issue: Politics

No Retreat on Health Care

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

It’s only taken six months for President Obama’s landmark health reform bill to go from stupendous historic achievement to political blunder. That anyway is the fast-congealing consensus among pundits who follow the polls.

Count me as skeptical. Even if health care doesn’t poll well now, that doesn’t mean Obama was wrong to make it a top priority. But, in an atmosphere colored by public anger over bailouts and a sluggish economic recovery, there’s no doubt that the bill, for now at least, is more of an albatross for the president than an asset.

According to pollster Douglas Schoen, 81 percent of independents express concern about a federal takeover of health care, and nearly three-quarters say it’s important that candidates back a repeal of the law. He calls health care an “unambiguous disaster” for Obama.

And Bill Galston reports on a new Gallup survey that finds voters by 56-43 disapprove of the health bill.

An AP poll reveals much confusion about health reform. More than half the public wrongly believes the bill will raise taxes this year, and a quarter think it sets up bureaucratic “death panels” to decide who gets or doesn’t get care.

No wonder Obama hit the hustings yesterday to clear the record and remind people of why they wanted health care reform in the first place.

But it’s clear, right, that Obama made a mistake in pushing so hard for health care reform and it distracted him from what most Americans care about, namely, fixing the economy?  Actually, I don’t think it’s clear at all.

First, Obama pulled out all the stops to keep the economy from sliding into the abyss, but gets very little credit for it. On the contrary, his steps to rescue financial institutions are even less popular than health care, and his stimulus package doesn’t fare much better.

More fundamentally, presidents have very limited tools for reversing economic downturns. It’s not clear what more Obama could have done — or gotten a deeply polarized Congress to agree to do — even if they spent every waking hour thinking about the economy.

And let’s suppose Obama had followed the pundit’s advice, and put off health care until the economy recovered. Well, that would mean taking up health care in 2011 at the earliest. But how likely is it that the president could pass an historic health care reform after the midterm election, when his party is expected to suffer big losses and maybe even lose control of the House of Representatives?

Maybe the midterm will produce a new crop of GOP moderates, eager to pass universal health care in defiance of the party’s leadership, not to mention the Tea Party’s feral legions, but I doubt it.

The historical record is very clear on one point: the time for presidents to wrack up big legislative accomplishments comes early in their term, when their political and public support is at highest ebb. If Obama had instead waited and tried to husband his political capital for a later push, he would have had a lot less to spend.

Besides, the bad economy overshadows everything else. If we had six percent unemployment, people might feel better about health reform too. And there’s a good chance that once its provisions actually kick in, reform will grow in popularity.

But even if it doesn’t, Obama still did the right thing. America today doesn’t need artful dodgers in the White House; we need leaders willing to take on the hard cases. That inevitably offends powerful interests and voting groups. In fact, presidents who leave office about as popular as when they come in probably haven’t done very much.

So progressives should take heart, and not try to back away from health care reform. It was difficult, it was imperfect, but it was a moral and economic necessity to cover the uninsured and start getting runaway medical costs under control. It was the very rarest thing in contemporary U.S. politics — an authentic act of political leadership – and no amount of second-guessing and poll-driven punditry can change that.

photo credit:  apoxapox

“Obama’s Wars” and the November Election

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Sure, everyone knows that this election season’s foil is the economy, stupid.  Much like 2008, no issue will dominate voters’ minds more than the relative emptiness of their pocketbooks.  But that quiet scraping you hear in the distance, my friends, is the sound of national security trying to claw its way into this year’s election.  Thanks to Bob Woodward’s new book, “Obama’s Wars”, it just might get a chip in the game.

Woodward’s book, previewed by articles today in the Washington Post (Woodward’s employer) and New York Times, apparently focuses on the administration’s decision-making process throughout the three-month Afghanistan strategy review that took place in late 2009.  The full volume isn’t due out until next week, but suffice it to say that the papers have gravitated to the more salacious details:

— ZING! Petraeus thinks Alexrod’s a spin doctor!
— BAM! Obama doesn’t listen to his generals!
— DOINK! Karzai is manic depressive and pops pills!

… or something.

With an election just weeks away, this is chum in shark-infested conservative waters.

But POW!  After digging past the juicy headlines, it’s evident that there’s a deeper message here, too: The progressive base, feeling like an abandoned date on prom-night over Obama’s Afghanistan decision and hardly motivated to support Democrats this fall, might just be heartened to learn of the president’s refusal to write the generals a blank check.

And if that means jazzing up more progressive election volunteers until election day, it might explain why the White House would grant Woodward such extensive access in the first place.  I mean, they didn’t let him sit down with the president to make them look bad.

Sheep and Goats

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Yesterday, I observed that we are getting to the point where all the speculation about individual 2010 contests will begin to yield to hard data, and the actual battlegrounds will emerge.

A good example of how that might be happening is provided by new polls from PPP of two Senate races that have been ostensibly very similar, in WI and CA. In both of these blue states well-regarded but always-vulnerable progressive Democratic U.S. senators are under attack from amply-financed Republican “newcomers.”

But according to PPP, Russ Feingold is suddenly in deep trouble against Ron Johnson, while Barbara Boxer is expanding her lead against Carly Fiorina. Both these polls represent a shift by PPP from registered voter to likely voter samples, making the trends interesting measurements of the so-called “enthusiasm gap” afflicting Democrats.

According to an account by its partner DailyKos, PPP finds the “enthusiasm gap” in WI to be “one of the most severe” in the country, with Johnson’s 1-point lead among 2008 voters ballooning to 11 points among likely 2010 voters.

But in California, Boxer’s 49-40 lead among RVs in July is a virtually unchanged 50-41 lead among likely voters today. More specifically, Boxer’s support among Democrats remains very strong, and as PPP’s Tom Jensen notes:

[T]he simple reality is that Fiorina has not proven to be a particularly appealing candidate to California voters. 42% of them see her unfavorably with only 34% rating her positively. Republicans like her, Democrats dislike her almost as much, and independents are slightly negative toward her. Again, not the formula that’s going to get a Republican elected to the Senate from California.

One other factor that should be noted here is that Boxer is just about the only vulnerable Democrat seeking reelection in a state where the majority of voters still approve of Barack Obama’s performance. His approval is 53/42, and by and large the folks that like Obama are supporting Boxer- California’s one of the last frontiers left where he’s not a drag.

Interestingly, PPP also shows Jerry Brown leading Meg Whitman among likely voters by a 47-42 margin in the CA governor’s race, even though Brown is just now getting around to running television ads.

Now it may be that PPP’s current polling in either WI or CA could prove to be an outlier; it happens to all pollsters on occasion. It’s also true that Russ Feingold has a habit of getting into trouble in his re-election campaigns, only to eventually recover and win.

But whether or not these two races in particular are examples, we should soon begin to see disparities in the host of “close races” we’ve all been watching, and separate the sheep from the goats.

This article is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist

Photo credit: Kat Clay

Empower the American People, Not Special Interests, to Bankroll Elections

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Eight months after a landmark Supreme Court ruling lifted decades-long limits on corporate and union spending in elections, the 2010 midterm election promises to be the most expensive – and most secretive – on record.

In a radical departure from previous high court jurisprudence, the decision in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission extended full personhood freedom-of-speech rights to corporations , allowing them to spend unlimited funds to advocate the election or defeat of candidates at any level. It is little surprise, therefore, that analysts are predicting political ad spending to balloon to $4.2 billion this year, fully twice the level spent in 2008.

In the absence of FEC enforcement of longstanding disclosure norms and the failure of the DISCLOSE legislation to garner 60 votes in the Senate, millions of dollars in electioneering ads are being spent for or against candidates by unknown players who are unaccountable to either the candidates or the public. A recent study issued last week by the watchdog group Public Citizen found that less than one-third of independent groups receiving electioneering donations have revealed their donors this election; virtually every such group did so in 2004 and 2006. Small wonder that eight in ten voters roundly condemn the Supreme Court ruling in opinion polls.

With these sobering changes in special interest spending and disclosure comes an opportunity for Congress to shift the election year debate from issues – on which there is little hope of consensus between the parties – to process. The political imperative for such a change is clear, as liberals and Tea Partiers alike are outspoken in their rejection of the current system of corporate special interest-funded elections. While progressive support of campaign finance reform has long been assumed, Republican strategist Mark McKinnon recently observed, “There is a conventional myth that Republican voters are opposed to campaign finance reform, but [recent] research shows that Republican voters, like all other voters, believe our system of electing representatives is irreparably broken.”

It is encouraging news that the Committee on House Administration is planning to vote this Thursday on the Fair Elections Now Act. The bill offers a sweeping overhaul of congressional campaign finance rules. It would take require that participating candidates say no to special interest contributions and instead raise money in $100-or-less donations directly from their constituents. Qualifying House candidates who can collect at least 1,500 such donations in-state would be eligible to receive competitive matching funds with which to run a viable campaign. The legislation is supported by 164 cosponsors in the U.S. House and 26 cosponsors Senate.

For Democrats concerned with leveling the electoral playing field to allow more voices to enter the debate, the appeal of Fair Elections is clear. For Republicans opposed to old fashioned limits-based regulation of ‘free speech’ but who are equally fed up with the never-ending hunt for special interest dollars, Fair Elections represents a free market-oriented ‘more speech’ approach, enabling non-millionaire and non-special interest candidates to compete against those with big money. Recent surveys confirm broad public support for Fair Elections across every political group.

Shortly after the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United came down, President Obama roundly condemned the decision  in his State of the Union address on the grounds that “American elections [should not] be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests.” Now is Congress’ opportunity to make good on their objection and to ensure that American elections are bankrolled by the American people.

Photo credit: Nick Ares

No Compromise from Obama on Bush Tax Cuts, Except Dividends

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

President Obama stood his ground on his tax plan during Monday’sCNBC town hall forum, arguing that he can’t make the math work for both keeping the deficit in check and giving away tax breaks to the richest two percent of Americans.  When asked about possibilities for compromise, including cutting rates for households with incomes between $250,000 and $1 million, Obama didn’t flinch and stuck to his talking points.

So it sounds like the President’s position on the Bush tax cuts is one he’s taking to the people on Election Day, rather than taking to the Hill for negotiation and deal-making.  He also brushed off a question about a payroll tax holiday, so it doesn’t sound like that idea will be on the table between now and November either.

Obama did make a strong statement about keeping a portion of the Bush tax cuts that would apply to the wealthiest Americans: reduced rates on income from corporate dividends.  He emphasized that he has proposed a 20 percent cap on both dividends and capital gains taxes

If the Bush tax cuts expire without this change, the highest income brackets would pay 20 percent on capital gains, but dividends would be taxed at marginal rates of 39 percent for the top bracket.  So when Obama mentions this 20 percent cap on dividends, he’s actually proposing a sliver of compromise in the tax cut debate. This appears to be the only part of the Bush tax cuts that he’s willing to extend for the top 3 percent of taxpayers.

I have to think that emphasizing the dividend cuts was one of the key messaging items the White House planned for this forum today.  First, it’s CNBC, so the business and investment audience is going to like the idea.

Second, it’s a cut that Republicans can’t possibly oppose, except as part of their pouting-in-the-corner strategy of demanding all the Bush tax cuts or nothing.

Third and most significant is that this isn’t a new position for the administration, but it’s new that Obama himself is talking about it.

It’s the first time I know of that Obama has really spoken out loud about this issue, even though it was included in hisbudget plan for 2011.  The only time other the administration has said anything about that proposal was when Treasury Secretary TimGeithner mentioned it on CNBC in July.

On the merits, the idea is a good one.  There are some decent arguments for taxing dividends at the same rate as capital gains to prevent the kind of investment bias that might result from taxing one at nearly twice the rate as the other, as I have briefly argued before. And because the bulk of total dividend payments go to those in the top brackets, their tax rates have a disproportionate impact on investment incentives.

Congress has for the most part ignored dividends in the debate about extending the Bush tax cuts, and the administration has done nothing to inject it into the discussion.  Until today, that is.

It will be interesting to see whether the White House actually pursues a legislative push for this cut, or if this is merely defensive posturing without follow-up to appear more business-friendly before a business audience.  Since it doesn’t have any real champions in Congress, my guess is that we may not hear much more about it, unless a prominent member or two decide to latch on to the idea as a moderate position and call the President’s bluff.

It’s Time to Repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

A few events over the last few weeks continue to highlight the importance of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, a policy the Obama administration is on the verge of repealing – that is, provided members of his Senate caucus don’t flip out before Tuesday, when the Senate Armed Services Committee is set to vote on the measure in the defense authorization bill and move it to a full Senate vote.  The swing votes in committee may be Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe (Rs-ME), who have said they’re unsure how they’ll vote.

DADT was always meant as a transitional policy from the Clinton era, born out of a fight the 42nd president picked (and essentially lost) with the military brass.  It’s time to move our military into the 21st century — Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has endorsed its end, as has Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen.  So has Colin Powell.

I worked for the Pentagon for about five years, and I know and worked with homosexual members of the armed forces.  Their orientation never affected their ability to serve, or their subordinates’ ability to respect them.  Countries including Britain, Denmark, and Israel have all realized that being gay and being in the military is a simply a non-issue.

Last week, Jonathan Hopkins, an Army captain honorably discharged this August for being gay, had this to say in the NYT following his forced separation from the military services:

In my case, after the military learned from others that I was gay, I served for 14 more months during investigations and administrative actions to discharge me. Everyone knew, so, essentially, I lived for more than a year in a post-D.A.D.T. work environment.

…

Amid all of that, the unit continued to function and I continued to be respected for the work I did. Many, from both companies I commanded, approached me to say that they didn’t care if I was gay — they thought I was one of the best commanders they’d ever had. And unbeknownst to me, many had guessed I was probably gay all along. Most didn’t care about my sexuality. I was accepted by most of them, as was my boyfriend, and I had never been happier in the military. Nothing collapsed, no one stopped talking to me, the Earth spun on its axis, and the unit prepared to fight another day.

John Nagl, president of the bipartisan CNAS, commented on Hopkins, his former charge, in Defense News:

Jonathan is the third combat veteran I personally know who has left the Army under the terms of DADT. Collectively, they represent almost a decade of combat experience, a big handful of Purple Hearts and Bronze Stars, service as aide-de-camps to general officers and as platoon leaders and company     commanders in combat, and the investment of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds. They have offered blood, sweat, and tears in defense of a nation that discriminates against them for no good reason.

This policy must end.

The cause has even received the attention of Lady Gaga, heretofore known as the spokeswoman of our times, who called for an end DADT at a rally in Collins’ Maine. She’s the most followed person on Twitter, and if she can motivate a few fans to show up, Tweet, and call the Senator, it might just make a difference

The House has already voted to repeal this highly discriminatory policy, and the Senate hangs in the balance.  If the issue is left to the next Congress, there’s no telling if a more conservative Senate would ever get around to it, which is why tomorrow’s vote is crucial. With the rise of the Tea Party and general rightward slant of the conservative movement today, it’s little wonder that Senator Collins is gun-shy about reiterating her support of a DADT repeal.  One hopes she musters the courage to do what’s right.

Photo credit: Enrico Fuente

Lashed to the Mast

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Weeks before the November elections, leaders of the Republican Party’s increasingly dominant right wing are spending nearly as much time fretting over the potential squeamishness of their own party about implementing a radical agenda as they are ensuring they get the opportunity to enact one.

In a CNN interview yesterday, Sen. Jim DeMint, the one-time kooky loner who’s now a Very Big Dog in the GOP, said the GOP would be “dead” if it didn’t keep its promises to repeal health care reform, balance the federal budget and radically reduce spending. Remember he’s the guy who thinks Social Security and Medicare have ensnared Americans in socialism, and likes to call public schools “government schools.”

Another fringe figure who’s suddenly become very relevant, congressman Steve King of Iowa, is frantic in his fears that a Republican House would fail to shut down the government as part of a strategy to repeal health reform. Indeed, he’s asking would-be Speaker John Boehner to sign a “blood oath” to include a health reform repeal in every single appropriations bill, which would have the effect of shutting down the government, just as Republicans tried to do, unsuccessfully, in 1995, in order to impose a budget on Bill Clinton.

This is a sideshow well worth watching. People like DeMint and King are trying to lash their fellow Republicans to the mast of their ship and make them immune to the siren song of the massive popularity of the public programs and commitments they aim to attack: Medicare, Social Security, federal support for educational opportunity, environmental protection, and on and on. It’s an interesting approach on the brink of what many expect to be a big Republican electoral victory, and says a lot about the gap between what Republicans are campaigning on and how they actually intend to govern when in office.

This piece is cross-posted at the Democratic Strategist

Photo credit: Mark Hyre

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.