Well, that was quick. Rather than risk a mutiny, House Republican leaders have agreed to now cut $100 billion from the $1.1 trillion federal budget, rather than their original plan of a mere $40 billion. The question is: Can they pull it off? And if they do, will they come to regret it?
Yesterday, I predicted a coming Republican crack-up based on the premise that the Young Turks of the Tea Party are out to take a stand (gosh darnit!) against big government, but it’s a stand that’s not compatible with the continued electoral success of the Republican Party. And the spending cuts are a perfect example.
Say Republican leaders are indeed serious about cutting $100 billion. Where will they cut? A new Pew poll found only two federal programs in which more respondents favored a decrease in spending than an increase: Global poverty assistance (45 percent for a decrease, 21 percent for an increase) and Unemployment assistance (28 percent for a decrease, 27 percent for an increase). Neither of these are big ticket items.
The only other area that is close to even is Defense (30 percent for a decrease, 31 percent for an increase). Defense accounts for about half of discretionary spending. But I’m guessing a good percentage of those 31 percent who want to increase the military are solid Republican base voters.
So here’s the hard reality: There is some serious bloodlust going around Washington about cutting the budget, in part because there is some serious bloodlust about cutting the budget in the Tea Party base. But when it comes down to the actual programs that will get cut, the picture changes.
You see, many voters are symbolic conservatives in that they like to say they are for things like small government and fiscal discipline. But when it comes to specific government programs, well, why would you go and cut my well-deserved Medicare benefits when you could be cutting federal salaries or aid to the poor? In fact, with the exception of federal pay and foreign aid or aid to the poor, it’s hard to find a single government program or funding source that any majority would support cutting.
Democrats, of course, know this, and are just waiting for Republicans to go wild with their proposed cuts – especially Senate Democrats, who will play the role of putting the pieces back together.
In the end, there are two likely scenarios. In one, Republican leaders hold to the Tea Party line, but play right into Democrats’ hands, demanding harsh cuts — and in the process they awaken all kinds of anxious voters who are now suddenly worried about protecting the programs that benefit them. In the other, Republicans compromise, but alienate the Tea Party contingent, leading to an internecine battle. Either way, it’s not gonna be a pretty scene for the GOP.
Look, I get it. If you’re not a budget wonk, I can understand how you might not care about this stuff. But if you’re a progressive and you’re concerned about the Tea Party destroying the EPA for no good reason, then that’s reason to pay attention.
I’ve written a policy memo about something else that is crucial to understand if we want to even the discussion of getting Defense spending under control: it’s simply vital that we end the practice of supplemental war funding bills.
Wait! Wait! Don’t fall asleep. Seriously. We’ve wasted $200 billion over the last ten years through a little-discussed system of back-door Pentagon budgeting, which essentially funds the stuff on DoD’s wish list by falsely calling them “emergency war necessities.” Why, for example, did Congress give Don Rumsfeld an $11 billion slush fund to spend as he pleases without any Congressional oversight?
We have to end this systematic abuse of your taxpayer dollars — start reading here to find out how.
As political handicappers weigh the impact on next year’s elections of Senator Jim Webb’s decision not to seek a second term, this much is certain: His departure will leave the Senate a less interesting place.
Webb is an original: Annapolis graduate, decorated Marine veteran of Vietnam, acclaimed novelist, Secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan and, following his improbable 2006 victory, Democratic Senator from Virginia.
Improbable not just because he started way behind, but also because he had previously been a Republican; because this erstwhile warrior rode a tide of anti-war sentiment to victory; and, because he is anything but a natural politician. A private, self-contained man, Webb does not lust for the limelight or feed on public adoration. He doesn’t like to press the flesh or ask fat cats for money. He is essentially a writer whose political model was the late intellectual-turned-legislator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
While marching to his own beat, Webb has quietly made his mark in the Senate over the past four years. He successfully pushed an expansion of G.I. Bill-style benefits for veterans, and drawn attention to an issue that isn’t on the nation’s political radar but should be: America’s overstuffed prisons and indiscriminate sentencing policies that lock up too many non-violent offenders. Following his own passions, Webb has specialized in foreign affairs, focusing especially on East Asia.
Also like Moynihan, Webb’s outlook has been shaped by a strong ethnic consciousness. Just as Moynihan drew on his Irish background in his studies of the ethnic melting pot, Webb, in Born Fightingand other books, has chronicled the Scots-Irish experience in America. Settled on the America frontier, Scots-Irish Protestants pushed relentlessly westward, battling Indians (and Mexicans) along the way. They form the core of a genuine warrior culture that, argues German writer Josef Joffe in Uberpower: the Imperial Temptation of America, has mostly disappeared from Europe but remains a key element of American exceptionalism.
Webb’s departure will be a significant political loss for Democrats, but not because it may put his Senate seat in jeopardy. More fundamentally, Webb is a rarity in today’s contemporary Democratic Party: a leader with an intuitive feel for the interests and values of white working class voters. Once the mainstay of the progressive New Deal coalition, their defection to the Republicans led to a generation of GOP ascendancy in national politics.
More than most Democrats, Webb has thought hard how about to win them back. He has chided his party for exhibiting anti-military attitudes, and for pushing economic policies that favor elites who profit from globalization to the detriment of working families, whose incomes have stagnated as good jobs have vanished over the last two decades. Bravely, he has taken on the “diversity” industry that promotes group preferences in hiring, government contracting and college admissions, even for recent female and minority immigrants who can by no stretch of the imagination be classified as victims of U.S. racism.
As it happens, the modern Democratic Party emerged under Andrew Jackson, America’s first Scots-Irish President. The “democracy” as it was often called was the party of ordinary people, while the Whigs represented economic and social elites. Much of middle America now feels estranged from the party of the people.
That’s an existential dilemma for progressives, not just a political problem. Jim Webb understands that, which is why I’m sorry to see him go.
I am hardly surprised to read today’s news that the House Republican leadership is losing floor votes due to mini-revolts within the party. With 87 freshmen and a large contingent of Tea Party types who came to Washington with a head of steam and little loyalty to the Republican establishment, it always seemed dubious to me that anybody short of Joseph Stalin was going to be able to keep this coalition together. And you can say all the mean things you want about John Boehner; he is no Joseph Stalin.
Four weeks in, and not everybody in the Republican caucus is going along with what was supposed to be routine vote to temporarily extend anti-terrorism provisions in the Patriot Act. Though surely the bigger issue is that the party’s most conservative members are demanding $100 billion in domestic cuts instead of the mere $40 billion originally planned. My prediction: this is but a preview of a coming internecine war within the Republican Party.
The reasons for this are straightforward. By taking back the House on the wave of the mad-as-hell Tea Party voters, Republicans got a radical faction that demanded and frankly expected something big and revolutionary to happen. And if they didn’t get that something big and revolutionary they would damn well yell and scream trying.
As I wrote back in November: “Good luck, Speaker Boehner: If you aren’t aggressive enough, you will lose the mad-as-hell Tea Party voters. But if you are too aggressive, you will lose the majority of independents who are worried you are going too far. And you’ll need to please both to keep your majority.”
Being minority leader is easy, especially in the House. The instructions are simple: Vote no. Always. Do everything you can to embarrass and undermine the majority party. And if you throw enough sand in the gears, you can successfully campaign on how ineffectual the majority party has been. Stay disciplined. You will have your chance.
Being majority leader is hard. Once your team is in power, everybody has their ideas about what they want to do, and everyone thinks it’s their turn now. Being majority leader is especially hard when a significant part of your caucus is backed by an angry base hungry for a purifying hot tub time machine journey back to 1789, when America was a small upstart nation of farmers and healthcare involved leeches.
I suspect what we are seeing is just the beginning of a coming crack-up. And a lot of this is going to be over spending cuts.
The main fault line is not hard to follow: Republican leaders like John Boehner have been around politics long enough to know that when you start cutting (or even threatening to cut) programs, people who benefit from those programs get upset. Really upset (see: attempt to privatize Social Security).
But the Tea Party base is riled up, and whatever Republican leaders propose, they are always going to be convinced that MORE is needed. Here are some of what I take to be representative comments from a National Review article on how Republican leaders are trying to come around to the $100 billion in cuts:
“Slash? Considering the size of our current and projected debt, $100 billion is but a nick.”
“back to 2008 level is at least 500 billion in cuts. Promise is not kept”
“I smell a rat. It’s inconceivable that more money cannot be cut from this bloated budget.”
So, stay tuned. These folks are not motivated by practical or even political concerns. They are motivated by a kind of messianic ideology. These are the people who don’t believe in compromise. So once more, good luck Speaker Boehner. Though really, I don’t think even luck can save you now.
Tomorrow every wingnut’s attention will be on Washington, where the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) begins its annual meeting and vetting session for Republican presidential candidates. The three-day affair will end with a straw poll of attendees that becomes, for better or worse, a data point in the nominating process (last year’s straw poll was sort of ruined, according to most accounts, when Ron Paul’s college-aged supporters packed the room and won it for him). The significance of the event has probably been increased by the late-developing presidential field; this really does represent, as Michael Shear of the New York Times put it yesterday, the “starter’s pistol” for the 2012 cycle.
There’s always some maneuvering about who shows up and doesn’t show up, and who’s behind the scenes manipulating things, at CPAC meetings. But this year is kind of special in that there has been a sustained and ostensibly ideological effort to boycott the event from the right. It’s been organized by social conservatives who are unhappy that a gay conservative group—known as GOProud, which is distinct from the better-known Log Cabin Republicans in that it is more explicitly conservative on issues other than GLBT rights—has been allowed to become one of the meeting’s many sponsors.
More generally, elements of the Christian Right may be using this brouhaha to send a message that they will not accept subordination to those in the conservative movement who demand an exclusive focus on fiscal issues. Indeed, in addition to the GOProud’s inclusion, one of the grievances against CPAC among social conservatives is the very fact that Mitch Daniels has been given a featured speaking slot, presumably as a possible 2012 presidential candidate. Daniels has enraged the Cultural Right by calling for a “truce” in the culture wars, which from their point of view means a continuation of the GOP’s longstanding refusal to go beyond lip service on issues like abortion, gay rights and church-state separation.
There’s a secondary behind-the-scenes issue with CPAC that’s drawn less attention outside the fever swamps of right-wing internecine warfare: anger among Islamophobes at the inclusion of a group called Muslims for America, which noted neoconservative agitator Frank Gaffney has attacked as a front for the Muslim Brotherhood. This brouhaha in turn reflects long-standing hostility among some conservatives to the efforts of anti-tax commissar Grover Norquist, long a fixture at CPAC meetings, to legitimize Muslim-American organizations and convince Republicans to pursue Muslim voters.
Finally, some conservatives have always had issues with CPAC due to concerns over the alleged financial irregularities of David Keene, long-time head of the American Conservative Union, the primary sponsor of the event. It’s often hard to untangle the personal from the ideological in these disputes, but they both definitely exist.
In any event, eight significant conservative organizations have joined the boycott of this year’s CPAC conference, the most prominent being the Heritage Foundation and the Family Research Council. But the boycott hasn’t had much of an effect on the would-be presidents invited to speak. According to Slate’s Dave Weigel, no-shows by Sen. Jim DeMint and House Republican Study Committee chairman Jim Jordan may be partially attributable to sympathy for the boycott, and/or for the complaints of social conservatives that their agenda is being deep-sixed.
It’s also possible that the most notable no-shows, Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee, are being influenced by it; it’s hard to say, though in an interview with Christian Right journalist David Brody, Palin seemed to be saying in her elliptical manner that she had no problem with GOProud’s inclusion in the conference. Palin has now found reason to skip four CPACs in a row, and some of her detractors say she simply does not want to speak without a hefty fee and an unchallenged spotlight.
Others have interpreted Huckabee’s and Palin’s decision to take a pass as indicating they really aren’t running for president in 2012. Influential Iowa Republican activist Craig Robinson took this tack in ranking the presidential candidates’ potential appeal in his state’s pivotal caucuses, refusing to list Huckabee and Palin as members of the potential field.
So background noise aside, what should astute observers look for at CPAC, particularly in the cattle-call series of “featured speeches” that begin with Michele Bachmann tomorrow and conclude with fiery Tea Party congressman Alan West of Florida on Saturday? Obviously the straw poll results—and the frantic efforts of the winner and the losers to spin them—will be of interest. The speeches may get tedious to non-conservatives; this is not a venue for truth-telling challenges to conservative shibboleths, and the smell of red meat will be overpowering. You can count on metronomic shout-outs to the power and the glory of the Tea Party Movement, and vast quantities of Obama-bashing.
Since no one can rival Michele Bachmann in appealing to the conservative id, I’d keep an eye on her speech, particularly since she’s playing with the idea of running for president (probably if Palin does not run), and could be formidable in Iowa. Similarly, a much longer long-shot for the presidency, John Bolton, could use his Saturday address to play off the news from Egypt and challenge both the administration and his fellow-conservatives to treat the disturbances in the Middle East as an Islamist threat to U.S. security.
But the most interesting speeches may be from presidential wannabes not known for their ability to get conservative crowds growling and roaring. Tim Pawlenty, for example, is putting together a credible Iowa campaign and seems to be every Republican’s second choice, but desperately needs to show he can fire up the troops. Mitt Romney (who won the CPAC straw poll at this point in the 2008 cycle) needs to recapture the mojo that made him the “true conservative” candidate four years ago, particularly now that he’s being generally depicted as representing what’s left of the moderate tradition in the GOP. Rick Santorum is a good bet to bring the grievances of the Christian Right into the open. Haley Barbour could really use a speech branding himself as something other than a former tobacco lobbyist who can raise large stacks of cash when he isn’t displaying an unfortunate nostalgia for the Old South.
It should be a good show, and an illustration of the hard-core Right’s emergence from the sidelines of Republican politics into the very center of power and attention.
The White House won’t back down. That was the signal beamed yesterday when Vice President Joe Biden announced the administration’s plan to spend $53 billion on high-speed rail over the next six years. But questions remain: How can the administration convince a spending-skeptical public it’s a worthwhile investment? And how can it bring long-term funding predictability to high-speed rail?
Since winning control of the House, Republicans have been angling to cancel the administration’s high-speed rail program as part of their deficit reduction plan. Their goal is to halt the program before any new train segment is constructed in Florida and California (where plans are most advanced) and to rescind funds appropriated but not yet spent on other passenger rail lines under the stimulus act.
Yesterday, the administration called their bluff by asking for $8 billion for fast trains in the 2012 federal budget, followed by $45 billion over the next five years.
The proposal puts a bold but reasonable dollar sign on President Obama’s State of the Union pledge to bring high-speed rail to 80 percent of Americans within 25 years. The federal government now spends about $35 billion a year to maintain its highway system. Washington will have to spend considerably more to expand roads to accommodate a growing population if new train lines are not in the transportation mix.
Assets Matter
But to make high-speed rail happen, the White House needs to mount a better public education campaign. For starters, the president must hammer home the point that developing modern infrastructure matters just as much as cutting spending.
In other words, while we want to avoid government waste that raises the national debt, productive debt – or debt that creates future opportunities for all citizens – is not a burden, especially when money can be borrowed at record low interest rates.
A presidential trip to General Electric’s locomotive factory in Erie, Pa., could demonstrate that America has an existing manufacturing base for high-speed rail. This base needs to be tapped before more jobs migrate to countries that actually make things.
GE has pledged to develop high-speed trainsets aimed for the California and Florida lines. CEO Jeffrey Immelt could pitch in by tasking his big financial arm, GE Capital, to help finance promising rail projects.
President Obama should also lean on his newfound friends at the Chamber of Commerce. Joe Biden got it right yesterday by warning that “commerce is going to suffer and it’s going to show up on the bottom line” if the U.S. does not improve the flow of people and goods. Building and operating high-speed lines would also create tens of thousands of middle-class jobs.
Reforming Congressional Spending
Public persuasion must be matched by a more clear-eyed view of how to fund this long-term program without the uncertainty of annual congressional appropriations.
The six-year surface transportation bill coming before this session of Congress could be an excellent vehicle for the White House to develop a reliable source for high-speed rail funding. We have outlined in a policy memo how to restructure the transportation bill, now beset by wasteful congressional earmarks, into a productive program that leverages public money with private capital.
While the White House and House Republicans currently appear far apart on high-speed rail policy, there are areas of compromise. House Transportation Committee Chairman John Mica (R-Fla.) has been critical of stimulus money spent on existing rail lines for upgraded passenger service. Mica says he is in favor of “true” high-speed rail that operates above 150 mph and would support federal funds that reduce trip times along Amtrak’s busy Northeast Corridor.
There seems to be room for the White House to accommodate Mica’s concerns, including expediting an environmental impact study that currently hangs up progress in the Northeast Corridor, and ways for Mica to persuade his colleagues that reflexively obstructing rail projects is not the way to bequeath America a better transportation future.
I’m coming a bit late to the 100th birthday party of Ronald Reagan. But the amazing extent to which he serves as the sole secular saint of Republican and conservative-movement politics these days demands some comment.
As J.P. Green documented last Friday, the mythology of St. Ronald ignores an awful lot of inconvenient facts about the man and his actual presidency. And as Jonathan Chait explained today, the conservative refutation of these facts is a bit threadbare.
But I’m interested in why conservatives still hold so fiercely to Reaganolatry 22 years after he left office. I’d offer three reasons:
First and most important, particularly to older conservatives, was his status as de facto leader of the conservative movement long before his presidency. From the moment he was elected governor of California in 1966, he displaced Barry Goldwater as the conservative movement’s political leader, and sustained its hopes through the craziness and ultimate disaster of the Nixon administration. Indeed, Reagan’s only momentary rival for the affection of conservatives, Spiro T. Agnew, resigned in disgrace, making the Californian more than ever the True Leader as the Right washed its hands of complicity in the presidency that launched wage and price controls, recognized China, pursued detente, and signed the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts. Later Reagan fulfilled a generation of conservative fantasies by challenging a “moderate Republican” incumbent president, and nearly pulled it off. Said “moderate” proceded to lose against a relatively conservative Democrat, reinforcing the “A Choice Not An Echo” prescriptions of the Goldwater insurgency.
Second and equally important, Reagan won in 1980 as an outspokenly conservative Republican nominee–the first time, ever, that had happened, after a long series of defeats that dated back to the Taft candidacy of 1940, which was crushed, as was his 1952 candidacy, at the Republican National Convention. Remember that as of 1980, the last three elected Republican presidents had been Richard Nixon, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Herbert Hoover. Reagan killed off the assumption, which was very powerful in Republican Establishment circles, that you could not move Right and win. This is an empirical data point that is particularly important to today’s right-bent Republicans, who have successfully defeated the argument that after 2006 and 2008, the GOP needed to moderate its conservative ideology to reclaim power. The Republican nominees after Reagan–Bush, Bush, Bush, Bush and McCain–were either heretics or losers, from the conservative ideological point of view.
Third and finally, Reagan’s talking points have more historical resonance than his governing record. He was the president who proclaimed that “government isn’t the solution to our problems; government is the problem,” a line that defines today’s conservatives better than anything they are saying. He was the president who first suggested that cutting taxes was compatible with fiscal discipline, another contemporary GOP axiom. He was the president who seriously tried to slash domestic programs, even if he soon gave up on the project.
Until such time as Republicans find another idol (and we should remember that George W. Bush briefly auditioned for the role, particularly when the initial invasion of Iraq succeeded and he was hailed as a world-historical figure), Reagan remains the only available icon.
And so they continue to worship at his altar, until such time as a new leader emerges who can cleanse them of the failures of the Bush administration much as Reagan seemed to cleanse them of Nixon’s.
The Washington Post’s reporting on the apparent leveling off of Washington lobbying expenditures has a misleading but telling lede: “Could the great lobbying gold rush be over?”
The more banal misunderstanding tied up in this framework is the tendency to overhype small changes, which, of course, is the nature of a news business in which every new piece of information demands a story. But if lobbying is indeed a gold rush (more on this shortly), it’s hard to see how this gold rush could be over when organizations are still spending $9.5 million a day (or $3.5 billion a year) on it.
Rather, given the amount of money that is still spent, it seems like it’s still very much a booming business, and as I’ve written before, my strong guess is that this is but a hiccup in what has been and will continue to be a steadily increasing interest in lobbying. Any speculation about the demise of lobbying is presumably much over-rated.
The more significant misunderstanding is that lobbying is a gold rush, and I think this is a more pervasive misunderstanding. Do companies and other organizations come to Washington to pursue special programs, earmarks, tax breaks? No doubt many do, and this is a non-trivial part of the lobbying business.
But look at who the heaviest spenders on lobbying are, and you’ll not find a lot of gold rushing.
I stole the excellent chart below from the Center for Responsive Politics, which does an invaluable service in collecting federal lobbying data.
Client
2010 Total
2009 Total
Difference
% Change
U.S. Chamber of Commerce
$132,067,500
$144,496,000
-$12,428,500
-8.6%
PG&E Corp.
$45,460,000
$6,280,000
$39,180,000
623.9%
General Electric
$39,290,000
$26,400,000
$12,890,000
48.8%
FedEx Corp.
$25,582,074
$16,370,000
$9,212,074
56.3%
American Medical Association
$22,555,000
$20,720,000
$1,835,000
8.9%
AARP
$22,050,000
$21,010,000
$1,040,000
5.0%
PhRMA
$21,740,000
$26,150,520
-$4,410,520
-16.9%
Blue Cross/Blue Shield
$21,007,141
$23,646,439
-$2,639,298
-11.2%
ConocoPhillips
$19,626,382
$18,069,858
$1,556,524
8.6%
American Hospital Association
$19,438,358
$18,347,176
$1,091,182
5.9%
Boeing Co.
$17,896,000
$16,850,000
$1,046,000
6.2%
National Cable &
Telecommunications Association
$17,710,000
$15,980,000
$1,730,000
10.8%
National Association of Realtors
$17,560,000
$19,477,000
-$1,917,000
-9.8%
Verizon Communications
$16,750,000
$17,680,000
-$930,000
-5.3%
Northrop Grumman
$15,740,000
$15,180,000
$560,000
3.7%
AT&T Inc.
$15,395,078
$14,729,673
$665,405
4.5%
United Technologies
$14,530,000
$8,100,000
$6,430,000
79.4%
National Association of Broadcasters
$13,710,000
$11,090,000
$2,620,000
23.6%
Pfizer Inc.
$13,330,000
$25,819,268
-$12,489,268
-48.4%
Southern Co.
$13,220,000
$13,450,000
-$230,000
-1.7%
First, it’s worth noting that that among these top 20 lobbying organizations, two-thirds (65 percent) of these organizations spent more on lobbying in 2010 than they did in 2009.
But more importantly, it’s worth peeking under the hood of these numbers and seeing what it means to spend eight or nine figures on lobbying.
Last year was certainly not a gold rush for The Chamber of Commerce, which accounts for four percent of all lobbying. Mostly, I suspect they’ve been playing quite a bit of defense, trying to shape intellectual environment by spinning narratives and doing everything they can to advance a free-market, pro-business perspective.
If you take a look at one of the Chamber’s quarterly lobbying reports from last year, you should be impressed at the length of the thing. The first quarter report runs 92(!) pages.
Here are the listings from a sample page, listing the Chamber’s lobbying on a single issue, category: “ENG – ENERGY/NUCLEAR”:
H.R. 3246/ S. 2843, Advanced Vehicle Technology Act of 2009 H.R. 3534, Consolidated Land, Energy, and Aquatic Resources Act of 2009 H.R. 5320, Assistance, Quality, and Affordability Act of 2010, including an amendment by Rep. Diana DeGette which would establish disclosure requirements regarding materials used in the hydraulic fracturing process S. 1462, American Clean Energy Leadership Act of 2009 S. 1792, A bill to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to modify the requirements for windows, doors, and skylights to be eligible for the credit for nonbusiness energy property S. 2818, A bill to amend the Energy Conservation and Production Act to improve weatherization for low-income persons, and for other purposes S. 3177 / H.R. 5019 / S. 3434, Home Star Energy Retrofit Act of 2010 S. 3072, Stationary Source Regulations Delay Act S. 3663, Clean Energy Jobs and Oil Company Accountability Act of 2010 S. J. Res. 26, A joint resolution disapproving a rule submitted by the Environmental Protection Agency relating to the endangerment finding and the cause or contribute findings for greenhouse gases under section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act
Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act (bill number not yet assigned) Department of the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2011 (bill number not yet assigned)
Draft climate legislation expected to be sponsored by Senators Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman (not yet introduced) Draft legislation to provide incentives to deploy nuclear power (not yet introduced) Various issues relating to the Kerry-Lieberman “American Power Act” (draft legislation, not yet introduced) Legislation to reauthorize the “Diesel Emissions Reduction Act” (not yet introduced)
NHTSA Proposed Rulemaking on Notice of Intent to Prepare an Environmental Impact Statement for New Medium- and Heavy-Duty Fuel Efficiency Improvement Program (see June 14, 2010, Fed. Reg., Vol. 75, No. 113, Docket No. NHTSA-2010-0079) EPA Proposed Rulemaking on National Ambient Air Quality Standards for Ozone (see January 19, 2010, Fed. Reg., Vol. 75, No. 1, Docket ID No. EPA-HQ-OAR-2005-0172) EPA Proposed Rulemaking on Identification of Non-Hazardous Secondary Materials That Are Solid Waste (see Januaray 2, 2009, Fed. Reg., Vol. 75, No. 107, Docket No. EPA-HQ-RCRA-2008-0329) EPA Proposed Rulemaking on National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants for Major Sources: Industrial, Commercial and Institutional Boilers and Process Heaters (Boilers MACT) (see June 9, 2010, Fed. Reg., Vol 75, No. 110, Docket ID: EPA-HQ-OAR-2002-0058)
General issues including: policy for storing nuclear waste, the Department of the Interior’s moratorium on offshore oil and gas exploration in the Gulf of Mexico, DOE Loan Guarantees for Rare Earth Elements, and Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases Under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act (specific legislation not yet introduced)
Or similarly, here are the listings for “CSP – CONSUMER ISSUES/SAFETY/PRODUCTS”
H.R. 1521, Cell Tax Fairness Act of 2009 H.R. 2271, Global Online Freedom Act of 2009 H.R. 2309, Consumer Credit and Debt Protection Act H.R. 2221, Data Accountability and Trust Act H.R. 690 / S. 144, Modernize Our Bookkeeping In the Law for Employee’s Cell Phone Act of 2009 H.R. 3458, Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009 H.R. 2267, Internet Gambling Regulation, Consumer Protection and Enforcement Act H.R. 3924, Real Stimulus Act of 2009 H.R. 3126, Consumer Financial Protection Agency Act of 2009 H.R. 6038, Financial Industry Transparency Act of 2010 H.R. 4173, Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009, all issues pertaining to Title X, the Consumer Protection Bureau H.R. 5777, To foster transparency about the commercial use of personal information, provide consumers with meaningful choice about the collection, use, and disclosure of such information, and for other purposes (BEST PRACTICES Act) H.R. 1346 / S. 540, Medical Device Safety Act of 2009
S. 139, Data Breach Notification Act S. 43, Permanent Internet Tax Freedom Act of 2009 S. 773, Cybersecurity Act of 2009 S. 1490, Personal Data Privacy and Security Act of 2009 S. 1192, Mobile Wireless Tax Fairness Act of 2009 S. 788, m-SPAM Act of 2009 S. 1597, Internet Poker and Game of Skill Regulation, Consumer Protection, and Enforcement Act of 2009 S. 3155 / H.R. 4962, International Cybercrime Reporting and Cooperation Act S. 3480, Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010 S. 3386, Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act S. 3742, Data Security and Breach Notification Act of 2010 S. 3579, Data Security Act of of 2010
Legislation Regarding Offline and Online Privacy (draft released by Rep. Boucher)
What impresses me is the sheer range of issues on which the Chamber is lobbying. The Chamber has the resources to make sure that every time a piece of legislation comes up that touches on some aspect of the broader business community, it can get in to see the right folks to explain why a particular piece of legislation would be good or bad for business, and help people on the Hill to “improve” legislation in a way that the Chamber approves of. There’s something to be said for being ubiquitous, I’m sure.
General Electric, third on the list, also has a similarly expansive quarterly lobbying report at 35 pages, covering an impressive range of issues. Again, pulling from the Center for Responsive Politics, here are the areas on which General Electric lobbied in 2010:
Yes, General Electric is a major conglomerate and an important part of the American economy. But again, one can’t help but be impressed by the range of issues on which GE is lobbying. It clearly wants to be part of the debate on just about everything.
Institutions like the Chamber, GE, and others are permanent parts of the Washington policymaking community. They are not part of a gold rush, and they are certainly not going away.
More broadly, if you look at the top 20 spenders on lobbying for 2010, it turns out that they represent $524 million in expenditures, or about 15 percent of all lobbying expenditures. There are about 15,000 organizations that have hired lobbyists in Washington, but the distribution of expenditures is highly skewed: a handful of large organizations (mostly companies and business groups) dominate.
From this vantage point, lobbying in 2010 looks a lot like lobbying in 2009: Mostly dominated by a handful of large important companies and business lobbying groups who want to have a say on a wide range of issues, and more broadly, to ensure that any conversation that might impact on them does not happen without them.
This is the inaugural edition of a new P-Fix feature entitled “Wingnut Watch,” which will appear each Wednesday. I’d like to take a few moments to explain why we are doing this.
It’s our belief that the conservative movement, and through it, the Republican Party, is on an ideological bender at the moment that has become one of the primary obstacles to any sort of bipartisan effort to address the country’s most pressing problems. It’s hard to say exactly when this bender began. There has always been a hard-core conservative faction in the GOP that opposes any cooperation with the partisan “enemy,” that deplores most of the bipartisan domestic policy accomplishments that have occurred since the Great Depression, and that counsels Republicans to seek political victory by polarizing the electorate as much as possible.
Not since the 1964 presidential campaign, however, has the conservative movement been so radicalized, or so dominant in the GOP. The wingnut right’s rise to power is in part attributable to an ideological sorting out of the two parties over the last thirty years, but also to the persistent belief—crystallized by the policy failures and corruption of George W. Bush’s administration—that lack of strict fidelity to “conservative principles” and complicity in “big government” were preventing the GOP from consolidating a majority coalition in the electorate. This faith in a “hidden majority” favoring extremism is common to ideologues of all stripes, but has gone viral among conservatives since 2008, thanks to the virtual conquest of the GOP by the Tea Party Movement (the latest incarnation of the party’s conservative “base”) followed by a smashing midterm election victory.
At this point, a vast array of issue positions and perspectives considered exotic until very recently have become common among conservative opinion-leaders and Republican pols alike: economic troubles are always the result of “big government” and excessive taxation and regulation; global climate change is a hoax designed to create a rationale for government takeovers of businesses; centrist market-based approaches to universal health coverage once associated with moderate Republicans are “socialist” efforts to destroy private-sector medicine; the Second Amendment is designed to enable “patriots” to prepare for armed resistance to “big government;” the constitutional jurisprudence of the last seventy-five years should be overturned in favor of Gilded Age limitations on the federal government; states should be able to nullify federal legislation; treaties, alliances and international law threaten U.S. sovereignty; safety net programs represent an immoral “redistribution” of income; progressive taxation and/or taxation of income is incompatible with economic growth; a return to the gold standard is advisable—it goes on and on.
A superficially confusing feature of contemporary radical conservatism is the projection of extremism onto the opposition, which has led not only conservatives but many “neutral” commentators in the mainstream media to blame ideologues and partisans on both sides of the barricades equally for polarization and gridlock. Without question, there are “moonbats” on the left who can rival the “wingnuts” of the right in terms of policy extremism, ferocious opposition to bipartisanship, subscription to conspiracy theories, and policing of politicians according to ideological litmus tests. But at present, there is no comparison between the political power of the radical left and right. There is no “triangulation” permitted by Republicans against the hard right, and rarely any public grousing in question of the wisdom and values of the Tea Party Movement. Those who identify with the GOP orthodoxy of just a few years ago are ruthlessly attacked and systematically exposed to primary challenges, regardless of the impact on Republican general election prospects.
While some on the Democratic left are bitterly angry with the policies and political strategies of the Obama administration, they’ve had remarkably little impact on rank-and-file voters, much less elected officials, and there is nothing remotely like Fox News as a propagator and enforcer of ideological and partisan unity. Moreover, the radical left’s claim that the political center is a dead end for Democrats has been heavily dependent on the wingnut right’s efforts to undermine bipartisanship and paint all Democrats as leftist.
So those who favor pragmatic progressivism have a special interest in understanding, and if possible, bringing to an end, the current extremist trend on the right. This column will pursue the former in hopes that it will encourage the latter.
But I’m not interested in conducting a carnival sideshow that cherry-picks and mocks radical conservatives who do not have any actual political power. I won’t follow the birthers and the white supremacists, won’t indulge in Nazi analogies, and won’t assume that every raving from the lips of Glenn Beck has been internalized as marching orders by Republican politicians. The degree of craziness in the conservative mainstream right now is large enough that exaggeration is unnecessary as well as unfair. And where conservatives do try to exert some control over their more delusional comrades, I’ll give credit where credit’s due.
Next week’s column will include, among other things, a preview of the Conservative Political Action Committee conference in Washington, which used to be one of the primary vehicles for hard-right vetting of Republican pols (particularly presidential candidates), but which has now, in a revealing sign of the times, become suspect as insufficiently intolerant of diversity and dissent. Stay tuned.
Roll Call is reporting today that annual Washington lobbying expenditures dipped slightly in 2010, marking the first time since expenditure data became public in 1996 that the amount of money has not increased. The decline was small: from $3.6 billion to $3.5 billion (according to CQ MoneyLine). But it’s worth asking: does this mark some kind of leveling off of lobbying in Washington?
Some background: there has been a remarkable increase in lobbying expenditures since 1998, when a mere $1.44 billion was spent on lobbying. More organizations have come to Washington, and in particular more companies are spending more money on lobbying. OpenSecrets.org has the history, and there’s been roughly a steady 7 percent annual increase in lobbying since 1998.
If there truly is leveling off, it would be a remarkable development. But I’m skeptical.
One possibility is that more reports will be trickling in late, and this early report will turn out to be an underestimate.
A more likely possibility is that the reporting is inaccurate. Organizations and companies may be reporting less lobbying in response to the Obama administration lobbying rules, which create all kinds of hurdles for former lobbyists who want to serve in the administration. In 2008, OpenSecrets counted 14,214 registered lobbyists; in 2010, it counted just 12,484 – a decline of 12 percent.
There is good reason to believe that a lot of lobbyists have increasingly decided it was better not to register, or even just slightly adjust their portfolios and work schedules so that they technically didn’t meet the definition of a “lobbyist” under the Lobbying Disclosure Act. The Senate Office of Public Records, which keeps track of these registrations and reports, is perpetually understaffed and not well-equipped to go after anybody.
If this is the case, it’s a shame, because it means that by unnecessarily demonizing lobbyists, the Obama lobbying rules may have actually made the practice of lobbying less transparent by encouraging fewer lobbyists to register and publicly file reports.
Of course, it’s also possible that with the passage of heath care and financial reform, as well as the breakdown of climate legislation, the big lobbying dogs have less reason to be active, and with two years of gridlock ahead, it’s possible some interests realize nothing is going to get through, so why waste the money? But both health care and financial reform have major agency rulemakings ahead, and gridlock may actually require more lobbying grease.
Still, if it is a leveling off, I suspect it’s only a temporary one. As I argued in my Ph.D. dissertation on the growth of corporate lobbying (which accounts for about two-thirds of all lobbying expenditures), “More and more companies are discovering that Washington matters to their business, and those who do are sticking around and increasing their political capacities. As a result, corporate lobbying activity is likely to continue to expand for the foreseeable future, with large corporations playing an increasingly central role in the formulation of national policies.”
There’s simply too much at stake, and still for many large corporations, the amount of money they spend on lobbying is still a rounding error on their annual budgets (and much less than they spend on advertising or R&D). Rather, I suspect more and more companies will continue to realize that the reality is they can’t afford not to be lobbying.
BOOK REVIEW: Disconnect: The Breakdown of Representation in American Politics, by Morris P. Fiorina (with Samuel J. Abrams)
For those who view themselves as political moderates, these are troubling times. Despite the renewed calls to bipartisanship and civility, the reality is that the two parties in Congress are very far apart from each other and continue to show every sign of being far more eager to engage in partisan flame-throwing than in bipartisan problem-solving.
And yet: how did things get to be this way? And what about the supposedly moderate public: how and why do they stand for this? To understand these questions, a good place to start is Disconnect: The Breakdown of Representation in American Politics, by Morris P. Fiorina, a professor of Political Science at Stanford University.
Disconnect is essentially a book in two parts. The first is an extensive compendium of data in support of the claim that there is indeed a widening disconnect between a largely moderate voting public and an ideological polarized political class. The second part is the story of how that disconnect came about.
Just how moderate the public actually is turns out to be a matter of some debate in political science circles. An alternate view – and useful foil for discussing Fiorina’s book – is Alan Abramowitz’s The Disappearing Center (which I reviewed here), which makes the case the current polarization reflects the fact that Americans have sorted into two distinct ideological camps, and that politicians are polarized because the public is polarized (and representative democracy is therefore alive and well.)
Fiorina sees it differently: “The orientation [of the public] is more pragmatic,” he writes. “Far more people position themselves on the issues on a case-by-case basis rather than deduce their specific positions from some abstract principle….Those who ostensibly represent the American public take positions that collectively do not provide an accurate representation of the public.”
Part of the disagreement results from different data employed. Whereas Abramowitz focuses mostly on ideological self-identification and a few hot-button issues, Fiorina incorporates a broader range of issue polling, and finds that Democrats and Republicans are not nearly as far apart on most of the major issues as is commonly believed – on 40 Pew survey items, Democrats and Republicans differ only by an average of 14 points.
Moreover, they are not even moving apart that rapidly. In 1987, the average difference across the same 40 issues was 10 percent, meaning that in 20 years, there has only been an average change of four percentage points. Nor has it been consistently in opposite directions. Rather, Fiorina writes: “One sees a nonideological public moving rightward on some issues, leftward on others, and not moving much at all on still others.”
On some issues, Americans prefer more government intervention, on others less. But most of all, “Americans accept conflicting core beliefs and values.” Political views are often ambivalent and conditional, open to revision and re-consideration, as opposed to absolute and fixed. For example, four in five Americans are not sure whether life begins at conception or birth.
Americans, on the other hand, are much more divided in their assessments of political figures. George W. Bush, as we know, was the most polarizing figure in American political history. But Fiorina argues that the reviews of Bush are polarizing not because the public is polarized generally, but because Bush was an extreme partisan.
Fiorina also differs from Abramowitz in the definition of the political class. Whereas Abramowitz sees more people reporting trying to convince others to vote one way or another as a sign of more engaged political class, Fiorina notes that the percentage of Americans who work for a party or attend meetings and rallies is still the same as it was in 1952: 10 percent.
However, those 10 percent are quite different today than they were in 1952. This is one of the big stories of Disconnect. In an era gone by, politics was a clubby game, more concerned with material motivations than ideology. Politics was about compromise and bargaining, about taking care of business. It was no place for purists.
But without getting too nostalgic for the smoky and often corrupt backroom politics of a bygone era, Fiorina notes that all this openness and transparency changed the nature of politics. “The great irony,” Fiorina writes, “is that after this explosion of openness and transfer of power to the people, turnout in elections fell and trust in government plummeted.”
Without party machines to turn out votes and with new sprawling suburban districts to cover, candidates turned instead to special interests and ideological believers who were willing to volunteer and give money because they felt so strongly. A new political class that cared more about being right than actually winning took over the party mechanisms, creating the perfect breeding ground for ideological candidates.
Several demographic changes also led to political sorting. African-Americans migrated to the North and as a result became a more important political constituency. Civil Rights reforms alienated Southern Democrats, freeing the Democrats of their conservative wing and making their caucus more liberal. New Southern Republicans, plus the rise of the conservative Sunbelt, shifted the Republican center of gravity, as did the political awakening of evangelicals.
Meanwhile, as politics became more partisan, it also became nastier. Because the activists who increasingly control the party now feel more is at stake, they became more aggressive – a feedback loop that has left much wreckage in its wake.
Fiorina, like Abramowitz, offers little by way of reform. Instead, Disconnect concludes by laying the blame on deep structural forces that must somehow change on their own:
The usual institutional reforms are unlikely to do much to lessen the polarization of contemporary American politics. That polarization has deep roots in a variety of social changes that have increased the homogeneity of each party, widened the differences between the two parties, and encouraged politicians to construct electoral coalitions out of group building blocks that are less encompassing and less representative of the broader public than was the case for most of American history.
The optimistic note, however, is that by Fiorina’s reading, the American public remains quite moderate, despite the partisan warfare that has been dominating Washington. Without at least a moderate public, it is very hard to build a moderate politics.
Last night, President Obama used the phrase “win the future” as the primary motif of his speech. But clearly, on his mind was also very particular future: the 2012 election.
If last night was the opening gambit in the 2012 campaign, it hints that Obama understands that the two keys to getting re-elected – a centrist politics and an economic recovery – are linked. What he also needs to understand is that he’s going to have to keep hammering on the same themes if he wants them to stick.
On the positioning front, voters seem to be responding well to the new centrist Obama, who actually looks a lot like the old centrist Obama that voters elected in 2008: a president who went out of his way to show that he was not interested in being a partisan warrior and was open to working with Republicans and even including a few Republican ideas here and there.
The political events of the last two months – an especially productive lame-duck session of Congress, plus a nice moment of reflection following the tragic events in Tucson – have played to Obama’s strengths and allowed him to slip back into the role that I suspect he always wanted to play: leader of all the American people, not just the Democrats.
To the extent that Obama continued his centrist politics last night – cobbling together ideas from both sides – he should continue to maintain a wide appeal.
The bigger challenge is the state and trajectory of the economy. If unemployment is falling, businesses are creating jobs, and people feel rosy about a better tomorrow, Obama is practically unbeatable.
And while national economies are complicated beasts that defy presidents, there is certainly more to do than just stand aside and cheerlead. To the extent that the Obama administration can implement the proposed program of investments in infrastructure, education, and clean energy, as well as increasing exports, this should create jobs.
But more significantly (from a political sense), it creates a narrative that things are getting better, that America is building a future we can be proud of. It’s the same smiling horse of hope that Obama rode into town on that got every so jazzed up in the first place.
Some of this can happen at the executive level. But a lot of it requires some congressional participation.
Unfortunately, if the post-SOTU chatter is any indication (and it probably is), Republicans are not budging from their small-government old-time religion. Generally, they are generally laughing off Obama’s speech as so much misguided hot air. Even the lines that were supposed to make inroads with Republicans seem to have fallen flat among those they were intended to soften up.
Obama may by temperament prefer the bargaining chip approach (we’ll take one of your ideas and hope you vote for the thing), but at some point, he’s going to have to play a little more hardball. The only way Republicans come around to supporting some “investments” is if they feel that there will be a price to pay come next election of they don’t.
Obama started to do this last night by appealing to a national sense of purpose, and posing our challenge in us-versus-them terms. “We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world.” He called it a “Sputnik moment.”
Obama is going to have to keep making his case to the American people in a more sustained and forceful way than he’s ever done. He’s going to have to keep hammering on the rhetoric that if we don’t take investing in the future seriously, we may as well kiss our role as a global leader goodbye.
And this is where positioning and performance come together. By framing his agenda in a way that puts America’s global competitiveness at the forefront and pulls ideas from both sides, he’s putting pressure on the Republicans to come along. And if they do, and the policies improve economy as predicted, it’s a double-bonus for Obama.
It’s a political gamble, but it’s a smart one. Now here’s hoping that Obama has the discipline to stick with it, and give this strategy the sustained effort it deserves.
Though the president failed to mention the words “foreign policy” until 80 percent of his speech lay in the rearview mirror, it very much served as the underpinning of the entire exercise.
“Winning the Future”, after all, is inherently a call to rise against two competitors: domestic political obstacles that restrain American growth and prosperity, and those nations who seek to best the American model of democratic free enterprise. In that sense, the best line of his speech–“We do big things”–was probably the most forceful testament to American greatness and world leadership of the Obama presidency. It was an effective reminder that despite the impasses our politics so routinely produce that our calling is at the head of the world’s pack, and for a damn good reason.
He used the buttress of China and India to raise the spectre of international competition, even though the notion of “competing” with with New Delhi and Beijing hardly boils down a zero-sum game. But to gird Americans to tackle the huge tasks in their way, the frame was apt–other big countries are succeeding, and their models are sub-optimal. We can be the best, he said, even though our democracy is messy.
Pundits may critique the speech for its lack of specific initiatives, that wasn’t really the point. Lofty rhetoric and inspirational moments fall well within the president’s balliwick, particularly at a political moment when a statement of first principles establishes the possibility of buy-in from erstwhile opponents. The specifics of regulatory reform, for example, may draw knee-jerk heckles from conservatives, but the idea of political cooperation that unleashes the power of American entrepreneurship and reestablishes American economic might on the world’s stage? That’s rhetoric to start a conversation around.
When President Obama did get down to the foreign policy details, it was a mixed bag. Some, like Josh Rogin over at The Cable, took a cynical bent and criticized the president for glossing over some of the, er, finer details. Fair enough — I might disagree with some of Rogin’s “translations”, but he underlying point is that all isn’t going quite as swimmingly in the world of foreign policy as Obama makes it appear, and that’s about right. Even if Obama’s foreign policy deserves, in broad strokes, a good amount of praise.
I wanted Obama to draw more of a line in the sand on foreign aid funding. With House Republicans set to eviscerate the foreign assistance line item in the federal budget, Obama could have used the moment to explain that if America is to remain numero uno in the world, it can’t retreat into isolationism. An America engaged with the world protects our security interests and advances our values, and engagement must be properly resourced.
And to conclude, I was pleasantly surprised at Obama’s forceful language on Tunisia and by subtle implication, the nascent rumblings in Egypt: “[T]he United States of America stands with the people of Tunisia, and supports the democratic aspirations of all people.”
Sure, platitudes come easy after a dictator has fallen, and Egyptians — as embodied in the “all people” tacked on the end — certainly wish Obama had been more direct. But in fitting with what I’ve said above, rhetoric is important and falls squarely within the president’s job-description.
Now let’s hope he has begun the process of cajoling our divided government into action.
This week, I taught the first class of a graduate seminar at Virginia Tech titled “Collaborative Governance.” Our readings included a Foreign Affairs essay where the author confidently pronounced a number of pretty simple and strong directions for policymakers. One of the students—who is earning a Ph.D.—became extremely frustrated. “It’s just so simplistic!” she complained. “There’s no subtlety, no context.”
So it goes with policy pronouncements, and so it often goes with the State of the Union. People are often frustrated that they don’t hear the specifics about what government should do.
Yet, as we discussed in class, the fact remains that the broad, often simplistic pronouncements we heard last night still do push the ship of state in one direction rather than another. And the fact also remains that the gulf between hard policy and the politics of policy can be perilous.
Democracy and governance held a place at once enthusiastic and general in the speech. The commitment to the metaphysical promise of democracy was very clear: “We must never forget that the things we’ve struggled for, and fought for, live in the hearts of people everywhere.” About South Sudan, for instance, the president celebrated the outbreak of self-determination and freedom.
But questions were unanswered: Here’s what President Obama said about Afghanistan:
There will be tough fighting ahead, and the Afghan government will need to deliver better governance. But we are strengthening the capacity of the Afghan people and building an enduring partnership with them.
“Need to deliver better governance” is the sort of generality that drives people like my frustrated student nuts. The Karzai government is currently riven about whether to ratify the results of last October’s Parliamentary election and actually seat the government, with Karzai’s Attorney General trying to declare the results invalid. The U.S. government’s position is that the elections should be upheld—but the overarching policy on how best to achieve governance in Afghanistan is still less than completely clear.
The allusions to the stirring outbreaks of democracy in Tunisia and Sudan were inspiring but equally indeterminate. Of Tunisia, the president said, “[T]he United States of America stands with the people of Tunisia, and supports the democratic aspirations of all people.”
We support the democratic aspirations of all people—but the speech did not mention the extremely thorny issue of our traditional partner Egypt, an autocratic nation where a Tunisia-inspired democratic revolt was happening as the president spoke. That gap spoke volumes about the difficulty of translating broad aims into hard policy.
But the saving grace came in passages about American democracy itself. In 2010, here’s what President Obama said about our system:
Democracy in a nation of 300 million people can be noisy and messy and complicated. And when you try to do big things and make big changes, it stirs passions and controversy. That’s just how it is.
This was striking both for its objectivity and its slightly defensive quality. There was a slight but crucial reframing of a highly similar statement in this year’s SOTU:
And yet, as contentious and frustrating and messy as our democracy can sometimes be, I know there isn’t a person here who would trade places with any other nation on Earth.
Perhaps it was the Giffords shooting, or the sight of the Tunisian activists in the street, or the Congressspeople sitting together—but the statement brought tears to my eyes. This year, President Obama’s observation of the messiness of American democracy became an article of pride. This is a generality we can all embrace.
If Rep. Paul Ryan’s response to the State of the Union Address was intended to broaden support for his party’s agenda, or actually “respond” to the President’s speech, I suspect it failed. Ryan offered, instead, a base-friendly reinterpretation of the “state of the union” that made downsizing government not just an end in itself, but the answer to every problem.
Obama’s own proposals were brushed away in the response with the claim that “investment” just means “spending,” and that government needs to get out of the way and let the private sector take care of our needs. Actually, Ryan barely alluded to the current economic challenge, other than to say it wasn’t fixed by the 2009 stimulus legislation. Obama devoted much of his speech to a recitation of small, tangible ideas for what the federal government can do to promote private-sector growth and national competitiveness. Ryan’s response contained just one idea: limited government.
In a brief response, to be sure, nobody should expect a detailed agenda. But Ryan used about half his words for dog whistles to conservative activists. There were references to the Founders’ Original Intent, beloved (however selectively) of Tea Party folk, and to the Declaration of Independence, which is the document whereby conservative legal beagles try to sneak divine and natural law into the constitutional design. Ryan’s brief list of legitimate functions for government included “protecting innocent life,” a shout-out to the anti-abortion movement. Gold bugs were treated to a ritualistic invocation of the importance of “sound money.” And Ryan even appealed to the nasty, Randian underside of conservative hostility to “welfare” by citing a vague fear that America is turning “the social safety net into a hammock, which lulls able-bodied people into lives of complacency and dependency.”
As for the tone of the response, Ryan certainly did not reciprocate Obama’s constant pleas for bipartisan cooperation, instead treating the overthrow of every Obama policy of the last two years as the starting point for his party’s policy.
I’ve written elsewhere that Obama’s speech may have represented a clever trap to expose Republican extremism by embracing remarkably modest initiatives keyed to public sector roles in economic growth that most Americans have supported for decades. If so, Ryan walked right into that trap, and showed it’s the GOP who are now vulnerable to the charge that they are talking about everything other than the economy, and have no ideas for fixing it other than indiscriminate attacks on government, taxes, and regulations.
But there’s more: Those conservatives who didn’t think Ryan gave them enough red meat had the opportunity to tune into a second GOP response, on behalf of the Tea Party Express, from the noted fire-breather Rep. Michele Bachmann of MN. She omitted even Ryan’s meager bipartisan grace notes, and lurched from a cartoonish chart of unemployment rates to a set of dubious anecdotes about the crushing burden of regulations on “job creators” (the new conservative word for “corporations”). As she closed her remarks, her choice of the Battle of Iwo Jima as the best metaphor for America’s current position was appropriately puzzling.
Like other State of the Union addresses, this one is best understood as a framing device for future conflict and cooperation between the two parties. Judging by the GOP response(s), that party is determined to pursue confrontation with the goal of seeing how much damage it can do to the size and strength of the federal government. The economy has become just an afterthought.
It was encouraging to see President Obama last night make such an impassioned call for investing in America’s future, while clearly taking seriously the deficit challenges. It was also very encouraging to see that many of his ideas were consonant with PPI’s 10 Big Ideas for Getting America Moving and that he is charting a course past old partisan divides.
Over the course of today and tomorrow, the gang here at PPI is going to be analyzing the President’s address and the ideas contained therein. So check back with us soon for smart insights you won’t want to miss.
Well, that was quick. Rather than risk a mutiny, House Republican leaders have agreed to now cut $100 billion from the $1.1 trillion federal budget, rather than their original plan of a mere $40 billion. The question is: Can they pull it off? And if they do, will they come to regret it?
As political handicappers weigh the impact on next year’s elections of Senator Jim Webb’s decision not to seek a second term, this much is certain: His departure will leave the Senate a less interesting place.
I am hardly surprised to read 
The White House won’t back down. That was the signal beamed yesterday when Vice President Joe Biden announced the administration’s plan to spend $53 billion on high-speed rail over the next six years. But questions remain: How can the administration convince a spending-skeptical public it’s a worthwhile investment? And how can it bring long-term funding predictability to high-speed rail?
BOOK REVIEW: Disconnect: The Breakdown of Representation in American Politics, by Morris P. Fiorina (with Samuel J. Abrams)