issue: Politics

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

Among Industry, Surprising Support for a Carbon Price

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In meetings I’ve had recently with folks representing industries from automobiles to energy to private equity, I’ve heard it over and over again. They want a price on carbon.

They want it because they want to make money through alternative energy. For that, they need predictability in supporting the companies that take risks and need capital to design and develop alternative fuel technologies.

They want it because they, their children, their grandchildren, their employees and their shareholders, like everyone on the planet, will suffer the externalities of a carbon-dependent economy.

And they want it because they’re good corporate citizens, and they want to do their part in easing the nation toward a lower-carbon future.

The question is whether carbon pricing will get any traction in the coming weeks from a White House that seems more intent on political calibration than on shaping the landscape itself.

Given the dynamism of the carbon-pricing movement, the twin mysteries today are, first, why the president didn’t press harder for what seems to be the consensus, industry-friendly position on carbon — a simple pricing mechanism — in his Oval Office speech last week, and second, whether he will do so in the coming weeks.

The politics of carbon have changed dramatically in recent weeks, as the nation continues to watch the spill billow in the Gulf. (If you haven’t yet done it yourself on your computer, click here for BP’s own mesmerizing and terrifying live feed). A recent, post-BP poll found that 63 percent of Americans support a bill with a carbon price, while only 29 percent oppose it. The environment has also improved for proposals like the “cap-and-dividend” bill recently offered by Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Maria Cantwell (D-WA) (and explained here on P-Fix by Danny Morris), which would price carbon with a net-neutral return to the taxpayers in the form of checks.

Meanwhile, the nation’s leading corporations continue to support a price on carbon. In April, before the spill, three of the nation’s largest oil companies — Shell, ConocoPhillips, and BP (this is even pre-oil spill) — as well as the Edison Electric Institute, a consortium of utilities whose members provide the bulk of the nation’s electricity, all announced their support for the Kerry-Lieberman legislation with a “hard price collar” for the price of carbon (including both a floor and a ceiling).

The fact is that many private corporations want a price on carbon. They want it because they believe the future is headed in a direction where carbon-producing technologies will simply have to be reduced, and they’d rather build their businesses around that future quickly rather than slowly.

However, there was no such leadership last week from the Oval Office. Of the transition from carbon, the president said:

There are costs associated with this transition. And some believe we can’t afford those costs right now. I say we can’t afford not to change how we produce and use energy — because the long-term costs to our economy, our national security and our environment are far greater. So I am happy to look at other ideas and approaches from either party — as long they seriously tackle our addiction to fossil fuels.

This clinical framing scarcely captures the urgency of the task. There is a golden opportunity now finally to get business and clean energy on the same page. The question is whether it will billow by and disperse, like the oil we’re all watching in the Gulf.

Photo credit: Michael Caven’s Photostream

Lieberman’s Cyber Bill Causes Consternation Among Dems

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Late last week, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) unveiled a draft bill that seems to be causing some anxiety among progressives.

Certain provisions in the bill seem to be reasonable – like creating a National Center for Cybersecurity and Communications and an Office for Cyber Policy — and should strengthen American defenses in an increasingly vulnerable climate (particularly as the China cyber threat is on the upswing). But others have split Democrats.

There seem to be three camps — civil libertarians, Democrats on the Hill working on the cyber issue and the White House.

Civil libertarians are concerned about this provision of the bill, which would provide the president with the power to declare a national cyber emergency and essentially compel owners of critical cyber infrastructure to subjugate themselves to the president’s direction. In other words, civil libertarians are making the case that with an emergency declaration, the president could close the Internet.

Lieberman has tried to explain the provision, saying “the government should never take over the Internet.” But his explaination fails to bridge the gap between a complete “taking over” and an ill-defined and vague emergency provision that his bill provides for.

But cyber-congressmen (a term I’m laying claim to) have come out in support of Lieberman’s bill:

In an unusual show of bipartisanship, two prominent senior members of the House panel — California Democrat Jane Harman and New York Republican Peter King — announced plans to co-sponsor and introduce a companion bill in the House to S. 3480, introduced last week by Senators Joe Lieberman (ID-Conn.), Susan Collins (R.-Maine) and Tom Carper (D.-Del.).

“I agree with Mr. King that the Lieberman-Collins bill is excellent,” declared Harman, adding, “I do plan to co-sponsor the bill with him…I think it is an excellent effort. I’m sure it will change as it goes through the legislative process, but I do think it will be good to work with our counterparts in the Senate on this, as we worked with our counterparts in the Senate on the Safe Ports act.”

While supporting tough cyber legislation is certainly laudable, questions of motivation hang in the air. Is support for the bill born of a desire to seek genuine bipartisan compromise, an attempt to pass major legislation that members are responsible for in an election year, or because of the reported overtures to cyber-business? Or all three? Or something different?

Then there’s the White House. Deputy Under Secretary for the National Protection and Programs Directorate for the Department of Homeland Security (there’s a mouthful) Philip Reitinger testified that:

[T]he administration’s review of the bill, which was released last week, is incomplete and could not give a timeline on when this would be done. He mentioned that revisions of the bill should be aware that the president already has certain emergency powers and care should be taken to avoid overlapping the law.

As such, the bill was declined the Obama administration’s endorsement in the hearing. Instead, the deputy suggested that the current Section 706 of Communications Act should be used as a foundation for revisions in the law, as opposed to the creation of a new one.

That part in bold is the upshot — no matter what the support or concerns are, the bill won’t become law unless the administration fully supports it. At this point, that’s unlikely without significant revision.

Photo Credits: Tsakshaug’s Photostream

Just Cops or Teachers, Too?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

A debate among Republican gubernatorial candidates in Georgia this week illustrated just how far the GOP (particularly in the South) has drifted from the impulse that led George W. Bush and John McCain to support comprehensive immigration reform back in the day. Now it’s all about deporting the undocumented pronto, and the only difference of opinion is over how many public employees need to spend their time in the dragnet for illegals.

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Jim Galloway, candidate Eric Johnson, who’s struggling to land a runoff spot, came out for requring both teachers and hospital employees to verify the citizenship status of their patrons. Candidate Nathal Deal professed frustration that few cops in Georgia viewed themselves as immigration enforcement officers, but did draw the line at teachers being enrolled in the chore.

All the GOP candidates, of course, supported the idea of Georgia enacting a law like Arizona’s; this is a position that’s becoming as much a litmus test for southern Republicans as attacking unions. That will become significant nationally in 2012 when the Republican presidential nomination contest moves south.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

So Much for Market Mechanisms

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

If, as appears likely, cap-and-trade legislation is not going to be enacted this year or any other time soon, it represents more than a setback for the Obama administration (or for the environment). It’s also another blow to the high concept of using market mechanisms rather than direct government control to address major public policy challenges.

Cap-and-trade was originally designed, after all, as an alternative to command-and-control environmental regulations, which is why it was once championed by Republicans, particularly during and after its successful use in reducing acid rain in the 1990s.

But as the New York Times‘ David Leonhardt (with an exclamation point from Jonathan Chait) explained this week, Republicans have abandoned cap-and-trade just when it might be most useful, with some former advocates, ironically, embracing command-and-control:

[T]he great economic strength of market systems like cap and trade also happens to be their political weakness. They set prices and allow people to react. In the process, market systems acknowledge that reducing pollution may actually cost a little bit of money.Politicians don’t like to admit this, because voters don’t like it. Accepting higher costs is especially hard when the economy is weak. So Congressional Democrats have been repackaging their energy bills to make them look less and less market-oriented. Senator John McCain, who supported a permit system for carbon as the Republican presidential nominee, no longer does. Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, has reversed his position as well.

What does Mr. Graham now favor? A series of command-and-control regulations. He has introduced a bill with Senator Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican, that would mandate specific standards for cars, trucks, homes and offices. It would also give the energy secretary the power to award loans to companies he thought could do a good job of setting up programs to retrofit buildings. State officials would do the same for factories. The bill, in short, puts more faith in government than the market.

Leonhardt clearly believes that the transparency of cap-and-trade when it comes to costs is its major political flaw. That’s definitely a factor, but I’d argue that something more fundamental is going on. Once Democrats embraced cap-and-trade, Republicans began retreating from it as a simple matter of politics. And this distancing effort has been immensely reinforced by the rightward trend in the GOP during the last few years, in which leaders who simply denied there was any climate change problem, and/or that government had any useful role to play on the issue, have been in the ascendancy. So “cap-and-tax” was demonized and essentially placed off-limits for Republican politicians, to the point where those like Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) and Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) who weren’t quite in the “denialist” camp found it easier to just support direct federal regulation.

We saw a similar dynamic play out on health reform, where a market-based managed competition model long supported by Republicans, and championed quite recently by Mitt Romney, became toxic the moment it was fully advanced by Barack Obama. And even as they savaged ObamaCare as “socialized medicine,” Republicans saw little irony in posing as last-ditch defenders of Medicare, a relic of an earlier Democratic drive for a government-run single-payer system.

On both health care and climate change, it’s not surprising that many progressives are impatient with Obama’s determination to promote market-based approaches that the supposed party of market-based policy, the GOP, will no longer support. But nobody should for a moment mistake the identity of the prime mover in shifting the political ground away from the once-promising “centrist” convergence on using market mechanisms to address public sector challenges. The GOP could have declared partial victory and celebrated the Democratic Party’s abandonment of big government solutions, and then fought it out over the details. Instead, Republicans have burned down every structure on the potential common ground that Americans seem to crave. They may be able to succeed for a while in opportunistically deploring the inability of Democrats to get anything done. But if and when Republicans regain power, they may well discover that the GOP policy arsenal has been emptied by their own hands.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Photo credit: Magnera

A Talking Head Dishes on Fox’s Fair and Balanced Farce

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Jim Arkedis on Fox NewsEvery so often, I’ll get a call from someone over at Fox News to appear as a talking head.

Now, before you scream out a collective “EEEEWWW! GROSS!” let me explain. I work at a smallish think tank, and as the old saying goes, any publicity is good publicity. My connection to Fox was established through a good friend (and conscientious journalist) who works on Fox News Sunday. He introduced me to a handful of other bookers, all of whom have been very courteous, friendly and genuinely appreciative of my contributions.

This started just over a year ago, and I’d estimate that Fox offers me a slot as a talking head on national security issues (oh, and on pirates. Fox LOVES pirate stories) perhaps once every two weeks. Due to scheduling conflicts and the last-minute nature of many of the requests (it’s not unusual to get a 9:00 a.m. call for a 10:30 a.m. appearance), I can do only perhaps half of them. (Click here to see a clip of me talking with none other than Geraldo Rivera [best line from Geraldo, “I agree with Jim”], or here to see me drop some knowledge on an “expert” from the Heritage Foundation [whom several of my friends suggested I ask out. I demurred].)

In the beginning, I was just really happy to get on TV. Call it narcissistic, call it what you will, but I was generally under the impression that I was providing Fox’s viewers with an alternate viewpoint. I understood that “Fair and Balanced” was a joke, but I always believed that I might be able to connect with a small percentage of the ardently conservative audience and give them some honest food for thought. When the White House froze out Fox a few months ago, I thought it was a bad move to all but give up on reaching a large percentage of the news-viewing public. (The White House has since backed down from that stance.) It’s from that perspective that I’ve been engaging Fox. But over the last few times I’ve gone on, I’ve come to realize that in some circumstances, it’s a futile effort.

Just yesterday, I received a request to discuss this op-ed from Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT). In the article, Lieberman dings the Obama administration’s recently released National Security Strategy because it uses the term “violent extremism” to define one of America’s enemies, rather than “violent Islamic extremism.” Lieberman took the omission of one word and turned it into an entire opinion piece.

Here’s where we run into problems. I am happy to go on Fox and discuss the big issues of the day when we’re starting from a neutral position. If the topic is “Let’s discuss Obama’s national security strategy,” that’s fine. But this time, the point of departure was, “Joe Lieberman, who’s a credible voice on national security to Fox’s viewership, says Obama’s national security strategy sucks. Jim, it’s your job to explain why it doesn’t suck.”

That’s a fairly clear illustration of Fox’s m.o. Instead of having an honest debate, Fox chooses an angle on a story (i.e., Lieberman’s critique of the National Security Strategy) that establishes a frame for the discussion. Those frames, more often than not, will have the progressive on the defensive from the start. But by having a progressive on TV, Fox can claim to be “fair and balanced.”

When I objected on these grounds, my Fox booker, whom I like a lot, reiterated that going on TV still provided me the opportunity to get my viewpoint out there. I replied that the interview was framed in such a way that did not allow their audience to be persuaded – and yet my appearance would validate their claim to be fair and balanced. I closed by saying,  “[I]f there are big issues framed from a neutral point of view, I love to talk about them. I just don’t want to be the punching bag on pre-determined outcome.”

So how did the slot I refused to go on turn out? Click here and see for yourself — they only had one guest, from the center-right Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

Consider that my little contribution to unfair and unbalanced.

What’s a President To Do?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As President Obama struggles though a host of problems, from the Gulf oil spill to the refusal of the Senate to support a new jobs bill or a cap-and-trade system, you can hear Republicans repeating a strange refrain that first became prominent in their rhetoric during the health reform fight: this president is arrogant and perhaps even tyrannical for trying to enact the policy agenda that he campaigned on in 2008 in the teeth of Republican and (in some cases) popular opposition.

Jay Cost of RealClearPolitics has been particularly insistent on this line of argument, with “bully” being the latest unlikely epithet employed to attack this embattled president:

For somebody who seems detached from the details of policy and largely uninterested in legislative wrangling, Barack Obama sure does come across sometimes like a political bully. But this is not bullying some obstinate backbench legislator. Instead, this is bullying the American people. With health care reform, he basically told the country that he didn’t care what it thought. The fact that people opposed the bill was proof they didn’t know what they were talking about. Now, apparently, the evolving strategy on energy is the same. Don’t like cap-and-trade? That’s your problem, not his. Plan to vote out Democrats in favor of the idea? Like he cares. He’ll pass it anyway….

Instead of passing unpopular bills through questionable methods over the opposition of the people, maybe the President should get behind proposals that can actually sustain popular support.

Okay, fine, let’s say that Obama should ignore the fact that he was elected on a platform to do all these outrageous things that Jay Cost objects to, and go with the polls which make 2010 “likely voters” the arbiters of what he should do right now. What are those “proposals” the president should “get behind” that “can actually sustain popular support?”

Should he, as he has often been urged by Republicans, forget about “irrelevant” issues like health care costs or climate change and focus strictly on the economy? Let’s say he should; what, specifically, can he do that Republicans in Congress won’t fight tooth and nail? Best I can tell, the GOP’s “strategy” for improving the economy is to slash upper-end taxes while eliminating deficits and debts. This cannot, unfortunately, be done without radical reductions in defense spending, which Republicans do not, by and large, support, or alternatively, big changes in Social Security and Medicare that the public is certain to reject by much bigger margins than health reform or cap-and-trade.

The dirty little secret of Washington right now is that the policies Republicans would follow if they were running things are considerably less popular than those being promoted by Democrats, and as the events of the last year have graphically demonstrated, there is no “half-loaf” compromise approach on major issues that Obama can take that Republicans will accept. So Obama can do what he’s doing, or do nothing. If he’s a “bully” for rejecting complete inaction, then bully for him.

Photo credit: Jurvetson’s Photostream

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.