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Iran’s Nuclear Noise

Monday, November 30th, 2009
Jim Arkedis


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

by Jim Arkedis

Iran is making noise in the wake of the IAEA’s censure last week. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told Iran’s state TV that the country will now build an astounding ten more nuclear plants.

It sure sounds bad, right? Conservatives are crowing that this is the result of President Obama’s weak-kneed, liberal “appeasement policy.” But for the life of me, I can’t figure out how exerting real pressure on Iran (with Russian and Chinese support no less) somehow amounts to appeasement.

Don’t get too upset by Iran’s brinksmanship just yet. Dr. Rebecca Johnson, editor of Disarmament Diplomacy, brings us all down a notch:

The idea that they have the economic wherewithal to build and get these [plants] functioning in a short space of time is nonsense. It’s bravado; it’s braggadocio.

That’s why this is all part of the negotiating dance. Its steps are something like this: The international community, stronger now than ever with Moscow and Beijing on board, squeezes Iran. Iran, beginning to sense that it has been backed into a corner, lashes out with wide-ranging threats. Then, everyone calms down and the real talk begins.

The Iranians know the score, too. Buried beneath the headlines was this revealing quote from Kazem Jalali, spokesman for the parliament’s national security and foreign policy committee, who left the door open for more talks: “We have options ranging from complete and full cooperation to leaving the Non-Proliferation Treaty on our table.”

Of course, negotiations may ultimately bear little fruit, but that judgment certainly can’t be made yet. Until the diplomatic shimmy-shake really gets swinging, cool resolve and patience are in order.

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Posted in A Progressive Security Strategy, Daily Fix | No Comments »

Follow the Leaderless: Palin and McCarthy

Monday, November 30th, 2009
Ed Kilgore


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

by Ed Kilgore

As I noted earlier, a new Washington Post poll of Republicans recorded the remarkable extent to which today’s rank-and-file GOPers can’t identify much in the way of any clear-cut Republican leaders. Having just read Sam Tanenhaus’ meditation on Sarah Palin in the New Yorker, I’m beginning to wonder whether the leaderless nature of the GOP represents a temporary vacuum or something a little more profound.

Here’s Tanenhaus’ kicker:

To judge from [Palin's] book, the most exciting time in her life was the election of 2008, when she was embraced by the army of “everyday, hardworking Americans,” the “everyday folks,” and “thousands of regular Americans coming out with their signs” who mobbed her tumultuous rallies, thrilling to her odes to the “true America.” She gave them a “magnifying mirror.” They reflected her own image back to her. This adoration is kept alive today by the excited autograph-seekers in Grand Rapids and Fort Wayne, in the audience that gave Oprah Winfrey her best ratings in two years, and in the various advocacy groups that have sprung up to promote Palin for the Presidency: Conservatives 4 Palin, Team Sarah, Vets 4 Sarah, 2012 Draft Sarah Committee, Sarah Palin Radio, SarahPAC. The true meaning of Palinism is Sarah Palin—nothing more and nothing less. She is a party unto herself.

Now it’s hardly novel to observe that the excitement Palin has aroused among (particularly) cultural conservative activists reflects how closely she resembles them, or that her fans celebrate her lack of conventional credentials or policy knowledge as a badge of honor. But it may also reflect a genuine leadership crisis in the conservative movement and the GOP, wherein no one who is not a Palin-style “mirror” of grassroots qualities can be trusted.

The Accidental Populist

It’s not enough to call this sentiment “populist.” Historically, most “populist” leaders have represented a preexisting ideological set of beliefs in one or both major political parties, and a relatively specific set of policy goals. Yes, populists like Tom Watson (with his dirt-farmer persona) and William Jennings Bryan (with an idiom derived largely from the Bible) drew some of their appeal from personal identification with the lives and values of people who felt disenfranchised. But they were also genuine leaders who pulled their followers along to positions on policy matters and political loyalties they might not have embraced on their own.

The history of “right-wing populism” in this country is murkier and more controversial. But by and large, the conservative populist impulse has been one that relatively conventional Republican politicians (notably Nixon and Reagan) or regional reactionaries (George Wallace) have exploited in the pursuit of conventionally conservative ends.

Palin strikes me as more like another famous conservative “populist,” Joseph R. McCarthy. And I don’t say that in order to invoke an invidious identification of the overall political dangers represented by St. Joan of the Tundra and the famously irresponsible red-hunter. What strikes me as similar is the extent to which both politicians were relatively ordinary people who were suddenly swept into vast celebrity by an almost accidental association with grievances poorly advocated by conventional political leaders.

McCarthy stumbled upon the power of many years of accumulated unhappiness — mostly among heartland conservatives, but elsewhere as well — with a bipartisan foreign policy led by northeastern elites that aligned the U.S. with what many considered historic national enemies: not just the Soviet Union, but “Europe” generally, and for many Irish-Americans, the United Kingdom. It’s sometimes forgotten that many of McCarthy’s red-hunting conservative allies fulminated against the “loss” of China and the “betrayal” of Korea because they deeply resented a Euro-centric foreign policy, as reflected in their general opposition to the establishment of NATO.

At a deeper level, many of McCarthy’s supporters (particularly in the Midwest) were the very people who were initially opposed to going to war with Nazi Germany, on the theory that Hitler represented a Western bulwark against communism; even those who didn’t feel we backed the wrong side in Europe often thought we should have negotiated an armistice with Germany that would have avoided the Soviet conquest of Eastern Europe. The eventual consolidation of conservatives in favor of an aggressively internationalist anti-communism was a later development, but it has obscured the isolationist roots of the McCarthy uprising.

McCarthy eventually came to grief, of course, in part because of his sloppy and reckless tactics, but more immediately because he extended his attacks on Democratic foreign policy “betrayals” to attacks on the Eisenhower administration and even the Army. And thus the entire leadership class of the Republican Party brought down the hammer on the fiery Wisconsin, even as they sought to co-opt his appeal by their own anticommunist fervor.

A Party Under the Influence

Like McCarthy, Palin is appealing to a variety of unredeemed cultural and political discontents, and like McCarthy, she’s gradually extended her liberal-baiting into attacks on conventional Republican pols, most notably the people surrounding the very presidential campaign that made her a celebrity. Unlike McCarthy, however, she’s not taking on a highly popular and newly elected Republican president, but a defeated GOP establishment that millions of conservative activists believe betrayed them through “big government” initiatives, excessive bipartisanship, and the failure to successfully execute a counter-revolution against legalized abortion, legitimized homosexuality, and other forms of cultural pluralism and diversity (or as they would say, “relativism.”). Moreover, said establishment has also been terribly weakened by its association with economic calamity, caused, so thinks the conservative “base,” by the reward-the-crooks-and-welfare-loafers “big government” betrayals of the autumn of 2008.

This doesn’t mean that Palin is destined to fill the leadership vacuum in the Republican Party. Like Joe McCarthy, she’s more suited to act as a vehicle for discontent that as the agent for its vindication. But make no mistake, the contemporary dynamics of the Republican Party and the conservative movement make it very unlikely that anyone from that quarter will curb her as Ike and his allies curbed and then broke McCarthy. If and when Palin succeeds again in creating a national public policy furor via a casual Facebook post, as she did with the famous “death panel” screed (arguably as irresponsible as anything Joe McCarthy said), it’s more likely that Republicans will co-opt her than repudiate her. So while Sarah Palin is unlikely to become the leader of the GOP, she may well play a major role in setting the terms on which anyone else can command the leaderless masses she embodies.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

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Posted in Daily Fix, Political Memo | 1 Comment »

Moving to the Right, Without Direction

Monday, November 30th, 2009
Ed Kilgore


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

by Ed Kilgore

Today’s Washington Post features a big new poll of self-identified Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. Unsurprisingly, these voters don’t like Barack Obama, don’t like the general direction of the country, and don’t want their leaders to help enact health care reform legislation (not that they are in any danger of doing so).

The two findings most worth paying attention to are (1) yet another confirmation that Republicans are undergoing a rightward shift; and (2) the complete lack of a consensus about Republican leadership.

On the ideological front, there’s been a modest but revealing shift in the composition of the Republican rank-and-file since the last time the Post polled them, in 2007. Asked if they regard themselves as liberal, moderate, conservative, or very conservative, GOPers chose this last category, the most extreme available, more than ever. In June of 2007, self-identified liberals (11% of the total) and moderates (24%) together outnumbered those insisting on calling themselves “very conservative” (30%) by five percentage points. Now the “very conservative” are up to 32%, while “moderates” have declined to 22% and “liberals” have been nearly halved, to 6%. Overall, “conservative” GOPers currently overwhelm “moderate” GOPers by nearly a three-to-one margin. This is in sharp contrast to the ideological profile of the Democratic Party, in which the number of “moderates” equals and usually exceeds self-identified “liberals.” The overwhelming ideological impetus in the Republican Party is centrifugal, not centripetal.

The second finding of note is that today’s GOPers have no agreement whatsoever about where to look for leadership. Offered an open-ended question about “the one person [who] best reflects the core values of the Republican Party,” nobody receives over 18%, and 8% insist “there is no leader.” The last presidential nominee, John McCain, does respectfully well at 13%, though nobody really thinks of him as the future of the GOP, and his running-mate, Sarah Palin, runs first at 18%, out of a combination of celebrity and her special appeal to social issue extremists. After that, no one scores in double digits. The congressional leaders, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, each weigh in at a booming one percent.

All this adds up to a situation where the increasingly conservative rank-and-file “base” of the Republican Party is pulling its putative leaders to the right rather than following their direction. Given the traditionally hierarchical nature of the GOP, that may be a refreshing change for its members, but it’s not exactly designed to produce a message or candidates that appeal to the rest of the electorate.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Posted in Daily Fix, Fixing Our Broken Politics | 1 Comment »

Yet More on the Filibuster and Polarization

Monday, November 30th, 2009
Scott Winship


Scott Winship is research manager of the Pew Economic Mobility Project and a recent graduate of Harvard's doctoral program in social policy. The views he expresses do not represent those of Pew.

by Scott Winship

I was going to title this post, “Ed Kilgore, You are Dead to Me,” but then again, I like Ed a lot, and he’s far more knowledgeable about politics than I am, and I don’t disagree with much of what he’s said about the filibuster.

Just as Ed isn’t “hell-bent on eliminating the filibuster,” neither would I shed many tears if it were to go away. I, too, object to how routine filibuster threats have become. That said, I do think that its elimination would have the potential to hurt progressive aims. Saying that the Senate “has a built-in red-state bias” makes the point — get rid of the filibuster and that bias means that red-state priorities are more likely to benefit from its elimination.

What I’d like to do here is start the first of a couple of posts on political polarization to defend my position that the filibuster wouldn’t be such a problem if we could make the Congress more representative of the nation. I think this point is actually implicit (almost explicit!) in commentary from Mark Schmitt and Ezra Klein that notes how the routinization of the filibuster is a recent phenomenon that owes its timing to the completion of what Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck have called “The Great Sorting-Out.” Over the past 40 years, liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats have gone the way of the dodo bird, making the parties more polarized along ideological lines.

LBJ could count on Medicare passing in 1965 because the existence of liberal and moderate Republicans made the successful deployment of the filibuster unlikely. On the GOP side, conservatives would have had to court a sizeable number of right-leaning Democrats to make a filibuster threat credible. The difficulty of doing so (particularly with a southern Democrat as intimidating as LBJ applying countervailing pressure) gave Republican moderates little incentive to go along with such a threat. On the Democratic side, the opportunity for a single senator to engage in grandstanding or deal-making in exchange for his vote was limited by the same dynamics — the ability to get moderate GOP votes would have allowed the leadership to ignore such threats. Unless the issue was one as momentous and controversial as civil rights, southern Democrats and conservative Republicans would not collaborate across the aisle.

Fast-forward to 1994, when there were far fewer conservative Democrats and far fewer moderate Republicans. In such an environment, the filibuster became an obvious strategy — because it could work. The filibuster was not a problem until the completion of The Great Sorting-Out. (And yes, Republicans have deployed filibuster threats far more often than Democrats have, largely because the Democrats are more dependent on their moderates than the Republicans are on theirs — a point to which I’ll return in the next post.)

Now, Ed is right that the power that party primaries give the least-moderate voters is not solely to blame for this (though let’s not discount the likelihood that the primary reforms between 1968 and 1972 accelerated the ideological sorting between the parties). But a solution to political polarization need not address its causes.

The key questions, it seems to me, are (1) whether one thinks that the parties are ideologically representative of their supporters or members and (2) whether one thinks that that is true on both sides. Kicking (2) to my next post, I’ll just say that Morris Fiorina’s research definitively shows that the obvious political polarization among elites, political junkies, and elected officials is not reflected among Americans as a whole. The reason that we have more political polarization — even between presidential candidates — is because the candidates on offer have been chosen by less-moderate primary voters and activists. Because relatively moderate voters still have to choose between two options, the growing polarization of party activists and primary voters translates into growing polarization among elected officials — even as the electorate has remained relatively moderate.

Whether you think the electorate is, in its heart of hearts, moderate is irrelevant in some sense, but what is fairly clear is that at least by the measures available, it has not become more polarized. And to circle back to my original contention that progressives should think twice before wanting to throw out the filibuster, political polarization makes the filibuster more important as a check against small majorities. The less moderate the two caucuses are, the more unrepresentative of popular preferences will be the legislation that can pass with narrow margins.

The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect those of the Progressive Policy Institute.

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Posted in Daily Fix, Fixing Our Broken Politics | 3 Comments »

The Pentagon’s Most Expensive Weapon

Monday, November 30th, 2009
Jim Arkedis


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

by Jim Arkedis

The Pentagon's Most Expensive WeaponDownload the full report.

When President Obama signed a $680-billion military policy bill last month, he fulfilled a promise to reform defense spending, slashing more weapons systems than any president had in decades. Left to wither were big-ticket programs like the F-22 fighter jet, the Combat Search and Rescue helicopter, the Airborne Lasers, and the Future Combat Systems. Conceived during the Cold War, these systems have come under criticism for their cost overruns and irrelevance to today’s unconventional conflicts.

The weapons bill represents a win for the president and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Gates, in particular, has made a mission of reforming Pentagon culture and breaking the grip of the military-industrial-legislative complex. But the reform of the procurement process hasn’t pleased everyone. For liberals, it doesn’t go far enough. Just before the November 2008 election, Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) had called for an across-the-board 25-percent cut in defense spending, saying we didn’t need “all these fancy new weapons.” On the other side of the aisle, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) and Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) have accused Obama of “gutting”the defense budget.

It’s not surprising that weapons systems draw all the attention when defense spending reform comes up. They translate into jobs that defense contractors spread cunningly across the nation’s states and congressional districts. But the “guns versus butter” debates between liberals and conservatives miss a key point. It’s not just weapons that drive defense spending through the roof — it’s the people, too.

According to its official budget, the Defense Department will spend $533.8 billion in 2010 in the following categories:

  • Personnel: $136 billion
  • Operations & Maintenance: $185.7 billion
  • Weapons Procurement: $107.4 billion
  • Research & Development for Weapons and Technology: $78.6 billion
  • Other: $26.1 billion

The personnel figure, however, doesn’t come close to capturing what America is really spending on defense personnel. According to PPI’s calculations, the real price tag is much bigger: $301.1 billion each year, 121 percent higher than the Pentagon’s figure. In other words, if you want major savings in defense spending, cutting weapons systems and the ever-elusive “waste, fraud and abuse” won’t take you far enough.

The point here is not that our military spends too much on people. It’s that personnel costs are the untold story in the defense spending debate. The U.S. military has grown 50,000 troops larger since 2001. At the same time, America has been embroiled in two counterinsurgencies that depend more on boots on the ground than planes in the sky or ships at sea.

The new emphasis on manpower-intensive counterinsurgency will have enormous repercussions on defense spending long after the wars are over. The aim of this report is to raise awareness among policy makers and the public about the real costs of U.S. military manpower.

It deconstructs the budgets of the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs to develop a more accurate overall measure of spending on America’s war fighters across their lifetime.

Calculating the Actual Cost of Manpower

Oddly, the Pentagon doesn’t even agree with itself about the total cost of military personnel. One of its public relations documents, titled “Taking Care of People,” says the Pentagon will actually spend $244.6 billion — or over $100 billion dollars more than the personnel account — on America’s service members in fiscal year 2010.

The Pentagon arrived at this figure by adding salaries of both active duty service members and civilian employees, plus services found under other accounts within the Pentagon’s budget, such as family support and housing. To this, the Pentagon adds costs partially paid out of the Department of Veterans Affairs, like military health care.

Pentagon Budget

Source: Department of Defense

Fair enough. The $136 billion line item for personnel costs in the Pentagon’s 2010 budget is incomplete because it does not fully account for the indirect and lifetime costs of military personnel. However, the DoD selectively included pay and benefits that are not counted in the “Taking Care of People” calculation, while acknowledging other health care costs. Moreover, while it includes certain support costs for personnel (p. 31 of PDF), it ignores indirect costs associated with housing, moving, and transportation of personnel. And while it includes some benefits paid by the Department of Veterans Affairs, it omits VA retiree benefits (p. 153 of PDF).

A more accurate calculation of U.S. defense personnel spending should encompass three aspects of a soldier’s cost to the military:

1. The service member’s active association with the military. This period counts pay and benefits disbursed to personnel on active or reserve duty.

2. The indirect costs associated with active duty personnel that are vital to their ability to serve, such as housing and transportation.

3. The service member’s passive association with the military. This includes retiree and health-care benefits and services provided by the Department of Veterans Affairs.

In a sense, everything from housing for enlisted troops to cataract surgery for the Vietnam vet must be counted to capture what the U.S. really spends on its military personnel. Taking all that into account, we arrive at the following calculation from the 2010 line items in the budgets of the Department of Defense and Veterans Affairs:

DoD-&-VA-budget

By this reckoning, in 2010, the U.S. government will spend a grand total of $301.1 billion on active duty and retired personnel, or 56 percent of what America spends on national defense. If DoD’s budget included the VA’s 2010 planned outlays for entitlements, health care and family support, the baseline Pentagon budget (excluding Iraq and Afghanistan) in 2010 would swell from $533.8 billion to $638 billion.

In short, U.S. defense spending is so high mainly because we maintain a highly professional, all-volunteer force and because of the global reach of America’s foreign policy. Ultimately, what we spend on defense reflects our foreign policy commitments. Much of America’s robust internationalist foreign policy is due to clear national security interests, as in Afghanistan. However, cost considerations must be part of the discussion, be they a decisive factor or not, when we talk about deployments. We may decide that the cost is worth incurring to keep our country safe, but being equipped with the knowledge of how much a deployment will cost us is simply a matter of good governance.

Soaring Personnel Costs

A perfect storm of extended overseas deployments and an expanding military will have ramifications on the Pentagon’s personnel spending obligations for years to come.

In 2001, there were 1.39 million troops on active duty; today, there are 1.44 million. The end-strength will continue to rise, assuming President Obama keeps his campaign pledge to increase the military’s size by 92,000 soldiers and marines. In July 2009, Secretary Gates called for an additional 22,000 Army soldiers, saying the persistent pace of operations in the two wars over several years has meant a steady increase in the number of troops who are wounded, stressed or otherwise unable to deploy with their units. In short, that’s an ever-expanding pool of overseas deployments, potential casualties, and lifetime benefit obligations.

The Department of Veterans Affairs budget tracks these accelerating obligations. Before America deployed to Afghanistan and then Iraq, the VA’s budget was $48.2 billion. As a result of those deployments, the VA budget has skyrocketed 134 percent to $112.8 billion in 2010. The spending, with a few annual variations, remains approximately a 50-50 split between discretionary costs — the bulk of which is devoted to medical care — and entitlement programs for veterans.

VA Budget

Source: Department of Veterans Affairs

As the Obama administration moves to curtail American involvement in Iraq while devising a new strategy in Afghanistan, Congressional Budget Committee Chairman Rep. John Spratt’s (D-SC) prediction at a PPI event in February seems prescient: “I have a sneaking suspicion that the near-term costs are going to outweigh the near-term savings.” As those deployments end over the next several years, the best-case scenario is that VA spending will remain at the current elevated plateau.

One simple, but ultimately ineffective, way of reforming military spending on personnel is to cut the salaries and benefits of the men and women who have joined the U.S. military. However, that prescription treats the symptom and not the root of the problem. Moreover, it would penalize the hard-working men and women of the armed forces who perform their duties admirably — clearly not an option.

Another way to get costs down would be to return to the draft. But that would diminish our military’s prowess and morale — again, not an option for the U.S.

The problem of rising personnel costs can only be addressed from higher up the chain. Extended deployments overseas invariably increase costs because of the strain they place on the force — in casualties, logistics, sustainability, and recruiting and retention costs. Once the force has recovered from Iraq and Afghanistan, it is incumbent on America’s civilian leadership to carefully weigh the extended cost burden placed on the Pentagon’s personnel account when plotting our global security strategy. In short, America must choose its wars and deployments carefully, as exploding personnel costs are the untold story of Pentagon spending in 2010 and beyond.

None of this is to argue against sensible procurement reforms. Debates over which weapons to cut and which best serve America’s new foreign policy objectives and war-fighting doctrines are necessary. The White House needs to impose fiscal discipline on a Congress that doesn’t like to make tough choices.

However, debates about defense spending should be informed by realism about what really drives up costs. Our analysis yields a clear conclusion: it’s the people, stupid. America spends a lot mainly because its force is asked to do so much. Any clear-eyed assessment of Pentagon spending needs to take the costs and benefits of our overseas commitments into account.

Download the full report.

Update: The previous version of the piece contained a typo. It originally stated that the president signed “a $680-million military policy bill.” Thanks to reader John Rose for spotting the error.

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Posted in A Progressive Security Strategy, Daily Fix, Policy Memo, Priority 3 | 11 Comments »

P-Fix Highlights of the Week

Friday, November 27th, 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

In case you missed it, here are Progressive Fix’s highlights from the past week:

  • PPI Policy Memo, “How Litigators Tried to Sneak a Pet Earmark into Health Reform,” Phil Goldberg

As the full Senate debate over health care reform legislation finally gets under way following Saturday’s vote, Democratic leaders in Congress should continue fending off special-interest amendments that could be added to what promises to be an enormous piece of legislation. Read more…

  • “RIP Compassionate Conservatism,” Will Marshall

The Republican message on extending health care coverage can be summed up in two words: “Bah, humbug.” Read more…

  • “President Obama Reportedly Settles on Afghan Strategy,” Jim Arkedis

McClatchy is reporting that the Obama administration has decided on a strategy that will involve sending at least 34,000 more American troops to Afghanistan. Read more…

  • “Progressives and the Filibuster—Round 2,” Ed Kilgore

I am not hell-bent on eliminating the filibuster as a possibility under the Senate rules (though not opposed to that step in principle, either). But what I object to categorically is the routinization of filibuster threats in recent years… Read more…

  • “The Little Republic that Could,” Mike Derham

Listening to the Scorpions’ “Wind of Change” while sitting in a restaurant in Pristina, the capital of the disputed Republic of Kosovo, on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, it hit me that Kosovo is an underplayed success story of nation-building. Read more…

Posted in Daily Fix | 1 Comment »

Happy Thanksgiving!

Wednesday, November 25th, 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

Progressive Fix would like to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving. Enjoy the holiday. Regular blogging will resume on Monday.

Posted in Daily Fix | No Comments »

PPI Relaunches

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009
Steven Chlapecka


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

by Steven Chlapecka

National Journal‘s James Barnes, writing for the Under the Influence blog, profiles PPI’s relaunch:

Last spring, the Progressive Policy Institute and the Democratic Leadership Council formally split, and now a revamped PPI is up and running with a new website to engage the public policy debate more effectively online and, in the words of long-time PPI president Will Marshall, to provide “a kind of ballast in the progressive coalition that keeps it close to the sentiments of the progressive center in America.”

Read the full article at the National Journal.

Posted in PPI in the News | No Comments »

Time to Panic for Obama?

Wednesday, November 25th, 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

Sometime around 1:00 pm last Friday, you may have heard a loud caterwauling outside your window. That was the sound of the punditry class going gaga upon the release of Gallup’s daily tracking poll showing that President Obama’s job approval rating had finally inched below the symbolic 50 percent line.

Combined with the recent losses for Democrats in New Jersey and Virginia — and the alleged flight of independents into the waiting arms of the GOP in those elections — the milestone might be another indicator of the trouble this administration now finds itself in.

But let’s not lose our heads. The estimable Charles Franklin of Pollster.com takes a look at the polling data over the last few months and finds much ado about nothing:

There is no evidence that any group of Dems, especially liberal Dems are unhappy with Obama’s performance. Critical is that moderate and even conservative Dems have not moved away since August. Angry conservative Reps are indeed very unhappy with Obama, at almost the same level of disgust as Dems felt for Bush, but they too have reached a plateau at a steady 10% approval. The small number of moderate Reps have also plateaued (I’d discount small moves in the last week of the aggregation.)

So the point is simple: Claims of abandonment of Obama by independents (or lib-Dems or con-Dems) are substantially exaggerated over the past three months. Significant decline from May through August, yes indeed among Inds and Reps, but that trend halted in August.

Far from plummeting, Obama’s approval rating has stabilized in recent months to a range close to his percentage total in last year’s vote. And when did we decide that a president dipping below 50 percent was a kiss of death for the rest of his term? Pundits made a big deal of the Gallup news, calling the fall “historic,” as it was the fourth fastest rate of decline of any president since World War II. Third on that list? Ronald Reagan, who was so damaged by his swift descent that he failed to win Minnesota in the 1984 election. (He did win all the others.)

To put Obama’s 49 percent in proper context, take a look at this chart from the Wall Street Journal:

Presidential approval ratings since World War II

These are the approval ratings for all the presidents since World War II. Every single president save for Eisenhower and Kennedy dipped below 50 percent. In fact, Truman, Reagan, and Clinton all hovered around or dipped below the 40 percent mark at some point in their first terms. And yet they somehow managed to win reelection.

For all of the overheated talk about polls and public opinion, you can bet that there’s little panic in White House. As we’ve noted before, this White House seems to have an almost eerie capacity to block out the noise of the day-to-day and take the long view. Andrew Sullivan put it well:

He is strategy; his opponents are tacticians. And in my view, their tactics are consigning them to a longer political death than if they had taken a more constructive course.

In the Obama world view, a stumble is a non-event, a bad poll a blip. What counts is whether you get to the destination in the end. It’s an outlook that got him to the finish line during the campaign. Let’s see if it gets him to where he wants to go in the crucial months ahead.

Posted in Daily Fix, Fixing Our Broken Politics | 1 Comment »

Charlie Crist’s Blasphemy

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009
Ed Kilgore


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

by Ed Kilgore

Florida Gov. Charlie Crist is a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate facing a conservative challenger who is attracting a lot of attention, support and money from conservatives around the country. He is, in fact, the number one target of the Club for Growth and other purge-obsessed conservatives determined to stamp out any hint of moderation in the GOP.

Crist’s opponent, former state House speaker Marco Rubio, has been picking up steam in the early polls, and is routinely trouncing the governor in local party straw polls. Aside from his gaudy national endorsements (including such conservative True Believers as Mike Huckabee, James Inhofe, and Jim DeMint), Rubio is assumed to have the private backing of his political patron, the Big Dog of Florida GOP politics, Jeb Bush. Crist, who aroused national conservative ire by endorsing President Obama’s stimulus package, increasingly has a great big bullseye on his back at a time when the right wing of the Republican Party is in a vengeful and triumphant mood.

So you’d think ol’ Charlie would be spending all of his time kissing the rings of talk radio hosts, yelling about socialism, sending out tea bags with his name stamped on it, and in general trying to build a Cristian Right. Florida is, after all, a closed primary state where the independents and conservative Democrats that Crist has attracted in the past can’t vote for him against Rubio unless they re-register as Republicans.

But to everyone’s surprise, Crist shows signs of doing the exact opposite: attacking not just Rubio, but his supporters, for being, well, wingnuts. In an interview with a Florida newspaper, Crist seems to be mocking Rubio’s supporters for being angry over nothing and for embracing nutty causes like that of the Birthers. Here’s how Evan McMorris-Santoro analyzed Crist’s apparent strategy for TPM:

While his attacks on Rubio’s conservative backers are sure to fire them up even more than they already are, Crist is hoping his confrontational approach will force Rubio into uncomfortable discussions about Obama’s citizenship and other right-wing rhetoric. He really had nowhere else to go — Crist’s record doesn’t allow him to make a serious run at changing the minds of Rubio’s supporters, so he has to run with the moderate message that has been successful in the past.

This being total blasphemy in the contemporary GOP, it will be interesting to see how it works out for Crist. If it does, Crist will become the maximum, and perhaps the sole, symbol of defiance against the rightward trend of the GOP. If it doesn’t, he may backtrack into can’t-beat-em-then-join-em territory, or add his scalp to the collection of the Club for Growth. Either way, that would be good news for Florida Democrats.

Posted in Daily Fix, Fixing Our Broken Politics | 1 Comment »

A Different Take on the Financial Transaction Tax

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009
Mike Derham


Mike Derham is chair of PPI's Innovative Economy Project.

by Mike Derham

Having just joined the Progressive Policy Institute from a stint on Wall Street, I’d like to offer a different perspective on the financial transactions tax (FTT).

Last week, Lee Drutman argued in favor of an FTT, saying that a transaction tax modeled after the one our British friends have would raise much-needed funds. Writing in light of the past year’s economic crisis, Drutman also said that an FTT would “throw a little sand in the gears of the giant financial speculation casino.” While both raising revenue and reining in Wall Street are goals worth pursuing, I would argue that the FTT is a second-best solution.

According to Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a proponent of the FTT, a Yankee equivalent of John Bull’s 0.25% transaction tax wouldn’t raise $100 billion — it would raise less than a third of that. You need to crank up the tax — to double the proposed amount on stocks and higher on other products — to get close to a hoped-for $100 billion in revenue.

Also, it’s worth pointing out that a transaction tax didn’t spare the British from any of last year’s financial crisis — they had housing crises, government bailouts, and bank nationalizations comparable to what we saw on this side of the Atlantic.

A transaction tax is simply too blunt an instrument. Pouring sand in the gears is not a way to slow a machine down — it’s a way to try to bring the machine to a halt. Trying to second-guess trader activity by taxing stocks and other securities at differing levels to generate sufficient revenue will only drive broker dealers to encourage trading in high-margin products to make up for the dead-weight loss of the tax. This would drive traders away from liquid products to illiquid ones, increasing systemic risk. This increased focus on complex structured products drains liquidity from the system, as we saw last fall.

A better solution is one along the lines in Sen. Chris Dodd’s (D-CT) proposed financial reform bill. In addition to heightened capital and leverage requirements for systemically significant, “too big too fail” banks, higher capital requirements and stricter leverage controls could be imposed on trading in complex financial instruments. This would drive Wall Street firms looking to goose returns through leverage from trading the complex products that contributed to last year’s crisis to more liquid — less systemically threatening — products.

Investors that would want to speculate on complex derivatives could still do so, providing they did it with their own money. And banks that wanted to sell those products could still do so, provided they had adequate capital to backstop those activities. Letting these properly priced incentives work their magic would allow the market to behave in a responsible manner. Revenue could then be generated from that market activity by taxing gains made by speculators at a rate in line with income tax rates.

This would achieve the goals the FTT sets out to do — rein in derivatives risk and raise revenues — in a way that leaves market forces free to be a driver of renewed growth in our economy. But I suspect the supporters of the FTT will want to have their say, and I look forward to hearing it.

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

Notes on the Hunger Problem and Volunteering

Wednesday, November 25th, 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

Coming on the heels of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s recent report on food insecurity in the U.S., the New York City Coalition Against Hunger (NYCCAH) this week released its annual survey (PDF) of the city’s food pantries and soup kitchens. Its findings provide another vivid snapshot of the economic distress gripping the country, but also offer an encouraging sign of the federal government’s efforts to alleviate suffering:

In 2009, New York City’s emergency food providers (food pantries, soup kitchens, and brown bag programs) reported a 20.8 percent increase in need for their services, with the fastest growth in demand from families with children. While this comes as no surprise, given that the demand at such agencies has been rising for years and has only been accelerated by the recession, this year’s findings also show something new: a renewed potential to alleviate hunger through government action.

As need increased dramatically, for the first time in years, this survey showed a positive trend: although the economy continued to plummet in 2009 and increasing numbers of New Yorkers relied on soup kitchens and food pantries for help, such agencies had somewhat more ability to meet the growing demand than previous years, as Chart 2 shows. This is mostly due to increasing participation in the SNAP/Food Stamp Program and a surge in anti-hunger funding from the federal recovery bill.

The study credited the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act — the so-called stimulus bill — for providing much-needed support for aid efforts, and urged the government to renew stimulus funds to ensure that the neediest continue to receive the help they need in a challenging economic time. Moreover, as NYCCAH Executive Director and Progressive Fix contributor Joel Berg wrote here last week, “It’s a well-known fact that food stamps offer one of the best bangs for buck when it comes to stimulus,” another consideration in aid expansion’s favor.

The NYCCAH release also included this entreaty:

We, as Americans, also need to change our attitude towards volunteerism — instead of donating cans around the holidays, we need to be offering our skilled services to pantries and soup kitchens year round. While it may be gratifying to serve soup for a morning, it will do more good to help a pantry apply for a grant or develop a website.

As reported in this Sunday’s New York Times, food aid programs are besieged by would-be volunteers looking to ladle soup or load cans around Thanksgiving. In fact, most places have nowhere to put most of them. As Berg told the Times about food aid volunteering, “Please, please, please don’t do it just on Thanksgiving, and please, please, please understand, we have skills-based needs that are far more important than just food service.”

The need for skills-based volunteers at soup kitchens and pantries is a familiar plea from those on the front lines of the hunger wars. But, as Berg notes, it also underscores the importance of national service programs like AmeriCorps and the AmeriCorps VISTA. A vigorous volunteer corps, given proper training, can — and do — fill the skills-based gaps for these vital social service programs.

On this front, the Obama administration has given civil society actors another reason to cheer, with his expansion of AmeriCorps earlier this year. With that, the stimulus bill, and its vocal support for volunteerism, the administration has shown a keen understanding of the complementary roles national service, civic enterprise, and government action play in bolstering the public welfare. It’s reason to be thankful in a dreary time.

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Posted in A New Framework for Growth and Equity, Daily Fix | No Comments »

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