issue: Politics

What David Brooks Gets Wrong About Campaign Financing

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Writing in yesterday’s New York Times, columnist David Brooks proposes to the media and campaign reformers, “Don’t follow the money” when it comes to spending in this year’s highly competitive mid-term elections. On one point, at least, Brooks is right. On a few others he is quite wrong.

Brooks is right that additional spending in over-saturated campaigns where both candidates are already well known to the voters has only a marginal effect on who gets elected. In fact, empirical research on the question “Does Money Buy Elections” conducted in 2008 by Americans for Campaign Reform, finds that across all House races since 1992, spending beyond $1 million or so simply doesn’t add up to more votes. What’s more, in races where both candidates crossed the $1 million mark, the higher-spending candidates was hardly more likely to win.

But Brooks neglected to mention the all-too-familiar case where one candidate, usually the challenger, has little ability to reach a credible funding threshold in the first place and so goes largely unconsidered by the public. Nor does he mention the scores of highly-qualified potential candidates who choose not to run at all because of the endless fundraising that makes up modern campaigns. Indeed, ask any big-time consultant or party player what they seek in candidates right out the gate, and it’s not ideas or experience or integrity but money. Small wonder that serious contenders for high public office today are frequently multi-millionaires with little or no political experience.

Finally, while Brooks may be right to dismiss as largely irrelevant the amounts of money being spent in close elections, he is naive to dismiss their source. Consider that lobbyists, executives, and PACs representing the financial, real estate, healthcare, communications, and energy/transportation industries contributed $1.2 billion to federal candidates in 2008 – nearly half the total raised. Indeed, with a majority of campaign cash coming from less than 1 percent of voters, it is little surprise that the American people have lost faith in Washington’s ability to work in the public interest.

Providing adequate funding to qualified candidates, in the form of small constituent donations and matching public funds, should therefore be the primary aim of those concerned with competition and accountability in Washington. The Fair Elections Now Act, which recently was referred out of committee in the House and is pending a floor vote, would do just that.

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Do Republicans Actually Want Government to Do More?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

How much anti-government feeling is really out there?  Perhaps less than you might think.

Consider a fascinating new poll in which Gallup listed 11 functions of government and asked respondents how much responsibility they think government have for each, one a scale of one to five. For five of the 11 functions, at least 48 percent of Republicans said the government should have more responsibility (giving these functions a four or five on the five-point scale).

“Protecting Americans from foreign threats” not surprisingly got strong support from 96 percent of Republicans. But “Protecting consumers from unsafe products” (66 percent), “Preventing discrimination” (54 percent), “Developing and maintaining the nation’s transportation systems” (52 percent),  and “Protecting the environment from human actions that can harm it” (48 percent) also did better than you might expect from all the government-bashing rhetoric dominating the airwaves.

Even 37 percent of Republicans think the government should have more responsibility for “making sure all those who want jobs have them.” And perhaps shockingly, a third (32 percent) think government should have more responsibility for “making sure that all Americans have adequate healthcare.” As one would expect, Democrats rate the responsibility of government 20 to 30 percentage points higher on all of these issues.

The lessons from this poll are simple, but important. While Republicans keep bashing “big government” as a general concept, it’s different when it they are asked about specific government functions.  Even as trust in government is at all-time lows, it’s not the case that this means that most voters – even supposed government-hating Republicans – don’t want government to do anything.

Rather, it’s more likely that the anti-government feeling is more about voters not trusting the current leaders in Washington to do what’s right.

To understand this better, consider another recent Gallup poll asking respondents “Do you think the federal government poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens?” Fully 66 percent of Republicans say it does pose a threat, while only 21 percent of Democrats do. But four years ago, when Republicans controlled Washington, the numbers were nearly reversed: 57 percent of Democrats were afraid of the federal government, compared to just 21 percent of Republicans. In other words, this has more to do with who is in power than about the federal government per se.

What this means is that all this anti-government rhetoric needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Most voters (even Republicans) still want the federal government to take responsibility for major things like protecting consumers, the environment, maintaining transit, preventing discrimination, and even ensuring adequate healthcare and making jobs available.

It’s easy for Republicans as the party out of power to bash big government in the abstract and to demonize Democrats for running government poorly.  But in the end, the supposed anti-government frame is probably more about personally frustrated voters looking for something and someone to blame. The vast majority voters don’t want government to go away anytime soon – they just want it to operate better and solve public problems intelligently. Though it’s easy to confuse the two, this is an important distinction. Elected leaders, especially extremist government-bashing Republicans, ignore this at their peril.

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Why It’s Easier For Conservatives To “Brand” Themselves

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

There’s been quite a bit of buzz over the last few days about a TNR article by Sara Robinson of Campaign for America’s Future that argues progressives need to emulate conservative “brand-building” through professional marketing techniques and institution-building.

It’s not exactly a new argument. At TPM Cafe, Todd Gitlin, who strongly agrees with Robinson, notes:

I mean no disrespect when I say that some version of this piece has appeared during every election cycle of the 21st century, and a lot of good books have sounded the theme.

Sometimes, of course, arguments for “branding” or “promoting frames” for progressives are less about using savvy marketing techniques or paying attention to basic values and themes, and more about insisting that the Democratic Party enforce the kind of ideological consistency that has made “branding” a more mechanical undertaking for Republicans, at least since Reagan. Robinson acknowledges that progressives don’t have the sort of level of consensus as conservatives, but argues that disagreements must be submerged in the interest of projecting a clear message.

Personally, I’m all for using smart techniques in politics, and have spent a good chunk of my own career in training sessions aimed at helping Democrats unravel and articulate their values, policy goals, and proposals in a way that promotes both party unity and effective communications.

But it’s important to understand that conservatives have an advantage in “branding” that I don’t think progressives can or should match. The best explication of this advantage was by Jonathan Chait in a justly famous 2005 article (also for TNR) entitled “Fact Finders,” which argued that conservatives, unlike progressives, have little regard for empirical evidence in developing their “brand,” and thus can maintain a level of simplicity and consistency in political communications that eludes the more reality-minded. Here Chait makes the key distinction:

We’re accustomed to thinking of liberalism and conservatism as parallel ideologies, with conservatives preferring less government and liberals preferring more. The equivalency breaks down, though, when you consider that liberals never claim that increasing the size of government is an end in itself. Liberals only support larger government if they have some reason to believe that it will lead to material improvement in people’s lives. Conservatives also want material improvement in people’s lives, of course, but proving that their policies can produce such an outcome is a luxury, not a necessity.

Thus conservatives are entirely capable of arguing that deficits don’t matter if they are promoting tax cuts, while deficits matter more than anything if they are trying to cut social spending; that tax cuts and deregulation are essential if the economy’s good, and tax cuts and deregulation are essential if the economy’s bad; and that particular totems like, say, missile defense, should be a top national priority both during and after the Cold War. Their agenda rarely changes, no matter how much the world changes, or how little evidence there is that their policy prescriptions work. The continued adherence of most conservatives to supply-side economics, that most thoroughly discredited concept, is a particularly important case in point.

As Chait notes, the refusal of progressives to ignore reality creates a real obstacle to consistency (and by inference, “branding”):

[I]ncoherence is simply the natural byproduct of a philosophy rooted in experimentation and the rejection of ideological certainty. In an open letter to Roosevelt, John Maynard Keynes called him “the Trustee for those in every country who seek to mend the evils of our condition by reasoned experiment within the framework of the existing social system. If you fail, rational change will be gravely prejudiced throughout the world, leaving orthodoxy and revolution to fight it out.” Note how Keynes defined his and Roosevelt’s shared ideology as “reasoned experiment” and “rational change” and contrasted it with orthodoxy (meaning the conservative dogma that market economics were self-correcting) and revolution.

What progressives gain in exchange for this sacrifice of the opportunity to pound in a simple message and agenda for decades is pretty important: the chance when in power to promote policies that actually work. And of all the “brands” that are desirable for the party of public-sector activism, competence is surely the best. Indeed, the most ironically perilous thing about the current political environment is that Democrats are paying a high price for the consequences of ideologically-driven incompetence–not to mention very deliberate efforts to destabilize the planet and promote economic inequality and social divisions–attributable to the last era of conservative control of the federal government.

The best news for progressives right now is that conservatives are engaged in another, and even more ideologically-driven, effort to promote their “brand” at the expense of reality. Indeed, one way to understand the Tea Party Movement is as a fierce battle to deny Republicans any leeway from the remorseless logic that will soon lead them to propose deeply unpopular steps to reduce the size and scope of government, while also insisting on policies virtually guaranteed to make today’s bad economy even worse, certainly for middle-class Americans. I’m willing to grant conservatives a “branding” advantage and keep my own political family grounded in the messy uncertainties of the real world

This piece is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist

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Rupert Murdoch v. Justice Scalia

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Just like their crazy-as-a-FOX cousins, the Wall Street Journal editorial page has indulged yet again in a spectacle of tragicomical self-victimization. An especially shameless recent raving targets the Democrats’ efforts to expose the furtive corporate backing behind their array of political front groups, of the sort that Rupert Murdoch, the brothers Koch and their band of aspiring overloads have nearly perfected. Naturally, the Journal gets it wrong across the board.

Their charge was that Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus engaged in a “liberal abuse of power” against right-leaning “issue advocacy” groups recently when he asked the IRS to investigate whether “certain tax exempt 501(c) groups had violated the law by engaging in too much political campaign activity.”  But Baucus did not target “certain” groups—his request to the IRS was broad, and intended to give them wide rein to go where the facts led them and report back.

Senator Baucus, as chairman of the Senate committee responsible for the tax code, has the obligation to examine how his committee’s laws work in practice, and whether they ought to be revisited. The examples in his letter, one of which cited a local financier who paid for a pro-development referendum campaign in Washington State, represented the results of investigations by the New York Times and Time, not part of any partisan hit list as the Journal would have us believe.

Even if the IRS investigation ends up disproportionately impacting conservative groups, that is because these groups’ “issues” just so happen to coincide squarely with their backers’ financial interests, calling into question their tax-exempt status.

This is not the case with conservative bogeymen such as George Soros. While Soros and other wealthy progressives also contribute to issue advocacy groups, their personal fortunes do not turn on the agenda they espouse.  Soros would in fact be even better off financially were the Republicans to gain power and, say, extend Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. Contrast that with the Koch brothers, whose sprawling empire is one of the top ten air polluters in the United States, and who have been called the “kingpins” of climate change denial.  One can just imagine how much they have to lose from stronger environmental regulations or a cap-and-trade bill.

Now, it is all well and good if the Kochs and Co. want to keep pumping dollars into elections and carbon into the air. That is their right under the law.  But they should have to be honest about it so that the American people can judge whether this agenda coincides with their own.   We all know that the Supreme Court in the case Citizens United upheld the right of corporations to spend freely on behalf of issues and candidates they believe in.  Less well known is the court’s decision, in the same term, in Doe v. Reed.  In it, the 8-1 majority held that there is no categorical First Amendment right to anonymous political speech.

In Doe, finding against such a right to privacy was critical, said the Court, to “fostering government transparency and accountability.” Perhaps Justice Scalia explained the rationale best: “Requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed…”  That is what the tax code provisions the right is abusing are supposed to reinforce, and which Senator Baucus is charged with overseeing.

Would that the Journal had Scalia’s spine. Instead it complains about businesses being made the “targets of vilification with the goal of intimidating them into silence.”   But why should consumers unwittingly support businesses that advocate interests potentially at odds with their values?   This contrast is especially striking when those same businesses can covertly advance their interests through a tax-exempt organization.  Only in the Journal’s circular world, where what’s good for the golden gooses is good for the gander, could this somehow square.  But such misdirection and obfuscation, as we well know, is the only way the far right can still pretend to have the interests of the American people at heart.

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The Republicans’ Self-Negating Electoral Strategy

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

I was struck by an item in the recent Washington Post/Kaiser/Harvard Survey on The Role of Government: The fact that in 2000, 28 percent of Republicans said they would give the overall performance of the federal government a grade of “A” or “B”.  (And that was with Bill Clinton as President.)

That number today is 8 percent, which is about what you would expect, given the ubiquitous anti-government rhetoric. It’s a remarkable loss of any faith in government by one of the two major political parties.  (By contrast, 42 of Democrats now rate government “A” or “B” – slightly less than the 47 percent in 2000, but not as significant a decline.)

But here’s the question that sticks with me: What happens if the Republicans take back the House or at least make significant enough gains to have ownership over the government again? Will the anti-government rhetoric explode in their face?

Having spent so much energy disparaging Washington, can Republicans maintain popular support if they take back some share of the federal government and are forced to make hard choices of actually governing? It’s easy for Republican voters to have no faith in Washington when it’s controlled by Democrats, but what happens if Republicans again have a share of governing responsibility?

Consider another telling item in the same poll highlights a problem that Republicans are going to face: Half of the country thinks that the budget can be balanced with only cuts to “wasteful spending.” But as Jon Cohen and Dan Balz note: “Eliminating waste in the budget would do very little to bring down the size of the deficit.” Republicans have, as many opposition parties are wont to do, peddled excessively simple solutions to excessively difficult problems.

In today’s Times, Kate Zernicke notes that “33 Tea Party-backed candidates are in tossup races or running in House districts that are solidly or leaning Republican, and 8 stand a good or better chance of winning Senate seats” – In other words, a there will be a sizeable caucus of firethrowers who will continue to amp up the anti-government rhetoric within the party.

But how long before the Tea Party faithful loses faith in the Republicans who they’ve elected on the bold revolutionary promises to tear down government when those promises go unfulfilled – as they inevitably must, given the dramatic mismatch between their platforms and what is actually possible to accomplish in Washington?

Republicans are essentially saying: Elect us to do things that we are incapable of doing. Elect us to run an institution that we have encouraged you to be thoroughly frustrated with, so that we can ultimately be in charge and be accountable for your frustration.

Of course, that’s not to say that Republicans can’t continue the Janus-like pose of both being responsible for governing and bashing the very idea of government. Reagan did it successfully. And even if Republicans take back the House, they will still have Obama and the Democratic-controlled Senate to bash.

But ultimately, it’s a self-negating electoral strategy. Republicans are never going to succeed in drastically shrinking the size of government or even repealing healthcare reform for the simple reason that when it comes down to it, there’s much less fat to trim than most people think, and certainly no fat to trim painlessly.

So I do not envy the new crop of Republicans who will be picking up seats this November. They’ll have been elected as part of an anti-incumbency, anti-government mood that they’ve done much to foment.  But that mood takes on a life of its own. It may not be so useful when they become the incumbents and are part of the government.

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Is the Obama Administration Really Serious About Nuclear Power?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Constellation Energy announced last weekend that it is pulling out of negotiations with the Obama administration over its pending application for Department of Energy loan guarantees to build a new reactor unit at its existing Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant in Maryland. This means that for now, Constellation has scrapped all plans to expand the plant, which would have brought 1600 megawatts of low-carbon power to the market and thousands of jobs to the local economy.

What drove Constellation to walk away from further negotiations is the position taken by the White House Office of Management and Budget over the cost of the “credit subsidy fee” Constellation must pay for the guarantee. OMB set the fee at  $880 million, or 11.6 percent of the total guarantee. OMB says this fee accurately reflects the risk to taxpayers of default by Constellation, which may or may not be accurate, even presuming that shielding taxpayers from 100% of the default risk is an appropriate goal.  The problem is that no one ever expected the loan guarantee program to be priced so high, most notably the energy companies that have spent years now tied up in the application process. Constellation had argued for a fee closer to 1-2 percent, and DOE had previously made statements that indicated it was basically in agreement with that fee level, before the Obama White House got involved in the program and indicated it needed greater protections against the risk that the company won’t repay its loans. OMB has demanded a price for those protections that is basically what private lenders would charge (which is high considering the regulatory and cost risks associated with a nuclear power plant–hence the need for the loan guarantee program in the first place).

If you are an opponent of expanding nuclear power, this is great news. It means that after years of hard-fought legislative and regulatory battles in which the nuclear industry made significant headway toward getting the federal government to clear the way for a “nuclear renaissance” in the U.S., yet another battleground has been found to effectively scuttle the entire program for nuclear loan guarantees for the time being. Apparently that new battleground is the arcane world of credit scoring within the federal budget bureaucracy, most notably OMB.

By throwing sand in the gears of this final stage of the bureaucratic approval process, the White House has let the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program grind to a halt after years of promises of support to the industry for badly needed new projects. By all accounts, this controversy appears to be simply a fight between budget bureaucrats that needs to be hashed out publicly and resolved. But a less benign interpretation might suggest a deliberate bias among those in the administration in favor of spending loan guarantee dollars on renewable energy at the expense of nuclear projects. In either case, it is a problem that President Obama could easily fix with leadership from the White House, by making it clear that nuclear power is a national priority that is too important to lose new projects over bureaucratic delays.

Instead of leadership, the White House has responded with unfortunate lack of credible commitment to addressing this issue. According to Bloomberg news, OMB’s spokesperson said administration officials were surprised that Constellation gave up on negotiations.  It’s hard to believe they could really be that clueless. Everyone following the nuclear loan guarantee process knew this was a potential deal-killing problem for Constellation and other applicants, especially anyone who read Constellation’s executives say so specifically in the New York Times almost a year ago. This issue was raised in Jack Lew’s recent confirmation hearing to take over OMB, and Senate Energy Chairman Jeff Bingaman openly criticized the administration in a hearing on September 23 for holding up these loan guarantees. These complaints have been heard coming from several different corners in Washington and the energy industry for months. If I knew enough not to be shocked by Constellation’s move, how did OMB and the White House did not see this coming?

The administration’s handling of the Constellation loan application raises an important question that needs to be answered: just how committed is President Obama and his administration to expanding nuclear power? The president has said nuclear energy is part of his vision of America’s energy future (most notably in a speech ironically delivered in Maryland announcing a nuclear loan guarantee approval), but we have not seen many tangible results that the members of his administration are fully committed to making that vision a reality. After all, the Constellation announcement comes during the same week when the president was stumping for more infrastructure spending and his own economists released a report arguing that now is an ideal time to build large capital projects, both in terms of economic stimulus and low project costs for financing and labor. In the last week, the administration also cleared the way for two new solar energy projects on federal land and, even more notably, announced a $1.3 billion DOE loan guarantee approval for a massive new wind power project. All of these other initiatives this week are important and deserving of the president’s leadership in making them a national priority. But with the news from Constellation coming amidst all this other administration support for new energy and infrastructure projects, the overall picture is too easily misconstrued as the administration coordinating to put a thumb on the scale in favor of everything but nuclear energy.

Given the energy realities we are facing and the president’s own acknowledgments that nuclear energy needs to be part of a low-carbon response to meeting growing demand, President Obama can not afford to let a bureaucratic bean-counting snafu tie up billions of dollars in new investment and tens of thousands of jobs. Hopefully, this issue is essentially a policy glitch in the administration’s energy agenda, rather than something more problematic. But regardless of the cause, if President Obama is serious about including nuclear in our energy mix, then he needs to use the power of his office to take a hard look at these problems–and fix the glitch.

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Neither the Left Nor the Right Gets It

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The night that President Obama won the presidency, I was distracted by a looming deadline for New Republic piece I was already writing warning the left not to misinterpret the election results.  Democratic Congressional victories were primarily the result of voters continuing to grow sour on the way Republicans ran the House and Senate.  Obama’s victory owed its magnitude to the financial crisis and McCain’s response to it.  Essentially, I warned that the 50-50 Nation was alive and well and that moving too aggressively could backfire.

The piece was largely ignored at the time, but it is looking pretty good today.  Democrats successfully enacted landmark health care legislation, shepherded the financial system through a harrowing period when fears of another depression were widespread, passed an enormous stimulus package, and pushed through financial reform.  In the process, the deficit soared to worrying levels, unemployment continued to rise, the government became the owner of FannieMae and FreddieMac and part owners of the automobile companies, the economy limped along, and public opinion turned against them.

In a sure sign that in its own way, the left is as out of touch as the conservative tea party activists, liberals lamented the supposed timidity and corporate-coziness of the Administration, and the base grew depressed.  This despite the unprecedented scale of federal spending and intervention into the workings of the economy, the near death of health care reform (the biggest progressive victory since Medicare’s enactment), and loss of support among independents and moderates.  Progressives thought they had a mandate for aggressive change.  Apparently they still don’t realize that they didn’t.

Ironically, one of the left’s leading pundits, E. J. Dionne, argued in a sharp book in the 1990s called They Only Look Dead that the way to understand the 1992, 1994, and 1996 elections was to view the first two years as a period of liberal overreach and the second two years as a mirror image on the right.  Despite all the evidence that the country is even more closely divided today, liberals such as Dionne cannot see the same dynamic of partisan overreach playing out over the past decade.  But it was there during the Bush years on the right, and it has been there over the past two momentous years on the left.

Yes, the economy is surely the driving force behind voter dissatisfaction with Democrats, and Obama was damned if he did (spend hundreds of billions to avoid a depression) and damned if he didn’t.  But health care was supposed to be a game changer—if voters were so keen on a massive disruption of the health care sector, as progressives have argued for twenty years now, why hasn’t this trumped the economy?  The electorate is fundamentally moderate and as poorly served by liberals who want to circumvent that moderation as by tea-party conservatives who are convinced Obama is a socialist Muslim foreigner.  It will be interesting to see which party—if either—gets it between now and 2012.

This article is cross-posted at No Labels.

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Stop the Madness: The New Politics of Stunts

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

On the heels of the controversy about this week’s perhaps terror alerts in Europe, I reflected on a recent experience with the very real costs of what you might call the terrorist-hysteria complex.

Two weeks ago, I was in Afghanistan on a U.S. government-sponsored mission to observe the Parliamentary elections on Saturday, September 18th. The day before, I sat on the balcony of our guesthouse and watched a dangerous drama unfold just outside. Our security guards strung a black curtain along our balcony rail to block prying eyes. Through two of the panels, I watched as a member of the Afghan National Police crouched behind a wall of olive-green sandbags about a hundred feet away and aimed his automatic rifle at a curve in the road to the right.

We were in Panjshir, a valley about two and a half hours north of Kabul. At that moment, a mullah up the road was leading a protest at an elementary school in response to the burning of a Koran by by two men in Tennessee named Bob Old and Danny Allen. (This was different from Terry Jones, the Florida preacher who canceled his burning.)

You probably never heard about the Tennessee story. When you watch the video, it’s mind-blowing that these two characters somehow animated events oceans away. But seven thousand miles away, amped up both by a local hair-trigger media and Afghan opportunists looking to stir up trouble, Bob Old and Danny Allen — names we will almost certainly never hear again — created real danger and real expense.

On the mission with me were two security professionals from the UK and the U.S., two Afghan security men, a translator, and my partner, all funded by a U.S. aid agency and U.S. taxpayer dollars. We were supposed to be out in the field, interviewing government officials, asking probing questions about the quality of the election, the depth of the rule of law. I should have been helping to determine whether the billions of dollars and gallons of blood our warfighters have poured into Afghanistan is worth it.

But we instead spent the day stuck in our guest house, pawns in the mad world of stunt-driven politics. There was a striking parallel between the stunts back in America and the Taliban’s efforts in Afghanistan. Both were aimed at controlling the actions of millions through discrete acts of violence. Both take advantage of the nexus of blogs, a 24-hour news cycle, and political opportunism. And both have real consequences not only on our perception of reality, but on policy.

Read the entire article in the Huffington Post.

What’s Progressive About the U.S. Military

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

This post is the first in a series about the Progressive Military

It has now been nine years since the 9/11 attacks, and since that day the average American has heard an awful lot about the military.  We are fighting extremism worldwide and still have troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Yet many progressives remain uncomfortable with the military, often assuming that it is a conservative organization because political conservatives are so eager to identify themselves with our troops.

This is a series about how the military is a more progressive organization than many people give it credit for. It will help progressives better appreciate the many ways that the U.S. Military operates and accomplishes progressive goals. It is also aimed at conservatives who implicitly trust the military and might see issues like climate change, healthcare, economic opportunity and energy policy as vital issues.

The military is a more progressive organization than many give it credit for and it is my hope in this series of articles to do just that.

Despite the daily attention to military issues, it is striking to me how little those who never served in the military know about it.  After I was already in the Army a few years, my father, who retired after 23 years of military service, met a friend of mine.  He told him that I was at Fort Lewis and went up to Seattle on weekends.  He was surprised and asked, ‘you mean they let them out?’

Since 1975 only around one percent of the population has worn the uniform.  Many have family members or friends who served, but this only gives them a bit more than the basic knowledge the majority of Americans have.  For most, opinions and attitudes toward the military are developed by the news media, TV shows, and movies.  Many of our elected leaders, despite their claims to the contrary, have little more knowledge than the general population and surprisingly few of them have served themselves though they make very important decisions involving the military every day.  Though others have claimed it falsely, there are only four Iraq war veterans in Congress.

This, however, doesn’t seem to keep them from claiming to speak for the military.  The debate about the Iraq ‘surge’ and the debate about the future of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan during the 2008 election prompted many on the right to claim ‘you can’t support the troops without supporting the war.’ I served in Iraq and Kuwait during these debates.  I didn’t support the war in Iraq, but I fought as hard as I could in it every day, receiving a Purple Heart in a suicide bombing.  I served with others who did support it and did the same.  Servicemembers do their duty no matter their personal opinion.  Anyone claiming to presume that they know what servicemembers believe doesn’t understand the concept of duty.

And yet, the recent debate on ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ centered on conservatives claiming troops don’t want to worry about sharing their ‘foxhole’ with a homosexual.  Our troops haven’t dug ‘foxholes’ in quite a while.  This comment exhibits an opinion based on the stereotypical swaggering, macho draftee of Hollywood films.  The truth is our all-volunteer military today is made of service members that see themselves as military professionals.  They have an opinion about the matter, but once the decision has been made they accept it and won’t be distracted, especially in combat, by such trivial matters as the sexual orientation of their squadmate.  This professionalism was previously exhibited when the military desegregated, despite opposition.  Sixty years later, troops of all colors and genders serve well beside one another.

A closer look at the policies and culture of the U.S. military today shows that it is more progressive than many traditionally think.  There are many lessons progressives can draw on from today’s military, and conservatives’ trust of the military on national security issues should translate to trust on other issues.

The military healthcare system shows that government can do big healthcare well and efficiently; it leads the way on addressing energy independence, efficiency, and the repercussions of climate change; despite its size and controversies, it has shown real commitment to providing economic opportunity; and it has an culture of innovation and learning, among other examples.  It is my hope in this series of articles to point out where the military is exhibiting progressive thinking and what lessons we can draw from the military.

Photo credit: US Army Africa

To Oppose or to Propose?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

France, 15 of September, 2010. The Pension Reform passes in the National Assembly after months of struggle. The obstruction instigated by the left parties leads to one of these cinema-like scenes when the right-oriented President of the Lower House (Bernard Accoyer) decides to suspend the debates, prompting call for his resignation by the Socialists – when not accusing the current government of fascism and a putsch.

The issue of reforming the pension system is in itself a subject of concern for all aging western democracies. France has an almost completely repartition-based system where working citizens contribute a percentage of their wages to the retirement pensions of the previous worker-generation. No need to explain that with the population pyramid, every developed country is facing nowadays, fewer young workers will have to pay for a “papy-boom” generation that is living longer and longer.

But what is also at issue here is the behavior of the opposition party, this vital nerve of every democracy, which faces the “to oppose or to propose” dilemma: How to make needed concessions without having them considered as surrender of principles?

After years of failed attempt at reforms, the French government has proposed extending the retirement contribution years and postponing the retirement age from 60 to 62  by 2018. Even if the Socialists officially accept lengthening the retirement contribution years, they fight against the loss of the symbolic legal age at which you can chose to quit work. The extreme left wing, for its part, is simply denying the reality of the age pyramid: They definitely want to “freeze the counters” up to 40 years of contribution, arguing that people deserve to experience healthy retirement years and that their departure would leave more work to the next generation.

The Socialist opposition clearly decided to apply the “opposing for opposing” strategy, which not only works against their interest, but also prevents any possibility of constructive democratic debates leading to a meaningful compromise.

Such an attitude makes the opposition seem unconstructive and static. At best, it only strengthens the extremes which seem to give voters a clearer choice – even if often extravagant. In the long haul, it weakens democracy not to have opposition parties willing and able to be serious partners in debate and deliberation.

Moreover, crying wolf at every proposition from the party in power turns the opposition into background noise citizens no longer bother to pay attention to. Consequently, it gives the governing party a freer hand in proposing and implementing policies — an opportunity the current French Government did not miss when passing bills against minorities without facing any reaction worthy of being called opposition.

Ultimately, it is up to the voters to reject opposition merely for the sake of opposition, and the extremism it builds. This is not always easy. Strong opposition can provide the appeal of moral clarity and righteous indignation. But it leads nowhere productive. Hard choices are ahead, but they only get harder when opposition parties take on a reflexive opposition stance and make compromise impossible.

Photo credit: marcovdz

The Tea Party is the GOP’s Problem

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Among the many midterm imponderables is this: will the Tea Party have as big an impact on the election as it’s had on the chattering class?

The media obsession with the Tea Party has made it the big political story of the year.  Fox News helped to midwife and validate it, and liberal commentators seem equally fixated on the phenomena, which they view with a mixture of dread and envy. They are forever dreaming of populist uprisings, and when it actually happens, it’s on the wrong end of the ideological spectrum!

But is the Tea Party really a new and genuinely independent expression of conservative populism, or is it something more familiar – the right wing of the Republican Party? A study released yesterday sheds some interesting light on the question.

It’s called Religion and the Tea Party in the 2010 Election, by Robert Jones and Daniel Cox of the Public Religion Research Institute. The study confirms much of what is already known about the Tea Party – its members are generally white, older, more affluent and more male than the population at large. They are very conservative, and as we all know, they have a gimlet-eyed view of government.

But the report also purports to correct some common misconceptions about the movement. Some key findings:

  • One in 11 voters describe themselves as a Tea Party member. That’s a lot, but hardly an irresistible force in America politics. As Jones and Cox note, it’s only half the percentage of voters who identify themselves as Christian conservatives.
  • Despite Dick Armey’s opportunistic attempts to get to the head of the Tea Party parade, the movement is more socially conservative than libertarian, at least on social issues. Its members, for example, are strongly opposed to abortion and gay marriage.
  • Nearly half (47 percent) say they are also part of the religious right, a key GOP constituency that supposedly has gone to ground in recent years.
  • Tea Partiers are overwhelmingly partisan Republicans. Most (76) say they lean Republican and over 80 percent say they plan to vote for GOP candidates in their districts.

This last point is offered as upending conventional wisdom, but it shouldn’t be. Many commentators, including PPI’s own Ed Kilgore, have pointed to the basic compatibility of Tea Party attitudes with those of hard-core GOP conservatives. In backing challenges to GOP moderates, in fact, the Tea Party looks like a looking glass version of the “netroots” progressives who backed Howard Dean in 2004 and Ned Lamont’s primary challenge to Sen. Joe Lieberman.

There are some distinctly new flavors in the Tea Party brew, of course. One is an antic Constitutional fundamentalism that yearns to roll back amendments providing for the direct election of Senators and the progressive income tax. And the Tea Party’s decentralized, headless nature means its members really don’t take orders from the GOP hierarchy.

But in general, Tea Partiers look like GOP conservatives, only more so. Not surprisingly, they are disproportionally from the South, the GOP’s geographical and ideological bastion.

So maybe progressives shouldn’t worry too much about the movement. Ultimately, the Tea Party is a Republican, not Democratic, problem. Yes, its members are energized to vote and will turn out in droves in November. But they are also divisive, polarizing and, often, downright weird (Delaware Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell) or borderline psychotic (New York gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino).

If Democrats do as badly as everyone seems to expect in the midterm, it won’t be because of the Tea Party. It will be because independent voters, who put Barak Obama solidly over the top in 2008, have defected to Republican candidates to protest joblessness and the sluggish recovery. Meanwhile, Tea Party passions are pushing Republicans to the nether fringe of conservativism, leaving an abandoned center for progressives to recapture after the election.

Photo credit:  bvcphoto

Don’t Destroy Government, Use It

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Recurrent outbursts of public anger against “big government” are a fixture of American politics. Partly, such sentiments are baked into the cake of America’s classically liberal founding ideas. But as Philip Howard points out, the relentless addition (hardly ever subtraction) of new laws, programs and regulations both bloats government and renders it less and less capable of solving new problems. If the machinery of government is all gummed up, it doesn’t much matter which party is at the controls. No wonder voters get mad, and discouraged.

So Philip is onto something here. Mancur Olson, in The Rise and Decline of Nations, and Jonathan Rauch, in Demosclerosis, explored this phenomenon in depth. So why am I not quite ready to sign onto his manifesto?

One reason is that it has a libertarian ring, in my ears anyway. I can imagine it going down much easier among Tea Partiers than, say, netroots lefties, or even pragmatic, center-left types like me. Yet progressives have, if anything, more reason to worry about the incapacitation of government than conservatives. We actually want to use the damn thing, not just disable it.

Read the entire article in the Daily Beast

Financing Future Growth: How Do We Pay For New Projects?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

A National Infrastructure Bank is an idea whose time has come. The politics are tricky, but there is clear recognition from leading public and private sector thinkers that we need to make big investments in infrastructure, and that we need to make those investments in a rational way.

These were the key takeaway points from Friday’s second panel on the question of “Financing Future Growth,” which was part of the Progressive Policy Institute’s Second Annual North American Strategic Leadership Infrastructure Leadership Forum in Washington, DC.

The panelists were: U.S. Representative Rosa L. DeLauro (D-CT), Sponsor of National Infrastructure Development Bank Act of 2009 (H.R. 2521); Chris Bertram, Assistant Secretary for Budget and Programs and C.F.O., U.S. Department of Transportation; Leo Hindery, Jr., Investor, Managing Partner of InterMedia Partners VII; former President and CEO of AT&T Broadband; former President, Tele-Communications, Inc. (TCI); and Everett Ehrlich, Economist, President of ESC Company; former Under Secretary of Commerce for Economic Affairs. PPI President Will Marshall moderated.

Rep. DeLauro set the tone for the panel by underlining the urgency for doing something big. “We need to be serious about a growth strategy,” DeLauro told a packed audience. “This is not stimulus, this is not recovery, this is whether we can grow and create jobs to compete with the economic power centers of the world. China invests nine percent of its GDP in infrastructure. India invests five percent. We invest less than two percent.”

And yet, Rep. DeLauro’s bill to create a National Infrastructure Bank and turn a chaotic ad-hoc infrastructure appropriations process into a rational national strategy has attracted only 60 co-sponsors – and not a single Republican.

“Resistance is internal to Congress,” said Hindery. “They would give up so much grant and earmark authority. Members are hesitant to see that move into an independent entity.”

Hindery argued that the key was leadership, and that the President wasn’t doing enough of it. “It has to be a stated priority,” he said. “It can’t be a proffered idea with tepid support.”

Ehrlich, who wrote a PPI Policy Memo on how an infrastructure bank should operate, was optimistic that this is an idea whose time has come. “This is a remarkable moment in infrastructure,” he said. “We are finally at a place where all the communities know the current programs are brain-dead…Local planners are wondering where the funds are going to come from, private investors are circling around the periphery of the area, looking for a way in.”

Hindery also noted that both the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable – both of whom have been largely resistant to any form of domestic spending – have come out in favor of an infrastructure bank. However, DeLauro said her Republican colleagues in Congress were not hearing this.

DeLauro highlighted that there is strong public support for making big investments in infrastructure: about 80 percent of Americans say they’d be willing to pay extra for more infrastructure.

Hindery also argued that in order for the proposal to pass, it would need to have a buy-American component, so that they unions would be on board. He also thought that making it explicitly a “jobs bill” would be effective. There was general agreement on this point.

Bertram, speaking for the administration, said that the President was serious about pushing an infrastructure bank. “I think the President is very interested in changing how we talk about these issues.”

DeLauro, who has been introducing legislation to create an infrastructure bank since 1994, was optimistic that the moment for it to pass was rapidly coming.

“We’re facing an economic crisis now, and we’re looking for ways to grow our economy,” said DeLauro. “Infrastructure is one of the pieces that makes sense for national growth. I believe it can be done. It’s not easy, but nothing is easy. And I’ll continue with this for as long as it takes.”

Retooling the American Economy for Jobs, Innovation, and Competitiveness

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

America is adrift and needs leadership to modernize and build a foundation for 21st century competitiveness. And while it’s a long hard to travel, there are at least a few signs of optimism.

Such were the key takeaway points from Friday morning’s panel on the question of “Retooling the American Economy,” which was part of the Progressive Policy Institute’s Second Annual North American Strategic Leadership Infrastructure Leadership Forum in Washington, DC.

The panelists were : Tom Friedman, New York Times Columnist, Pulitzer-Prize Winning Author; Jason Furman, Deputy Director, National Economic Council, White House; Roderick Bennett, Advisor to the General President of the Laborers’ International Union of North America; and John Woolard, CEO, Brightsource Energy. David Wessel, economics editor of the Wall Street Journal moderated.

In general, the panelists agreed that we’re in a difficult spot. We’re falling behind China on infrastructure, on energy, on basic research and development –  just about every measure of investing in a 21st century economy. As Friedman put it, “We can only go so long with a philosophy of dumb as we want to be.”

Part of that dumb-as-we-want-to-be philosophy is an unwillingness on the part of many to admit that government has a key role to play in creating an environment where innovation can thrive, both by making big investments and putting the right incentives in place. The solution to this, of course, is leadership.

“We have an epic lack of faith in government with a capital G, but we have an unchanging love for government at the local level when it means bridge projects and energy projects and broadband projects,” said Furman. “And that’s something you see at the bipartisan level. Some of this means we have a messaging problem, and some of that is bottom-up, pointing out what it all tangibly means.”

“But how you get the snake through the python is a big challenge,” Furman added. “You have to pass the thing through Congress, and the debate will be framed in big government terms.”

Friedman, who was openly critical of the administration’s salesmanship efforts, argued that what was needed was big-picture leadership.

“We need to make it aspirational,” said Friedman.  “That’s what the moon shot was all about. People want nation-building at home. You fly from Shanghai to JFK, and you go from the Jetsons to the Flinstones. People sense that. And the President has never made that the lodestar. He’s never leveraged all that energy.”

Woolard, who heads a large solar energy company, offered a dose of optimism. “We have a lot more projects here in the U.S. than abroad,” he said. “There are good projects, and there’s a lot moving forward.”

“But,” he added, “The thing that scares me most is the longer-term issue. Not enough students are going into engineering. We need to encourage people to go into those disciplines.”

Woolard also described the challenge at hand: In order to stabilize carbon emissions at 450 parts per million by 2050 (a commonly-agreed on target to stem global warming), “we’ve gotta build between 12,000 and 20,000 gigawatts of carbon-free power. That’s a power plant per day. We’ve built gigawatts a week before, but we don’t have the rules yet to get to this objective. We need policy.”

The consensus was that there would need to be a price on carbon. “Capital works itself out with the right rules,” Woolard said. But given the politics of energy, would the political will ever exist?

Here Friedman was an optimist: “We’re absolutely going to have a gas tax and a carbon tax,” he told the audience. “Because we’re going to run out of money, and we will need revenue and when we run into that wall, people will look around and say, what’s the best source? The sad thing is there are 535 members of Congress, and not one will propose this when it is so manifestly in the strategic and economic interest of the country.”

Bennett, whose union represents construction workers, also registered support for a gasoline tax, which he called “the elephant in the room.”

Friedman also offered a “killer app” for economic competitiveness: “An ecosystem of a national renewable standard, a price on carbon, a gasoline tax, higher building efficiency standards,” he said. “Put that ecoystem in place and you get 10,000 green garages trying 10,000 different things. Two of those will be the next green Google and Microsoft. The killer app is the enabling system.”

How to Make an Infrastructure Bank Work

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

When President Obama proposed  a national infrastructure bank on Labor Day, he was short on details. How would such a bank work to give coherence to meeting our infrastructure building needs?

Today, in conjunction with our national conference on infrastructure, PPI is proud to release a new Policy Memo from infrastructure expert Everett Ehlrich about how a national infrastructure bank would work.

In his memo, entitled “A National Infrastructure Bank: A Road Guide to the Destination,” Ehrlich sees five key aspects of a Bank:

  • First, a Bank will evaluate infrastructure needs from an economic, as opposed to an engineering perspective. That is, infrastructure projects must actually be economically sound investments, not bridges to nowhere.
  • Second, a Bank will be able to provide consistent, apples-to-apples comparisons of different infrastructure projects so that policymakers can make more rational decisions about where to allocate infrastructure funds.
  • Third, a Bank will be able to select projects where it can leverage private capital effectively.
  • Fourth, a Bank will provide an alternative to what Ehrlich calls the “Appropriations Merry-Go-Round” – that is, the process by which states and localities put off much-needed repairs in hopes that congressional appropriators will lavish funds on them if only they wait long enough.
  • Fifth, a Bank will encourage localities to think creatively about ways to improve on existing infrastructure use, such as designing traffic optimization algorithms. The bank will be able to support non-structural solutions that can often do just as much for our infrastructure needs as building.

Here’s Ehrlich’s overview for how the bank would work:

Any entity – whether state, local, or federal – would have standing to come to the Bank with a proposal requiring federal assistance.  The Bank would be able to negotiate the level and form of such assistance based on the particulars of each project proposal.  It could offer cash participation or loan guarantees, underwriting or credit subsidies, or financing for a subordinated fund to assure creditors.  Any project requiring federal resources above some dollar threshold (on a credit scoring basis) would have to be approved by the Bank.

Ehrlich will be discussing his memo on Friday at a panel on “Panel: Financing Future Growth: How Do We Pay For New Projects?,” as part of the 2nd Annual North America Strategic Infrastructure Leadership Forum, co-sponsored by the Progressive Policy Institute.

In Defense of Jon Stewart’s Million Moderate March

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Last Monday, I shared my optimism that in Jon Stewart’s “Rally to Restore Sanity” and Michael Bloomberg’s funding of moderate candidates, there was reason to hope that the center might hold after all, and maybe even become vital.

Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education Brainstorm blog, Laurie Essig had a very different take. Where I see a vital center, she sees a “muddled middle” that is “in fact continuing to represent the interests of corporations and corporate-controlled media against the interests of the majority of Americans.”

It’s worth spending a few minutes with Essig’s deconstruction of the so-called muddled middle, because it reflects a certain unfortunate way of thinking about the political center. It also offers an opportunity to defend what’s vital about the vital center.

Essig argues that: “The first thing that is clear is that the Muddled Middle wishes to merge the Left and the Right as ‘the same’”

I’m not quite sure where Professor Essig finds this clarity. I cannot think of a single political moderate who sees or even wishes to see the Left and the Right as being “the same.” They clearly represent very different political ideologies. This much is obvious to anyone with even half a brain.

But they do share one troubling similarity: they both view the world in black and white terms, and both equate any form of compromise with surrender.

In Essig’s view, and the view of many on the political far left, “the world’s greediest corporations continue to highjack our democracy.” Anybody (i.e. the moderates) who does not believe we are locked in an existential good-versus-evil struggle on the behalf of poor working class folks against the powerful interests is therefore complicit with the political right. If only the world were so black and white, it might be comforting to be sure that one was on the side of righteousness. But nothing is every that simple.

In my mind, the wisdom of the vital center is the ability to recognize two big things. First, that while the far Left and the far Right are fundamentally different in what they believe, a politics that forces everybody to choose one extreme or the other is a politics of stalled gridlock, brutal warfare, or both. We have a country to govern, and that country is quite divided, but also largely moderate. And if there is a true American tradition, it is pragmatism.

Second, the world is a complex place, and it rarely fits neatly into pure black and white. Individuals, corporations, and governments are all capable of both good and evil, of both brilliance and stupidity, of both innovation and inefficiency – often at the same time. To me, a sign of wisdom is being willing to accept this complexity, and to be humble about it. It is to be open to the possibility that one has not, in fact, figured it all out, and to be willing to experiment.

To borrow from Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “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 Vital Center, p. 254)

So sign me up for Jon Stewart’s Million Moderate March. I’ll be there, with an open mind, eager to hear what everyone has to say.

photo credit: Dale Basler