issue: Politics

Wingnut Watch: Confused Obama-haters

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Recent events in Libya have left conservative Obama-haters a bit confused. Up until this week, conservative gabbers frequently took easy shots at the president for inaction on Libya; you didn’t have the sort of divisions on the Right often seen during the Egyptian crisis, when some (notably John Bolton) defended Mubarak as a stout U.S. ally and many others warned that Egyptians rebels were or would eventually be dominated by radical jihadists. Qaddafi has no conservative fans.

In the wake of the administration’s support for a U.N. resolution authorizing the use of force in Libya, and the robust U.S. participation in the first stages of the multinational military campaign, virtually no conservatives have gone so far as to praise Obama, other than backhanded “better late than never” comments. The prevalent sentiment is that the administration has demonstrated its fatal weakness once again by flip-flopping into an internationally led and insufficiently clear military commitment, too late to secure a rebel victory. Among the 2012 presidential possibilities, no one has even bothered to make the ritualistic “salute the flag” gestures of vague support owed a current commander-in-chief by prospective future commanders-in-chief.

One very specific and highly characteristic right-wing complaint has been that Obama sought sanction for military action from the United Nations but not from the current conservative power lode, Congress. A Washington Times editorial went so far as to call it “Obama’s illegal war:”

The president cannot be seen as a mere instrument of the United Nations, which would relegate the U.S. Constitution to second-class status behind the U.N. Charter. If U.S. troops are going to be put in harm’s way, the authority must come from elected representatives in Washington, not from a bunch of international bureaucrats hanging out in Turtle Bay.

The editorial (like many other conservative commentaries on Libya) stressed George W. Bush’s pursuit of congressional approval before launching the Iraq War. They seem to have forgotten how long the Bush White House resisted this step, or the arguments Bush’s defenders never stopped making that congressional approval was unnecessary in light of the president’s inherent national security powers.

If the Libya intervention devolves into a difficult passage wherein Qaddafi is stopped from destroying the rebels yet cannot be dislodged from control of much of the country, you can infallibly expect many conservatives to default to their traditional claim that liberals like Obama always increase the risk associated with military interventions by using insufficient force and worrying about the opinions of Europeans and Muslims.

Ironically, the Libya crisis comes at a time when the longstanding Republican united front favoring ever-expanding military commitments and ever-rising defense spending is showing some cracks. Last week probable 2012 presidential candidate Haley Barbour made a speech in Iowa calling for greater scrutiny of the defense budget as part of an overall deficit reduction effort, and also suggested he might favor winding down troop levels in Afghanistan because of an insufficiently clear mission.

While Barbour may back down on this provocative message, it could well blow open a long-implicit conflict between the GOP’s Tea Party rhetoric on federal spending and the party’s long pro-defense-spending posture, often posited as the glue that held economic and social conservatives in harness. Last summer Sarah Palin made some noise about convincing the Tea Folk to explicitly place defense spending off-limits to cuts. And for the most part, conservative appropriations and budget schemes have let the Pentagon alone, aside from a disputed acceptance of the elimination of weapon systems the Pentagon itself no longer wants. Certainly the Ron Paul/Rand Paul wing of the GOP has long been eager to pare back overseas commitments as a matter of isolationist principle as much as fiscal probity. But Barbour is the most prominent Conservative Establishment figure to drop hints in this direction.

It was almost certainly no coincidence that immediately after Barbour’s speech in Iowa, Tim Pawlenty told an audience in South Carolina that he didn’t favor defense cuts, and also didn’t favor any troop draw downs in Afghanistan unless they were asked for by Gen. David Petraeus. And then predictably, neo-con pundit William Kristol poured gasoline on the embers of the dispute with a column entitled, “T-Paw Versus Hee-Haw,” a not very subtle dig at Barbour’s Boss Hawg reputation, compounded by additional insults:

This is a) childish, b) slightly offensive, and c) raises the question of how much time Barbour has spent at the Pentagon—apart from time spent lobbying for defense contractors or foreign governments.

Nasty as it was, this is probably a pale echo of the kind of pounding Barbour will receive from other precincts of the conservative movement if he persists in talking about treating defense like other forms of federal spending or cutting short the U.S. commitment in Afghanistan. It will be interesting to see what other proto-candidates for president say if this suddenly evolves from being the Great Unmentionable among conservative posing as maximum deficit hawks, into a regular topic on the campaign trail. Mitt Romney has long sought to make toughness on foreign-policy-and-defense issues his calling card for 2012, and Newt Gingrich is clearly preparing to depict himself as a visionary Churchillian figure determined to defend America from the Islamic hordes. So this could turn into a white-hot fight pretty quickly, unless Barbour shuts up about defense spending and goes back to savaging Medicaid and offering to remake the U.S. economy to resemble Mississippi’s.

Too High Or Too Low, There Ain’t No In Betweens

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Book Review: Going to Extremes, by Cass Sunstein

Back in 2005, a trio of researchers conducted a little experiment on deliberative democracy. They assembled groups of six citizens and asked them to get together to talk about a few politically charged issues (civil unions, affirmative action, global warming). Half the groups were made up exclusively of political conservatives, and half were made up exclusively of political liberals. The result: in almost every group, the individuals took on more extreme positions after talking with the folks who already agreed with them.

Similarly, a study of judicial decision-making found three-judge panels that were all Republican rendered more conservative decisions and three-judge panels that were all Democrat rendered more liberal decisions.

The above experiment and study form the take-off point for Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide, by Cass R. Sunstein, a smart book (now available in paperback!) that sets forth a pithy summary of how group polarization happens. It’s an especially useful guide to the obstacles to open-minded thinking for those of us who are trying to chart a course toward a more moderate politics, and so worth understanding.

The quick takeaway point is that what matters most is information. If you only hear one side of the argument, you are likely to strengthen your convictions that the one side you hear is the correct side. And the more your convictions are strengthened, the more you are likely to seek out only that one side and disregard anyone who comes to you with alternatives. In short, a powerful reinforcing feedback loop.

“A great deal of what we believe, like, and dislike,” writes Sunstein, “is influenced by the exchange of information and by corroboration.”

Sunstein explores a number of entry points into these kinds of reinforcing cascades of corroboration. A surprisingly large number of the entry points have more to do with social instincts than anything else. Individuals defer to other individuals who are of higher status; they defer to family and friends and social groups. Most people want to be liked, and most people have an intuitive sense that a good way to be liked is to agree – or sometimes to even do those whose respect they wish to gain one better. Groups are particular prone to follow confident people – even if those confident people are wrong.

Once people start in on a particular belief path, they tend to be on the lookout for information that confirms what they already think: “Consider the well-established finding that after purchasing a product, people tend to seek out information confirming that their purchase was a sensible one.” And once caught in a cascade of confirmation, it’s hard to get out of it. Sociologists call it “homophily” – a process by which people feel more connected to that which is similar to them.

The problem, Sunstein argues (borrowing a phrase from Russell Hardin) is that most people have a “crippled epistemology” – they know very little to begin with, and if what they know supports their extremism, they have no way to know that their position is extreme.

Worse, “people often ignore powerful contrary evidence,” writes Sunstein. “When people’s false beliefs are corrected, they might become even firmer in their commitment to those beliefs.” (One famous example of this is described in Leon Festinger’s 1956 book When Prophecy Fails, about how members of a UFO cult become more resolute in its beliefs after the group leader’s prophecy that aliens from the planet Clarion would rescue cult members from an earth-destroying flood on December 21, 1954 did not come to fruition)

Sunstein worries that in the modern media environment, self-selection into different camps is easier than ever before. “Many people appear to be hearing more and louder versions of their own views, thus reducing the benefits that come from exposure to competing views and unnoticed problems…The Internet creates more dramatic ‘stratification.’”

The way out of polarization, of course, is the standard bromide of entertaining alternative viewpoints. Sunstein urges “humility and curiosity.” In fact, after reading this article, you should probably immediately go seek out a perspective you disagree with, entertain it, and let it create a slight sense of doubt in all your previous certainties.

But the truth is, you probably won’t go seek that out. Or even if you do, it’s unlikely you will come to doubt your previous ideas. One reason is that what you find will probably be written from a completely different perspective, meaning that it won’t have much to say to somebody who isn’t already a true believe from the opposite perspective.

At the very least, it is helpful to have a certain amount of self-awareness. Sunstein’s analysis of how easily and almost effortlessly one can get caught in a self-reinforcing feedback process of one-sidedness is a little bit scary. What’s remarkable is just how easily the mind closes, and how much constant work is required to fight against it. In other words: those of us who care about moderation have our work cut out for ourselves.

Am I a Race-Baiter?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

On Tuesday, I put together some data highlighting the fact that there was a strong correlation between how much Democrats’ partisan identification had declined in the last two years and how white a state is. Since then, I’ve received many comments accusing me of saying that Democrats’ problems exist only because white people are racist.

One comment was extremely aggressive: “The race-baiting on display by Mr. Drutman shows the void of his intellect and his morality since he is deliberately unwilling to find the real reasons Democrats are failing everywhere.” Here’s another: “Yet another incident of failure of the intellectual left in the US. Barack Obama was elected by white voters as well as non-white in 2008; rather than look at what changed to disgruntle these voters (INCLUDING ME!) they play the race card.” And a third (sarcasm alert): “But, here we have it. Solid facts! Whites are racist!”; and a fourth: “Keep playing the race card. Please do.”

First of all, this may seem obvious, but I was merely reporting the data. There is an undeniable correlation between the percentage of whites in a state and the decline in Democratic partisan ID advantage. It also doesn’t take a genius to look at the polling data and see that Democrats and Obama are doing poorly among white voters, especially especially southern and rural whites.

But what impresses me about these comments is how quickly they went straight to the “race card” and “race-baiting.” It’s clearly a sore spot.

Of course, as far as I can tell, there are plenty of honest reasons that one would no longer want to identify as a Democrat that have nothing to do with race. There are plenty of reasons to be frustrated with the Democrats, and plenty of honest philosophical disagreements over what policies would serve the country best. As I wrote in the initial post, statistically speaking, whiteness of a state explains only 13 percent of the decline in Democratic partisan identification advantage. What this strongly suggests is that there are many factors.

But as Ron Brownstein has argued, there is also an emerging “New Color Line” that may have more to do with policy preference than with race, even if the two are sometimes hard to disentangle: “From every angle, the exit-poll results reveal a new color line: a consistent chasm between the attitudes of whites and minorities. The gap begins with preferences in the election.” In particular, the white voters seem to be particularly concerned with the size and role of government.

And it then follows that there are must be ways to address the concerns of white voters without making it about race. America may be becoming a more diverse nation, but it’s not a majority-minority country yet, and whites generally vote at greater rates than minorities. So Democrats need to take this seriously. As my colleague Will Marshall recently noted:

Progressives need to engage white voters more directly on questions about the size and role of government. We should be serious about making government more accountable, about enabling citizens and communities to do more for themselves, and about reining in runaway federal deficits and debts. But we should also stand firmly for public activism to rebuild America’s productive capacities, particularly our run-down infrastructure, curb out-of-control medical costs and make the promise of equal opportunity real for all citizens.

In one sense, the comments I received are quite instructive. They suggest there are white voters out there who feel accused of racism if they vote Republican, and they don’t like that. But they are also quite depressing. They suggest that there are too many Republicans out there who can’t respond to a presentation of empirical data without accusing me (a white who remains a Democrat and Obama supporter) of implicitly accusing them of racism.

I’m a number-cruncher. I’m not a race-baiter.

Why High-Speed Rail Could Still Get Built in Florida

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Contrary to reports in the New York Times and elsewhere, high-speed rail in Florida is not yet dead. There’s a grassroots effort by municipal governments to revive the high-speed line between Tampa and Orlando that Gov. Rick Scott has so zealously tried to kill.

The cities of Tampa, Lakeland, Orlando, and Miami want to create an “inter-local” agency that would receive federal grant money and assume the responsibilities vacated by the state last month when Scott shut down Florida Rail Enterprise and dismissed its staff.

The cities have until the first week of April to create the new entity and bid for the $2.4 billion in federal money that Scott rejected. A major sticking point, once again, is the rookie Republican governor, who is threatening to forbid the Florida Department of Transportation from permitting rail construction along I-4 owned by the state.

The same kind of high-handed arrogance got Scott fired as CEO of Columbia/HCA in 1997 after the health-care giant was slammed with a criminal investigation of its billing practices. Scott insisted that nothing was wrong until several board members found out that the company was in deep legal trouble. Scott escaped the consequences of his actions, but HCA wasn’t so lucky. It paid over $2.6 billion to settle civil suits and federal fines.

So far, Scott has managed to roll over timid state lawmakers and beat back a lawsuit charging that he overreached his authority by rejecting rail funds approved by former Gov. Charlie Crist. A quirk in Florida’s government, however, may allow the rail program to go forward if other officeholders take a principled stand.

Florida is the only state to have three elected executives who serve collectively with the governor on the Florida Cabinet, the decision-making body for the state. This means that the Cabinet, not solely the governor, controls the right-of-way needed for the rail project. So a yes vote by Attorney General Pam Bondi of Tampa, Commissioner of Agriculture Adam Putnam of Lakeland and Chief Financial Officer Jeff Atwater of Palm Beach could re-start the project over the governor’s protestations.

New developments are undermining Scott’s case. The governor said that he rejected the rail project because he believed it would not attract enough ridership and that state taxpayers could be “on the hook” for operating losses. But a study released last week by Florida DOT estimated that ridership would actually be one-third higher than an earlier estimate and that the line would be profitable, earning $10.2 million in its first year of operation.

Scott also expressed concern that construction cost overruns could add as much as $3 billion to the project, which he said he could not let taxpayers absorb during the current fiscal crisis. But in his self-righteous claims of prudence he forgot to mention that private enterprise – not government – was stepping in to build the railway.

Eight international firms had expressed interest in bidding on the project. Several were expected to cover all potential construction overruns. But before they had a chance to bid on the project, Scott pulled the plug and rejected the federal funds. That’s when the municipalities decided to take ownership of the project.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has done Florida a favor by asking for bids next month on the federal funds rejected by Scott rather than handing the money over to California, New York and other states. This gives Florida another chance.

Make no mistake, Scott’s opposition to fast trains is ideological, not fiscal. If he were on a crusade to rein in all transportation spending in tough economic times, that would be one thing. But Scott is proposing to spend billions of dollars to expand highways (including I-4) and dredge the Port of Miami for supercargo ships that are likely never to dock there, while denouncing “Obama rail” as imprudent.

His maneuvering is as transparent as Gov. Scott Walker’s bid to undercut unions and generally turn back the clock in Wisconsin. It should be recalled that Walker rejected federal rail funds last fall. Now Rick Scott wants to make a bigger splash by denying Obama credit for creating thousands of construction jobs in a swing state in time for the 2012 election.

In a recent letter the four mayors (two Republicans and two Democrats) outlined the economic benefits of fast rail linking world-class tourist attractions, top medical and educational centers and other institutions in central Florida. The Tampa-Orlando line would be a starting point for a comprehensive train system, with 170-mph-plus trains eventually linking Orlando with Miami and Jacksonville.

And what would happen if the project does not go forward? “The decision will not contribute one bit to reducing the federal deficit or lowering the federal taxes Floridians pay,” the mayors noted. What it would demonstrate is how devilishly difficult it’s become to build innovative public works in an era of sound-bite politics.

Kerry Builds A New Road To Infrastructure Bank

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Showing the kind of bipartisan leadership that has become all too rare these days, Senators John Kerry and Kay Bailey Hutchison have announced a new proposal to improve the way we fund infrastructure and unlock hundreds of billions in much-needed financing for new projects across the country. Their bill has one of those great acronym-friendly names that congressional staff labor to perfect: The Building and Upgrading Infrastructure for Long-Term Development Act of 2011, or for short: The BUILD Act.

Kerry and Hutchison announced the BUILD Act today in a packed Senate hearing room, flanked by the heads of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO, who both endorsed the proposal and spoke about the shared need that business and labor have for Washington to move beyond its political dysfunction to address the urgent needs for building and maintaining the backbone of our economy and help create jobs. Senator Mark Warner is as an original co-sponsor of the bill and also joined the press conference. Senator Warner issued a similar warning that he delivered at PPI’s infrastructure conference last fall, explaining that we must reverse the decline in U.S. infrastructure investment to make our country a more competitive place for attracting capital investment and jobs in the global economy.

The BUILD Act represents an entirely new approach to the idea of creating a National Infrastructure Bank, one that goes a long way to reconcile the huge levels of needed investment with the very real spending constraints facing the current Congress. Given the realities of the current political environment, their proposal launches the bank on a fiscally responsible scale, while preserving the best principles of political independence and economics-based decision making that make the bank worth doing in the first place. They do this by structuring their bank as a financing authority under the Federal Credit Reform Act, a model used by the U.S. Export-Import Bank and other existing federal lending entities, that allows the bank to shift enough lending risk to borrowers to keep the burden on the government and taxpayers low, which avoids the large capital requirements of traditional infrastructure bank proposals.

By combining a smart financing structure with a 50% cap on the federal share of any project’s total funding, the BUILD Act avoids the high price tag that other infrastructure financing bills often carry. That makes it an innovative approach that needs to be a part of the upcoming debates on the already underfunded transportation bill. As Chamber President Tom Donohue said today, it’s an invaluable part of the solution to how we pay for maintenance and improvements that we can’t afford to ignore, but it can only work if added to a strong foundation of spending in the transportation bill, which he said will also require increasing our 17 year-old gas tax, to meet our current needs and adjust to lower fuel consumption by more efficient vehicles.

PPI has long supported the idea of a National Infrastructure Bank, including the current House bill sponsored by Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the long-time champion for infrastructure in Congress. DeLauro joined other top political, business, and labor leaders to discuss the bank proposal at our infrastructure conference last fall. Economist and infrastructure heavyweight Ev Ehrlich released an excellent paper at that conference laying out some of the key benefits to the bank approach. The experts who participated in that conference agreed that there were many approaches to structuring a bank that would be acceptable and achieve the benefits Ehrlich described, with the caveat that we could not afford to abandon the principles of independence and project selection based on economics, not political logrolling. Senators Kerry and Hutchison have managed to apply those principles in crafting a workable proposal during this time of fiscal austerity, and we at PPI applaud them for their resourcefulness and leadership.

Why Dems Are Doing Worse in Some States than Others: It’s Race, Not the Economy

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In 2008, Democrats enjoyed a solid advantage in partisan identification. By 2010, that advantage had largely evaporated. As I detailed in a previous post, in every state, the Democratic partisan ID advantage has declined, and by an average of nine percentage points.

But the decline has not been equal across the nation. In fact, there is a good deal of variation in the change in Democratic identification across states, ranging from a ranging from a drop of 22.2 percent in New Hampshire (from +13.2% to -9.0%) to a drop of just 1.6 percent in Mississippi (see this table for state-by-state numbers).

Why should these changes vary so much from state to state? Are there demographics that might explain this?

As it turns out, the only statistically significant predictor of the decline in democratic partisan affiliation advantage is the percentage of white people in the state. Surprisingly, the state economy (at least as measured by unemployment rate or change in unemployment rate) doesn’t seem to matter.

Unemployment

Let’s begin with the unemployment rate, since a good deal of the analysis around the 2010 election was an “it’s the economy stupid” story: voters blamed Democrats for high unemployment, and voted Republican to express their anger and frustration.

Yet, what’s remarkable about this scatterplot (above) is that the story doesn’t hold up. If anything, the relationship seems to be slightly opposite what the conventional wisdom would lead us to expect: the Democrats appear to have lost more support in states that have relatively lower unemployment rates. However, it is not statistically significant.

Still, it’s possible that what matters is not the absolute unemployment rate, but rather the change. Yet, once again, the scatterplot (below) shows that this is not the case. The more unemployment dropped between November 2008 and November 2010, the less the average decline in Dems’ partisan ID advantage. Though the relationship is actually stronger than above, it is still not a statistically significant one.

These numbers just don’t fit with the story of voters turning against Democrats for a failing economy. Take Nevada: Unemployment jumped from 8.0 percent to 14.3 percent, yet Democrats partisan ID declined by only; Similarly, California: Unemployment goes up from 8.4 percent to 12.4 percent.

On the other side, consider New Hampshire: Unemployment goes up from 4.3 percent to 5.4 percent (both among the lowest in the nation), but Democrats lose 22.2 percentage points in partisan ID advantage; Or South Dakota: Enemployment up from just 3.4 percent to just 4.5 percent, but the Dem partisan ID advantage falls up 10.4 percent.

Manufacturing

Another possibility is that what matters is the economic make-up of the economy, and in particular, perhaps states that rely disproportionately on manufacturing are more likely to have a lot of anxious voters, since manufacturing is a dying industry. But if we plot the decline in Democratic partisan ID and the manufacturing as share of the state GDP, there is no relationship.

Seniors

Another possibility is that Democrats are losing out in states with more seniors, since senior citizens are reportedly turning against Democrats. A scatter-plot shows a clear relationship, though not quite a statistically significant one (but close!). Generally, the more seniors in a state, the more Democrats have lost in their partisan ID advantage. However, the number of seniors explains only three percent of the variation in the Democratic vote share decline.

Whites

Finally, we come to the share of white voters. Here we have a consistent pattern, and one that is statistically significant (and explains 13 percent of the state-level variation). For every ten percent increase in white voters as a share of the electorate, the predicted decline in Democratic ID advantage is almost one full percentage point (the one outlier in the lower left is Hawaii, which is highly Asian. Without that outlier, the relationship would be even stronger).

This re-emphasizes the problems that Democrats seem to be having with white voters. (Democrats have not enjoyed parity with Republicans among white voters in 20 years, but 2010 was especially bad, with white voters breaking 62-to-38 for Republicans in the mid-term elections.)

This explains why the Democratic decline in diverse states like California (47 percent white) and Nevada (66 percent white) is less than in lily-white states like South Dakota (90 percent white) and New Hampshire (95 percent white), even though California and Nevada have much higher levels of unemployment.

These results exist regardless of economic circumstances (these findings are robust even in a statistical model that controls for all the other possible factors discussed).

Conclusions

The brief summary of this analysis is that race may matter more than the economy for  why voters have been identifying more and more as Republicans for the last two years.

Of course, there are obvious caveats to this interpretation, most significantly the fact that I am playing around with state-level data, as opposed to individual-level data.

But the patterns are discouraging for Obama and the Democrats. Much prognostication has argued that the number one factor for 2012 will be the unemployment rate, because historically, the unemployment rate has been a very strong predictor of whether the incumbent party wins or not. This analysis suggests that something else is going on as well. Democrats are having a hard time with seniors and particularly white voters, and it’s not just a story about the state of the economy.  Democrats ignore these scatterplots at their peril.

Update: I’ve written a response to some of the comments entitled “Am I a Race-Baiter?”

How Gallup’s Partisan ID Numbers Could Mean Trouble for Obama in 2012

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In looking ahead to 2012, I’ve been playing around with Gallup’s State of the States numbers on political party affiliations. Gallup asks people whether they identify as Democrats or Republicans, and really pushes Independents to pick a side, which means that you can get a pretty good picture of where voters are

In 2008, Democrats had a party affiliation advantage in 42 states, and that affiliation advantage was at least 10 points in 28 states. In 2010, just two years later, Democrats enjoyed an affiliation advantage in 28 states, and had an advantage of more than 10 points in just 12 states. On average, Democratic Party affiliation advantage has gone down by 9.0 percentage points. In other words, the country went from being solidly Democratic to just slightly so. But it gets a little more troubling for Obama when translated into Electoral College math.

Since Democrats seem to enjoy a party affiliation advantage in Gallup’s polling that is slightly higher than the state voting patterns (Gallup thinks this is because Republicans vote at higher rates), in 2008, the state with the lowest Democratic affiliation advantage that went to Obama was Virginia, which was +9.0% Democrat. If that threshold carries over to 2012, and the party affiliation numbers remain the same, the Republican candidate would pick up at least 358 electoral votes, possibly more, since a couple of states that had even higher Democratic advantages than +9.0% voted for McCain in 2008.

Looking ahead to 2012, the key will be the states in the more than five percent but less than ten percent Democratic advantage range. Here we have a whole bunch of probable swing states: Iowa (+5.1%), North Carolina (+5.2%), Minnesota (+5.4%), Ohio (5.6%), Pennsylvania (6.4%), Michigan (+7.3%), and Washington (+7.7%). If Obama takes these seven states (but still loses West Virginia, which is +9.7% Dem, but he lost last time at +18.9%) Dem, he gets 271 electoral votes, just enough to win.

Key swing states that have fallen below the five percent Democratic advantage now include: Nevada (+4.5%, down from +11.3%), Florida (+3.1%, down from +9.1%), Wisconsin (2.6%, down from 17.8%(!)), Colorado (+2.6%, down from 10.7%), and Virginia (-0.3% down from +9.0%).

Obviously, there is a fair amount of time between now and November 2012, and things could shift back in the other direction. Since we know independents broke strongly for Republicans in 2010, it’s a decent bet that a fair amount of the shift toward Republicans comes from independents, and that those independents could be won back. Moreover, the Republican presidential field continues to look week.

In a subsequent post, I’ll be dealing with what I think is a very intriguing question raised by these numbers: that there is a good deal of variation in the change in Democratic identification across states, ranging from a ranging from a drop of 22.2 percent in New Hampshire (from +13.2% to -9.0%) to a drop of 1.6 percent in Mississippi (already a pretty red state).

Why has the Democratic advantage fallen much more precipitously in some states than others? And could knowing why help Democrats at all? Stay tuned.

A Navy Fighter Pilot’s Perspective on the No-Fly Zone

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In 1999, I was a Navy F-14 pilot enforcing a no-fly zone over Southern Iraq.  As I climbed into my cockpit, I was confident – confident in our mission to destroy Saddam Hussein’s brutal Republican Guard units, confident in my ability to distinguish foes from the innocent Iraqi civilians we were protecting, and confident in the legitimacy and wide support of an United Nations-backed mission.

If I were to suit up today to enforce a no-fly zone over Libyan to help depose dictator Muammar Qaddafi, I would be conducting a murkier – and more dangerous – mission.  First of all, I would not have a clear mission to guide me.  Is it to destroy all Libyan aircraft, to identify and destroy only Qaddafi’s forces, or to just protect civilians from airborne assault?  I would not be able to easily distinguish rebels from government forces on the ground.  Both fighting forces look pretty much the same when you are flying at high speed or high altitude.  I would have none of the policy cohesion and global support that I had in 1999.  Washington, DC would still be trying to sort out what to do.  At the current pace of international negotiations, I probably would have neither United Nations nor NATO support.

I am proud that the United States is considering military actions to “lead from the front” to stop Qaddafi’s planes and tanks from killing civilian protesters.  Yet, the Libyan situation is one that is best resolved with global (or at least regional) consensus. Unilateral action is ill-advised as we have considerable burdens in Iraq and Afghanistan currently. Adding a unilateral military force to the Libyan conflict could unnecessarily burden our military, put additional strain on America as it fights to right its economic course post-recession, and provide additional fodder to those that posit that America routinely acts capriciously and unilaterally.

If the United States were to become involved militarily in the absence of any sort of global consensus, that would take us back to the fragile “coalition of the willing” of the Bush era.  This undermines our work to strengthen NATO and the United Nations as organizations that could take on more global security responsibilities.  When coalitions are ad hoc, it makes for a less predictable and stable climate for our allies to find common ground on which to solve future problems.

We should strive for global, or at a minimum regional, consensus on how to address the Libyan problem.  If the United Nations cannot reach consensus, America should not assume that its actions would be in concert with trans-regional goals.  After all, if our allies are not sufficiently included in the “take-off” planning, they are less likely to be with us for the landing.

Congress and the Obama Administration should strive for policies that would make it relatively safe for a pilot climbing into a cockpit in the near future to enforce a no-fly zone over Libya.  He should know that his aerial bombing targets were properly vetted to distinguish between civilians and armed forces and that the rules of engagement make sense.  He should have the peace of mind to know that America and the global community are behind him 100 percent and that there is recognizable agreement on the preferred diplomatic and military options.

A Comparative Look at Income Inequality

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

What would it mean for theories of U.S. income inequality growth if the U.S experience has been similar to that everywhere else?

Yet again and again [economists and other researchers not named Hacker or Pierson] have found themselves at dead ends or have missed crucial evidence.  After countless arrests and interrogations, the demise of broad-based prosperity remains a frustratingly open case, unresolved even as the list of victims grows longer.

All this, we are convinced, is because a crucial suspect has largely escaped careful scrutiny: American politics.

– Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner Take All Politics

Here’s a chart showing trends in the share of income received by the top one percent for all the modern industrialized nations for which data is available going back to the early twentieth century:

Picture

The data is from a new website created by several of the leading scholars studying inequality with tax data.  The American trend, the thick black line, is from the much cited work of Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, which is part of this new database.

From 1910 to 1970, American inequality trends follow the broad international pattern, and inequality levels are in the middle of the pack.  That’s basically still true from 1970 to 1986:

Picture

It’s rising a bit over the period, but only by a percentage point.  Note I’m keeping the scale of the charts the same for each one.  Here’s the chart for 1988 to 2006:

Picture

Uh-oh.  Now we look like our inequality levels are higher than everywhere else.  What happened?  1986 to 1988 happened, as is evident from the 1970-2006 trend:

Picture

Wow, that’s a four percentage point increase in two years—three times the increase over the 16 years from 1970 to 1986, and bigger than the 12-year increase from 1988 to 2000.  Huh. There are two possibilities here.  One is that the data is right.  You can see where I’m going here.

It helps to know that the 1986 tax reform created big incentives for people who had previously reported income on corporate returns (where it is invisible to the datasets above) to report on individual income tax returns (where it appears as an out-of-the-blue increase).  And if this may be considered a permanent change in the tax regime, then the effect is for more income to show up on individual returns after 1986 than before, artificially lifting the top income share in every subsequent year.

Hmmm…which possibility is more likely? Let’s look at another chart showing the trends just for the northern hemisphere Anglophone countries, to which I’ll add a new line:

Picture

OK, from about 1940 to 1986, these trends line up strikingly, then the U.S. trend goes AWOL.  However, let’s instead assume the post-1986 U.S. trend is an artifact of the 1986 tax reform.  First, let’s increase the top one percent share from 1986 to 1988 by the same rate that it increased in the U.K.  Then let’s let the top share in the U.S. increase by the same rate that it actually did from 1988 to 2006, but from the new, lower 1988 level.  The result is the revised line above.  This makes the U.S. trend and level consistent with not just the U.K., but Canada.
Of course, if the 1988 to 2006 top share levels are more accurate in the U.S. after 1988 than before 1986, then rather than lowering the post-1986 trend, we should raise the pre-1988 trend.  That would make U.S. levels uniformly higher than in the U.K. and Canada.  But of course, the measured U.K. and Canadian top share levels may also be artificially low due to tax avoidance.  And of course, the common trend over the three countries would remain.

So, to review, when the post-1986 U.S. trend is corrected, the U.S. experience with inequality over the past 100 years is broadly consistent with the rest of the modern world.  Here’s the summary chart for 1910-2006, with the revised U.S. trend.

Picture
Comparing levels is more difficult, but many recent cross-national comparisons related to inequality are about why trends differ.  What these five charts clarify is that explanations for the recent rise in American inequality that focus on uniquely American causes—such as greater political muscle-flexing among corporations and the mega-rich—are insufficient (and unnecessary).

Update: I’ve received several responses offline that it’s going to far to say the experience of the U.S. is like that “everywhere else” and that it is really only like the other Anglophone countries. To some extent, that’s a fair criticism. But of 15 countries shown here, only Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland haven’t experienced an increase in inequality since 1980. And the increases in Norway and Finland are as big or bigger than in the U.S., U.K., and Canada. Sweden’s increase is also nearly as great in relative terms (starting from a much lower level of course). But even if this is a story about the U.S., U.K., and Canada or the Anglophone countries versus the rest of the world, that’s still a problem for Hacker’s and Pierson’s U.S.-centric theory.

This piece is cross-posted at Scott Winship’s blog

Dems’ Hard Times in the Anxiety Belt

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Yesterday, I began exploring the idea of an “Anxiety Belt” – an upper Midwest group of six swing states from Pennsylvania west to Iowa. I showed how these states were whiter, older, less well-educated, and slightly poorer than the nation at large, and argued that, with 81 electoral votes between them, Obama needs to pay attention to them. Today, I want to look at what’s happened to the partisan dynamics in those states in the last two years.

Across almost the entire country, the number of individuals identifying as Democrats or at least leaning Democrats (according to Gallup) has declined since 2008. But in the Anxiety Belt, that decline has been more pronounced. In all six states, the state-level decline than the national (average of 7.6 percentage points, compared to 6.1 percentage points nationwide). Overall, the Anxiety Belt went from slightly more Democratic than the rest of the nation to slightly less Democratic. Not an encouraging trend for Dems.

As might be expected, the Republicans have made greater gains in these states. Again, the Republican gain in each of these states is higher than the national average Republican gain, and overall, the average state-level gain among Anxiety Belt states in Republican identification (4.2 percent) is 50 percent more than the national average (2.7 percent).

Republicans won all five governor’s races in these six states last November, with the sixth being Indiana, where Republican Mitch Daniels was elected to a second term in 2008. Republicans also won all four Senate seats up for re-election in these six states.

Of course, it’s worth pointing out that Democrats still enjoy an overall partisan identification advantage in five out of the six states.

Certainly, Obama should still be competitive in all of these states, though Indiana might be a stretch. But the direction of this region is unmistakably away from Democrats, and even moreso than the nation as a whole. Democrats are going to have to continue to think hard about why they are having a particularly time here, and what they can do to speak to these voters.

Gang of Six Steps Up

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

If there’s any hope for making headway this year against America’s debt crisis, it lies with the bipartisan “Gang of Six” in the U.S. Senate. This group is filling the political vacuum created by House Republicans’ lemming-like rush to the ideological cliffs, and President Obama’s reluctance to commit himself on tough fiscal choices.

Led by Virginia Democrat Mark Warner and Georgia Republican Saxby Chambliss, the Gang of Six has picked up where the President’s Fiscal Commission left off. They’ve embraced the commission’s main political breakthrough – a hard-won bargain in which some key conservatives like Sen. Tom Coburn agreed to cut tax expenditures, while liberals such as Sen. Dick Durbin agreed to constrain Social Security costs.

This is the only bipartisan game in town, and it makes the Senate the main arena in Washington’s three-ring budget circus. What’s happening in the GOP House is essentially a sideshow, though it could turn into a very destructive bit of political theater.

Despite the jobless recovery, the House proposes to cut $61 billion in domestic spending this year – the largest immediate spending cut in U.S. history. Everyone knows there’s no way such a draconian measure gets through the Democratic Senate or past a presidential veto. Senate Democrats have countered with $6 billion in domestic program cuts, but that’s not likely to clear the filibuster-proof 60-vote threshold either.

So we’re in for a game of budgetary chicken in which both sides maneuver to blame the other if the federal government runs out of money in two weeks. Even if there is a federal shut-down, however, it’s unlikely to go on for very long, given how fed up U.S. voters already are with the antics of Washington politicians of all stripes.

But what’s really dumb, if not tragic, is to expend all this political blood and energy in a battle over domestic programs, which account for only 12 percent of the federal budget. Yes, their growth needs to be constrained too, but there just isn’t enough money there to make a sizeable dent in our fast-growing national debt, now $12 trillion and inexorably rising toward 90 percent of GDP if we don’t act soon. In the real world, stabilizing the debt at a sustainable level and eventually whittling it down means putting everything on the table – defense spending, taxes and entitlements.

That’s why the deal struck within the Fiscal Commission is so significant. It targets over $1 trillion in tax expenditures, like the tax exclusion for employer-paid health and scads of smaller business subsidies. To Senate conservatives like Chambliss, Coburn and Gang of Six member Mike Crapo of Idaho, these are essentially back-door spending programs administered through the tax code. And unlike many House Republicans and self-appointed tax commissar Grover Norquist, the GOP Senators don’t regard closing loopholes as tantamount to raising taxes. That brave departure from anti-tax fundamentalism is crucial to any bipartisan budget deal, because no self-respecting Democrat is going to negotiate deficit reductions on the spending side of the budget alone.

In a reciprocal show of political courage and country-first patriotism, commissioners Durbin and Kent Conrad of North Dakota signaled their willingness to entertain reforms in Social Security, notwithstanding all the overheated blather in the lefty blogosphere and cable TV land about the “cat food commission.”

According to today’s Washington Post, the Gang of Six is trying to recruit other Senators to join their center-out coalition. Let’s hope they succeed – and that President Obama enters the lists soon. Obama did the Fiscal Commission he created no favors by declining to endorse any of its recommendations. Worse, top White House aides lately have dropped hints that the administration may try to separate Social Security reform from negotiations over deficit reduction. If true, it would represent backsliding from Obama’s forthright pledges on taking office to confront Social Security’s problems.

In a recent op-ed, OMB Director Jack Lew argued that “Social Security does not cause our deficits,” and added: “Strengthening Social Security is an important, but parallel, issue that needs to be addressed as quickly as possible. But let’s not confuse it as either the cause of or a solution to our short-term fiscal problems.”

It’s true that health care costs are a far bigger problem, but Social Security also faces a long-term spending gap that will contribute to our mounting national debt as the baby boomers retire. The fact that it’s more easily fixed than Medicare or Medicaid is no reason to put that chore off. On the contrary, Democrats’ willingness to get serious about entitlement reform is an indispensible element of any plausible bipartisan deal for getting our fiscal house in order. It’s also the best way to take the heat off domestic programs, including progressive investments in education, infrastructure and social mobility that Democrats rightly defend.

If Durbin, the Democrats’ Senate whip, understands this, then surely President Obama does as well. His reticence on the specifics of a bipartisan budget deal may be purely a matter of tactics, but Durbin, and the Gang of Six, deserve his unequivocal support.

Romney Agonistes

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

It’s not exactly Sophie’s choice, but you have to admit there’s something a little poignant about Mitt Romney’s dilemma. To win the GOP nomination for president, he’s being forced by Tea Party types to distance himself from his greatest public achievement – making Massachusetts the first state in the union to achieve universal health care.

To mask this abject act of self-repudiation, Romney is attacking Obamacare with unwonted ideological zeal. “Obamacare is bad law constitutionally, bad policy and it is bad for America’s families,” he assured a group of New Hampshire Republicans over the weekend. Ladling on the conservative boilerplate, he added, “The federal government isn’t the answer for running health care any more than it’s the answer for running Amtrak or the Post Office.”

The problem for Romney – as his presidential rivals gleefully keep reminding conservatives — is that Romneycare is the policy template for Obamacare. It has the same basic architecture: a menu of competing private health care options (“exchanges” in the federal law, the “Connector” in Massachusetts), public subsidies for those who need them, and an individual mandate requiring all adults to buy medical coverage. The biggest difference between the two approaches, ironically, is that Obamacare is a lot tougher on containing health care costs than the Massachusetts law.

Nationally, about 15 percent of Americans (roughly 45 million) lack basic health care coverage. Thanks to Romneycare, it’s less than three percent in Massachusetts. Romney says he’s proud of that accomplishment, but Massachusetts may have to file a paternity suit to get him to own up to the individual mandate.

Romney’s disingenuous attempts to disavow the obvious similarities between his approach and the President’s aren’t doing much for his reputation for intellectual honesty. Given conservatives’ fanatical loathing for the President’s bill – “Repealing Obamacare is the driving motivation of my life,” avers Minnesota Republican and Tea Party pin-up Rep. Michele Bachmann – Romney evidently feels the bill he hammered out with Massachusetts Democrats poses an existential threat to his candidacy.

So the GOP front-runner is seeking refuge in federalism: “One thing I would never do is to usurp the constitutional power of states with a one-size-fits-all federal takeover,” he said in New Hampshire. Let me get this straight: it’s OK for states to adopt a “socialist” approach to universal coverage, including the heartily despised individual mandate, as long as it’s not foisted on them by Washington?

Maybe Romney will find a way to persuade conservatives to forgive him for governing effectively in a deep-died blue state. But at what cost? Let’s face it, Romney is basically a pragmatic problem-solver, not a right-wing ideologue. Pretending to be otherwise will cast further doubt on his authenticity as a candidate, even if it’s the only way to run in today’s radicalized Republican Party.

More Trust, Less Anger Will Help Obama in 2012

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Pew has some new data out about trust in and anger towards government. The short headline: a little more trust, a little less anger than a year ago at this time. All of this bodes well for Obama in 2012. Fewer angry voters and more trust (particularly among Republicans) means fewer voters who are motivated to devote long hours to campaigning to defeat Obama.

Overall, 29 percent of Americans now say that they can trust the government in Washington to do what is right at least most of the time, up from 22 percent last March (which was pretty much an all-time low). On this front Democrats look exactly as they did a year ago (34 percent). But Republicans have gone from 13 percent to 24 percent, and Independents from 20 to 27 percent. Interestingly, the biggest shift has been among self-identified moderate and liberal Republicans (a dying breed). In March 2010, 17 percent had trust in the government. Now 36 percent do.

Looking more deeply at the anger numbers also is revealing. A year ago, 21 percent of Americans claimed to be “angry” with the federal government. Now only 14 percent do. Again, the big drop-off is among Republicans (from 30 percent a year ago to 16 now), and Independents (from 25 percent a year ago to 15 now). Democrats are flat (9 percent a year ago to 10 percent now). Interestingly also is that the percent expressing anger among has remained flat for both Blacks (12 percent) and Latinos (17 percent). But for Whites, it’s fallen from 23 percent to 14 percent.

Most of this makes sense. With Republicans gaining a stake in government by winning the House, Republican voters are more likely to feel that somebody is representing them, and they are thus more likely to have faith in government, since faith in government is effectively a question of how much faith you have in the people running the government, which is also tied up with the state of the economy (which seems to be doing a little better). And likewise, since anger is often aroused in response to blame, with shared control of the government, it becomes less clear who to blame when things go wrong, and therefore harder to get angry.

The declining anger is likely to especially benefit Obama. Anger is a potent mobilizing force in politics. But if anger is on the decline, there will be fewer Republican campaign activists to do all the hard campaign volunteering work. This will make it harder for a Republican to win in 2012.

This is a number worth keeping close tabs on. If the percent of voters who are angry stays low and the number trusting Washington continues to increase, Obama should do well.

Gov. Scott Stages a Trainwreck in Florida

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Why is Florida’s rookie Republican Gov. Rick Scott hell-bent on rejecting $2.4 billion in federal funds for a Tampa-Orlando high-speed railway? Is it because his argument that Florida taxpayers would be “on the hook” for cost overruns was about to be exposed as a bunch of hooey?

Until Scott announced he would veto the rail program on Feb. 16, the new 84-mile rail line was going to be put out to private bid. It was an open secret in business circles that expected bidders, including Japan’s JR Central (builder of the high-speed Shinkansen) and South Korea’s Hyundai Rotem (builder of Korea’s bullet trains), would be willing to pay for Florida’s $280 million share of the project, plus any construction cost overruns and operating losses, in return for a 30-year lease on the Tampa-Orlando railway.

In other words, the private sector, not the Florida taxpayer, would cover any non-federal costs for the project. Since such a revelation would throw a monkey wrench into Scott’s ideological stance that “Obama rail” is “a federal boondoggle,” he tried to veto the program before it got to the bidding stage.

But Scott may have overstepped his state constitutional authority. Two state senators, Republican Thad Altman and Democrat Arthenia Joyner, filed a lawsuit Tuesday before the Florida Supreme Court arguing that Scott exceeded his powers by “retroactively vetoing” the project after the legislature voted to move ahead with the project and prior governor, Charlie Crist, agreed to accept the federal rail funds.

According to the suit, “The legislation implementing high-speed rail and the appropriation of the state and federal monies were fully accomplished prior to the election or inauguration of the Respondent, [but] once elected, Gov. Scott has refused to permit the Grant Amendment to be executed by the Florida Rail Enterprise,” thus halting the process of issuing a so-called “design-build-operate-maintain-and-finance” contract with a private bidder.

Predictably, Scott roared back yesterday by saying the two legislators overstepped their bounds by criticizing him. “Fortunately for the taxpayers of Florida, nothing in Florida law compels the Governor … to pour millions of dollars into a black hole during the historic fiscal crisis with which the state is presently grappling,” wrote Scott’s general counsel.

Scott vowed to veto any future appropriation for high-speed rail by the Florida legislature and added imperiously that he would reserve the right to declare the federal government’s stimulus package, from which the high-speed rail funds were derived, “an unconstitutional infringement on his rights as governor.”

The governor’s intransigence has set off a scramble by federal, state, and local officials to circumvent his office and save the long-planned project. Local governments, including Orlando, Tampa, and Miami, have formed a coalition they said could assume responsibility for putting the project out to bid and ensure that a private company would cover any construction cost overruns. A group of mayors presented the plan to Scott earlier this week, but he did not budge from his anti-train stance.

There is no dispute that the project would create about 30,000 construction jobs in the economically depressed central part of Florida and aid tourism by providing a fast ride from Orlando International Airport to Disney World.

Scott campaigned for office promising to create thousands of new jobs for Florida. But those jobs are to be created “his way” by building new roads, expanding local ports and cutting taxes, not by accepting a program whose job creation might rub off favorably on Barack Obama during the 2012 presidential election.

Scott may be speeding toward his own political fall – his poll numbers are slipping – but at the moment he seems to have the momentum to bring down the Obama administration’s most “do-able” passenger rail project. So far, it’s unclear whether the White House wants to stand up and fight Scott or redirect the federal funds to places like California and New York where the governors are openly campaigning for the money.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has given Scott until the end of Friday to accept or reject the federal rail funds. Doubtless we know what Scott will do. The Florida story, however, won’t be over until the local entities give up on their plan to take over the project and the state Supreme Court weighs in on the constitutional issues raised by the Altman-Joyner suit.

We Can Do Better on an Oil Spill Liability Cap Compromise

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Last year’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill revealed not just technological problems, but policy gaps as well. Among the most notable of these gaps is the federal limit on liability for oil spills, set at $75 million for offshore facilities. This is three or four orders of magnitude smaller than the damages associated with a major offshore spill like Deepwater Horizon, whose damages are estimated in the tens of billions. Firms that cause more damage than the limit aren’t liable, at least not under federal law. It is only BP’s decision to waive this limit that has kept it from being a much larger problem.

But we may not be so lucky next time, and the spill has greatly increased pressure to increase or eliminate the cap. I and my colleagues at Resources for the Future have written on this and, most notably, the President’s Commission on the spill recommended significantly raising liability caps. Congress could not agree on a measure to do so last year, however, and urgency ebbed in the election season. The problem still exists, however, and discussions in Congress have begun again. The latest development is a potential compromise between Democratic Sens. Mark Begich and Mary Landrieu. But unfortunately, this compromise is likely to make the situation worse, not better.

The Begich/Landrieu compromise has two elements: first, it raises the liability cap to $250 million. This is relatively meaningless given the size of large-spill damages, but let’s set that obvious objection aside for now. The deeper problems with the compromise exist even if the cap number is much higher. The second element is a kind of insurance pool, funded by contributions from all drilling firms, that would cover spill damages above the cap level.

This insurance pool creates problems that undermine any benefit from an increased cap. The first is moral hazard – liability works because, by forcing wrongdoers to pay for damages they cause, it creates incentives to avoid dangerous or negligent activity. But when liability is pooled, these incentives are blunted. Under the compromise, if a firm spilled oil that caused damage over $250 million, it would not pay much for these “excess” damages – but its competitors would. In a sense, the pool lets firms outsource the costs of their dangerous activity, and therefore erases much of the incentive to avoid it. This “moral hazard” is a recognized problem with insurance and particularly pooled insurance. There are ways to deal with it, but it is impossible to resolve it entirely.

But this isn’t the only way the compromise would kill firms’ incentive to operate safely. It would also undercut spill victims’ only real remedy under current law. Critics of the federal spill liability cap often forget that it isn’t the only game in town – spill victims can sue under state law. And with the big exception of Louisiana, state law has no liability caps at all. This means that victims can recover damages even beyond the federal cap levels. Now federal caps do still matter – for procedural reasons and due to protections offered under federal law, it is a better route for most victims. And of course Louisianans are out of luck under either law.

But if there is an insurance pool, victims won’t pursue claims under state law. No good lawyer would advise them to do so when they could just recover from the insurance pool. State liability laws would become largely meaningless, and any incentives they give firms to operate safely would fade. This makes the moral hazard problem even worse. The only remaining reasons for firms to prevent major spills would be avoiding bad press and cleanup costs (which aren’t covered under the caps). And that’s not likely to be enough to increase safety investments, as the recent spill has shown is necessary.

The spill illustrated something we probably should have recognized earlier – that our liability policy for oil spills is totally inadequate. The liability cap was too low when it was passed, and it is far too low now. There’s a very strong case that we shouldn’t have one at all.

But changes to the liability cap won’t happen without compromise. It’s a good thing that legislators continue to discuss the issue and are making such compromises (though getting Republicans on board will be necessary eventually). But whatever political benefits the Landrieu/Begich compromise has, it’s bad policy. It will make the problems with current liability policy worse, not better. The senators risk expending political capital only to make the Gulf less safe. Oil companies and the legislators that champion them may still oppose this compromise, but there will be a certain amount of Br’er Rabbit and the briar patch in their cries. Even if politics means an ideal spill liability policy is impossible, we can do better than this.

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

Wingnut Watch: How The Battle of Madison Became an Apocalyptic Struggle for the Right

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

One of the salient realities of politics is that much of the contention revolves around efforts to get the news media and the public to focus on events that reinforce one group’s point of view over others.  There are, of course, front-and-center national and international news developments that literally command attention.  But when it comes to, say, a noisy dispute over a budget in a medium-sized state, you’d normally see one side or the other trying to “nationalize” the event to gain external allies.

But that’s what is most fascinating about the ongoing saga in Madison, Wisconsin: what began as a series of union protests against Gov. Scott Walker’s efforts to take away public employees’ collective bargaining rights, and then evolved into a national cause célèbre for unions and progressives generally, has become of equal importance to the Right, where the belief that Walker is sparking a nationwide revolt against “union thugs” is very strong.

Even as polls in Wisconsin and nationally show Walker with relatively low and flagging levels of support for his confrontational tactics, conservative gabbers are treating the events like the Battle of Algiers.  The highly influential RedState blog has become completely obsessed with Wisconsin and its political and economic implications; on Monday of this week, the site featured no less than five front-page posts on the subject.  Here’s a taste of the tone, from RedState diarist Mark Meed:

I appreciate it might seem unnecessarily provocative to compare union thugs to dogs — especially to those in the moderate attack dog community — so let me offer a “scratch behind the ears” qualification. These aren’t just any dogs, they’re the ones out of “Animal Farm”. These are the pack animals that are inevitably dispatched when socialists run out of other people’s money, and those other people finally notice.

Nice, eh?  But the focus on Wisconsin is not limited to the fever swamps of the conservative blogosphere; it’s breaking out on the presidential campaign trail as well.  Tim Pawlenty released a video with dramatic footage of the Madison protests and ending with the proto-candidate himself gravely intoning: “It’s important that Americans stand with Scott Walker, stand with Wisconsin.” Newt Gingrich recently devoted his Human Events column to a lurid characterization of the Wisconsin fight.  A sample:

In Madison, Wisconsin, we are witnessing a profound struggle between the right of the people to govern themselves and the power of entrenched, selfish interests to stop reforms and defy the will of the people.

Not a lot of nuance there.  Meanwhile, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels is taking some conservative heat for failing to follow Walker’s lead in declaring war on unions, compounding the hostility he earlier aroused by calling for a “truce” on cultural issues.

There is one underlying difference of opinion among conservatives about Wisconsin that’s worth noting and pondering: while some focus strictly on public-sector unionism, others view the assault on public-employee collective bargaining as just one front in a broader fight against unions and collective bargaining generally.  Most obviously, conservatives are aware of the important role of unions in Democratic Party campaign financing and voter mobilization efforts, and naturally welcome any opportunity to weaken the “other team” (even as they characterize Democratic defenders of unions as parties to a corrupt bargain that shakes down taxpayers and businesses for higher wages and benefits in exchange for political assistance).

But some conservatives are willing to go further and denounce all forms of collective bargain as either corrupt, as coercive, or as incompatible with economic growth.  Here’s Robert VerBruggen writing for the National Review site:

In reality, “collective bargaining” is when a majority of employees vote to unionize, and then the union has the legal right to represent all the employees. In other words, it forces workers to accept unions as their bargaining agents, and it forbids employers to negotiate with non-union workers on an individual basis.

A more colloquial version of this argument was made by a conservative blogger calling himself USA Admiral:

There is no real use for [unions].  If you can’t negotiate your own contracts, you need to be flipping burgers.

The larger, macroeconomic case against unions as an institution in the private as well as the public sector is mainly made by Right-to-Work agitators, but it occasionally is taken up by conservative politicians as well.  It’s probably not surprising that the most overt stance against the very existence of unions was recently made by South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who appointed a corporate labor relations lawyer (i.e., someone whose job is to oppose unions and unionization) to head up the state labor department.  Haley was not shy about her motivation in taking this unusual step: “She [the appointee] is ready for the challenge,” Haley said. “We’re going to fight the unions and I needed a partner to help me do it. She’s the right person to help me do it.”

In the end, the sense that Scott Walker is fighting the ancient enemy of the conservative movement probably best explains why so many conservatives can’t resist blowing the Wisconsin saga up into an apocalyptic struggle of immense importance.  If Walker loses, it will be interesting to see if he’s treated as a martyr or just as insufficiently vicious.