issue: Politics

The GOP’s Health Farce

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

President Obama hopes his bipartisan health care summit on Feb. 25 won’t degenerate into “political theater.” Too late: the partisan jockeying over health care reform already has turned into a farce worthy of Moliere.

It’s bad enough that Democrats, despite holding the White House and commanding majorities in Congress, can’t pass their top domestic priority. They look as feckless as Moliere’s cuckolded husbands.

But now Republicans are trying to dictate health care policy, despite having been soundly whipped in the last two national elections. As piously as one of Moliere’s hypocrites, they profess their devotion to covering the uninsured and restraining health care costs in a market-friendly way, though somehow they never got around to pushing a serious proposal when they held power.

Republican leaders have warily agreed to attend the summit, for fear that a no-show would cement their image as the party of “no.” But they are telling reporters it will be a waste of time unless Obama agrees to jettison reform bills that have passed both Houses of Congress and start over from scratch.

“Why would they want to keep pushing something that the public is overwhelmingly against?” GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell asked rhetorically after meeting with Obama this week. “Really, right now, it’s up to the President and Speaker Pelosi to start listening to the American people,” chimed in Eric Cantor, the No. 2 House Republican. “If they don’t, there’s not much to talk about.”

They may be the minority party, but Republicans are effectively claiming a new mandate on health reform – from opinion polls.

True, public opinion has turned against the health reform blueprints that emerged after many months of haggling and horse-trading on Capitol Hill. Obama says Americans were turned off by the “process,” but then, he was the one who decided to offer only the most general reform guidelines and let lawmakers fill in the blanks.

But public opinion is mutable, even fickle. Most Americans were strongly for health reform before they were against it. And it’s highly unlikely they oppose it because they’re intimately familiar with the complex provisions of the House and Senate bills. The way they were put together – basically, by paying off powerful interests and hold-out lawmakers – no doubt was a factor, but polls indicate that worries about the economy and jobs were a bigger one.

Public opinion may yet be turned around by a decisive show of political leadership. That’s why Obama is right to keep pressing for reform, even if in the end he has to settle for less than he wants or the country needs. And the coming summit is shrewdly conceived to give Republicans a chance either to win some substantive points – Obama is already talking about adding tort reform to the mix – or to show their overriding motive is to defeat a Democratic president, not fix health care.

In any case, shifting polls, tea parties and a single U.S. Senate victory in Massachusetts don’t give Republicans the right to speak for the country, much less shape the nation’s health care agenda. That would turn a farce into a tragedy.

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

Not Working: Republicans’ Assault on Obama’s National Security Policies

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

A new ABC News/Washington Post poll confirms what we already knew: Republicans may be hammering away at Obama for being soft on terrorism, but the public isn’t listening.

Since the Christmas Day bombing attempt, the percentage of Americans who approve of the White House’s handling of terrorism has actually increased by 3 percentage points, from 53 to 56 percent between November and now (39 percent disapprove). Respondents also gave the president a five-percent edge over Republicans on the question of who is more capable of handling terrorism issues. Public attitudes have shifted, however, on the issue federal courts vs. military tribunals — the number supporting federal courts has slipped a full eight points since the end of last year.

It’s slightly curious that Republicans view terrorism as such a winner, especially because the only effect they’re having is on the electorally dubious issue of which mechanism should be used to try suspects. Even there, the administration has made arguments in favor of federal trials (like the one that sentenced shoe bomber Richard Reid to life) that are only now taking hold.

So why are Republicans continuing to hammer away? I imagine its a bunch of factors. The anti-Obama sentiment has them pushing back on absolutely everything (even if they supported the same policies under Bush), they really believe Obama is a weakling, and they fundamentally misunderstand national security in the 21st century. It’s also an issue that really fires up the conservative base almost as much as taxes, and that will be important to motivate volunteers and donors in an election year.

Take Sarah Palin’s remarks at the Tea Party Convention. She said, “We need a commander-in-chief, not a professor of law.” The truth is that in the fight against terrorism — if we really stand a chance at long-term American security — we need the president to be both. And a clear majority of the public believes he is.

Same-Sex Marriage in Iowa: Safe Until 2014

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Sometimes significant political news stories involve dogs that don’t bark. That’s just happened in Iowa, where Republicans in the legislature have failed to force a vote on a constitutional amendment to overturn the state Supreme Court’s 2009 ruling legalizing same-sex marriage. Under Iowa’s constitution, amendments have to be enacted by two consecutive legislatures (which meet for two years), and then face ratification by voters. So barring some unforeseen development late in the current session, the earliest an amendment could be sent to voters would be in 2014.

Aside from the fact that this gives same-sex marriage a new lease on life, this non-barking dog also preserves the issue as a source of political controversy in Iowa for two more election cycles. But it also means that it won’t be directly on the ballot during the 2012 presidential contest.

Same-sex marriage has become a heavily partisan issue in Iowa, with virtually all Democratic officeholders supporting the Supreme Court decision and virtually all Republicans opposing it. But it’s also a bit of an intraparty issue for Republicans, since elected officials and candidates deemed insufficiently obsessed with efforts to overturn the court decision (e.g., former Gov. Terry Branstad, the favorite in this year’s GOP gubernatorial primary) have faced angry criticism from the Cultural Right. And the issue could spill over into the 2012 Republican presidential caucuses, where Iowa, as always, will have the first say, and where the Cultural Right (viz. Mike Huckabee’s 2008 victory) has always been very strong.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Going Along with the GOP Charade

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Perhaps being snowbound for the third day in a row has left me in an ornery mood, but this 37-second snippet of House Minority Leader John Boehner speaking after yesterday’s jobs bill meeting left me fuming.

Asked to comment on the upcoming bipartisan health care summit that President Obama proposed, here’s what Boehner said:

It’s going to be very difficult to have a bipartisan conversation with regard to a 2,700-page health care bill that a Democrat majority in the House and a Democrat majority in the Senate can’t pass. So why are we going to talk about a bill that can’t pass?

First of all, health care legislation did pass. In both chambers. The House passed its bill. The Senate passed its bill. They were in the process of reconciling their bills when the Senate lost its 60th seat to Scott Brown. Now, because the Republican strategy calls for total obstruction of any major legislation that is not 100 percent Republican, a Democratic majority in the Senate can’t pass whatever emerges from a House-Senate conference even though Dems hold 59 out of a 100 seats. (And Rep. Boehner, it’s “the Democratic majority,” not “Democrat.” But you knew that already.)

But there’s another part to the clip that set me off. It comes in the last few seconds when a reporter outside the frame asks Boehner, “Do you think [Obama’s] sincerely listening to your concerns?” “We’ll see,” Boehner solemnly intones.

Perhaps the most infuriating thing about our discourse today is the pretense among the media and the commentariat that these Republicans are open to discussion — that there actually is a meeting point in the middle, or even right of the middle, where the Republicans finally say, “OK, it’s a deal.” There isn’t. The Republican objective isn’t to shape policy with their own ideas — it’s to make sure policy doesn’t get made at all.

One suspects that many in the media know this. But for some reason, they have to engage in the kabuki theater of pretending that Republicans actually do want to participate in governing, when obstructionism in the pursuit of regaining power is clearly their game plan. Just once I’d like a journalist to ask of Republicans, “You have asked Democrats to drop some of their priorities to achieve compromise. Which of your priorities are you willing to drop?” Or, “If the president accepts your pet provisions for health reform, which of his provisions would you accept?” But in the current media narrative, all the onus to achieve bipartisanship is on Obama and the Democrats. Bipartisanship will be measured by how much they give in to a Republican Party that doesn’t have to budge at all.

Playing Chicken

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

President Obama has now thrown down the gauntlet to Republicans to demonstrate that their alleged willingness to work with him on big national challenges is not just a pose.

On one very high-profile track, Obama has invited congressional Republicans to participate in a public forum on health care reform. After some talk among GOPers of insisting on preconditions like abandonment of the current House and Senate bills, and of any intention of using reconciliation to enact health reform measures in the Senate, it now looks like Republicans will show up. That’s probably in part because a new ABC-Washington Post poll shows Americans blaming the GOP much more than the president for intransigence.

Despite Democratic fears that Obama is going to screw up the highly fragile prospects for final congressional action on health care reform, all he’s publicly said in the way of concessions to the GOP is that he’s willing to take action on medical malpractice insurance reforms if Republicans are willing to get out of opposition to serious action to cover the uninsured. That’s probably not a deal Republicans will seriously consider.

Meanwhile, on another front, the White House is pushing Republicans to make a deal on jobs legislation.

This is a really tricky proposition for Republicans. They’ve spent months attacking any jobs bill as a “second stimulus” bill, which in their vocabulary is a deadly insult. And they’ve certainly boxed themselves into a proposition that any bill significantly increasing budget deficits is a no-go.

But on the other hand, the administration has made it clear that targeted tax cuts for businesses creating new jobs would be the centerpiece of a jobs bill, and it will be difficult for Republicans to reject that in the current environment. At the same time, though, GOPers have consistently argued that across-the-board, not targeted, tax cuts, is what they demand, even though across-the-board cuts benefit big corporations and/or wealthy individuals, and tend to cost a whole lot.

It’s pretty clear the White House is playing chicken with the GOP: offering bipartisan cooperation, but in a way that either exposes Republican self-contradictions and hypocrisy, or makes them finally cooperate on more-or-less the president’s terms. This may represent a revival and intensification by Obama of his controversial “grassroots bipartisanship” strategy, just when most observers in both parties thought it was dead.

The stakes in this game of chicken are very, very big.

Cheney’s Terrorists

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The following is a guest column from Major General Donald Edwards, Vermont Army National Guard (Ret.), who served in the military for 37 years.

Just last week, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair declared with certainty that there will be another terrorist attack aimed at the United States within the next six months. With the Obama administration pursuing record numbers of drone attacks and taking out top al-Qaeda leaders, it’s hard to understand how this could be the case. But the paradox becomes clearer if we take a quick trip back through time to examine the track record of one particular individual: Vice President Dick Cheney.

As a former military officer, it is immensely difficult to speak out against our former vice president. While he was in office, I believed that it was inappropriate to criticize Dick Cheney. But now that he is no longer in government, I am compelled to speak my mind about his disastrous national security policies.

In the days and years following September 11, 2001, Vice President Cheney stood out as the chief architect of a calamitous approach to U.S. foreign policy that resulted in a weakened United States and the recruitment of a new generation of terrorists dedicated to anti-American jihad. The Bush-Cheney contribution to terrorist recruitment is clear from the numbers: In 2000, there were 423 international terrorist attacks. The Iraq War heralded a sharp spike in terrorist attacks, which continued with a 607 percent average yearly increase. Eight years later, there were 11,770 international terrorist attacks, as the terrorists birthed by the Bush-Cheney policies grew up.

Unlike Dick Cheney, who glorifies conflict but has never put his own body on the line, I am a retired military officer. I know firsthand the long list of security threats that our country faces. And I know that Cheney’s reckless strategy, out of touch with today’s threats, made that list longer. The first rule of grand strategy – from Sun Tzu to General Petraeus – is to choose your own battlefield. On September 12, 2001, the United States was in a position to frame the security threats of the new century as the world united against violent, radical extremists. Osama bin Laden, on the other hand, was eager to frame his battle as the West versus Islam. The Bush administration walked onto al-Qaeda’s battlefield and began fighting Osama bin Laden’s war.

As even former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld realized, winning the fight against al-Qaeda requires killing more terrorists than we create. Instead, Cheney served as a prime recruiter for our enemies. Al-Qaeda featured Guantanamo Bay in its recruiting videos, citing its evasion of the Geneva Conventions as “evidence” of American’s lack of moral standing and antipathy toward Islam.

Defeating al-Qaeda turns on human intelligence, which requires careful infiltration, relationship-building, cultural research, and triangulation of information. But conservatives based their intelligence-gathering tactics on Hollywood movies: bust a knee cap hard enough, and the truth will pour out like blood. In reality, interrogators rarely know whether they have the right knee cap — and even if they do, actual intelligence agents know that busting it is likely to yield a string of lies, misinformation, and false leads. Instead of generating information and creating leads, Cheney’s strategy led to an Arab generation growing up on images of Abu Ghraib.

Finally, quashing al-Qaeda requires focusing on the countries where the movement had built relationships and infrastructure. For over a decade, al-Qaeda’s senior leadership had lived in and erected training camps along the Afghan-Pakistan border. Meanwhile, Bin Laden’s roots lie in Yemen, and he repeatedly recruited the radically loyal tribes originating in that country for his riskiest missions. Yet the past administration ignored Yemen and starved Afghanistan for troops in order to launch a war in Iraq, where there were no terrorists. Terrorist attacks spiked following the invasion of Iraq, and have continued to grow since.

For a generation of young Arabs now in the prime terrorist age range of 18-25, September 11 was their first political memory. The Bush-Cheney strategy handed Al Qaeda the colors they needed to paint a false picture of “America versus Islam.” It produced hundreds of terrorists who learned that they could be heroes by fighting the West — the West that tortured and indefinitely detained Arab brethren and killed women and children.

And to think we had an opportunity, in the wake of 9/11, to bring about a smarter, more hopeful strategy. America was unified and ready to sacrifice on September 12. If our leaders had called on the best and brightest to learn Arabic or join the CIA, we would now have a flood of fresh intelligence experts. If they had asked us to declare our independence from oil – demanding that auto companies innovate and asking environmentalists to accept a resurgence of nuclear power – we would have stopped funding the bullets that are now going into terrorist guns.

We have not heard the last from Cheney’s terrorists. We cannot waste another day. We must act immediately to build the covert networks we need to fight terrorists. We must prioritize shutting down Guantanamo — a gift that keeps on giving for Al Qaeda — and not make it a political football. And we must understand that, as we did during the fight against the Soviet Union, claiming the higher ground in the debate is strategically important. Cheney sold America’s greatest weapon – our moral authority and our freedoms — on the cheap. Let’s win it back, before more of Cheney’s terrorists strike again.

Update: The original version of this piece did not include the author’s full rank and title. We regret the error.

Remembering John Murtha

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

I’d be remiss if I let Jack Murtha’s (D-PA) passing go unnoticed.

It’s easy to sneer that Murtha represented the worst of Washington business. While it’s true that Murtha had some extraordinarily close ties to the defense industry, focusing on his dealings at the time of his death misses much of his otherwise extraordinary life story. Not only was he the first Vietnam veteran to serve in Congress, but he had the gumption to join the military twice. It’s true — after serving as an enlisted man in Korea, he went to the University of Pittsburgh on the G.I. Bill, and then became an officer before being shipped off to Vietnam.

But to me, the most impressive part of his military career might have been his stint as a drill sergeant in Parris Island, S.C. Parris Island, you see, is the United States Marine Corps’ boot camp, and I’ve heard plenty of horror stories about the place from my father, a former Marine who lived in fear and dread of flunking out of Officer Candidate School and ending up in the South Carolina swamp. Rep. Murtha may have looked like a teddy bear, but I assure you that he’s caused his fair share of 18-year-olds’ bed wetting.

As a congressman, Murtha endorsed the use of force in Iraq in 2002, but then turned on the Bush administration, saying the campaign was “a flawed policy wrapped in an illusion.” He also did the right thing by speaking out against his own USMC’s excessive use of force in the 2005 Haditha killings. It’s probably for these reasons, as much as anything else, that Secretary of Defense Gates called Murtha “a true patriot” upon his death.

Ah yes, and then there were those ties to the defense industry. I couldn’t sum them up better than my friend Brian Wingfield at Forbes.com:

Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., who died Monday at age 77, was an old-school, dealmaking politician and a master of the earmark. Some watchdog groups, like Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, called him “corrupt.” Murtha just said he was good at his job, and obtaining government money for the folks back home came with the territory.Obtain he did. According to the annual “Pig Book,” a listing of pork projects, published annually by Citizens Against Government Waste, Murtha had a hand in 50 earmarks totaling $132 million–last year alone. The year before, he was responsible for 73 earmarks worth $159 million. Years prior are similar. …

Murtha will undoubtedly be remembered most for his skill at acquiring earmarks, for good and for bad. During the past several years, his reputation was tarred by his association with the PMA Group, a lobbying firm that was the fifth most generous donor to Murtha’s campaigns since 1989. According to press reports, Murtha helped direct $137 million on federal contracts to PMA’s clients, who helped fill the Pennsylvania congressman’s campaign coffers. The Office of Congressional Ethics last year dropped its investigation of Murtha.

Murtha once said, “I know better than those damn people in the White House what needs to be done in my district.” It’s a valid point, but one that is symptomatic of the problem in today’s politics.

Can a Cap-and-Dividend Scheme Pass?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In a new post on his blog, Harvard economist and PPI contributor Robert Stavins surveys the dismal political landscape for cap-and-trade and finds reason to be optimistic. Acknowledging that cap-and-trade as laid out in the Waxman-Markey bill is dead, Stavins surveys the remaining alternatives.

First he looks at the increasingly likely option of a stand-alone energy bill, which as he accurately describes it lops off the best thing about Waxman-Markey (a cap-and-trade scheme) and preserves the worst (a cocktail of standards and subsidies that will do very little at high costs).

Then he takes a look at EPA regulation as mandated by the Supreme Court. Stavins argues that going that route would be “relatively ineffective and terribly costly for what is accomplished.” Moreover, it promises a political backlash, with the EPA’s enforcement becoming the embodiment of regulatory overkill that can be used by the right to defeat sensible climate policies.

But Stavins does like one alternative lurking out there: a so-called “cap-and-divided” system whose appeal lies in its populist politics. Stavins explains:

This could be done with a simple upstream cap-and-trade system in which all of the needed allowances are sold (auctioned) – not given freely – to fossil-fuel producers and importers, and a very large share – say 75% – of the revenue is rebated directly to American households through monthly checks in a progressive scheme through which all individuals receive identical payments.

Such an approach could appeal to the populist sentiments that are increasingly dominating political discourse and judgments in this mid-term election year. Such a system – which would have direct and visible positive financial consequences (i.e., rebate checks larger than energy price increases) for 80% of American households – might not only not be difficult for politicians to support, but it might actually be difficult for politicians to oppose!

Such a system has already been proposed in Congress, with Sen. Maria Cantwell’s (D-WA) Carbon Limits and Energy for America’s Renewal (CLEAR) Act. Also sponsored by Republican Sen. Susan Collins (ME), the bill has the advantage of being bipartisan as well as populist. Stavins warns that changes still need to be made. For instance, the bill restricts the creation of a broad market for CO2 allowances, making it less efficient and needlessly driving up costs. (David Roberts at Grist has a more detailed — and I must say persuasive — critique of the CLEAR Act here.)

In actuality, a cap-and-dividend system as Stavins lays it out is little different from a cap-and-trade system. The main difference is optics. Waxman-Markey has now been (unfairly) painted as an unwieldy sausage of backroom deals and industry giveaways. By calling for auction revenues to be returned to consumers, a cap-and-dividend certainly might be more palatable in a populist period.

But one thing that supporters of cap-and-dividend forget is that Waxman-Markey did not give away free allowances because the bill’s authors like industry. Rather, they did it because they needed industry to buy in. Can a bill that withholds those incentives from utilities and other affected companies actually make it through the legislative process? I have my doubts.

Palin’s Saturday Night Live

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

If you didn’t watch Sarah Palin’s speech at the National Tea Party Convention on Saturday night, you should definitely give it a gander. It was in some respects an unprecedented opportunity for her: a prepared text (obviously her best format), but not one scripted by a campaign (unlike her 2008 Republican Convention address), and guaranteed major media attention. As a private citizen, she was in a position to say pretty much whatever she wanted. Yes, the venue was a bit tricky, because of the widespread criticism of the Tea Party Convention itself, but not remotely as perilous as her resignation speech as governor of Alaska.

She used her own Saturday Night Live opportunity to perform four tasks: general cheerleading for the Tea Party Movement (while making it clear the immediate venue and the controversial for-profit organization that sponsored it was a small piece of that Movement); a quick tour d’horizon of global hot spots to begin addressing one of her most glaring weaknesses, a lack of foreign policy chops; an assortment of crowd-pleasing snarky attacks on the Obama administration, not very original but pretty well-delivered; and an extremely conventional recitation of time-honored conservative themes, punctuated by ritual invocations of the Holy Name of Ronald Reagan.

Anyone who thinks the Tea Party Movement is vastly at odds with the dominant conservative wing of the Republican Party should observe that this speech could have been delivered at a Lincoln Day dinner pretty much anywhere in the country, and would have received the same rapturous audience reaction.

Indeed, the speech is a good illustration of why Palin creates such dramatically different perceptions among different groups of politically active people. To most progressives, every other line in the speech was something of a howler, thanks to the exceptionally unselfconscious way in which she glides over self-contradictions. She genuflected at the altar of constitutional supremacy even as she mocked the president as a law professor. She called for a radical attack on budget deficits while she demanded more tax cuts, often in the same sentence. She repeatedly assaulted the lack of transparency in Democratic policy formulation, but failed to offer any policy prescriptions other than minor (and frankly, stupid) conservative pet rocks like interstate health insurance sales or her own well-rehearsed pet rock of expanding fossil-fuel exploration. She redundantly assailed Wall Street bailouts that she endorsed when they were actually happening. And with every breath, she posed as just another citizen-activist fighting against political elites and media persecution, even though she was a professional politician lifted from obscurity by Washington-based Republican political professionals and then made a national celebrity by constant media attention.

But to conservative ideologues, Palin is simply expounding Revealed Truth, in the uncomplicated manner attributed to the sainted Reagan, and her red meat attacks on Democrats, her allusions to persecution by “elites,” and her pose of independence from the GOP establishment, are all projections of their own feelings, cultivated over many years.

And that’s why having watched Palin’s act in Nashville, I disagree more strongly than ever with those who assert she can’t possibly launch a viable campaign for the presidency in 2012. No, I don’t think she will be elected president, but yes, I think it’s possible she could win the Republican nomination.

To assess this question, you have to appreciate the psychology of movement conservatives at this particular moment of political history. Most of them have believed all along that there is a “hidden majority” of conservatives in America that can only be crystallized by the most rigorous conservative candidates and messages. After 1964, at least, conservatives have attributed every single Republican presidential defeat to a combination of RINO machinations, “moderate” policy prescriptions, and an unwillingness to exploit the opposition’s vulnerability by any means necessary–all mistakes imposed by Republican “elites” who contemptuously betray conservative interest groups and causes. These are the kind of people who started showing up at McCain rallies in the autumn of 2008 to upbraid their candidate for failing to talk about Jeremiah Wright and ACORN, and who empathized viscerally with Palin’s public frustration about the campaign’s unwillingness to “take the gloves off” (a frustration she alluded to in her Nashville speech).

I don’t think most progressives fully appreciate how vindicated conservative activists feel right now. Since the 2008 elections, their party has executed the most remarkable turn away from the political center any losing party has probably ever undertaken. RINOs have been intimidated and silenced; Republican Members of Congress have been whipped into highly disciplined submission; policy positions on issues ranging from health care to climate change to foreign policy that were highly respectable in GOP circles just a few years ago are now “socialist” anathema. And in consolidation of earlier conservative victories within the GOP, legalized abortion is now almost universally considered murder; “moral relativism,” including homosexuality, is regarded as an abomination inflicted on a suffering “real American” population by decadent elites in Sodom and Gomorrah enclaves on the coasts; and any suggestion that Islamic jihadism is less than an Cold War-level existential threat is treated as “hate-America” semi-treason.

And lo and behold, even as Republicans finally take hard-core conservative advice, their electoral prospects are blossoming. A Tea Party ally has won Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat! Even liberal media villains expect a big Republican victory in 2010! With every day, more American are beginning to blame Obama and the Democrats for the economic crisis, and Republican discipline in the Senate ensures he can’t do much about it. And moreover, the most vibrant popular political movement in the country, the Tea Party Movement, is pushing Republicans (and perhaps the country) even further to the right, aiding materially not only in the savaging of Obama, but the ongoing purge of RINOs and “moderate” squishes.

This is the context within which any assessment of Sarah Palin’s immediate political future needs to be conducted. It’s a context in which vast and largely sympathetic media coverage is devoted to an amateurish, financially-questionable convention in Nashville where people like Tom Tancredo and Roy Moore really don’t stand out. It’s a context where Sarah Palin is firmly in the mainstream.

So why wouldn’t this sudden mega-celebrity, who believes her career is the object of divine favor, and who is surrounded constantly with adulation made even more intense by any mockery of her misteps, run for president? Why not take a chance on completely eclipsing Mike Huckabee and utterly destroying Tim Pawlenty in the Right-to-Life dominated caucuses in Iowa, a state where a new Des Moines Register poll shows one-third of all voters supporting the Tea Party Movement?

That’s all a long way off, and a lot could change. 2010 may not after all represent the great gittin’ up morning that conservative expect. At some point, conservative activists may finally get tired of Palin’s maddening lack of specificity, or tumble to the fact that Democratic horror of Palin does not actually represent fear of her general-election appeal. Maybe she really doesn’t want anything other than her current level of fame or her very manageable political work-load. And perhaps her fans will find a new, or old, champion (her Fox colleague Glenn Beck, for example, seems to think Rick Santorum is The Bomb).

But it’s far past time to stop pretending that Palin is just a joke. If her performance in Nashville was taken seriously by the kind of people who tend to dominate the Republican nominating process–and it was–then she’s got a political future that she can only enhance by continuing to pose as the personification of grassroots conservative activism, “you betchas” and all.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

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

Obama Calls a Big Play

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

An onside kick to start the second half may have been the biggest play call of the night, but President Obama’s audacious gambit to jump-start the stalled health care reform effort was not far behind. In an interview with Katie Couric, the president announced that he would like to hold a bipartisan health care summit in front of TV cameras at the end of the month.

Perhaps emboldened by his masterful performance at the televised House GOP caucus retreat — by consensus one of the most compelling pieces of political theater this country has seen — the president goes to the well for the second time in a month.

It’s a brilliant but risky move. The risk comes in putting health care at the forefront of the public agenda when the public would rather fixate on one thing: jobs. That impatience translates into Democratic jitteriness, which could lead to a further decline in legislative support to get something passed. Plus, Obama’s talk of bipartisanship could incense some progressive allies, who at this point are so fed up with Republican obstructionism that they see any attempt to reach out across the aisle as a sign of naivete, even weakness.

But I’m betting that Obama’s play will actually pay off. As Steve Benen notes, it’s a “call-the-bluff moment.” For months now, Republicans have complained that they have been shut out of the process. (False — remember the interminable Senate Finance Committee deliberations? And, let’s be clear, to the extent that they not been included, Republicans themselves closed the door from the outside.) Well, here’s their chance to participate, in as high-profile a setting as they can ask for. Obama’s basically saying, “Fine — you like your ideas so much? Let’s sit down and talk about them for all of the American people to see.”

It has the makings of a no-win situation for the GOP because a) they don’t really have a workable and realistic idea to reform health care and b) it’s much easier to lie about the other side when the other side isn’t there to call you on it. And as Obama demonstrated at the GOP caucus, he has the ability to confront GOP mendacity with equal measures of assuredness, intelligence, and good faith.

You can tell the Republicans are worried — and that they already have the outlines of a strategy. House Minority Leader John Boehner (OH) said in response to the president’s announcement, “The best way to start on real, bipartisan reform would be to scrap those bills and focus on the kind of step-by-step improvements that will lower health care costs and expand access.” But starting over is not an option for Obama. As a White House official said, “We are coming with our plan. They can bring their plan.” And that is how they should continue to frame it.

I wouldn’t put it past the GOP to keep humping the scrap-the-bill note and demand that the only way they can agree to a sit-down with the president is if he starts from scratch. Of course, Obama should call their bluff. Could there be a better image of Republican irresponsibility than a bipartisan summit on health care called by the president, with Democrats and the president exchanging ideas, and all those empty chairs where Republicans should be? Then again, considering how utterly uninterested they are in governing, and how the risk of revealing that fact in a nationally televised forum is too high, not showing up for the game might actually start looking like the less painful option.

Obama’s Regulatory Accomplishments

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute
Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Administrator Cass Sunstein

While virtually all national attention has been focused on the difficult straits of the higher-visibility items of the Obama administration’s legislative agenda (and even there, according to the Brookings Institution’s Thomas Mann, his record has been vastly underappreciated), on the domestic matters that a president actually has some control over, the federal government’s regulatory apparatus, the administration has quietly undone many years of Republican mischief.

That’s the message of an important piece by John Judis that appeared in The New Republic earlier this week.

Judis places Obama’s accomplishments on the regulatory front into three main categories. First he’s appointed (where Republicans in the Senate have allowed him) officials who actually believe in the missions of the agencies they work for, and are qualified for their jobs.

Given the habits of Republican administrations, that’s no small thing:

Reagan chose Thorne Auchter, the vice president of a construction firm, to head OSHA. Bush appointed a mining company executive to head the Mine Safety and Health Administration and a trucking company executive to head the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. To lead OSHA, he named Edwin G. Foulke Jr., a longtime foe of the agency who had advised companies on how to block union organization. Some of the Republican appointees weren’t business types, but ideologues or hacks who were utterly unqualified for their positions. Anne Gorsuch, whom Reagan nominated to head the EPA, was a rising member of the Colorado House of Representatives, where she was part of a conservative group known as the “House crazies.” Michael Brown, whom Bush appointed to run the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), had previously been commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association.

Obama’s approach, says Judis, couldn’t be more different:

[T]he flow of expertise into the federal bureaucracy over the past year has been reminiscent of what took place at the start of the New Deal. For instance, as a replacement for Foulke at OSHA, Obama chose David Michaels, a professor of occupational and environmental health at George Washington University. In 2008, Michaels published a book, Doubt is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health, detailing how businesses had delayed regulations by “manufacturing uncertainty” about scientific findings.

To manage the EPA, Obama appointed a slew of highly experienced state environmental officials. (As Bill Becker of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies explains, state officials are ideally suited for the EPA because they have firsthand experience in how regulations are enforced and how they work.) Obama’s choice to run the agency was Lisa Jackson, a chemical engineer who led the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. Her deputies include the former secretary of the environment in Maryland, as well as the former heads of the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection, the Massachusetts Bureau of Resource Protection, and the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality.

Meanwhile, Obama chose as his Food and Drug Administration (FDA) chief Margaret Hamburg, who achieved renown during the 1990s as health commissioner of New York City, where she developed a program for controlling tuberculosis that led to a sharp decline in the disease. Her number two is a former Baltimore health commissioner who, in 2008, was named a public official of the year by Governing magazine.

Second, says Judis, Obama has decisively reversed the Reagan-Bush 43 habit of undermining regulatory agencies by starving them of administrative funds and personnel:

Even in the face of the recession, he proposed and got funding increases for numerous regulatory agencies–some of them dramatic. He asked for $10.5 billion for the EPA for 2010–a 34 percent jump over 2009, and the first time in eight years that the budget had increased. He also requested a 19 percent increase in the FDA’s budget, the largest in its history; a 10 percent increase for OSHA, which will allow it to hire 130 new inspectors; and increases of 5 percent, 7 percent, and 9 percent for the Federal Trade Commission, the SEC, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Finally, Obama has ended the application by Republican administrations of a skewed approach to cost-benefit analysis of proposed regulations that makes short-term costs to businesses an overriding consideration. His most important step was probably appointing progressive law professor Cass Sunstein to head up the White House “super-agency” that reviews federal regulations, which under Bush became a major obstacle to the ability of regulatory agencies to do their work.

Judis warns that continued progress on this front is one of the little-appreciated stakes involved in this November’s elections:

In 1993, Clinton, too, attempted to revive the regulatory agencies by appointing well-qualified personnel and increasing funding. But, after Republicans took control of Congress in 1994, they managed to cut Clinton’s budget proposals and delay or block the implementation of regulations. If Democrats lose Congress this November, the same thing could happen again.

That’s something for progressives “de-energized” by the events of the last year, and inclined to sit on their hands this election cycle, to keep in mind.

Another Teachable Moment

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) has done a very irresponsible thing that nonetheless offers Democrats a classic “teachable moment” about the true fidelity of Republicans to fiscal discipline. Shelby put a hold on all presidential appointments (70 are pending at present ) until he gets his way on a couple of big projects — one involving a Shelby appropriations “earmark” — benefiting Alabama.

Some may recall that during the 2008 presidential campaign, Republicans talked as though earmarks were the primary cause of the federal government’s budget problems. And here’s one of their own gumming up the entire executive branch over one of them, while also trying to control the exact language of a federal contract on another project to steer money to his own state.

Shelby’s action could also help draw attention to the disgraceful pattern of Republican obstruction of presidential appointments, which has left dozens of federal agencies without key personnel.

“Holds” by senators are an atavistic tradition in the first place. Democrats should not let Shelby get away with the unprecedented step of a “blanket” hold, in order to shake down the administration for earmarked money, even as his party demagogues endlessly about runaway spending. Congressional Republicans should finally begin to pay a political price for their hypocrisy and cynicism on fiscal issues.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

The Right and the GOP: Pushing On An Open Door

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In any highly fluid political situation, you will always find some observers determined to argue that it’s not fluid at all–that underneath the surface, the status quo prevails, and anyone thinking otherwise is naive or poorly informed.

Tuesday night, you just knew that Mark Kirk’s U.S. Senate primary victory in Illinois would be interpreted in some circles as proving that the much-discussed rightward trend in the Republican Party, sped along by pressure from the Tea Party Movement, was actually a mirage. And sure enough, Politico‘s Jonathan Martin published an article today entitled: “Tea leaves: Republican establishment Still Rules.”

Aside from Kirk’s win (more about that in a moment), Martin’s main bits of evidence for his hypothesis are that the Republican National Committee recently rejected an effort to impose an ideological “purity test” on candidates seeking party financial support, and that recent GOP winners like Scott Brown and Bob McDonnell didn’t campaign on divisive cultural issues.

The “purity test” argument would be more compelling if not for the fact that many hard-core conservatives opposed it as insufficiently rigid, ham-handed, or unnecessary. Nobody, but nobody, in the conservative movement is more preoccupied with driving RINOs and “squishes” out of the Republican Party like whipped curs than Red State proprietor Erick Erickson. Yet he opposed the “purity test” as offering ideological heretics a phony seal of approval:

Rome long ago stopped selling indulgences, but conservatives keep right on selling them. Look, for example, at NY-23. The moment Dede Scozzafava signed ATR’s [Americans for Tax Reform] no new tax pledge, she was absolved of all her sins, including voting for 198 tax increases in the New York legislature.

Therein lies the inherent problem with candidates signing off on well meaning pablum — there are no teeth and the party will not serve as its own enforcer.

While I applaud the desire of conservative RNC members to try to put the train back on the tracks, I am afraid this will do what the ATR pledge did in Scozzafava’s case — give a lot of candidates cover to pretend to be conservative.

Plenty of other conservatives opposed the “purity test” on grounds that “grassroots Republicans” were best equipped to police candidates. Some interpreted such rhetoric as indicating a big-tent willingness to tolerate regionally important ideological variations. But as the recent DK/R2K survey of self-identified Republicans illustrated, “regional differences” in the GOP are pretty much a relic of the past in a monolithically conservative party. And nowadays the “grassroots” means conservative activists, who are indeed avid to conduct ideological purification rituals. If there is a significant body of “grassroots activists” fighting to protect the interests of Republican “moderates,” it’s an awfully quiet group.

In general, the “purity test’ furor reminds me of a quip I heard during the Jim Crow era about the relative weakness of the John Birch Society in the South: “Nobody sees the point in joining an organization standing for things everybody already agrees with.”

The argument that the success of hyper-opportunist Scott Brown and stealth theocrat Bob McDonnell “proves” the ideologues don’t have much real power in the GOP strikes me as almost self-refuting. Sure, Brown had a “moderate” reputation in the MA legislature, but that’s not why he became the maximum hero of the Tea Party Movement, whose themes he adopted wholesale. By contrast, McDonnell didn’t need to reassure social conservatives of his bona fides by campaigning on “their” issues; he had proven himself to be “one of them” for many years.

As for Mark Kirk, it’s true that conservative activists don’t like him, and there’s even a chance his Senate campaign will be immensely complicated by a Tea Party inspired third-party effort. But it’s also true he spent much of the primary campaign tacking steadily to the right, flip-flopping on the Gitmo detainee issue, and more dramatically, promising to vote in the Senate against the climate change legislation he voted for in the House. He’s hardly a good example of the weakness of conservatives in the GOP nationally.

More generally, it’s increasingly obvious that what passes for a “Republican Establishment” these days is focused heavily on surrendering to the most immediate ideological impulses of Tea Party and conservative movement activists (who are in fact the very same people in many places) and then coopting them for the 2010 and 2012 campaign cycles. In attempting a takeover of the GOP, the hard right is in many respects pushing on an open door. The RNC chairman, supposedly a “moderate” of sorts, never misses an opportunity to identify himself with the Tea Party Movement. Sarah Palin, who was the party’s vice presidential candidate in 2008, has called for a merger of the Movement and the GOP. Republican Sen. Jim DeMint has argued that they have already more or less merged.

In his piece Martin suggests that the longstanding Republican pedigree of Florida Tea Party hero Marco Rubio somehow proves the “establishment” is still in charge. I’d say it shows that “establishment” is in the process of rapidly surrendering to the “conservative coup” that Martin scoffs at. Charlie Crist, whom Rubio seems certain to trounce in a Republican Senate primary later this year, was without question a major “GOP establishment” figure just months ago, and Rubio was considered a nuisance candidate. Now he’s the living symbol of a “purity test” being applied to Republicans by the “grassroots” to dramatic effect.

Yes, many Tea Party activists continue to shake their fists at the “Republican establishment,” just like unambiguously Republican conservative activists have done for many decades, dating back to the Willkie Convention of 1940. But with some exceptions, they are choosing to operate politically almost exclusively through the GOP, to the “establishment’s” delight.

The emerging reality is that the Tea Party activists are the shock troops in the final conquest of the Republican Party by the most hard-core elements of the conservative movement. It’s apparent not just in Republican primaries, but in the remarkable ability of Republican politicians to repudiate as “socialism” many policy positions their party first developed and quite recently embraced (Mark Kirk’s support for cap-and-trade would have been considered relatively uncontroversial just a few years ago). You can certainly root around and find a few exceptions to this trend, but they are few and far between. And the implicit assumption of Martin’s piece–that the “adults” of the Republican “establishment” will once again tame the wild ideological beasts of their party–is actually dangerous.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

The State of Play on Cap-and-Trade

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Remember cap-and-trade? Progressives now speak of it in hushed, glum tones, the way we do of the recently departed. If the bill was already unlikely to be passed in the wake of a difficult 2009 for Democrats, then Scott Brown’s win all but guaranteed that it wouldn’t be so much as a blip on the Dems’ political agenda in 2010.

Yet there are some out there who continue to hold out hope. Some are even Republicans. Here’s Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) speaking at a D.C. event yesterday:

I don’t think you’ll ever have energy independence the way I want it until you start dealing with carbon pollution and pricing carbon. The two are connected in my view—very much connected. The money to be made in solving the carbon pollution problem can only happen when you price carbon in my view.

So if the approach is to try to pass some half-assed energy bill and say that is moving the ball down the road, forget it with me.

Now, Graham has come out against both the House-passed cap-and-trade bill last year and the bill that passed out of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. But he, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), and Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) are trying to cobble together a compromise that results in some sort of carbon-pricing scheme and, no less important, can get 60 votes.

It’s indisputable that a system that prices carbon is better at curbing greenhouse gas emissions and spurring clean energy development than a stand-alone energy bill with the usual cocktail of subsidies to energy companies – something that some in Congress are now actively pushing. As Bradford Plumer has pointed out, “without a cap on carbon, such a bill might even end up increasing emissions – especially if the proposed new transmission lines merely gave coal-fired plants access to new markets, allowing them to boost output.”

Where’s the administration in all this? President Obama’s budget pointedly left out revenue that an emissions-trading program would have brought in. (Last year’s budget, by contrast, included a revenue forecast of $646 billion over several years from a cap-and-trade system.) The administration insists that the omission shouldn’t be read as a signal of where things stand on cap-and-trade — but it’s sure hard not to. Then again, the budget also includes a $43 million increase for the EPA’s implementation of its carbon endangerment finding, certainly a signal that it intends to move ahead with a Supreme Court-mandated regulatory effort to confront the carbon problem in the absence of legislation.

For his part, President Obama in a town hall appearance in New Hampshire earlier this week gave a strong defense of the concept of pricing carbon to drive incentives for clean energy investments. But he also acknowledged that the Senate might separate the subsidies for clean energy in an energy bill from a carbon-pricing mechanism – which realistically means no cap-and-trade at all.

I understand that the president can’t throw around words like “half-assed.” But a stronger push would be nice. Graham called out an energy-bill-only route for what it is and stood firm on the issue of carbon pricing. It seems like there’s an opening there for the president to make the same argument and embolden Congress to do what’s really needed to spur a clean energy economy and curb greenhouse gases: pass a cap-and-trade system.

Can Republicans Win the Senate?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

With yesterday’s easy primary victory by Mark Kirk in IL, and with the news that former Sen. Dan Coats will leave his lobbying gig to take on Evan Bayh in IN, Republicans are now getting excited about the possibility of retaking the Senate this November.

They should probably chill a bit. Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post breaks down the 10 Democratic seats Republicans would have to win — without losing any of their own — to regain control of the Senate. And while anything’s possible if this turns out to be a “wave” election, running this particular table will be very difficult.

To start with the least likely Republican victories, Chris Dodd’s retirement makes Democratic attorney general Richard Blumenthal a solid front-runner in CT. Republicans must negotiate a difficult primary and then take on one of the most popular politicians in recent Nutmeg State history. Similarly, CA Republicans must get through a tough primary before taking on Sen. Barbara Boxer, one of the more popular politicians in a state that really hates its politicians (in both parties) these days.

Bayh will hardly be an easy mark. The never-defeated former Boy Wonder of Hoosier politics, he’s sitting on $13 million in campaign cash, and has a history of winning big in good Republican years. Meanwhile, Coats has to deal with bad publicity over his 10 years of DC lobbying work, including representation of banks and equity firms. And he’s been voting in Virginia, not Indiana, all that time.

A lot of Republicans seem to be assuming that Mark Kirk will win easily in IL. Only problem is: he’s currently trailing Democratic nominee Alexi Giannoulias in early polls, and will also have to explain some major flip-flops he executed to survive his primary.

I’m probably not the only observer in either party who remains skeptical that former Club for Growth chieftain Pat Toomey is going to win in PA against the eventual winner of the Sestak-Specter primary. Toomey is certainly the kind of guy who will make sure that intra-Democratic wounds heal quickly.

And then there are states which are absolute crapshoots at this point, such as CO, where either appointed Sen. Michael Bennet or former state House Speaker Andrew Romanoff will probably face former Lt. Gov. Jane Norton. The same is true of an open Republican seat in MO, where Democrat Robin Carnahan has been running essentially even with Roy Blunt.

Republican open seats in NH, OH, and KY are hardly safe for the GOP, either.

All in all, it would take an odds-defying “wave” indeed to deliver the Senate to Republicans. And by the very nature of Senate races, which match high-profile politicians usually well-known to voters, “waves” are less likely to control outcomes than in House races. The only real precedent for what GOPers are dreaming of came in 1980, with Republicans improbably won every single close race.

In many respects, the Senate landscape will be much improved for Republicans in 2012. But then we will be dealing with a presidential year, different (and more favorable for Democrats) turnout patterns, and the little problem that the Republican presidential field doesn’t look that exciting (with the possible exception of Sarah Palin, who’s a little too exciting).

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Simmer Down, America

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The headlines make it sound like we’ll all be dead by July…

WaPo: “Officials warn of looming terror risk”
NYT: “Senators warned of terror attack by July”
CBS News: “CIA Chief: Al Qaeda Poised to Attack U.S.”

…but I’d still go ahead planning that BBQ on the 4th, because even if there is an attack, the headlines portray a threat environment that — while serious — probably isn’t as menacingly “looming” as they make it seem.

Here’s the actual exchange between Senate Intelligence Chairwoman Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, CIA chief Leon Panetta, and FBI Director Robert Mueller:

Senator Feinstein: What is the likelihood of another terrorist attempted attack on the U.S. homeland in the next three to six months? High or low? Director Blair?

Blair: An attempted attack, the priority is certain.

Sen. Feinstein: Mr. Panetta?

Panetta: I would agree with that.

Sen. Feinstein: Mr. Mueller?

Mueller: Agree.

That’s a little bit more nuanced than the writers would have you believe. The journalists’ apparent ironclad certainty about an impending terrorist attack distorts the intensely political context surrounding the issue and ignores the degraded threat al Qaeda central poses.

It’s important that the issue was raised during Senator Feinstein’s questioning and not during the intel chiefs’ opening statements. If they brought it up right off the bat, that would imply there was specific intelligence about an ongoing plot. Given the context of this exchange, security heads don’t appear to have anything concrete that is specific and imminent. They’re hedging their bets.

Now Senator Feinstein is right to ask tough questions like this — that’s her job. But if you’re a high-ranking intelligence official, and the senator overseeing your department asks you about the possibility of an attempted attack, who in their right mind would ever say, “Naaah, I think it’s all good. Nothing to worry about here…”? If that’s your answer and there is even a small-scale attempt (like the one on Christmas), then you can kiss your job goodbye.

Finally, we need to put al Qaeda’s attack capabilities in context. Senator Feinstein correctly qualified her question to ask about an attempted attack; it’s a critical word that gets ignored. Because over the next six months, I don’t believe that either AQ’s senior leadership or its international affiliates will regain the logistical competence to attempt a massive attack on the scale of 9/11. Far more likely is the small-time attempt perpetrated by individuals who, as Director Panetta mentioned, have “clean” histories and are — by definition — more difficult to collect intelligence on.

Or to reinterpret the security chiefs’ answers, “Yes, there is the high probability that someone we could never hope to know about will attempt a minor terrorist attack in the United States. It may or may not be successful, depending on how competent and lucky the operator is. To say otherwise would ignore such individuals’ patterns of recent behavior. But another 9/11 — though possible — is far less likely.”