It’s undoubtedly a good thing that the newly Democratic House finally passed lobbying reform (and less noticed but equally important, budget reform) legislation in its first moment in power.:But as today’s DLC New Dem Dispatch noted, lobbying reform won’t mean much if Congress doesn’t go on to deal with the real source of special-interest abuse in Washington–our crazy system of financing elections:

The much-anticipated new restrictions on lobbyist relationships with members, which were enacted late yesterday with only one dissenting vote, are fine so far as they go, though a willingness to strictly enforce bans on the worst abuses (e.g., “revolving door” arrangements that tempt members to lobby the lobbyists for future jobs) will be critical. Moreover, since most of the banned activities will be permitted if conducted as part of campaign fundraisers, we think it’s important that House Democrats signal a renewed interest in cutting the link between campaign contributions and legislation, preferably by jump-starting progress toward serious campaign finance reform, including public financing of congressional elections. A good place to start might be a fresh look at the voluntary public financing plan proposed by Al Gore in 2000, which is one of the few proposals certain to pass constitutional muster.

Aside from those on both the demand and supply sides of campaign contribution checks who prefer the current system, the main sources of indifference to the kind of public financing in place in virtually every other democratic nation are twofold: the immovable object of the Supreme Court’s infinitely regrettable doctrine that political contributions are hyper-constitutionally-protected “free speech,” and the movable but daunting obstacle of public opposition to the use of taxpayer funds for political campaigns. There are many possible if unsatisfying paths around the Supreme Court’s roadblock, as illustrated by the various state systems of voluntary but politically coercive public financing schemes. And at the federal level, as the New Dem Dispatch suggests, Al Gore’s long-forgotten but promising proposal for a public financing fund for congressional campaigns, developed by then-Gore-advisor and now Progressive Policy Institute scholar Paul Weinstein, is worth another look. The key thing for progressives is not to give up, for even a moment, on public campaign financing as a goal. It may take a while to get there, but leadership requires, well, leadership, and succumbing to the current crazy and corruption-feeding system is not acceptable. This is something on which progressives who disagree on many other topics ought to be able to unite.

Last night, over at New Republic‘s The Plank, Michael Crowley marveled at the appearance of Rep. Barney Frank in the chair of the U.S. House of Representatives (sitting in for newly-elected Speaker Nancy Pelosi), describing the visual impact on him as one of “cognitive dissonance,” and a reminder of how much things changed on November 7.This immediately reminded me of a much earlier appearance in the chair by Frank, in the early 1980s, during one of those interminable end-of-year round-the-clock sessions when junior Members were often dragooned into presiding in the wee hours. During a tedious speech by Republican Rep. Marjorie Holt on school prayer, Holt referred to America as “a Christian nation.” Frank interrupted her to observe: “If this is a Christian nation, why does some poor Jew have to get up in the middle of the night to preside over the House of Representatives?” Interestingly enough, when I Googled the quote to find a source, what popped up first was a reference to the hilarious incident in a 1984 piece by none other than Charles Krauthammer, appearing in–you guessed it–The New Republic–a piece reposted on the TNR site about two weeks ago. The more things change….

It has been much unremarked given the holidays and the Gerald Ford reminiscences, but on New Year’s Eve, Seymour Martin Lipset, the great American political sociologist, died after a debilitating illness following a stroke in 2001.Marty Lipset was part of an amazing generation of New York Jewish intellectuals of the mid-to-late twentieth century that was educated at City College, went through immersion in socialist theoretical combat, and emerged to make all sorts of contributions, some Left, some Right, to the political life of the United States. Lipset’s most important contribution was his analysis of “American exceptionalism,” and especially his elucidation of the cultural and social factors that prevented the American working class from the commitment to socialism that characterized their counterparts in Europe. Lipset is also well-known in Canada for his long-standing and serious efforts to examine differences between U.S. and Canadian culture and politics.On a more personal level, I would note Lipset’s involvement late in his career with the Progressive Policy Institute, and his work on the emergence of post-socialist progressive politics in the 1980s and 1990s. During my own long association with the DLC/PPI, I have had the opportunity to meet two “living legends” (politicians aside). One was Betty Friedan, at a lunch with Will Marshall to discuss a New Democrat magazine article that Friedan was writing. And the other was Marty Lipset.

Jonathan Cohn has a fascinating article up on the New Republic site touting Denmark as a country that has managed to post world-class economic growth and employment figures despite maintaining (with some important reforms) a generous social safety net. The whole article’s worth reading and pondering, but there’s one detail in Cohn’s account of the Danish experience that especially caught my attention:

Denmark spends more than 4 percent of its GDP on its labor market programs–the most of any country in the n Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (oecd) and more than 20 times what the United States spends on its worker-training programs

.There’s been a long-raging debate in U.S. progressive circles over the proper role, if any, of worker retraining initiatives in coping with job loss and other economic dislocations associated with both technological change and with globalization. Those of us from the Clintonian pro-trade persuasion are often accused of advocating better education, and particularly worker retraining, as a substitute for direct government efforts (e.g., trade restrictions) to prevent job dislocations before they happen. Indeed, deriding worker retraining opportunities as a sort of withered booby prize for people who ought to expect their government to protect the jobs they already have is a habit that’s recently spread from protectionist circles to many progressive writers and thinkers, mainly because of growing evidence that high skill levels don’t necessarily insulate workers from offshoring and other globalization-related dislocations.I certainly don’t think of worker retraining as a silver bullet, and don’t intend to get into the general argument over globalization in this post. But as Cohn’s article illustrates, before anyone buries worker retraining as one of many strategies for coping with globalization, maybe we should actually try it, because we haven’t. For all the talk about worker retraining, the U.S. had never made s significant investment in this resource as compared with other countries. And despite many proposals for overhauling our cramped, uneven and bureaucratized system of training programs, and despite several cosmetic changes (i.e., the Workforce Investment Act, following the Job Training Partnership Act), it’s still a mess, and hardly a genuine national commitment.The Clinton administration is partly to blame for the disconnect between its rhetoric of universal and easily accessed worker retraining resources and the underlying reality. This was, in fact, one of those “investments” that never much survived the initial Clinton budget, with its emphasis on deficit reduction. But in my view, the Congresses, including Democratic-controlled Congresses, of the early to mid-1990s, deserve more of the blame, thanks to their bipartisan deficit reduction strategy of freezing spending on various discretionary programs without setting real priorities among them. A new and robust commitment to worker retraining was one of the casualities of this everything’s-equal approach.There remain plenty of proposals out there for getting serious about worker retraining. Back in 1996, former PPI vice president and Under Secretary of Commerce Dr. Rob Shapiro suggested that the “non-discrimination rule” that denies companies tax write-offs for health care benefits unless they are offered to all employees be extended to training and retraining benefits. And it’s not that hard to figure out ways to cut through the bureaucracy and offer workers direct support for retraining, as illustrated by Paul Weinstein’s PPI proposal for “New Economy Scholarships.”My fear is that the debate over the role of worker retraining as a response to globalization is blocking investments and reforms in this area that no progressive should oppose. After all, no one pretends that any government action can eliminate job churn, job loss, or the need for individual workers to upgrade their skills. Why deny workers these opportunities? To prove a point about their insufficiency as a total solution to economic insecurity? Beats me.