issue: Politics

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

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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

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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.”

Among the Elephants: Rightward, Ho!

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Daily Kos has just released a large Research 2000 poll it commissioned to test the views of just over 2000 self-identified Republicans. Here’s Markos’ analysis of the findings, and here are the crosstabs so you can slice and dice the results yourself.

Markos calls the poll’s results “startling,” but I guess that depends on your expectations. Seems to me that it confirms the strong rightward trend in the GOP that its leaders have been signaling now for the last two years. Some of this actually represents a long-term trend that ‘s been underway since the early 1960s; some of it involves the shrinkage of the Republican “base” to a seriously conservative core from the party’s identification peak around 2004; and some is attributable to a conscious or subconscious effort to absolve the party from the sins of the Bush administration by treating it as too “moderate.”

In any event, aside from a general and rigorous conservatism, the two findings that are probably most relevant to the immediate political future, and to the relationship between Republicans and independents, are the GOPers’ exceptionally hateful attitude towards Barack Obama, and their unregenerated cultural extremism. The first factor will complicate any efforts in 2010 to go after congressional Democrats as a bad influence on the well-meaning president (who remains more popular among voters outside the GOP than either party in Congress). And the second undermines the media narrative that today’s Republicans are semi-libertarians who have finally sloughed off all that crazy Christian Right stuff and are focused like a laser beam on the economy and fiscal issues.

How much do self-identified Republicans hate Barack Obama? Well, this is hardly news, but in the DK/R2K poll they favor Obama’s impeachment by a 39/32 margin (the rest are “not sure”). Only a narrow plurality (42/36) believes he was born in the United States. By a 63/21 margin, they believe he is a “socialist” (tell that to his progressive critics!). Only 24% say Obama “wants the terrorists to win,” but with 33% being “not sure” about it, only a minority (43%) seem convinced he’s not an actual traitor. Only 36% disagree with the proposition that Obama is a “racist who hates white people” (31% agree with the proposition, and the rest are not sure). And only 24% seem to be willing to concede he actually won the 2008 election (12% think “ACORN stole it,” and 55% aren’t sure either way).

On the cultural-issues front, self-identified Republicans are almost monolithically conservative. The number that jumps off the page is that 31% want to outlaw contraceptives (56% are opposed). But that’s not too surprising since 34% believe “the birth control pill is abortion,” and 76% (with only 8% opposed) agree that “abortion is murder.”

But it’s the homophobia of GOPers that’s really striking, considering the steady national trend away from such a posture, particularly among younger voters. It extends beyond familiar controversial issues like gay marriage (opposed 77/7) and gays-in-the-military (opposed 55/26) to exceptionally unambiguous statements of equality like the ability of openly gay people to teach in public schools (opposed 73/8). This last finding really is amazing, since St. Ronald Reagan himself famously opposeda California ballot initiative banning gay and lesbian public school teachers, way back in 1978.

The crosstabs for the poll break down the results on regional lines, and there are some variations; most notably, southerners are marginally more conservative on most questions, and really stand out in their incredible levels of support for their own state’s secession from the United States (fully 33% favor a return to 1861, as opposed to only 10% in the northeast). But by and large, the regional splits aren’t that massive; the old idea of the GOP as a coalition of conservatives based in the south and west and moderates in the midwest and northeast is totally obsolete.

The poll finds no real front-runner for the 2012 presidential nomination. Given eight options (about the only plausible candidate not mentioned is Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels), Sarah Palin tops the list at 16%, with Romney at 11%, Dick Cheney (!) at 10%, and everyone else in single digits. Fully 42% are undecided. Given the overall results of the poll, that almost certainly means the 2012 nomination process will exert a powerful pull to the right for all the candidates. I mean, really, in a scattered field, is it at all unlikely that someone will focus on that one-third of southern Republicans pining for secession and issue some serious rebel yells before the early South Carolina primary? Or might not a candidate seeking traction in the Iowa Caucuses, a low-turnout affair typically dominated by Right-to-Life activists, maybe call for banning those “murderous” birth control pills?

We’ll know soon enough how crazy the GOP crazy-train will get in 2012, I suppose. But it’s a lead-pipe certainty that the dominant right wing of the Republican Party won’t find any reason to moderate itself if the GOP makes serious gains in November.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Will GOP Tango on Nuclear Power?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

President Obama has delivered on his promise to expand nuclear energy — big time. But can Republicans take “yes” for an answer?

Obama’s new budget calls for a whopping increase in federal loan guarantees for nuclear power, from $18.5 billion to $54 billion. Last week, he also created a blue ribbon panel to explore solutions to the contentious issue of nuclear waste disposal, which many regard as a key roadblock to building new nuclear plants.

The president’s commitment to a nuclear “renaissance” in America signals a major shift among progressives. Although some environmentalists remain adamantly opposed, Obama’s pragmatic stance probably will speed the melting away of taboos on nuclear energy that date back to the 1979 Three Mile Island incident.

Increasing the role nuclear power plays in the nation’s energy portfolio serves our economic, security and environmental interests. It would help America meet rising energy demand as well as the targets it set in Copenhagen for greenhouse gas reduction. As more hybrids and electric cars come onto the market, it would enable us to generate more electricity with zero carbon emissions. And the switch in transportation fuels from gas to electricity will lessen our dependence on foreign oil.

Some progressives, however, balk at expanding federal loan guarantees to underwrite nuclear plant construction. They cite a relatively high risk of default, although such risk is at least in part the result of political obstacles to expeditiously siting, approving and building new facilities.

Critics also object that Obama’s push for nuclear power is a preemptive concession to Republicans. Some GOP leaders, like Sen. John McCain, have demanded more support for nuclear energy in exchange for their support of the president’s “cap-and-trade” proposal to reduce U.S. carbon emissions and spur clean energy development. It’s true that Republicans aren’t lining up now to support the legislation, but it’s also true that the president’s budget is still just a proposal at this point.

Expanding nuclear power is worth doing whether or not some pro-nuke Republicans sign onto the climate bill. But in coming budget negotiations, Obama should offer Republicans a deal: more support for nuclear power in return for a softening of their monolithic, and retrograde, opposition to ensuring that America does its part to stop overheating the planet.

If they refuse, it will bolster the president’s point that “it takes two to tango,” and put the onus of obstructionism squarely on the GOP.

Gulliver Among the Lilliputians

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Reading Peggy Noonan is emotionally difficult for me. For one thing, she was the first of a breed that I find inherently obnoxious: the Celebrity Speechwriter. Perhaps it’s just envy, since I happened to have labored at that craft in total obscurity for decades. But there’s something, well, unseemly, about a ghost that is so all-pervasively visible, and so willing to take credit for the golden words uttered by employers who, after all, were actually elected to public office and bear responsibility for their deeds as well as their words.

But more importantly, ever since she obtained her own bylines and television gigs, Noonan has steadily “grown” into one of those imperious columnists who express exasperation at the idiocy and small-mindedness of politicians, particularly those who happen to harbor policy views at variance with her own. And that’s especially annoying when, as in her snarky take on the State of the Union address for the Wall Street Journal, she is offering dubious and partisan “advice” to Barack Obama, designed to attack what he is doing while professing sympathy for his challenges.

There are no less than three such toxic bits of “advice” in the column in question. First, Noonan mocks President Obama for allowing Congress to push him around, unlike, of course, her first Big Boss, Ronald Reagan:

James Baker, that shrewd and knowing man, never, as Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff, allowed his president to muck about with congressmen, including those of his own party. A president has stature and must be held apart from Congress critters. He can meet with them privately, in the Oval Office. There, once, a Republican senator who’d announced opposition to a bill important to the president tried to claim his overall loyalty: “Mr. President, you know I’d jump out of a plane for you if you asked, but—””Jump,” said Reagan. The senator, caught, gave in.

That’s how you treat them. You don’t let them blur your picture and make you more common. You don’t let them call the big shots.

Aside from reflecting the eternal Cult of Reagan, these words certainly distort the actual relationship of the 40th president with Congress. Certainly nothing was more central to the Reagan presidency than his initial budget and tax proposals. His budget director, David Stockman, wrote an entire book on how these proposals were mangled into a fiscal abomination by members of Congress from both parties. It was entitled, revealingly, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed.

Quite likely Barack Obama erred during his first year by deferring too much to congressional committee barons on health care reform, and on the composition of appropriations bills. But that was a matter of degree, not some fundamental failure to pursue a Fuhrerprinzip that separates the Big Men from the small. Obama’s immediate predecessor was arguably a small man in genuine leadership capacity, but no one since Nixon has demanded more imperial powers. America can do without more of that.

Second, Noonan stipulates that Obama’s anti-Washington rhetoric is laughably in contradiction with his policy agenda:

The central fact of the speech was the contradiction at its heart. It repeatedly asserted that Washington is the answer to everything. At the same time it painted a picture of Washington as a sick and broken place. It was a speech that argued against itself: You need us to heal you. Don’t trust us, we think of no one but ourselves.

Now you don’t have to think too deeply about this to understand that Noonan is saying that “Washington” is “liberalism.” So “anti-Washington” sentiment is conservatism. Thus, presumably, for Obama to redeem the “change Washington” rhetoric of his presidential campaign, he needs to become conservative! What a brilliant idea!

This is all pretty ludicrous, of course, since recent conservative administrations (particularly those following Noonan’s exalted notions of presidential leadership) have been avid to use federal power to wage undeclared wars, usurp civil liberties, and preempt state regulations of corporations. Moreover, you can be angry at “Washington” not just for trying to do too much, but for trying to do too little, or for doing what it does poorly or corruptly. “Change” can be in any sort of direction, not just Peggy Noonan’s direction.

Third, Noonan extends an especially devious back-handed compliment to Obama (employing the hoary device of an anonymous “friendly critic” who seems to resemble Noonan herself) of suggesting that he’s “too honest” to undertake the obvious route of “moving to the center,” by which she means “moving to the right:”

“I don’t think he can do a Bill Clinton pivot, because he’s not a pragmatist, he’s an ideologue. He’s a community organizer. He mixes the discrimination he felt as a young man with the hardship so many feel in this country, and he wants to change it and the way to change that is government programs and not opportunity.”The great issue, this friendly critic added, is debt. The public knows this; Congress and the White House do not. “To me the Republicans are as rotten as the Democrats” in terms of spending. “Almost.”

“I hope we have big changes in 2010,” the friend said. Only significant loss will force the president to focus on spending. “To heal our country we need to get the arrogance out of the White House and the elitists out of the Congress. We need tough love. We need a real adult in the White House because we don’t have adults in the Congress.”

So Obama can only be saved by a Republican victory in 2010 (the only “big changes” on tap), which will enable him to act as an “adult” on “debt,” which the people–and Peggy Noonan and Obama’s “friend”–understand as “the great issue.” (Never mind that it didn’t seem to be a “great issue” when George W. Bush was running up most of the debt we now face).

What’s really going on in Noonan’s column, beyond a remarkable display both of arrogance and of disjointed, illogical writing, is a theme we will hear a lot of between now and November. Republicans understand that for all his struggles, Barack Obama remains more popular and trusted than they are. Heavy-handed right-wing attacks on the president as some sort of treasonous monster can backfire, and also don’t comport well with the sort of well-bred sophistication that conservatives like Noonan cultivate. So Obama is Gulliver among the Lilliputians, held back from his better impulses by the petty spendthrifts of Congress and the hobgoblins of his own ideological and “community organizer” background.

If and when Republicans make big gains this November and succeed in completely thwarting Obama’s efforts to act as president, “friends” like Noonan will sadly conclude that he couldn’t overcome his shortcomings, and begin calling for a “real adult”–Mitt Romney, anyone?–in 2012. Bet on it.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

A Close Look at Those Republican Health Care Ideas

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

So lots of Americans, we are told, really wish the president would reach out to the Republican Party and come up with bipartisan solutions for our nation’s problems. This very day, the president is in fact trudging up to Baltimore to attend a retreat of the House Republican Caucus, an organization devoted to his complete political destruction.

But before anyone gets agitated about “bipartisan solutions” or the failure to achieve them, it’s important to take a look at where Republicans actually are on big controversial issues–like, just to pull one example out of the air, health care policy.

At the New Republic today, Washington & Lee University law professor Timothy gives us a refresher course on GOP health care policy, from AHiPs to interstate insurance sales. He concludes their proposals wouldn’t do a whole lot for the uninsured, the insured, or health care costs and federal spending. But the most important conclusion he reaches is that there simply isn’t a lot of “common ground” on which to build any sort of bipartisan compromise.

The two parties presently come at the issue in fundamentally different ways, with Republicans, in particular, being transfixed by the desire to encourage the purchase of individual health insurance policies, if not individual purchases of health care without insurance.

Maybe the president and House Republicans can find plenty to talk about in Baltimore today. But comparing notes on health reform is probably a waste of time.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.