issue: Politics

A Discouraging Vote on School Reform

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee has a well-deserved reputation for not mincing words.  She wasted no time last week in calling D.C. Council Chairman Vincent Gray’s primary victory over Mayor Adrian Fenty a “devastating” blow to children in Washington’s traditional public schools.

That pretty much scotched any talk of Rhee staying on as Chancellor under Gray. In truth, however, that was never in the cards because the Democratic primary race was in significant measure a referendum on Fenty’s signature initiative: his decision to take over the city’s troubled public schools and bring in the hard-charging Rhee to oversee their transformation.

Fenty’s defeat has delighted reform skeptics and the American Federation of Teachers, which pumped nearly $1 million into Gray’s campaign. The Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt opined today that the outcome was more a repudiation of Fenty’s aloof style than school reform per se. But it’s hard for me to disagree with Natalie Hopkinson’s gleeful characterization of the vote as a “resounding rejection” of Fenty and Rhee’s struggles to dramatically improve D.C. public schools.

The Fenty-Rhee reforms proved deeply polarizing in Washington, with voters splitting along racial lines. According to a pre-election poll by the Post, 68 percent of white voters said Rhee was a reason to support Fenty, while 54 of black Democrats cited her as a reason to oppose the Mayor. What in one community looked like a bold attempt to shake up a deeply dysfunctional education bureaucracy in another looked like a callous effort to foreclose opportunities for middle class employment.

Gray played shrewdly to public discontent over Rhee’s firings of hundreds of teachers and many principals for poor performance. And it wasn’t just schools: Critics also slammed Fenty for not awarding enough high city posts to blacks, and for building bike paths and dog parks prized by affluent D.C. residents while neglecting poor neighborhoods. In last Tuesday’s primary, Gray won more than 80 percent of the vote in predominately black wards 7 and 8, while Fenty did nearly as well in mainly white Ward 3.

But what of Rhee’s charge? Will Fenty’s loss condemn tens of thousands of D.C. children to substandard public schools?

There’s no doubt that Rhee’s departure will slow the momentum of school reform in Washington. With unswerving backing from Fenty, the blunt and often impolitic Rhee imposed real accountability on the school system for the first time. She won national acclaim for making student testing more rigorous, closing failing schools, attracting outside talent (like private foundations and the Teach for America volunteers Hopkinson dismisses as “cultural tourists”), and firing incompetent administrators and  teachers.

Under Fenty and Rhee, D.C. public schools moved from the cellar of urban education into the vanguard of reform. The schools opened on time, with books and accurate counts of students. And test scores rose: Over the past three years, Washington was the only big city to show double-digit increases in state reading and math scores for the 7th, 8th and 10th grades.

Rhee also negotiated among the most innovative teacher’s contracts in the country, which offers teachers the chance to earn extra pay in exchange for loosening tenure rules. There’s worry in reform circles that her departure could induce foundations to withdraw $65 million in pledges to fund $25,000 performance bonuses for teachers under the next contract. And since Rhee was a virtual poster child for the kind of education reforms the Obama administration is pushing, there’s also speculation that D.C. would lose a $75 million “Race to the Top” grant from the Department of Education if Rhee leaves.

So now the spotlight turns to Gray, whose victory in November is a given in overwhelmingly Democratic Washington. If Fenty and Rhee failed to win support from black voters for their reforms, what will Gray do differently?

It should be noted that he is not uniformly hostile to school reform. As Council Chairman, he has been a strong supporter of D.C.’s robust public charter school sector, which now enrolls about 38 percent of the city’s students. (Full disclosure: I’m a member of the board that oversees D.C. charters).

Still, Gray faces a dilemma: continue reform and disappoint key allies, especially the teachers’ union, or slow things down and risk abandoning Washington’s hard-won progress toward raising school standards.  And it’s not just Gray’s challenge. In fact, this is a moment of truth for the city’s black establishment.

Can the city’s new leaders really find a kinder, gentler way to fix D.C.’s chronically underperforming schools?  Or will they revert to the traditional practice of regarding education as a kind of patronage or public jobs program for adults?

The city’s economic vitality, not to mention hopes for raising living standards in its poorest communities, hinge on the answer.

Photo credit: from-the-window

Jon Stewart, Michael Bloomberg, and the Resurgent Center

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Over the last few days, I’ve become cautiously optimistic about the future of the political center. Something seems to be happening. Maybe it was Christine O’Donnell’s surprise Tea Party victory over moderate Michael Castle in the Delaware primary, but it feels like maybe, just maybe, the dormant defenders of moderation and reason are being roused from their slumber.

In particular, I’m encouraged by three developments: Jon Stewart’s decision to hold a “Rally to Restore Sanity” on the National Mall on October 30, Michael Bloomberg’s decision to be very public about his widespread support of centrist candidates, and the fact that independents are really starting to turn against the Tea Party.

First Stewart’s decision to hold a rally: “We’re looking for the people who think shouting is annoying, counterproductive, and terrible for your throat,” advertises the website advertising the rally, “who feel that the loudest voices shouldn’t be the only ones that get heard; and who believe that the only time it’s appropriate to draw a Hitler mustache on someone is when that person is actually Hitler.” (I was impressed that Stewart’s announcement went after both Tea Partiers and 9-11 Truthers, attacking extremism on both sides)

Such a rally at first seems like an unusually public move for somebody who has made a career out of skewering from the sidelines. But could it be that Stewart looked around, realized that he was one of the few partisans for reason and moderation left with a large and enthusiastic following, and felt a sudden pang of responsibility?

Perhaps Stewart actually can give voice to a many Americans who share the Daily Show’s conceit that our current politics is fundamentally fodder for satire. But if comedy is tragedy plus distance, perhaps the increasing tragedy of American politics is making it feel less distant. Is the Tea Party as funny when it forms a meaningful voting block in the U.S. Senate?

Then there is New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s decision to speak to the New York Times (his first newspaper interview in several years) in order to grab the lead story in the Sunday paper to highlight his systematic attempt to back moderates – raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for candidates that hew to a moderate vision of politics.

Bloomberg’s decision to make a public show of his plans may partly be an attempt to raise his profile as the leader of the radical center. But it also an encouraging development: a public signal that the political center is worth defending and supporting, and perhaps, just as Jon Stewart’s rally might be a clarion call to previously apathetic moderate voters, perhaps Bloomberg’s decision will be a similar call to disengaged moderate donors who are equally concerned about the increasingly extreme ways in which the current electoral season is shaping up.

The final encouraging development the latest CBS/ New York Times poll, in which the Tea Party’s unfavorable rating has risen from 18 percent in April to 25 percent (compared to 20 percent favorable, 18 percent undecided, and 36 percent saying they haven’t heard enough). Moreover, independent voters now have a more negative view of the party (30 percent unfavorable, to 18 percent favorable). These are small changes, admittedly, but they are in the right direction, and hopeful portents of a steady waking up to just how crazy the tea party is becoming.

Hopefully this confluence of factors – Jon Stewart’s empowering cheerleading of moderation, Michael Bloomberg’s aggressive financing of moderates, and sinking public support for the tea parties – are legitimate reasons to be optimistic that the center might indeed hold, and maybe even start to feel vital again.

What Becomes of Michael Castle?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

“My politics fit Delaware’s politics. They appreciate the fact that I’m independent.”

That was Michael Castle, long-time Republican congressman from Delaware, quoted in CQ’s Politics in America.

Did Castle’s moderate politics fit Delaware’s politics? His strong re-election record would suggest so.  The man had never had a close race since first being elected to the seat in 1992, consistently winning by 20 or 30 points, even as Delaware went from a state that voted 60-40 for Reagan in 1984 to a state that voted 62-37 for Obama in 2008.

And sure, he was a Republican, but he was the kind of Republican who could vote for all six of the Democratic majority’s signature bills in the 110th Congress (one of only three Republicans to do so) and who would regularly break with the Republican orthodoxy to support, for example, embryonic stem cell research.

But popular as Castle might have been statewide, the Republican primary was decided by just 57,582 voters, or 6.5 percent of Delaware’s 885,000 residents. Of those, 30,561 preferred Christine O’Donnell. That’s just 3.5 percent of Delaware’s residents – not enough to fill a single major league  baseball stadium.

It is now widely assumed that Democrat Chris Coons will win trounce Christine O’Donnell in the general election, mostly owing to the fact that O’Donnell is a certified nut job.

But what I wonder is this: what happens to somebody like Michael Castle? And what happens to the many Republican moderates in Delaware who liked voting for Castle, year after year?

What happens to the Lisa Murkowksis and the Bob Bennetts as well, also forced out of their seats by a handful of insurgents for even more minor tilts towards moderation? (Bennett, to his credit, has been quite public in his criticism of the Tea Party, criticizing them for lacking a governing philosophy.)

As more and more moderates are swept away in the Tea Party tide, what becomes of them and their supporters? Presumably, many are adrift, feeling like the Republican Party no longer represents them.

For Democrats this should be a tremendous opportunity, a moment to reach out to disillusioned Republican voters who no longer see a home for themselves in the increasingly extreme party.

Republicans are rapidly forfeiting the center, gambling that an angry and energized base is a surer path to victory than a wide appeal. That may indeed be the case in 2010, but there is good reason to believe that this moment is fleeting.

What this means is that Democrats have an opportunity to seize and secure the vital center, to lay a firm claim on the politics of reason and moderation, and to provide a welcoming environment for the Michael Castles of the world.

But it’s a chance that won’t last forever. Eventually, Republicans will get wise to the fact that becoming more extreme is not a sustainable majoritarian strategy. Democrats ought to more aggressively seize this opportunity, while it lasts.

Photo credit: Lou Angeli

Lessons From Political Science

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Does political science matter? On Sunday, Ezra Klein, one of the rare journalists who seems genuinely interested in what political scientists have to say, wrote a column distilling some key lessons from political science, all of which revolve around the fact that most of what politicians do doesn’t actually make much of a difference, at least in the face of broad underlying forces: Presidential speeches don’t matter. Elections are determined by underlying economic conditions. Lobbyists aren’t as important as people think.

Over at the Monkey Cage, John Sides, who is also quoted in the article, argues that this lack of control should be good news to politicians: “Political science really does empower politicians. It tells them to ignore a lot of gossip and trivia. It tells them not to sweat every rhetorical turn of phrase.”

I must admit, I’ve been asking myself this question of whether political science matters ever since I started a Ph.D. program six years ago (and completed it a month ago). And I have a few quibbles with the conclusions that both Klein and Sides draw, and a few warnings for politicians and journalists lest they over-extrapolate from the received political science wisdom.

Those who consume political science research need to understand that political scientists are largely interested in finding patterns and proving that two variables are correlated (which is a necessary but not sufficient condition for proving causation, the holy grail of political science). But patterns tend to be rough patterns, and there are always other forces at work.

Figure 1 shows a typical XY scatterplot with a regression line, the most basic graphical tool of the social scientist.  While journalists tend to be interested in the dots (i.e., the real-life cases), political scientists are interested primarily in the regression line (i.e., the underlying relationship). Both are important, and ignoring one at the expense of the other inevitably leads to a limited perspective.

Figure 1: A Typical XY Scatterplot

Also notice: While there is clearly a relationship between X and Y variables very few dots (the actual real-life cases) fall directly on the line, meaning other factors are at work.  Of course, very little social science takes place at the bi-variate (two variable) level. Most published models explain outcomes with multiple factors, which account for more of the deviations from the predicted values (i.e., the regression line).

But even the best models still are often unable to explain half of the deviations.  What this means is that while large structural forces do drive political outcomes, there is also almost always room for idiosyncratic forces to operate as well, and they can often be decisive.

Sometimes candidates win victories they shouldn’t because of opponent gaffes. Sometimes lobbyists do get what they want, and make their clients very rich in the process. Sometimes presidential speeches do make a difference.  Political scientists are interested in the general case, and are fond of couching their findings in the cautionary language of ceteris paribus (all else being equal). But all else is rarely equal.

The thing is, it’s very hard for political actors to know when something they are going to do will make a difference. Often the impact hinges on unpredictable timing and unanticipated resonances. Anyone who has spent time in politics knows that you never know when something is going to “pop.”  So it’s almost always worth gambling because they pay-off could be big.

For a lobbyist, for example, even if on average you won’t win, when you do win, you might just win big enough to make it all worthwhile. A scoring system that treats all wins and losses equally ignores the fact that some lobbying wins are very big wins indeed, wins that far make up for a long strong of losses. For example, getting Medicare prescription drug coverage was a huge, huge win for pharmaceutical companies, surely worth many losses.

Additionally, one of the reasons why many political actions may seem to NOT matter is because political actors on both sides think that they DO matter. Consider the empirical conclusion that presidential speeches do not move public opinion. One reason that public opinion is unlikely to move is because there is always an opposition to respond, and so citizens who are skeptical of what the president has to say can easily latch on to messages that are critical. Thus they remain unmoved.

But say conservatives suddenly followed this wisdom, decided that speeches didn’t matter, and therefore didn’t bother to respond to anything Obama said. My guess is that Obama’s unrefuted speeches would start having more of an impact. Or alternately, say Obama decided speeches didn’t matter, and stopped giving them. He’d be leaving it to the conservative opposition to define him, without speaking up for himself and giving voice to his supporters. My guess is this would also have an impact on public opinion.

Likewise with lobbying or campaigning. These things exist in a kind of equilibrium. Given a rough balance of power, actions on each side are countered with actions on the other side, and hence drained of their perceived impact. Lobbyists on one side respond to lobbyists on the other side, thus neutralizing their efforts (this seemed to me one of the most important points of “Lobbying and Policy Change: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why?”) Campaign contributions on one side are often matched by campaign contributions on the other side.

But were one side to decide outcomes were beyond their control and stop sweating, my guess is they’d very quickly prove the conventional political science wisdom wrong.

In short: there is a lot that political science can teach both politicians and journalists about underlying structural forces and general patterns that drive political outcomes. But politics takes place in specific cases, not general cases. Journalists and politicians ought to have a better appreciation for these general patterns, which will provide context for specific cases.

But politicians better not take political science wisdom too much to heart, lest they undermine it by upsetting the equilibrium that exists when they believe what they do on a daily basis actually DOES matter.

Voinovich Shows Leadership: Is There More to Come on Infrastructure?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The good news out of Congress yesterday is that the Senate actually broke through the infamous 60-vote barrier to move forward on the small-business relief bill.  The bill itself is a good thing, and no doubt good news for small businesses struggling to thrive in this sideways economy.  For me, the even bigger story is the leadership shown by Senator Voinovich (R-OH) in breaking the logjam that the Republican leadership had planned for this bill, and for anything else President Obama hoped to pass before the elections.

This vote was not just a one-shot deal for Voinovich—it can be a potential game-changer for the president’s economic agenda this fall, especially if the administration is serious about acting on its proposal for long overdue investments in our infrastructure.

When he announced his vote last week, Voinovich set an important precedent by acknowledging that the country’s economic needs should be more important this year than short-term campaign strategies.  As he put it, “We don’t have time for messaging. . . . This country is really hurting.”

That’s a huge step in the right direction, because it means there is a faint glimmer for hope that Washington will not remain paralyzed during this extremely critical moment for our economy.  As Bernard Schwartz and David Rothkopf wrote in the Financial Times last week, the next few months will be a pivotal time for us as a nation, and the response from Washington (or lack thereof) may have a profound and long-lasting impact on our economy and the world:

The US faces not one but two economic crises. One is that the current slump could easily take a turn for the worse. The second is even more unsettling: a long-term competitiveness crisis that, if unaddressed, raises questions about the country’s ability to create jobs, attract investment and maintain its international leadership.

For both these reasons, it is critical that America’s political classes set aside partisanship and focus on taking concrete action now – even if it comes when such political courage (which is to say responsible leadership) is most difficult, in the last months of an election cycle.

All of the president’s ideas are solid ones with broad potential benefits. In our view, among these, an infrastructure bank is particularly promising and has been misunderstood in many of the initial responses. It is so central to what the US requires at present that voters and leaders in both parties need to examine it carefully and find a way to bring it to fruition.

Senator Voinovich has not only shown he can answer this call to set aside partisanship, he has also made a similar case for investing in infrastructure now, rightly arguing that the focus on short-term stimulus has “miss[ed] the forest for the trees.”  He’s riding a different horse than the president, advocating for a strong highway bill funded by an increase in the gas tax, rather than the president’s proposal for an infrastructure bank.  However, this is a difference on which the two men should work together to bridge the gap between them.  Given the opportunity to do something meaningful for the economy, there should be plenty of room for Obama and Voinovich to find a common ground.

Senator Voinovich has taken a brave first step toward bipartisanship for the sake of recovery.  Now it is President Obama’s turn.  The president has a lot of bad choices he can make in the coming weeks, and there are other moderate approaches to breaking the impasse on infrastructure spending after the elections.  But chances for leadership like this are fleeting, and he should take advantage of the opportunity Senator Voinovich has given him to make infrastructure investment more than just campaign rhetoric.

Photo credit: Respres

Middle-Class Tax Cut: The No-Brainer

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

For all I know, by now House Democrats may have already made the informal decision whether or not to force a vote on extension of middle-class tax cuts and expiration of high-end tax cuts.

I understand that if the votes aren’t there, they aren’t there. But it will be extraordinarily disappointing if they decide against forcing the vote on grounds that it will make some of their Members “uncomfortable.”

This is clearly the last opportunity prior to November 2 for congressional Democrats to make an impression on voters, not only about their own priorities, but about what sort of policies we can expect if Republicans gain control of the House. The GOP has been able to disguise or draw attention away from their own agenda throughout this midterm election cycle. Making them vote against tax relief unless the bulk of it goes to upper-income Americans exposes their hypocrisy on taxes and on federal budget deficits at the same moment. And this strategy also happens to be very popular, as TDS Co-Editor Stan Greenberg is expected to personally explain to the House Caucus later today.

There are few true no-brainers is the complicated business of politics, but this may qualify. Having cynically enacted tax cuts scheduled to expire at a date certain in the future in order to disguise their impact on the deficit, Republicans are in no position to label that expiration a “tax hike,” particularly since millionaires will benefit like everyone else from the portion of their income that falls into the lower brackets.

No matter what happens in November, Democrats are going to have to begin forcing comparisons of the two parties and what they stand for going into the presidential cycle of 2012, lest that election become another “referendum” whereby Democrats assume total responsibility for an economic and fiscal situation they largely inherited. This tax vote is the perfect opportunity to begin that process.

This item is cross-posted at the Democratic Strategist

Photo credit: Andrew Higgins

Wrestling with the Kochtopus

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Ever since Jane Meyer put the Koch brothers’ political empire on display in the Aug. 30 New Yorker, there has been a vibrant debate over the propriety of the owners of the second-largest private company in the U.S. using their personal fortune (spawned from an enterprise that they inherited) to fund a variety of libertarian and anti-government causes, and not always in the most transparent ways.

For those on the left, that Koch-controlled foundations have doled out almost $200 million to conservative foundations over the past 10 years — including $12 million to Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks, a major force behind the Tea Party movements — offers the allure of an explanation for a disappointing political turn of events.

Why else would so many people be throwing in their lot with the foolish Tea Party? How else could someone be motivated to travel hundreds of miles to attend a Glenn Beck rally on the National Mall, let alone watch the guy’s television program? Surely, this movement must be manufactured anti-government populism, as fabricated as Koch Industries’ industrial polymers.

Here’s The New York Times’s Frank Rich, casting the attendees of the recent Glenn Beck rally in Washington as little more than the unwitting puppets of the so-called “Kochtopus”: “There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it.” Meanwhile, Obama adviser David Axelrod puts it this way in The New Yorker: “What they don’t say is that, in part, this is a grassroots movement brought to you by a bunch of oil billionaires.” (If only the people knew! Then surely they’d come around to the side of common sense!)

Yes, there is a lot of money behind this right-wing populist uprising. But regardless of funding, one still has to contend with the fact that the Tea Party movement has tapped a powerful nerve in the collective psyche of mostly older, almost entirely white voters suffering a lot of anxiety about their future and wanting a simple explanation for their troubles and a villain to blame for it.

Given the underlying demographics and socio-economic forces at work here, it’s unclear how much Obama and the Democrats could have done to make inroads here, but certainly they could have done more. At the very least, it’s largely defeatist to think that the masses are being thoroughly manipulated by wealthy industrialists.

Rather, it makes more sense to say they are being enabled. The problem for Obama and the Democrats is that after the election, the energy that put Obama in the White House simply evaporated, and nobody on the political left was there to enable alternative path. Into the void came the Tea Party and its generous benefactors.

As for transparency: Could and should the Koch brothers be more open about what they are doing? Absolutely. Slate’s David Wiegel has argued that “The Kochs should come out of the closet” — that is, that they should be loud and proud about their support of libertarian and anti-government causes. Indeed.

After all, if they believe in a true free market, they should also believe in a true free market for ideas. And as any economist will tell you, markets always work best when they are transparent and all parties have full information.

If the case for limited government can’t withstand full disclosure of its sustainers and messengers, it’s probably not much of a case. Understandably, there is a certain discomfiting hypocrisy when you have populist uprisings against corporate power funded by wealthy industrialists, and some valid concern that many of the Koch-funded causes conveniently advocate the kind of light regulation that would benefit Koch Industries’ empire, much of which is in the fossil-fuel sector.

One of the challenges of the marketplace of ideas is, as Matt Kibbe, the president of Tea Party promoter FreedomWorks (which is funded by the Kochs) and a former Republican operative, told The New Yorker: “Ideas don’t happen on their own. Throughout history, ideas need patrons.” This is the reality we live in. Ideas do need patrons.

But for the marketplace of ideas to function properly, it also needs patrons not ashamed to stand publicly behind the ideas that they advocate. The Koch brothers should do this. But the marketplace of ideas also needs participants on both sides who can and do engage fully and confidently — not defeatists who assume that the only reason somebody might support an alternate idea is because the proponents of that alternate idea are backed by more money.

This article was originally published in the Providence Journal

Photo credit: HA! Designs – Artbyheather

The Perception Puzzle and the Democrats’ Challenge

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Back in June, the Pew Center for People and the Press released a poll that asked voters to place both themselves and the political parties on a scale of very liberal to very conservative. I picked this chart up again over the weekend, and stared at it for a while. Amidst the constant up and down of polling, I haven’t seen anything that better lays out the challenges that Democrats face both in the upcoming election and for the foreseeable future, so I think it’s worth re-visiting.

At first, this chart seems puzzling.  While there is remarkable consistency in where ALL voters place both Republicans and the Tea Party movement, there is a remarkable gap in how Republicans and Democrats differentially view Democrats’ ideology. (Independents come down in the middle, but since many independents tend to be closet partisans, the result makes sense as the average of the two.)

Why should this be the case? Why do Democrats and Republicans perceive the Republican Party about the same, but the Democratic Party so differently? And why does it matter?

One explanation is that Republicans spend a lot more time and energy painting Democrats as too liberal than Democrats spend painting Republicans as too conservative. As a result, the average Republican voter thinks Democrats are far more liberal than they actually are, whereas the average Democrat sees less difference between Democrats and Republicans.

This would explain why Republicans are much more enthusiastic right now about voting. If Republican voters see a larger difference between the two parties than Democrat voters, they are likely to believe that much more is at stake. If they think more is at stake, they are more likely to vote.

The second explanation is that Democrats think that the policies they support are quite sensible and reasonable, and they have a hard time imagining how anybody could not agree with them.  But the polling suggests that the Democrats’ policies might actually not be as moderate as many Democrats think they are, and the political center of gravity is a little bit further right than many Democrats would like to admit.

What this means that Democrats have their work cut out for them, both in the next two months and for the foreseeable future.

First, Democrats need to continue to make clear just how conservative the Republican Party has become, and therefore how much is at stake in these elections. Democratic leaders can’t take it for granted that average Democratic voters see a huge difference between the two parties since apparently, they do not. Certainly, Democrats are working hard to draw lines, but this polling suggests just how much work they have to do to make sure these lines stick.

Second, Democrats need to be much more careful in considering how their policies play. They need to understand that a lot of voters see them as much further to the left then they see themselves. They cannot simply assume that just because that they see their policies and positions as moderate that they are self-evidently so. Democrats also must be more aggressive in making the case that the moderate policies that they do propose are, in fact, moderate, since they are working against prevailing beliefs.

These are the challenges Democrats face, and these are the keys to whether they can maintain control in November and beyond: drawing clearer distinctions with Republicans, and recognizing that the political center of gravity may not be as far to the left as many Democrats instinctively think it is.

9/11, Nine Years Later: A Day to Rekindle the Better Angels of Our Soul

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Tomorrow we pause to remember, as we have for nine September mornings, the lives and memories of those lost on September 11th, 2001.  It is hard to believe that the attacks of that autumn day are now approaching a decade in our past.  It just does not seem that long ago.  And yet, even with the passage of time, the legacy and the impact of the attacks on our national psyche and our national politics have not become much clearer.

If you visit Ground Zero today you see a bustling site of activity with skyscrapers rising, a transportation hub growing, and the National 9/11 Memorial taking shape with deep, cascading pools visible and trees now in the ground.  The portion of the Pentagon damaged in the attacks has been rebuilt, the entire building has been refurbished in the ensuing years, and the memorial park at the site of the impact is one of the most peaceful places in a monument-filled Washington, D.C.  The Flight 93 Memorial in Pennsylvania is being constructed as a national memorial under the care of the National Park Service and will be dedicated on the 10th anniversary of the attacks next year. These are the physical scars healing ever-so-slowly.

But some of the wounds remain raw, as evidenced by the raging battle over the Islamic community center in lower Manhattan and the proposed “Koran-burning” by a Florida pastor.  We have seen a marked increase in the anti-Islamic rhetoric in our national discourse. A recent Time/CNN poll showed that  61 percent of Americans are opposed to the Park 51 Islamic center near Ground Zero. The same poll showed that one in three Americans think Muslims should be banned from running for President and that one in four mistakenly believe that President Obama—a Christian—is a Muslim (I’m still unclear on what the problem is even if he was a Muslim).   Newt Gingrich, a potential Republican presidential candidate, went on Fox News and—breathtakingly—equated Muslims to Nazis.

To our detriment, the politicization of Ground Zero and the demonization of the broader Muslim-American community are seemingly creeping into the mainstream. When General Petraeus, the American/NATO commander of forces in Afghanistan, has to pull his focus from the field of battle to ask a Florida preacher not to endanger American troops already risking their lives in combat, I would hope it would be enough for us to take a collective step back from the slippery slope of demagoguery.

September 11th is the day to take this collective step back from the edge. It is not a day for partisanship and division. It is a day of remembrance, of collective mourning and most importantly, a day of national unity when every American, regardless of religious faith and ethnicity, stops to rekindle the better angels of their soul.  The physical scars of the 9/11 attacks have mostly healed. But we need to do a much better job— both as a nation and as individuals—of healing our emotions as well. The nearly 3,000 men and women who lost their lives nine years ago that morning deserve nothing less.

Hillary Rebuts the Declinists

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Among foreign policy mandarins here and abroad, it’s become axiomatic that America must radically downsize its global ambitions to avoid hubris and to match our straitened economic circumstances. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is having none of it.

In a speech this week to the Council on Foreign Relations, Clinton vigorously affirmed the world’s need for, and America’s capacity to provide, strong global leadership. Even in a multipolar world, she argued, no other nation has the unique combination of strengths necessary to organize collective action against common global problems.

And, at a time when moral relativism has crept into U.S. foreign policy discourse in the guise of realism, Clinton was refreshingly unapologetic in pledging U.S. support for the “universal” values of liberal democracy. As she had done in an important speech to the Community of Democracies in Krakow July 3, she noted that authoritarian governments are cracking down on independent civil society organizations, and she pledged U.S. assistance to embattled NGOs.

Clinton’s confident assertion of a “new American moment” is in striking contrast to narrative of U.S. decline now fashionable among global elites. The story goes something like this:

As the Cold War ended, the U.S. found itself the last superpower standing, its system of democratic capitalism triumphant — and quickly succumbed to hubris. It intervened in conflicts all over the globe, rashly plunged into unnecessary wars, drank the elixir of free market ideology, and in general overestimated its ability to shape events and impose its will on others. Now we are overextended and facing a global backlash against U.S. imperialist pretensions.

What’s more, we’re broke and can no longer afford to maintain our old position as global hegemon. Meanwhile, economic dynamism has shifted eastward, and the rapid growth of China, India and others is fundamentally altering the world’s balance of power.

All this Spenglerian gloom points to an inescapable conclusion: America must retrench strategically. This entails defining our interests more narrowly, shrinking our military, ceasing to lecture others about democracy, and shedding the too-costly burdens of global leadership.

Clinton instead argued essentially for updating the liberal internationalist vision for today’s interconnected world. She stressed the need for America to once again be the chief “architect” of cooperative institutions, at both the regional and global level, for providing mutual security and prosperity, tackling underdevelopment and climate change, and defending human rights (with her customary special emphasis on women’s equality). Through such interlacing institutions, she said, the burden of providing “public goods” could be spread more broadly.

She also widened the definition of the Obama administration’s policy of “engagement.” In addition to engaging adversaries and rivals diplomatically, she stressed her determination to engage directly with the people and foreign publics in general.

Less convincing was her account of U.S. efforts to contain Iran’s nuclear program. Our engagement with China and Russia, she said, paid real political dividends when the U.S. Security Council last spring passed, “the strongest and most comprehensive set of sanctions ever on Iran. ”

True, but Iran’s continued intransigence suggests the limits of multilateral diplomacy more than its effectiveness. The underlying assumption that Tehran is eager to be welcomed back into the world community overlooks the regime’s self-conception as a revolutionary Islamist theocracy and challenger of the international status quo.

In a curious omission, Clinton had little to say about terrorism amid all the architectural metaphors. While al Qaeda may be holed up in Pakistan, its ideology has spread to affiliates in Iraq and, more recently, in Somalia and Yemen, where the gruesome pattern of suicide attacks and mass murder of civilians is more and more evident.

Containing this ideological contagion is of critical importance to the United States and to its vision of a world order upheld by a growing network of liberal democratic institutions. Let’s hope we hear more from the Administration on this subject soon.

It’s Time To Unmask the Republican Agenda

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

With the arrival of Labor Day, and the end of Vacation Time for Americans lucky enough to have jobs with benefits, the options for changing the dynamics of the midterm elections have gradually but steadily narrowed. Significant external events could still happen, but probably won’t; the economy is not going to turn around between now and November 2.

Moreover, the opportunity to engineer a basic sea change in public opinion on the Obama’s administration’s agenda is probably past for the time being. Much as the White House’s earlier efforts to convince people that the economy would be far worse without unpopular market interventions made sense, basic judgments have been made by most persuadable voters. The same is true of health reform; the legislation’s beneficial effects will have to kick in before it gets a fresh trial in the court of public opinion.

What Democrats can — and must — do more of during the shank of the campaign season is to challenge Republicans to disclose their own agenda for the country, and draw greater attention to the extremist logic of where Republican positions of current events would lead. The vast majority of all Democratic messaging in the next two months needs to relentlessly focus on this single topic.

This is obviously easier in the case of Republican nominees such as Rand Paul, Sharron Angle and Joe Miller, who have called for phasing out Social Security and Medicare. But many other Republicans are demanding elimination of any federal role in education, energy environmental protection or agriculture, and virtually the entire party is reflexively opposing regulations on a wide variety of subjects where corporate misbehavior has had a devastating effect on the national interest and middle-class Americans individually.

Even those GOP elected officials and candidates who have been careful to avoid such specific positions have accepted the party-wide argument that federal budget deficits must be immediately reduced if not eliminated even as new tax cuts for high-earners and corporations are provided and the defense budget is protected (if not expanded via a new war with Iran which many Republicans have been agitating in favor of for years now). By any sort of math, the Republican agenda means massive steps to eliminate regulations and scale back Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other basic safety net programs.

Democrats need to hammer away at these general and particular implications of the GOP agenda every day and in every competitive contest across the country.

To those who argue that this sort of “negative” campaigning would represent an effort to change the subject from its own performance in office, Democrats must respond: it’s Republicans who are trying to change the subject from a proper comparison of the agendas of the two parties and of individual candidates.

There’s no secret about the Democratic agenda; the administration and the congressional Democratic leadership have been trying to implement it since January of 2009, against the active obstruction of the GOP, which is using every dilatory tactic, most notably unprecedented threats to use Senate filibusters. The public deserves to know exactly what the Republican Party will propose if it gains control of either House of Congress.

At this late date, such a “negative” campaign by Democrats is the right thing to do, and perhaps the only thing to do that can simultaneously persuade swing voters and motivate a high turnout by Democrats. Waiting until next year to force the hand of Republicans is both irresponsible and politically feckless.

However much conservatives and many elements of the media insist the midterm elections are a “referendum” on the Obama administration or this or that Democratic initiative, they cannot wish away the fact that every contest that will decide control of Congress or of state and local governments involves a choice between a Democrat and a Republican–with the former being held strictly responsible for every discontent with the status quo, and the latter free to demagogue and make vague or wild promises without immediate consequences.

Every Democrat reading these words knows the sort of extremist and very unpopular agenda the GOP will be forced to advance in the very near future by its own loose rhetoric, the logic of its conflicting promises, and the growing radicalism of its cadre of politicians. It’s time to tell the country about it right now.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist

Photo credit: Tim Bradshaw’s photostream

The Shelf Life of the Tea Party

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Will the Tea Party endure?  If so, for how long?

Steve Clemons writes:

I hope David Frum is right and that the Tea Party movement, which is growing in numbers and ferocity, will hit its limit, experience an Icarus moment, and plunge back into the fringe of American politics where pugnacious, jingoistic, narrow band nationalism has always lurked.

But Clemons is skeptical: “But there is no guarantee of this,” he writes, citing a prominent funder, who frets that “their political loss didn’t teach the Republicans anything; they actually got much worse.”

Kevin Drum chimes in with faith in the political pendulum that always swings back:

I think Frum is right and the mega-funder just needs to have a bit more patience. Parties rarely move to the center immediately after a big defeat. Usually it takes two or three before they finally get the message, and on that metric Republicans aren’t due for a move to the center until sometime after 2012.

Sure, when a party keeps losing, eventually there is a move to shake it up. But the problem is that Republicans are winning doing this, which the wingnuts in the party will surely interpret as a vindication for their, errr, patriotic turn.

But I’m still optimistic that the Tea Party movement does have a limited shelf life. Here’s why:

In all likelihood, at least some of these tea party candidates are going to actually have to govern.  Mike Lee is up by 25  points in Utah; Rand Paul is up almost 10 points in Kentucky; Joe Miller, Marco Rubio, Ken Buck are all leading as well in polls.

And governing is more difficult than campaigning.  Once in Congress, these wild turks won’t be able to deliver on their outrageous promises of ending big government and repealing healthcare. This will likely provoke disillusionment and then infighting among Tea Party types as to whether to find a new breed of “purer” Tea Partiers, or to remain loyal to their existing leaders. Disillusionment and infighting will sap the Tea Party movement of energy.

Additionally, Tea Party legislators, especially in the Senate, will effectively grind the wheels of governance to a halt. Moderate voters, who are now fed up with Democrats for not fixing the economy in two years, will still want somebody to blame for a sluggish economy. And this new batch of Tea Party fanatics, who like to run off their mouths into the deep recesses of ridiculousness, will now find that being accountable makes them the hunted rather than the hunters.

In many ways, this is just the latest step in a decades-long ratcheting up of opposition political rhetoric and promises. The party out of power always promises that there are simple solutions to hard problems that will solve everything, and accuses the party in power of being just too corrupt, incompetent, or whatever to see that. But of course hard problems actually have hard solutions, and the problems now are harder than before and the solutions are even harder. In short: it’s probably a bad time to be overpromising.

Photo credit: adulau’s photo stream

The Conservative Politics of Common Purpose

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The primary defeat of incumbent Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski (confirmed by her concession yesterday) by former judge Joe Miller is generally being interpreted as another scalp for the Tea Party Movement in its assault on Republicans deemed too moderate on this or that key issue. But there’s something going on a bit deeper, if you consider Alaska’s exceptional dependence on the federal government and the past political track record of politicians like Murkowski’s mentor, the late Ted Stevens, who aligned themselves with the anti-government GOP but emphasized their ability to “bring home the bacon” via appropriations.

In endorsing Miller on behalf of his Senate Conservatives Fund, Jim DeMint emphasized this dimension of Murkowski’s defeat:

Joe Miller’s victory should be a wake-up call to politicians who go to Washington to bring home the bacon. Voters are saying ‘We’re not willing to bankrupt the country to benefit ourselves.’

Now it wouldn’t be quite right to accept DeMint’s characterization of either Alaska voters’ motivations or Miller’s ideology at face value. After all, when Miller calls for abolishing the federal Department of Energy, he’s appealing to the rather selfish desire of Alaskans to control their “own” energy resources–whose value is a lot higher than any federal earmark– regardless of what it means nationally.

But it’s true that there’s an element of collective self-denial among those conservatives who are genuinely willing to take on federal spending categories that are popular among their constituents. Miller is just the latest of a number of Republican Senate candidates this year who have called for phasing out Social Security and Medicare. DeMint himself has long described these programs, along with public education, as having seduced middle-class Americans into socialist ways of thinking.

As Republican pols from Barry Goldwater to George W. Bush can tell you, going after Social Security and Medicare is really bad politics. And they’ve yet to come up with a gimmick, whether it’s “partial privatization” or grandfathering existing beneficiaries, to make major changes in these programs popular (I seriously doubt the very latest gimmick, “voucherizing” Medicare, will do any better once people understand the idea). Indeed, Republicans notably engaged in their own form of “Medagoguery” by attacking health care reform as a threat to Medicare benefits.

Yet the sudden Tea Party-driven return to fiscal hawkery among Republicans, particularly if it’s not accompanied by any willingness to consider tax increases or significant defense spending cuts, will drive the GOP again and again to “entitlement reform.” In Senate candidates like Rand Paul and Sharron Angle and now Joe Miller, we are seeing the return of a paleoconservative perspective in the GOP that embraces the destruction of the New Deal/Great Society era’s most important accomplishments not just as a matter of fiscal necessity but as a moral imperative.

You can respect this point of view even if you abhor its practical implications. But there’s little doubt it represents political folly of potentially massive dimensions. Certainly Democrats owe it to these brave conservatives to take them seriously in their desire to free middle-class seniors from the slavery of Social Security and Medicare, and draw as much attention to it as possible.

Photo credit: Steve Rhodes’ photostream

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist


Obama’s Iraq Speech Splits the Right

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

To thank or not to thank?

Yesterday morning, that’s what we were wondering around the PPI offices — would Obama thank President Bush during his Iraq address that night?  I had a conversation with my colleague Lindsay Lewis, who had just heard White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs mention that Obama was scheduled to call Bush that afternoon.  Might Obama directly thank Bush for adopting “the surge”, which, as the incomplete political narrative goes, was responsible for the decrease in violence in Iraq in 2007?

If he was explicit in his praise, I felt that the left would be apoplectic.  DailyKos and HuffPo headlines would read “The Jerk THANKED Bush”, not “Obama Fulfills Campaign Pledge.”  As polls indicate Democrats’ looming losses this November, that’s not what the administration wants floating around its mysteriously disenchanted base.

Lindsay, ever the astute politico, noted that by paying tribute to Bush, Obama was playing long-ball:  If he were to thank Bush, Obama would be positioning himself as a post-partisan Commander-In-Chief.  In political terms, he’d be positioning himself for the reelect.

Turns out that Lindsay wasn’t far off, and Obama even did him one-better: The president threaded a very fine needle that mollified critics on left and right:

This afternoon, I spoke to former President George W. Bush.  It’s well known that he and I disagreed about the war from its outset.  Yet no one can doubt President Bush’s support for our troops, or his love of country and commitment to our security.  As I’ve said, there were patriots who supported this war, and patriots who opposed it.  And all of us are united in appreciation for our servicemen and women, and our hopes for Iraqis’ future.

Turns out he didn’t go so far as to thank Bush, which keeps the focus on fulfilling his campaign pledge for the progressive base, but he succeeded in praising Bush enough to mute conservative critique and position himself as a post-partisan leader.  If you’ll pardon the phrase, Mission: Accomplished.

The conservative intelligensia are split.  Here Max Boot sounding… magnanimous, even:

I thought that this speech was about as good as we could expect from an opponent of the Iraq war — and better than Obama has done in the past. He even (for the first time?) held out an olive branch to his predecessor. … There was only a brief mention of Afghanistan, but what he said was pretty good.

Here’s Bill Kristol, sharing the love:

I thought his speech was on the whole commendable, and even at times impressive. … Not a bad tribute to the troops, and not a bad statement of the importance and indispensability of hard power. And, on the whole, not a bad speech by the president.

Truth be told, I’m happy to see them giving credit where credit is due.

Of course, every conservative didn’t feel so gooey inside.  Here’s Jennifer Rubin:

Obama is still candidate Obama, never tiring of reminding us that he kept his campaign pledge and ever eager to push aside foreign policy challenges so he can get on with the business of remaking America. All in all, it was what we were promised it would not be — self-serving, disingenuous, ungracious, and unreassuring.

And Jonah Goldberg:

I really disliked it…. If you read this closely, what Obama is saying is that not only do we owe it to the troops to rally around his discredited and partisan economic agenda (“It’s our turn”), not only is it a test of our patriotism to sign on with his environmental and industrial planning schemes, but that doing so “must be our central mission as a people.” I find everything about that offensive.

The point is that on some level, Obama succeeded in presenting himself as a post-partisan Commander-in-Chief.  Of course, anyone can concoct a reason why not to like a speech given by the president of a different political persuasion.  So while Rubin and Goldberg’s reactions are stock and trade, drawing even faint praise from the likes of Bill Kristol is a remarkable and welcome milestone.

An Iraq Milestone?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Many commentators seem puzzled over President Obama’s decision to use an Oval Office speech to mark the “end of combat operations” in Iraq. The reason: Iraq is important to Barack Obama, even if most Americans are nowadays preoccupied with a foundering economy.

Iraq, in fact, may be the reason Obama is President. During the 2008 campaign, the very green Junior Senator from Illinois used his opposition to the war to distinguish himself from more experienced rivals like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. His anti-war credentials allowed him to ride the powerful tide of anti-Bush sentiment among progressives. It also buttressed his claims to be a Washington outsider, the most authentic agent of political change in the race. This appealed to independents.

So it’s little wonder that Obama takes his pledge to end the Iraq war very seriously. He undoubtedly regards it as a matter of keeping faith with his core supporters. At the same time, he was careful not to inflame old passions over the war. On the contrary, he rightly praised U.S. troops for their skill and valor, offered a graceful salute to his predecessor, and urged the country to move on.

In this respect, the speech was probably the most genuinely “post partisan” of his presidency. But it also raised questions about what Obama really thinks about the war.  He noted that U.S. troops, at tremendous sacrifice, toppled one of the world’s worst tyrants and gave Iraq a chance to embrace “a different destiny.” Does that mean he disagrees with the New York Times’ characterization of Iraq as a “tragic, pointless war”? Obama sounded ambiguous on the question of whether it was all worth it, but such reticence probably comes with the job of being President.

Whether the public will regard his declaration as an important milestone is another matter. Violence in Iraq is already down, thanks at least in part to the surge that Obama initially opposed but has since implicitly endorsed by putting the same general, David Petraeus, in charge of a similar escalation in Afghanistan. What’s more, 50,000 U.S. troops will remain in Iraq for the next 16 months, and at least some of them will be fighting al Qaeda insurgents. Truth to tell, the President did little more last night that endorse the timetable set forth in the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) the Bush administration negotiated with the Iraqi government.

For Obama, the significance of this moment is that it marks the transition to Iraqi responsibility for security. That’s fine, but America can’t simply wash its hands and walk away at the end of next year. Iraq didn’t ask to be invaded, or to be plunged into the hellish sectarian violence that followed. The United States has incurred an unavoidable moral obligation to help a decent political order emerge in Iraq. If that requires revisiting the SOFA, the administration shouldn’t be inflexible on the point.

In stressing the limits of America’s responsibilities, the President also drew parallels between Iraq and Afghanistan. The United States should stay in Afghanistan only as long as it takes to build the capacity of the Afghan government and security forces to defend the country against a vicious Taliban insurgency.

Obama, in fact, seemed to be implicitly advancing a new doctrine of limited U.S. military intervention. The unstated assumption: America probably will be forced to intervene again in failing and fragile states beset by terrorism or communal conflict. But we should make no open-ended commitments to counterinsurgency and national building. But war is seldom so tidy. The United States still has troops in South Korea, 57 years after the war there ended.

In all, it was an often confusing and even contradictory speech, as Fred Kaplan captured well today. It reflected the deep ambivalence of a man who rose to prominence on the strength of his anti-war stance, and now finds himself, as Commander in Chief, responsible for bringing no less than three wars – Iraq, Afghanistan and the fight against al Qaeda – to a successful conclusion.

Photo Credit: Jurveston’s photostream

The Dangers of the Beck-on Call

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Among the literature I picked up on Saturday while attending the “Restoring Honor” rally on the National Mall (purely to indulge my curiosity) was a three-by-five card asking me: “ARE YOU READY TO BEGIN THE REBIRTH OF THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION?” The card directs me to a website, the1789project.com, where I can pledge money to a PAC that will only support candidates who adhere to the Constitution.

Another card tells me: “Politicians are destroying our country. We have the solution. Join us. We seek the modern day incarnations of Madison, Franklin, and Jefferson.” The card is for the “Get Out of Our House” project, or GOOOH. The plan, according to the website, is “to remove all members of the U.S. House of Representatives and replace them with everyday Americans just like you.” Wow. Just like me? I can only dream.

I was struck by the ways in which this resonated with the larger theme of the program: Restoring Honor. Restoring. This great hope that only if we could get back to some golden era, if only we could tap into this apparently forsaken “Constitution” document, if only we could get rid of all the “career politicians” and replace them with ordinary citizens, somehow all the problems of the world would solve themselves.

It’s a wonderfully alluring biblical narrative: the return to the lost Eden. One gentleman I spoke with assured me that if only we all would just stop and really read the Bible and take its teachings to heart, all of our problems would be solved. There would be no need for government. Everything would work perfectly. (He was handing out literature for “Project Restore”). Meanwhile, Glenn Beck announced over the loudspeakers: “To Restore America, we must restore ourselves.”

The idea of redemption through a return to first principles is nothing new, and it’s far from the exclusive province of the political right. One is reminded, for example, of the hopeful Port Huron statement, with its great emphasis on a return to participatory democracy driven by a return to values, and its explicit narrative of decline: “Theoretic chaos has replaced the idealistic thinking of old — and, unable to reconstitute theoretic order, men have condemned idealism itself. Doubt has replaced hopefulness — and men act out a defeatism that is labeled realistic.” Compare that to Glenn Beck: “My role, as I see it, is to wake America up to the backsliding of principles and values.”

Sure, I’m all for self-improvement. We could all be kinder, gentler, harder working, better people. But the very fact that self-improvement is a $10 billion a year industry (and growing) is a testament to the human condition never quite being able to live up to our ideals. “If men were angels,” wrote Madison in Federalist #51, “no government would be necessary.”

The flaw in the redemption-by-return-to-first-principles story is that there never was a golden age. Each era had its strengths and weaknesses, but we tend to remember the wisest statements because those are the ones that are passed on and consecrated. (And lest we forget: The America of 1789 was an isolated agrarian nation in which only rich, educated, white property owners could vote. Would we want go back, even if we could?)

The mild danger in the redemption-by-return-to-first-principles story is that it undermines the ability of political institutions to solve problems through the messy art of compromise. If the only acceptable solution to the mess we’re in is to start fresh (for example, to replace to whole stinkin’ lot of lawmakers with “ordinary citizens”), it won’t be long before that fresh start encounters the same timeless governance problem of aggregating diverse preferences, and start acting like “politicians.” The more serious danger is that the redemption-by-rededication is a kindred spirit of utopian thinking that slides easily into ends-justifies-the-means murder and genocide, from communist purges to terrorist jihads.

The current sputtering economy, or the toxic brew of declining revenues and spiraling debt and entitlement obligations, or climate change, or any of the hard problems we face as a society — these are not going to go away if only we learn to love thy neighbor. The only way they’ll go away is with patience and compromise and hard work. This is the world in which we live. We need to roll up our sleeves and be realistic.

Yes, we can all be better people. I’m trying every day. But a full and complete purge of sin as gateway to a lost Eden is not a substitute for the real challenges of politics. Politics, whatever its shortcomings, is the art of the possible. The return to a lost golden age is the art of the impossible.

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore’s photostream