issue: Politics

Health Reform Endgame

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Whatever happens today in Massachusetts, congressional Democrats must pass a health care reform bill. There is a lot more at stake here than curbing medical costs and expanding coverage, though both are crucial. The fundamental challenge is proving that progressives can govern the country.

A win on health care would show that Obama and his party are serious about fixing our broken political system. A loss would make Democrats look feckless and deepen public anger and cynicism toward government.

It’s gut check time for Democrats. If Republican Scott Brown wins the Massachusetts Senate race, some nervous centrists may be tempted to overread the result as a “populist” revolt against health reform or “big government” solutions in general. Some liberals will claim that voters are punishing Democrats because Obama and his party haven’t been radical enough. If only the Democrats had included a public option, or embraced a straight-up single payer architecture, then voters would at last see change they can believe in.

Well, Massachusetts voters seem to have other things on their minds besides health care, like the economy and one-party dominance of state politics. But there’s no doubt that public support for health reform has steadily eroded over the past year. During the 2008 campaign, voters routinely listed health care as their top concern; now only 39 percent favor the President’s reform blueprint.

Although conservative disinformation has taken a toll, the main reason is that Americans are more worried about the economy than health care. And as ordinary families struggle with depleted retirement savings, home foreclosures and double-digit unemployment, they also stew over the billions Washington has spent to bail out overcompensated bankers and inept auto executives. Such “populism,” however, doesn’t fit neatly within any ideological template. People are mad at Wall Street greedheads, but they’re also increasingly anxious about government regulation and deficits, which makes them wary of liberal demands for bolder, costlier initiatives.

Another reason for growing disenchantment with health reform is the process itself. The health care debate has shown Washington at its polarized and parochial worst. It has taken too long and involved endless haggling by an ever-changing cast of negotiators. Too many interests have been accommodated, at the expense of both taxpayers and policy coherence. Win or lose, the coming after-action reports on health reform will surely focus on the wisdom of President Obama’s decision to articulate broad principles and let Congress sweat the details.

Still, in the end, all of us need relief from escalating health care costs, and millions of our fellow citizens need access to insurance. And more than anything else, Americans need to know that our democracy still works. That’s why progressives ought to fall in behind President Obama’s dogged efforts to pass a bill.

“The worst thing to do is nothing,” former President Bill Clinton advised Democrats at their recent retreat. He’s right. Should Democrats lose the Massachusetts seat, they will basically face three choices. One is to speed up efforts to reconcile House and Senate bills and push for floor votes before Scott is seated in the Senate. The second is for the House to pass the Senate bill intact and send it to the President’s desk for signature. The third is to give up. Option 2 is the quickest, simplest and most procedurally defensible course. It’s one pragmatic progressives should support on policy grounds as well, since the Senate bill, though far from perfect, is more fiscally responsible and contains stronger cost control measures than the House version.

Republicans will cry foul in any case, but their credibility is shot. The post-mortems also will show that, by taking an obstructionist stance from the beginning, Republicans foreclosed any possibility of a bipartisan bill. Worse, as health care analysts Bryan Dowd and Roger Feldman argued last week on Progressive Fix, they violated their their own beliefs (for example, by piously denouncing cuts to Medicare providers) and utterly failed to offer a principled alternative.

For House Democrats, especially liberals, having to approve the Senate bill unchanged would be a bitter pill. The bill’s subsidies for low-income workers aren’t as generous, its regulations on the insurance industry are less severe and, of course, it doesn’t include their cherished public option. But they should recognize that their party’s reputation for governing competently is on the line and take one for the team.

For the governing party, winning ugly beats losing ugly. Passing a bill, moreover, is the beginning, not the end, of improving health care quality and delivery in the United States. The government will have to issue new regulations to put the bill’s often vague provisions into force, and like any piece of landmark legislation, it will be tweaked and revised as we go along.

So on health care reform, progressives ought to hang together or – you know the rest.

More on the Tea Party/GOP Dance

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Yesterday I posted some thoughts on the relationship between the Tea Party Movement and the Republican Party, suggesting the latter was probably in the process of swallowing the former.

At about the same time, the ever-excellent David Weigel of the Washington Independent provided another, and very detailed, perspective on the Tea Party/GOP relationship in the context of the controversy over next month’s National Tea Party Convention in Nashvillle.

Weigel reports that while some of the grumbling over the convention among Tea Party activists has been published in the context of an alleged “takeover” or “hijacking” of the Movement by Republican pols. But at the same time, there’s not much interest in any other political direction:

Nine months ago, [American Liberty Alliance chairman Eric] Odom got national headlines for pre-emptively denying RNC Chairman Michael Steele a speaking slot at the Chicago Tea Party. “We prefer to limit stage time to those who are not elected officials, both in government as well as political parties,” he said at the time. Today, Steele is winning a Tea Party Nation web poll on whether he should speak the convention, and Odom is gearing up for a trip to Massachusetts to help the Republican candidate, Scott Brown, take the state’s open Senate seat. The Tea Party Express, an operation of the GOP-supporting Our Country Deserves Better PAC which has been utterly rejected by some Tea Party activists, is rolling into the convention and catching hardly any flack for it. The presence of Palin, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) at the convention is seen, universally, as a coup with import that will outlive the controversy over the event itself.

So for all the protests by Tea Party activists about their hostility to the Republican “establishment” and their independence from both parties, it appears their short-term political objectives, and their heroes, are so closely aligned with the GOP’s dominant conservative wing that you can barely tell them apart.

Update: Two other new pieces of note have appeared on this subject: a New York Times report by Kate Zernike on the growing determination of Tea Party activists to take over the GOP at the grassroots level and move it sharply to the Right; and a piece by Michelle Goldberg at TAP about Christian Right involvement in the Tea Party Movement, which calls into question its supposed libertarian character.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Why Republicans Deserve to Lose the Health Care Reform Debate

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As Congress makes sausage out of health care reform, Republicans have complained bitterly that they have been excluded from the process. As health economists whose work generally reflects a market-based perspective, it might be surprising to hear us say that exclusion is just what the Republicans deserve. There are three reasons why.

Private health insurance works best for Americans who get it in groups through their employers. But virtually all such Americans know they are only one layoff away from losing their health insurance. If they have a pre-existing medical condition, they will have to pay astronomical premiums for an individual insurance policy, if they are lucky enough to get coverage at all. Those who are turned down can face financial ruin from the cost of illness. Any rational person would want to insure against the risk of losing his or her health insurance, but that is virtually impossible to do in the current health insurance marketplace.

This is a clear case of market failure and it has persisted for decades, yet Republicans simply don’t recognize this as a problem that needs to be solved. The individual insurance market is the source of most of the horror stories that plague and sully the health insurance industry, yet Republicans, who say they want to preserve private insurance, have proposed nothing that would address the problem.

The obvious solution is to impose some type of structure (i.e. “insurance exchanges”) on the individual insurance market, including a guarantee that affordable coverage would be available to anyone who shops in the individual market. State governments would be the natural entities to manage this market, but government involvement, even in the face of clear market failure, is anathema to Republicans. In addition, the Democrats’ mandate requiring individuals to purchase insurance is too much for many libertarian-oriented conservatives to bear, especially if costly subsidies are tied to the mandate. But at least they’re attempting to solve a complex problem, something Republicans can’t seem to do.

The second Republican failure is their criticism of the Democrats’ proposed cuts to Medicare. Part A of Medicare (which pays for hospital care) is scheduled to run out of money in 2017, or sooner if the recession continues to depress federal tax revenues. Young Americans have not mismanaged the Medicare program and don’t deserve to pay the bill for that policy failure. Drastic cuts in the cost of Medicare (coupled with higher premiums and a dramatic increase in price competition at all levels) will be necessary to solve this problem, and the sooner the better. The cuts proposed by congressional Democrats – mainly in payments to hospitals, other providers, and private Medicare Advantage plans – are a tepid attempt to deal with this problem. Like many Democratic proposals, they go hand in hand with a misplaced distaste for private health insurance plans. But vilifying the Democrats on that score, without offering alternatives to shore up the program, is fiscally irresponsible.

The third Republican failure is their knee-jerk criticism of “comparative effectiveness” research. This research aims to discover which medical treatments work better than others. It’s perfectly acceptable to worry that comparative effectiveness research in the wrong hands (like the government’s) could lead to rationing. But blanket condemnation of comparative effectiveness research leaves the impression that the current level of ignorance regarding the effectiveness of medical treatments is an inconsequential feature of the health care system. This is an embarrassment to the party that claims to be a prudent steward of the public’s money.

Republicans need to start listening to their constituents and propose innovative, conservative remedies to the numerous problems that plague the U.S. health care system. People who truly are market-oriented should be able to see market failure when it exists and propose corrections, even when those corrections include a role for government. Since the insurance industry has failed to fix itself, Republicans should have proposed a new set of products that protect people from losing insurance coverage. They should have proposed remedies including regulatory constraints that would lead to more stable and affordable health insurance coverage without the need for government subsidies. Finally, Republicans should have promoted their own proposals to fix Medicare, instead of demagoguing the issue. The Republicans’ silence on these fronts has been deafening – and explains why they deserve to lose the health care debate.

Bryan Dowd and Roger Feldman are professors at the University of Minnesota. They split their votes between Barack Obama and John McCain in the 2008 presidential election.

A Push For Regional Primaries

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

A recent report from a “Democratic Change Commission” authorized by the last national convention to look at the presidential nominating system mainly got attention for its predictable recommendation that “superdelegates” lose their independent voting power. The “supers” will still get convention seats and votes, but said votes will be allocated according to primary or caucus results in their home states (which could make the DC primary of greater-than-usual interest).

A second Change Commission recommendation got a bit of attention: another in a long series of efforts to reduce “front-loading” of the nominating process by pushing the “windows” for allowable primaries and caucuses forward a month (the Commission did not, however, tamper with the two-tiered process by which four states—IA, NV, NH and SC—get their own early “window”).

But virtually no one was aware of a third recommendation, until yesterday, when 538.com’s Tom Schaller interviewed Change Commission member (and 2008 “delegate guru” for the Obama campaign) Jeff Berman. According to Berman, the commission is encouraging the party to award bonus convention delegates to states that agree to cooperate in regional primary/caucus “clusters.” Regional primaries, long a favorite idea of critics of the current system, are relatively efficient ways of enabling candidates to compete for significant delegate counts, particularly when contrasted with the high costs and sheer madness of big, scattered national “clusters” like Super Tuesday, or the inefficiency of dozens of individual contests.

The big questions, of course, are (1) whether the party chooses to make the “bonuses” large enough to actually encourage states to participate in regional primaries, and (2) whether there’s a parallel movement by Republicans, since many states require both parties to hold nominating events on the same day. On this latter point, it’s probably an ideal time for Democrats to make changes in the nominating system, as nobody much expects a challenge to President Obama in 2012. But with Republicans anticipating a wide-open nomination contest, any changes in the system will be scrutinized minutely for their possible impact on particular candidates.

I would argue that a direct assault on the “right” of states to control the presidential nominating process is the only way to ensure major reforms. But barring that, the carrots-and-sticks approach of the Change Commission is perhaps the best available avenue for reform. And there’s no time like the present to undertake it.

An Interesting Idea for Senate Reform

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The possibility of Democrats losing their 60th Senate seat in Massachusetts next week, slim as it is, should concentrate minds once again on the travesty of the 60-vote threshold for enacting legislation in the Senate. The Senate being what it is, of course, prospects for a major change in rules governing filibusters are not that good, unless some new dynamic is introduced.

At the American Prospect, Mark Schmitt may have identified an avenue for Senate reform: link rules restricting filibusters to rules tightening up the use of the budget reconciliation process.

He predicts, quite plausibly, that if Republicans continue to gum up the works in the Senate by voting en bloc against cloture motions, needing just one Democrat (at present) to hold up action, Democrats will increasingly resort to the reconciliation process, which fast-tracks legislation and prevents filibusters. But that’s hardly an ideal scenario:

[B]ecause budget reconciliation was designed for a completely different purpose it makes an awkward fit for big policy initiatives. It’s like entering a house through the pet door instead of the front door — you might fit, if you twist just the right way, but it will be painful. Provisions that don’t directly affect the budget can’t be included, so, for example, much of the fine detail of health-insurance regulation in the current bill would likely have been lost if pushed through reconciliation. If Congress chose reconciliation as the means to pass a jobs bill, it could include tax credits for job creation but probably not many of the infrastructure-spending initiatives that would directly create jobs.

Still, what choice does any majority party in the Senate have if the minority party chooses to block all major legislation? The experience with health reform is all but certain to create momentum among Democrats for using reconciliation whenever possible. And thus the dilemma, says Schmitt:

So what we have in the Senate are two extremes: the rigid, partisan system of near-total stasis created by the filibuster, on the one hand, and the merciless, closed-door, majority-controlled arcane process of budget reconciliation on the other. A solution might be found in reforming both: Loosen the stranglehold of the filibuster…. And in return, offer the minority party a reform of the power of budget reconciliation that currently cuts them out entirely. Start by permanently limiting reconciliation to measures that actually reduce the deficit (a rule the Democrats adopted in this Congress) and then look at reforms that open up the process to longer debate and a wider range of amendments.

Schmitt cites a number of feasible filibuster reforms, including Sen. Tom Harkin’s proposal to gradually lower the votes needed for cloture after repeated efforts to move legislation are thwarted, along with the very popular idea of requiring actual stemwinding filibusters instead of paper threats. But what’s important is Schmitt’s notion of packaging together reforms attractive to both majority and minority parties. The big question is whether Republicans are interested in any reforms, if only because they hope someday to return to majority status in the Senate. Maybe a bill or two whipped through the Senate via reconciliation would bring them around.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Public: Obama Handled Christmas Day Terror Attempt Well

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Turns out wild conservative accusations of Obama being “weak on terror” were greeted with a disinterested sigh by the majority of the American public. A new CNN/Opinion Research poll finds 57 percent of Americans approving of President Obama’s handling of the Christmas Day terror attempt. Furthermore, fully 66 percent have modest-to-great confidence that the Obama administration can protect the country from future acts of terrorism. That’s a three-percent increase since August.

Notably, only 37 percent opposed Obama’s handling of the situation, which is actually less than the 42 percent of Americans in Gallup’s tracking poll who identified themselves as Republican this past September. In other words, Republican tactics aren’t moving the public perception of Obama’s security credentials, and an argument could be made that Obama’s cool headed resolve has even won over a handful of conservatives. If Republicans run with the “weak” argument for mid-term elections, as my erstwhile “debate” foil did on a certain 24 hour cable news channel, it doesn’t look like the winner they thought it was.

Little Learned from “Game Change”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As readers may have discerned, if only from the Harry Reid “Negro Dialect” furor, the big whoop in Washington during the last few days has revolved around Game Change, a 2008 campaign chronicle by DC press veterans John Heilemann and Mark Halperin.

The people flacking this book have done a brilliant job of trickling out “juicy” insider anecdotes in which major campaign figures do and say deeply embarrassing things. The most notorious example is the Reid quote, but there are others: in particular, an excerpt published by New York Magazine that provides a hellish account of the Reille Hunter saga as seen from within John Edwards’ presidential campaign. The excerpt is getting particularly large play because of its unusually negative portrayal of “St. Elizabeth” Edwards, displayed as an erratic and abusive control-freak who used her knowledge of her husband’s infidelity as a weapon for leverage in the campaign.

You read this stuff and cringe, but in the end, wonder how much it really adds to our knowledge of the Edwards campaign, much less the 2008 elections generally. If you look very closely at the New York excerpt, buried in all the “juicy” bits, you can discern the real story of the Edwards campaign:

To Edwards, the pathway to the nomination seemed clear: beat Clinton in Iowa, where his surprising second-place finish in 2004 had catapulted him to national prominence; survive New Hampshire; then kill her off in the South Carolina primary, which he’d carried the last time around. Over and over, he proclaimed to his aides, “I am going to be the next president of the United States.”

To put some flesh on these bare bones, the Edwards campaign was a strategic gamble which heavily influenced everything the candidate did after 2004: his faithful adoption of the “crashing the gates” netroots narrative of the corrupt DC Democratic establishment, epitomized by the Clintons; his hiring of netroots veterans like Joe Trippi; his highly consistent anti-corporate rhetoric; his repeated assertions that only a southerner could win a tough general election; and his slavish devotion to nurturing his organization in Iowa.

It never worked out, of course, in part because he fatally underestimated Barack Obama, and by Caucus Night, the fiery populist was reduced to hoping for a low, senior-dominated turnout.

Now maybe it’s just me, but I find this story, which seems to get little attention in Game Change, to be as interesting and even dramatic as all the internal maneuverings around Rielle Hunter. Other accounts have suggested that Elizabeth Edwards played an outsized role in shaping the strategy for her husband’s campaign, and perhaps their weird relationship made that possible. But otherwise, aside from speculation about the explosive impact the Hunter scandal might have had if Edwards had actually won the nomination, it’s not that clear why it much matters to anyone other than the unfortunate immediate participants. And that may be true of other “revelations” in this book.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

To Fix Our Country, We Need to Fix Our Politics First

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

It’s the start of a brand new decade, but declinism hangs heavy in the air. And that, says writer Jim Fallows, is a good thing.

Having returned from three years in China, Fallows finds America in a funk. Bled by war and terrorism, beset by a lingering financial crisis and stubbornly high unemployment, facing stagnant wages and growing inequality, saddled with obsolete infrastructure and massive public debt, the United States today seems far removed from the confident “hyperpower” of a decade ago. Among the global commentariat, the “post-American world” is the cliché du jour.

But Fallows comes to challenge, not embrace, this glum narrative. In a lengthy Atlantic essay, he notes that premonitions of American decline have recurred frequently in U.S. history – and have just as often been proved wrong. He admits to having contributed himself to the “Rising Sun” hype in the 1980s, when many observers worried that Japan would soon overtake the U.S. thanks to its superior production techniques and state-guided economic strategies.

Instead, Japan sank into a long period of stagnation. But if the “jeremiad tradition” is a poor predictor of the future, says Fallows, it has the salutary effect of spurring Americans to rise to new challenges and prove the doomsayers wrong.

He attributes American resilience and adaptiveness to our inventive, entrepreneurial culture, a welcoming immigration policy and first-rate system of higher education. What’s holding us back, however, is a hopelessly dysfunctional political system that has lost the capacity to deal effectively with big national problems.

“This is the American tragedy of the early 21st century: a vital and self-renewing culture that attracts the world’s talent, and a governing system that increasingly looks like a joke,” he says. So far, so persuasive. But Fallows’ congenital optimism seems to fail him when the discussion turns to solutions. He’s no doubt realistic in dismissing great structural transformations, like a Constitutional convention to reorder our governing system, a parliamentary system or new rules that favor third parties. But concluding that “our only sane choice is to muddle through” under present arrangements ignores political reforms that are both powerful and attainable.

We could, for example, launch a frontal attack on Washington’s transactional culture and diminish the power of special interests by changing the way we finance Congressional elections. And rather than accept the inevitability of “rotten boroughs,” we could counter the worst abuses of gerrymandering by insisting that political districts be drawn by nonpartisan commissions charged with increasing rather than decreasing the number of competitive seats. We could also think seriously about addressing the abuse of the filibuster in the Senate, something that has sparked a great deal of commentary from progressives of late.

Such reforms would make it easier to overcome obstacles to the substantive changes that progressives favor, from affordable health coverage for all, to big investments in modern infrastructure and a new, low-carbon energy system. And where policy changes often expose philosophical cleavages and well as clashing interests within the Democratic coalition, fixing our broken political system is a cause that has the potential to unite all progressives.

Fallows has highlighted the right problem. But progressives should give high priority to fixing our broken politics as the prerequisite for renewing America.

The Founders and the Filibuster

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Current defenders of the de facto 60-vote requirement for enactment of legislation by the United States Senate invariably argue that a non-representative and obstructionist upper legislative chamber was crucial to the Founding Fathers’ system of constitutional checks and balances. Without a cranky and institutionally conservative Senate, you see, popular majorities might run roughshod over minority rights, and/or enshrine highly temporary objects of popular enthusiasm into law.

Attorney/activist Tom Geoghegan blows up this line of reasoning very effectively in aNew York Times op-ed piece that appeared yesterday. His main argument is that by requiring Senate supermajorities in very select circumstances, the Founders made it clear they did not contemplate a universal, routine supermajority requirement for every circumstance. This is, in fact, a very recent development, accomplished through the abandonment of actual filibusters for threatened filibusters as an obstructionist tactic, and then the routinization of filibuster threats. What used to be an extreme and controversial measure–an actual filibuster–that was very difficult to deploy has now become the normal order of business in the Senate.

Had the Founders wanted the Senate to require supermajorities for all sorts of legislation, they would have placed it right there in the Constitution. But they did no such thing.

Geoghegan offers several avenues for challenging the Supermajority Senate outrage. But his best contribution is an argument that will leave constitutional “originalists” sputtering in confusion.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Reid and Lott

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The big toxic political news coming out of the weekend was the revelation, retailed in a new 2008 campaign book, that Harry Reid once speculated that Barack Obama might be electable as president because he was “light-skinned” and didn’t speak with a “Negro dialect.” Republicans immediately started demanding that Reid resign as Democratic Majority Leader, with many claiming his reported remarks were the equivalent of Trent Lott’s infamous wish-he-had-been-president praise for Strom Thurmond in 2002.

Ta-Nehisi Coates has the most sensible comment about Reid’s remarks and particularly the comparisons to Lott:

I think you can grant that, in this era, the term “Negro dialect” is racially insensitive and embarrassing. That said, the fair-mind listener understands the argument–Barack Obama’s complexion and his ability to code-switch is an asset. You can quibble about the “light skin” part, but forget running for president, code-switching is the standard M.O. for any African American with middle class aspirations.But there’s no such defense for Trent Lott. Lott celebrated apartheid Mississippi’s support of Strom Thurmond, and then said that had Thurmond won, “we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years.” Strom Thurmond run for president, specifically because he opposed Harry Truman’s efforts at integration. This is not mere conjecture–nearly half of Thurmond’s platform was dedicated to preserving segregation. The Dixiecrat slogan was “Segregation Forever!” (Exclamation point, theirs.) Trent Lott’s wasn’t forced to resign because he said something “racially insensitive.” He was forced to resign because he offered tacit endorsement of white supremacy–frequently.

Claiming that Harry Reid’s comments are the same, is like claiming that referring to Jews as “Hebrews” is the same as endorsing Nazism.

All I’ll add is a guess that Reid’s use of the word “Negro” probably represented a clumsy effort to find an adjective to modify “dialect,” which isn’t exactly the same as calling African-Americans “Negroes.” Frankly, I haven’t heard a white person use the term in close to three decades; racists don’t bother to clean up their own favorite slur, and everybody else generally follows the rule of adopting whatever a particular racial or ethnic group chooses to call itself.

But in any event, this idea that one race-related gaffe is equal in offensiveness to any other is plain stupid. Lott was expressing continued solidarity with the racist political system he grew up with and didn’t abandon until the last possible moment. Reid used offensive language to make a almost universally-recognized objective point about voter attitudes, in the process of encouraging an African-American to run for president. That’s hardly the same.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

More On “The Base” and Obama

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Mark Blumenthal’s post the other day noting continued strong support for Obama among self-identified “liberal Democrats” attracted a nuanced dissent from OpenLeft’s Chris Bowers.

Bowers notes that there’s evidence liberal non-Democrats have soured on Obama pretty strongly, and that even among liberal Democrats, levels of support as compared to 2008 voting percentages have dropped more than for any other major voting category.

Blumenthal responds today by arguing that the levels of liberal disaffection from Obama are far too small to constitute a “revolt” by the “base,” and also suggests that approval ratings are a misleading barometer when it comes to liberal voters who would never consider pulling the lever for a Republican.

Aside from reporting the substance of this exchange, I would note that its tone represents something of a model for intraprogressive debates. Both Bowers and Blumenthal are respectful of each other’s opinion, try to stick to empirical data, and acknowlege this is a continuing subject for legitimate debate, not something on which one side or the other than claim any definitive “win.”

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Tea Party Convention: Third Force or Takeover Bid?

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For all the notoriety of the Tea Party Movement, it’s been difficult to get any reliable fix on its fundamental political objectives. Is it a “third force” in American politics that will either morph into a third party and/or burn itself out through ineffectual if incendiary protests? Or is it essentially a hard-right takeover bid aimed at turning the GOP into a mirror image of its ideological obsesssions, ranging from gun rights to anti-immigration sentiment to radical reductions in taxes and spending?

We may get a better understanding of the answer to that question next month, when a group called the Tea Party Nation puts on the first-ever national conventionof tea party organizers and activists at Nashville’s Opryland.

TPM’s Christina Bellatoni says the convention’s agenda “sounds a lot like an attempt to form an official third party.” I dunno; the announced speakers list looks a lot like a prayer meeting of the right wing of the Republican Party. The big keynote speaker is Sarah Palin, with Michele Bachman speaking at lunch. Other confirmed speakers include the U.S. House GOP leadership’s resident wingnut, Marsha Blackburn (you do have to admit the Tea Party folks are very good at achieving gender parity in their panelists); Christian Right warhorses Rick Scarborough and Judge Roy Moore; and assorted conservative TV and radio gabbers.

It’s now becoming standard for hard-core conservative candidates in Republican primaries around the country to identify themselves closely with the Tea Party Movement. Nowhere is this more evident than in Florida, where Marco Rubio’s senate candidacy is a cause celebre for Tea Party folk everywhere. There’s a long profile of the Rubio-Crist race by Mark Leibovich in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine that gives the distinct impression that Crist is a goner and Rubio’s about to become a maximum national conservative celebrity. And although there will be elements of the Tea Party movement who want to remain independent, the temptation of an opportunity to conquer, or at least intimidate into submission, one of the two major parties may prove irresistable.

Update: The intrepid David Wiegel reports some conservative grumbling about the cost of this event–$549 for registration, and $349 just to attend the Palin speech–and Palin’s own rumored speaking fee of somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000. Sure, big-name pols often command that much or a lot more for speeches, but it’s not what you’d want to charge to a grassroots activist group if you were thinking about running for president with their support. More generally, this kind of money-grubbing could undermine the legitimacy of the event.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

The Clinton Boom Was Real — Then Bush Happened

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Most progressives were happy to say goodbye to the “aughts,” as dismal a decade as America has endured since the snake-bitten 1970s. But they may be surprised to learn that the U.S. economy’s poor performance on George W. Bush’s watch was actually Bill Clinton’s fault.

So says Michael Lind, who rang in a new year with a retrospective blast on Salon this week against the “New Democrat” policies of the 1990s.

If you lived through the Clinton years, you might recall them as flush times. Some basic facts: The economy grew briskly, creating 18 million new jobs; rapid innovation, especially in information technology and online commerce, bred new businesses and helped to raise productivity in old ones; unemployment stayed low despite a steady influx of immigrants and women coming off welfare rolls; markets rose as the percentage of Americans owning stock jumped 50 percent; homeownership reached a record high (nearly 70 percent); the poverty rate shrank significantly; and the United States ran budget surpluses for the first time in three decades.

Not bad, right? Well, as reimagined by Lind, the 1990s were another “lost decade,” just like the Bush years, with their successive dot.com and housing bubbles, regressive tax breaks, zooming federal deficits and of course, the grand finale – the near-meltdown of U.S. financial markets in the fall of 2008 along with the worst recession since 1982. If the comparison seems, well, strained, no matter. Lind’s real target is what he calls the myth of the “New Economy,” an illusion conjured by Clintonites (PPI comes in for honorable mention here) to justify “neoliberal” policies.

Breaking Down the New Economy

Specifically, Lind takes issue with New Democrats’ claims that the IT revolution helped to spur more robust productivity growth. This is not a terribly controversial point among economists. For example, a 2003 review of over 50 scholarly studies (PDF) by Jason Dedrick, Vijay Guraxani and Kenneth L. Kraemer (cited in Rob Atkinson’s 2007 report “Digital Prosperity“) reached this conclusion: “At both the firm and the country level, greater investment in IT is associated with greater productivity growth.”

It’s true that economist Michael Mandel, a PPI friend and prominent advocate of innovation-centered growth, has argued that U.S. productivity gains after 1998 were overstated. But the fact remains that labor productivity, which grew at an average of only 1.46 percent per year between 1973 and 1995, grew to nearly three percent annually afterwards. That spurt helped to produce the prosperity of the second half of the 1990s, a period which saw incomes grow in a “picket fence” pattern, meaning that all segments of the population saw roughly equal advances. For those years, at least, relative wage inequality narrowed.

Yet rather than give Clinton credit for economic results in the years when his policies actually were in force, Lind invokes the poor performance of the 2000s to condemn the policies of the 1990s. George W. Bush, arguably the worst economic manager since Herbert Hoover, is oddly absent from this revisionist fable.

And what about all the money gushing into the United States during the ‘90s from foreign investors? In Lind’s telling, New Democrats naively assumed that money was chasing higher returns, when in reality foreign lenders were trying to drive up the dollar’s value to make their country’s goods more competitive. Currency manipulation, especially by China, is obviously a problem today. But in the 1990s, the U.S. was not only innovating furiously, it was also growing faster than Europe and Japan, making it a natural magnet for foreign investment.

Finally, Lind challenges the notion that skills gaps are related to wage inequality. There are reams of economic studies showing strong positive returns to educational attainment.  (For an excellent discussion, see chapter eight in Creating an Opportunity Society, by Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill.) He is probably right that skills disparities alone don’t account for the growth in income inequality over the last several decades, but it seems perverse to argue that Clinton and his allies, as well as President Obama, are mistaken in wanting to see more Americans attend college.

Blaming the New Dems for GOP Sins

As a quick perusal of our website will confirm, PPI in the latter part of the 1990s published a raft of reports that a) documented the rise in relative inequality and b) proposed an array of innovative policies aimed at “expanding the winners’ circle” to include more working Americans. And perhaps Lind has forgotten that Clinton, in his first budget, raised taxes on the wealthy to restore progressivity and thus reduce after-tax inequality. He also got Congress to pass a massive expansion of the “work bonus” (earned income tax credit) for low-wage workers.

The causes of inequality are a subject of lively dispute among economists, but Lind is not hobbled by doubts. The reasons, he asserts, are to be found in the decline of unions, an eroding minimum wage, and unskilled immigrants. Yet by his own account, inequality really took off in the 1970s, when unions were relatively strong. (Plus, it’s strange to blame Democratic policies for growing inequality since 1980, since Democrats controlled the White House for only eight of those 28 years). Moreover, it should be obvious that falling union membership is the consequence, not the cause, of a massive shift in the U.S. employment base from manufacturing to services.

Because it affects only a small proportion of workers (including lots of kids working at part-time jobs), the minimum wage is a slender reed on which to hang the revival of good, middle-class wages in America. And there’s scant evidence to support Lind’s claim that immigration, legal or otherwise, has exerted significant downward pressure on native workers’ wages. The tide of unskilled immigration does have an impact on workers who don’t graduate from high school, but not a very large one.

The problem with Lind’s attempted deconstruction of the “New Economy” narrative is that it ignores a whole herd of elephants in the room, namely big structural changes in what U.S. firms do and how work is organized. Consider this description by Rob Shapiro, a key architect of the Clinton economic policies:

For the first time ever, U.S. businesses have been investing more in the development and use of ideas and other intangible assets than in physical assets of property, plant and equipment. Moreover, most of the value the economy now produces comes from those intangible assets. In 1984, the book value of the 150 largest U.S. companies—what their physical assets would bring on the open market—accounted for 75 percent of their stock market value; by 2005, it was equal to just 36 percent of the their market capitalization. The idea-based economy has gone from metaphor to reality.

We are left at last with the question of motive. Why is Lind so intent on rewriting the history of the most successful Democratic president in our lifetime, and raising doubts about the economic competence of the first majority-vote winning Democrat – Barack Obama — in the White House since LBJ?

Some progressives find it hard to forgive Bill Clinton for forcing them to acknowledge past mistakes. But failing to recognize your own successes may be even worse.

This item is cross-posted on Salon.

The “Heading for the Exits” Narrative

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Over the last 24 hours, word has been leaking out of four separate Democratic candidates for statewide office around the country deciding to retire from office or otherwise fold campaigns. They are Sens. Chris Dodd of CT and Byron Dorgan of ND, along with Gov. Bill Ritter of CO (up for re-election this year) and Lt. Gov. Don Cherry of MI (running for governor this year).

Republicans are naturally spinning these unrelated developments as part of a wave of discouraged Democrats getting out of campaigns in anticipation of a big pro-GOP November. That’s not surprising. But it is annoying that mainstream political media are so avidly buying this spin. Politico‘s banner headline this morning is: “Top Democrats head for the exits.”

The irony is that these changes of heart could actually improve overall Democratic prospects in November. Dodd was in deep political trouble, and his likely replacement as Democratic nominee, CT Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, will be favored to win. Cherry’s gubernatorial campaign was struggling to raise money, and his withdrawal could open the door to any number of better-positioned Democratic candidates. And in CO, Ritter’s retirement could well draw former state House Speaker Andrew Romanoff out of a contentious primary challenge to Sen. Michael Bennet; if that doesn’t happen, highly popular Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper might run, and there’s even been some talk that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar would like to be governor. Any of these candidates would be considered stronger than Ritter.

Dorgan’s retirement is definitely a blow to Democrats. But he, too, was badly trailing Gov. John Hoeven in the polls, and if Rep. Earl Pomeroy decides to take the plunge, his prospects might be as good as Dorgan’s.

In terms of handicapping the overall contest for control of the U.S. Senate, it’s important to remember that not two but six Republicans have already announced retirements (in OH, FL, MO, KY, NH and KS). I don’t recall any “Top Republicans head for the exits” headlines about them.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Can Mitt Romney Get His Groove Back?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

With Republican prospects for 2010, and just maybe 2012, trending upward, it’s worth noting that Mitt Romney, the insiders’ front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, has announced a publicity tour for his upcoming book, No Apology. He’ll begin with two stops in (surprise!) Iowa in March.

Team Romney has tried to suppress in advance any comparisons between the Mittster’s round of book signings and that of Sarah Palin. “We’re not going to match her crowd size or sales. These are two different people with different ways of expressing themselves,” Eric Fehrnstrom, a Romney spokesman, told the Boston Globe. But, even if he’s no Sarah Palin, putative candidate Romney needs to show with this tour that he’s got his groove back.

After losing the GOP nomination 2008, he dropped below most Americans’ radar screens. Yet he retains most of his original points of appeal: the granite visage, the competent-exec air, the economic policy fluency, and the résumé that includes being governor of blue-state Massachusetts and CEO of the 2002 Winter Olympics, which is sure to make him a regular quote machine during the upcoming Vancouver games. Each day that passes takes him further away from the social policy heresies of his earlier political career. And some Republican insiders really do believe that a prior failed presidential bid is an essential box to check, making him arguably “next in line” for the nomination.

More importantly, the likely GOP field for 2012, in comparison to the 2008 crop, looks a bit easier for Mitt to manage. As National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru observed in asmart piece in October, Mitt didn’t fit in 2008 as the conservative alternative to John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, but he will find it easier in 2012 to be the establishment candidate acceptable to movement conservatives:

Romney seems more naturally an establishmentarian than a conservative insurgent, so this strategy would be a better fit for him than his last one. He is not a man to be swayed by the momentary passions of his party’s base; pretending otherwise adds to his reputation for slickness. If he ran as an establishment candidate, the fact that he used to take less-conservative positions would still matter. But it would not matter as much, because he would no longer have to prove himself as a true-blue conservative.

If either Mike Huckabee (strangely undamaged by the Maurice Clemmons firestorm of late November) or Sarah Palin runs in 2012, much of the oxygen among social conservatives will be bottled up. Since the GOP establishment really dislikes Huck and doesn’t have much faith in Palin, other than as a hobgoblin with which to terrify progressives, Romney would be nicely set up to be the “responsible conservative” in the race, competing for that mantle mainly with Tim Pawlenty, who makes Mitt look like Mr. Excitement.

But there’s one major problem with Romney’s positioning for 2012–and it’s a very big one: He may no longer be “acceptable” to movement conservatives thanks to his sponsorship of a health reform plan in Massachusetts that looks uncomfortably like the legislation that Barack Obama will probably be signing early this year.

In his profile of a possible Romney 2012 run, Ponnuru notes this problem, along with Mitt’s rationalizations for it:

Romney makes three arguments in his defense. The first is that a Democratic legislature and his Democratic successor made the plan worse than his original conception. The second is that he has no intention of pushing the Massachusetts plan on the entire country. Health-care reform, he tells me, “should occur on a state-by-state basis.” The third is that the plan has worked out well for his state. “The plan is well within budget and has accomplished its objectives at a relatively modest cost.”

It’s that third point that could get Romney into trouble. The cost to the state government has indeed been modest. But the plan was designed so that the state picks up only a fifth of the costs the plan generates, with the federal government and the private sector absorbing the rest. Premiums are growing much faster than in the rest of the nation. Waiting times are up, too, which imposes costs on people. The plan is losing popularity in Massachusetts. Ideally, Romney would learn from this experience that a reform centered on state governments’ manipulation of federal dollars is a mistake. At the very least, Romney would be foolish to keep defending the plan.

But, given the hopped-up rhetoric among Republicans about “Obamacare” since Ponnuru wrote these words, it may not be enough for Romney to “stop defending” his health care plan. For one thing, right-wing hysteria is now increasingly centered on the supposed tyranny imposed by the individual mandate, which Romney has always championed. But, were he to flatly repudiate his own record, the “flip-flop” attacks on his character would resume with a real vengeance.

Put simply, Romney can’t just recalibrate his 2008 race based on the 2012 landscape and expect to win. This isn’t the Republican Party of two or three years ago; it’s moved palpably to the right. While Romney’s 2008 rivals took some shots at his health care record, it wasn’t that big a deal in the contest. But, at that point in history, conservatives weren’t in the habit of using Slavedrivers-of-Collectivism rhetoric about individual mandates or other features of the Massachusetts system.

With health care policy certain to remain front-and-center in Republican politics for the foreseeable future, the supposed front-runner for the 2012 GOP nomination may face an impossible, disqualifying problem. And, given the choices Republicans look likely to have (any “fresh faces” emerging in 2010 won’t be ready for an immediate presidential race), that’s a very big problem for a party that considers itself on the brink of a return to power in the next few years.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Is “The Party Base” Fed Up With Obama? No.

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Anyone paying attention to political discourse during the last two or three months is aware of an acute unhappiness with the Obama administration among a goodly number of self-conscious progressives, sometimes expressed in terms of the president’s “betrayal” of “the Democratic base,” which may not turn out to support the party in November.

But is “the Democratic base” really as upset with Obama as elements of the progressive commentariat?

Mark Blumenthal looks at the numbers over at pollster.com, and concludes there’s not much evidence of displeasure with the president among rank-and-file Democrats, particularly those of a more progressive bent. Using Gallup’s weekly tracking poll of presidential approval ratings as a benchmark, Blumenthal notes:

Obama’s rating among liberal Democrats the week before Christmas (89 percent) was just a single percentage point lower than in the first week of his presidency (90 percent). None of this suggests a full revolt.

Approval ratings, of course, don’t get at intensity of support or disdain, which could have an impact on voting participation, particularly in midterm elections. So Blumenthal goes on to look at more nuanced measurements:

Between late February and mid-December, the ABC/Post survey shows an overall decline in Obama’s strongly favorable rating from 43 percent to 31 percent. Among liberal Democrats, strong approval started out at 77 percent in February and varied between a low of 72 percent and a high of 81 percent through mid-September. It fell in October (65 percent) and November (67 percent) before rebounding in December (76 percent).

So that’s a one point drop in Obama’s high “strong approval” rating from self-identified liberals between February and December.

Now everyone doesn’t mean “self-identified liberal Democrats” when they refer to the “party base.” As Blumenthal notes, Bob Brigham, among others, has suggested that “base” really refers to smaller communities like activists or donors. But it is fair to say that the political relevance of any particular community is somewhat limited if its views are sharply at odds with those of rank-and-file voters who say they share the same ideology.

Remember that next time anyone presumes to speak exclusively for “the base.”

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.