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About Those “Green Shoots” of Moderation

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010
Ed Kilgore


Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.

by Ed Kilgore

Yesterday I wrote about the conservative effort to convince the news media and others that crazy people were being kept under control by the Tea Party Movement and the Republican Party. There’s an even less credible media narrative kicking around that was pursued the same day by Janet Hook of the Los Angeles Times: Republican moderates are making a comeback!

If you understandably missed this development, here’s how Hook puts it:

With healthcare legislation mired in partisanship, “tea party” activists on the march and GOP leadership dominated by conservatives, Capitol Hill looks like a parched landscape for the withered moderate wing of the Republican Party.But green shoots are sprouting in Washington and on the campaign trail. A small band of Republican moderates in the Senate broke a logjam on jobs legislation. They added to their ranks with the arrival of another New England Republican, Scott Brown. And several moderate Republicans are in a good position to win Senate seats in November.

The article is loaded with qualifiers of this dubious proposition, but not enough of them. The jobs bill where “Republican moderates” — including Tea Party favorite Scott Brown — offered a few votes for cloture was a vastly watered-down $15 billion measure that included a payroll tax credit for employers long beloved of Republicans (indeed, that’s why it was in the bill). Once cloture was invoked, 13 GOPers voted for the bill, including such decidedly non-moderate senators as James Inhofe (OK), Richard Burr (NC) and Hatch (UT). Indeed, the only reason the bill was even controversial for Republicans is that it was offered by the Democratic leadership in lieu of a much more expensive and tax-cut laden bill worked out between Sens. Max Baucus (D-MT) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA)  that most Democrats intensely disliked. Anyone expecting this development to lead to an outbreak of bipartisanship or a breakdown of Republican obstruction is smoking crack.

Hook’s optimistic spin on “moderate Republican” prospects for election to the Senate is equally off-base. She cites Rep. Mark Kirk (IL), Rep. Mike Castle (DE), Gov. Charlie Crist (FL), former Rep. Tom Campbell (CA), and former Rep. Rob Simmons (CT) as potential additions to the “moderate” ranks. Kirk moved hard right to win his primary, and is running even with his Democratic opponent. Campbell is best known at present as the object of primary opponent Carly Fiorina’s cult favorite “demon sheep” web ad; I’d bet serious money he doesn’t win his primary, and the winner likely won’t beat Democrat Barbara Boxer, either. Simmons is struggling against a well-financed primary opponent, and is trailing Democrat Richard Blumenthal by double digits. Crist is political toast. I’ll grant that Castle is in good shape, and has a quite moderate record (so far). But even if Castle and Kirk win, their election would no more than offset the retirements of George Voinovich and Judd Gregg in the less-than-loudly-conservative ranks. And Hook also doesn’t mention that at least two GOP senators who occasionally cooperate with Democrats, Bob Bennett and John McCain, could get purged in primaries.

As for the forward-looking optimism of Hooks’ “green shoots” metaphor, it should be noted that Castle is 70 years old; Simmons is 67; Campbell is 56; Crist is 53; and Kirk is 50. Even by the geriatric standards of the Senate, this group ain’t exactly the wave of the future. They also don’t look much like America.

Sure, if the Republlican caucus in the Senate expands significantly this November, it is going to include a handful of members who don’t regularly howl at the moon about “socialism.” But any suggestion that the ancient tribe of moderate Republicans is much more than an anthropological curiosity these days is just not credible. It says a lot of the direction of the GOP that the early 2012 presidential favorite of “moderates” appears to be Mitt Romney, who spent the entire 2008 cycle campaigning as the “true conservative” in the race.

If words like “moderate” have any real meaning, it’s not a word that should be applied to any major faction in today’s Republican Party.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

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A Pretty Wild Mainstream

Monday, March 1st, 2010
Ed Kilgore


Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.

by Ed Kilgore

I don’t quite know exactly where this is coming from, but there’s clearly a media effort underway to show that the conservative movement and the Republican Party are reining in “the extremists” in their ranks, presumably in order to look all ready to govern.

Today’s Politico features a long piece by Kenneth Vogel detailing claims by various conservative and Tea Party spokesmen that the influence of “the fringe” has been grossly exaggerated by “the Left,” and that in fact unruly elements are being ignored or excluded by the Right’s grownups.

“Birthers,” Birchers and militia types, we are told, are being shown the door, and haven’t been that important to begin with, except in the propaganda of the Left.

The door-keepers in Vogel’s account, however, are not a group that would normally strike you as moderately-tempered unless the bar for political sanity is set very low. One is none other than Judson Phillips of Tea Party Nation, who told Vogel that activists needed “to control the message and to prevent the tea party movement from being hijacked.” That’s interesting, since Phillips’ recent National Tea Party Convention featured a race-baiting keynote address by Tom Tancredo, another speech by “birther” advocate Joseph Farah of WorldNetDaily, and a breakout panel headed by Christian Right extremist Roy Moore. Another is dirty-trickster and ACORN conspiracy theorist Andrew Breitbart, who is credited with disrepecting Farah at Phillips’ event. Still another is Erick Erickson of RedState, that ferocious advocate of strife against “squishes” and moderates of every variety.

If these folk want to keep “the Left” from talking about crazy people on the Right, they might want to make their policing a bit more rigorous than the occasional tip from the coach to stay on the political sidelines. “The Left” did not invent the cosponsorship of the recent Conservative Political Action Conference by the John Birch Society and the militia-friendly Oathkeepers. But more to the point, it’s a disturbing sign in intself that people like Phillips, Breitbart and Erickson are being treated as some sort of “mainstream,” where it’s perfectly normal to call President Obama a socialist, treat Democrats as presumptive traitors, and advocate an array of radical economic and social policies. All the “self-policing of the Right” narrative really shows is how far and fast conservatives have recently moved to what used to be thought of as “the fringe.” It’s cold comfort to learn there is ample frontier territory on the Right that’s well beyond that.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/heroiclife/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

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What We Talk About When We Talk About Health Care

Monday, March 1st, 2010
Elbert Ventura


Elbert Ventura is the managing editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. He formerly served as the managing editor of the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Elbert Ventura

Regardless of the outcome of the Democratic health reform push, one point is obvious: at every turn, they lost the messaging battle to Republicans and the Tea Party. The latest reminder came this morning, as the umpteenth story on budget reconciliation came on the radio. These days, to talk about health care reform is to talk about process — exactly where the GOP wants the conversation to be.

Over the last few weeks, a new narrative has taken hold in health care news: that of a partisan Democratic Party determined to “ram” a bill through Congress. It’s a frame that the GOP has been relentless and disciplined in perpetuating. Some have even taken to calling it the “nuclear option,” which in its previous political incarnation was the name Trent Lott gave the Republican effort in 2005 to change filibuster rules for judicial nominations.

The “nuclear option” as shorthand for budget reconciliation is not only a misnomer, it’s flat-out misleading. Hardly unprecedented, budget reconciliation has been used 22 times since the process was established in 1974. As Jackie Calmes wrote in the New York Times last week, 16 of those times, it was the Republican Party that used it to “ram legislation through on a one-party vote” (at least that’s how House GOP Leader John Boehner describes its use today).

Moreover, reconciliation has been used several times to pass health care legislation. NPR’s Julie Rovner, who has done superb work on the health care story, pointed out that health care provisions ranging from COBRA (it even says so in the name — COBRA stands for Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act) to the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) to changes in Medicare and Medicaid have come via reconciliation.

But efforts by reporters like Rovner notwithstanding, the Democrats have already lost this battle as the media have taken the GOP’s cue and fixated on process. The unwarranted magnification of reconciliation is not unlike the media frenzy over Sen. Ben Nelson’s “Cornhusker Kickback,” a bit of horse-trading that was hardly unusual in writing bills, but somehow became the equivalent of a legislative high crime by the time the GOP and the media were done with it.

More than any other piece of legislation in recent memory, health care reform has been debated, negotiated, and written under the unforgiving attention of the 24-hour cycle. This is as close a view as the American public has had to the sausage-making in Washington. They don’t like what they see. Republicans are well aware of this, and continue to point the spotlight on the frequently ugly process.

And so we are now at the current pass. One party has made unprecedented use of the filibuster to prevent anything from being done. The other party is now thinking of using a procedural tactic used nearly two dozen times since 1980, including to pass health care legislation, to break the impasse. While there certainly has been more attention on the abuse of the filibuster of late, that the use of reconciliation is even a story is a problem for Democrats. That Democrats are playing defense on a matter of process speaks volumes about their PR ineptitude, the Republicans’ messaging cohesion, and the media’s ongoing failure to go beyond stenography.

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Posted in A New Framework for Growth and Equity, Daily Fix, Fixing Our Broken Politics | 2 Comments »

USA Today: Among Democrats, a conflicting consensus on Massachusetts

Friday, February 19th, 2010
Steven Chlapecka


Steven K. Chlapecka is the director of public affairs for the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Steven Chlapecka

Will Marshall in USA Today:

Centrist policy activist Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, says it’s “gut-check time for Democrats.”

Marshall is urging the White House and congressional Democrats to push forward on health care reform. He says Obama is caught in a “progressive paradox,” in which Americans still support the president’s goals but believe he hasn’t delivered fast enough.

“What surprises me most about the Massachusetts vote and the inchoate popular anger that it seems to reflect is this judgment that Obama has moved too far to the left,” Marshall said. “By and large, I don’t think that’s true. By and large, I think he has been quite pragmatic in his approach to the issues. That is why you hear a lot of moaning and groaning on the left, even talk of betrayal.”

Marshall was a key policy adviser to Bill Clinton when the Democrats lost Congress after a health care reform initiative failed in 1994. After the ’94 defeats, Clinton moved to the ideological center, cut deals with Republicans on welfare reform, and even ran against fellow Democrats in Congress when he sought re-election in 1996.

But Marshall says today is fundamentally different for Democrats. [...]

“The president ought to get the (Democratic) leaders, shut them in at the White House and say, ‘We are going to pass (health care reform) because I won an unambiguous mandate for it and so did you in 2008,’”Marshall said.

Clinton, he said, “won 42% of the popular vote so he had to work with the other party.”

But Obama and the Democrats, Marshall said, “have majority support for their biggest initiative, and they ought to show a ruthless determination to govern.”

“One argument that should be rejected out of hand is that somehow a Massachusetts Senate race is somehow a national mandate on health care,” Marshall said. “It isn’t.”

Read the full article.

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Going Along with the GOP Charade

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010
Elbert Ventura


Elbert Ventura is the managing editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. He formerly served as the managing editor of the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Elbert Ventura

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Big Lie About Failed Bipartisanship

Thursday, December 31st, 2009
Elbert Ventura


Elbert Ventura is the managing editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. He formerly served as the managing editor of the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Elbert Ventura

‘Tis the season for year-end assessments. As the pundit class weighs in on Obama’s year in office, one meme has been particularly frustrating: the judgment that Obama “failed” to bring bipartisanship back to Washington.

Yesterday’s The Hill has the latest entry in the bogus narrative. “Obama’s first year yields few results in drive for bipartisanship” reads the headline. It then gives the floor to Republican sources:

“You might remember that Senate Republicans began the year hopeful that the president would actually make good on his campaign promises to reach across the aisle and build consensus,” said one GOP aide, who argued the divide began with the stimulus.

“People were skeptical of Obama’s rhetoric, but nobody could have predicted the surge in partisanship that his administration would wage over the first year. And their fierce partisan approach has become a major reason why independent voters are sprinting away from Democrats.”

In true he-said-she-said fashion, The Hill then gives some Democrats a chance to respond, without bothering to weigh in on who’s speaking in good faith and who’s spinning.

William Galston, in his evaluation of President Obama’s first year in American Interest magazine, offers a similiar take:

[T]he President never tried very hard to render bipartisanship a matter of substance as well as tone, making it all but certain that he would not redeem an important promissory note he had issued to the American people during the campaign.

Newsweek‘s Evan Thomas said much the same thing a month ago:

Obama tried to foster bipartisanship at the outset of his administration, but he didn’t try very hard, and his fellow Democrats can be just as rigidly partisan on the left.

It’s indisputable that Washington is as rancorous and polarized as ever. And there’s no question that Obama may have set himself up for criticism by campaigning as a post-partisan figure who could bridge the Washington divide.

Misplacing the Blame

But to blame Obama for failed bipartisanship is to blame the only grown-up in the room for the mess the kids are making. The two real culprits are a Republican Party that refuses to act responsibly, and a mainstream press that is unable or unwilling to call them on it.

What we have in the GOP today is a party that has lost all interest in policy now that it’s out of power. It has one goal: to destroy the Obama presidency. Every hand extended by the other side is to be rejected. The Republicans know what they’re doing — the media, true to form, has stuck to its pox-on-both-houses posture. Never mind that the president has made an honest effort to get Republicans interested in the idea of governing again: if Republicans keeps saying no, it must be because Obama’s not asking often and nicely enough.

Take the claim that the stimulus represented a violation of Obama’s pledge to reach out to the other side. Here was a stimulus plan that was one-third tax cuts designed to appeal to Republicans — tax cuts that economists agreed would be less than stimulative. Despite that sop to conservatives, it got only three GOP votes, including one from a Republican who would soon make the switch to the other side, Arlen Specter.

To think that Obama could have won more GOP votes had he given in a little more is to misread the GOP. The stated Republican objection to the stimulus was that there was too much spending in it — which is exactly what stimulus is. The hidden Republican objection, of course, was that it just might work. And if there’s one thing the GOP is deathly afraid of, it’s the rebound under Obama’s watch of an economy that they wrecked.

Take another example: health care. Some have complained that the Democrats rammed through their bill without Republican input. Does anyone not remember the slow-as-molasses work of the Senate Finance Committee on its bill, geared specifically toward winning the support of Republicans?

The Party of No Compromises

The Republican idea of compromise is that Obama enact Republican policies. Anything short of that means that he must not be serious about reaching out. Even policies that won Republican support in the past are now encountering opposition, lest Obama claim a bipartisan win. (Exhibit A: John McCain, hitherto a strong supporter of cap-and-trade, has now flip-flopped on it, calling it part of a “far left” agenda.)

True bipartisanship — the idea of two parties arguing in earnest over the direction of the country and reaching the necessary compromises to make sure everything runs smoothly — is impossible with the current Republican Party. Obama has made every effort to reach out to Republicans. And as president, annoying as it may be for some progressives, he should continue to seek the higher ground and not get caught up in the daily trench warfare. But there’s only so much one person can do in dealing with a rabid and unbending opposition.

A certain madness has gripped the GOP. Many in the media know it — and yet their stories barely mention the phenomenon. The same kabuki dance keeps getting enacted news cycle after news cycle. Fact-free spin is treated as a legitimate retort to good-faith argument. The enablers of a Republican Party gone rogue, the media are a key contributor to our broken politics. Only when the news stops giving politicians and parties the incentive to act irresponsibly can we expect irresponsible actors to even begin thinking about changing their ways.

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Weekend Papers Detail White House Afghanistan Review

Monday, December 7th, 2009
Jim Arkedis


Jim Arkedis is the director of PPI's National Security Project.

by Jim Arkedis

In the wake of President Obama’s West Point speech announcing the administration’s new strategy for Afghanistan, the White House must have been concerned that lingering charges of warmongering (on the left) or dithering (on the right) were going to dominate the public debate. Why would there be major weekend stories in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times to set the record straight?

Coming from sources as wide-ranging as National Security Advisor Jim Jones to “more than a dozen senior administration and military officials who took part in the strategy review,” these newspapers’ accounts of the strategy sessions show a president asking careful questions to redefine the mission in a way that protects the country while limiting open-ended commitment.

Last week, I was in the offices of a certain 24-hour cable news channel that’s nice enough to put my ugly mug on the air. I overheard one of its regular pundits exclaim breathlessly, “I just don’t understand why Obama just doesn’t do what his commanders on the ground tell him.” This weekend’s trio of articles paints the best picture I’ve seen of why not.

Here’s the short version of that answer from the NYT:

The decision represents a complicated evolution in Mr. Obama’s thinking. He began the process clearly skeptical of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s request for 40,000 more troops, but the more he learned about the consequences of failure, and the more he narrowed the mission, the more he gravitated toward a robust if temporary buildup, guided in particular by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. …

The group went over the McChrystal assessment and drilled in on what the core goal should be. Some thought that General McChrystal interpreted the March strategy more ambitiously than it was intended to be.

And the longer version from the WaPo:

In June, McChrystal noted, he had arrived in Afghanistan and set about fulfilling his assignment. His lean face, hovering on the screen at the end of the table, was replaced by a mission statement on a slide: “Defeat the Taliban. Secure the Population.”

“Is that really what you think your mission is?” one of those in the Situation Room asked. …

“I wouldn’t say there was quite a ‘whoa’ moment,” a senior defense official said of the reaction around the table. “It was just sort of a recognition that, ‘Duh, that’s what, in effect, the commander understands he’s been told to do.’ Everybody said, ‘He’s right.’ ”

“It was clear that Stan took a very literal interpretation of the intent” of the NSC document, said Jones, who had signed the orders himself. “I’m not sure that in his position I wouldn’t have done the same thing, as a military commander.” But what McChrystal created in his assessment “was obviously something much bigger and more longer-lasting…than we had intended.”

Whatever the administration might have said in March, officials explained to McChrystal, it now wanted something less absolute: to reverse the Taliban’s momentum, deter it and try to persuade a significant number of its members to switch sides. “We certainly want them not to be able to overthrow the government,” Jones said.

On Oct. 9, after awaking to the news that he had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Obama listened to McChrystal’s presentation. The “mission” slide included the same words: “Defeat the Taliban.” But a red box had been added beside it saying that the mission was being redefined, Jones said. Another participant recalled that the word “degrade” had been proposed to replace “defeat.”

Already briefed on the previous day’s discussion, the president “looked at it and said: ‘To be fair, this is what we told the commander to do. Now, the question is, have we directed him to do more than what is realistic? Should there be a sharpening . . . a refinement?’” one participant recalled.

Said a senior White House adviser who took extensive notes of the meeting: “The big moment when the mission became a narrower one was when we realized we’re not going to kill every last member of the Taliban.” [emphases mine]

Separately, a few other nuggets, like on troop numbers (NYT):

On Oct. 9, Mr. Obama and his team reviewed General McChrystal’s troop proposals for the first time. Some in the White House were surprised by the numbers, assuming there would be a middle ground between 10,000 and 40,000.

“Why wasn’t there a 25 number?” one senior administration official asked in an interview. He then answered his own question: “It would have been too tempting.”

And from the LA Times‘ piece on the date of withdrawal:

Gates was also persuaded by Petraeus and others that announcing the date would help create an incentive for the Afghans to act, he said this week.

The proposed date also would make it such that the withdrawal of troops would begin just as the campaign for the 2012 presidential election was heating up.

Still, it was crucial to Gates and other military officials that Obama not announce a specific drawdown plan. Doing so could embolden militants, Defense officials said. Gates and others wanted to make sure that the pace of the drawdown would be based on the security situation — not a set timetable.

“Ultimately,” said a senior Defense official, Gates “wanted conditionality, and got it.”

All three articles are must-reads to anyone who wants to understand the complexity of the White House’s decision. In sum, it seems that the review sessions narrowed the goal, and resourced it as robustly and quickly as possible.

I understand that the administration needed to fix a date for beginning withdrawal as a political concession to the progressive base, and I still remain uncomfortable with that notion, even as these articles do a good job clarifying that the withdrawal’s pace is subject to the security situation.

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