issue: Politics

Three Responses To U.S. Cap And Trade Troubles

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

It’s been a bad month for cap and trade.

Governor Chris Christie has decided to pull New Jersey out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), the Northeast’s carbon cap-and-trade program. New Hampshire’s legislature has also voted to leave, though the governor may veto the bill. Other states are considering their positions. As states leave RGGI and its market gets smaller, the advantages of linking up diminish, eroding its economic and political viability. Meanwhile, California’s attempt to implement cap and trade is under attack from the left and, as a result, has hit procedural roadblocks. These events have come as a surprise to many who follow this sort of thing—but are they important? Maybe. Three reactions are possible.

1) Despair (Cap and trade gets a knife in the back to match the one in the front)

 

RGGI and California’s AB32 are reminders that once, not so long ago, climate change was politically relevant and the best policy for avoiding it—pricing carbon—appeared not only possible but inevitable. RGGI and Europe’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) are the only carbon cap-and-trade programs of any size anywhere in the world. (New Zealand also has a nascent scheme.) RGGI, to date, has survived the political tides that turned cap and trade into “cap and tax” and likely make any new carbon policy impossible in this country. In short, the states would carry the torch until, one day, Washington wakes up. It would be depressing irony, this story goes, if those state programs should die not by outside political force but by suicide.

2) Indifference (“Wait…New Jersey had a carbon policy?”)

 

Another view is that you can talk all you want about “carrying the torch” without changing the fact that RGGI was and is a mere drop in the bucket. Its goals were always modest, and emissions caps were set so high that allowances never had any real value. If it weren’t for price floors, they would have been worthless. The program didn’t result in enough emissions cuts to be regionally relevant, much less have an effect on the climate problem. RGGI hasn’t had political success either. It’s chosen form—cap and trade—has become much less popular since the program started. If RGGI was supposed to show the country that cap and trade could work and wasn’t so scary after all, it’s either failed or nobody was paying attention in the first place. When and if pricing carbon becomes politically plausible again in Washington, it will be because politics and national public opinion have changed, not because New Jersey lit the way. The programs don’t seem to have had any effect internationally, either—they aren’t touted by U.S. climate negotiators and seem to have had no persuasive power during climate talks.

3) Optimism (Playing the long game)

 

Michael Levi argues that there may be more positives than negatives in Gov. Christie’s announcement:

…in the course of rejecting RGGI, Christie embraced the reality of the climate problem. Last fall, he said he was skeptical that human-caused climate change was a real problem. In his withdrawal announcement, though, he made it pretty clear that he thought climate change was a serious matter. This is no small thing for a rising star in a party that has increasingly made climate denial a litmus test for its leadership.

 

Christie’s about-face on this issue makes former Minnesota Governor and GOP presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty’s recent turn in the opposite direction look like ham-handed pandering.

Just as with every other environmental issue, the U.S. will have a climate policy when the center-right accepts that one is necessary, and not before. RGGI is doing very little to change that. In other words, RGGI matters only if you care more about the tool (cap and trade) more than the problem (climate change). It is odd, though, that a deficit hawk like Christie would spike a revenue generator like RGGI. That does not bode well for those who think that a carbon tax is the key to a grand environmental-fiscal compromise.

Which of these three is right? Perhaps unsurprisingly, all three to some extent. Pricing carbon is the most effective climate policy—so it is troubling to see it lose ground. RGGI itself is largely irrelevant to both the science and politics of climate. And the long view matters most of all. If you want a meaningful federal climate policy, you are looking for one thing: a 60th vote in the Senate. Could that one day be Christie?

This item is cross-posted from Weathervane.

Photo Credit: Kirsten Spry

Wingnut Watch: Going Down the Rabbit Hole

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

It’s a nostrum of American politics that presidential candidates do best by first playing to the party base in competitive primaries, but then “moving to the center” to appeal to swing voters in close general elections. As a result, one of the strategic pitfalls for candidates is to go “too far” in the primaries in a way that makes “moving to the center” impossible.

Given the radicalization of the Republican Party by the Tea Party Movement (itself, I would argue, mostly a radicalized subset of the same old conservative “base” that has dominated the GOP for three decades), one of the big imponderables for the 2012 GOP field is how many general election risks they are willing to take to establish conservative bona fides in a very demanding and competitive environment for Wingnuttery. Last week we witnessed three examples of candidates going pretty far down the rabbit hole.

Most notably, Tim Pawlenty released an economic plan—a first in the field—which begged for mainstream media and “expert” mockery, but aligned T-Paw with an assortment of useful intra-party themes and pet rocks.

Do conservatives believe, to a theological degree, tax cuts for the wealthy will produce hyper-growth, generating revenues that largely pay for the tax cuts? Pawlenty promised to achieve growth levels exceeding anything in the go-go early 1980s or late 1990s, which is good, because it would take that kind of miracle to even come within shouting distance of the eleven trillion dollars in lost revenues his tax cuts would produce over ten years, according to the Tax Policy Center.

Do conservatives tend to think of federal budget deficits as caused by “waste, fraud and abuse” and excessive benefits for poor people? Well, T-Paw offered up a magic stew of symbolic, pain-free (to Republican voters) gestures in the direction of massive spending reductions, including a balanced budget amendment, vast new appropriations impoundment powers for the president, and implementation of the Lean Six Sigma process beloved of the management consultants of yesteryears.

Have conservatives recently lurched in the direction of Ron Paul’s monetary theories, redolent of the deflationary gold bugs of the late nineteenth century? Pawlenty’s plan lurches in that direction, too, raising alarums about “runaway inflation” and demanding the Fed do nothing but focus on fighting that phantom menace.

T-Paw’s not the only one using rather over-the-top methods to send up ideological flares. Michelle Bachmann is known primarily as a social conservative (her roots are definitely in the Christian Right) and as a partisan bomb-thrower, not as much a sober economic conservative. She addresses that perception by submitting to a public inquisition in the Wall Street Journal by self-appointed ideological commissar Stephen Moore (best known as founder of the Club for Growth):

Ms. Bachmann is best known for her conservative activism on issues like abortion, but what I want to talk about today is economics. When I ask who she reads on the subject, she responds that she admires the late Milton Friedman as well as Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams. “I’m also an Art Laffer fiend—we’re very close,” she adds. “And [Ludwig] von Mises. I love von Mises,” getting excited and rattling off some of his classics like “Human Action” and “Bureaucracy.” “When I go on vacation and I lay on the beach, I bring von Mises.”

Reading Austrian economics on the beach sounds pretty elitist to me, but it’s important for Bachmann to build her credibility in that area, regardless of how it all might sound to swing voters or just regular folks.

Herman Cain pulled a much easier stunt to gain attention as a wingnut zealot: promising not to sign any congressional bills that were longer than three pages. This rule, of course, would have made impossible most of the significant legislation in U.S. history, but that’s not important to a candidate trying to convey his populist contempt for the pointy-heads trying to pull a fast one via too-demanding reading material.

Exercises like this illustrate the extent to which the 2012 presidential field seems to think there’s very little risk in primary-season extremism; certainly no one among them is going to oppose it. During last night’s first major presidential candidate debate in New Hampshire, candidates were given every opportunity to point and hoot at the growth rate assumptions of Pawlenty’s economic plan, but no one would go there. In sharp contrast to debates in 2008, no one rolled their eyes when Ron Paul went off on one of his patented tirades on monetary policy. And no one spoke up for the proposition that just maybe there was some economic peril involved in taking debt limit legislation hostage.

What made this atmosphere most interesting is that it occurred in New Hampshire, the place in the early caucus-and-primary season that is supposedly least dominated by social or economic policy ultras and most open to a “moderate” like Jon Huntsman. Such terms as “moderate” really do have to be used sparingly, if at all with respect to the 2012 GOP field, as the candidates themselves would probably protest the title. For Republicans in 2012, truly, extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. The rest of us should get used to it; we’ll be hearing it in many debates.

Photo Credit: Grace Skidmore

WingNut Watch: Social Issues Very Much In-Play For GOP Field.

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Last week’s less-than-positive jobs report revived ever-hopeful mainstream media talk that economic issues would decisively trump cultural or constitutional issues in the Republican Party’s councils. And indeed, some reporters saw this long-awaited sign even in the entrails of the Christian Right: the annual Washington get-together of Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition, which attracted most of the GOP presidential field. Here’s how Reuters described the confab, under the title, “Social issues fade as Republicans court conservatives”:

Christian conservatives looking to put a Republican in the White House heard a lot about the economy on Friday in a sign that their social issues may take a back seat in 2012…. In contrast to some previous presidential campaigns, social issues like gay marriage and abortion have not been prominent topics for Republicans hopefuls seeking to replace President Barack Obama in next year’s election.

That’s a Beltway wish-fulfillment view of the FFC event, and of contemporary Republican politics generally.

But it’s also not exactly right: There was lots of talk about those supposedly forgotten “social issues” at Ralph’s soiree. The proto-candidate for president who defines the left wing of the GOP these days, Jon Huntsman, did not consign these issues to the “back seat.” Here’s what he had to say:

“As governor of Utah I supported and signed every pro-life bill that came to my desk,” Huntsman said, rattling off legislation that made second trimester abortions illegal, a bill that he said allowed “women to know about the pain that abortion causes an unborn child,” a bill “requiring parental permission for an abortion,” and another piece of legislation “that would trigger a ban on abortions in Utah if Roe vs. Wade were overturned.”

“You see,” Huntsman explained, “I do not believe the Republican Party should focus only on our economic life to the neglect of our human life.”

Turning the “social issues don’t matter” meme on its head, another supposedly non-social-conservative candidate, Mitt Romney, argued that economic and fiscal problems represented a “moral crisis.”

Most MSM treatment of the FFC event missed the rather central point that Ralph Reed’s organization is not a full-on Christian Right group purely devoted to social issues, but instead a “teavangelical” effort explicitly designed to merge the religious and limited-government impulses of the GOP. There is already a massive overlap of affiliation with Tea Party and Christian Right identities. And there’s a more important if less understood overlap in the Tea Party and Christian Right theories of what’s gone wrong with America: an emphasis on alleged judicial usurpations of state and private-sector powers going back to the New Deal, and a hostility to supposed cultural elites who favor both secularization of American society and maintenance of the progressive legacy of New Deal/Great Society programs.

There’s really not that much tension between the economic and social wings of today’s conservative movement. And both appear to converge in an aggressive foreign policy, focused especially on the Middle East. FFC Speaker Rep. Michele Bachmann ended her remarks with a prayer that concluded:

Our nation hangs precariously in the balance financially, morally and also in our relationship with the rest of the world — with our position toward Israel.

Another already-announced presidential candidate, who reportedly received the most impressive response, Herman Cain, told FFC attendee:

“The Cain doctrine would be real simple when it comes to Israel: You mess with Israel, you mess with the United States of America,” he said to a long standing ovation.

In general, bad economic indicators don’t seem to be tilting the conservative movement or the Republican Party in any sort of economics-only direction. Indeed, to the extent that Republican economic policy now focuses on short-term federal spending cuts and long-term elimination of New Deal/Great Society entitlements, it converges with non-economic policies aimed at a cultural counter-revolution remaking America according to mid-twentieth-century values and opportunities. The very people who want to criminalize abortions and restore “traditional marriages,” also want to get rid of unions and collective efforts to make health care or pensions universally available.

…

On the presidential campaign trail, Mitt Romney formally declared his candidacy, but on the same day, in Boston, Sarah Palin spoke out against the Massachusetts health reform plan. Palin’s impossible-to-divine ambitions received vast attention. … Michele Bachmann has reportedly recruited Ed Rollins, Mike Huckabee’s 2008 campaign manager, to her cause. … Newt Gingrich followed up his disastrous campaign launch by suddenly announcing a two-week vacation to the Greek Islands, subsequently losing his Iowa political director. … Jon Huntsman became the first candidate to officially announce he was skipping Iowa. And polls consistently show Mitt Romney narrowly leading a field of candidates who will soon be attacking him on many grounds, most notably RomneyCare. While Romney appears to think his economic message and resume will make him ultimately irresistible to both primary and general election voters, it’s unclear he can overcome hostility to his health care record among the former, and coolness towards his Wall Street Republican orientation among the latter. We’ll soon know if what Romney has to do to get the Republican presidential nomination will prove to be too much for him, or too much for the November 2012 electorate.

Rebuilding America Is Job One

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Amid the high drama of fiscal brinkmanship in Washington, it’s easy to forget that reducing budget deficits isn’t the biggest economic challenge we face. Even more important is kick-starting the great American job machine and reversing our country’s slide in global competition.

Critical to both goals is shoring up the decaying physical foundations of national prosperity. Without world-class infrastructure, the United States won’t be able to attract private investment, sustain rapid technological innovation and productivity growth, or keep good jobs from going overseas.

According to a new Gallup poll, general economic concerns (35 percent) and unemployment (22 percent) top voters list of worries, with federal deficits and debt a distant third at 12 percent. Fiscal restraint is important, but it must be balanced against the larger imperatives of jobs and global competition. Among other things, this means leaving room for public investment to replenish the nation’s stock of physical capital.

America can’t build a more dynamic and globally competitive economy on the legacy infrastructure of the 20th Century. Thanks to their parents’ far-sighted public investments, baby boomers grew up in a country that set the world standard for modern infrastructure. But after a generation of underinvestment, compounded by politicized spending decisions, we now face a massive infrastructure deficit that exerts a severe drag on U.S. productivity.

Meanwhile, China and other fast-rising countries are building gleaming new airports and bullet trains. To keep from falling farther behind, the United States needs to make large-scale capital investments in repairing decrepit roads and bridges; upgrading air and sea ports; building “intelligent” transportation systems and smart energy grids; modernizing the air traffic control system; speeding up our pokey rail networks; and leading the world in deploying ultra-fast broadband.

But with the government strapped for cash, it’s reasonable to ask where the money to rebuild America will come from. The answer is that we need to look more to the private sector. U.S. companies are sitting on $2 trillion in idle cash, and pension funds, overseas investors and sovereign wealth funds also are looking for places to invest. Although the federal government will have to put up seed capital, its main role should be to leverage private investment in state-of-the-art infrastructure.

That’s why America needs a National Infrastructure Bank. As proposed by the bipartisan trio of Senators John Kerry, Kay Bailey Hutchison and Mark Warner, the bank would use a modest, one-time appropriation of $10 billion to leverage enormous investments — $640 billion over 10 years — for projects with the greatest potential to put Americans to work and enhance U.S. competitiveness.

President Obama has repeatedly endorsed a national infrastructure bank and proposed the idea again in the budget he sent to Congress in February. But the Senate bill (and a separate House proposal championed by Rep. Rosa DeLauro) have decided advantages over President Obama’s proposal. The president’s approach starts with a smart idea to create programs that work more with the private sector to find financing solutions. But unlike the Kerry proposal, it does not focus enough on the most powerful tools for leveraging private investment: loan programs that include a reasonable cap on the federal share of project costs. Obama’s bank would also be housed within the Department of Transportation, whereas the Kerry bill would make the bank an independent, quasi-public entity. That’s an important difference, because to attract hard-headed capitalists who expect a real economic return on their investments, the government’s financing facility must be genuinely free of political interference.

An independent infrastructure bank would select projects based on their ability to generate real economic returns rather than their influential political patrons. As a self-sustaining entity that would not rely on future appropriations from Congress, the bank would not be subject to the pork barreling and earmarking that distorts federal and state infrastructure spending, especially on transportation.

It’s time to get serious about our dilemma: the U.S. economy is creating too few jobs to bring down unemployment to pre-recession levels. For that, we’d need nearly 12 million new jobs, or about 100,000 more on average than the 200,000 the economy is creating each month. Big capital projects would immediately create those jobs where they are most desperately needed–in the hard-hit construction industry, which is still struggling with a 20 percent unemployment rate.

In the short run, a big national push to build modern infrastructure could create high-skill jobs that can’t be exported. In the long run, it will ensure America’s return to being an engine of production, not just a global center for consumption. That’s why, as Congress struggles to contain federal deficits and debt, it needs to make room for a National Infrastructure Bank to rebuild America.

This item is cross-posted at the Huffington Post.

Wingnut Watch: Cain Raised as Mitt Romney, Frontrunner, Foiled By Microwave Popcorn

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

If Newt Gingrich’s self-destructive criticism of Paul Ryan’s Medicare proposals pushed Republicans more firmly into Ryan’s corner (e.g., Tim Pawlenty’s forced statement that he would sign a bill implementing Ryan’s budget as president, even though he intends to present his own “ideas”), you might think the results of last Tuesday’s special congressional election in New York would then exert counter-pressure against Ryan’s plan. After all, it’s pretty clear that Republican candidate Jane Corwin’s support for Ryan’s budget was the central issue in the campaign, and contributed to her loss in a strong GOP district. But for the most part, conservative opinion-leaders are resisting the pressure, either rationalizing Corwin’s loss as attributable to other factors (mainly through an unconvincing claim she would have won without the presence of self-proclaimed Tea Party candidate Jack Davis splitting the GOP vote), or simply arguing that Republicans need to do a better job of explaining Ryan’s proposal.

In any event, last week’s results guarantee that Democrats will keep relentlessly tarring the entire GOP with the unpopularity of Ryan’s specific take on Medicare. Whatever individual Republicans actually think, they probably calculate they’d rather take their chances on a general election loss over Medicare than invite a primary challenge by dissing Ryan. Many also undoubtedly hope the president will eventually give them “cover” by supporting a budget deal including enough changes to Medicare and Medicaid that makes it describable, accurately or not, as Ryan Lite.

Elsewhere, it’s been another wild week on the Republican presidential campaign trail, particularly on the Wingnut Right. Three national polls of Republicans have shown Georgia-based radio talk host Herman Cain leaping past more highly-regarded competitors to a high-single or low-double digit position of support, despite low name ID and meager (up until now) media coverage. The Hermanator (as he likes to call himself) has already been regularly winning straw polls after candidate speaking engagements, and is at this point the unquestioned favorite of Tea Party activists around the country. He’s been wowing audiences in Iowa in particular, and a Public Policy Institute poll of likely Caucus-goers in the Hawkeye state to be released later today will reportedly show him running second.

The media attention Cain has now earned will be a mixed blessing, making him more of a national conservative celebrity, but also inviting the kind of negative scrutiny he has avoided as a fringe candidate. It could well produce both effects, as illustrated by the mockery he’s already getting for conflating the Declaration of Independence with the Constitution in his announcement speech. In Wingnut World, it’s gospel that the latter document incorporates the former, which is how both Christian Right and Tea Party folk import God, natural law, and an implicit right of resistance against Big Government into the Constitution. Odds are Cain wasn’t being ignorant, but was simply blowing a dog whistle to conservative activists. His insouciance about foreign affairs could be a bigger problem, as could publicity about his past support for TARP and his service on the Federal Reserve Board back in the 1990s. Above all, Cain’s new prominence will bring race back into the national political discussion with a vengeance, even though many of his supporters seem to feel he represents sort of definitive rebuttal against charges that anti-Obama sentiments reflect racial undertones.

Even as polls have been raising Cain, however, an even bigger phenomenon could be unfolding as Sarah Palin—assumed to have been driven away from a 2012 run by poor poll numbers, savage Republican Elite criticism, and her highly remunerative day jobs—is suddenly behaving very much like a proto-candidate. First up, it came out that she had commissioned a full-length feature film centering on her persecution by the forces of Establishment Evil, to be released next month in Iowa, followed by other early primary states. Then she sprang into action by becoming the chief Celebrity Guest at the annual Rolling Thunder motorcycle rally in Washington, and is on the verge of launching a bus tour that will eventually make its way to Iowa. By all accounts, she’s viewing this re-emergence on the national scene as a test of whether she could launch a viable candidacy while pursuing an “unconventional campaign” that apparently would involve low-substance “patriotic” appearances with her large and famous family in tow.

The impact of all this turbulence on the rest of the field is an interesting sub-plot. As someone whose candidacy would be mortally endangered by a Christian Right/Tea Party coalescence around Cain, or a campaign by her doppelganger Palin, Michele Bachmann had quite the nerve-wracking week, including a damaging and clumsily handled no-show at an important Iowa Republican fundraiser she was supposed to headline. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney, considered the likely beneficiary of any surge of support for a presumably unelectable right-wing candidate like Cain or Palin, made his first appearance in Iowa in many months. As he sought to maintain a delicate balance between dissing Iowa and committing to the kind of full-tilt campaign in the state that undid him in 2008, Romney delivered a shirt-sleeve speech to an audience at a state facility in Des Moines. But before he could get into his altar call, fire alarms went off and Romney had to cut short his remarks and urge the crowd to calmly head to the exits. Ever snake-bit in Iowa, the Mittster was foiled on this occasion by someone overcooking a bag of microwave popcorn.

Picture Credit: DonkeyHotey

Obama’s Two Most Pro-Israel Speeches You Haven’t Heard About

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Football, they say, is a game of inches. So too, is Middle East peace making — both figuratively, and in some cases quite literally. President Obama was reminded of that last week when his comments about terms of reference for future Israel-Palestinian peace negotiations provoked a significant public debate, and in some cases, a furious reaction.

Many Republicans – some acting out of purely political motives – and many Democrats, myself included – acting out of genuine concern – reacted quickly and negatively when President Obama adopted as American policy on Israeli-Palestinian peace talks what had previously been described by this Administration as a “Palestinian goal”– that is, a Palestinian state “based on the 1967 lines, with mutually agreed swaps.”

In the view of some, including the White House, that statement was not new U.S. policy. Those views assert that negative reactions suggesting otherwise “misrepresented” the president’s statement, or perhaps more importantly, his intended meaning.

But as we know, when it comes to issues about Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict, nuance matters. This is a place where inches count.

Reaction to that one passage in the “Winds of Change” address, and the media’s almost singular focus on the matter, overshadowed what was one of the most important and impressive speeches of President Obama’s tenure. And in the end it was only a handful of missing words, representing real-world American commitments that were at the heart of the commotion.

There was so much to celebrate in his address: From the soaring and inspiring vision of a boundless future of prosperity for billions of people across the Middle East who have never known freedom, to the impressive and important commitments to Israel’s security, and to America’s determination to stand up for its values and interests in defeating efforts to isolate and delegitimize Israel at the United Nations and beyond.

In fact, an address that was billed as a landmark speech about change in the Arab world was one of the President’s most impressive and pro-Israel addresses of his presidency.

But you’d probably never know that. And that’s a shame.

By saying that an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal should be based on the 1967-lines with mutually agreed swaps, but omitting the next key phrase – “that take into account demographic changes and realities on the ground” – it was by just a few inches that the president missed the goal line of putting his statement in line with a half century of his predecessors.

It was the vagueness of his remarks, and the omission of a key few words, which necessarily go hand-in-hand, that caused so much alarm.

The truncated phrase was treated with great significance, because this Administration has consistently declined to affirm the validity of a 2004 official letter of commitments from President Bush on behalf of the United States to the Prime Minister in Israel, in which among other key commitments, the U.S. reaffirmed its promise to ensure that Israel would have “defensible borders” distinct from the 1967 lines that would accommodate demographic changes and reality on the ground – ie, major Israeli population centers in the West Bank.

Furthermore, despite the president’s repeated calls for a Jewish State, he has yet to embrace the position taken and assurance provided by Presidents Clinton and Bush that under any final peace accord, the refugee question will be addressed within the borders of a Palestinian State, and not Israel.

Had the Obama Administration previously embraced that letter and those critical U.S. promises, there would have been not nearly the outcry.

But that inexplicable breakdown, seeming to call into question America’s commitment to assurances made in writing by an American president to the State of Israel, codified by Congress, and endorsed in the Clinton Parameters of January 2001, laid the groundwork for the stinging reaction to the President’s incomplete reference to the ’67 lines.

In that context, like Tonto to the Lone Ranger, the Israelis were left asking, ‘What do you mean by swaps, Kimosabe?’

A few days later, President Obama gave another speech on the Middle East, this time even more pro-Israel, but once again, you may not know that, either.

Among the important things President Obama made clear in his second address on the Middle East at the AIPAC policy conference, was that, indeed, he agreed with his predecessors, Presidents Bush and Clinton, that any changes on the ground in a peace agreement must reflect today’s demographic realities and Israel’s unique security needs. His statements on that matter put him firmly in-line with American leaders going back to the 1960s, when President Johnson first established America’s policy that no one could expect Israel to go back to its indefensible 1949/1967 lines.

Why does that matter? History and perspective, of course. Consider the Israeli perspective: In the 1967 Six-Day War, in which Israel survived a miraculous third attempt by a combined force of Arab armies to ‘drive the Jews into the sea’, the nascent Jewish state made important territorial gains.

The city of Jerusalem, after 19 years of Jordanian rule that suppressed freedom of worship for Jews and Christians, was liberated and reunified. The West Bank, known for millennia and in the Old Testament as Judea and Samaria, was brought back into contact with the rest of Israel. The Golan Heights, for years a launching pad from which the Syrian army terrorized Israeli towns, was won in an epic and heroic battle. And the Sinai Desert and Gaza Strip, soon to be offered to Egypt in exchange for peace, were conquered.

Like the Sun rises, Russia and other Arab allies at the United Nations pressed their condemnations of Jewish State. In a typically hypocritical move targeting Israel, some in the world body demanded that for the first time in history land won in a defensive war be fully returned to the aggressors.

The United States – defending its ally Israel, our interests in the region, and basic fairness – rejected that approach. Our elected leaders understood that it was the very indefensible boundaries of 1949/67 encouraged Arab aggression and dreams of destroying the Jewish State and the Jewish People. The United States understood that Israel could not ever be expected or pressured to go back to what became know as ‘the Auschwitz borders.’ That is why America fought so hard to ensure that UN Resolution 242 specifically did not force Israel had to relinquish all of the land it had captured in its war of self-defense, did not force Israel back to indefensible borders and need not exchange territory in a one-to-one ratio.

That is the diplomatic tradition many feared the president was undermining, at a time when Israel is under threat from a genocidal Hezbollah to the north, an unstable Egypt and Syria to its south and northeast, and a Hamas/Fatah unity government that seems ready to abandon the peace process on multiple fronts. The Palestinians rushed to enshrine the president’s position as new preconditions for talks.

But they’re likely to be disappointed. The president made it clear during his second AIPAC speech that he is aligned with those decades of American diplomacy stretching back to the U.S. stand on UNSC 242. That is precisely the diplomatic tradition that the President embraced during his AIPAC speech, a clarification that – again – has been under-appreciated by some.

Perhaps realizing that his first remarks were incomplete and left an impression he had not intended, President Obama, in his speech to AIPAC, built on the pro-Israel foundation of his Winds of Change Address, not only completing the thought he’d begun the prior week, but expanding on several themes in praise-worthy ways.

President Obama powerfully restated in emphatic and unmistakable terms how strenuously the United States will oppose Palestinian efforts to attain unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state in the absence of peace and an end to all claims. This clear leadership stance, and the president’s forceful denunciation of efforts to delegitimatize and isolate Israel are deeply appreciated and underscore the President’s commitment to safeguarding the Jewish state.

Notable was the President’s statement that Israel cannot be expected to negotiate with Hamas, which he rightly called a terrorist organization. His explicit call once again for the Iranian proxy to meet the quartet conditions – recognizing Israel and its right to exist, renouncing violence, and accepting prior agreements between the PA and Israel, was fundamentally important, and ensures that Hamas must fundamentally change, or else remain a pariah.

The President also explicitly signaled his support for a long-term, but not permanent, Israeli military and security presence in the Jordan Valley. This stance is vital, and like his effort to align administration policy with administrations past, is not just commendable, but significant. And in both speeches, the President stressed not only “ironclad” American support for Israel’s security, but insisted that a future Palestinian state be demilitarized.

His remarks on issues beyond the narrow question of the Israel-Arab dispute are also vitally important – in particular, Iran. Again, President Obama said clearly and unequivocally that Iran cannot be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons and that it is American policy to prevent them from doing so.

Both speeches were strongly pro-Israel in the broadest sense. From the President’s vision of a Middle East made up of progressive Arab states more focused on investing in their own human capital and building tolerant, prosperous societies – rather than scapegoating Israel, to his embrace of Israel and its future as a Jewish state with peaceful neighbors, there is much to appreciate. It’s time to say so.

Photo credit: Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Fixing Our Broken Politics: Mine’s bigger than yours, or how raising money trumps raising good arguments

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In recent weeks Mitt Romney has been seeking to bolster his claim to be the mainstream establishment candidate capable of beating Barack Obama in the general election. It’s a logical enough claim for any candidate to seek to make, except that his most compelling argument has had more to do with dollars than ideas.

Last week, the Romney campaign arranged for more than 400 activists to travel to Las Vegas to participate in a telethon that the campaign claims raised $10.25 million in a single day. Two events in Boston later in the week were reported to have raised $2 million.

By June 30, the date on which donations from the last quarter will be published, the Romney campaign is hoping to be able to comprehensively demonstrate financial dominance over the rest of the field. Romney’s staff is keen to emphasize its fundraising prowess, not as a means to articulate Romney’s arguments about issues, but as an argument in and of itself.

Following the latest fundraising effort, the Romney campaign posted an article on their website claiming, “When it comes to money, President Obama and Mitt Romney occupy a plateau far above everyone else”. The message is clear: it doesn’t matter if you really like Tim Pawlenty or Ron Paul or any of the several other respected Republicans in the race: Mitt Romney is the only candidate with the cash to win.

Arguments about fundraising power and the supposed credibility that it gives a candidate are ubiquitous in primary campaigns. Newt Gingrich has already felt this bite: One of the key ideological moments in the GOP contest so far was perhaps Newt Gingrich’s apparent flip-flop over Paul Ryan’s budget plans for Medicare. The moment may well have made support for the budget a shibboleth for conservative voters, while the attention given to Gingrich’s misstep will make it harder for candidates to evade the issue.

Amidst the furor, however, one of the key arguments made by Gingrich’s detractors was that it had damaged his campaign’s ability to raise funds. Much was made of the fact that within 24 hours of his comments on ”Meet the Press”, 13 out of 18 co-chairs for Gingrich’s Florida fundraising effort dropped out. A ‘veteran Republican strategist’ was widely quoted as questioning whether Gingrich can “even make it to July 4th, because his fundraising is going to dry up.”

Primary elections are a vibrant part of American democracy. They contrast favorably with systems in most other democracies where the selection of candidates that the electorate chooses between is still largely controlled by party bosses.

Therefore, it’s tragic that the opportunity to have open discussions about ideas within America’s two great ideological traditions can be drowned out by questions about fundraising. This focus not only distracts from important issues, but also maintains the role for party elites that primary elections were intended to abolish.

Thirteen Florida co-chairs are supposedly able to hail the demise of Newt Gingrich’s campaign, while a small group of Romney fundraisers send a dramatic message to party activists and primary voters that, arguments over issues aside, his is the only campaign capable of defeating Obama’s formidable electoral machine.

There is currently legislation before Congress that would mitigate the oppressive effect that money in politics can have on the vibrancy of American democracy. The Presidential Funding Act would provide $4 for every $1 raised by candidates from small donations of $200 or less. Participating candidates must accept limits on the size of donations they are able to receive.

Such reforms would make candidates who inspire widespread support, but lack access to the tiny proportion of wealthy donors who contribute the majority of campaign finance funds, to be competitive. That would allow primary campaigns to be more about issues and less about money and organization. By negating “I can raise the most” as an argument it would enrich and broaden public discourse and keep our democracy lively and strong.

To find out more about the damaging role of money in politics please visit https://www.youstreet.org/ or go to Americans for Campaign Reform (ACR) on Facebook.

photo credit: las – initally

 

Do We Need a Third Party to Fix Deficits?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Republicans are crying foul over Democrats’ resort to “Mediscare” tactics to win an open House seat in New York. Democrats are chortling because they think the GOP’s heretofore unstoppable austerity offensive may have met its Stalingrad.

All this is diverting to aficionados of partisan thrust-and-parry in Washington. But the rest of the country may be less amused. By adhering to unbending, absolutist positions on Medicare and taxes, could Democrats and Republicans be cracking open the door to a serious third party challenge in 2012?

On Tuesday, Democrat Kathy Hochul won a traditionally Republican House seat in upstate New York in a special election. She relentlessly linked her GOP opponent to Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan for making deep cuts in Medicare while preserving the Bush tax cuts for the rich. Many Democrats now see this as the winning formula for next year’s elections.

Ryan complained yesterday that Democrats are “shamelessly demagoguing and distorting” his plan. It was hard to feel any sympathy for the earnest House Budget Commission chairman, however, since Republicans in 2010 spent millions on ads shamelessly blasting Democratic candidates for backing the proposed Medicare cuts in Obamacare. There’s actual double hypocrisy at work here, since Ryan’s Medicare proposal works through the same health exchanges Republicans find so objectionable in Obama’s plan.

Being called a demagogue by the party of death panels and death taxes is like being called ugly by a crab.

Nonetheless, Democrats need to resist the temptation to pay back their opponents in kind. They need to retain the flexibility to slow down Medicare’s cost growth, which as Bill Clinton said yesterday at the Peterson Foundation Fiscal Summit, is the sine qua non of any serious proposal to reduce federal deficits and debt.

Medicare spending is by far the biggest driver of federal spending growth. Together with Social Security, it represents nearly one-third of federal spending. According to the Social Security and Medicare Trustees, the government is slated to transfer over $3.4 trillion in general revenues to Medicare by 2020. This problem needs to be tackled now, even if it complicates Democrats’ ability to run on “Medagoguery” in 2012.

Meanwhile, “progressives” aren’t helping by running a ridiculously over-the-top ad showing a Ryan look-alike pitching a wheelchair-bound granny off a cliff. True progressives believe in solving the nation’s core dilemmas, not fetishizing the status quo. Cutting the nation’s debts down to manageable size will require both higher revenues and lower rates of entitlement spending growth.

If Democrats and Republicans can’t produce a fix along these lines, they practically invite the 2012 version of Ross Perot into the race.

Wingnut Watch: Debt-Ceiling Deniers, Hostage-Takers and the 2012 Field

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

It’s happened so quickly that its significance may have been obscured, but one of the biggest recent developments in Wingnut World has been the rapid devolution of conservative opinion on the pending debt limit crisis–from demands for hard-line negotiations to outright rejection of negotiations at all, often supplemented by claims that the government doesn’t need new debt authority anyway.

This last phenomenon, which Jonathan Chait and others have been calling “debt-ceiling denialism,” is spreading like kudzu since it was first notably articulated by Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) in a January column in the Wall Street Journal. There are different forms of the argument, but the common threads are the claim that the federal government can prioritize the use of revenues in a way that avoids debt default, and the complaint that the whole issue has been manufactured by Democrats to avoid big spending cuts. Toomey attracted 100 House members and 22 Senators to his “Full Faith and Credit Act” legislation that would supposedly avoid a default by forcing debt payments to the top of the spending priority list.

Short of explicit denial that a real breaching of the debt limit would be a bad thing, other conservatives (including presidential candidates Tim Pawlenty, Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain) take the parallel position of opposing any increase in the debt limit on grounds that spending (without, of course, any tax increases) should be cut enough to make the increase unnecessary.

The usual reaction in Washington to this sort of talk is to dismiss it as tactical positioning for the “deal” that will ultimately be cut—as “hostage-taking” aimed at maximizing the “ransom.” Perhaps that’s exactly what it was initially. But at some point, arguments that the hostage’s life is worth nothing, or worse yet, that the ransom limit increases are perpetually unpopular among the overwhelming percentage of Americans who have no real idea of the merits of either side of the can be earned precisely by killing the hostage, undermine the very idea of a deal, particularly when refusing to negotiate with Democrats is a posture that conservatives value as an end in itself anyway. Indeed, the trend in conservative rhetoric on this subject is to accuse Democrats of hostage-taking by their adamant refusal to accept vast spending reductions. It’s a dangerous gambit, made even more tempting to Republicans by the fact that debt dispute.

The key question is the extent to which the GOP’s business elites forcefully push back and demand a more reasonable attitude before things get out of hand. That’s particularly urgent since debt-limit deniers and hard-liners alike are getting into the habit of arguing that financial markets care more about spending reductions than any hypothetical default on the debt. Moreover, debt-limit ultras are also playing with fire by systematically eliminating any incentive for the Obama administration or congressional Democrats to make concessions to a credible negotiating partner. Why offer a ransom when the hostage-takers no longer seem to care what you offer? Better to just send in the SWAT team and take your chances.

Meanwhile, the last week offered more news in the shaping of the 2012 Republican presidential nomination field: Mitch Daniels disappointed his Beltway cheerleading squad by deciding against a run; Newt Gingrich imploded his long-shot campaign with a series of disastrous remarks and revelations; and Tim Pawlenty and Herman Cain formally announced candidacies.

Assessments of the impact of Daniels’ non-candidacy vary according to perspective. Some think it will lead Establishment Republicans to make a last-ditch effort to find another savior such as Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) or even Jeb Bush. And if that fails, to resign themselves to the existing field and get behind Romney, Pawlenty, or Huntsman (though the last option remains implausible because his path to the nomination remains extremely difficult). Others combine the Daniels and Huckabee withdrawals and suggest the weak field will produce a big opening for a southern Tea Party conservative with deep pockets like Rick Perry. Both Establishment types and fans of a late entry are beginning to burrow away to undermine the credibility of the Iowa Caucuses as the essential starting-point for the real campaign (for the latter camp, it’s in part because competing in Iowa requires competing in the state party Straw Poll that is held this August).

Though the Gingrich implosion has interested the conservative commentariat less than Daniels’ decision–for the good reason that very few observers considered the Newster viable in the first place–its long-term significance should not be underestimated: it proved once again that ideological purity is the preeminent demand of conservatives for GOP presidential candidates. If nothing else, the incident will make it very difficult for other candidates to distance themselves from Paul Ryan’s politically perilous Medicare proposals. But it should also serve as a dashboard idiot light to Mitt Romney warning him that his hopes of being forgiven for his health care heresy may not be terribly realistic.

Donald Trump: Presidential Politics and Business As Usual

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

This week Donald Trump officially announced that he would not run for President in 2012 saying, “business is my greatest passion” and that he was not ready to leave the private sector. A look at Trump’s contributions to political campaigns suggests that he is quite prepared to put his money where his mouth is when it comes to setting priorities: business before politics.

According to The Washington Post, Trump has made a total of $1.3 million of political contributions to date. These donations have been fairly evenly split between the two parties, with 54% going to Democrats. Indeed, Trump’s loudmouthed criticism of Democratic policies in recent days did not stop him from donating to prominent Democrats closely associated with President Obama over several years, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the President’s former Chief of Staff, Rahm Emmanuel.

In an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Trump justified donating to Democrats on the grounds that it was good business to do so. Trump was keen to point out that many of his donations have been in Democrat-controlled New York, the place where he does business. “Why should I contribute to a Republican for my whole life when…the most they can get is one percent of the vote?” Trump asked. In New York and other states where Trump has business interests, Democrats are the incumbents and so are the logical beneficiaries of Trump’s largesse. As Trump told Hannity he’s “not stupid”; why would he donate to candidates who can’t win and will not hold power or affect his interests?

While Trump may be an eccentric politician, he is–at least in this respect–a very typical businessman. Corporate political giving is overwhelmingly directed at incumbents and tends to significantly favor the political party in power. In 2008 PACs and individuals in the energy industry gave 82% of their contributions to incumbents, Wall Street gave 74%, and the pharmaceutical industry gave 89% regardless of political party, according to Americans for Campaign Reform.

It is hardly surprising that Trump and others in business should direct campaign contributions towards politicians likely to wield power. But the idea that Trump’s calculating self-interest remains in the headlines is somewhat of a shock, suggesting that much of the small dollar donations given by individuals is still representative of deeply-held personal political convictions.

As Trump leaves the Republican presidential field, perhaps he can bring a bit of straight talking to the debate on campaign finance reform. The issue has many complexities, but one key is quite simple after all: the bulk of big-dollar campaign donations aren’t made in support of deeply held ideological beliefs. They’re made as a business investment to the candidate most likely to win, regardless of the party they’re in.

The Donald doesn’t pretend otherwise and nor should we. You don’t need a gold toupee stand to see this.

Will Marshall in Politico on the Gang of Six

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Head on over to Politico’s site today to see Will Marshall’s take on the implosion of the Gang of Six, a group of Senators trying to forge a bipartisan compromise on the budget. Here’s an excerpt, but click here to read the whole piece:

Sen. Tom Coburn’s defection from the Gang of Six obviously sets back prospects for restoring fiscal sanity in Washington. Nonetheless, the now diminished Gang remains the only plausible vehicle for advancing the political breakthrough achieved by the president’s Fiscal Commission.

To the surprise of many jaded Washington observers, the commission struck a fiscal “grand bargain” that marries tax and entitlement reform. Defying the Norquist Doctrine, Coburn and two other GOP senators agreed to close tax expenditures and use the savings not only to lower individual and corporate tax rates, but also to cut the federal deficit. This prompted a reciprocal act of political courage by several Democrats led by Sen. Dick Durbin, who embraced Social Security reforms unpopular with liberals.

Continue reading the whole piece at Politico.

Wingnut Watch: Conservatives Savage Romney’s Health Care, Huckabee Sits It Out

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Presidential politics was again the focus of Wingnut World last week, as conservative opinion-leaders took the opportunity to savage Mitt Romney for his adamant defense of the Massachusetts health reform plan, while mulling over the decision of controversial fellow-traveler Mike Huckabee to stay on the sidelines in 2012.

Romney took the calculated risk of delivering a self-hyped “major speech” on health reform at the University of Michigan, apparently in hopes that a definitive statement on the subject would flush out and eventually diminish conservative anger at him on the subject before Republicans actually begin voting next year. It certainly flushed out negative opinions on the Right. Even before the speech was delivered, Romney took a pounding from the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, which rightly predicted he would refuse to back down on the wisdom of backing a state reform plan that included an individual insurance purchasing mandate and other features associated with “ObamaCare.” The title of the op-ed says it all: “Obama’s Running Mate.”

The speech itself was a hodge-podge of arguments and rationalizations. Romney alternated between what progressive health wonk Jonathan Cohn called an “inspiring” defense of his reasoning in signing the Massachusetts law, and less-than-compelling claims that the law had no implications for national health policy. The conservative commentariat has long since rejected as inadequate his “federalism defense” that “RomneyCare” was a system designed for Massachusetts only, which is unsurprising since the individual mandate is the specific target of a host of state lawsuits aimed at overturning ObamaCare. Moreover, the proto-candidate’s effort to change the subject to what he would propose as president after a theoretical repeal of national health reform legislation drew virtually no attention, probably because he simply endorsed every conventional conservative gimmick of recent years—a tax credit for the purchase of individual insurance policies, preemption of state regulation of private health insurance via interstate sales, and medical malpractice reform.

Only time will tell if Team Romney is right that hostility to RomneyCare will burn itself out, much as John McCain’s many past heresies against conservative orthodoxy were ultimately forgiven in 2008, leaving Republican elites to focus on his superior “electability.” But Romney’s not off to a very good start. Among his tormenters after the speech were the editors of National Review, who gave him a crucial endorsement in 2008. After rejecting Romney’s federalism argument that an individual mandate was acceptable at the state level, his one-time fans at NR made this brutal assessment of the political thinking behind the speech:

We understand that Romney does not feel that he can flip-flop on what he had touted as his signature accomplishment in office. But if there is one thing we would expect a successful businessman to know, it is when to walk away from a failed investment.

This is in synch with the advice Romney has been receiving from Sen. Jim DeMint of SC, another key 2008 supporter who is vastly more influential today.

Later in the week, conservative chattering class attention was diverted to Romney’s 2008 nemesis, Mike Huckabee, who stage-managed an announcement of non-candidacy on his Fox show Saturday after touching off an orgy of confused speculation about his plans by issuing a variety of mixed signals.

His Saturday show was quite a spectacle. It included a derisive panel discussion of Romney’s health care speech, a bizarre interview with right-wing rocker Ted Nugent—who discussed his proposal to unleash the Navy Seals to “secure” U.S. borders with mega-violence—who then took the stage to perform “Cat Scratch Fever” with Huck on bass, followed by a videotaped benediction from Donald Trump. Near the end of the show, Huckabee faced the cameras and detailed all the reasons he should run for president, before divulging that God had persuaded him otherwise via prayer.

For all the hype and the alleged divine intervention, Huck’s decision was precisely what the conventional wisdom had long predicted, mainly because of his palpable reluctance to give up the Fox show and a new-found personal wealth to go trudging through the pot-luck dinner circuit of Iowa once again. At fifty-five, Huckabee is also young enough to consider running in 2016 or even later.

Assessments of the impact on the 2012 race of Huckabee’s non-candidacy have been mixed, but there’s a general consensus that it provides an opening for other outspoken social conservative in Iowa, while limiting the southerners in the field to the not-very-southern Newt Gingrich and African-American Herman Cain. In both respects, this could be very good news for smart-money favorite Tim Pawlenty, who is by all accounts out-organizing his rivals in Iowa and is clearly acceptable to the Christian Right and can now seriously contemplate a breakthrough in southern states beginning with South Carolina.

Speaking of Tim Pawlenty and South Carolina, a fascinating subplot in the presidential contest has been unfolding after Gov. Nikki Haley demanded that all the candidates side with her in attacks on the National Labor Relations Board, which has at least temporarily stopped the relocation of jobs by Boeing from Washington to SC in the wake of disputes with the machinists union. Haley, it should be noted, has trumped the usual conservative bashing of public-sector unions by arguing that private-sector unionism is incompatible with economic growth (she appointed a “management” labor attorney as her state labor department chief with the explicit mission of keeping unions out of the state to the maximum extent possible). Pawlenty won the race to first kiss Haley’s ring on the Boeing issue, though the other candidates are quickly following. This helps reinforce the impression that Pawlenty’s strategy—ironically, much like Mitt Romney’s in 2008—is to supplement his “moderate-governor-of-a-blue-state” background with an effort to do whatever he is told by conservative activists. He hasn’t turned them down yet.

Can Immigration Benefit Dems?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Immigration isn’t a winning issue for either party. Republicans, under the tea party’s spell, are gravitating toward a purely restrictionist stance, which will complicate their party’s efforts to make inroads among Latinos, the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. electorate. President Obama and the Democrats favor “comprehensive reform,” which includes legalizing millions of workers. With joblessness stuck at twice normal levels, and wages stagnant at best for average workers, that’s a hard sell.

Since there’s obviously no way today’s divided Congress will pass a comprehensive bill, people naturally wonder why Obama keeps returning to the theme. No doubt his advisers want to galvanize another big Latino turnout in 2012, with similarly lopsided Democratic margins. But it’s also true that Obama never stops looking for ways to advance his core campaign promises – just ask the bin Ladens.

Latino advocacy groups are pressing Obama to use his executive powers to slow down deportations. That also will be difficult, because stronger enforcement of U.S. immigration laws constitutes the only common ground in this debate. If you are weak on enforcement, you won’t get a hearing on anything else.

In any case, balanced immigration reform will have to await full economic recovery. In the meantime Obama and progressives should focus on a more modest goal: beginning to align U.S. immigration policy with America’s economic needs. This means expanding the number of high skill visas, stapling green cards to the diplomas of foreign students so they can put what they’ve learned to work in the United States, and opening a pathway to citizenship for the children of illegal aliens who get into college.

cross-posted at The Arena at Politico

Wingnut Watch: The Republicans Debate, and Wait for a Serious Contender

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The nuttier elements of Wingnut World were on high-profile display last week in Greenville, SC, as Fox News and the South Carolina Republican Party held the first event billed as a 2012 candidate debate. With the exception of Tim Pawlenty, everyone who showed up has about as much chance of winning the nomination as I do.

One of the under-discussed topics of the endless wind-up to the 2012 race is the extent to which an abundance of fire-breathing minor candidates can distort the tone of the GOP contest, and particularly its televised debates. The Greenville event showed it could get pretty weird, even with a tightly controlled format and with Michele Bachmann and Roy Moore not in the room.

As is almost always the case at Republican gatherings with no stiff entry fee, the live audience was dominated by very loud followers of Ron Paul. The enthusiasm for Paul was not diminished by the presence of a second libertarian, Gary Johnson. Meanwhile, one of those famous Frank Luntz focus groups watched the show and went gaga for Herman Cain, another familiar phenomenon from the early campaign trail. Cain is smooth and keeps things simple, which separates him a bit from other 100 percent red-meat stemwinders who always sound like they want to deliver a 3,000-page book written all in capital letters, with more shouting in the footnotes.

But if Herman Cain won the night, Rick Santorum may have won the week in South Carolina with several events (he’s now been to SC sixteen times already) capped by winning the straw poll at a state party fundraising dinner. He was, of course, the only candidate who showed up. The same day, oddly enough, in the very same city, Jon Huntsman made his first public appearance after stepping down as U.S. Ambassador to China, as the commencement speaker at the University of South Carolina. Aside from some remarks about patriotism that some are interpreting as an elliptical defense of his service in the Obama administration, Huntsman made it through his speech without having to address the kind of right-wing concerns about his commitment to the Cause he’ll soon be facing if he runs for president.

While we are on the presidential topic, Newt Gingrich has let it be known he will announce his candidacy on Wednesday, after several false starts over the last month. Gingrich will try to extend the press surrounding his announcement with a Major Speech at the annual convention of the Georgia Republican Party.

Newt isn’t being taken that seriously as a candidate by most of the punditocracy, but it does respect his money, as reflected in a very interesting piece in today’s Wall Street Journal about the vast and well-financed array of organizations he’s put together since leaving Congress in 1999, often called “Newt, Inc.” Like Mitt Romney, Gingrich is a candidate who harnesses tremendous organizational, fundraising and (conservatives think, at least) intellectual skills to a pattern of flaws that may or may not prove disqualifying.

The other presidential buzz this week involves the man beloved of many Beltway Establishment Republicans who believe he can save them from a presidential field sporting the likes of Cain, Santorum, Gingrich, Romney and the rest of them: Mitch Daniels. Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post nicely captured the thinking of these folk:

A Daniels candidacy probably would be taken as a sign that the games are over for the Republican Party, that it is time to buckle down and organize to beat President Obama.

“He will turn a race that is about less serious politics into a race about more serious policy,” argued Alex Castellanos, a Republican media consultant who is not aligned with any candidate heading into 2012. “Daniels is the adult in the room saying the party is over, it’s time to clean house. That contrast in maturity is how a Republican beats Obama.”

Any time you read this many references to seriousness and maturity, you have to figure the political professionals in the GOP are very worried about their presidential field, and, moreover, willing to accept the risks involved in a “serious” candidate who wants to undertake very unpopular policies in order to nominate someone who seems as presidential as Barack Obama. But the more immediate problem is that the people being implicitly derided as immature, unserious brats happen to be the grassroots conservatives who tend to dominate early-state caucuses and primaries—and to cheer Herman Cain and Rick Santorum when they call for total war against the godless liberals and Beltway elites alike.

 

Egypt’s Errant Diplomacy

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Although the fall of Arab dictators is in general a healthy development for America, it could also pose some tricky, short-term challenges to U.S. interests in the Middle East. Egypt’s post-Mubarak diplomacy is an unsettling case in point.

Long our most reliable ally in the region, Egypt has struck a more independent course since a popular uprising forced Hosni Mubarak to relinquish power. To the consternation of Washington and Jerusalem, it brokered the April 27 power-sharing agreement between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas apparently sought the reconciliation with Hamas because he thinks a unified front bolsters the chance for Palestinian statehood. A new interim government will ask the United Nations in September to recognize a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. But since Hamas did not renounce terrorism or accept Israel’s right to exist, the accord would seem to foreclose any possibility of jump-starting stalled peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.

Israel’s relatively dovish President, Shimon Peres, minced no words in calling the unity pact a “fatal mistake that will prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and will sabotage chances of peace and stability in the region.”

Unfortunately, Hamas’s intransigence reflects a tragic Palestinian tendency to indulge in fantasies of redemptive violence and rally behind “strong men” who call for Israel’s destruction and defy the United States. Virtually alone in the region, Palestinians cheered Saddam Hussein during the 1991 Gulf War. A recent poll shows that a majority of Palestinians approve of Osama bin Laden, the only place in the region where that is true.

In fact, in stark contrast to the reaction of most Middle East leaders, Hamas deplored America’s killing of Osama bin Laden. “We condemn the assassination of a Muslim and Arab warrior and we pray to God that his soul rests in peace,” declared Ismail Haniya, “prime minister” of the Gaza strip. “We regard this as the continuation of the American oppression and shedding of blood of Muslims and Arabs.”

In any case, Egypt’s initiative has sharpened tensions between Palestinians and Israelis. Over the weekend, Israel froze Palestinian custom revenue to prevent it from being used to fund Hamas missile strikes, which have been escalating. Cairo has further deepened Israeli anxieties by lifting an electoral ban on the Muslim Brotherhood and reestablishing diplomatic ties with Iran. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to address Congress later this month, but is reportedly recoiling from proposing new peace initiatives.

Egypt’s foreign minister also is urging the United States to back U.N. recognition of a Palestinian state. But the Obama administration is holding firm to its position that peace can only be achieved through direct negotiations between Israel and Palestinians.

Wingnut Watch: Responding to the Death of bin Laden

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Conservative reaction to the president’s announcement of the killing of Osama bin Laden has been relatively, perhaps even surprisingly, positive, given the standard view of Obama on the Right as an irresolute multilateralist afraid to use military force and always ready to apologize for American power.

Naturally, GOP congressional leaders and would-be presidents have been careful in their reactions. All gave credit to military and intelligence personnel with the event, but most (with the exception so far of Mitch McConnell, Rick Santorum, Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann) also gave at least a small shout-out to the Obama administration, typically along with his predecessor.

Even some of the major right-wing opinionaters have been giving Obama grudging praise. RedState co-founder Ben Domenech made this rather strong statement at RealClearWorld:

Whatever you may think of Obama’s domestic policies or diplomatic decisions, his approach to national security has been largely wise and overwhelmingly vindicated thus far.

But there’s a very big undertow of conservative criticism of Obama for hypocrisy on grounds that the tactics that led to the discovery of Osama’s hiding-place were allegedly those that the president and other Democrats have deplored in the past. In fact, it’s being accepted at break-neck speed in the right-wing blogosphere that interrogations at Gitmo and/or the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed produced the critical intel. In other words, if Bush and Cheney can’t get the bulk of the credit for a big achievement that eluded them, the interrogation methods they defiantly championed were the real heroes.

There seems to be more than a little lefty-baiting going on in this line of conservative “reasoning,” in hopes of pouring gasoline on anti-war sentiment. Indeed, you can expect conservatives, initially at least, to leap to Obama’s defense if he visibly rejects the much-anticipated post-Osama advice to accelerate troop withdrawals in Afghanistan or announce an end to the Global War On Terror.

Before leaving this subject, I’d like to give a special acknowledgement to Michele Bachmann for her reaction to the death of Osama, which is a minor masterpiece in message discipline:

Tonight’s news does not bring back the lives of the thousands of innocent people who were killed that day by Osama bin Laden’s horrific plan, and it does not end the threat posed by terrorists, but it is my hope that this is the beginning of the end of Sharia-compliant terrorism.

“Sharia-compliant terrorism?” Sounds an awful lot like those “Sharia-compliant mortgages” Tim Pawlenty’s been accused of promoting as governor of Bachmann’s home state.

OBL’s death has temporarily interrupted the build-up of conservative wrath over the debt limit and GOP spending cut demands, but only temporarily. This week’s meetings in Washington involving representatives of the White House and congressional Republicans, and separately, the Senate’s Gang of Six deliberations, will produce a quickly intensifying backlash if there is any sign whatsoever of agreement. The latest “idea” that you’ll hear more about is that of a series of short-term (say, two-month) debt limit increases, providing multiple bites at the ideological apple, or, depending on which metaphor you prefer, a planned series of hostage crises. This is supposedly Grover Norquist’s pet proposal, and it could become very popular, even though some Tea Folk will point out this tactic didn’t work as brilliantly as was advertised on the FY 2011 appropriations front.

On the presidential campaign front, the news from Pakistan may have partially obscured Mitch Daniels’ decision to sign legislation making Indiana the first state to formally ban public funding for Planned Parenthood, and the third to impose a constitutionally-suspect ban on abortions more than 20 weeks after conception. This step is being widely interpreted as a signal that Daniels is back-tracking from his famous proposal for a “truce” on divisive cultural issues like abortion until such time as the country’s fiscal crisis is resolved, and/or that he has decided to run for president.

I dunno about that. Clearly, if Daniels had vetoed this legislation, the outcry from social conservatives would have made any presidential run in the immediate future a highly dubious proposition. But it’s not as though he actively promoted the bill before it landed on his desk, so further demonstrations of fealty to the anti-abortion cause will probably be necessary, and in any event, no one seems to know if he actually wants to run.

Pressure is also building on Mike Huckabee to make a move towards a candidacy a bit earlier than his own summer timetable. His friends in South Carolina recently had to bat down rumors he’d put out the word that he was giving the contest a pass.