foolish ideas should take precedence over free speech.”

Read the full op-ed here

Election Watch: A Conservative Romney Emerges

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Tuesday’s primaries in Wisconsin, Maryland and D.C. were a clean sweep for Mitt Romney, who also won 86 of the 95 pledged delegates at stake in the three states.

According to everybody’s estimates (other than those of the Santorum campaign), Romney is now well over half-way to the goal of the 1144 delegates needed to win the GOP nomination.  An especially credible estimate made by Ryan Lizza, Josh Putnam and Andrew Prokop for The New Yorker even before Tuesday’s votes were counted showed Romney as certain to get very close to the magic number at the end of the contested primaries, needing only a tiny sliver of the unpledged delegates to get over the top. At worst, Mitt’s in the situation Barack Obama faced late in the 2008 Democratic contest, when the only scenario that could have prevented his nomination was an unlikely and almost unanimous revolt among unpledged super-delegates. But any such comparison suggests that Rick Santorum could have Hillary Clinton’s staying power and ability to win heavily in late primaries, and that’s more than a stretch.

From a more practical perspective, the question going into the April 2 primaries was whether Santorum could somehow survive until May, when a string of southern and midwestern primaries could provide him with the sort of demographic landscape in which he has done well so far. But even if that happens, the June calendar represents a Romney firewall of delegate-rich primaries in New Jersey, California and Utah that now look likely to officially put the front-runner over the top–that is, even if Santorum fights on to the bitter end.

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Republican Candidates Ignore the Housing Crisis

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

PPI President Will Marshall and PPI Senior Fellow Jason Gold critique the Republican candidates failure to address the country’s lingering housing crisis at the Las Vegas Sun:

If the Republican presidential candidates have any ideas for solving America’s housing crisis, they aren’t sharing them with the voters. Since leaving behind February primaries in Nevada, Florida and Arizona, the GOP’s final four have virtually dropped the subject.

That’s puzzling, because housing remains a top concern for U.S. voters. Some 12 million homeowners remain underwater and 4 million are delinquent on their loans or in foreclosure. The ongoing drop in home prices is the single biggest drag on economic recovery. As catastrophic as it is to lose a job, the percentage of Americans who are unemployed is actually exceeded by the percentage of Americans who have either lost significant wealth from their homes or are drowning in “negative equity.”

Yet the primary debate has fixated on such evidently more urgent issues as contraception, Obamacare, gas prices, Obamacare, porn, and, of course, Obamacare (which doesn’t actually take effect until 2014). Why have the Republicans clammed up on housing?

Read the entire article

Suppress the Vote!

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

PPI’s executive director Lindsay Lewis, and PPI Fellow Jim Arkedis, explain how conservative super PACs will likely wage a voter suppression war in November over at the New York Times:

 

The grip of the super PAC on the Republican primary season has been well-documented. They are wrecking balls operating outside the candidates’ direct control, fueled by massive influxes of cash from a handful of wealthy patrons. The millions spent by the pro-Santorum Red, White and Blue Fund and the pro-Gingrich super PAC, Winning Our Future, have prolonged their respective candidates’ rivalry with the front-runner, Mitt Romney, whose own Restore Our Future has bludgeoned the competition from Iowa to Florida to Michigan.

And that’s just the start. In the general election, super PACs will evolve into full-blown shadow campaigns. This transition is already underway, with the super PACs supporting Republican candidates beginning to take on voter persuasion operations — like sending direct mail and making phone calls — that have traditionally been reserved for a campaign operation or party committee.

The phenomenon won’t be isolated on the right. President Obama recently embraced the outside groups that he had rejected, saying that he would not unilaterally disarm. The president has dispatched one of his most trusted aides to run Priorities USA, the White House’s super PAC of choice.

Read the full op-ed

Election Watch: The Beginning of the End?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The Beginning of the End? On one level, Rick Santorum’s campaign got a desperately needed boost from his win in Louisiana’s primary last Saturday. But all the other signs about the campaign indicate a party ready to end the primary season.

Santorum got his ideal electorate in Louisiana, a low-turnout affair in which half the voters were self-identified “very conservative” voters, and half called themselves “strong supporters” of the Tea Party movement.  Two-thirds say they attend worship services weekly or more.

Just as importantly, Newt Gingrich, who was running very well in Louisiana polls not that long ago, saw his support-levels shrink along with his campaign budget.

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Home Economics: Obama Ups Game on Housing Crisis

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In the last six months, President Obama has rolled out a series of proposals to address America’s still ailing housing markets. Elevating housing on the White House priority list is a welcome if belated development—one PPI called for in a major conference on new housing solutions we cosponsored last fall.

To assess the administration’s new proposals, we should start by clearly defining the central problem that must be solved. Contrary to media accounts, it’s not foreclosures, abandoned homes or underwater borrowers. These are all symptoms of a deeper malady: declining home prices. So the question we should ask is whether the President’s new flurry of ideas will move the needle on prices.

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Election Watch: A Turning Point for Romney?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Mitt RomneyMitt Romney’s solid win in Illinois on Tuesday placed him in an arguably unstoppable position for the GOP presidential nomination. He could claim formal victory perhaps as early as next month, and certainly, barring major mistakes, by June.

Along with his sweep of delegates in Puerto Rico, and the majority of delegates he claimed the previous Tuesday even as Rick Santorum got the headlines, Romney’s prize of 43 (out of 54) delegates in Illinois gives him a grand total (according to CNN’s estimates) of 562 out of 1019 delegates awarded so far; Santorum is more than 300 delegates behind. The “magic number” to clinch the nomination formally is 1144. Louisiana holds its primary this Saturday, and Santorum is a slight favorite; a loss could boost Romney’s sense of “inevitability” considerably. But in any event Romney seems certain to enjoy a big April, with very likely wins in DC, Maryland, Rhode Island, New York and Connecticut, and at least even odds in Wisconsin. Santorum’s home state of Pennsylvania is also on the April calendar, but he’s hardly a cinch there, and the proportional allocation rules will limit his gains.

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A National Infrastructure Bank: A Road Guide to the Destination

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Download the entire memo.

President Obama has proposed a National Infrastructure Bank, a simple declarative sentence that left most listeners wondering what he meant. The confusion arises partly because the administration did not follow up the president’s remarks with a specific proposal, but also because the operations of such a bank have never been fully fleshed out. Felix Rohatyn and I have elsewhere laid out the broad outline of how such a bank would function,1 and that description serves as a good starting point for our expectations regarding the president’s proposal and what Bank-type proposals generally ought to do.

As many writers have noted, American infrastructure is depreciating rapidly – we are likely well below the replacement rate of investment in roads, mass transit, airports, ports, rail, and water assets. The logical implication is that we need to invest more. But more investment in and of itself will not move us towards having the right mix of infrastructure assets in place.

The current mix results from one of two selection processes. The first is devolution to the states (for example the cost-sharing grants delivered by the Highway Trust Fund), and the second is selection by Federal agencies (e.g., the Corps of Engineers). At worst, these processes lead to politically motivated outcomes, either because state governments favor some projects for wholly non-economic reasons, or because the Congress can muscle the selection process from the federal agencies. The most recent transportation authorization bill, passed in 2005, made the word “earmark” famous by incorporating a stunning $24 billion of them – the price of having a law passed. Insofar as we have given the task of project selection to the political process, it would be surprising if this kind of event didn’t happen, not that it sometimes does.

Politicized project selection is one of several problems associated with the current process. But it is one of the reasons why a National Infrastructure Bank is so important and so urgently needed: not just because a bank might be able to lever federal dollars, but because it can use the existing dollars more wisely and obtain a higher public return.

What follows, then, is a description of the role a National Infrastructure Bank could play, taken from the perspective of the specific problems in the current process it might solve. This perspective also allows us to evaluate the administration’s proposal.

In a nutshell, Rohatyn and I propose that we collapse all of the federal “modal” transportation programs into the Bank. Any entity – whether state, local, or federal – would have standing to come to the Bank with a proposal requiring federal assistance. The Bank would be able to negotiate the level and form of such assistance based on the particulars of each project proposal. It could offer cash participation or loan guarantees, underwriting or credit subsidies, or financing for a subordinated fund to assure creditors. Any project requiring federal resources above some dollar threshold (on a credit scoring basis) would have to be approved by the Bank. Additionally, we imagine that some part of the funding for existing modal programs would be converted into block grants sent directly to the states and large cities to be spent on projects too small for the Bank’s oversight. Such grants could also be used for those programs desired by the states that do not pass muster on terms proposed by the Bank.

This is more a vision of infrastructure policy than a blueprint for the immediate future. Admittedly, it will take years and a meticulous reorganization to produce this configuration. But the best way to measure our progress in infrastructure policy (and the merits of the administration’s proposal) is not to see how quickly we adopt the Bank’s specific features, but to see how the Bank addresses the underlying infrastructure policy flaws it is designed to fix.

Download the entire memo.

Union Voters and Democrats

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Top Democratic and union leaders play host this week to prospective 2012 Congressional candidates, highlighting labor’s status as a critical cog in progressive campaigns. Some observers believe that, in the aftermath of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s efforts to strip the state’s public unions of collective-bargaining rights, labor has found both renewed public sympathy and political momentum.

It’s not clear, however, that such attitudinal shifts will be enough to reverse the steady erosion of union membership, and the voting power that goes with it. That’s the fundamental reality progressives must reckon with as they ponder how to forge electoral majorities.

To offset labor’s declining share of the electorate, Democrats logically must do one of two things: do better among union households or do better among non-union households. As it happens, the key to both is the same – winning more moderate voters.

Read the entire memo