issue: Politics

State of the Union: The Philosophical President

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

“There was quite a bit of lecturing, not leading.”

This is what Sarah Palin said about Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech. Yes, I laughed, too — but it’s worth listening to Palin’s response (if not taking it too seriously). I found the president’s speech serious to the point of contemplative. We all know that Obama was a law professor. He deeply believes that thesis, brought into conflict with antithesis, will result in synthesis — truth.

One of Obama’s greatest unheralded risks is his repeated attempt to use politics to help lead toward truth, rather than just a win. You might call this the “philosophical model” of the presidency. Whether or not using the presidency not just to educate but to help collectively drive toward greater understanding works for people when more material needs are on their minds is a critical question for Obama. It’s a new experiment, one that is unfolding as we speak.

In several conversations I’ve had since the speech, the topic of Obama’s silences has come up. Often you could hear a pin drop, as the president introduced big themes, complicated them, let a heavy idea drop on the shoulders of his audience. He delivered some lines literally to make people ponder, rather than rise from our chairs cheering.

Here’s one example — a leading passage meant to make people reflect on their own responsibility to counter pessimism with a sort of voluntary optimism:

As one woman wrote me, “We are strained but hopeful, struggling but encouraged.” . . . It is because of this spirit – this great decency and great strength – that I have never been more hopeful about America’s future than I am tonight. Despite our hardships, our union is strong. We do not give up. We do not quit. We do not allow fear or division to break our spirit. In this new decade, it’s time the American people get a government that matches their decency; that embodies their strength.

And tonight, I’d like to talk about how together, we can deliver on that promise.

Note that he says, “I’d like to talk about…” It’s as if Obama is inviting us to reason together. This is what Palin heard as a “lecture.”

Then there was the passage where he slowly, methodically, almost quietly mocked the “noise” that surrounds politics today:

But remember this – I never suggested that change would be easy, or that I can do it alone. Democracy in a nation of three hundred million people can be noisy and messy and complicated. And when you try to do big things and make big changes, it stirs passions and controversy. That’s just how it is.

Those of us in public office can respond to this reality by playing it safe and avoid telling hard truths. We can do what’s necessary to keep our poll numbers high, and get through the next election instead of doing what’s best for the next generation.

But I also know this: if people had made that decision fifty years ago or one hundred years ago or two hundred years ago, we wouldn’t be here tonight.

Here, he linked “doing big things and making big changes” with an opposition to “noisy and messy and complicated.” He quietly suggested those who are “noisy and messy and complicated” are not on the right path; reason, paired up with policy ambitions, will instead lead the way.

The only problem is it hasn’t worked out that way so far. Obama’s greatest rhetorical successes have also been his most reflective — e.g. the campaign’s “race speech” about Jeremiah Wright, or Obama’s Oslo speech reconciling the Nobel Peace Prize with his deployment of 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. But both of these speeches were also retrospective — about events in the past, rather than policies in the future. The question is whether this approach can sustain the presidency itself, especially against the Republicans’ scorched-earth tactics. Can Hegelian dialectic be the rule, rather than the exception?

The answer, I suppose, will lie in the eating of the pudding. If the president’s injunction to be more thoughtful about our problems and more capacious in our understanding ends up eliciting more participation in solutions, then he’s right. If, on the other hand, during all those long silences last night, Republican operatives were only scheming about how to kill every single one of his proposals — and they do it — then it will have been an exhibit of a beautiful mind.

That’s what Palin was after with her attack on Obama’s “lecture.” After all, inanity has never been inconsistent with extremists’ strategy; indeed, in dark times, it is sometimes their best playbook.

State of the Union: A Litany of Solid, Progressive Proposals

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Facing almost as much uncertainty about the economy one year into his mandate as he did at the outset, President Obama gave his State of the Union address the way we’ve come to expect him to – sticking to his guns with cool determination while acknowledging that not everyone agrees with him. His speech highlighted what he has accomplished and promised to the American people, but didn’t propose any sweeping new changes.

With unemployment at 10 percent and Wall Street banks handing out record bonuses (Goldman Sachs’ bonuses are reported to match 2007’s record levels), and pundits reading doom for the administration in the tea leaves of the Massachusetts election, the political temptation to go populist would be strong. But Obama decided instead to reassert his progressive program for addressing the economy. Obama highlighted not grand industrial policy, but accomplishments that have helped the American people face a truly global recession. The stimulus bill helped us avoid falling off the economic precipice, and unemployment protection and COBRA extensions make a meaningful difference to people looking for work in a changing economy.

Obama’s call to Democrats to not “run for the hills” on issues such as health care suggests that the talk of that reform’s demise was premature. The embrace of centrist – and even Republican – proposals on energy, including nuclear power and offshore drilling, might offer some hope on a climate change bill making it’s way through the Senate. But until politicians spell out what sacrifices will come with addressing climate change, it may be a campaign promise that remains unfulfilled.

Disappointingly, the president soft-pedalled trade and immigration priorities. While they were mentioned, it’s notable that the president didn’t call on Congress to pass free trade agreements with South Korea, Panama and Colombia. And the reference to the Doha global trade round and immigration reform were pro forma at best, not promising any results.

Obama was laying the foundation for significant payoff from his education initiatives, however. Student loan subsidies to banks are an easily overlooked handout to Wall Street that the president was smart to put an end to. The investment in K-12 education reform, community colleges, and Pell grants will help prepare the next generation of Americans for the 21st-century economy. Incentives for debt forgiveness for public sector workers will mean that our best and brightest — who go to very expensive colleges and graduate schools — can now afford to look at public service, and can be used to limit some of the demand for a revolving door between the public and private sectors.

The president didn’t break new ground, or lay out a visionary mandate for change. But he reassured us that he was going to govern as he was elected, looking for progressive solutions to the challenges the country faces.

One last point — at last week’s “banking limits” announcement, beltway Kremlinologists were reading volumes into the fact that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was off to one side, while presidential economic adviser Paul Volcker was front and center. (Simon Johnson said: “Where you stand at major White House announcements is never an accident.”) Last night was Geithner’s chance to stand front-and-center — shoulder to shoulder with Bob Gates. With Larry Summers way off to the right — and I didn’t see Volcker in the audience — the handshake the president gave Geithner on his way in would seem to be sending the message that the secretary continues to be the president’s man.

The Republican Response: Was that Army Sgt. Supposed to Be There?

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I went slack-jawed during the Republican response when — lo and behold — right behind Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell and in plain view of the cameras sat an Army Staff Sergeant in full uniform:

Per paragraph 4.1.2.15 of the official DoD Directive on “Political Activities by Members of the Armed Forces,” armed forces member explicitly MAY NOT:

Attend partisan political events as an official representative of the Armed Forces, except as a member of a joint Armed Forces color guard at the opening ceremonies of the national conventions of the Republican, Democratic, or other political parties recognized by the Federal Elections Committee or as otherwise authorized by the Secretary concerned.

In other words, unless authorized by the Secretary of the Army, the staff sergeant was breaking the law.

I suppose this begs the question of whether the McDonnell’s speech constitutes a “partisan political event.” After all, he gave it in his role as governor of his state in response to the president’s State of the Union address, a nonpartisan political event.

But McDonnell didn’t give a State of the State speech. He was giving the Republican response to the State of the Union. The speech was carried on the website www.soturesponse.com with the blazing headline: REPUBLICAN ADDRESS TO THE NATION. Sounds like a partisan event to me.

Republicans like to tout their ties to the military as a proxy for being strong on the issue of national security. But by thrusting this uniformed Army Staff Sergeant front-and-center on national TV and endangering the poor guy’s career (he’ll probably be reprimanded for misconduct), I think we have to ask a very serious question: Do Republicans actually care about the military, or do Republicans just view military members as as political pawns to be trotted out at election time?

Update: According to the Virginia Voices blog at WaPo, the Army Staff Sergeant in question was Robert Tenpenny. Staff Sergeant Tenpenny admirably served with Gov. McDonnell’s daughter in Iraq, and I’m sure he considered it an honor to be seated behind his friend Jeanine’s father as he delivered the most important speech of his life. I can understand how in the excitement of being selected for such a prime spot, he may not have realized the consequences of that choice. However, he probably should have erred on the side of caution — my active duty coworkers in DoD were always very careful about this stuff in 2004 and 2006. A Navy friend of mine refused to so much as stand in the crowd at a Jim Webb rally because of the regulation.

That said, I’m also confident that the RNC knew what it was doing in its heavy-handed staging of the event.

State of the Union: Obama Doubles Down

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Many conservatives hoped last night’s State of the Union Address would represent something of a white flag from President Obama. Some progressives hoped for a fiery, “populist” attack on malefactors of great wealth. Others yearned for rhetorical enchantment, a speech that would redefine messy contemporary debates according to some previously unarticulated transcendent logic.

The president did none of those things. He essentially doubled down on the policy course he had already charted, made a serious effort to re-connect it to the original themes of his presidential campaign, and sought to brush back his critics a bit. In purely political terms, the speech seemed designed to halt the panic and infighting in Democratic ranks, kick some sand in the faces of increasingly smug and scornful Republicans, and obtain a fresh hearing from the public for decisions he made at the beginning of last year if not earlier. It was, as virtually every one I spoke to last night spontaneously observed, a very “Clintonian” effort, and not just because it was long and comprehensive. It strongly resembled a couple of those late 1990s Clinton SOTUs organized on the theme of “progress not partisanship,” loaded with data points supporting the sheer reasonableness of the administration agenda and the pettiness of (unnamed) conservative foes.

Substantively, the speech broke little new ground. But while such “concessions” to “conservative ideas” as highlighting business tax cuts in the jobs bill, or making nuclear energy development part of a “clean energy” strategy, were decided on some time ago, they were probably news to many non-beltway listeners.

All in all, Obama used the SOTU as a “teachable moment” to refresh some old but important arguments. And he did that well: his reminder of Bush’s responsibility for most of the budget problems facing the country was deftly done, in the context of accepting responsibility for what’s happened fiscally on his own watch. He rearticulated once again the economic rationale for his health care and climate change initiatives, a connection that was reinforced by the subordinate placement of these subjects in the speech. And he conducted something of a mini-tutorial on the budget, and cleared up most of the misunderstandings created by his staff’s use of the word “freeze” to describe a spending cap.

Perhaps the most surprising thing in the speech was his frontal attack on the five Supreme Court justices sitting a few yards from his podium, about the possible impact of last week’s Citizens United decision liberating corporate political spending. I only wish he could have amplified this section by quoting from Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell’s many hymns of praise for this disturbing opinion as a giant blow for free speech.

And that gets to my only real criticism of this well-planned SOTU: a lot of it was in code. A number of the digs at Republicans were clear to people who watch Washington closely, but not so much to people who don’t. For example, the president was clearly taunting congressional Republicans when he said he’d be glad to consider any ideas they had that met his list of criteria for health care reform. To someone watching who didn’t know how ridiculous contemporary conservative “thinking” on health care has become, this may have sounded less like a criticism than like a decision to reopen the whole issue to many more months of wrangling in Congress, even as he tried to urge congressional Democrats to get the job done and not “run for the hills.”

Yes, the president has to walk a fine line in dealing with public and media perceptions that both parties are equally responsible for “partisanship” and gridlock. But at some point between now and November, he needs to better connect the dots, and explain exactly whose “partisanship” is an obstacle to “progress.”

Update: Nate Silver did an analysis of “buzzwords” in Obama’s speech, comparing it to those of previous presidents at similar junctures in their administrations. Unsurprisingly, Obama’s most resembled those of Bill Clinton.

State of the Union: Obama Still Missing a Master Narrative

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

President Obama’s first State of the Union address was a surprisingly prosaic affair for a man of his oratorical gifts. It was practical, concrete, and workmanlike, long on common sense and short on inspiration.

Still, the speech probably advanced several of Obama’s key goals, and it gave the country a chance to see how well he stands up to political adversity. By turns humorous, passionate and resolute, Obama gave the impression of a more seasoned leader who has not been knocked off stride by recent reverses, and who is rededicating himself to changing the way Washington works.

On the positive side, Obama conveyed empathy with working Americans who have lost jobs, houses and retirement savings, and reassured them that he will put jobs and economic recovery first in 2010. He identified with their anger over government’s rescue of the financial sector – “we all hated the bank bailout” — and reeled off a list of small-bore initiatives to boost small businesses and help middle-class families pay for childcare, retirement and college.

Although his major reforms — health care, financial regulation, the climate and energy bill – seem stalled, the President vowed to stay the course. In fact, he deftly parried conservative depictions of these as big government or archliberal initiatives, defining them instead as integral to the mission he was elected to accomplish: changing Washington’s dysfunctional political culture.

Crucially, Obama sought to resurrect his image as an outsider and insurgent bent of tackling America’s polarized and broken politics. He spoke of the “deficit of trust” in government and vowed to reduce the power of lobbyists and special interests, though was uncharacteristically vague on how he’d do that.

The president also seems to have recognized that, to win back disaffected independents, he will have to confront the forces of inertia in his own party as well as his political opponents. He issued a pointed challenge to liberals not to resist his efforts to impose fiscal discipline on the federal government, endorsed a deficit-reduction commission and threatened to veto profligate spending measures. And he bluntly called out Republicans for their blind obstructionism, adding that their ability to block legislation carries with it the responsibility to help solve the nation’s problems.

The most disappointing part of Obama’s address was on international affairs, a subject he finally turned to about an hour into his speech. The president duly noted that he is waging the fight against al Qaeda aggressively and sending more troops to Afghanistan. But he had little to say about the nature of the struggle that America is waging, at great sacrifice, against Islamist extremism. He seemed more passionate in affirming his pledge to get all U.S. troops out of Iraq, but said little about what they have achieved there, or whether our country has any interest in what happens there after we leave.

All in all, the president seemed to treat consequential matters of war, terrorism and foreign relations generally as an afterthought. This may suit the public’s present mood, but it didn’t reveal much about how this president connects America’s purposes abroad to what he wants to achieve at home.

And this underscores what was perhaps most striking about the speech. There was very little by way of an overarching vision or governing philosophy to link together the president’s many initiatives and commitments. There was no striking image like Reagan’s “shining city on the hill,” or thematic scaffolding like Bill Clinton’s “opportunity, responsibility and community” to invest Obama’s tenure with a deeper logic than serial problem-solving. Yes, Obama in his peroration repeatedly invoked “American values,” in an almost generic way. What’s still missing after a year in office is the master narrative of the Obama presidency, a story that is less about him and more about the next stage in America’s democratic experiment.

State of the Union: Commander-in-Chief as Cheerleader

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In the most raucous and gutsy State of the Union I can remember — the president challenged Democrats to not run for the hills, thrust the onus of governance on Republicans, and stared down Chief Justice John Roberts — national security policy came and went with hardly a whimper. It’s not that the president didn’t spent a significant chunk of his speech on the topic (he did), but rather that what he said didn’t break new ground.

If there was a newsworthy tidbit of policy, it was the president’s call to secure all loose nuclear material within four years. It was a smart way to package the issue, tying nuclear terrorism to Obama’s repeated goal to eventually have a world without nuclear weapons. Republicans will no doubt jump at that line as the latest in a twisted attempt to paint Obama as naive and weak. It’s not true, of course — eliminating nuclear weapons is the right long-term goal, but their reduction will come in concert with other countries as part of a slow, negotiated, equitable drawdown over decades.

Otherwise, the president gave a set-piece rundown of the broad set of national security priorities. He vowed to continue the withdrawal in Iraq, even though the disturbing increase in violence over the last few weeks and barring of ex-Ba’athists from the March parliamentary elections are both cause for significant concern. He charted a path out of Afghanistan, framing the choice to send more troops there as one of the hard choices of governance that won’t make him popular. And he vowed to continue to take the fight to al Qaeda while acknowledging shortcomings within the intelligence community (that, if you’ve been buying what I’m selling, is a more nuanced problem than he’d have time to explain). On the AQ score, the administration actually deserves more credit than it has received — if the harshest critics examine the record, they’ll find that, for example, the White House was sending top officials to Yemen well before the Christmas attempt.

The policy implications aside, I thought the most impressive rhetorical flourish about American national security and foreign policy actually came in the first part of the speech that was dedicated to the economy. Extolling the virtues of American ingenuity and innovation, Obama compared America to China, India, and Germany — three countries the president said that weren’t waiting to revamp. He challenged Americans to beat those countries, saying he refused “to accept second-place for the United States of America.”

Bam. That’s what Americans need to hear from this president: that he’s ready to lead, that — just like we’re doing in Haiti — America acts internationally because “our destiny is connected to those beyond our shores,” and that the United States is the greatest country in the world. Now, if you’re reading this blog, chances are that you’re a progressive who might have some doubts about what America has done in Iraq, or questions about why we’re in Afghanistan. But regardless of any questionable past policies (and without getting into a debate about them here), Americans need to hear from this White House that America is a strong force for good in the world. I worry that the president hasn’t made that case strongly enough all the time. This was a good start.

Supreme Court Ruling Gives Boost to Public Funding Movement

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The recent Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC has put campaign finance reform back on the nation’s political agenda. Now more than ever, Americans are voicing concern over the corrupting influence of special interest money in politics and seeking long-term solutions that can tilt the balance of power in Washington back to the people. In recent days, we have seen new momentum for one such response: voluntary public funding of federal elections. It’s the ironic upside of a deeply disturbing ruling by the Court.

The Fair Elections Now Act for publicly funded elections (H.R.1826/S.752) was introduced in the House by Representatives by John Larson (D-CT) and Walter Jones (R-NC) and in the Senate by Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Arlen Specter (D-PA), gaining more than 130 co-sponsors to-date. These bills — championed by Americans for Campaign Reform and a broad, bipartisan coalition of business leaders, former members of Congress, and labor, environmental, religious, and civic organizations — would establish an innovative system of public funding of elections that rewards candidates that successfully attract small donors. These systems have been proven to work well in major cities like New York and Los Angeles and in eight states, from Arizona to Maine, where large majorities of candidates on both sides of the aisle have been elected with public funding.

As the New York Times wrote in an editorial on the heels of the Supreme Court ruling:

Congress and members of the public who care about fair elections and clean government need to mobilize right away, a cause President Obama has said he would join. Congress should repair the presidential public finance system and create another one for Congressional elections to help ordinary Americans contribute to campaigns.

Why is public funding of elections receiving so much attention in the wake of the Court’s decision? Quite simply, it’s the only meaningful reform that offers a long-term fix to the problem of special-interest money in our elections that also passes constitutional muster with this Supreme Court. Rather than restricting candidates and groups from spending money on political speech, it cherishes and expands free speech by ensuring that credible candidates without deep pockets will have the means to run competitive races. And because those who win elections using public funds have no special interest funders to pay back for their seat, they will be free to represent their conscience and constituents alone.

Empirical analysis of the effects of campaign spending on votes clearly shows that if we provide a candidate with sufficient public funds to get her message out and respond to attacks, excessive spending by opponents, their parties and special interest groups will have little determining effect on the outcome of the election. It’s a classic case of diminishing returns. And for a price of just $6 per citizen per year, a program to publicly fund all races in Washington is a bargain for taxpayers concerned with the billions in wasteful spending that goes to reward big donors.

In December, I wrote a policy memo making the case for the Fair Elections Now Act. The Supreme Court’s unfortunate decision has now pushed us into a new paradigm for campaign finance regulation, underscoring the need for new and innovative solutions. Real change in Washington cannot happen as long as corporations and other special interests dominate the debate on Capitol Hill and exercise undue influence over who runs for, and wins, public office. The Fair Elections Now Act offers our best chance at fixing our broken politics.

On Budget, Obama Must Walk a Fine Line

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As President Obama prepares to deliver his first State of the Union Address tonight, he is being tugged in conflicting directions. His dilemma is simple, and familiar: independent voters want different things than liberals.

Independents and moderate Democrats worry about big government and deficits. Liberals want more government spending and regulation, and they think fiscal discipline is the death of progressive reform.

These tensions were on display yesterday as the Senate squelched a bipartisan proposal, endorsed by President Obama, to set up a special commission to tackle the nation’s growing fiscal crisis. Offered as an amendment to legislation increasing the debt ceiling, the proposal by Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-ND) and Ranking Member Judd Gregg (R-NH) attracted a bipartisan majority of 53 votes. But under the Senate’s tyranny of the supermajority, it needed 60 to pass.

To the independents who have been defecting from Obama’s winning 2008 coalition, it looked like yet another victory for the status quo in Washington. The defeat sets up a confrontation with Senate moderates, who have threatened to vote against raising the debt ceiling unless Congress empowers a commission to rein in the nation’s runaway deficits and debt. It may also prompt President Obama to revive his idea for setting up the commission under executive order. House Blue Dogs yesterday endorsed a commission as part of their plan for fiscal reform.

On the other side of the fiscal divide, many liberals have recoiled from Obama’s call for a three-year “freeze” on non-security discretionary spending, seeing it as a cave-in to budget hawks that will crimp progressive ambitions and possibly forestall economic recovery. Since the bill envisions only modest cuts in spending ($250 billion over the next decade) — none of which go into effect until 2011 when it won’t hinder the recovery — such fears seem overwrought. And Obama cushioned the blow by unveiling a new package of middle-class tax cuts.

Nonetheless, the president has a fine line to walk tonight. He must convince the country that he is taking decisive action to control government spending and deficits. And he must convince his party that big progressive reforms can advance within a framework that restores long-term fiscal stability.

Even as the commission went down, the Congressional Budget Office yesterday released new budget forecasts that underscore why Congress must begin laying the groundwork for a return to fiscal discipline in Washington. CBO projects this year’s deficit at $1.3 trillion. At 9.2 percent of GDP, that is slightly less than last year’s whopping 9.9 percent shortfall, which was the biggest in U.S. peacetime history. But while these short-term deficits are enormous, the more fundamental problem is the nation’s cascading national debt. CBO sees the debt nearly tripling from $5.9 trillion to $15 billion by the end of the decade, or from 53 to 67 percent of GDP, and that estimate is based on very conservative assumptions.

America piled up a similar load of debt after World War II, but at least we owed the money to ourselves. Unchecked, today’s borrowing binge means more dependence on Chinese and other foreign lenders to keep our economy afloat, more tax dollars siphoned off to service our debts, and a growing squeeze on public investment as automatic spending on the elderly crowds out everything else.

Given the magnitude of the problem, Obama’s proposed freeze is exceedingly modest. What’s more, it’s a flexible freeze, not an indiscriminate swipe of the budgetary ax. Congress can boost vital public investments – say in technological innovation and clean energy, as long as it is willing to pass offsetting program cuts. As Ed Kilgore has pointed out, the proposal would basically restore the budget “caps” that effectively restrained spending during the Clinton years.

The deficit commission is a bigger deal because it aims at the core of America’s long-term fiscal challenge: the automatic and unsustainable growth of spending on Medicare, Medicaid and Society Security. Congress, polarized along lines of party and ideology, and intimidated by pressure groups, has repeatedly shown itself incapable of slowing entitlement cost growth. Hence the Conrad-Gregg proposal for a bipartisan commission to develop a package of tax and spending changes, and present them to Congress for an up or down vote.

The president tonight should challenge both anti-tax conservatives and pro-spending liberals to get serious about entitlement reform. And he should use the occasion to spell out for skeptical independents why health care reform is indispensible to controlling public spending. Coupled with a strong message on jobs, a forceful presidential commitment to restoring fiscal discipline in Washington will boost economic confidence and help to bring independents back into the progressive fold.

Straining Tea

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As a follow-up to J.P. Green’s post this morning suggesting that the DSCC is trying to split the right from the far right, it’s kind of important to understand that the far right is really feeling its oats these days, particularly in the Tea Party Movement.

But anyone trying to understand the Tea Party phenomenon is constantly urged not to stereotype its participants politically or ideologically. It’s a grassroots movement, we are told, so no one in particular speaks for them. They hate both parties equally, it is said, so you can’t confuse them with conservative Republicans. There are former Obama voters in their ranks, we are told breathlessly.

Well, okay, after reading a long, impressionistic, nonjudgmental “life among the tea party activists” piece in The New Yorker by Ben McGrath, I won’t assume the author (after all, he’s writing for The New Yorker, at the very center of Wall Street/Liberal Enemy Camp, for God’s sake) gets the views of tea party activists accurately or fairly depicted. But it’s pretty clear that there are an awful lot of these folks who can only be described as harboring views considered, until just last year, about 90 degrees to the right of the right wing of the Republican Party. They are independent of the Republican Party only to the extent that they won’t support it fully until it moves further to the right another 90 degrees (which seems to be happening at a brisk pace).

Sure, there are probably all sorts of people in the mix, but here’s my question for them: please read the following passage from McGrath’s piece and tell me how much of this scenario sounds plausible to you:

An online video game, designed recently by libertarians in Brooklyn, called “2011: Obama’s Coup Fails” imagines a scenario in which the Democrats lose seventeen of nineteen seats in the Senate and a hundred and seventy-eight in the House during the midterm elections, prompting the President to dissolve the Constitution and implement an emergency North American People’s Union, with help from Mexico’s Felipe Calderón, Canada’s Stephen Harper, and various civilian defense troops with names like the Black Tigers, the International Service Union Empire, and CORNY, or the Congress of Rejected and Neglected Youth. Lou Dobbs has gone missing, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh turn up dead at a FEMA concentration camp, and you, a lone militiaman in a police state where private gun ownership has been outlawed, are charged with defeating the enemies of patriotism, one county at a time.

If you find yourself nodding your head at much of this stuff, then you are indeed living in a different conceptual world than I am, and I’m afraid I’ll have to stereotype you as a dangerous wingnut. Maybe a nice, patriotic, well-meaning wingnut, but a wingnut nonetheless.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Obama’s “Theory of Change” Revisited

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

If you are interested in a deeper interpretation of what’s been happening in and to the Obama administration–deeper, that is, than conservative allegations of “radicalism” and “sociialism” and progressive complaints about “spinelessness” or “corporate influence”–then I highly recommend a colloquoy on The American Prospect site between TAP’s Mark Schmitt and historian Rick Perlstein. It’s in essence a lookback at the simmering debate among progressive observers that ran all through the 2008 election cycle about Barack Obama’s “theory of change,” and especially the tension between his progressive goals and his rhetoric of bipartisanship.

As it happens, Schmitt (along with Michael Tomasky and yours truly) was highly identified with the argument that Obama’s “theory of change” was aimed at offering the political opposition a choice between cooperation on progressive policy initiatives or self-isolation through obstruction and extremism. In other words, in a country unhappy with partisan gridlock, Republicans would either go along with key elements of a progressive agenda, or shrink themselves into an ever-more-extreme ideological rump that was irrelevant to the direction of the country.

Rick Perlstein was more of an Obama-skeptic, but he, too, began to feel that Obama might be luring Republicans into a big trap. As he recalls now, during the stretch drive in 2008:

Conservatives eagerly played to type — GOP congressional leaders called in Joe the Plumber for strategy sessions, and Newsmax.com started advertising a 2009 “Hot Sarah Calendar.” On my blog I labeled what Republicans had been reduced to as “Palinporn”: “material to help lonely conservatives retreat within their own cocoon of fantasy rather than participate in the actual conversations taking place to govern the country.” It was a very “Obama theory of change” insight: Obama could simply get on with governing. Republicans would conversely build ever more elaborate halls of mirrors that made it increasingly impossible for them to speak to America. In fact, around that time, I was exhilarated by the thought of Rush Limbaugh’s ratings exploding through the roof, from 20 million to 30 million listeners — 30 million Americans able only to speak to each other, sounding to the rest of the country like practitioners of esoteric Masonic rites.

Today, of course, Republicans haven’t gotten any less extreme–au contraire in fact–but their political prospects, for 2010 at least, look pretty good. What went wrong? Was Obama’s “theory of change” fundamentally flawed, making him look weak and unprincipled when talking about “bipartisanship?” Would Democrats have done better under the leadership of someone whose theory of change was based on “fighting” or constituency-tending?

You can read the whole piece, but both Schmitt and Perlstein agree that Obama underestimated the ability of Republicans to achieve almost total solidarity against the new administration, and overestimated his own ability to maintain the strong and excited coalition he put together in 2008, given the excrutiatingly difficult circumstances he face upon taking office. Moreover, they agree that going forward, Obama must find ways to “draw lines” with the Republican opposition without trying to abandon his natural style and tone. To put it another way, they suggest that Obama’s “theory of change” required, in practice, a more aggressive approach than trap-setting and jiu-jitsu. The strategy isn’t just falling into place naturally.

What I would add to their analysis is that this “line-drawing” should focus more on the present and future than the past. Yes, George W. Bush is responsible for a lot of the country’s current problems and even many of the policies that Obama was more or less forced to continue. Yes, Obama inherited two wars, vast long-term budget deficits, and an economic nightmare, and he should remind people of that now and then. But inevitably, fairly or not, with every day that passes more Americans will hold the current administration responsible for current conditions in the country. Moreover, what the “blame Bush” narrative misses is that Republicans have in no small part insulated themselves from responsibility for his record by moving harshly to the Right, implicitly criticizing Bush for not being a “true conservative,” and in particular, attacking the steps he took to head off a global economic collapse, which are deeply unpopular. And focusing on Bush distracts attention from the extremism, craziness and emptiness (depending on the issue) or the post-Bush Republican Party, which ought to be the source of comparison for voters this year and in 2012. Without an aggressive, presidentially-led effort to expose that extremism, you can’t really expect political independents to look past the mainstream media’s inveterate tendency to assume the political “center” is half-way between wherever the two parties happen to be at any moment, and to blame both parties equally for the climate of “partisanship” (or maybe blame Obama even more, since he was supposed to be “post-partisan”).

Presenting a choice not just to Republicans, but to voters, of two distinct courses in American politics and policy is the best chance the president and the Democratic Party has of negotiating the current climate, re-energizing the 2012 coalition, and eventually, getting a clear mandate for progressive governance that will include public support for overcoming Republican obstruction, especially in the Senate.

Obama’s “theory of change” hasn’t been refuted, just immensely complicated, and there’s no compelling evidence that a different strategy of dealing with a public wanting conflicting things, an opposition party that’s gone nihilistic, and the built-in obstructions to change in our system, would have worked better. But at some point, the theory has to be adjusted to current realities and past mistakes, and get visible results. Otherwise, the spectacle of the post-partisan president getting attacked for “socialism” while trimming his own policy sails and begging the opposition for cooperation really will look just feckless.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

On Net Neutrality, Google and Verizon Find Common Ground

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

It’s been about a week since the deadline for comments on the FCC’s notice of proposed rulemaking for net neutrality. Regulators are no doubt immersed in what promises to be an extremely long review process (in a somewhat unusual move, various advocacy organizations directed their supporters to submit comments directly — by at least one account, over 120,000 were submitted).

None of those comments attracted as much attention as the joint filing between Google and Verizon. An Internet service provider (ISP) and a content producer on the same side of this debate? It might not seem like a natural fit. It’s consequently tempting to look at the Google/Verizon proposal as an indication of what a possible net neutrality compromise could look like. But is it? And, just as important: would it be a good idea?

In truth, the partnership isn’t as unusual as one might think. Google and Verizon have collaborated on this issue before, publishing a joint blog post in advance of the FCC notice. It’s not entirely surprising: among the ISPs, Verizon’s current market position makes it uniquely amenable to the case being made by the content provider bloc. With DSL hitting technical limits and receding into a role as a budget broadband option, Verizon has undertaken a major infrastructure upgrade to FiOS — one that should leave them with a substantially higher-capacity network than the cable ISPs can offer. They’re also a new entrant to the digital-television marketplace. In short, Verizon is gunning for the Comcasts of the world, and doing so as a bit of an underdog. It has little reason to fight for a regulatory environment in which the network operators currently at the top of the heap can use their market power to entrench their positions.

So does the jointly submitted letter represent a good-faith common ground, free of the hyperbole and deliberate obfuscation that has characterized so much of this debate? Well, kind of. There’s a pleasant lack of “the FCC is about to accidentally break the internet!”-style fear-mongering. But there isn’t too much else on offer: some opening paeans to the Internet and consumer choice; an endorsement of transparency; a gentle reminder that neither party wants to be on the hook for enforcing intellectual property laws; and muted terror at the realization that the FCC is about to do… well, something.

From this flows the one really substantive idea in the letter: a proposal to create one or more “technical advisory groups” consisting of industry stakeholders, which would resolve neutrality-related disputes on a case-by-case basis, acting as a layer of mediation before the government became involved. Optimists will see this as an attempt to avoid the potential inefficiencies of regulation. Cynics will see it as a recipe for regulatory capture before the regulations are even written. And of course it’s not clear which stakeholders would have a say in these advisory groups. Would Joost? Or Sopcast users? It may be difficult to identify scrappy startups that deserve a seat at the table, particularly if they aren’t corporate entities.

More than anything, the letter serves as a reminder of how nebulous the net neutrality debate has become. What could the ISPs do to our society if they decided to press their advantage? It’s easy to let one’s imagination run wild and conjure net neutrality threats to virtually any cause or principle — hence the various framings of net neutrality as a fundamental economic/political/human rights/feminist issue.

But it’s worth keeping in mind that the only unambiguous violation of net neutrality that we’ve yet seen is Comcast’s decision to monkey with Bittorrent users’ reset packets — and, relatedly, some ISPs’ decision to throttle all encrypted traffic in an effort to fight Bittorrent (though this is still largely a Canadian phenomenon). That’s not to say that neutrality regulation isn’t worth pursuing. But whatever system is established should at least be able to deal with the one problematic case we’ve actually seen — and while the details could prove me wrong, the advisory group proposal doesn’t strike me as being up to the task. Verizon and Google’s common ground may indeed prove to be a useful preview of the FCC’s final vision of net neutrality, but it seems unlikely to be the whole picture.

Discipline Government, Too

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Since last week’s shocker in Massachusetts, the White House has amped up the populist rhetoric in hopes of deflecting voter anger onto Wall Street bonus babies and health insurance companies. That might make progressives feel better, but it’s unlikely to mollify ornery independents.

For one thing, Barack Obama is no Huey Long. As president, his job is to point the way out of the nation’s dilemmas, not channel voter rage. What our jittery country needs now is his calm, penetrating intelligence, not hackneyed demagoguery that will unsettle markets and retard the return of economic confidence. A swifter economic recovery is the best elixir for what ails Obama and his party.

Besides, independents, who are now more numerous than either Democrats or Republicans, are as upset with big government as they are with big banking and business. Everything that has happened in the past year – from bailing out feckless bankers, home owners and auto executives, to stimulus spending that has failed (so far) to keep unemployment from getting worse, to the spectacle of lawmakers appeasing powerful interests as they cobble together a huge and complicated health reform bill – has aggravated their misgivings about government’s cost and intrusiveness.

President Obama needs to speak directly to independents’ qualms about big government. The first step is to acknowledge their validity. Then he must take forceful action to show that he is as determined to discipline government as he is to impose new rules on irresponsible capitalists.

On no account should he back down on health care reform. Rather, he should work to strengthen its ability to control health care costs, the issue that matters most to independent and working-class voters.

The right response to anti-government populism is to get serious about restoring fiscal sanity in Washington. That’s why the president’s decision over the weekend to support a bipartisan deficit reduction commission is a promising sign.

In theory, establishing a bipartisan commission to cut federal budget deficits is a terrible idea. It lets Congress off the hook, even while usurping the legislative branch’s Constitutional responsibility for the nation’s fisc.

In the real world, however, a commission may be the only way to force Congress to do its job. Lawmakers’ inability to find common ground on expanding health care coverage – something both parties claim they want – doesn’t inspire much confidence that they will take the tough steps necessary to close the nation’s yawning deficits.

That’s why 14 moderate Democratic senators, led by Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad and Sen. Evan Bayh, have threatened to withhold their votes for raising the nation’s debt ceiling – which allows the government to borrow to meet its obligations – unless Congress sets up a commission. As currently proposed, the commission would present its recommendations to Congress as a package for an up or down vote. This is how Congress managed to close unneeded military bases after the Cold War ended. According to the Washington Post, President Obama has endorsed the idea of setting up a commission by legislation, after previously pushing for a bipartisan panel established by executive order.

The moderates are right that a “statutory” commission would have real teeth. For that reason, however, it has drawn fierce opposition from both ends of the ideological spectrum. A coalition of 50 left-leaning pressure groups came out swinging on Wednesday, blasting a commission as “undemocratic” and “truly dangerous” to Social Security. Having invested time and money in acquiring influence in the legislative arena, the last thing they want is a change of venue.

For such groups, “protecting” Social Security benefits from cuts is more important than dealing with the nation’s fiscal crisis – just as many conservatives would sooner see America plunge deeper into the red than raise a penny in taxes. “A budget deficit commission is nothing more than a time-tested ploy to get Republicans to raise taxes,” the Wall Street Journal harrumphed last month.

So there we are: the left won’t cut spending, the right won’t raise taxes, and the two remain locked in a tacit conspiracy to bankrupt America. Maybe all those angry independents have a point.

It remains to be seen whether Obama’s decision back a statutory commission will sway congressional leaders, who have been skeptical. In any case, if the Senate moderates hold firm, Congress won’t be able to raise the debt ceiling to $14.2 trillion, which it must do by mid-February or the federal government will run out of money.

This sets the stage for some interesting brinkmanship, and for a determined push by President Obama to change the way Washington works. Stay tuned.

Bring On the GOP Health Policies!

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

I’m with Steve Benen on this one: after listening to Republicans say all weekend that the president needs to surrender on health care reform and start embracing theirpolicy ideas, maybe it’s time to draw a lot more public attention to all that fine GOP thinking on the subject.

So where to begin? I guess that would be with the “plan” that drew 176 Republicans votes in the House in a test vote in November of last year, the so-called “Boehner plan.” Dissed by an official Congressional Budget Office analysis that suggested it would cover almost none of the uninsured, while controlling costs far less effectively than the House Democratic proposal, this plan followed the usual conservative template of focusing on tort “reform,” “interstate markets” for private heath insurance (e.g., elimination of state regulations), elimination of the entire employer-based system, and a two-pronged strategy of subsidizing high-deductible individual health plans for healthy people, and state-run risk pools for sick people. It was, as Matt Yglesias put it, an “un-insurance” plan that would take health policy, in some respects, back to the 1950s.

Another example of Republican “thinking” on health care policy is the idea of “voucherizing” Medicare, which was the central health policy element of the official House GOP “alternative budget” offered last April by Rep. Paul Ryan of WI. While “Medicare voucher” proposals vary, they all at the very least aim at transforming Medicare into a system of federal subsidies for purchasing private health insurance, while capping expenditures regardless of the impact on benefits. To put it simply, seniors would march through the streets with torches to protest any such plan if it were taken seriously.

And then there’s the most fully developed Republican health care plan, the one developed and implemented by the front-runner for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination, and recently promoted by the party’s maximum “new star”: the Massachusetts health reform plan. How about allowing a vote on that in Congress? Oh, yeah, sorry, that’s pretty much the plan already passed by the U.S. Senate without a single Republican vote! It’s socialist!

Suffice it to say that while Democrats have been materially hurt by endless scrutiny and confusion about the substance of their ideas on health care, Republicans have massively benefitted from a total lack of accountability for their own ideas. Best I can tell, Republicans would probably be politically destroyed if people truly paid attention to GOP health proposals. So Democrats should find ways to help their GOP colleagues publicize their ideas.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Fragile Consensus

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Everyone should read Matt Yglesias’s post,”How Close Were We, Really?” which makes a point that I’ve been mulling. The fact that health care reform blew up so quickly after the Brown win implies that whatever consensus had been achieved between the Senate and House, it was significantly incomplete, weak, or both. House liberals apparently were not prepared to pass anything coming out of conference that didn’t reverse the problems they have with the Senate bill. But it’s unclear whether moderate senators or representatives would have stayed on board in that event. If the last week shows nothing else it reveals that a whole lot of members of Congress were decidedly un-excited about supporting anything resembling either chamber’s bill.

This seems like a job for Keith Hennessey: knowing what we know now about the uneasiness of moderates and the stubbornness of liberals, what was the likelihood that reform would have passed if Coakley had won? (Keith had the probability of collapse given a narrow Coakley victory at 10 percent — and two percent with a big win — before the election.)

If this interpretation is right, it implies that many progressives haven’t given enough credit to how far out on the plank many moderates actually went (which isn’t that surprising given how many of them misread the polls). Pre-Brown, moderates were betting that antagonism toward reform wasn’t so strong that their job — their chance to work on all of their other legislative priorities — was in mortal danger. The Brown win provided new information that clearly affected the calculus (as did the initial freak-out by Massachusetts’s own Barney Frank).

Perhaps one big reason why the Obama team (and everyone else) was caught flat-footed after the election was that they were unaware of how much moderates already felt they had stuck their necks out.

All this said, I think the consensus that Democrats having second thoughts ought to accept that they have no choice but to vote for the final bill is correct. Actually, I think these Democrats have probably reached that conclusion too. But it’s important to note that that wouldn’t be enough to pass something — if House liberals won’t vote for the Senate bill, it doesn’t matter what moderates do. What progressive bloggers need to do is start working the liberal legislators in the House.

Scott Brown Tests Republicans, Too

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As Democrats try to piece together the shards of an agenda that Scott Brown’s election just blasted to pieces, there’s been a lot of talk about how they should proceed. What lesson should Democrats take away from this? Can they withstand the test that Brown’s victory and its aftermath poses? (The nearly unanimous answer from despairing liberals and cynical pundits: no.)

But set aside the Democrats for a minute. One thing that few people are talking about is how the Republicans will respond to Brown. Based on the party’s trajectory, it won’t be too long before Brown prompts another round of party soul-searching – and it won’t be the Democrats doing it the next time.

As Boris Shor, a political scientist at the University of Chicago (h/t Andrew Gelman) has pointed out, Brown is a liberal Republican – perhaps the most liberal of the party. Shor’s analysis of Brown’s State Senate record revealed that Brown enters the U.S. Senate as the 60th most liberal senator, somewhere to the right of Nebraska’s Ben Nelson, a Democrat, and somewhere to the left of Maine’s Olympia Snowe, a Republican. This makes sense – Massachusetts is, Tuesday notwithstanding, one of the bluest states in the union.

There is, of course, a not insignificant chance that Brown will turn to the right now that he’s in the national spotlight. But Shor douses water on that scenario by pointing out that if Brown is like almost every other politician, he’ll vote with both eyes trained on his home state electorate. And, as Shor adds, “Brown will have a far harder time in 2012 against some credible, seasoned Democrat who won’t get surprised again (or run so badly). Turnout will be higher in that presidential year, meaning the Democratic base will be far more evident at the polls” – meaning that a turn to the right in a blue state is, though not impossible, probably not likely.

This is where the Tea Partiers that have elevated him to party folk hero status come in. For putting a halt to health care reform, Brown may have earned a lifetime pass from the far right. Rush Limbaugh just this week bashed John McCain while invoking Scott Brown as a model maverick. But the euphoria of this week will wear off, and the votes will start trickling in. If Brown becomes a member of the Snowe-Collins bloc of northeastern Republicans willing to deal with the other party, will the Tea Party still cheer for him?

For a Republican Party struggling to present a responsible, sensible face to mainstream America (they’re showcasing Virginia’s Bob McDonnell, who ran a centrist campaign in November, in their State of the Union response), a moderate Republican from Massachusetts is a godsend. But you can’t escape who you are.

The Tea Party DNA is deeply embedded in the party’s makeup. The party of Rush Limbaugh may be cheering now, but chances are good they’ll be cursing Scott Brown’s name down the road. What Scott Brown’s win has obscured is that the Republican crack-up is still proceeding apace – and, like Brown’s victory, it might well sneak up on everyone, too.

They Don’t Like Each Other

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

A problem that seems to be getting lost in the current confusion over the fate of health reform legislation is something that has little to do with party or ideology, much less with the details of health policy. It’s cameralism.

To put it simply, members of the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate have very different perspectives, mistrust each other’s motives, and rarely communicate. In general, they don’t much like each other. They live and work in two very different institutional cultures, and with the exception of House veterans serving in the Senate, they don’t go to much trouble to find out how the other chamber functions.

Much of the time this “cameralism” is background noise in the legislative process. But when it comes to the kind of highly complex, trust-based maneuvers that health care reformers are talking about this week–you know, House passes Senate bill with assurance that Senate passes bill “fixing” their own bill via budget reconciliation, somewhere down the road–it’s a real problem that can’t just be wished away. And that’s particularly true in an environment requiring almost total agreement among Democrats in both Houses. Maybe that’s one reason the White House is talking about a “cooling off” period on health care reform.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.