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Wingnut Watch: The Tea Party Celebrates Tax Day

Posted on April 18, 2011September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

The Tax Day (or more accurately, Tax Weekend) observances of the Tea Party movement weren’t as large or well-publicized as in the past, but they did reflect the hardening consensus of conservative activists against both the appropriations deal just agreed to by congressional Republicans, and the coming legislation increasing the public debt limit. This consensus is being reinforced by potential presidential candidates and other opinion leaders who are encouraging the perception that the Beltway GOP is once again “selling out” the conservative movement and its latest Tea Party incarnation.

This snapshot of the mood at New Hampshire Tea Party events by Michael Crowley is illustrative:

The overall picture is one of a restless Republican base that sees defeating Obama as a matter of national survival. Angry conservatives believe Washington is spending the country into oblivion, and that lazy freeloaders are leeching federal money at the expense of ever more squeezed middle-class taxpayers. They also feel that the Washington game is rigged against them: “We’re constantly being lied to,” fumed Dan Dwyer of Nashua at a local GOP confab on Thursday night, still angry that Republicans had “caved” in their budget negotiations with Democrats earlier this month.

At a Wisconsin Tea Party rally, anger at congressional Republicans was fed by none other than Sarah Palin, who “unleashed a withering critique of congressional Republicans Saturday, lambasting them for not cutting spending deeper and faster, and saying the party needs to ‘fight like a girl.’” Meanwhile, Tim Pawlenty, who spoke at a number of Tea Party events, has been urging Republicans to oppose a debt limit increase on the questionable grounds that arrangements could be made to avoid a federal credit default until the autumn.

The superficially confusing aspect of this rhetoric is that the conservatives who are being most vocal about the dire nature of the deficit-and-debt emergency are precisely the same people who are fearful that congressional Republicans might cut some long-term budget deal with Senate Democrats and the administration that leaves increased taxes on the wealthy on the table. That’s why they are linking any approval of a debt limit increase not just to some deficit agreement, but to acceptance of the kind of deep spending cuts and “entitlement reforms” laid out in Paul Ryan’s budget proposal.

Accordingly, we will soon see Tea Party fire concentrate on those Senate Republicans said to be negotiating a deal that would include some tax increases. The Republican point man in the so-called “Gang of Six” of bipartisan senators engaged in these negotiations, Saxby Chambliss of GA, is already drawing unfriendly home-state fire from Red State’s Erick Erickson, who had this to say today:

Senate Republicans are going to support raising the debt ceiling and raising taxes all while refusing to demand passage of a Balanced Budget Amendment. House Republican Leaders will no doubt decide that . . . well . . . Republicans only control one house of one branch of government so . . . .

Bend over America.

This conflict will soon make it more obvious than ever that most conservative activists, including those identified with the Tea Party Movement, are less concerned with deficit reduction than with permanently shrinking the size and reach of the federal government and pushing both radical spending cuts and continued tax cuts.

On another front, there are growing signs that Republican elites have decided to give Donald Trump the same dismissive treatment that was said to have led to Sarah Palin’s steady decline in credibility as a potential presidential candidate. Over the weekend, Karl Rove called Trump a “joke candidate.” Playing his snooty Tory role, George Will called The Donald a “blatherskite,” and warned he could seriously screw up Republican presidential candidate debates. Slate’s Dave Weigel went to the trouble of reading Trump’s 2000 proto-campaign book, and noticed that Trump expressed a fondness for the Canadian single-payer health care system. Surfing off that disclosure, the Club for Growth put out a release calling Trump a “liberal.”

It’s almost certain that this offensive was stimulated by the Public Policy Polling survey of Republicans that was released on Friday showing Trump jumping out into a sizable national lead over the rest of the potential presidential field. Trump’s 26 percent is higher than any proto-candidate has registered in early national polls. And the internals, showing 23 percent of Republicans saying that could not vote for a candidate who believes Barack Obama was born in the United States (and another 39 percent saying they weren’t sure if they could or not), were probably terrifying to beltway GOPers.

No Trump

Posted on April 18, 2011 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Eventually, even billionaires grow bored with making money and look for more meaningful pursuits. For Bill Gates, it’s fighting disease in Africa; for George Soros, it’s kindling civic freedom in closed societies. To find Donald Trump, you have to slide considerably further down the social utility scale, to reality TV and, now, tea party demagoguery.

Is Trump a serious candidate? That’s an easy one: No. If he runs it will be to provide comic relief, which may be superfluous given the Republican Party’s already motley collection of odd, extreme and improbable presidential aspirants.

A tougher question: are Republicans a serious political party? That America’s vulgarian-in-chief can so easily vault to the top of early polling suggests a fatal GOP weakness for noisy celebrity over political substance.

Continue reading at Politico

Obama Reframes the Fiscal Fight

Posted on April 14, 2011September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Entering the lists at last, President Obama delivered a stout defense of progressive values yesterday and checked the rightward drift of the deficit debate. For all its strengths, though, his speech also left open the question of whether he and his party are ready to grapple effectively with surging health and entitlement costs.

Obama started with a history lesson. As the Tea Party harks back to 19^th century conceptions of limited government, he reminded Americans that the nation’s progress since then has been built upon a pragmatic synthesis of free enterprise and progressive governance. The extent of public activism required to create optimal conditions for shared prosperity is always a legitimate matter of debate, but the basic need for it shouldn’t be.

By insisting that deficit reduction leave room for strategic public investments in scientific research, modern infrastructure and education, Obama underscored a vital distinction that was being lost in the scramble to cut government spending: Reducing budget deficits is integral to reviving America’s economic dynamism. For most Americans, the priority is to get our economy moving again, not shrink government.

Obama also pushed back hard against Rep. Paul Ryan’s delusional budget, which asserts that the America’s path back to fiscal responsibility entails 100 percent spending cuts and 0 percent tax increases. In endorsing (finally!) his own fiscal commission’s plan, the president has set up a clear choice between the GOP’s fanatical devotion to shielding the rich from higher taxes and a bipartisan approach that exempts no one from sacrifice.

The president’s confident rejection of GOP tax dogma left House GOP Whip Eric Cantor sputtering. He was reduced to repeating the ridiculous Republican mantra that asking the wealthy to pay higher taxes is tantamount to killing America’s small businesses. Please Eric, bring it on: this is a debate progressives can win.

But Obama can’t just win debates. He needs to preside over passage of a comprehensive deficit-reduction package that, in a divided government, can only be achieved on a bipartisan basis. If he wants moderate Republicans to play on raising revenues – and a few intrepid souls like Sens. Tom Coburn and Saxby Chambliss have begun to do – he is going to have to convince Democrats to play on entitlement reform.

Here his speech fell short. Clearly mindful of President Clinton’s success in rallying the pubic behind his plans to protect Medicare and Medicaid during the 1995-96 budget battle, Obama categorically ruled out structural changes in how government finances those programs. That could prove to be a mistake.

It’s one thing for Democrats to reject the size of Ryan’s proposed cuts in the big public health care programs. But for both substantive and tactical reasons, they shouldn’t reject out of hand innovative devises to constrain entitlement costs.

It’s 2011, not 1996, and the baby boom retirement is underway, not over the horizon. This demographic surge, combined with health care costs that have been rising for decades faster than the economy has grown, are the real drivers of America’s debt crisis. To put a governor on the engine of federal health care spending, Ryan has proposed moving Medicare to a premium support model, and turning Medicaid into a federal block grant.

In his speech, Obama endorsed an alternative: strengthening provisions in his health reform bill to slow the unsustainable rate of health care cost growth. These provisions would encourage health providers to shift from fee-for-service to fixed fees for bundled services or capitated payments, which reward the value rather than volume of care delivered. These and other Obamacare provisions, including the independent commission set up to explore efficiencies in Medicare, are all good ideas. But even if they work, it will take a very long time for them to reach the scale necessary to break the back of medical inflation.

In the meantime, we need to protect public budgets from surging health care costs that threaten to soak up every dollar of revenue raised by 2040. If premium support and block grants are ruled out – even though some prominent liberals and Democrats have long supported one or the other — progressives need to come up with an alternative.

The political “grand bargain” Obama must strike couldn’t be clearer. It’s embedded in the fiscal commission plan: GOP support for raising revenues in return for Democratic support for constraining public health care and retirement costs. As the political action now shifts to the Senate, Obama needs to challenge his own party too.

Wingnut Watch: How the Budget Compromise Played Out on the Far Right

Posted on April 13, 2011September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

The consensus in Washington that last week’s appropriations deal represented a victory for conservatives was not shared very widely on the Right. Polls showed self-identified Republicans significantly less likely to approve of the deal than Democrats or indies. At the activist/elite level, the negative reaction was much stronger. Fits were pitched over the surrender of policy “riders,” notably by RedState’s Erick Erickson, who accused congressional GOPers of, quite literally, selling out “murdered children.” Rush Limbaugh even claimed that media assessments of the deal as a Republican win represented some sort of devious liberal trick.

Part of what’s going on here, of course, is that conservative activists want to maintain their leverage over Republican pols going forward. Many also don’t much appreciate all the bouquets being tossed at John Boehner for how well he “managed” them during the negotiations. Still others, especially on the Christian Right, really did care more about the policy riders than the overall level of budget cuts. A few, including probable presidential candidate Michele Bachmann, have adopted the Ahab Posture, making repeal of “ObamaCare” the condition for their vote on any budget or appropriations measure.

In any event, wingnut opinion is virtually unanimous in demanding a harder line in the FY 2012 budget debate and the associated debt limit vote, which many opinion-leaders (most famously Sen. Marco Rubio) are already promising to reject unless Democrats surrender definitively on every major issue, including “entitlement reform.” You can also expect a lot of conservative pressure to be applied to Republican senators this week to minimize support for the so-called Gang of Six, a bipartisan group that is working on a budget deal (loosely based on the Bowles-Simpson deficit commission report) that includes revenue measures, and may wind up working in tandem with the White House.

Over on the presidential campaign trail, things continue to heat up. Many conservatives took advantage of Mitt Romney’s announcement of a campaign exploratory committee to mock him for his stubborn continued support for the Massachusetts Health Plan, which, as it happens, was enacted five years ago this week. Puzzlement over the Mittster’s strategy for winning the nomination is spreading as well, particularly since it’s beginning to appear he may run away from serious campaigns in South Carolina as well as Iowa.

But the big news on the presidential front has been the startling evidence of significant support for possible candidate Donald Trump, the mythical tycoon and reality show host. A new CNN poll, in fact, shows The Donald running even with Mike Huckabee for the national lead among Republicans at 17 percent. The big question is whether such showings simply reflect name identification (Trump is, after all, nothing if not a celebrity), or perhaps a reaction to his recent high-profile expression of neo-Birther sentiments.

A PPP poll of New Hampshire, showing Trump running a relatively close second to Mitt Romney in that state, indicates the latter could be a factor: Trump actually leads among those denying Obama was born in the U.S. All these polls also show Trump having unusually high unfavorable numbers as well, so he’s hardly a threat to actually win the nomination. Still, his sudden emergence may indicate a craving in the GOP electorate for candidates with greater star quality, and perhaps more hard-core conservative views, though Michele Bachmann is certainly doing everything possible to supply both qualities. The possibility that Trump could actually run (and his bizarre interview with Christian Right journalist David Brody shows he’s trying to check off the interest-group boxes) should remain unsettling to other candidates; aside from his alleged wealth, he would be a nightmare in debates.

While Trump seems to be doing better than had been imagined among the conservative rank-and-file, the big winner during the last week in the Invisible Primary of insiders was Tim Pawlenty, with the announcement that former Republican Governors Association executive director Nick Ayers would run his campaign. Ayers, a Georgia-based wonder-boy (he’s only 28), was given a lot of credit for the GOP’s big gubernatorial gains in 2010. But a lot of the buzz about his T-Paw gig stems from the earlier assumption of many pols that he’d be involved in a different campaign: that of Haley Barbour, who was Ayers’ boss at RGA during the 2010 cycle. If nothing else, Pawlenty now has something important that he has lacked: a prominent backer from the South, where he will need to show strength if he winds up being the “consensus conservative” alternative to Romney to his left and perhaps an actual southerner to his right.

As Obama Prepares to Speak, PPI Hosts Tax Reform Forum

Posted on April 13, 2011September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Today, President Obama is speaking on long-term deficit reduction. He’s expected to embrace the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform’s general framework (also known as Bowles-Simpson).

Yesterday, the Progressive Policy Institute joined forces with the Moment of Truth Project to host an event to discuss what comprehensive tax reform should look like, and what it will take to get it passed. (Moment of Truth was formed by Fiscal Commission co-chairs Erskine Bowles and Sen. Alan Simpson to build momentum behind the commission’s deficit reduction plan.)

Yesterday’s event, at Johns Hopkins University, helped build the momentum for reform. There was wide consensus that tax reform will need to be bipartisan and comprehensive, and will need to scale back most of the $1.1 trillion in tax expenditures. Tax expenditures are at the heart of the “modified zero plan,” which would eliminate or scale them back, and use the savings to cut individual and corporate tax rates, as well as budget deficits.

Coinciding with the event, PPI released a policy memo on the modified zero plan, written by PPI Senior Fellow Paul Weinstein and Marc Goldwein of the Committee for a Responsible Budget, and both formerly of the Commission. Both were on hand.

Yesterday’s forum event featured three Senators who have been leading the charge for reform – Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Dan Coats (R-Ind.) – and one CEO and Fiscal Commission member, Dave Cote (CEO of Honeywell). They provided the big picture framing, so I’ll summarize the highlights of their remarks first, and then delve into the two panels of experts second.

Sen. Bennet kicked off the event with stories from the town halls he’d been spending the last two years doing: “In every single meeting, debt and deficit came up,” he said. “There’s a deep skepticism that if we can’t figure out how to pay our bills, it suggests a lack of confidence in our government and our elected leaders, and it’s fairly well-placed.”

Bennet offered three criteria for what a deficit reduction plan would have to accomplish to pass muster with voters. First, it would need to be comprehensive. “People know we can’t fix this overnight, but they want it to be comprehensive.”; Second, sacrifice has to be shared: “They want to know that we’re in this together, and everybody has a share of the burden.”; Third, it has to be bipartisan.

Coats laid out a similar series of principles for the legislation that he has introduced with Senator Wyden. First, he said, echoing Bennet, it has to be bipartisan. Second, it has to be revenue neutral. Third it has to be simple (“Right now we’ve got 71,000 plus pages of tax code, 10,000 plus special preferences and deductions. It’s a nightmare.) Fourth, it has to help out the middle class, and help families to save money for college, and help charitable organizations. And fifth and finally, “this has to be based on a principle of growth…the bottom line is it has to lead to jobs.”

Wyden looked at the problem through the lens of tax simplification, noting that as April 15 approaches, “Americans are going through the 6 billion hours they spend each year filling out tax forms — 690,000 years is what you have in an annual effort going through the water torture of figuring out if line 9 is modifying line 7.”

Wyden also stressed that any tax reform also needed to encourage investment in what he called “red-white-and-blue jobs” – that is, solid American jobs, preferably in manufacturing. Wyden called his bill fundamentally a jobs bill.

Cote, CEO of Honeywell, echoed similar themes in his remarks. “We need a global competitiveness agenda for the U.S.” he began. “Our corporate tax system is globally uncompetitive. We have the highest tax rate in the world, and we’re the only major country with a territorial system that encourages companies to keep their cash overseas. And we give back $1.2 trillion in what is euphemistically named ‘tax expenditures,’ but just another form of spending that’s done through the tax code.”

Echoing the urgency of the Senators, Cote posed the looming crisis this way: “The debt problem can get resolved one of two ways. We can do it now and do it thoughtfully, or the bond market can force us t do it, like Greece and Portugal.”

Moving to the policy substance, the first panel featured Paul Weinstein, PPI Senior Fellow, Diane Rogers of the Concord Coalition, Alan Viard of the American Enterprise Institute, and Howard Gleckman of the Tax Policy Center as moderator

Weinstein gave the quick version and backstory of the “modified zero plan,” which is the subject of a new PPI memo Weinstein co-authored. As the name might suggest, it began as the “zero plan,” which was the name the deficit commission gave the plan that reduced all tax expenditures to zero, saving $1.1 trillion in deductions, credits, and deferrals. The “modified zero plan” put back in only a few consensus tax expenditures, like the EITC, a mortgage deduction, a charitable contribution deduction.

“The rates are lower, it simplifies the tax code to fewer incentives and helps reduce tax avoidance and mistakes,” explained Weinstein. “Obviously the revenue increases get bigger and bigger over time. We estimate $800 billion over ten years.”

Rogers responded favorably to the plan. “I like the approach. There’s something for everyone to love,” she said. “Liberals should like it because it’s progressive and better than having to cut direct spending. Conservatives should like it because it’s an economically efficient way to raise revenues, and it doesn’t raise the size of government. It reduces the size of government.”

Viard gave it two cheers. He called it “Well-specified and thoughtful. This is one of the best approaches you can have with an income-based tax system that includes a separate corporate income tax.” Viard’s stated preference was for a value-added tax (VAT), though the subsequent discussion highlighted how difficult the politics of transitioning to a VAT would be. (Rogers put it this way: “we should work within the existing system first.”)

As the discussion shifted into the politics of policy, there was general agreement that tax reform terminology is confusing to the general public, and any discussion of tax expenditures is going to lead to thousands of interest groups begging to keep their favorites. And again, there was agreement that it needs to be comprehensive. “Tax reform can’t be done unless it’s in the context of deficit reduction,” said Weinstein. “You need to look at the whole apple.”

The second panel featured Leonard Burman of Syracuse University, Marc Goldwein, of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, Joseph Minarik of the Committee for Economic Development and Derek Thompson of The Atlantic as moderator.

Goldwein began by reiterating the consensus: “The current income tax code is a mess. There is a consensus to broaden the base, and reduce the rates, and don’t keep tax expenditures that aren’t worth their cost.”

But how to do that? Burman argued that ending tax expenditures would require not referring to them anymore as tax expenditures. “We need to change the fiscal language. I sometimes call them IRS pork,” he said. “Part of the problem is mischaracterizing tax expenditures. Some people think that by putting new tax expenditures in the code you’re making government smaller, but what you’re doing is just spending more money and making taxes higher to achieve a given level of revenue.”

Minarik, a grizzled veteran of tax fights, highlighted the fact that the inside-the-halls negotiating in Congress is very different from the “outside” formulating that goes on at events like this, and reminded everyone that the simpler the solution, the easier it will be to pass. In that respect, he said, a fifth-best solution that’s simple and straightforward is better than a second-best solution that can lead to more complicated politics.

Next Up: Tax Reform

Posted on April 11, 2011September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Averting a government shutdown was only the first of a series of gates Congress must clear in this year’s downhill slalom of fiscal politics. Even sharper turns lie ahead – raising the debt ceiling, and approving next year’s federal budget.

In mid-May, the U.S. Treasury will bump up against the limit of its legal authority to borrow money to finance the federal government’s operations and service its debts. Republicans have served notice that they see the coming vote to raise the debt limit as another opportunity to extort deeper cuts in federal spending for next year.

The stakes in this game of fiscal chicken, however, are infinitely higher. Without a debt limit hike, the United States, for the first time in its history, would be forced to slash hundreds of billions in spending, or more likely, default on its obligations. Are GOP leaders really willing to let the Tea Party turn America into Argentina?

More likely they’re bluffing. Still, it wouldn’t be a bad thing if the debt ceiling vote becomes an action-forcing mechanism for serious negotiations to cut future deficits and stabilize the national debt. By “serious” I mean pragmatic and bipartisan, qualities you can only find nowadays by crossing the Capitol from the House to the Senate.

The House this week will probably pass some version of Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s proposed budget. It’s an ideological document, not a plausible point of departure for horse trading. By taking taxes off the table, Ryan panders to GOP taxophobia and ensures no Democratic support for his plan. And that plan is a distributional horror, concentrating all the pain of deficit reduction on middle- and lower-income Americans, while giving the most fortunate a free pass.

That’s why all eyes are on the “Gang of Six,” a bipartisan group of Senators who are trying to forge consensus around the Fiscal Commission’s deficit reduction plan. Its centerpiece is a call for a sweeping overhaul of tax expenditures, with the savings dedicated both to buying down individual and corporate tax rates and cutting federal deficits. PPI will co-host a public forum on tax reform tomorrow featuring Sens. Micheal Bennet (D-Colo.), Dan Coats (R-Ind.), and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), as well as prominent budget and tax experts.

And President Obama, who seems to have gone on walkabout, returns to the fiscal fray Wednesday with a major speech on the need for cutting entitlement spending, especially for Medicare and Medicaid. The unsustainable growth of these huge “mandatory” programs – not the domestic spending targeted by House Republicans in the shutdown battle – is the real driver of federal spending and debt.

A decisive intervention at this stage by the President is crucial, since many Democrats are as deeply in denial about the need for entitlement reform as Republicans are when it comes to raising enough tax revenue to finance government. Many liberals, irate over the $38 billion in domestic spending cuts Democrats were forced to swallow to keep the government open, are demanding that Obama stop compromising and take up the ideological cudgels against Republicans. They want a full-throated defense of progressive government. But that requires action against entitlement spending, which is inexorably soaking up tax dollars and squeezing domestic programs that progressives rightly want to protect.

It also means showing the public that Democrats can responsibly manage the nation’s finances and restore fiscal discipline, even as they shield progressive priorities from chainsaw wielding Republicans. Obama’s challenge is to nudge, prod and cajole both sides toward a grand political bargain for shared sacrifice, built around tax and entitlement reform.

On the other hand, both Obama and Ryan have punted on the other big entitlement program, Social Security. It isn’t as big a problem as Medicare and Medicaid, but it must be on the table too because it’s adding to the nation’s overall debts. What’s more, it’s easily fixable. The Fiscal Commission pointed the way with sensible reforms, backed by Senate Democrats and Republicans, for raising the retirement age to match increases in longevity, and trimming future benefits for wealthy retirees.

The next step, however, should be tax reform. If the two parties can coalesce behind a plan similar to the Fiscal Commission’s, they could assure a balanced approach to deficit reduction, and build trust for the hard work of entitlement reform.

America’s Come Undone

Posted on April 8, 2011September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

$fracture$ Book Review: Age of Fracture, by Daniel T. Rodgers

The Princeton Historian Daniel T. Rodgers has written a fascinating new book about how the U.S. has gone from being one big beacon of light to a thousand little points. The title gives it away. We are in an Age of Fracture. We’ve gone from shared sacrifice and shared identities to individual expression and diffuse identities. We’ve gone from limits to dreams; we’ve shed the confines of the past for the endless possibilities of future reinvention. The only problem is, it’s starting to look like we might now want the past back after all, and limits are starting to look more prudent.

The story begins in the Cold War, an era of asking what you could do for your country. History and tradition weighed heavily; big institutions dominated. “Dedication, courage, responsibility, self-scrutiny and sacrifice,” writes Rodgers, “these were the nouns that bore the burden of the Cold War presidential rhetoric.”

But by the time sunny Ronald Reagan was in the White House, the confining rhetoric of the Cold War was gone and “terms like ‘crisis,’ ‘peril’ and sacrifice slipped one by one out of Reagan’s major speeches like dried winter leaves.” (What can he say? The man likes his collections of representative words.) In Reagan’s speeches, the historian detects the new optimism of self-actualizing philosophy, and the (re?)-birth of an American faith that from three simple words – “We, The People” – anything was possible.

But Reagan may just be the transition’s most visible mouthpiece. The shift away from institutions to individuals was just as much the rage among intellectuals. First, most visibly, in economics: In the 1960s, Keynesian economics was the consensus view, with its focus on institutions and macro-level supply and demand. But then it proved unable to either explain or solve the stagflation of the 1970s, leading Daniel Bell to proclaim that, “nobody has any answers he is confident of.”

Enter the new microeconomics: the atomized market of millions of socially-detached, utility-maximizing individuals, owing nothing to society other than to make themselves happy. “In its very simplifications,” writes Rodgers “it filled a yearning for clarity that the older, more complex pictures of society could not.”

Like Reagan’s soaring rhetoric, the new faith in markets was a way to break free of limits. In contrast to the gray pessimism of planners and government bureaucrats who wanted people to live within their means, the new models bespoke a land of heroic entrepreneurs and innovators, of an America that could re-invent itself constantly from the bottom up.

Other social sciences tracked the trends in economics. In political science, models of rational choice, with their focus on individual utility, replaced the importance of larger institutional structures and forces. Everything now could be explained by examining the incentives of individuals as if they were independent from larger social institutions. Phrases like the “will of the people” became meaningless when complex models showed how impossible it actually was to usefully aggregate independent preferences.

In sociology, the guiding concept of power “grew less tangible, less material, more pervasive, more elusive, until, in some widespread readings of power, it became all but impossible to trace down.” Michel Foucault found power everywhere, and by doing so, effectively rendered it meaningless – for if it was everywhere, than who could pin it down? In anthropology, Clifford Geertz found “nothing but a play of texts.” Everything was performance and masks.

In more popular books, Alvin Toffler’s widely-read Future Shock proclaimed “The death of permanence.” John Naisbitt’s Megatrends promised the triumph of the individual in the new information age.

The politics of race and gender were likewise affected. On the subject of race, conservatives embraced the notion of a color-blind society, and race as a social construct. “In the ‘color-blind’ society project,” writes Rodgers. “Amnesia was a conscious strategy, undertaken in the conviction that the present’s dues to the past had already been fully paid.” Again, the same theme: the triumph of individualism came at the expense of the past. One could not have a world of endless new opportunities if one got bogged down with worries about history and obligations.

On gender, the breakdown was internal to the movement. A representative 1977 woman’s gathering in Houston fell apart when it became apparent there was no single woman’s experience everyone could agree on. The feminist scholar Judith Butler concluded in her landmark book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity: “There were only scripts, nothing outside or beyond them.” Postmodernism strikes again. If everything is socially constructed, nothing has a foundation.

“Choice, provisionality, and impermanence,” writes Rodgers. “A sense of the diffuse and penetrating, yet unstable powers of culture; an impatience with the backward pull of history – these were the emergent intellectual themes of the age.”

And yet by the late 1980s, one could also detect a backlash. In the academy, Allan Bloom railed against the nihilistic deconstruction of everything in The Closing of the American Mind. Conservative think tanks began looking to local communities as sources of civic republicanism. Evangelicals saw the church as the center that could and must hold.

“Conservative intellectuals by the end of the 1980s still yearned for a common culture,” wrote Rodgers. “They could half-remember and half-invent in their mind’s eye a more consensual age, when terms like ‘civil religion’ and the ‘American creed’ had been sociological commonplaces.”

But the great irony was that the new conservative embrace of the American tradition was itself a creative reinvention –a mythic golden age that only selectively drew on actual history.

In conservative legal scholarship, Rodgers writes: “The originalist argument tapped not a desire to go back to any actual past but a desire to escape altogether from time’s slipperiness – to locate a trap door through which one could reach beyond history and find a simpler place outside of it. Originalism’s appeal to the past was, like the economists’ modelings of time, profoundly ahistorical.”

As a document of intellectual history, Rodgers’ book is brilliant. Learned, wide-ranging, delightful to read, full of keen little insights (and epoch-defining bundles of nouns.) But it leaves open the question: is the fracture permanent? “One might reach nostalgically for a fragment of the past,” Rodgers concludes. “But the time that dominated late-twentieth-century social thought was now.”

One way to view politics is about the tension between the individual and the group. All the great political trade-offs – liberty vs. security, equality of opportunity vs. equality of outcome – are at root conflicts between the desires of individuals to do as they please and attempts by the group to keep individuals from doing so much of what they please that the group falls apart. Such a view takes history as civilizations as bouncing back and forth between the two poles: give people too little room for individual self-expression, and they’ll demand to be free. But give them too much room to do whatever they like and be whatever they want, and they’ll demand more order and group identity.

Rodgers leaves us at the moment in which a hunger for a rootedness in history seems to be growing. Have we gone as far as individualism will take us? And if so, what takes us back? Here’s a hypothesis: do the new social networking tools that increasingly dominate our lives restore the possibility of a new and different kind of collective identity? And am I the only one wondering this? Maybe I’d better post this review to Facebook, and see what other people think…

Obama Needs a Stronger Veto Threat on EPA Regulations

Posted on April 6, 2011September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Brinksmanship is the name of the game in Washington this week. GOP leaders are publicly shifting away from negotiation tactics and turning to endgame spin strategy in advance of a government shutdown, while President Obama continues working to secure a deal without staking out an early position in the blame game that’s soon to follow.

A perfect example of the GOP’s unanswered offense in this game is the timing of votes in both houses this week to strip the EPA of its ability to move forward with new greenhouse-gas regulations. There has been no shortage of Republican proposals in both houses of Congress to do this for months, plus a handful of Senate Democrats who also support some version of stopping or delaying the EPA climate rules. But what better time to bring up a divisive issue with no hopes for compromise than in the last hours of an overheated budget standoff? Tactically speaking, it’s a reminder of why Republicans are always so much better at strategy and spin than Democrats, but it could also prove to be another example of how their ideological extremism eventually undermines their strategic successes.

Already the White House is playing defense, trying to calm environmentalists after rumors that the administration has been using the EPA’s authority as a bargaining chip to secure a budget deal and avoid a shutdown. On Tuesday, OMB issued a policy statement warning that if the House measure ever reaches the President’s desk, “his senior advisors would recommend that he veto the bill.”

That’s fairly strong language for OMB bureaucrats to use, but it’s pretty pathetic as the only public response of the White House to direct attacks one of the most significant regulations issued by this administration. Much of the media coverage has interpreted the statement as a promise to veto the House bill, but it includes no such promise. As veto threats go, this one is half-hearted at best.

With the budget fight reaching a fever pitch and GOP leaders raising the stakes by bringing climate change into the game, it’s time for the President to take a side on this fight before votes are cast, not after.

President Obama should announce clearly and unequivocally that he will not sign any bill that delays, repeals, or compromises the EPA’s greenhouse-gas regulations, until Congress has passed legislation adopting some form of long-term national energy and climate strategy.

Here’s why: the EPA regulations are the last leverage he has left at this point to get any energy bill through Congress, and they may be one of the only political defenses he has post-shutdown for not reaching a budget deal with Republicans. Even entertaining the possibility of trading away EPA’s regulations for a budget deal is not only a loser’s hand in the short term, but it would be the end of any hopes he might have to move any meaningful energy agenda during his first term, and possibly his second.

For some presidents, calling for this type of statement and strong positioning might not be a big thing to ask for. But President Obama has shown consistently he prefers to lead from the rear, leaving the bloodshed to members on the front lines in Congress, many of whom are no longer around to fight after casting tough votes for last year’s energy bill. The administration’s reluctance to lead on climate and energy in 2010 gives congressional Democrats facing tough races little reason to think they will get any cover in 2012 for defending the EPA this year.

What’s more, President Obama faces two problems if he chooses to stand up more forcefully for the EPA’s regulations. His first problem is the perception Republicans are promoting that this is more simply more “job-killing” regulation heaped onto an already weak economy. That thinking has a number of vulnerable Democrats spooked, especially in the Senate, where a handful of moderates already co-sponsored a bill to delay the regulation for two years.

Obama’s second problem with trying to defend the EPA rules is that he has never strongly supported them up until now. The administration has soft-pedaled its commitment to the EPA rules from the beginning, presumably to use them for leverage to motivate industry opponents and their many representatives in Congress to support a less painful alternative, such as cap-and-trade. The fact that they did such a poor job of using that leverage to actually enact an alternative now leaves them stuck with regulations they have said they don’t want, and a Congress that doesn’t want them either, but also doesn’t want to give him a better alternative.

Anyone who thinks Obama will fall on his sword to protect the EPA rules in addition to passing an energy bill hasn’t listened to what he and his advisors have said about the rules for the last two years. You just need to look at the EPA’s official press release for its initial endangerment finding in December, 2009, which was supposed to explain why the regulations were so critical and necessary to mitigate the threat that greenhouse gases pose to public health and welfare. Instead, EPA pitched it as an unavoidable Plan B forced by a Supreme Court decision and Congress’s failure to act first:

President Obama and Administrator Jackson have publicly stated that they support a legislative solution to the problem of climate change and Congress’ efforts to pass comprehensive climate legislation. However, climate change is threatening public health and welfare, and it is critical that EPA fulfill its obligation to respond to the 2007 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that determined that greenhouse gases fit within the Clean Air Act definition of air pollutants. (link here)

If anything, the administration seems even less committed now to greenhouse gas regulations than it did then. Carbon emissions aren’t exactly at the top of President Obama’s list of talking points these days. In fact, his recent signals on energy policy appear deliberately calculated to move away from climate change positions altogether in favor of arguments for energy innovation, job growth in clean energy industries, and (as of last week’s speech at Georgetown) energy independence.

Obama made a bold attempt to reframe the energy debate in his State of the Union address, but not once in that speech did he reference climate change, cap-and-trade, the environment, or the EPA. His proposal for a new “clean energy standard” that moves us away from older fossil-fuel resources over the next 25 years has not picked up much energy of its own in Congress, and the President has yet to fill in the details of the proposal, leaving congressional leaders struggling to make sense of it on their own.

It is still unclear whether President Obama believes his clean energy standard or any of the proposals he mentioned last week would be sufficient steps toward carbon reduction to justify trading away the EPA’s regulatory authority over greenhouse gases. It’s even less clear whether all of those things together would be enough for environmentalists to even entertain the thought such a trade might happen.

Presumably, the comprehensive energy bill that passed the House last year would have been a strong enough substitute, but Waxman and Markey are not committee chairmen anymore. GOP members in the House have turned back time and aggressively attacked the science behind global warming, forcing advocates to invest more in defending the EPA’s actions, which may make it harder for the President to make a deal that undermines those actions.

Regardless of what hopes environmental groups may have for moving forward on clean energy while defending the EPA at the same time, it may be necessary to put everything on the table if we want any forward movement on energy policy in the foreseeable future.

But for now, what’s important is there is no such movement to be seen yet. So whatever type of climate or energy bill might justify regulatory horse trading, now is the time for talking about it. Given the state of the budget mess and the absence of political will to tackle energy legislation, now is the time for backing up bold speeches with firm conviction.

Why Obama Shouldn’t Play it Safe in 2012

Posted on April 5, 2011September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

So, surprise, surprise, Barack Obama is officially running for re-election in 2012. As someone who knocked on doors in 2008, I watched the official 2012 announcement video with some eagerness, hoping to be inspired anew. Perhaps he would say something akin to his 2007 speech in Springfield, which launched his then long shot campaign with stirring calls to purpose.

“I want to win that next battle – for justice and opportunity,” he said in 2007. “ I want to win that next battle – for better schools, and better jobs, and health care for all. I want us to take up the unfinished business of perfecting our union, and building a better America.”

But Obama doesn’t even appear in the 2012 video, a two-minute montage of five “volunteers” talking in the most remarkably content-free generalities: “There’s too much that is fundamentally important” says a white man from North Carolina, who later admits, “I don’t agree with Obama on everything” (though he does trust and respect him).

“There are many things on the table that need to be addressed,” says a Latino mom, who wants the best for her children, and for Obama to be the person who addresses, you know, things. An African-American woman reminds us that the President has a job to do, so we’ll have to get inspired ourselves. Fade to blue: “It begins with us,” reads the text.

Yes, I understand what Obama is doing. He’s trying to re-capture what made the 2008 campaign work, which was a propulsive sense of “we” – volunteers caught up in the story of Obama and all he could do. And he could get away with the vagueness of “Hope” and “Change” because all he needed to be then was the anti-Bush. And so I hoped: Here was a real intellectual who will not only take the challenges of governing seriously, but who could also stirringly articulate a national vision of coming together to solve hard problems.

Now, as the 2012 campaign season kicks off, Obama is clearly playing it safe. The fundamentals are on his side. The Republican field is weak; the economy is moving back in the right direction; his poll numbers are decent; demographic shifts are expanding his base of supporters. And Obama’s not one to veer from the cautious path. Especially not at this early stage.

But here’s the thing. In 2008, conservatism was discredited. Heck, even McCain wanted to be the candidate of change. In 2011, conservatism is flourishing again, reinvigorated by the Tea Party. And conservatives are telling a compelling about the American spirit, and the way in which it can be regenerated if only we can get rid of that awful greedy leech responsible for everything that’s gone wrong for the last however many years: Big Government. Moreover, the coalition that Obama put together in 2008 looks decidedly weaker now.

Presidential campaigns can be defining moments. There is no other opportunity for a political figure to speak so often and so loudly to the American people about what we stand for as a nation, to define the moment and define the basis for leadership in it. And yet, most incumbent presidents waste this moment, because they just want to play it safe. They figure, I’ll get re-elected, and then, then I’ll finally be free to offer a true vision, to lead this time for real without actually having to worry about re-election.

Except, second terms rarely offer the opportunity for that defining moment. And they especially don’t offer that opportunity if the campaign hasn’t paved the ground for it, hasn’t prepared the public and made the case. As Irving Kristol once put it: “What rules the world is ideas, because ideas define the way reality is perceived.”

I’m sure the Obama campaign people will come up with some wonderful poll-tested cognitive scientist-approved campaign slogan for 2012 and then repeat it ad infinitum. But in doing so, here’s what I ask: please, please don’t squander this opportunity. Please come up with a message and a story that makes an affirmative case for lasting progressive values of pragmatic experimentation and solving hard problems through collective means. Challenge the Tea Party memes. Reclaim history, reclaim the Founders, reclaim the meaning of American Exceptionalism. These are more than just things on the table. They are the way we understand and make sense of present day events.

Wingnut Watch: How Much to Cut the Budget?

Posted on April 4, 2011September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

This will be a very important week in determining exactly how much fiscal radicalism the Republican Party is going to be willing to embrace. The odds of a government shutdown over Fiscal Year 2011 appropriations remain relatively high, despite major Democratic concessions over the level of cuts. House Republicans remain under significant conservative activist pressure to refuse compromise either on the level of cuts or the appropriations riders Democrats are most likely to go to the mat to reject (e.g., decimation of EPA enforcement powers, defunding of Planned Parenthood).

Meanwhile, Rep. Paul Ryan is due to release the House GOP’s draft long-term budget resolution tomorrow, which is almost certain to include “entitlement reforms” that Democrats will heatedly oppose. One tactical consideration is whether hard-core conservatives want to “take their stand” and threaten highly irresponsible behavior over the appropriations measures (which would involve a government shutdown) or over the budget (which they have linked to a debt limit increase vote many are promising to oppose unless they get their way on “entitlement reform.”).

A closely related question is how far conservatives (including those considering a 2012 presidential run) go out on a limb with Ryan on specific entitlements. Intel on Ryan’s plan indicates he’s going to give Social Security a fairly wide berth. Medicaid is most likely to get a big, obvious ax, with a trillion dollars in savings over ten years being the figure heard most often, and conversion of the entitlement into a block grant to the states being the most likely mechanism. Medicare will be the most interesting subject, given recent Republican demagoguery on the alleged impact of health reform on Medicare benefits, and Ryan’s past identification with the idea of turning benefits into vouchers that would have to be spent on buying private health insurance and that will not keep up with actual costs. One guess is that Ryan will use terminology that avoids the “v word” and makes it appear he is simply offering Medicare beneficiaries more choices, which will boost competition and thus hold down costs (an interesting proposition in itself, since past private-sector options for Medicare beneficiaries have been far more expensive than the traditional government plan).

On both Medicaid and Medicare, expect conservatives to object emotionally to any description of what they are proposing as “cuts,” since levels of spending will rise, just not remotely as much. Democrats will then be under the burden of explaining the concept of “current services,” whereby changing population levels and rapidly rising health care costs make the same dollars buy fewer actual services over time. During the budget struggles of the 1990s, Democrats largely won that linguistic fight, at least on Medicare. But one factor that might play out differently arises from Ryan’s likely strategy of “grandfathering” everyone 55 years are older into the current system, and limiting major structural changes to younger Americans. That didn’t work for George W. Bush when he attempted the same tactic for selling partial privatization of Social Security in 2005, but could have some effect at a time of perceived austerity when demographic groups tend to look after their own interests.

A parallel question is how far Republicans go in stimulating Tea Party resentment of the poor and minorities in promoting destruction of Medicaid as an entitlement. Initially, they will almost certainly focus on the demands of Republican governors for “flexibility” in administering Medicaid, which actually means the power to reduce eligibility and benefits. But Democratic arguments that the most vulnerable Americans will be bearing the burden of budget cuts could well produce a Santelli-like backlash among hard-core conservatives who don’t have much sympathy for “looters” dependent on government benefits. There’s not much evidence such sentiments are broadly shared in the population, but they are visible enough on the Right as to find expression among House Republican freshmen.

Throughout the appropriations and budget “crises,” the reaction of presidential candidates to ongoing events could be an aggravating factor, given the competitive pressure to express base-voter fury against Congress and conventional politicians and show “leadership” by saying outrageous but crowd-pleasing things. And by the same token, events in Washington could affect the lay of the land on the campaign trail quite a bit. It’s worth remembering that with one exception, no one among the likely presidential candidates is currently serving in Congress. And the one exception, Rep. Michele Bachmann, has staked out a permanent position of opposing any conceivable compromise with Democrats on any topic.

Speaking of the fiery Minnesotan, she’s finally beginning to get some attention in the mainstream media as something other than a gaffe machine and a cartoon character. First-quarter fundraising figures for the various proto-candidates’ leadership PACs showed her unexpectedly out in front, just ahead of Mitt Romney, having already raised over $2 million. Since she raised over $13 million for her 2010 House re-election campaign (more than Mike Huckabee raised for his entire 2008 presidential campaign), this was just a small indication of what she might ultimately raise if she does run for president.

Going Bananas

Posted on April 4, 2011September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

It’s spring and the sap is rising in Washington – especially among Tea Party militants. They seem determined to shut down the federal government, even if it means making the United States look like a plus-size banana republic.

House Speaker John Boehner has been trying to talk sense to his vast freshman class, but they are in no mood for compromise. Although Democrats have agreed to reduce current spending by $33 billion, the GOP’s fiscal fundamentalists won’t budge from the $61 billion in cuts they have already passed on a party-line vote.

Nor will they back off from a slew of nakedly partisan policy riders calculated to be radioactive to Democrats. These poison pill measures, for example, would cut funding for Planned Parenthood, bar the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating carbon emissions, and block implementation of parts of President Obama’s health care law.

The government will run out of money if no agreement is reached by midnight Friday. The prospect of government agencies shutting down and hundreds of thousands of federal workers being furloughed doesn’t faze Tea Partiers. Having drunk deep of their own strange infusions, they apparently believe the public shares their contempt for the federal government. More experienced GOP hands know better.

“Let’s all be honest, if you shut the government down, it’ll end up costing more than you save because you interrupt contracts. There are a lot of problems with the idea of shutting the government. It is not the goal. The goal is to cut spending,” Boehner warned at a news conference last week.

The economic costs of a shutdown, of course, aren’t the real issue. Behind closed doors, Boehner no doubt is reminding his caucus of the fierce public backlash against Congressional Republicans who forced two shutdowns in the mid-1990s. These battles energized Democrats and set the stage for Bill Clinton’s political resurgence and reelection in 1996.

All this is ancient history to Tea Partiers, who believe they won a public mandate in 2010 for a drastic and immediate fiscal retrenchment. But a more dispassionate reading of the midterm results suggests that the voters’ foremost concern was the economy’s poor performance. Yes, they also want to reduce federal deficits, but timing is crucial. With unemployment falling at last, GOP demands for austerity now are likely to strike many Americans as premature. Plus, what the public wants is for their elected leaders to pull together and tackle the nation’s economic and fiscal problems, not bring government to a grinding halt.

What’s more, House Republicans are fighting on the wrong battleground, haggling over discretionary spending programs that comprise only 13 percent of the federal budget. Slowing and eventually reversing today’s rapid run-up of public debt will require a combination of tax reform and constraints on the automatic spending growth of “mandatory” programs, chiefly Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan will introduce tomorrow a comprehensive debt reduction package along these lines. The Ryan plan is really radical: it would voucherize Medicare and turn Medicaid into a block grant. But at least it will focus the House on the real drivers of our fiscal crisis and realistic fixes.

Meanwhile, over in the Senate, there’s been a striking, bipartisan convergence around the idea that the comprehensive blueprint developed by the President’s Fiscal Commission should be the starting point for fiscal reform. Remarkably, 64 Senators (half from each party) endorsed that approach, as has the bipartisan “Gang of Six” led by Senators Mark Warner and Saxby Chambliss.

This is the main arena for serious action to restore fiscal stability in Washington. The sooner we move beyond the distracting “squirmish’ in the House, the better.

Is the Tea Party Finally Boiling Over?

Posted on March 31, 2011September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Maybe the Tea Party is finally starting to boil over, after all. According to CNN’s latest polling, 47 percent of the public now views the Tea Party unfavorably, a new high (up four points from December, and up 21 points from January 2010). By contrast only 32 percent now view the movement favorably, down five percent from December. Tea Party favorability had actually been pretty stable for the last year in the high 30s, so the recent downslide is significant.

Meanwhile, in Washington, House Speaker John Boehner appears increasingly willing to leave Tea Party demands for $100-billion-in-cuts-or-bust behind, and instead gamble that he can find enough moderate Democrats to support a shutdown-averting deal.

Tea Partiers are descending on the Capitol today to hold a “continuing revolution rally” to demand no surrender on the budget. Tea Party nation founder Judson Phillips wrote in an email to supporters that: “Boehner must go. The Tea Party must unite and make sure Boehner is replaced in the next election. Boehner is living proof of something I have said for a long time. It is not enough that we vote out bad leaders, we must replace them with good leaders.”

I hope Boehner’s stand will be a decisive moment: a solid break that begins the marginalization of the Tea Party as too-crazy-to-govern.

Presumably, Boehner the strategist understands a few things that the Tea Partiers do not.

First: that, if there is a government shutdown, Republicans are much more likely to get blamed, and nobody really wants a government shutdown.

Second: 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, they like those. As a recent Pew poll reminds us, there is not a single budgetary area in which a majority of voters would favor a decrease, and 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). The only other program that at least 30 percent of voters support decreasing is military defense. (I’m still mystified with how this squares with the fact that 64 percent of Americans think “federal spending and the budget deficit” is a problem that they worry “a great deal” about, but that’s a rant for another time)

If Boehner can make a break with the Tea Party, it will presumably drive the Tea Party into over-boil (I envision more Boehner-must-go memes). And that’s good.

The more visibly extremist the Tea Party gets, the high the level of disapproval (I hope!). But even better, if they’ve declared war on Republican leadership, it means that Republican leadership now has a vested interest in casting them as unhelpful extremists. And this is the key.

So could this be the moment for some GOP leaders to re-discover a bit of courage in moderation and finally offer some real thought leadership that gives ordinary Republicans an alternative to the exasperating slash-and-burn anger that has dominated the dialogue for too long? I certainly hope so.

Beyond Sanction: The Next Iran Strategy

Posted on March 31, 2011September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

PPI has launched a new task force on human rights inside Iran. We’re proud to team up with Freedom House in this endeavor, and the project will be chaired by PPI Senior Fellow and frequent P-Fix contributor Josh Block and Andrew Apostolou, Senior Program Manager for Iran at FH. Yours truly will be a member of the group.

We’re calling the task force Beyond Sanction: The Next Iran Strategy, a nod to the necessity of bringing fresh ideas and new life into the debate on how to handle Tehran. As Iran defiantly continues efforts to construct a nuclear device, it has become glaringly clear in the wake of the 2009 Tehran protests in response to the country’s sham presidential elections that the regime lacks popular legitimacy. In the context of recent upheavals across North Africa and the Middle East, it’s important to remember that the pro-democracy movement began not in Tunisia, but in Iran.

We did an official launch of the new project yesterday, and have received a fair amount of positive press. Ben Smith of Politico had the scoop, and we’ve also received attention in the Jerusalem Post, Commentary, and The Atlantic.

From The Atlantic’s write up:

Nuclear weapons and human rights are “separate issues, but they’re separate issues with regard to the same regime, so one of the things the task force is going to listen and come up with is … how do you raise those separate issues and when do you raise them that has a direct impact,” said Freedom House co-chair Andrew Apostolou on a conference call with reporters this morning. …

The point of the group is not to criticize the Obama administration, but to supply it with strategic options.”I think they’ve taken some actions that have been important,” Block said, referencing President Obama’s initial openness to engage Iran and his messages to the Iranian people on the Nowruz holiday.

The administration’s initial policy was an attempt “to test Iran and give Iran a chance to say we are serious about talking about our nuclear regime, and I think the Iranian response was loud and clear that [Iran was] not serous,” Apostolou said. “What are you supposed to do, after 30 years … the same thing?

“They gave it a try, and it didn’t work. It didn’t work, and now they’re casting around for ideas.”

Exactly.

Wingnut Watch: Iowa’s Cattle Calls and Conferences Continue, But is it Too Much Camp Christian?

Posted on March 30, 2011September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Aside from rather predictable carping about the president’s handling of the military intervention in Libya, the wingnut world has been preoccupied the last week with an anticipatory sense of betrayal on federal spending and with sorting through its 2012 presidential options.

Conservative activists continue to pant for a government shutdown over FY 2012 appropriations, and are alarmed at any and all Republican efforts to avoid a shutdown via negotiations with the White House or congressional Democrats. News that Speaker John Boehner has begun talks with “moderate Democrats” in the House as a hedge against conservative defections on a compromise plan has spurred shrieks throughout the wingnut-o-sphere.

RedState’s Erick Erickson left no cliché undeployed in announcing that the GOP leadership had “no spine” and was so “scared of its own shadow” that it would “sell its soul, betray its base, and out-negotiate itself.” Conservative activists vary somewhat in their bottom lines; some are demanding no compromise on the policy riders aimed at Planned Parenthood, EPA and NPR; some want language crippling “ObamaCare;” some just want much deeper cuts, even though Democrats seem willing to reach the targets originally announced by House Republicans. Some want a separate deal on “entitlement reform” as part of the initial discussions on a long-term budget. And some will scream about any deal blessed by the America-hating socialist in the White House.

From a tactical point of view, of course, this conservative agitation will give Republican negotiators a bit of extra leverage, so long as the rank-and-file in the House doesn’t take it too seriously and sabotage any ultimate agreement.

Even as they keep a suspicious watch on their current representatives in government, conservatives are already avidly engaged in the 2012 presidential nomination contest, particularly in Iowa, where the whole game begins. There were two major Iowa events last weekend: a home-schoolers conference addressed by Michele Bachmann, Ron Paul, and Herman Cain; and a cattle-call organized by Iowa’s own favorite wingnut, Rep. Steve King, which drew Bachmann, Cain, Newt Gingrich, Haley Barbour, and John Bolton. At the former event Bachmann touted her own history of homeschooling her kids (before setting up a “Christian school” with her husband) while Paul proposed a large tax credit for homeschoolers. It was not lost on anyone that homeschoolers were a significant part of the coalition that won the 2008 Iowa Caucuses for Mike Huckabee.

Steve King’s event produced an array of proto-candidate speeches. Bachmann and Cain gave all-red-meat addresses split between liberal-baiting and challenges to the audience to get ready for 2012 and ultimately for leadership of the country. Bolton stuck to foreign policy in his speech, while Barbour stuck mainly to economic and fiscal policy. Gingrich gave his standard stock speech. In what is likely to become a pattern for such events, Cain and Bachmann got far and away the strongest audience response. And King’s influence was validated by the appearance of not only the presidential candidates, but of national conservative titan Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC). King is widely expected to endorse Bachmann, his closest colleague in Congress, if she ultimately makes the race.

The cavalcade of culturally conservative events in First-in-the-Nation Iowa is spurring some debate, there and nationally, about the extent to which other Republican voices are being marginalized. Doug Gross, who was the Republican gubernatorial nominee in Iowa in 2006 and ran Mitt Romney’s 2008 Caucus operation, complained to The New York Times:

We look like Camp Christian out here. If Iowa becomes some extraneous right-wing outpost, you have to question whether it is going to be a good place to vet your presidential candidates.

The observation earned Gross some seriously angry responses (the Iowa Republican’s Craig Robinson referred to him as “Mr. Irrelevant”). But it did get some non-Iowa analysts looking at the numbers to see if the “Camp Christian” rep of Iowa Caucus-goers was overblown. RealClearPolitics’ Erin McPike ran some numbers:

The strength of religious conservatives in Iowa, while formidable, may be somewhat overstated.

To be specific, add Romney’s 2008 results in Iowa (about 30,000 votes, or 25.2 percent) to Arizona Sen. John McCain’s (about 15,500 votes, or 13 percent) to former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson’s (16,000 votes or 13.4 percent) to former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s (4000 votes or 3.4 percent), and the total is about 55 percent of the votes. Texas Rep. Ron Paul garnered a tenth of the votes. Compare that to winning Mike Huckabee’s winning share of some 41,000 votes, 34.4 percent of the vote.

The problem with this analysis is that in 2008 Mitt Romney was running as the “true conservative” candidate (he was ultimately endorsed by Jim DeMint, Paul Weyrich, Sean Hannity, Robert Bork, and many other hard-right figures) while Fred Thompson was the candidate of both Steve King and the National Right to Life Committee. Limiting “Camp Christian” to Huckabee caucus-goers misses a big part of the picture.

In any event, 2012 proto-candidates seem to be taking seriously the state’s reputation as a stomping ground for the Christian Right specifically and “movement conservatives” generally. King’s being treated like a senior statesman rather than a much-mocked crank. Romney’s giving the state a wide berth for the time being and trying to tamp down expectations. And if Mitch “Truce” Daniels is ultimately going to run, he certainly hasn’t shown his face in Iowa. Newt Gingrich probably did a very smart thing politically by getting one of his PACs to pour money into the successful 2010 effort to recall some of the judges responsible for the Iowa Supreme Court’s 2009 decision legalizing same-sex marriage. In a Caucus environment where evangelical fervor has a lot to do with the willingness to spend hours on an icy night standing up for a candidate, investing in the foot soldiers of the Christian Right makes a lot of sense.

Clean Elections Are Constitutional

Posted on March 30, 2011September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

When the U.S. Supreme Court last year ruled in Citizens United that incorporated entities have the same First Amendment rights as individuals to spend money in political campaigns, it upended a century of settled law aimed at limited special interest influence in American politics. The predictable result was a torrent of new spending in the 2010 midterm election, with nearly $300 million in electioneering ads by outside interest groups, half of which was undisclosed.

On Monday, the Supreme Court waded back in to the campaign finance issue when it heard oral arguments in McComish v. Bennett, concerning one of the most sweeping and successful forms of campaign finance regulation to emerge in recent years, publicly funded “Clean” or “Fair Elections”.

The case in question involves a challenge to the constitutionality of a specific “trigger funds” provision of Arizona’s Citizen’s Clean Elections Act of 1998, the law which established voluntary public funding for qualifying candidates for any state office in Arizona. Under the challenged provision, candidates who opt in to the Clean Elections system receive matching funds beyond their initial allocation if they are outspent by a privately funded opponent. The aim of the provision, as of the law in general, is to provide serious and hardworking candidates who attract broad-based constituent support in the form of small donations and who agree to forego private special interest contributions with enough money to mount a credible campaign.

The law is being challenged by a group of Arizona candidates and political committees who claim that triggered funds to participating candidates have a “chilling” effect on the First Amendment free speech of privately funded candidates and independent spenders. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the challenge last May, which concluded that no candidate or group had been prevented from spending money by the law.

Contrary to petitioners’ characterization of the Arizona law as curtailing First Amendment speech, Arizona’s Clean Elections program places no limits on the ability of privately funded candidates or independent spenders to enter the political debate, including by spending far in excess of the triggered funds provided to participating candidates. Instead, as argued by former Reagan Solicitor General Charles Fried in an amicus brief to the Court:

Arizona extends public financing to any candidate who meets certain qualifications and agrees to forego fundraising from private sources. Thus, if the government violates no one’s First Amendment rights, does not silence, suppress or deter anyone’s speech by speaking a contrary message in its own voice, so most assuredly it burdens no speech when it makes funds available to all comers on a viewpoint neutral basis. More speech may answer speech but it does not silence it. What effect speech has on its audience the First Amendment leaves up to the audience.

The brief, which was signed by a bipartisan committee of former Senators, Representatives, and Governors on behalf of Americans for Campaign Reform, established in no uncertain terms the constitutional imperative of voluntary public funding as an effective means of expanding and enhancing First Amendment free speech: “The law at issue in this case is not, in the words of the First Amendment, a law ‘abridging the freedom of speech.’ Rather, it adds voices to the political forum and thereby expands speech… If there is one fixed star in the constitutional firmament, it is that arguments seeking to compel a reduction in speech face an extraordinary hurdle.”

That message, at least, the Court heard loud and clear in the oral arguments on Monday: public funding writ large, regardless of the specific provisions of Arizona’s law, does not violate the Constitution. In the the post-Citizens United world of big spending by corporate and union interests, public funding may be the only means left to effectively combat the power of special interest money in politics.

A decision is expected before the end of the Supreme Court Term in June.

Whither Progressive History?

Posted on March 30, 2011September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Over in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, Elbert Ventura has an excellent piece about progressives’ inability to develop a “coherent vision” – a guiding sense of history that can provide both context and narrative for progressive accomplishments and ongoing political struggles. Contrast this to the political right, which has, with relentless impetuousness, pushed a once-fringe view of American history that casts the 20^th century as one big nightmare betrayal of founding principles, thus setting for itself the task of restoring the world’s largest economy to a golden age of agrarian farming.

“History is being taught – On TV and talk radio, in blogs and grassroots seminars, in high-school textbooks and on Barnes & Noble bookshelves,” writes Ventura. “In all of those forums conservatives have been conspicuous by their activity – and progressives by their absence.” (Full disclosure: Ventura is a friend and my predecessor as managing editor of ProressiveFix.com)

Perhaps, as Ventura goes on to suggest, “Part of it may be the progressive orientation – our eyes are always cast toward the next horizon, not the one behind.”

But let me toss out another possibility. Arguably, the political left lost its abiding faith in ideas by putting too much faith in ideas.

Let me explain: A previous era of liberal thought put great faith in the capacity of human rationality. But ideas led to hubris, and hubris led to overreach, and ultimately to policy failures. Lacking humility, liberals over-estimated their ability to achieve social justice ends in through top-down technocratic means. Constituencies who had been helped by the New Deal did not benefit from the Great Society, and instead grew anxious and angry.

In response, the idea of planning became socialism, which became communism. Critics repeatedly traced the facile road-to-serfdom syllogism that any attempt to improve the workings of society winds up with Stalin and Hitler.

For progressives, the lesson from the failure of 1960s idealism should have been to approach big ideas and grand narratives with a requisite caution. Instead, the lesson seemed to be abandoning big ideas altogether.

But what didn’t change for progressives was the political program. Instead, it became increasingly unmoored from a larger narrative. Lacking a grand story, progressivism increasingly decayed into a kind of interest group liberalism. A coalition once formed for a grander purpose became a tangle of single-interest groups fighting myopically to defend yesterday’s victory. Rather than being a means to the social justice ends it was designed to achieve, familiar liberal policies became ends in and of themselves.

The conservative story was different. Four decades ago, a kind of principled Burkean conservatism was a legitimate response to a genuine assessment that the Great Society had not turned out so great after all; Contra the great liberal narrative of progress through collective action, conservatism warned of the folly of grand gestures and the humility of human endeavors.

But then, in the grandest of all grand gestures, conservatism went ahead and embraced radical theories of its own — about economics, about tax cuts, about the role of government — and effectively went from simply yelling “stop!” to aggressively yelling “rewind!” Far from principled caution, conservatism took on a utopianism that put even the most liberal of 1960s liberals to shame.

That modern conservatism has not been effectively dismissed as antithetical to the traditional conservatism is truly remarkable. To quote Sam Tanenhaus, the New York Times book review editor who has proclaimed conservatism dead: “What passes for conservatism today would have been incomprehensible to its originator, Edmund Burke, who, in the late eighteenth century, set forth the principles by which governments might nurture the “organic” unity that bound a people together even in times of revolutionary upheaval.” Burke would be horrified at a Tea Party rally.

The question then becomes, why have we given conservatives a free pass on this? The answer is that it’s hard to challenge one narrative if you don’t have an alternative.

We can argue over what that progressive narrative ought to be, but let me offer up my preferred candidate: an embrace of progressivism’s relentless experimentation as a kind of philosophy in and of itself, the kind of pragmatism that FDR expressed when he famously said, “Do something. If it works, do more of it. If it doesn’t, do something else.”

Or put another way: a hopeful but humble faith that there is some rough-and-tumble thing called human progress, some long arch that does bend towards justice eventually, even if that eventually is far into the horizon. A telling of history that recognizes that there are no easy answers, only a series of hard problems that we must confront with humility. We must always strive, but never promise.

As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote in the conclusion of The Vital Center: “Problems will always torment us, because all important problems are insoluble: that is why they are important. The good comes from the continuing struggle to try and solve them, not from the vain hope of their solution.” (The same sentiment can be found in the writings of the progressive theologian Reinhold Niebuhr: “Democracy is finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems.”)

To me, this is a fighting faith, and a story. That the history of America has mostly been a history of, in FDR’s words, trying things and if they work, doing more of them, and if they don’t trying something else. It’s only in recent years that politics has become more about trying things, and if they don’t work, trying them again and again and blaming circumstances or your opposition if they still don’t work. This is not a fighting faith. It’s surrendering to faith.

We need something better. Conservatives have gone overtime in re-telling American history as a mistake that must be undone. We need to tell history in a way that moves forward.