issue: Politics

On Immigration, Obama Ready to Lead — But Will the Public Follow?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

It’s puzzling that President Obama keeps returning to the combustible subject of immigration. You’d think that, with big financial reform and energy/climate bills hanging fire, he’d have his hands full. And with unemployment stuck at nearly 10 percent, it’s not exactly a propitious time for a national debate over legalizing millions of immigrants who are living and working illegally in this country.

So what gives? Maybe it’s simply that Obama is the son of an immigrant father. Republicans, of course, have a more cynical explanation. They say Obama is throwing a bone to Latino advocacy groups disappointed by his failure to redeem a campaign pledge to move comprehensive immigration reform. Facing a very difficult midterm election, Democrats can’t afford to give Latino voters reasons to stay home.

After the Justice Department sued Arizona this week over a controversial immigration law, the Wall Street Journal accused Obama of being “more focused on branding the GOP anti-immigrant than he is on signing a reform bill.”

It’s true that immigration has opened up a fault line between Republican restrictionists and moderates like former President Bush, who won a substantial chunk of the Latino vote in 2000 and 2004. But give Obama some credit: He’s consistently ignored advice from Washington wise men to postpone politically risky undertakings – like health care and the climate bill – until the economy turns up again. His determination to take on the nation’s biggest problems, rather than “kick the can down the road,” is admirable, if impolitic.

But while Obama may be ready to lead, it’s not clear the public is ready to follow. A new Gallup poll finds Americans closely divided on immigration reform. By a 50-45 margin, they favor halting the flow of illegal immigrants over “developing a plan to deal with immigrants now in the U.S. illegally.” The survey also found that immigration is far from uppermost in voters’ list of concerns.

In a major speech on immigration last week at American University, Obama once again showed a fine instinct for the middle ground. He chided restrictionists who imagine that all 11 million illegal immigrants can simply be rounded up and sent home. But he also criticized immigrant advocates who call for a blanket amnesty for all people here illegally. “It would suggest to those thinking about coming here illegally that there will be no repercussions for such a decision. And this could lead to a surge in more illegal immigration. And it would also ignore the millions of people around the world who are waiting in line to come here legally,” Obama said. And he added: “Ultimately, our nation, like all nations, has the right and obligation to control its borders and set laws for residency and citizenship. And no matter how decent they are, no matter their reasons, the 11 million who broke these laws should be held accountable.”

That kind of moral clarity has been missing from liberal discourse on immigration, and it gives Obama a chance to be heard by Americans worried that the flow of undocumented immigrants across our southern border have eroded U.S. sovereignty and made a mockery of our laws. Once that has been stipulated, it’s easier to engage people in rational discussion about a compassionate way to deal with the millions of illegal immigrants working in our communities.

So far, so good. But Obama’s speech contained two large blind spots. One has to do with developing our capacity to enforce immigration laws in the workplace. After all, what attracts undocumented immigrants is the opportunity to work in the U.S. Until we have reliable systems for establishing the identity and legal status of workers, it will be difficult to hold employers accountable for hiring those who came here illegally.

Second, and even more important, the president seemed oblivious to the fundamental mismatch between U.S. immigration laws and our economy. America needs to import more skilled labor to plug gaps for scientists, engineers and technicians throughout our high-tech, high-wage economy. Our immigration system, however, gives priority not to skills, but to family unification.

Rather than simply urge Congress to take up comprehensive immigration reform where it left off back in 2006, the administration needs to think more creatively about modernizing immigration policy, and aligning it more closely with the requirements of U.S. economic innovation and competitiveness. I’ve offered some ideas along these lines, but more fundamental change is needed.

President Obama’s instincts on immigration are sound, but he needs to bring our policies and laws up-to-date in addition to finding a fair and compassionate way of dealing with people who came here illegally to find a better life.

Holding Romney Accountable on Foreign Policy

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

When a presidential hopeful like Mitt Romney signs a Washington Post op-ed attacking the president for an arms agreement with Russia, there’s a tendency among Democrats to shrug and ignore it. Mitt, we all understand, is a former governor with no foreign policy experience who needs to burnish his credentials in this area, even if it’s only by bloviating. And Mitt, we know, is vulnerable on his right flank, partially because the GOP has decisively moved in a more conservative direction since Romney posed as the “true conservative” candidate in 2008, and partially because his sponsorship of a Massachusetts health reform initiative that’s hard to distinguish from the hated ObamaCare is going to be a constant problem for him in 2012.

So you read Mitt’s op-ed and maybe laugh at the extraordinary retro feeling of it all — you know, all the Cold War hostility to the godless Russkies — and note the many right-wing boxes he checked off, from the ancient conservative pet rock of missile defense, to the ill-repressed desire for war with North Korea and Iran, to the ritual denunciations of Obama for his alleged fecklessness in negotiating with bad people. But initially, few if any Democrats had anything to say about it.

That certainly changed Wednesday, when Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) took to the same WaPo pages to pen a devastating riposte to Romney for getting, well, just about all the facts wrong. After tearing Romney apart on missile defense, on MIRVs, on what the treaty would and wouldn’t let the Russians do, and on the bipartisan support for what Obama’s done, Kerry concluded with this well-placed jab:

I have nothing against Massachusetts politicians running for president. But the world’s most important elected office carries responsibilities, including the duty to check your facts even if you’re in a footrace to the right against Sarah Palin. More than that, you need to understand that when it comes to nuclear danger, the nation’s security is more important than scoring cheap political points.

As it turns out, Kerry was nicer to Romney than was foreign policy wonk Fred Kaplan, writing in Slate:

In 35 years of following debates over nuclear arms control, I have never seen anything quite as shabby, misleading and–let’s not mince words–thoroughly ignorant as Mitt Romney’s attack on the New START treaty in the July 6 Washington Post.

Whether or not Romney’s efforts to display conservative ferocity on foreign policy work with the GOP base, he could pay a price down the road in terms of the impact on people who aren’t hard-core conservative ideologues. Talking to progressives, you generally get the sense that while they would fight Mitt Romney like sin itself if he’s the 2012 GOP presidential nominee, they basically think the man’s sane and relatively competent, and wouldn’t threaten the foundations of the Republic like some possibilities they could name. But a few more rabid op-eds on world affairs like Romney’s latest effort will definitely undermine any latent tolerance for Romney in center-left precincts, and will also provide some target practice in case the endlessly flip-flopping former governor’s act gets him to a general election.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Photo credit: marcn’s Photostream

Southern Republican Focus on Immigration Intensifies

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As regular readers might recall, back in May I did an analysis which predicted that the furor over immigration policy touched off in Arizona would have its greatest political impact not in the southwest or west coast, but in the Deep South, where a combination of new and highly visible Hispanic populations, low Hispanic voting levels, and red-hot Republican primaries would likely bring the issue to the forefront.

Nothing that’s happened since then has made me change my mind about that, though southern Republican unanimity on backing the Arizona law and replicating it everywhere has reduced the salience of immigration as a differentiator in some GOP primaries, most notably in South Carolina (where in any event the Nikki Haley saga eclipsed everything else).

But in Georgia, whose primary is on July 20, immigration is indeed a big issue in the gubernatorial contest, as reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Jim Galloway:

For the next 13 days, all stops are off when it comes to debating the issue of illegal immigration.

The Obama administration’s court challenge to the Arizona law that gives its peace officers the authority to stop and impound undocumented residents is already serving as a stick to a wasp nest in Georgia’s race for governor.

Former congressman Nathan Deal’s first TV ad of the primary season on Wednesday focused on illegal immigration and a promise that Georgia would soon have an Arizona-style law.

On the answering machines of tens of thousands of GOP voters, former secretary of state Karen Handel left a message of endorsement from Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer. Expect to see Brewer at Handel’s side before the July 20 vote.

The climate doesn’t brook dissent. Democrats have been uniformly silent on the Arizona issue.

As it happens, Deal and Handel are battling for a runoff spot. Handel and long-time Republican front-runner John Oxendine are also proposing radical changes in the state tax code, abolishing income taxes entirely, but so far that momentous issue is not getting the kind of attention generated by the action of another state on immigration three time zones away.

Photo credit: Th.omas’ Photostream

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Cross-Fire on Race to the Top

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

One of the great and ironic constants in this age of partisan and ideological polarization has been a tacit left-right alliance hostile to federal education initiatives promoting test-enforced national standards and — in some cases — charter public schools. In fact, one of the more reliable ways to get applause at both liberal and conservative grass-roots gatherings around the country for years now has been to call for the repeal of No Child Left Behind, that unlikely product of cooperation between Ted Kennedy and George W. Bush.

We’re seeing this phenomenon re-emerge with the implementation of the Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative, a competition to reward states for educational innovations including higher academic standards, more openness to public school choice, and stronger performance indicators for teachers. Unsurprisingly, many on the left dislike charter schools, pay-for-performance, and “teaching to the test.” Many of the right are hostile to the very idea of federal involvement in education, and particularly to national standards of any sort; others are lukewarm to charter schools because they are public, and instead favor private-school vouchers and/or oppose “government schools” altogether.

Liberal hostility to Race to the Top was reflected in this recent effort by House Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey to shift emergency funds out of Race to the Top and into teacher layoff prevention. More broadly, there’s notable tension between teachers unions (particularly the NEA) and the administration on education policy.

One of the most interesting examples of conservative infighting on education policy is in Georgia, where lame duck Republican Gov. Sonny Perdue has made his state’s RTT application the centerpiece of his administration’s education program, and also a major part of its strategy to balance the state budget. But when Republican State School Superintendent Kathy Cox abruptly resigned to take a Washington think tank post, after the filing deadline for the post, the GOP was left with two candidates who opposed RTT because they oppose federal involvement in education altogether. So Perdue is backing an independent bid for the post by the career educator he appointed to replace Cox, which has made conservatives quite unhappy.

This is one major policy area where the differences within and between the two major parties are playing out at every level of government. It could be a very rocky ride just ahead for anyone longing for consistency in how our public schools are run.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Photo credit: Kevindooley’s Photostream

Culture War and Peace

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

It’s no big secret that one of the rising smart-money favorites for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination is Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels. Matter of fact, back in January, when National Journal asked 109 Republican “insiders” to rank possible nominees in terms of likelihood, Daniels finished fifth, tied with Sarah Palin and well ahead of Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee. And at the same time, 111 Democratic “insiders” ranked Daniels fourth when asked about the most formidable prospective GOP candidate. And that was all before a slow but steady drumbeat of interest in the Hoosier, culminating in one of those long, hagiographical magazine profiles that often serve as the informal launching pad of presidential runs, this one by Andrew Ferguson for The Weekly Standard.

You can see the logic behind the Daniels-for-president enthusiasm. Virtually unknown among voters outside Indiana, Daniels has none of the baggage accompanying retreads like Gingrich, Huckabee and Mitt Romney, or even fellow-insider-favorite Haley Barbour, much less the lightning-rod Palin. He’s a state official who has never had to cast a controversial vote in Congress, but also has DC street cred from his work in the Reagan White House and his stint as George W. Bush’s first OMB director (where he exited before the inevitable gusher of red ink really exploded). He’s very popular in a state carried by Barack Obama in 2008, and his state’s positive fiscal record stands out sharply against a national landscape of state fiscal disaster. Moreover, as Ferguson’s profile illustrates, Daniels has a moderately quirky but folksy personality that seems a lot more appealing than those of other, dark horses like Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota or John Thune of South Dakota.

Given the newly rediscovered monomania for deficit hawkery among Republicans, buttressed by Tea Party demands for smaller government now, Daniels looks like someone who can credibly wear a green eyeshade at a time when that’s the sexiest look around.

But in the self-same Ferguson profile that exemplified the emergence of Daniels ’12 buzz, the putative candidate himself (who has mastered a stance of disinterested availability for a White House run) tossed a little hand grenade into his own camp:

And then, he says, the next president, whoever he is, “would have to call a truce on the so-called social issues. We’re going to just have to agree to get along for a little while,” until the economic issues are resolved.

Predictably, Mike Huckabee pounced on the “truce” idea (or gaffe, or whatever it was):

“Apparently, a 2012 Republican presidential prospect in an interview with a reporter has made the suggestion that the next president should call for a ‘truce’ on social issues like abortion and traditional marriage to focus on fiscal problems,” Huckabee said. “In other words, stop fighting to end abortion and don’t make protecting traditional marriage a priority.”

“For those of us who have labored long and hard in the fight to educate the Democrats, voters, the media and even some Republicans on the importance of strong families, traditional marriage and life to our society, this is absolutely heartbreaking. And that one of our Republican ‘leaders’ would suggest this truce, even more so,” said Huckabee, a social conservative who is weighing another presidential run.

Christian Right warhorse Tony Perkins chipped in with his own more harshly worded condemnation of Daniels for talk of a culture-war truce:

We cannot “save the republic,” in Gov. Daniels’ words, by killing the next generation. Regardless of what the Establishment believes, fiscal and social conservatism have never been mutually exclusive. Without life, there is no pursuit of happiness. Thank goodness the Founding Fathers were not timid in their leadership; they understood that “truce” was nothing more than surrender.

Other, more sympathetic social conservatives, like National Review‘s Ramesh Ponnuru, wondered if Daniels had simply misspoken or overstated his focus on fiscal issues, but also warned him not to get carried away with fiscal-first rhetoric:

A lot of people will cheer [Daniels’] statement: Truces are usually popular, and most people see the economic issues as more important than the social ones at this moment. But I’m not sure how a truce would work. If Justice Kennedy retired on President Daniels’s watch, for example, he would have to pick someone as a replacement. End of truce.

I also can’t help but think of Phil Gramm’s presidential campaign in 1996. Like Daniels, Gramm was an enthusiastic budget-cutter. Concern about big government was running strong in the years just prior to that election. Gramm had a solid social-conservative record, but consciously chose not to campaign on it; he famously flew out to Colorado Springs to tell James Dobson, “I’m not a preacher.” That approach helped to doom Gramm’s campaign.

Finally, the Washington Post’s resident religious conservative Mike Gerson gave Daniels a chance to backtrack, and the Hoosier allowed as how cultural issues with a fiscal dimension, like the Mexico City rules (and presumably abortion funding generally), would not fall under any “truce.”

Crisis averted? Perhaps; certainly many Republicans will be privately counseling Daniels not to make the same mistake twice, and he’d be smart to take advantage of the Kagan confirmation issue by blowing the dog whistle of determination to appoint “strict constructionist” judges. Meanwhile, he’ll get some credit from the shrinking band of social moderates in the GOP, not to mention libertarians, along with secular MSM types whose skepticism of the Tea Party movement has always been tempered by their obvious relief at the sight of conservatives thumping not Bibles but the Constitution.

But it’s worth noting that Huckabee’s not the only 2012 possibility who is taking a different tack than Daniels on the culture wars. And indeed, the other candidate with a bullet next to his name of late, and in public polls rather than insider buzz (viz. a recent PPP survey of Texas Republicans, which placed him at the top of the 2012 list with or without home-state Gov. Rick Perry), is none other than Newt Gingrich, who seems determined to escalate the culture wars into a full-scale Clash of Civilizations.

The former House Speaker raised some eyebrows in May when his new, just-in-time-for-the-campaign book, To Save America, came out, with the unsubtle subtitle of: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine. Most of the negative commentary involved his comparison of the Obama administration to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and even on that assertion, he’s only partially backtracked, according to a Fox News report:

Gingrich said that he stands by his argument that the “secular-socialist machine” represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, not in the sense of the immorality of those deadly regimes, but as a “threat to our way of life.”

In the book itself, Gingrich calls this “threat” an “existential threat,” a term most often heard in connection with Israeli fears of a genocidal nuclear attack by Iran. And he is very clear that he’s not just fretting over debt or deficit forecasts, but instead is fighting an anti-religious threat to the essence of American culture:

[E]ven more disturbing than the threats from foreign terrorists is a second threat that is right here at home. It is an ideology so fundamentally at odds with historic American values that it threatens to undo the cultural ethics that have made our country great. I call it “secular-socialism.”

The Left has thoroughly infiltrated nearly every cultural commanding height of our civilization.

Not much of a hint of any “truce” in that kind of talk, is there?

So which of these two conservative Republicans best has his finger on the conservative Republican zeitgeist, the green-eyeshaded Daniels or the crusading Gingrich? Will there be peace with the socialist infidels until the books are balanced, or total war until the secularist roots of the socialist “machine” are destroyed once and for all?
It’s probably worth remembering where both of these men–and particularly the nationally-obscure Daniels–would have to begin any path to the White House: in Iowa.

This is not only a caucus states where social conservatives have always had a disproportionate influence (viz. Huckabee’s astonishing 2008 victory over Mitt Romney, who outspent him a gazillion-to-one). It’s also a place where conservative activists are more than a little obsessed with the goal of overturning the State Supreme Court’s legalization of same-sex marriage, a process that cannot, due to the vagaries of Iowa constitutional law, culminate before 2014.

Here’s guessing that a awful lot of Iowa Republican Caucus-goers won’t be ready to smoke any peace-pipes with their secular-socialist–and in their eyes, “sodomite”–enemies real soon, and that Daniels will have a tough sell convincing them otherwise.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Photo credit: Indiana Public Media

A Great Friend

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In case you missed it, there was an indirect exchange between the senior and junior Republican U.S. senators from South Carolina that raises a few questions.

In a long and interesting profile of Sen. Lindsey Graham that appeared in the New York Times Magazine this weekend, it was vouchsafed that the senior senator had described the Tea Party Movement as a marginal, passing fad that “will die out.”

Asked about this comment on Fox News yesterday, the junior senator from South Carolina, Jim DeMint, who has been intervening in state after state to support Tea Party-approved candidates against alleged RINOs, had this to say:

“Lindsey’s a great friend, but he’s wrong on this.”

“The tea party is just the tip of the iceberg of an American awakening of people that want to take back their government,” said DeMint, a vocal leader of the tea party movement. “Americans are going to show in November that they aren’t going anywhere.”

Insofar as DeMint appears to think the Tea Party Movement is coextensive with “Americans,” it might be inferred that doesn’t think his “great friend” Lindsey Graham is actually an American, much less right on this subject.

As for Graham’s intentions, the Times profile can be read in two very different ways. Perhaps he’s already decided to pack it in when his current term ends, and thus doesn’t care what he says. On the other hand, given his obvious pride in mastery of public opinion polls, perhaps he thinks he can flip-flop just enough to stay ahead of the conservative mobs back home who are itching for his destruction, and get re-elected anyway. He’s certainly off to a good start with his abandonment of bipartisan negotiations on several key topics, but he might be advised to be a little more circumspect about the political calculations that guide his conduct.

Photo credit: World Economic Forum’s Photostream

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Recommendations on Curbing the National Deficit

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The following is the is an excerpt from Will Marshall’s June 30 testimony before the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform during the commission’s first public listening session:

Chairman Bowles, Chairman Simpson, and Members of the Commission, I appreciate the opportunity to appear before you to discuss ways to put America on a fiscally sustainable course.

Once unemployment rates start to fall, U.S. policy makers must be prepared to pivot sharply from fiscal stimulus to fiscal restraint. Otherwise, a large and growing federal debt will deplete our capital stock and thereby limit future economic growth. It will divert resources from productive investment to interest payments on the debt, half of which is already held by foreign lenders. And it will shake investor confidence, here and abroad, in the fundamental soundness of the U.S. economy, eventually driving interest rates up and the dollar down.

Despite these dire and entirely foreseeable consequences, too many federal policy makers remain in denial about the need for fiscal discipline. You have taken on what many consider a Mission Impossible: forging a bipartisan consensus on how to defuse the nation’s debt crisis. That’s put you in the crosshairs of extreme partisans of the left and right, who imagine this problem can be solved strictly at the other side’s expense. By refusing either to cut spending or raise taxes, the two have joined in a tacit conspiracy to bankrupt the country.

Common to both is the assumption that you can have fiscal responsibility, or you can have progressive government, but you can’t have both. We at the Progressive Policy Institute have always rejected this false choice. We believe that a progressive government can and must live within its means, and that if it instead chases the illusion of borrowed prosperity, it’s not really progressive.

To paraphrase Franklin Roosevelt, Americans know instinctively that borrowing routinely to consume more than you produce is both bad economics and bad morals. I don’t think it’s an accident that, as public worries about deficits have been mounting, public trust in government has been plummeting.

So there’s a lot riding on your ability to forge consensus behind a bold and balanced plan to restore fiscal responsibility. Let me offer some thoughts on what that plan should include from the perspective of a “progressive fiscal hawk.”

Read the entire testimony.

Good Ol’ Days

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

When House Republican leader (and would-be Speaker) John Boehner claimed the other day that Democrats were “snuffing out the America I grew up in,” it didn’t cause much reaction (or at least far less than his remarks on Social Security and on financial regulation), since it’s the kind of thing conservatives say all the time. But as Mike Tomasky quickly noted, it was a very strange statement if you actually think the problem with Democrats is their addiction to big government and their subservience to unions:

Boehner was born in November 1949. Let’s take a look at the America he grew up in.In the America John Boehner grew up in, the top marginal tax rate on wealthy earners was 90%. It had gone up there during the war, and five, 10, 15 years after armistice, no sizable group, Democrat or Republican, felt any strong urge to lower it.

In the America John Boehner grew up in, private-sector union membership was around or above 30%. Today’s figure is 7%. The right to form a union was broadly accepted. Outside of a few small turbulent pockets, there was no such thing as today’s union-busting law firms hired by management to go into workplaces and intimidate workers.

That’s all very true. But as Matt Yglesias observes, the country was in fact a lot more conservative back then on the cultural front:

[In] many other respects the America of John Boehner’s youth was a much more right-wing country. Gays and lesbians were stuffed deep into the closet, and there was no suggestion that they should be allowed to serve openly in the military or in any other role. African-Americans were subjected to pervasive discrimination in housing and employment, and in the southern states they couldn’t vote or exercise any basic rights–all this backed by the state, and also by collusion between state authorities and ad hoc terrorist groups. It was a whiter country with dramatically fewer residents of Asian or Latin American descent. It was a more religiously observant country, and it was a country in which Jews were far from fully accepted into American life.I’m not nostalgic for that era at all. There are a few areas of policy in which I think we’ve moved backwards since the mid-sixties, but I wouldn’t want to return to an America with almost no immigrants or to an America with a single monopoly provider of telecom services. I’m glad airlines can set their own ticket prices and I’m glad black people can sit in the front of the bus. What is it that Boehner misses?

What indeed? Let’s all remember Boehner’s regret for the passing of the good ol’ days of high taxes, strong unions, Jim Crow and homophobia next time we are told that the GOP wants to declare a truce in the culture wars, or only cares about economic or fiscal issues.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

“Top Two” Illusions

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

One of the more interesting developments on the June 8 “Super Tuesday Primary” day was the approval of a ballot initiative (Prop 14) by California voters creating a “top two” voting system. Similar to the process already used in Washington State, it essentially abolishes party primaries and provides that the top two finishers in a nonpartisan primary will proceed to the general election.

Over at Sabato’s Crystal Ball, TDS contributor and advisory board member Alan Abramowitz of Emory University has examined the claims of Prop 14 backers like Arnold Schwarzenegger that the new system will reduce ideological and partisan polarization in California, and concludes it’s pretty much a nothing-burger. He takes on two particular illusions associated with Prop 14: the idea that party primaries and gerrymandering are responsible for political polarization in California, and the idea that abolishing party primaries will prevent ideologues from winning elections.

On the first topic, his reseach shows:

The most important source of polarization in California politics is the ideological divide between supporters of the two major parties….In both California and the nation, ideological polarization increased considerably over this time period, but it has always been greater in California. That’s because while California Republicans are as conservative as Republicans in the rest of the country, California Democrats are considerably more liberal than Democrats in the rest of the country.

And on the second topic:

In Washington, which began using the new system in 2008, the electoral consequences were minimal. In all 9 of the state’s congressional districts the open primary produced a general election runoff between the Democratic or Republican incumbent and a challenger from the opposing party and in all 9 general election contests the incumbent was victorious. And based on the winners’ voting records in the 111th Congress, the new primary system has had no effect on partisan polarization–the gap between the state’s Democratic and Republican representatives was just as large in the current Congress as it was in the previous one. Expect the same results in California.

So can we just forget about Prop 14? That’s not quite clear just yet. The new system could produce some strange and unintended consequences.

For one thing, making the primary non-partisan could be a major boon to self-funders, who may simply need high name ID to win a general election spot, particularly in California statewide races where the cost of television advertising will be prohibitive for many candidates. For another, the system could theoretically increase partisan polarization. The “top two” system does not provide any particular incentive for winning an actual majority of votes in a primary; the top finisher still must face the runner-up in the general election, where turnout is very likely to be much higher. So the safe thing to do is to nail down a general election spot by appealing to partisans (Prop 14 does not repeal party registration, which means that candidates will know exactly whom to contact with partisan messages), while beginning the general election campaign by going after the other party’s preferred candidate.

Consider this year’s governor’s race. If Meg Whitman were running with her vast fortune in a “top two” system, perhaps she would not have spent quite so much time attacking Steve Poizner for alleged ideological heresy. But on the other hand, she would have had every incentive to go after Democrat Jerry Brown (whom she largely ignored) hammer and tongs to drive up his negatives in preparation for November.

In effect, Prop 14 makes the general election cycle a lot longer. That does not seem to be a particularly smart way to reduce partisan polarization.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Photo credit: Nancyf’s Photostream


The Ever-Shifting RINO Line

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

One of the more interesting byproducts of the Tea Party Movement and the ideological battles going on within the Republican Party is that the tolerance of “movement conservatives” for dissent is really reaching a low level. This was made most painfully evident during the recent Utah Senate primary, when Tim Bridgewater, whose issue positions would have placed him on the far right fringe of the GOP as recently as a couple of years ago, was regularly denounced by supporters of Mike Lee as a RINO, mainly for supporting in the past Republican initiatives that a majority of Republican officeholders also supported.

Now the litmus-testers seem to be training their sights on the GOP’s leadership in the House. Check out the language of this post today from right-wing opinion leader Erick Erickson of RedState:

Eric Cantor and John Boehner — particularly Eric Cantor — have decided they don’t need or want conservatives and, more troubling, do not have any intention of trying to win at the polls by forcing Democrat hands on Obamacare….Last week and on Monday I mentioned Rep. Steve King’s effort to repeal Obamacare and start over. He’s filed a discharge petition. If he gets 218 signatures, Nancy Pelosi must hold a vote.

At the time, I was hearing that Eric Cantor was desperate to undermine Steve King’s efforts and, sure enough, he’s trying. Worse, he has John Boehner helping him….

Today, Eric Cantor and John Boehner are announcing that they’ll sign King’s discharge petition, but they’re also going to go with one by Congressman Wally Herger that would repeal Obamacare and replace it with a Republican alternative….

Tea Party activists and others should pay attention here: Eric Cantor and John Boehner are implementing a strategy that makes it look like they are on your side, but are in fact stabbing you in the back.

Cantor and Boehner are spinning this as a good thing. But it is not. It muddies the water and gives Democrats an escape from being forced to take action.

Any Republican who signs on to the Herger discharge petition should be driven from office for betraying the “repeal” cause. This does nothing but provide cover to people who don’t really want to repeal Obamacare, just nibble at the edges.

And should the GOP take back Congress in November, we should remember this betrayal and the lies that go with it.

So a strategic difference of opinion in which Boehner and Cantor, who are slavishly deferential to the conservative movement, chose not to go along with the routinely demented Steve King becomes a “betrayal” rationalized by “lies” that reveal the two top House GOP leaders as secret allies of the satanic socialists.

Granted, Erickson likes to play the bully-boy and go rhetorically over the top as an intimidation tactic, but this is still pretty amazing stuff. Looks like by November the RINO line will have shifted so far that even Steve King will need to watch his back.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Photo credit: asterix661

RIP Robert Byrd

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

It’s been a tough year for the Democratic tradition in the U.S. Senate, with the loss of Edward Kennedy and the solidification of the Almighty Filibuster as the real power in the institution. But the death of Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia really does turn a lot of pages, while denying the Senate its unrivalled historian and parliamentarian.

Byrd’s tenure alone makes him one of the titans of Senate history: more than a half-century, spanning the administrations of eleven presidents. He was, however, the junior senator from West Virginia until he was 68, and in another reflection of the Senate’s slow pace of change, his career overlapped with only five Democratic leaders — not counting Byrd himself.

When Byrd was first elected to the Senate in 1958, Democrats from his corner of the world were typically hard-core segregationists and equally hard-core New Deal economic progressives. He abandoned and apologized for the former habit, but never the latter. The persistent poverty of West Virginia — for much of career it included some of the very poorest areas of the country — made it one place where politicians never shrank from the full exercise of power on behalf of the home folks, or from celebration of the seniority system that gave Byrd and so many others the clout to serve as equalizers. Byrd became the embodiment of Senate traditions for good reason: they served his constituents well.

He survived wave after wave of efforts in both parties to change the Senate and make it more responsive to national political trends, and might well have survived one or two more had he been born 10 years later. He also survived wave after wave of efforts to bend Congress to the will of presidents of both parties, and in that respect was more consistent than most of his colleagues in both parties.

In this era of political turbulence and simmering resentment of professional politicians, it’s unlikely America will ever see another senator like him. And so in a very real sense a big part of national history will go to the grave with him. His distinctive and authoritative voice will be missed, and may he rest in peace.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Photo credit: cliff1066™’s Photostream

Ancient History

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Bruce Bartlett has a column up in today’s Fiscal Times that drills home just how far the Republican Party has veered from the center over the last few years. Bartlett recounts the story of the 1990 budget deal, which saw President George H.W. Bush reach across the aisle and strike a compromise with Democrats in an effort to shrink the deficit. The compromise on Bush’s end is, of course, now legendary: a violation of his “read my lips” pledge during the 1988 campaign that there would be no new taxes.

Working with Democratic majorities in both houses, the president knew that getting through measures on the spending side of the ledger would require some concessions on his part. Bartlett sums up the outcome of the budget negotiations:

Budget negotiations finally concluded in late September. The final deal cut spending by $324 billion over five years and raised revenues by $159 billion. The most politically toxic part of the deal, as far as congressional Republicans were concerned, involved an increase in the top statutory income tax rate to 31 percent from 28 percent, which had been established by the Tax Reform Act of 1986. The top rate had been 50 percent from 1981 to 1986 and 70 percent from 1965 to 1980.

More importantly, the deal contained powerful mechanisms for controlling future deficits. In particular, a strong pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) rule required that new spending or tax cuts had to be offset by spending cuts or tax increases. There were also caps on discretionary spending that were to be enforced by automatic spending cuts.

The conservative base, of course, went ballistic. Their opposition was reflected in the House of Representatives, where 163 Republicans voted against the budget, while only 10 voted for it. The Senate was a little better — half of Republicans approved the deal. These days, getting half of the Republican Senate caucus to go along with anything the Democratic majority pushes would be a minor miracle.

The consequences of Bush’s budget deal are well known. The violation of his tax pledge would prove to be a devastating weapon for political opponents in the 1992 campaign. But the economic consequences are less heralded. President Clinton deserves credit for bringing sanity and surpluses to the budget in the 1990s, but budget experts agree that his predecessor’s budget deal contributed to that achievement.

Bartlett quotes the GOP’s tax-cutting commissar, Grover Norquist, to underscore conservative suspicion of budget deals: “Budget deals where they actually restrain spending and raise taxes are unicorns.” Only spending cuts, Norquist argues, are permissible. The way the right is moving these days, we’re more likely to see a unicorn than a GOP leader going against party orthodoxy on taxes.

Photo credit: sdk

What No One Is Paying Attention to in the “Rolling Stone” Article

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The now-infamous Rolling Stone article that earned Gen. Stanley McChrystal a one-way trip out of Afghanistan has attracted attention for what it says about the White House.

And in a way, that’s a good thing.

Because once you get past the name-calling scandal, the article is really a takedown of counterinsurgency strategy and, by extension, a subtle get-out-of-Afghanistan-now message. In an attempt to categorize the debate about whether to adopt a counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, here’s Hasting’s characterization:

COIN, as the theory is known, is the new gospel of the Pentagon brass, a doctrine that attempts to square the military’s preference for high-tech violence with the demands of fighting protracted wars in failed states. COIN calls for sending huge numbers of ground troops to not only destroy the enemy, but to live among the civilian population and slowly rebuild, or build from scratch, another nation’s government – a process that even its staunchest advocates admit requires years, if not decades, to achieve. The theory essentially rebrands the military, expanding its authority (and its funding) to encompass the diplomatic and political sides of warfare: Think the Green Berets as an armed Peace Corps.

[…]

The entire COIN strategy is a fraud perpetuated on the American people,” says Douglas Macgregor, a retired colonel and leading critic of counterinsurgency who attended West Point with McChrystal. “The idea that we are going to spend a trillion dollars to reshape the culture of the Islamic world is utter nonsense.

Or this:

After several hours of haggling, McChrystal finally enlisted the aid of Afghanistan’s defense minister, who persuaded Karzai’s people to wake the president from his nap. This is one of the central flaws with McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy: The need to build a credible government puts us at the mercy of whatever tin-pot leader we’ve backed – a danger that Eikenberry explicitly warned about in his cable.

To sum up, you have a questionable description of COIN, followed by a single opinion from someone whose stated qualifications are that he went to college with McChrystal (who knows if Macgregor has any COIN expertise) deriding the entire concept.

It’s one thing to report on who McChrystal is, what he’s said, where he comes from, and the difficulty of mission he’s trying to accomplish. But it’s quite another to falsely characterize his mission as a Sisyphean task from the get-go. Clearly, the president, having consulted and deliberated for three months, believes that there’s significant reason to hope counterinsurgency can bring about hard-fought American security.

For a better discussion of COIN, I’d encourage you to read papers like this, by David Kilcullen, author of the Accidental Guerilla and an actual COIN expert. In the paper linked above, Kilcullen properly characterizes COIN as difficult and far from a guaranteed success, but forwards a thoughtful framework for how COIN practitioners might organize their efforts to bring about the best chances of sustainable security.

…you may now return to your regularly scheduled name-calling.

Photo credit: The US Army’s Photostream

Big Night For the Right in SC

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As I expected, the cluster of organizations and interests that represent the most conservative wing of the increasingly very conservative Republican Party had some real fun last night in South Carolina’s runoff elections.

Nikki Haley, the Mark Sanford protege who had staked out the “most conservative” territory in her gubernatorial race long before anything was said about her sex life or ethnicity, won the runoff over congressman Gresham Barrett by a two-to-one margin, essentially winning everywhere other than a few counties in Barrett’s upstate base. Similarly, another Sanford protege with a can’t-outconservative-me rep, state legislator Tim Scott, beat Charleston County Councilmember Paul Thurmond by better than two-to-one for an open congressional seat.

I’ve written enough about Haley over the past few weeks; suffice it to say that she won this race the moment her old staffer, blogger Will Folks, accused her of marital infidelity in a way that failed to convince much of anybody but made the entire campaign All About Nikki. And it was especially appropriate that Sarah Palin endorsed Haley just before the Folks furor began; the Haley saga was a pitch-perfect projection of Palin’s own persecution complex–you know, the Good Old Boys and the liberal lamestream media trying to smear a brave Mama Grizzly for telling the simple right-wing truth.

Scott’s victory was equally interesting, and perhaps an even bigger deal for the Republican Right, which will have an African-American spokesman in Congress for the first time since J.C. Watts retired. The symbolism of an African-American defeating the son of Strom Thurmond within shouting distance of Fort Sumter is obviously very striking. But it’s not as though Scott’s win repudiated any aspect of Thurmond’s legacy other than the blatant racism he abandoned by the 1970s; Scott was himself co-chairman of ol’ Strom’s last Senate campaign.

The third great event for South Carolina conservatives was the absolutely humiliating 71-29 defeat of U.S. Rep. Bob Inglis by Tea Party vehicle Trey Gowdy. This result will serve as an enduring reminder to GOP elected officials that The Movement will find someone to run against them if they stray from orthodoxy. Inglis’ fatal act of sacrilege was probably telling fist-shaking protestors at a town hall meeting to stop paying attention to Glenn Beck.

South Carolina has always been a special place for the more radical variety of conservatives. They certainly seemed to have the whole state wired last night.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Photo credit: maryaustinphoto

Follow the Leader

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Congress isn’t always the first place you look for intellectually honest discussion of America’s fiscal dilemmas. Neither party has clean hands, yet each points smudged fingers at the other. How refreshing then to hear Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD) uttering blunt truths rather than partisan cant about America’s exploding debts.

“Unfortunately, we can blame our long-term deficit on policies that are almost universally popular,” the House Majority Leader said yesterday at a forum hosted by Third Way. “We’re lying to ourselves and our children if we say we can maintain our current levels of entitlement spending, defense spending, and taxation without bankrupting the country,” he added.

Hoyer also wondered aloud about the wisdom of permanently extending any of the Bush tax cuts absent a serious plan for long-term deficit reduction. It’s a pertinent question for both Republican anti-tax zealots and President Obama.

Even as they excoriate Obama and the Democrats for ballooning the federal deficit, Republicans insist that all the tax cuts passed in 2001 and 2003 be extended. That would cost a cool $3 trillion over the next decade, but don’t expect the GOP to fill that gaping hole in the federal budget with spending cuts. As Hoyer pointed out, Republicans have run like scalded dogs from Rep. Paul Ryan’s “roadmap” to a balanced budget, which calls for deep cuts in Medicare and Social Security.

But President Obama is in a bind as well. He has set up a fiscal commission to come up with a plan after the midterm election to start unwinding America’s massive debts. Many economists believe such a plan is essential to boost investor and lender confidence in the soundness of the U.S. economy, and to reverse the enormous imbalances in world financial flows.

During the 2008 campaign, however, Obama promised to extend the Bush cuts for the “middle class,” which he defined as families earning less than $250,000 and individuals earning less than $200,000. That promise helped him deflect GOP efforts to brand him as an inveterate tax hiker. But it carries a high price tag: about $1.4 trillion over the next decade according to the Joint Committee on Taxation.

What’s more, the nation’s fiscal outlook has deteriorated dramatically since the campaign. Massive public spending to avert a financial and economic collapse last year could push this year’s deficit to a record $1.7 trillion. The national debt now stands at about $13 trillion, and is on course to reach 90 percent of GDP by 2020 – not far from Greek-style proportions.

America really can’t afford any of the Bush tax cuts right now. Letting them expire would give the fiscal commission more room to devise a balanced package of spending and tax reforms aimed at whittling down our debts.

But with unemployment stuck in the stratosphere, and with Democrats apparently facing sizable losses in the midterm election, it’s hard to ask them to expose middle-class families to higher taxes – especially when Republicans can be counted on to indulge in monolithic, over-the-top demagoguery.

GOP Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell wasted no time in unloading on Hoyer yesterday. “It’s now official. Top Democrats on Capitol Hill are starting to signal their intention to raise taxes on the middle class,” he declared on the Senate floor.

To limit the long-term fiscal impact, centrist Democrats like Hoyer are considering a temporary extension of the middle-class tax cuts. Many liberals, however, are more concerned about the supposed dangers of “austerity” than the nation’s colossal debt burden. In fact, they want to make the cuts permanent now, while Democrats still enjoy big majorities in both Houses.

So chances are Congress will extend the middle-class tax cuts this fall, setting a less-than-inspiring example of restraint for the fiscal commission.

Nonetheless, Hoyer said House Democrats are pushing a budget resolution that would limit discretionary spending; cut deeper than the president’s budget; reinforce PAYGO rules; and commit to a vote on the fiscal commission’s recommendations. It’s a modest down payment on fiscal reform that’s unlikely to suppress demand and throw the economy into a tailspin.

In any case, the contrast between Hoyer’s fiscal realism and the GOP’s denial couldn’t be sharper. Let’s hope Democrats follow their leader.

Photo credit: Center for American Progress Action Fund

That McChrystal Article

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Washington is abuzz this morning with news of an as-yet-unpublished Rolling Stone profile of Gen. Stanley McChrystal. You can read the nastier bits here and here, but let’s just say that we learn that the general and his entourage have some not terribly complementary things to say about Obama, Biden, National Security Advisor Jim Jones, U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry and U.S. Special Envoy to Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke.

Though the full article isn’t out, leaks of the article make the attacks seem more personal rather than professional in nature, though I guess it’s likely that personal animosity is probably an extension of professional differences. And for those scoring at home, some of the attacks aren’t even that clever. No, I don’t think “Biden” sounds anywhere close to “Bite Me.”

The moral of this story is simple: Never, ever let your staff get trapped on a 12-hour bus ride between Paris and Berlin during a volcanic ash eruption with an all-access reporter. Duh. Michael Hastings, the freelance journalist who penned the piece, went on Morning Joe today and dropped that a lot of his material came from a European trip with McChrystal and co. that was extended and forced onto a bus thanks to Eyjafjallajokull (or as the military calls it, “E-15”). In such confined spaces and after such a stressful travel experience, people tend to get punchy and let things slip.

You’d expect that after such a flabbergasting news bomb, McChrystal’s staff would offer a “clarification” or denial or retraction or… something. But instead, there was an apology sent from McChrystal to reporters:

I extend my sincerest apology for this profile. It was a mistake reflecting poor judgment and should never have happened. Throughout my career, I have lived by the principles of personal honor and professional integrity. What is reflected in this article falls far short of that standard. I have enormous respect and admiration for President Obama and his national security team, and for the civilian leaders and troops fighting this war and I remain committed to ensuring its successful outcome.

In other words: it’s all true.

McCrystal and his staff’s comments are certainly beyond the pale, and the profile continues to confirm erstwhile speculation that there are significant fissures within the U.S. team in Afghanistan. First, there was McChrystal’s interview with “60 Minutes” last September, where he dished on the Pentagon’s slow-response and his lack of contact with Obama. Then there was Ambassador Eikenberry’s leak of a strategy memo that resisted McChrystal’s call to increase troop levels. That’s on top of an eyebrow-raising speech in London that got him hauled onto Air Force One for a chat with the president. And now this.

Some are howling that this amounts to insubordination and that McChrystal should be fired. That may be true, and McChrystal is being reeled into D.C. tomorrow to explain himself. At the very least, it’s amazingly dumb public relations. You don’t get to be a flag officer in the U.S. military without being accustomed to the chain of command. And McChrystal and any loose-lipped staff should know that you keep your disagreements private and then execute the orders of the commander in chief. But who knows, maybe that’s not the way McChrystal, an ex-commander of the insular and secretive Special Ops, was used to conducting himself.

So what now? There is, of course, a very good possibility that this will be the end of the road. But that decision isn’t as easy as you might think. For one, Obama is not a knee-jerk politician who reacts instantly to every negative media report. He’s careful, deliberate and won’t be pressured.

Furthermore, this is an issue of national security, not petty politics. The president has to make decisions in the long-term interest of American safety and in consideration of the country’s sons and daughters in harm’s way. So, absent a ridiculous inability to keep things out of the press, changing an otherwise strategically competent theater commander in the midst of a major counterinsurgency campaign may not be the best thing to do at the moment. Obama has to thread the needle between team chemistry in Afghanistan and a PR nightmare to give both Afghanistan and the U.S. the best chances for long-term security.

And it’s with that in mind that any decision to replace McChrystal will be made.

Photo Credit: isafmedia