issue: Politics

What Not to Do in Afghanistan

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Michael Cohen’s new piece in Dissent is a perfect blueprint for a colossal disaster in Afghanistan that would seriously jeopardize American security.

Michael, whose company I very much enjoyed during an ill-fated 72-hour effort to get to Afghanistan as election monitors, argues for a less-ambitious plan for American involvement in Afghanistan. It is deeply flawed.

The very first line, “The United States has been fighting the war in Afghanistan for more than eight years,” hints at the sentiments underlying his views: exhaustion with the war, a desire to end it. The piece makes a pitch for a new way forward in Afghanistan by offering a different strategy, something he calls an “enemy-focused approach.” His strategy calls for incorporating the Taliban into the government, shrinking the size of the Afghan army by some 80,000 troops and abandoning the entire South and East to the Taliban.

Where to begin? I’ve argued time and time again against the possibility of incorporating anything but the Taliban’s foot soldiers into the government. The most succinct argument I’ve seen against it is from Barbara Elias in last year’s Foreign Affairs:

[The Taliban’s] legitimacy rests not on their governing skills, popular support, or territorial control, but on their claim to represent what they perceive as sharia rule. This means upholding the image that they are guided entirely by Islamic principles; as such, they cannot make concessions to, or earnestly negotiate with, secular states.

Then there’s Cohen’s suggestion to scale back the size of the Afghan army, reasoning that 170,000 poorly trained Afghan soldiers trained by Americans are worse than 90,000 “trained to fight like an Afghan army — not an American proxy force.” Huh? Does anyone have a good example of what a model Afghan army looks like? Why does Cohen believe 90,000 is the right number? And why is Cohen so certain that American training efforts will fall flat for 170,000? And, if we did cut it off 90,000, what would we do with the extra 80,000 recruits to whom we’ve given basic firearms skills but have just lost their paycheck and would now feel betrayed by the U.S.?

And finally there is Cohen’s idea of just abandoning the South and East of the country. You know, the Marjas and Kandahars of Afghanistan where the U.S. is now either deeply invested or creating expectations that they’re about to be. Compounding the sense of betrayal that Afghans in those regions might feel (notice a theme?) would be the mistake of offering the Taliban the safe haven they require.

I suspect Cohen’s strategy is merely a fig leaf to preempt the inevitable right-wing cries of “cutting and running.” But while such sound-bite attacks are repulsive, there is a case to be made that Cohen offers his strategy disingenuously. Cohen thinks that “the original goal of the mission has been achieved; al Qaeda’s safe haven in Afghanistan has been destroyed and its Taliban allies pushed from power.” But if that’s the case, why would we need a new strategy — why not just pull out entirely? And why advocate returning the Taliban to power if we’ve already pushed them out of it?

Cohen may be justifiably war-weary — we all are. But I happen to believe what Cohen wrongly calls President Obama’s “rhetorical tricks” about the “risks of an al-Qaeda return to Afghanistan” if we do not create a stable environment that can endure after we leave. And I also think that the counterinsurgency strategy that Cohen curtly dismisses as “a fad” is a sound plan that’s our best shot at lasting security in Afghanistan. Cohen mistakes U.S. gains in Afghanistan for victory and says we can leave now; I see it as proof that what we’re doing is working and that we should keep at it.

Michael, I’m sorry to be so blunt, but if you’re just sick of the war, it would be better to say it straight out and not offer half-baked, ineffective solutions that would seriously jeopardize American and Afghan security. Competent governance is about making really difficult decisions with the best information available. That’s exactly what this White House did with its careful, deliberative process, and that’s why I’m going to trust them on this one.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/soldiersmediacenter/ / CC BY 2.0

Immigration, the Tea Partiers and the GOP’s Future

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

It’s long been apparent that immigration is an issue that is the political equivalent of unstable nitroglycerine: complex and dangerous. It arguably splits both major parties, although national Democratic politicians generally favor “comprehensive immigration reform” (basically a “path to citizenship” for undocumented workers who meet certain conditions and legalize themselves, along with various degrees of restriction on future immigration flows), and with George W. Bush gone, most Republicans oppose it.

It is of most passionate concern, for obvious reasons, to Latino voters, and also to many grassroots conservatives for which widespread immigration from Mexico into new areas of the country has become a great symbol of an unwelcome change in the nation’s complexion. But the fact remains that perceived hostility to immigrants has become a major stumbling block for Republican recruitment of otherwise-conservative Latino voters, which explains (along with business support for relatively free immigration) the otherwise odd phenomenon that it was a Republican administration that last pursued comprehensive immigration reform. (Some may remember, in fact, that immigration reform was and remains a big part of Karl Rove’s strategy for insuring a long-range Republican majority.)

I’m not sure how many progressives understand that immigration policy is a significant part of the narrative of “betrayal” that conservatives have written about the Bush administration — right up there with Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, and big budget deficits. And implicitly, at least, when Republicans talk about “returning the GOP to its conservative principles,” many would make repudiation of any interest in comprehensive immigration reform — or, as they typically call it, “amnesty for Illegals” — part of the litmus test.

This is one issue of many where professional Republican pols are almost certainly happy that Barack Obama is in office right now — they don’t have to take a definitive position on immigration policy unless the president first pulls the trigger by moving a proposal in Congress, and it’s unlikely he will until other priorities are met.

But at some point, and particularly if Republicans win control of the House in November and inherit the dubious prize of partial responsibility for governance, they will come under intense pressure to turn the page decisively on the Bush-Rove embrace of comprehensive immigration reform. And no matter what Obama does, immigration will definitely be an issue in the 2012 Republican presidential competition.

So it’s of more than passing interest to note that the pressure on Republicans to take a national position on this issue has been significantly increased by the rise of the Tea Party Movement.

At 538.com today, Tom Schaller writes up a new study of tea partiers and racial-ethnic attitude in seven key states from the University of Washington’s Christopher Parker. While the whole thing is of considerable interest, I can’t tease much of immediate political signficance from the fragmentary findings that Parker has initially released, beyond the unsurprising news that Tea Partiers have general views on race, ethnicity and GLBT rights that you’d expect from a very conservative portion of the electorate.

But one finding really does just jump off the page: Among the 22 percent of white voters who say they “strongly support” the Tea Party Movement in the seven states involved in the study, nearly half (45 percent to be exact) favor the very radical proposition that “all undocumented immigrants in the U.S. should be deported immediately.” That’s interesting not only because it shows how strong anti-immigrant sentiment is in the Tea Party “base,” but because it embraces a very specific and proactive postion that goes far beyond resistance to comprehensive immigration reform or “amnesty.” The finding is all the more remarkable because it comes from a survey on “racial attitudes”; I don’t know what sorts of controls Parker deployed, but polls that dwell on such issues often elicit less-than-honest answers from respondents who naturally don’t want to sound intolerant.

So if and when push becomes shove for the GOP on immigration, the shove from the Tea Partiers could be especially strong. And that won’t make the GOP happy: Republican elites understand that however bright things look for them this November (in a midterm contest that almost always produces an older-and-whiter-than-average electorate), their party’s base of support is in elements of the population that are steadily losing demographic ground. Beginning in 2012, that will become an enduring and ever-worsening problem for the GOP, and a position on immigration guaranteed to repel Latinos would be a very heavy millstone, just as Karl Rove concluded when he pushed W. to embrace comprehensive immigration reform.

The issue is already becoming a factor in the 2010 cycle. This is most obvious in Arizona, where J.D. Hayworth’s Tea-Party-oriented challenge to John McCain is in part payback for McCain’s longstanding support for comprehensive immigration reform. But it could matter elsewhere as well. You’d think that Cuban-American Senate candidate Marco Rubio would be in a good position to do very well among Florida Latinos. But actually, his potential achilles heel in a likely general election matchup with Democrat Kendrick Meek (who, as it happens, is an African-American with his own close ties to South Florida’s Cuban-American community) is a weak standing among Latinos, particulary the non-Cuban Latino community in Central Florida, attributable in no small part to his vocal opposition to comprehensive immigration reform. Indeed, even if he defeats Meek, if Rubio gets waxed among Florida Latinos, Republicans will have an especially graphic illustration of the continuing political peril of opposing legalization of undocumented workers, even when advanced by a Latino politician.

The real acid test for Republicans on immigration could come in California, the state where in 1994 GOP governor Pete Wilson fatally alienated Latino voters from his party for years to come by championing a cutoff of public benefits for undocumented workers (a far less draconian proposal than immediate deportation, it should be noted). Underdog conservative gubernatorial candidate Steve Poizner has made his campaign all about reviving Wilson’s proposal. If Republican front-runner Meg Whitman can crush Poizner without any accomodation of his views on immigration, it could help her overcome a problem with Latino voters that emanates not only from Democrat Jerry Brown’s longstanding ties to the Latino community, but from the fact that her campaign chairman is none other than Pete Wilson.

In any event, whether it’s now or later, in 2010 or in 2012 and beyond, the Republican Party is going to have to deal with the political consequences of its base’s hostility to the levels of Latino immigration, and to growing demands for steps ranging from benefit cutoffs to deportation of undocumented workers. With the Tea Partiers exemplifying instensely held grassroots conservative demands for a more aggressively anti-immigration posture, even as the political costs of obeying these demands continues to rise, Republicans will be juggling explosives on this issue for the foreseeable future.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/people/vpickering/

Democracy as a Free Lunch for Islamofascists

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As I am sure you have noticed, one of the big conservative talking points in recent months has been that the Obama administration and congressional Democrats despise democracy because they have (sic!) used “revolutionary methods” to (sic!) “cram down” health reform against the manifest wishes of the American people, who wisely oppose socialism. Fortunately, Republicans are determined to help Americans “take back their country” in November.

But at the very same time, bless them, conservatives can’t help but express some long-held negative feelings about this small-d-democratic claptrap. One sign is their great hostility to any efforts to encourage higher levels of voting (though this is typically framed as opposition to “voter fraud,” evidence for which is completely lacking). Another is the Tea Party theory that there are absolute limits on the size and cost of government that either are or should be enshrined in the Constitution or enforced by the states, regardless of the results of national elections. And still another involves periodic bursts of outrage over people who don’t pay income taxes being allowed to vote.

This last meme got a boost very recently when estimates emerged that 47 percent of U.S. households won’t have any 2009 federal income tax liability.

“We have 50 percent of people who are getting something for nothing,” sneered Curtis Dubay, senior tax policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation.

Sean Hannity chipped in with alarums about the implications of “half of Americans not paying taxes.”

One conservative site took the AP story on this data and added this helpful subtitle: “Tax Day Is Just Christmas For Many.”

Another had an even more suggestive title: “Let’s Make You Spend More on Me,” along with a chart showing upward federal spending trends. This interpretation is clearly just a hop, skip and jump from the “culture of dependency” rhetoric most famously expressed by South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer in his speech comparing subsidized school lunch beneficiaries with stray animals who shouldn’t be encouraged with free food. And in retrospect, Bauer showed some unorthodox brilliance in galvanizing conservative anger about socialist “free lunch” redistribution toward kids who are literally receiving free lunches.

Now the various conservative “analysts” of the free-lunch, free-rider phenomenon rarely go to the trouble of acknowledging that most of that lucky 47 percent not owing federal income taxes (which represent less than half of federal revenues) pay high and very regressive federal payroll taxes, not to mention even more regressive state and local sales and property taxes. Nor do they note that most non-federal-income-tax-paying households are either retirees living on savings and retirement benefits or working poor families with kids (the beneficiaries of those child tax credits that conservatives are always promoting as “pro-family” policies). And I’ve yet to see even one concede that the 47 percent figure is a temporary spike attributable to the recession and to short-term tax credits that will expire with the economic stimulus program.

While the reverse-class-warfare subtext of some of the conservative angst about alleged tax-and-benefit freeloaders is pretty clear, there are those who would link it to an even more lurid, culture-war theme. Check out this remarkable weekend post from National Review’s Mark Steyn, who compared our system of “representation without taxation to” — no, I’m not making this up! — Muslim oppression of non-Muslims. Gaze in awe:

United States income tax is becoming the 21st-century equivalent of the “jizya” — the punitive tax levied by Muslim states on their non-Muslim citizens: In return for funding the Islamic imperium, the infidels were permitted to carry on practicing their faith. Likewise, under the American jizya, in return for funding Big Government, the non-believers are permitted to carry on practicing their faith in capitalism, small business, economic activity, and the other primitive belief systems to which they cling so touchingly.

So there you have it: socialism and Islamofascism nicely bound up in the policies of that madrassa-attending elitist, Barack Obama.

However you slice it, the conservative commitment to democracy sometimes seems limited to those “real Americans” who think right and vote right. At a minimum, progressives should not let them combine such attitudes with pious invocations of the Popular Will.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/katerkate/

The Cold War Is Over, But the Nukes Are Still Here

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

President Obama sure is spending a lot of time worrying about nuclear weapons this week. Today’s Nuclear Security Summit – a meeting of over 40 world leaders in Washington, D.C. – caps seven days of highly publicized events on nuclear security.

The attention lavished on atomic weapons feels almost anachronistic, invoking a Cold War-era standoff that now seems so distant. Twenty-five years ago, I was a third grader at St. Joan of Arc in Chagrin Falls, Ohio. Once a month, Ms. Elliot would trot my class into the hallway where we’d kneel down and clasp our hands behind our necks. This wasn’t some strange Catholic school ritual – we were “protecting” ourselves from a Soviet nuclear attack.

While I realize now that this defensive maneuver wouldn’t have kept me safe from a direct hit on the jungle gym, the looming threat of a mushroom cloud over the American Midwest felt real.

It doesn’t today. The end of the Cold War, years of American military dominance and improving, if occasionally frustrating, relations with Moscow have effectively banished the threat of mutually assured destruction. Beyond Russia, it’s nearly impossible to imagine China, perhaps the United States’ “near-peer” military competitor but also its financial Siamese twin, launching its nuclear weapons.

But nuclear security must be important – just glance at Obama’s schedule. Before signing the New START accord with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev last Thursday, his administration released its Nuclear Posture Review, an important document that redefines the way America will use the 1550 deployed warheads New START permits. And today the president is convening the summit of world leaders in Washington, D.C.

It’s not only this week. These events are part of a yearlong effort that began last April when President Obama spoke about his vision of a world without nuclear weapons.

It’s a long-term goal to be sure — Obama has been clear that America would retain its arsenal as long as others did. But it’s hardly a liberal fantasy — conservative icons like former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz have joined forces with mainstream Democrats like former Senator Sam Nunn and Defense Secretary Bill Perry to promote a nuclear-free world.

They’re following the legacy of Ronald Reagan, who nearly signed on to sweeping nuclear restrictions with Mikhail Gorbachev in Iceland in 1986, and George H.W. Bush, who signed the START treaty in 1991.

So with no Cold War threat, what’s the urgency? Why is the president wasting time negotiating with countries that wouldn’t dare attack us anyway?

Here’s why — it’s not state-sponsored atomic destruction that’s the threat. It’s the al-Qaeda operative with a nuclear suitcase. That sounds crazy, right? Then again, we never could have imagined that three airliners could bring down the Twin Towers and slam into the Pentagon. President Obama realizes that a nuclear arsenal in the hands of nation-states still poses a threat, albeit from stateless ones.

How, then, does a stuffy gathering of world leaders at a conference center in Washington, D.C. keep the bomb away from a small-fry terrorist? First, curbing nuclear proliferation depends on the large nuclear powers — U.S., Russia, China, U.K. and France — showing a serious and sustained effort towards nuclear disarmament that convinces the smaller nuclear powers — India, Pakistan and Israel — and nuclear weapons aspirants — North Korea and Iran — to feel comfortable without them. That dialogue needs to start on a big stage, particularly for American allies India and Pakistan, who may want to do the right thing but happen to be mortal enemies.

What’s more, it’s the North Koreas, Irans and Pakistans of the world that stand the greatest chance of selling nuclear technology to the black market’s highest bidder. Getting those countries to swear off nuclear weapons planning is critical. Just ask A.Q. Khan — he might be a hero as the father of the Pakistani A-bomb, but he has also sold nuclear secrets to Iran and North Korea in the 1980s and 1990s for tens of millions of dollars.

We need nation-states to control their nuclear scientists, and getting everyone on the same page — as Obama’s doing — is the first step to achieving that goal.

We are long-removed from cowering in the hallway of my Catholic school in Ohio, but that doesn’t mean the nuclear threat died with the Cold War. It has simply changed. That’s why the Obama administration is spending so much time yanking America’s nuclear security policy into the 21st century.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/travlr/

Turnout Rumblings

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As we inch closer to the November 2010 elections, some of the early indicia affecting turnout are showing remarkable numbers predictive of an unusually high turnout for a midterm election.

Now it should come as no great surprise that when asked by USA Today/Gallup if they are “more enthusiastic than usual” about voting in November, 69 percent of Republicans respond affirmatively. This comports with the general sense that Republicans are getting ready to joyfully snake dance to the polls in November to get rid of the socialist usurpers in Washington and restore the natural order of things. But as Nate Silver has pointed out, the same survey shows 57 percent of Democrats expressing unusual enthusiasm as well — a higher percentage than ever registered before a midterm by voters in either party, until now.

At pollster.com, turnout guru Michael McDonald of George Mason University stares at the data and suggests we could be seeing a historic turnout rates this November, since overall enthusiasm levels are about where they were two years ago. He’s pretty sure turnout will exceed that of the last midterm election, in 2006, which was considered a very good turnout year by historic standards.

Normally high overall turnout in a midterm election would be good news for Democrats, but turnout predictions based on voter enthusiasm must note the advantage GOPers have on that measurement. We’ll see if conservative excitement about November can be sustained at its current high-pitch chattering whine, and if Democrats can maintain or increase their own level of engagement.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Neo-Confederate History Month

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As most readers have probably heard, Virginia’s Republican Governor Bob McDonnell got himself into hot water by declaring April “Confederate History Month,” in a proclamation that did not mention the rather pertinent fact that the Confederacy was a revolutionary (and by definition, treasonous) effort to maintain slavery against even the possibility of abolition.

After the predictable firestorm of criticism, McDonnell allowed that it must have been a mistake not to mention slavery in his proclamation. And then he repeated his rationale for the whole idea, which was, he claimed, simply a matter of promoting tourism in anticipation of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War’s outbreak. Tourism!

I’m sure most conservatives will consider McDonnell’s act of contrition sufficient, while many liberals will cynically conclude the whole thing was a dog whistle to the far Right, much like his earlier and less notorious commemoration of March 7-13 as Christian Heritage Week, in honor of the Christian Right’s revisionist theory that the Founders were theocrats at heart.

But as a white southerner old enough to remember the final years of Jim Crow, when every month was Confederate History Month, I have a better idea for McDonnell: Let’s have a Neo-Confederate History Month that draws attention to the endless commemorations of the Lost Cause that have wrought nearly as much damage as the Confederacy itself.

It would be immensely useful for Virginians and southerners generally to spend some time reflecting on the century or so of grinding poverty and cultural isolation that fidelity to the Romance in Gray earned for the entire region, regardless of race. Few Americans from any region know much about the actual history of Reconstruction, capped by the shameful consignment of African Americans to the tender mercies of their former masters, or about the systematic disenfranchisement of black citizens (and in some places, particularly McDonnell’s Virginia, of poor whites) that immediately followed.

A Neo-Confederate History Month could be thoroughly bipartisan. Republicans could enjoy greater exposure to the virulent racism of such progressive icons as William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson, not to mention Democratic New Deal crusaders in the South like Mississippi’s Theodore Bilbo. The capture of the political machinery of Republican and Democratic parties in a number of states, inside and beyond the South, by the revived Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, would be an interesting subject for further study as well.

Most of all, a Neo-Confederate History Month could remind us of the last great effusion of enthusiasm for Davis and Lee and Jackson and all the other avatars of the Confederacy: the white southern fight to maintain racial segregation in the 1950s and 1960s. That’s when “Dixie” was played as often as the national anthem at most white high school football games in the South; when Confederate regalia were attached to state flags across the region; and when the vast constitutional and political edifice of pre-secession agitprop was brought back to life in the last-ditch effort to make the Second Reconstruction fail like the first.

Bob McDonnell should be particularly responsible, as a former Attorney General of his state, for reminding us all of the “massive resistance” doctrine preached by Virginia Senator Harry Byrd in response to federal judicial rulings and pending civil rights laws, and of the “interposition” theory of nullification spread most notably by Richmond News Leader editor James Jackson Kilpatrick.

Any Neo-Confederate History Month would be incomplete, of course, without reference to the contemporary conservative revival of states’ rights and nullification theories redolent of proto-Confederates, Confederates, and neo-Confederates.

Having flirted with such theories himself, Bob McDonnell probably wouldn’t be interested in discussing them in the context of Civil War history. But that’s okay: A greater public understanding of the exceptionally unsavory tradition that conservative Republicans are following in claiming that states can refuse to accept health care reform would be valuable without an explicit discussion of current politics.

So give it up, governor: If you are going to have a Confederate History Month, at least be honest enough to acknowledge that the legacy of the Confederacy didn’t die at Appomattox.

This item is cross-posted at The New Republic.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/carlwain/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

KickSTART to the 21st Century

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The president got a New START. Now he needs the Senate to ratify it.

This should be a no-brainer. When Presidents Obama and Medvedev signed the treaty, dubbed New START, in Prague today, they were doing a lot more than concluding a dry, complex arms reduction agreement. The accord is a pragmatic and essential first step in strengthening American security.

The Cold War is over, but the weapons remain. Though we no longer fear global thermonuclear war between America and Russia, a nuclear explosion in an American city would be an unimaginable catastrophe. There are still 23,000 nuclear weapons held by nine different nations. Our military and security leaders agree: nuclear terrorism and the emergence of new nuclear states are the greatest threat to our nation. To prevent these threats we have to reduce the global stockpiles, secure all weapons material and block new nuclear-armed nations.

The New START treaty is part of the administration’s effort to develop a comprehensive national defense strategy that focuses on these 21st-century threats. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mullen gave his emphatic endorsement:

Through the trust it engenders, the cuts it requires, and the flexibility it preserves this treaty enhances our ability to do that which we have been charged to do: protect and defend the citizens of the United States.  I am as confident in its success as I am in its safeguards.

That is why this administration worked for a year to secure this follow-on to the 1991 START agreement, which was a legacy of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Those presidents knew, as did Nixon, Kennedy and Eisenhower before them, that sustained attention to arms control reductions made the U.S. stronger and safer.

The New START will make this country more secure in several ways. It lowers the limits on deployed strategic bombs to levels not seen since the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. It also establishes a cutting-edge verification process that allows us to track Russia’s nuclear activities and verify their reductions. Our intelligence agencies will enjoy enhanced monitoring capabilities that will give them greater knowledge of Russian nuclear forces and plans.

We will also gain greater international stability. This treaty is a key step in gaining the global cooperation that we need to prevent nuclear terrorism and the spread of nuclear weapons. It will also help us to box in hostile states like Iran and North Korea by clearly reaffirming the U.S.’s and Russia’s commitment to disarmament, and move other states to take the steps necessary to secure nuclear materials and block nuclear weapons trade and development — steps that are often expensive or cut against the commercial interests of many key nations.

A Bipartisan Issue – But Will We See Bipartisan Support?

This is why New START has broad, bipartisan support from former military and national security leaders. Former Republican Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger and former Democratic Secretary of Defense Bill Perry and Sen. Sam Nunn (D-GA) have lauded the treaty (PDF) as an important step.

But there are problems standing in the way of quick Senate action. For one thing, there are nuclear Neanderthals that remain inside the beltway, clinging to Cold War theories and strategies. And the partisan rancor in Washington has become almost radioactive, with cheap political point-scoring taking precedent over the business of governance. Remember that treaties need to be approved by two-thirds of the Senate — a heavy lift considering the political environment.

Can the U.S. Senate rise above the partisan bluster and Tea Party talking points and focus on what’s good for American national security? The New START is an integral part of a smart, strong and pragmatic nuclear policy plan. Senators should approve this treaty before they take off for summer vacation.

Whitman’s California Buy-Out

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Query: is it possible for a political candidate to spend too much money on too many television ads? California Republican gubernatorial hopeful Meg Whitman seems determined to find out.

Those who read my recent piece on the California governor’s race may recall the amazement with which Golden State cognoscenti are viewing eMeg’s barrage of early ads. It’s not just the size of her ad buys that’s impressive–you can’t, after all, exceed saturation levels–but it’s the timing. Her “introductory bio” ad started running night and day all across California during the Winter Olympics, long before the June primary, and very long before the November general election. If possible, her attack ads on primary opponent Steve Poizner have been even more ubiquitous, and she’s just put up a new “positive” ad that’s very hard to miss.

As political reporting site Calbuzz noted this week, no one really knows if Whitman’s strategy will work:

Two months before the primary election for governor, Meg Whitman’s unprecedented campaign spending — including another cool $20 million tossed in late Monday — has hit the standard quantum limit of politics: its effect on the governor’s race has moved into unknowable territory.To any would-be prognosticator, seer or soothsayer Calbuzz offers this verbum sapienti: Like scientists mulling data from the Large Hadron Collider, we have no idea what the effect of $100-150 million in campaign spending will do in a California statewide election, because we’ve never seen anything like it.

That’s saying a lot, since California was the scene of the 1998 campaign of former airline executive Al Checchi, which broke all the previous spending records. In the end, the Checchi campaign’s torrent of attack ads on Democratic rival Jane Harman appear to have backfired, becoming the main issue in a campaign eventually won by a third candidate, Gray Davis (Davis strategist Gary South memorably described Checchi’s attacks on Harman as a “murder-suicide”).

It’s unclear whether a similar fate could befall Whitman, since she has the luxury of just one significant opponent in each cycle: Poizner in the primary, and Jerry Brown in the general. But if she keeps up her current pace of appearances on the tube, her name ID will soon approach 100 percent, and at that point an undefined but real set of otherwise persuadable voters may get tired of her act, and perhaps wonder if someone so excessive in the spending of campaign dollars is really a good bet to cut state spending, which is her main campaign promise.

You don’t have to have a stake in this campaign to watch Whitman’s experiment in sheer dollar power with a sort of fascinated horror.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

The Greening of Massachusetts

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Much to Mitt Romney’s chagrin, Massachusetts has been in the news a lot recently as the birthplace of President Obama’s new health care reforms. Despite Romney’s protestations to the contrary, Obama’s ideas indisputably grew out of the reforms that the commonwealth enacted a few years ago.

Now it turns out that Massachusetts is also leading the country in another area that will likely become the subject of intense national controversy later this year: environmental regulation and the quest to build a clean economy. In one of America’s oldest and most traditional states, a coalition of business, policy-makers and nonprofits are leading the way in transforming the American economy – and bringing us closer to a clean, green future.

Massachusetts has a distinctive environment that makes clean energy a particularly bright choice. The commonwealth has unusually expensive electricity (from a lack of indigenous coal or natural gas) and a deregulated power market (where utilities do not own power plants).

Recently, PPI convened about three dozen clean tech industry leaders at the beautiful Parker House Hotel in downtown Boston. PPI’s new E3 Initiative held an event keynoted by Massachusetts Secretary of Energy and Environment Ian Bowles and also featuring Nick Darbeloff and Peter Rothstein, president and senior vice president, respectively, of the New England Clean Economy Council.

Secretary Bowles recounted for the audience the advances that have taken place under Governor Deval Patrick. Massachusetts has taken the lead in New England’s Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative covering all major power plants, which caps emissions at 2009 levels through 2015, after which the cap will decline to reduce emissions 10 percent by 2019. Its efficiency programs have been so successful that the state is on track to cut its energy use by 30 percent by 2020. And under the renewable portfolio standard it adopted they have already exceeded their targets. Massachusetts has also built greenhouse gas emission reductions into the state environmental review process, which is leading to greater private investment in green buildings. The state will also provide utility customers with $1.6 billion in incentives to conserve energy at home, including free energy audits and rebates to purchase more efficient appliances.

National leaders looking to Massachusetts for lessons would do well to keep one thing in mind. Just as muscle needs a skeleton for support, structure and politics both matter for environmental regulation. Soon after Patrick was sworn in, and with the cooperation of Massachusetts’ legislative leaders, Massachusetts became the first state in the nation to merge all its energy and environmental agencies (six total) into a single cabinet secretariat with the overall mission of bringing clean energy technology to market, curbing greenhouse gas emissions and achieving energy efficiency.

With that structure in place, Bowles and his team went about achieving their agenda by closely cooperating with legislative leaders in the state House and Senate. Too often American states (or the federal government, for that matter) have seen promising environmental issues die on the vine, as special interests whittle ambitious legislative proposals into pilot projects that fail to achieve the economies of scale and systemic effect necessary for change. In Massachusetts, however, Bowles and his team began working very closely with legislative leaders in 2007, soon after Patrick took office. With a lot of elbow grease and diplomacy, Massachusetts enacted six major energy and environmental laws achieving broad energy reform, greenhouse gas reduction and comprehensive oceans management.

In advance of the battles certain to come this summer in Washington about a carbon control system, the E3 Initiative was proud to showcase Massachusetts’ pioneering work on achieving a clean economy. With smart ideas, proven economic benefits and steady political talent, we can see results instead of gridlock.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/mnsomero/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Warm-Up Act for the Supreme Battle

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As we await word from Justice John Paul Stevens about his retirement plans, conservatives (and particularly the conservative legal activists who live for Court nomination battles) have decided to engage in a sort of warm-up act, or perhaps a show of force, by picking a fight over UC-Berkeley law professor Goodwin Liu’s nomination to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

In a summary of the mobilization over Liu that’s already far along among conservatives, Politico‘s Kasie Hunt suggests the professor’s views (or more specifically, the long paper trail that professors tend to leave) make him symbolically important to his and the president’s enemies:

Why all the fuss over just one among hundreds of federal judicial nominees? Conservatives see Liu as the tip of the spear for the next generation of jurists — if he makes it to the court they fear he could become a leading liberal jurist on property rights, the death penalty, affirmative action, guns and even interpretations of the health care law.

Now it’s fundamental to disputes over the Supreme Court and the Constitution that each side — sometimes fairly, sometimes not — tends to depict the other as aggressors against the status quo ante; I’d personally rephrase Hunt’s characterization of conservative opinion to say that they view a rising legal star like Liu as a conveniently “radical” foil for their own radical constitutional arguments, aimed at rolling back “liberal” Supreme Court decisions dating back at least to the New Deal.

Accordingly, progressives need to go into the fight over Liu not in a defensive crouch over his “controversial” utterances carefully taken out of context from law review articles and interviews, but determined to expose the radicalism of his tormentors. Among the conservative legal beagles who will be leading the charge against Liu are people who are determined to erode the separation of church and state; to undermine the constitutional basis of New Deal and Great Society programs like Social Security and Medicare; and to strip away significant civil liberties and civil rights protections.

Whatever happens to Liu’s judicial ambitions (and it’s worth noting that it’s a lot easier to defeat a circuit court nomination than a Supreme Court nomination), the fight over his nomination should be a warm-up act for progressives as well. As I wrote when word of Stevens’ likely retirement came out, the Supreme Court battle offers progressives a good opportunity to show that the Republican Party is increasingly the captive of people and opinions that won’t much stand the light of day, and whose radicalism is most evident when they begin trying to tamper with the Constitution. I suspect Goodwin Liu’s “controversial” liberalism will embolden them to go hog-wild.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Speedy Elections

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As noted yesterday, the 2012 presidential election cycle is already informally underway, and will get very real the day after the midterm elections on November 2.

By comparison, check out our older cousins in the United Kingdom. Today Prime Minister Gordon Brown set the date for his country’s next general election: 30 days from now.

Now obviously, electioneering in Britain is not totally confined to the formal period of the campaign, but much of it actually does take place in the sprint to election day, and that’s the case in most other democracies as well. It helps illustrate one of the major drawbacks of our own system, in which constitutionally fixed general election dates allow campaigning for major offices to creep back through the calendar relentlessly.

As for the likely outcome of the UK elections, the Conservatives have long led in the polls, which is unsurprising given the long tenure of Labour control (13 years), and the condition of the economy. But the Tory gap over Labour has been shrinking lately, and if it continues to shrink, what looked like an almost certain Tory victory a year ago could turn into a narrow advantage producing a “hung parliament” — i.e., where no party has a majority in the House of Commons. That scenario could create a minority government in which either the Tories or Labour form a coalition with the third-party Liberal Democrats, or if negotiations with the LibDems fail, another quick election.

American Republicans looking to the British elections as a possible harbinger of good things to come here at home should take note of Tory leader David Cameron’s repeated pledged that protecting the National Health Service — a.k.a., “socialized medicine” in the real, not (as with ObamaCare) imaginary sense — will be his “top priority.” Tories have also been blasting Brown for exceesively austere fiscal policies. So a Tory victory, if it happens, wouldn’t exactly be transferable to the U.S.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/secretlondon/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Presidential Field Hockey

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The 2012 presidential cycle doesn’t officially begin until November 3, but the Republican field will start being seriously shaped this week down in New Orleans, at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference. Confirmed speakers include no fewer than nine people who have been “mentioned” as possible presidential candidates: Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, Ron Paul, Mike Pence, Rick Santorum, Haley Barbour and Bobby Jindal. Tim Pawlenty will address the event by videotape. Mitt Romney, who may be playing the traditional front-runner’s game of avoiding appearances with his lilliputian rivals, will be missing; he’s off hawking copies of his book in — two guesses where! — New Hampshire.

Other than the usual straw poll of attendees (with the main question being whether Ron Paul’s young supporters will flood the event like they did at the CPAC conference in February), and the usual informal assessments of the speeches, here are some other sources of intrigue: (1) Will any or all of Mitt’s rivals blast him for prevarication on similaries between RomneyCare and ObamaCare? (2) How many of the presidentials will claim close kinship with the Tea Party Movement? (3) Will any of them formally disclaim candidacy? (4) How bloody will the rhetorical red meat get? (5) Who if any of them will try to get media plaudits for a calm, substantive approach? and (6) Will any new “true conservative” limus tests be laid down?

The New Orleans event could represent quite a presidential field hockey match. And in case you think it’s crazy to be talking about the 2012 presidential race, remember this: it’s just 21 months til the Iowa Caucuses!

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

End of a Delusion

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

It’s certainly taken a while, but as we head towards the Tea Party Movement’s holy day of April 15, it seems to finally be sinking in among the commentariat that these people did not come out of nowhere or arise spontaneously from an aroused populace, but are instead simply the same old conservative Republicans who used to be so boring back in the day. A new poll of the Tea Folk by Gallup seems to have spurred this realization along, though some gabbers may persist in being baffled by the high number of Tea Partiers who self-identify as independents. The Atlantic‘s Marc Ambinder explains it to them:

[I]t’s true that just half of those Tea Partiers surveyed called themselves Republicans. Yes, the lion’s share of the other half say they’re independent. But they’re not: they’re Republican-oriented conservative voters who are dismayed by the direction of the GOP and who don’t want to identify with the party’s brand. That’s not surprising, given how tarnished that brand is. Only 8% identify as Democratic; 7% identify as liberal; 70% percent identify as conservative; two-thirds are pro-life; nearly 90% were opposed to the health care bill.

This is a very old story, one that arguably goes all the way back to the 1940s. At any given moment, a significant number of conservative Republicans don’t want to call themselves Republicans because their leadership is not, in their view, conservative enough. This is one reason why Republican self-identification numbers have chronically undershot Republican votes in actual elections. At particularly difficult moments, conservative Republicans have even threatened to form a third party — as in the mid-1970s, when National Review publisher William Rusher argued that conservatives should leave the GOP to it’s “elitist” establishment and make common cause with Wallacites and other social conservatives in a “producer’s party.” Such threats today are no more unusual, or credible, but do help encourage Republican office-holders to follow their own inclination to hew to the Right.

As the (apparent) novelty of the Tea Party wears off, its familiar outlines should become apparent, except to those with a strong bias in favor of misunderstanding the phenomenon. In an interesting column today, Mark Schmitt of The American Prospect discusses those left-progressives who persist in helplessly hoping for a “populist” alliance with the Tea Folk. Part of the allure, he suspects, involves some progressive self-loathing:

[F]inding allies among Tea Partiers is the equivalent of what finding a black friend was to liberals in the 1960s. It’s a way to get in touch with the real America, to feel a little superior, a little less elitist or isolated, less wimpy, less conformist.But the real America is at least as likely to be found in the 205 million voting age adults who aren’t Tea Partiers as the few hundred thousand who are. And the rest of that real America, with its own passions and anger and economic pain, is probably a more fruitful area to look for allies on real liberal goals that include inclusion and fairness.

In any event, I’m with Ambinder: If pollsters want to keep examining the Tea Folk, it’s time for them to drill a little deeper:

Next time, I’d love for Gallup, or any other pollster, really, to ask self-identified Tea Partiers for their vote histories, for their views on immigration and race, for their views on questions about Obama attributes (is he a socialist?), for their specific views on policy matters (do they support a “fair tax?”).

Moreover, instead of asking Republicans and independents over and over if they might be tempted to vote for a hypothetical Tea Third Party candidate, pollsters might want to focus on the actual major-party preferences of Tea Partiers, since in all but a few scattered contests, that’s what they are going to face at the polls. I say that mainly because of all the delusions surrounding the Tea Party Movement, the one that suggests Democrats will be saved by a mass of third-party candidates associated with said Movement is among the most fanciful. The Tea Folk are systematically dragging the GOP to the Right, and that’s the development that Democrats need to think about exploiting in November and beyond.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

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When Democrats Unite

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Despite the enduring popularity of the “Democrats In Disarray” meme in certain precincts of the chattering classes, the truth is that the enactment of health reform reflected a degree of Democratic unity, resolution, and yes, accomplishment that is becoming a bit hard to ignore. Ron Brownstein’s latest National Journal column gets it straight:

After Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown’s victory in January’s Senate special election, Democrats appeared shaken to the point of panic. But, from President Obama on down, the party has rapidly regrouped–enacting health care reform, virtually daring Senate Republicans to filibuster tougher regulation of financial institutions, and challenging the GOP with last weekend’s White House announcement of recess appointments for 15 nominees stalled in the Senate. Pundits may be pelting the party with predictions of doom in November, but Democrats have apparently decided that the best defense against a resolute Republican opposition is a good offense.

More importantly, improved Democratic morale has made it easier to get some perspective on the last turbulent year, when Democratic defections in Congress were largely limited to House Members from districts that Barack Obama lost in 2008 (defections that shouldn’t be that surprising).

The governing core of the party’s House majority has been members elected from districts that Obama carried in 2008. House Democrats who represent such districts voted 199-8 for final approval of the Senate health care bill last month. Last year, they voted 201-1 for Obama’s stimulus plan, 194-1 for federal tobacco regulation, 191-8 for financial reform, and 189-15 for climate-change legislation. The Democrats elected in districts that preferred Republican presidential nominee John McCain haven’t supported Obama nearly as reliably, but Pelosi has corralled enough of them each time to pass the president’s priorities.In the Senate, the governing core is the 33 Democratic senators elected from the 18 “blue wall” states that have supported the party’s presidential nominees in at least the past five elections. In 2009, these senators collectively recorded a stunning 97 percent party unity score on the index calculated by Congressional Quarterly. Around that axis, Democratic leaders have assembled shifting coalitions of Democrats from states that are more closely divided. On the most-momentous votes — the stimulus plan and the initial health care reform package — every Senate Democrat from either camp backed Obama.

Brownstein concludes that for all the strom and stress of the last year, Obama and congressional Democrats have put together the most impressive record of accomplishment by any Democratic administration since Lyndon Johnson’s, and a degree of party unity that rivals that of Republicans in the early years of George W. Bush’s presidency. Interestingly enough, a considerable proportion of Democratic criticism of Obama has been from those arguing that he is too committed to bipartisanship in the face of ever-more-radical Republican opposition to his entire agenda. This was not a criticism made very often of George W. Bush and his political guru Karl Rove.

The problem for Democrats this November is not so much disunity as it is distraction and disinterest among voters who don’t often show up for midterm elections and who in this difficult period of American history understandably have other fish to fry. That’s why upcoming fights like financial reform and a Supreme Court nomination could be especially important: not only adding to this administrations legacy, but providing relatively unmotivated Democratic and swing voters with a graphic illustration of what could happen to the country if the GOP returns to power.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Iran’s Role in Iraq

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Tom Ricks, author of Fiasco and The Gamble, the two definitive contemporary histories of the Iraq War, has long said that Iran has been the biggest winner since Shock and Awe.

I’ve always been inclined to agree with him, even if there was scant overt evidence to support the claim. Sure, the U.S. military would parade allegedly Iranian-made explosives out to the media to “prove” Tehran’s support of Shi’ite Iraqi militias. And it has long been assumed that the leading figure of those Shi’ite militias, Muqtada al-Sadr, put his tail between his legs and decamped to Iran as soon as the U.S. figured out what it was doing in Baghdad. But for the first time, we have unquestionable evidence of Iran’s waxing influence on the new Iraqi government: They invited (almost all of) them over to play. Or their Shi’ite cousins anyway:

The ink was hardly dry on the polling results when three of the four major political alliances rushed delegations off to Tehran. Yet none of them sent anyone to the United States Embassy here, let alone to Washington. … The Iranians, however, have shown no such qualms, publicly urging the Shiite religious parties to bury their differences so they can use their superior numbers to choose the next prime minister. Their openness, and Washington’s reticence, is a measure of the changed political dynamic in Iraq.

The uninvited fourth major political party was Iraqiya, the largest vote-getter in last month’s election, a largely Sunni party (headed by Ayad Allawi, a secular Shia), which has the first crack at forming a government with Allawi as the new prime minister. This is, of course, provided they can stave off the latest round of politically motivated witch-hunting. Incumbent PM Nouri al-Maliki is fighting for his political life, and has come out swinging. He’s trying to make it as difficult as possible for Iraqiya to capitalize on its victory by having the national election commission — a body Maliki essentially controls — begin to disqualify other Iraqiya candidates on the shaky grounds that they were members of Saddam Hussein’s old Ba’ath Party. When combined with Iran’s efforts to broker peace between the Shi’ite parties, this is the best hope Tehran has of getting a large, friendly, Shi’ite majority and prime minister in Baghdad.

Will it work? It’s obviously way too early to say. The U.S. is trying to toe a razor thin line between respecting a democratic process they created and cultivating the new government (no matter who runs it) against Iranian influence. But while Tehran’s overtures are worrisome to say the least, the U.S. will continue to hold plenty of cards in the poker game of Iraqi politics. That’s because if Mr. Allawi isn’t the next prime minister, the current one will be.

That leads to two consoling final thoughts: the U.S. will continue to have strong pull with whoever is in charge, and is legally scheduled to get out anyway. In essence, Iran’s influence may be increasing, but that doesn’t mean it’s coming at the expense of America’s.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/soldiersmediacenter/ / CC BY 2.0

Exploding a Stimulus “Study”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

It’s considered gospel truth in many conservative circles that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, a.k.a. the “economic stimulus package,” was just a porkfest aimed at buying votes or rewarding Democratic constitutencies at the expense of good, virtuous taxpayers and their grandchirren. In support of this hypothesis, Veronique de Rugy of George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, and a regular contributor to conservative and libertarian magazines and web sites, recently wrote a “study” designed to show that ARRA dollars went disproportionately to districts represented by Democrats and/or that voted for Obama in 2008, regardless of their actual economic needs. De Rugy helpfully touted her study at National Review’s The Corner yesterday, for the edification of those who look to that blog for talking points.

Looks like she should probably have kept the paper to herself. Nate Silver of 538.com took a look at it, and pretty much demolished it today.

Turns out that de Rugy didn’t notice, or didn’t mention, that most of the “Democratic districts” that show up in her study as the top recipients of ARRA dollars happen to contain state capitals. Thus, ARRA spending designed to benefit states as a whole (the Medicaid super-match, school improvement incentives, state infrastructure grants, the state “flexibility” funds, etc.) are attributed by her to individual districts. She also ignored economic indicators showing poverty and local unemployment, which may or may not be correlated with Democratic voting habits, but which certainly indicate actual need.

I hear through the grapevine that de Rugy plans to respond to Nate’s demolition job at some point. If she manages to climb out of this crater, I’ll certainly be impressed.

The larger point, though, is that without Nate’s intervention (and perhaps even after it), conservatives would be gleefully citing de Rugy’s bottom line “findings” as “proof” that ARRA was what they always said it was. She is, after all, an academic thinker, and her “study” is impressive-looking, with lots of footnotes and scatter plot charts. I’m not saying that conservatives are alone in conducting this sort of skewed and deeply flawed “research,” or in citing it without examination. But that doesn’t excuse it for even a moment, particularly when the “researcher” is out there circulating the stuff as agitprop for the chattering classes before the ink is even dry.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jbyoder/ / CC BY-NC 2.0