Archive for March, 2010

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Evening Fix

Wednesday, March 31st, 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

Some of the day’s best reads:

  • James Traub on whether nuclear disarmament still matters: “So what difference does it make if the United States reduces its stock of deployed strategic warheads from 2,200 to 1,550? The answer is that disarmament has largely become a means rather than an end. It is, as Obama began saying during his presidential campaign, the means by which the United States induces other states to help confront the threat that really matters: the proliferation of nuclear weapons, above all to rogue states and terrorists.”
  • John Avlon on the right-wing militia movement’s presence on YouTube: “These seven clips show the militia movement as they want to be seen by their supporters — a collection of armed military exercises by men in fatigues backed by the sounds of heavy metal.”
  • Mark Kleiman on our recidivism problem: “If we were better at supervising offenders when we’re not paying for their room and board, fewer of them would wind up back inside, and they would commit fewer crimes when on the outside.”
  • Joel Kotkin on Texas: “Our Urbanist in Chief may sit in the Oval Office, but Americans continue to vote with their feet for the adopted hometown of widely disdained former President George W. Bush. According to the most recent Census estimates, the Dallas and Ft. Worth, Texas, region added 146,000 people between 2008 and 2009 — the most of any region in the country — a healthy 2.3% increase.”
  • Nissan yesterday unveiled their entry in the electric car wars: the Leaf.

Posted in Daily Fix, Evening Fix | No Comments »

Cap-and-Whatever

Wednesday, March 31st, 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

Via TPM, I learned that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar went on CNBC today and said the administration would no longer be using the term “cap-and-trade” for its climate change proposals.

This decision does not appear to mean any change in the actual proposal, which would still presumably involve placing a “cap” on carbon emissions and then creating a system whereby credits for exceeding carbon goals could be “traded,” thus creating market incentives for pollution control efforts and technology. It’s the label that seems to be the problem, probably because conservatives have taken to calling it “cap-and-tax.”

I can sympathize with the rebranding effort (though it’s not clear what the new moniker will be). We at PPI — early proponents of “cap and trade” — spent years trying, without a lot of success, to find simple ways to explain the cap-and-trade approach to carbon emissions. It wasn’t as hard as, say, trying to write descriptions of the “revolution in military affairs,” another perennial head-scratcher, but it was never possible to capture it on a bumper sticker.

It probably doesn’t matter, so long as the administration and congressional proponents continue to make it clear that cap-and-whatever is a way to limit potentially catastrophic carbon emissions while employing market mechanisms to create incentives for private-sector innovations in clean energy technology. It is, indeed, the kind of market-friendly alternative to command-and-control environmental regulations that conservatives ought to find attractive, and often have in the past. But it’s the substance, not the politics, of this approach, that really matters, and that will remain regardless of the marketing.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

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

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Posted in Clean Energy and Modern Infrastructure, Daily Fix | No Comments »

What’s Next for Russia?

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010
Jim Arkedis


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

by Jim Arkedis

Tuesday’s Moscow attacks may do more to define the path of Russia’s future as a democracy than any single event since 1991. In a worst-case scenario, Vladimir Putin could return to the presidency. A sunnier forecast sees popular sentiment rising against Putin – and the emergence of a wild card that could lead the way to real change in Russia.

Hyperbolic? Sure, but certainly within the realm of possibility. Three things worth noting:

First, after the tragic Beslan school attack in 2004, then-President (and current Prime Minister) Putin used the event as a catalyst to execute a political power-grab in the name of national security. Most glaringly, Putin canceled the election of regional governors and chose to appoint them himself, thus consolidating power in the president’s hands. This was, as I mentioned yesterday, akin to George W. Bush canceling all elections for state governor in the wake of 9/11. That’s downright crazy. So Putin has set the power-grabbing precedent following past acts of terror — might he do so again?

Second, anecdotal evidence suggests the public may be starting to tire of Putin’s act. Ilya Yashin, a self-described youth activist, makes the point that since Putin has concentrated so much power in his own hands, “he is responsible for everything that happens in our country” and should therefore be held accountable for the latest attacks. “Not long ago Putin promised an end to terrorist acts in Russian cities and a military victory over terrorism. For this we gave up our political rights and civil liberties. We gave up the right to elect governors,” Yashin said.

Will this gently percolating anti-Putin sentiment boil over once Russians add concerns over security to concerns over a stagnating economy, as Josh Tucker and I wrote last year?

And then there’s the wild card: President Dmitri Medvedev. Let’s not forget that Putin may have handpicked Medvedev as his presidential successor, but Medvedev has shown an inclination to be open and possibly more pro-Western, having never been involved with the ex-KGB cadre that surrounds Putin. What’s more, Medvedev has distanced himself slightly from Putin’s Caucasus strategy, saying (from NYT) that the government should aggressively hunt down the terrorists, but also focus on the poverty and government malfeasance that he contended nurtured extremism.

Weighing these factors, I can envision two distinct outcomes for Russian democracy.

1. Putin brazenly unmasks himself as Medvedev’s puppet master. He uses the Beslan precedent and Moscow bombings to justify another round of power consolidation, saying that the last round had clearly not been effective enough. He crushes any sort of domestic civil opposition and launches a drive to change the Russian constitution to allow him to run for another term as president. Medvedev proves powerless to object and is slowly moved off to the side.

2. Medvedev realizes he has a potentially strong domestic political constituency as a resolute but smart antiterrorism president. He offers a different strategy to Russians to deal with the threat and successfully distances himself from Putin while effectively holding off Putin’s attempts to grab power.

Much of the outcome rests with Medvedev’s desire and ability to be independent from the man who picked him. I’m hopeful for the second, but my money is on the first.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gloel/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

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Posted in A Progressive Security Strategy, Daily Fix | 1 Comment »

Over the Brink

Wednesday, March 31st, 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

The craziness surrounding futile efforts to overturn health reform via lawsuits reached a new crescendo in Georgia yesterday, when Republicans in the state House introduced articles of impeachment against Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker. You see, Baker (a Democrat) refused to join Republican Attorneys General who are launching a suit charging that federal health reform is unconstitutional. He argued (very accurately) that the suits have no change of succeeding, and that pursuing them would be a waste of time and money. Republicans claim he’s required to file suit at the request of Republican Gov. Sonny Perdue.

By threatening impeachment on such transparently partisan grounds, GOPers are probably doing Baker a big favor: he’s running for governor, and has been trailing former Gov. Roy Barnes in the polls. In addition, there’s something a bit attention-grabbing about the spectacle of Republicans demanding that an African-American statewide official embrace neo-Confederate constitutional theories on “state’s rights” grounds.

As Eric Kleefield of TPM has noted, the “massive resistance” approach to health reform has already become a litmus test for conservative Republicans, right up there with criminalizing abortion and defending trust fund babies against “death taxes.” So get used to it; they just can’t help themselves any more.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

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

How America Led, and Lost, the High-Speed Rail Race

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010
Mark Reutter


PPI Fellow Mark Reutter is the former editor of Railroad History and author of Making Steel: Sparrows Point and the Rise and Ruin of American Industrial Might (2005, rev. ed.).

by Mark Reutter

How did America get to where it is today, a country with the slowest and most threadbare intercity passenger rail service of any advanced nation?

Not so very long ago, we were not in this humiliating position. In fact, we operated trains that amazed and impressed the rest of the world. These trains were called streamliners, and their very names – Silver Meteor, Flying Yankee, Rocky Mountain Rocket, Denver Zephyr – connoted speed and luxury. In the period between 1935 and 1950, the 10 fastest scheduled passenger trains in the world were all U.S. streamliners.

One of the great racetracks of this period was the New York Central Railroad’s four-track mainline between Buffalo and Cleveland. Paging through an old timetable, I counted 42 daily passenger trains running on this line in the 1940s. Such trains as the Commodore Vanderbilt, Fifth Avenue Special and the extra-fare choice of tycoons and Hollywood starlets, The 20th Century Limited, routinely topped 90 miles per hour on straightaways and averaged 60-65 mph, including station stops.

The 187 miles between Buffalo and Cleveland were covered in 3 hours then. Today, the sole passenger train traveling this route, Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited, takes 3½ hours, if (and this is a big if) the train is on schedule.

The Rise and Fall of American Rail

What differentiated our streamliners from contemporary trains in Europe and Asia was advanced technology. American railroads and equipment suppliers had not only pioneered the diesel-electric locomotive in the 1930s – a quantum leap over from the old steam locomotive – but introduced lightweight cars with better wheel sets, couplers, braking systems and lower centers of gravity to negotiate curves at higher speeds.

The interiors of these streamliners abounded in creature comforts – wide double-paned windows, recessed fluorescent lighting, luxurious reclining seats and the first air-conditioning found in any commercial transport.

Streamliners attracted customers by the carload. In fact, they made money. Wall Street consultants Coverdale & Colpitts surveyed 58 streamliners in 1948 and found that they grossed $98 million and netted $48 million after out-of-pocket costs, for a return of 49 percent.*

And then almost as quickly as the streamliner era flourished, it ended. There were a number of reasons for the rapid decline of rail passenger service, but the overwhelming factor was the explosion of government funding for new highways and airports. In 1956, Dwight Eisenhower signed the Interstate and Defense Highways Act. First estimated to cost $27 billion, the Interstate system took more than 30 years and $200 billion to complete. At the same time, state and local governments bankrolled airport construction, while Washington subsidized air carriers by fixing artificially high rates for U.S. airmail contracts.

The twin impact of airways and roadways was devastating on American railroads, which, after all, were private companies that paid property taxes and ticket taxes on their operations. For example, between 1956 and 1969, a total of 28,800 miles of interstate highways were opened to traffic. In the same period, 59,400 miles of railroad were taken out of passenger service.

From 2,500 daily intercity trains in 1954 (that’s excluding commuter service), fewer than 500 trains were left when the National Railroad Passenger Corp., or Amtrak, took over intercity rail service in 1971. Outside of the Boston-Washington Northeast Corridor, America’s passenger train had virtually disappeared.

American Technology Goes Abroad

So carelessly tossed away by our policymakers and politicians, the American streamliner did not simply die during those dismal decades of the 1950s and 1960s. Instead, it rose from the ashes as its key technological features moved overseas, welcomed by a visionary group of railroaders.

An all-electric test train ordered by Louis Armand, head of the French national railway, shattered world records with 208-mph speeds in March 1955. This achievement proved the capacity of rail equipment using overhead electricity for propulsion to operate far above 100 mph on a sustained basis.

The French experiments inspired Japan’s Minister of Transport Shinhi Sogo. In 1956, the same year that President Eisenhower signed the Interstate Highways Act, Sogo began planning a rail line without sharp curves or up and down grades that would permit streamlined, all-electric trains to run at extremely high speeds with utmost safety

To operate the Shinkansen, or “New Trunk Line,” between Tokyo and Osaka, Sogo actively imported technology from America, including the two-axle trucks of the Budd Manufacturing Co. and dynamic braking pioneered by General Motors’ Electro-Motive Division. To top it off, the Japan ordered the most advanced computer used outside of military applications (built by yet another American company, Bendix) to operate the line’s signal and dispatching systems.

Remarkably, the U.S. government gave Japan foreign aid – money purportedly going to an underdeveloped country – to build a rail infrastructure far superior to our own. Opened in time for the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, the first Shinkansen train traveled at a maximum of 125 mph. The latest-generation Shinkansen runs at 188 mph, and its ancestor is in a museum.

Japan wasn’t alone. After developing moderately high-speed trains on mixed freight-and-passenger lines, France opened Europe’s first all-new railroad between Paris and Lyon in 1981. This route featured the now-famous TGVs, or “Trains of Great Speed.” Six thousand of 20,000 rail miles in France are now covered by TGV trains. High-speed service has expanded into Belgium, Germany, Holland, Italy, Switzerland and Spain in Europe and in China, South Korea and Taiwan in Asia.

Playing Catch-Up

Compared to these developments, we’re still in the horse-and-buggy stage. Amtrak’s self-declared high-speed line, the Northeast Corridor, does not even qualify as high speed by world standards. The Acela Express is designed for 150 mph, but only goes that fast for about 25 miles in Rhode Island.

Overall, Acela trains average only 67 mph between Boston and New York. South of New York, Acela operates at an average of 77 mph and can’t go faster than 125 mph anywhere because the overhead electric wires are obsolete and can slip off the train’s pantographs at higher speeds.

This is what happens when you starve a business for 60 years. It becomes stunted. Our passenger rail system is stunted today not because of some inevitable law of economics or natural outgrowth of competition. It’s stunted because of longstanding government policy that thoughtlessly, absentmindedly, let some wonderful American-made technology slip away.

This piece is an excerpt from Mark Reutter’s keynote address at the High-Speed Rail Summit last week in Erie, Pa.

* “Streamliners Earn More Than Ever,” Railway Age, March 4, 1950.

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Posted in Clean Energy and Modern Infrastructure, Daily Fix, Priority 1 | 20 Comments »

No Bump?

Wednesday, March 31st, 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

In the run-up to health care reform’s passage, many people (including yours truly) predicted that the president’s approval ratings would see a bump once the bill passed. Bill Clinton went out on a limb and forecast a 10-point bounce. And in the days immediately following passage, Obama’s approval ratings did seem to nudge up a little.

More than a week later, however, Obama’s approval ratings seem to have been little changed:

Democrats who held out hopes that President Barack Obama’s health reform win would mean a quick boost to the party’s political fortunes are getting a reality check — a reminder that it takes more than one good week to shake up a year of sliding polls.

Obama and his health reform plan did get a bump in several surveys immediately after the House vote eight days ago — but the numbers in some of those polls flattened out, showing how difficult it will be for Obama to capitalize on reform, even after his top legislative goal cleared Congress.

Even the bounce for the plan itself has proven evanescent. A USA Today/Gallup poll immediately after passage found 49 percent favoring it versus 40 percent against, an improvement from earlier polls. But the newest USA Today/Gallup poll now finds a 47-50 favor/oppose split. An aggregate of polls on health care finds little movement from the pre-passage days.

How to read the numbers? For one thing, it reveals just how divisive the health reform debate has been. After months of Republicans demonizing the plan as the next stage in Obama’s grand totalitarian scheme, it’s no surprise that a week-plus of good news cycles has done little to change public opinion.

But perhaps the more important lesson here is just how much the economy overrides everything right now. With the employment situation still dismal and the recovery yet to manifest itself on Main Street, the public mood is still understandably sour.

In a blog post yesterday, Charles Franklin repeated an observation he made earlier — that Obama’s public approval ratings, and the forces influencing it, track very closely with what we saw with Ronald Reagan:

The short version is both come in with inherited economic troubles that don’t turn around miraculously in the first 24 months. Both replace deeply unpopular predecessors, and suffer from high expectations in comparison. And both set out to dramatically change the direction of national policy. Reagan suffered substantial losses in the House in his first midterm (26 seats lost), and Obama looks headed to similar if not larger losses in 2010.

So how is the analogy holding up? In approval terms, still quite well. The two continue to track rather well. Obama has occasionally been slightly below and recently slightly above Reagan’s trend, but the parallel movement remains striking. Likewise, their relative location compared to other first term post-war presidents continues to drive home the point that these have been (so far) among the lowest approval ratings in the first 24 months.

One bright spot for Democrats is that the economy seems to be turning earlier for Obama than it did for Reagan. Even though unemployment has not yet begun its descent, the upward trend in GDP is a hopeful sign. (According to Franklin, GDP is “consistently a better predictor of midterm outcomes than is unemployment,” counterintuitive though that may seem.)

The other bright spot for Dems comes from a closer look at the polling numbers. Though the overall numbers have seen little improvement, Democratic enthusiasm seems to have been buoyed by health reform’s passage. In a midterm election, when traditionally low turnout puts even greater pressure on a party to bring its faithful to the polls, a depressed base would have been disastrous for Democrats. Obviously, the Republican rank-and-file will be fired up for November. But now, at least, the Democrats can make a fight of it with its own energized base.

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

Evening Fix

Tuesday, March 30th, 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

Some of the day’s best reads:

  • William Galston on the deficit: “In the face of this looming challenge, our political system is doing nothing to prepare the American people for the hard choices that lie ahead. The hyper-polarized parties are in no mood to compromise on their core commitments.”
  • Robert Stavins on why cap-and-trade has fallen out of favor: “But the most important factor — by far — which led to the change from politically correct to politically anathema was the simple fact that cap-and-trade was the approach that was receiving the most serious consideration, indeed the approach that had been passed by one of the houses of Congress.”
  • Third Way on reforming intelligence oversight: “The Obama administration should drop its objection to notifying all members of the intelligence committees when the President limits covert action briefings to the Gang of Eight.”
  • ITIF’s Daniel Castro on the Obama administration’s open government initiative: “Effective use of IT has brought a new level of transparency, participation and collaboration to federal government in the United States. Government is more open today than it was one year ago.”
  • Sean Wilentz on the right’s obsession with nullification: “The idea was broached most vociferously in defense of the slave South by John C. Calhoun in the 1820s and 1830s, extended by the Confederate secessionists in the 1850s and 1860s, then forcefully reclaimed by militant segregationists in the 1950s and 1960s.”

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Mitt’s “Problem” Redux

Tuesday, March 30th, 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

Back at the beginning of the year, I wrote a piece suggesting that putative 2012 Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney might have a hard time overcoming his sponsorship of a form of health care reform in Massachusetts that was impressively similar to that great socialist abomination, ObamaCare. This has now become a pretty common refrain in the early 2012 handicapping (viz. this Jonathan Martin-Ben Smith item in Politico yesterday), to the point where the estimable Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic posted a rebuttal to the Mitt-as-toast hypothesis yesterday.

Ambinder made four reasonable points about Romney’s potential viability regardless of RomneyCare. Let’s consider them in order:

(1) RomneyCare may look more successful by 2012. I don’t think the problem with RomneyCare is that it’s unpopular on unsuccessful in MA; it’s that it bears a lot of resemblence to ObamaCare, which is by definition, regardless of public opinion or objective reality, a horror to the kind of people who participate in Republican presidential primaries.

(2) Health care may not be a transcendent Republican issue by 2012 (just as the Iraq War began to recede once the 2008 Democratic contest reached its climax). Sure, other major issues of importance to Republican primary-goers may emerge, but until such time, if ever, health reform is repealed, there is virtually no chance that it will be forgotten by 2012 (and it can’t be repealed before then unless Republicans win every single Senate race this year and also win two-thirds of the House). If the Iraq War is a suitable analogy, as Ambinder suggests, I think it’s indisputable that Barack Obama would have never emerged as a viable presidential candidate in 2008 if Hillary Clinton hadn’t voted for the war resolution and then refused to say she made a mistake by doing so. Other issues mattered, but that was the big threshold issue. (One of my fellow Mitt-o-skeptics, Jonathan Chait, did a response to Ambinder today that mainly focuses on his own belief that RomneyCare will actually be a bigger issue for Republicans in the future than it is today.)

(3) The Republican nominating process is “hierarchical,” and especially favorable to establishment favorites like Romney. This is something you hear all the time, and it’s valid in the very limited sense that the rules for awarding delegates in Republican contests don’t demand strict proportionality, and thus help front-runners consolidate early victories. But in 2012, as in 2008, Mitt’s problem could be getting out of the gate, not finishing off the field. Recall that in Iowa in 2008, he couldn’t survive what was basically a one-on-one contest with Mike Huckabee, despite a vast financial advantage and endorsements from most of the local GOP establishment, and even though he was running as the “true conservative” in the race. None of Romney’s problems from 2008 (a wooden speaking style, a history of flip-flops on cultural issues, his religion, his history as a corporate downsizer) have gone away, and it’s very likely the Iowa Caucuses will be even more dominated by cultural conservatives than ever, given the huge importance of the gay marriage issue to conservatives in that state. Add in RomneyCare, and the odds look pretty bad; skipping Iowa like McCain did is a possibility, but would also give another candidate a good chance to become the early front-runner, going into two states (Michigan and New Hampshire) that Romney can’t lose and still have a prayer for the nomination.

(4) Romney is just too reasonable and accomplished a candidate to get knocked out by one issue. Maybe so, but as noted above, he has more than one problem, and as it happens, “one issue” — in fact, one utterance — knocked Mitt’s father, George, out of the 1968 presidential contest, and his resume was if anything stronger than his son’s. If I were a Republican, I’d actually be worried that Mitt’s sitting there soaking up attention endorsements, and poll numbers that could go to some attractive darkhorse candidate, leaving the GOP with a very weak field if he does go belly-up. And you don’t have to be a total Democratic partisan to observe that Republicans aren’t disposed at the moment to be completely rational about their choice of candidates: a recent PPP survey suggested that nearly as many rank-and-file Republicans think it’s more important to nominate a candidate who is “conservative on every issue” as those who think it’s more important to nominate someone “who can beat Barack Obama.”

In any event, will all due respect to Marc Ambinder (who may simply be playing devil’s advocate), I’d say the burden of persuasion should be on those who think Mitt Romney’s stronger than he was in 2008 than on those who think he’s in very deep trouble thanks to RomneyCare.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/newshour/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

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A Common Enemy?

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010
Jim Arkedis


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

by Jim Arkedis

While the Moscow bombings have brought out fighting words and suggestions of a scorched-earth response from Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin – a reaction that I cautioned against in my previous post – President Obama’s has been perfectly pitched. He has expressed solidarity with the Russian people and sympathy for the killed and injured. The president has made a notable attempt to distance himself from overly emotional Bush/Putin-style rhetoric about terrorism, reasoning (correctly in my mind) that pounding a fist on the table and screaming about revenge only plays into the terrorists’ hands.

I would urge one note of caution, however. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, appearing on Canadian television, compared the Moscow terrorist attack to those in the West: ”We face a common enemy, whether you’re in a Moscow subway or a London subway or a train in Madrid, or an office building in New York, we face the same enemy.” I’d counsel the State Department to be a bit more nuanced here. True, one can argue that the ultimate motivation in all these attacks was to establish part of the Muslim caliphate that stretched from North Africa to Southeast Asia. But it’s a tricky argument to make when part of the history of that motivation is independence from Moscow (whether you’re a pure separatist or one motivated by Muslim ideology).

Endorsing a “common enemy” might encourage the Kremlin to continue heavy-handed tactics against its own people, not to mention attempting to retroactively justify, say, the invasion of Georgia by conflating it with terrorist motivations. Or, to continue Putin’s 2004-2005 precedent, throw language like this back into American faces when he uses it to justify another power-grab…like his return to the presidency. Seriously — he’s not above it, and this might be exactly what’s coming.

Foggy Bottom should be clear on these distinctions about a common enemy, particularly when there’s no evidence of direct al Qaeda involvement in the Moscow bombings.

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“Populist Crossfire”

Tuesday, March 30th, 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

Over the weekend Ron Brownstein wrote up the nightmare scenario for Democrats in terms of their appeal to white working class voters:

[P]olling just before the [health reform] bill’s approval showed that most white Americans believed that the legislation would primarily benefit the uninsured and the poor, not people like them. In a mid-March Gallup survey, 57 percent of white respondents said that the bill would make things better for the uninsured, and 52 percent said that it would improve conditions for low-income families. But only one-third of whites said that it would benefit the country overall — and just one-fifth said that it would help their own family….Obama has already been hurt by the perception, fanned by Republicans, that the principal beneficiaries of his efforts to repair the economy are the same interests that broke it: Wall Street, big banks, and the wealthy. The belief that Washington has transferred benefits up the income ladder is pervasive across society but especially pronounced among white voters with less than a college education, the group that most resisted Obama in 2008. Now health care could threaten Democrats from the opposite direction by stoking old fears, particularly among the white working class, that liberals are transferring income down the income ladder to the “less deserving.”

Brownstein calls this dynamic “an unusual populist crossfire.” The antidote, he suggests, might be two-fold: continuing to stress the benefits for the middle class, and to the country, of health reform, while spending more time reinforcing a Democratic message on the economy and the financial system that makes Republicans, not Democrats, defenders of Wall Street and the wealthy. The White House and congressional Democrats seem to be moving briskly on both those fronts, and how well they succeed could be fateful in November. At the same time, it wouldn’t hurt to make sure that perceptions (which Brownstein also documents) by poor and minority voters that health reform does in fact help them and help the country produce a greater willingness to vote this year than would normally be the case in a midterm election.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

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Terrorism in Russia

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010
Jim Arkedis


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

by Jim Arkedis

Nearly 36 hours after the attacks in Moscow’s subway system, reports indicate that nearly 40 are dead and more than 70 have been injured. As of this writing, no group has claimed responsibility, though heavy suspicion has fallen on Muslim separatist groups based in southern Russia’s Caucasus region, the primary source of terrorism in Russia since the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. More on that in a second.

There were two bombings, conducted quasi-simultaneously (about 40 minutes apart) at two busy metro stations in Moscow’s city center. The Lubyanka station is located near the headquarters of Russia’s Federal Security Service (the legacy organization of the KGB), which points to a message the attackers may have been hoping to convey; the second scene at the Park Kultury Station is located a few stops to the south along the same metro line. If you’d like to see some interesting citizen-journalism of the attacks’ aftermath, click over to the NYT’s The Lede blog.

Much has been made of the attackers’ identity — two women dressed in black robes with explosives and shrapnel packed underneath their garments. Female suicide bombers have been used by Chechen separatists dating back to 2002 and are commonly — and disturbingly – referred to as ”black widows.” Furthermore, female suicide bombers are hardly a new phenomenon. If memory serves, they’ve been used as long ago as the early 1990s by the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. Terrorist groups — even those with no formal ties to one another — observe each others’ tactical successes and adopt the effective ones. The use of unsuspecting women has made the rounds in terrorist circles, even if Western audiences still find the tactic shocking.

It’s important to appreciate the dynamic nature and motivations of the Caucasus’ separatist groups over the last decade and the Russian government’s response to them. Boris Yeltsin first installed the then-little-known ex-KGB chief Vladimir Putin as prime minister in 1999, and Putin vowed to crush the Chechen separatist movement. In the early-to-mid 2000s, the group was a relatively structured militia that was responsible for mostly large-scale terrorist attacks. The group most famously conducted the 2004 siege at the Beslan school that killed over 300 people, many of whom were school children; it was also responsible for the 2002 siege at a Moscow theater.

In large part, Putin was responsible for successfully dismantling the organizational hierarchy behind those acts, killing leaders like Shamil Basayev and Abdul Khalim Sudalayev in 2006. He used victories like those to consolidate power behind the Kremlin, saying political power-grabs like eliminating the direct election of regional governors were necessary to defeat terrorism. Can you imagine if Bush had eliminated the election of state governors after 9/11? Just a bit of a stretch, right?

But as often happens with insurgent organizations, cutting off their head rarely kills them. Moscow’s success only caused the resistance to morph over the last four or five years from a top-down military-style structure to more of a flat, non-hierarchical, Islamic-based motley crew. Here’s an excellent run-down on the insurgency’s changing nature and motivation from WaPo’s Philip Pan late last year:

Russia has long blamed violence in the region on Muslim extremists backed by foreign governments and terrorist networks, but radical Islam is relatively new here. In the 1990s, it was ethnic nationalism, not religious fervor, that motivated Chechen separatists. That changed, though, as fighting spilled beyond Chechnya and Russian forces used harsher tactics targeting devout Muslims.

In 2007, the rebel leader Doku Umarov abandoned the goal of Chechen independence and declared jihad instead, vowing to establish a fundamentalist Caucasus Emirate that would span the entire region. After Moscow proclaimed victory in Chechnya in April, he issued a video labeling civilians legitimate targets and reviving Riyad-us Saliheen, the self-described martyrs’ brigade that launched terrorist attacks across Russia from 2002 to 2006.

It would appear on the surface that the Kremlin has failed to appreciate this change. In my mind, the new shape and motivations of the Chechen insurgency would call for more of a counter-insurgency style strategy that has been adopted by the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead, Putin has vowed a continued heavy hand, saying, “The terrorists will be destroyed!” This is of course what any national leader must say to placate a fearful and confused domestic audience, but may begin to ring a bit hollow in light of Putin’s similar rhetoric of 1999:

“Putin said [before these attacks], ‘One thing that I definitely accomplished was this [stopping the Chechen threat],’ and he didn’t,” said Pavel K. Baev, a Russian who is a professor at the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo.

“My feeling is this is not an isolated attack, that we will see more,” Mr. Baev said. “If we are facing a situation where there is a chain of attacks, that would undercut every attempt to soften, liberalize, open up, and increase the demand for tougher measures.”

In my next post, I’ll take a look at how the U.S. has responded to the attacks.

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

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Posted in A Progressive Security Strategy, Daily Fix | 3 Comments »

Primary Challenges, Ideology and Electability

Tuesday, March 30th, 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

Something interesting is going on in Arkansas Democratic politics right now: a serious primary challenge to an incumbent senator, Blanche Lincoln, who is not mired in any sort of personal scandal, and is not, it would seem, mispositioned ideologically for a general election in her conservative state.

As Steve Kornacki notes at Salon today, Lt. Gov. Bill Halter’s primary challenge to Lincoln is hard to categorize as simply an ideological challenge to a wayward politician who has offended the party base, or as simply an “electability” challenge to a weakened incumbent who looks likely to lose in November:

Generally, it’s easy to categorize these primary challenges. There are two basic varieties: ideological, with an exercised party base seeking retribution for an incumbent’s dissent from the party-line; and pragmatic, with party members responding to the perceived electoral deficiencies of the incumbent. And then there’s the Democratic Senate primary now underway in Arkansas, which seems to be a perfect hybrid of these two types. With the latest poll showing Blanche Lincoln’s challenger, Bill Halter, within 13 points of her, that primary – now just seven weeks away – has become the hottest Democratic contest in the nation.

Lincoln, who’s in the final year of her second term, has managed to pull off a somewhat remarkable feat, infuriating both the left-of-center base of her party and her state’s right-leaning general election audience at the same time. Thus, the challenge she’s receiving from Halter doesn’t neatly fit into either of the above categories.

Kornacki goes on to examine prior examples of ideological primary challenges, and finds little evidence of any that were also based on evidence of superior electibility (absent some non-ideological factor like a personal scandal affecting the incumbent’s political standing).

Now it should be obvious that Kornacki’s premise would not be accepted by a fair assortment of people in both parties. Among both self-identified progressives in the Democratic Party, and most especially self-identified conservatives in the Republican Party, many have argued for decades that “centrists” aren’t really more electable, and that rigorously ideological candidates could actually, if given the chance, exert a superior general-election appeal (via better “frames,” or clearer messages, or by mobilizing non-voters, or simply by providing a “choice”), even in difficult partisan terrain like the one Democrats face in Arkansas. There’s definitely evidence that this proposition is true at times and in places where there are significant numbers of voters who are “mispositioned” by adherence to parties with ideologies alien to their own (e.g., southern conservative Democrats in the 1980s and 1990s, and northern moderate-to-liberal Republicans more recently). A subset of the “electability” argument for ideological rigor is that Democratic progressives or conservative Republicans can and will offer messages that have particular appeal to swing voters in a given constituency. That’s also sometimes true, as with antiwar Democrats in times of unpopular wars, or with anti-tax Republicans in places where some state or local tax revolt is underway.

But the Halter challenge to Lincoln is emphatically not in a state where there are liberals outside the Democratic Party ripe for the picking, and there’s not much evidence that Arkansans are generally receptive to any particular progressive arguments, notwithstanding the ancient claim that southerners are especially receptive to anti-corporate “populism” (a complicated topic which I won’t get into here, other than to say that I personally think the claim is vastly overstated since southern conservatives are conservatives on nearly every imaginable topic, including economics).

Lincoln is, however, an incumbent senator at a time when incumbency is not an advantage, and that alone could make Halter as competitive as, if not more competitive than, Lincoln in a general election. And it’s not as though Halter is running as the re-incarnation of Huey Long. His anti-corporate rhetoric, in fact, is pretty much indistinguishable from what we hear from Tea Party folk, opposing bailouts rather than promoting regulation.

It appears Lincoln’s strategy (other than touting endorsements from relatively popular Democrats like Bill Clinton) is to use Halter’s challenge as evidence that she’s not the raging socialist that Republicans make her out to be. If it works, this playing-off-the-left message would presumably boost her general election standing, thus making it easier for her to appeal to Democrats on electability grounds. But she doesn’t have much time to pull this off, and if she doesn’t, she hasn’t instilled enough loyalty in Arkansas Democrats to give her much confidence in a primary win absent an electability argument.

Arkansas will thus be an interesting test of the limits of tolerance for Democratic heterodoxy in tough terrain. And if Halter wins the primary, his performance in the general election will be watched closely for its broader implications as well. The last widely-discussed Democratic primary challenge to an incumbent senator, the Ned Lamont candidacy in Connecticut in 2006, involved a totally different situation: a blue state, a more famous incumbent, a red-hot issue where Joe Lieberman was horribly mispositioned with local opinion, and most of all, a third-party Lieberman general election candidacy that Republicans largely supported. The results of a Halter nomination in Arkansas would be sui generis.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

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Posted in Daily Fix, Fixing Our Broken Politics | No Comments »

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