issue: Politics

Why Obama Shouldn’t Play it Safe in 2012

Posted on 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 20th 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.

Republicans for Environmental Progress: An Endangered Species

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

For most of modern American history, the two major political parties in America have largely agreed on the desired long-term environmental outcomes for the country: there was a consensus among Republicans and Democrats that it was a good thing to press for cleaner air and water, less toxins in the environment, biodiversity preservation, and mitigation strategies for clean energy and, mostly recently, climate change.

The disagreements were largely centered around how to achieve these outcomes, and to some extent the pace of change and the absolute targets. Democrats by and large preferred a heavier regulatory approach (i.e. “command and control”) that set specific firm-level emissions limits, prescribed permissible technologies, and set industry-wide energy and fuel efficiency standards. Republicans tended to support more market-oriented policies, with cap and trade foremost among them.

Nowadays, the arguments are no longer over the methods to achieve environmental progress, but whether we should support such progress in the first place. This situation is unprecedented. Those who believed that divided government would lead Republicans to take a more moderate and constructive role have so far been proven wrong. It is hard to imagine the situation being much worse for America’s environmental quality, which is directly linked to the quality of life for all Americans.

The modern Republican Party has absolutely no affirmative environmental agenda whatsoever, and goes so far as to contest the entire rationale for continued environmental progress. Ironically, this extremely reactionary environmental agenda is coming at a time when the ideas that Republicans once championed are now widely accepted as the best ways to structure environmental policy.

The cap and trade bill that died in the U.S. Congress in 2010 was based on market-oriented principles that were the centerpiece of George Bush Sr.’s cap and trade policy for sulfur dioxide, enacted in 1990. It permitted maximum flexibility in achieving its goals of greenhouse gas reductions over a long time horizon, giving businesses plenty of time to adjust and adapt. The bill’s intellectual foundations were so strongly rooted in conservative economics that then-presidential candidate John McCain was a huge supporter of the measure and included it in his presidential platform.

And yet today, the Republican-led House of Representatives has voted to deny the science of climate change and strip the EPA of its authority to regulate greenhouse gases, which was granted to the agency by a 5-4 decision in the very conservative-leaning Supreme Court. The GOP-led House has proposed gutting the EPA’s budget as well. And it gets worse.

The Republicans in the House have refused to end the subsidies for oil companies (as these firms continue to rake in record profits), and while they seek to reduce food stamps, they have made it clear that they will not touch the billions in agricultural subsidies that disproportionately benefit big agribusiness. Adding insult to injury, House Republicans even reintroduced Styrofoam into the House cafeteria after Democrats had removed it during the last Congress.

I have been involved in environmental policy for almost 20 years and have never seen anything like the current Republican assault on the environment. It is truly astounding. To be clear, the Republicans leading this charge against environmental progress are in no way following conservative principles ― they are doing the exact opposite. Those who profess to support conservative economics should be leading the charge against subsidies for big business and taking a firm stance in favor of the “polluter pays principle,” which states that those producers and consumers whose actions degrade the environment should pay for the damage. (You know we’re living in an upside down world when the one avowed socialist in the Senate, Bernie Sanders, has been the most vociferous opponent of oil company handouts.)

There is absolutely nothing “free market” about letting polluters trash the environment for free. In fact, this fits the definition of a market failure, not a well-functioning capitalist system. What the Republicans are currently practicing is crony capitalism of the worst kind: rewarding industry at the expense of the public interest and future generations.

It is the Republican rank and file who should be the most offended by these policies. Public opinion polls consistent show that both Democrats and Republicans care deeply about the environment, and support clean energy policies and strong environmental safeguards. Unfortunately, the once proud environmental ethic of the Republican Party has been snuffed out by a small group of radical Tea Party extremists who are deeply confused both about true conservative principles and the proper role of government in society. And once moderate Republicans who supported sensible environmental policies are nowhere to be seen. Until true conservatives retake the Republican Party we will be left doing little more than damage control, and the chances of a new comprehensive affirmative environmental agenda are slim to none.

More College Graduates, More Democratic Voters?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

This week, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced competitive grants to encourage states to increase their college graduation rates, with a goal to add eight million college graduates by 2020.

Sure, there are plenty of legitimate policy-related reasons why we might want to increase the number of college graduates. After all, as Secretary Duncan put it, “We all know that the best jobs and fastest-growing firms will gravitate to countries, communities, and states with a highly qualified work force.”

But, for those who can’t imagine Obama doing anything without an ulterior motive, consider the graphs below that show that increasing the number of college graduates might also increase the number of Democratic voters and reduce the number of Republican voters.

 

The first graph shows the state-level relationship between the percentage of individuals identifying as Democrats (data from Gallup) and the percentage of individuals with bachelor’s degrees. There’s a clear, statistically significant relationship that explains 28 percent of the state-level variation in Democratic identification. For every one percentage point increase in college graduates in a state, the percentage of Democratic identifiers increases by 0.75 percent.

The second graph shows the state-level relationship of Republican identifiers and college graduates. As you’d expect, it’s pretty much the reverse. For every one percentage point increase in college graduates, the percentage of individuals identifying as Republicans decreases by 0.76 percentage points. This simple regression explains 30 percent of the variation.

Now let’s look at the relationship of state-level education to state-level liberals and conservatives. Here the relationship is even more significant:

For every one percentage point increase in state-level college graduates, the percentage of liberals also increases by 0.75 percentage points. Impressively, education level explains 66 percent of variation in state-level percentage of liberals.

By contrast, for every one percentage point in college graduates, there is a 0.88 percentage point decline in the share of conservatives, and this by itself explains 58 percent of the state-level variation in the number of conservatives.

Does this mean that there is a simple causal story that education makes people more liberal either because (in the conservative telling) it turns them into elitist snobs, or (in the liberal telling) it gives them enough knowledge to understand how the world works?

Maybe. Maybe not. Perhaps liberal, Democratic states invest more in education, which is why those states have more college graduates. It’s also important to note that 1) these are state-level, not individual-level relationships, and 2) this is a static relationship, not a time series.

Nonetheless, the graphs are quite telling. The more college graduates, the more Democratic (and especially more liberal) the state. The fewer college graduates, the more Republican and (and especially more conservative) the state. There’s clearly something going on here, and I’m actually quite curious to hear how conservatives would respond.

Increasing the number of college graduates by eight million would bring the number of college graduates in the United States from approximately 83 million (27 percent) to 91 million (about 29 percent in 2020). That’s two percentage points, and if the relationship between state-level education and voting is indeed causal, it would mean a 1.5 percentage point increase in the share of Democratic identifiers and a similar decline among Republican identifiers. This could tip some states.

Well, now I’ve given conservatives an argument against increasing the number of college graduates.

Republicans By the Book

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The American Prospect‘s Paul Waldman has done us all a great favor by reading and interpreting the latest batch of “campaign books” from prospective 2012 presidential candidates, including Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee and Tim Pawlenty. And after duly noting the relatively low political value of such books, and the low standards governing the genre, he offers some key insights about what they reveal about the Republican zeitgeist of the moment:

Despite their surface differences, the books raise some common questions. How do we answer key policy questions? How important is God to our politics? Is Barack Obama merely wrong about everything, or is he actively attempting to destroy our country? Just how great is America?

Actually, that last question is something the candidates all agree on: America is stupendously great, awesomely great, so great that “great” doesn’t begin to describe its greatness — and Obama just doesn’t get it.

Aside from a peculiar emphasis on “American exceptionalism” that appears to exempt this country not only from healthy self-doubt but from ordinary logic and the lessons of human history, notes Waldman, the books are dominated by an equally unreflexive attitude towards the 44th president, who is always wrong:

In their attempts to understand Obama, the candidates again and again reach the conclusion that when Obama does or says something they like, he’s either shrewdly hiding his real intentions or has been cornered by political reality. When he does or says something they don’t like, he has revealed his true self. So Romney can claim, without any supporting evidence, that “another of President Obama’s presuppositions is that America is in a state of inevitable decline,” just as Palin avers that Obama “seems to see nothing admirable in the American experience.” How do they know this? Well, they just do. None of the candidates provides any quotations in which Obama apologizes for America because he never actually has. And don’t bother bringing up the hundreds of speeches in which Obama has lavished praise on this country, because as Romney says, “President Obama is far too gifted a politician to say in plain words that America is merely one nation among many.” However, if we take some things Obama has said out of context and make a series of absurd leaps in logic to arrive at the worst possible interpretation of them, then we will learn the truth.

America is great, and Obama wants to destroy it. That’s the overriding theme of proto-candidates working in the most expansive format they’ll ever use.

As it happens, I was involved as a “ghost” in a “campaign book” for a candidate running against an incumbent president in 2004, and I can tell you that George W. Bush’s sins and shortcomings were in the background, not the forefront, of the policy-heavy tome. And while the book was full of invocations of America’s greatness, they were deployed not to congratulate Americans for their superior virtue, but to encourage them to meet common challenges, most of which have yet, seven years later, to be seriously addressed.

It’s an open question as to whether GOP presidential candidates can make it all the way through the nomination process–and for the winner, all the way to November of 2012–on a message that essentially tells Americans there is nothing wrong with their society that firing Barack Obama can’t fix. I guess if you get all your information from Fox News, that’s a credible argument. But for everyone else, a positive agenda that goes beyond telling a suffering nation and world that they need to shut up and salute the flag (and oh yes, cut taxes and regulations allegedly afflicting their economic masters, from whom all good things come) might prove necessary.

 

Crossposted at The Democratic Strategist

Wingnut Watch: Confused Obama-haters

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Book Review: Going to Extremes, by Cass Sunstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Am I a Race-Baiter?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why High-Speed Rail Could Still Get Built in Florida

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kerry Builds A New Road To Infrastructure Bank

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

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

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

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

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

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