It’s not exactly news that South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford has decided to stake out the most extreme Hooverite position available on the federal government’s efforts to stop the downward spiral of the economy via fiscal stimulus. He’s been ranting about this on every available national platform for months, and scolding his fellow governors, and his fellows Republicans, for wanting “bailouts.” And it’s also no secret that Sanford would like to run for president in 2012.
But it’s interesting to see the lengths to which Sanford is willing to take his crusade for deflation. His latest stunt was to demand that President Obama give him some sort of super-waiver to devote $700 million in federal stimulus dollars (about a fourth of the state’s total allocation) slated for SC not to their intended purposes, but to a pre-financing of future state debts. Gee, that’s just want you want to do in the middle of a recession, particularly in a state whose unemployment rate just jumped to 10.4%.
Sanford made this completely symbolic demand secure in the knowledge that the people of SC wouldn’t actually have to suffer, since SC congressman Jim Clyburn, knowing his governor, inserted into the federal legislation language allowing state legislatures to apply for the stimulus funds if any governor failed to do so by April 3. And after some hemming and hawing, the SC legislature’s Republican leadership is moving to do just that.
Just to make sure, however, that the whole political world understands there ain’t nobody getting to the Right of Mark Sanford, the governor has chosen to analogize people who want to spend the stimulus money for stimulus to the Zimbabwean supporters of Robert Mugabe, as reported by Politico’s Glenn Thrush:

Sanford told reporters in South Carolina that he still intends to turn down millions in stimulus cash, despite the likelihood of his state legislature accepting the cash — and criticism by House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-SC) that rejecting any payments would disproportionately harm African American residents.
“What you’re doing is buying into the notion that if we just print some more money that we don’t have, send it to different states – we’ll create jobs… If that’s the case why isn’t Zimbabwe a rich place?”…”why isn’t Zimbabwe just an incredibly prosperous place. Cause they’re printing money they don’t have and sending it around to their different – I don’t know the towns in Zimbabwe but that same logic is being applied there with little effect.”

As Oliver Willis observed: I’m sure him being from South Carolina had nothing to do with this.” And among the things that Mark Sanford is willing to sacrifice to his “principles”–or more likely, to his ambitions to run for president as the King of the Right–you’d have to list not only his own state’s economic conditions, but its longstanding efforts to rid itself of the legacy of the Confederacy and Jim Crow.
As a native of the Palmetto State, let me say: Nice work, governor.

Read Zuraya Tapia-Alfaro’s post today at NDN Blog for a link-rich update on the current politics of immigration.
In the Sunday New York Times, John Harwood weighs the pros and cons of President Obama abandoning the bipartisan consensus strategy and using filibuster-proof “budget reconciliation” rules to achieve his legislative goals for health care reform and energy independence.
The Associated Press has a report on the growing clout of the moderate New Democrat Coalition.
David Sirota’s “Harkin Delivers The Perfect EFCA Message” at OpenLeft is a good read for those seeking a “succinct smackdown” of the conservative argument that EFCA must be stopped to save the economy.
Crisitunity’s ‘Daily Digest’ at Swing State Project reports that Sen Arlen Specter will stay a Republican, according to Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, who tried to persuade him otherwise.
Newsweek financial columnist Daniel Gross makes the case at Slate.com that Obama “should pay no attention to stock prices” in developing his economic reform strategy.
Sheri and Allan Rivlin have an insightful analysis up at Pollster.com today comparing public opinion towards health care reform in 1993 vs. today
WaPo‘s Chris Cillizza reports in ‘The Fix” that Team Obama is ready to launch “an unprecedented attempt to transfer the grass-roots energy built during the presidential campaign into an effort to sway Congress” to pass the Administration’s $3.55 trillion budget.

One of the odder phenomena of contemporary public life is the enthusiasm of conservative gabbers and even elected officials for the idea of “Going Galt:” the suggestion that the oppressed wealthy of America withdraw their vast contributions to the commonweal in protest against the supposedly confiscatory taxes and redistribution of income to the morally depraved underway at the behest of the Obama administration. The allusion is to John Galt, the hero of Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged, that massive tome that represented the Summa of her rigorously capitalist, atheist, and anti-altruist philosophy of “Objectivism,” which has captured a vast number of adolescents and an impressive number of adults over the last several decades.
I’ve written about this in the context of U.S. Rep. John Campbell’s (R-CA) claim that “we’re living through the scenario” laid out in Atlas Shrugged, wherein the industrial leaders of the West, sick of subsidizing “parasites” and “looters,” drop out, take to the Rockies, and finally, through Galt’s voice–a radio address that took up 90 solid pages in the novel–chastise an economically helpless nation.
But Campbell was just surfing the right-wing zeitgeist, where excited talk about “going Galt” has spread like kudzu. It’s merged, in fact, with the Rick-Santelli-spawned Tea Party “movement” of “productive” people fed up with the poor-and-minority scum who cause the financial collapse by living beyond their means, and who now refuse to shuffle off into the ranks of the homeless and instead are instituting a socialist tyranny.
I don’t need to summarize the “going Galt” literature; that’s already been done quite well by David Weigel of the Washington Independent and Roy Edroso of the Village Voice (the more Galt-sympathetic Stephen Gordon of The Liberty Papers also has a long list of relevant links from various points of view). I also don’t need to analyze the absurdity of well-heeled, not-going-anywhere conservative bloggers and pundits like Michelle Malkin or Helen Smith to encourage others to “go Galt,” or of the self-congratulatory people who think it’s a license to cheat on their taxes, lay off a few underlings, or stop tipping (no, seriously!). Hilzoy has succinctly demolished the clownish and entirely un-Randian nature of these latter-day Galtists.
What I’d like to do as a public service is simply to remind folks tempted to “go Gault” or to gush ignorantly about the subject in blogs or on Fox that they are flirting with a philosophy that is profoundly and expressly hostile to anything that could remotely be described as “conservative.” And before anyone even thinks of offering the “you-don’t-have-to-be-a-fascist-to-love-Ezra-Pound’s-poetry” defense, it’s important to understand that John Galt, Atlas Shrugged, and their creator Ayn Rand represent a remorselessly unified and logical world-view that can’t be sliced and diced into bite-sized portions you can take or leave. Galt’s speech, in particular, which is the supposed inspiration for all this excited Tea Party chatter, was a painstakingly wrought distillation of Rand’s all-encompassing philosophy of Objectivism, which few “conservatives” could stomach, much less endorse. And Rand, if she were alive, would be the first to object to promiscuous use of her words and character, especially by political “conservatives,” whom she largely despised as life-hating slaves to an imaginary God, or as unprincipled demagogues little better in practice than all the other “collectivists.”
The following are a sprinkling of quotes from Rand’s work that ought to make any self-conscious conservative think twice about scribbing “Who is John Galt?” on the nearest whiteboard.

Read more…

I’ve done a couple of posts (here and here) on Stan Greenberg’s fascinating new book, Dispatches From the War Room–enough, I hope, to interest folks in reading Stan’s unique memoir in its entirety.
But I’d be remiss in failing to write a few notes about the central issue of Dispatches: the relationship between public opinion and political strategy, and beyond that, with political leadership.
Throughout the book, Stan challenges the common stereotype that public opinion research ruins political leaders by making them tactical, reactive, and basically gutless. That may be true with some leaders relying on some strategists and pollsters, he acknowledges, but in the right hands knowing public opinion is essential to principled leadership, and to actual change. As he puts it in a post at Pollster.com:

I come out of this believing that strong political leaders build a special bond with people, rather than flying in the face of it. Strong leadership is not defying the public, but engaging with it — using support to get things done; mobilizing the public, educating the public on challenges and goals and working to shift opinion. I look at the example of Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt who were both intensely solicitous of public opinion. Engaging with the public was a precondition for boldness. That contrasts with Bush and Cheney who thought they were strong because they pursued bold policies, never guided by polls and focus groups, but I think we can look now at the consequences. President Obama’s special bond with people is part of his leadership but he will struggle like these leaders to keep people with him and enhance his chances of success. That makes for stronger and more democratic leadership and produce greater civic engagement.

This crucial distinction between the proper and improper role of public opinion research by political leaders comes out most clearly in the chapter of Dispatches about Ehud Barak. In one of the most emotional passages in the entire book, Stan defends himself against charges that he led Barak to abandon negotiations with Syria based on adverse poll results. But he then goes on to explain how in the midst of the famously intense negotiations with the Palestinians over a proposed “final status” settlement, Barak used constant polling not to determine his negotiating stance, but to measure his relative success in bringing Israelis along with him in his astoundingly bold course of action. And to Stan’s own surprise, public opinion in Israel moved significantly on issues long thought to be carved in stone. In the end, Stan suggests, it was the inability of Palestinian leaders even to attempt a similar feat of leadership and public education in their own community that doomed the whole enterprise.
To put it another way, political leaders who do what they are so often urged to do, and eschew public opinion research in order to avoid the temptation of following rather than leading, are actually denying themselves an essential tool for leadership: the ability to intelligently engage the public. To cite a prosaic parallel, those who tell politicians not to use polls are much like the baseball “traditionalists” who have spent much of the last three decades fighting the use of sophisticated statistical methods in evaluating the game and its players. As the baseball pioneer Bill James once observed, people who don’t want more information are almost certainly relying on assumptions and stereotypes that are no less imprisoning than “statistics.” It’s the same with public opinion research. Those who don’t want to know what the public thinks probably assume they already know without asking, or, worse yet, like Bush and Cheney, don’t really care. Wilfull Ignorance or arrogant indifference isn’t really a better option than knowledge when it comes to political leadership in a democracy.
I should also mention a corollary of this approach to public opinion that helps explain the title of Stan’s book: the War Room. The whole idea of a campaign War Room, which originated in the 1992 Clinton campaign, was to foster a highly integrated message and field operation with (literally) no walls. From the point of view of the campaign pollster, that meant sharing all the public opinion research, good or bad, conclusive or inconclusive, with everyone else, as part of an ongoing and highly collaborative effort. Stan doesn’t come right out and say it, but the War Room approach also helped insure that no one, and certainly not the pollster, was given an opportunity to become a backstairs Mephistopheles tempting the candidate to trim his or her sails and abandon the broader strategy and the broader “mission” in search of short-term advantage.
Thus this “pollster’s memoir” actually serves as a very rich and entertaining meditation on the nature of leadership in a democracy–particularly progressive leadership at a time when the public is demanding change. That’s why Dispatches, for all its value as recent history, is especially relevant for progressives right now.

More and more, the Republican Party seems to be chasing its own tail under the direction of its new national chairman, Michael Steele. And this week, the putative revolt against Steele transcended the grumbling about slow staff appointments and his clumsy dance with Rush Limbaugh, and became openly ideological, at a time when the GOP’s ideological rigidity seems to have reached an all-time high. As Ben Smith explained yesterday at Politico:

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele’s series of gaffes turned into something more serious Thursday, as leaders of a pillar of the GOP—the anti-abortion movement—shifted into open revolt over comments in an interview with the men’s magazine GQ.
Steele called abortion an “individual choice” and opposed a constitutional ban on abortion in the Feb. 24 interview, which appeared online Wednesday night. He echoed the language of the abortion rights movement and appeared to contradict his own heated assertions during his campaign for chairman that he is a committed soldier in the anti-abortion movement.
While he issued a statement Thursday affirming his opposition to abortion and his support for a constitutional amendment banning it, the damage appeared to be done as leading social conservatives publicly attacked the embattled chairman.

Some of the criticism came pretty close to the line that separates more-in-sorrow-than-anger rebukes from get-thee-behind-me-Satan anathemas. Mike Huckabee, for example, isn’t satisfied with Steele’s apologies for his heretical comments on abortion:

For Chairman Steele to even infer that taking a life is totally left up to the individual is not only a reversal of Republican policy and principle, but it’s a violation of the most basic of human rights–the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. His statement today helps, but doesn’t explain why he would ever say what he did in the first place.

And Smith quotes several other social conservative activists who clearly would like to drop Steele from the nearest cliff:

“Michael Steele has just walked away from the Reaganesque position of strong moral clarity on abortion to personify why the Republican Party continues to be in a ‘free fall’,” said another activist, Jenn Giroux, the executive director of the conservative group Women Influencing the Nation. “It is amazing that he cannot see and learn from the fact that Sarah Palin’s position on abortion and her unapologetic defense of every conceived child drew crowds by the thousands on that issue alone.”

Trouble is, of course, that dumping Steele as RNC chairman isn’t a very easy or appetizing prospect, either. The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza today offers “Five Reasons Why Steele Stays.” To boil them down: (1) The last thing the GOP needs now is more chaos at the top; (2) Dumping the first African-American RNC chairman so quickly would constitute “symbolic suicide;” (3) There’s no obvious successor; (4) Removing an RNC chairman is procedurally tricky; and (5) Steele is finally getting things moving again at the RNC.
That all makes sense, though Republicans could dragoon some generally acceptable elected official into chairing the RNC, at least as a figurehead, to minimize the damage if they want to show Steele the door. My guess is that Steele stays, but with a muzzle firmly attached to his face. And while that might keep him out of the newspapers and out of trouble, someone who never gets noticed is not exactly what you want these days in a national party chairman.

You’d sort of think that Citigroup, perhaps the biggest public assistance recipient in history ($50 billion or so and counting), would be a little careful about meddling in politics right now. Logical, but apparently wrong.
First came the news that Citi was downgrading its rating of Wal-Mart’s stock on grounds that the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA)–which was just reintroduced in Congress this week–might pass and damage the retail giant’s profits. Then it transpired that the same analyst who pulled that bizarre scare-tactic stunt, one Deborah Weinswig, actively participated in a conference call among EFCA opponents to strategerize about defeating the infamous socialist legislation that would let a majority of employees in a workplace form union bargaining units without formal NLRB elections.
As explained by Sam Stein at HuffPo, the conference call was organized by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, represented by Gordon Spencer, who explained its highly nuanced position on EFCA as follows:

“From the Chamber’s perspective, and I would say probably from the whole business community’s perspective, there are really no amendments you could make to this bill that would make it acceptable.”

So much for the spirit of compromise and bipartisanship.
In any event, the hysteria level among business lobbyists about EFCA is very high, strange as that may seem at a time when you would think they have a lot of bigger fish to fry.
As for Ms. Weinswig and Citi’s involvement in the anti-EFCA cabal, they aren’t the only corporate welfare loafers who think it’s okay to beg the Obama administration and a Democratic Congress for money while lobbying against legislation they support. According to Stein in an earlier article, Bank of America hosted its own anti-EFCA conference call three days after receiving a $25 billion subsidy from the feds.
It’s unclear at this point if EFCA has the votes to get through the Senate. But even if it does, and without the sort of amendments that the Chamber is already ruling out, the only way it would affect the business community is if it made it a bit easier for workers to organize unions. If the position of the anti-EFCA crowd is that unions are so intolerable that they ought to be outlawed, then they should come right out and say so without all the crocodile tears about preserving the sacred right of workers to vote against unionization via secret ballots after long, employer-dominated campaigns. But those who are accepting vast public subsidies to stay in business ought to have the decency to stay out of lobbying efforts based on the idea that corporate America should be allowed to do whatever it damn pleases, or they’ll plunge us all into penury.

The Center for American Progress has released two very meaty new studies on progressive trends in the American electorate.
The first, by TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira, is entitled “New Progressive America,” and documents “twenty years of demographic, geographic, and attitudinal changes across the country” that “herald a new progressive majority.” Texeira’s basic conclusion is:

At this point in our history, progressive arguments combined with the continuing demographic and geographic changes are tilting our country in a progressive direction–trends that should take America down a very different path than has been traveled in the last eight years.

The fundamental question Teixeira asks in this study is how the country moved from a 53-46 Republican victory in the 1988 presidential election to a 53-46 Democratic victory in 2008.
In terms of demographics, the study focuses on pro-Democratic shifts in the population, especially an 11 point increase in the minority percentage share of voters in presidential electionsa 4 point increase in the percentage of voters who are white college graduates, and a 15 point drop in the percentage of voters who are non-college-educated whites. The first two groups have become solidly pro-Democratic, and while Democrats made small gains in the “white working class vote” between 2004 and 2008, this remains the most conservative major voting demographic.
Other pro-Democratic demographic trends include the impressively progressive outlook of Milennials (those born after 1978), which are adding 4.5 million adults to the voting pool every year, and the growing tilt of professionals, who are “now the most progressive occupational group.” Religious diversity, or more specifically “rapid increases among the unaffiliated”–is another pro-Democratic factor.
In terms of geography, Democrats have become dominant in most major metropolitan areas, primarily because they have made vast improvements since 1988 in fast-growing suburbs.
Texeira also offers detailed analysis of trends in nine states usually thought of as “swing states”: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Colorado, Nevada, Ohio, Florida, Virginia, North Carolina and Indiana. All these states were carried by George H.W. Bush in 1988 and by Barack Obama in 2008.
The second big CAP study, by John Halpin and Karl Agne, is entitled “State of American Political Ideology, 2009.” Using new definitional categories and a detailed examination of voters’ actual views, this study challenges the static impression of ideological positioning in the electorate that has been produced by the many surveys that simply ask voters whether they consider themselves “liberals, moderates or conservatives” (the basis of all that “center-right nation” talk after the last elections).
Its basic conclusion is:

After nearly three decades of public acceptance of the Reagan-Bush model of conservatism–limited government, tax cuts, traditional values, and military strength–a broad and deep cross-section of the American public now holds markedly progressive attitudes about government and society.

In terms of ideological self-identification, the study deployed a five-part scale that adds “libertarian” and “progressive” to the usual three-part menu. This approach showed 34% of voters self-identifying as conservatives, 29% as moderates, 15 percent as liberals, 16 percent as progressives, and 2% as libertarians. Follow-up questions designed to identify the leanings of moderates divided the electorate into 47% who were or who leaned liberal or progressive, and 48% who were or who leaned conservative or libertarian.
But when Halpin and Agne used 40 specific ideological statements to probe beneath self-identification, a different picture emerged:

On the domestic front, after years of supply-side tax cuts, support for corporations (especially extractive oil and mining companies), and deregulation of the economy, large percentages of Americans increasingly favor progressive ideas centered on: sustainable lifestyles and green energy; public investment in education, infrastructure, and science; financial support for the poor, elderly, and sick; regulation of business to protect workers and consumers; and guaranteed affordable health coverage for every American. On the international front, the legacy of the Bush years has yielded to an American public far more interested in restoring the country’s image abroad, fighting climate change, and pursuing security through diplomacy, alliances, and international institutions than in the continued pursuit of national objectives through the sole projection of military might.
Approximately two-thirds of Americans—reaching to 70 percent to 80 percent on some measures—agree with progressive ideas in each of these domestic and global areas.

Both these studies supply extensive details supporting the top-line findings. But the big news is that the trends–both demographic and ideological, and ultimately partisan–so evident in November of 2008 are truly trends, not emphemeral events. And while the success of President Obama’s and the Democratic Congress’ agenda will obviously have a major impact on what happens in 2010 or 2012, we Democrats do, finally, appear to have the wind at our backs.

The current (3/18) issue of The New Republic sports a nifty ’30s-style prole art cover and the articles are organized around the theme “Obama’s New Deal.” Inside, TNR features an interesting discussion of one of the more important grand strategy choices Obama must make half way through the first hundred days — focusing his agenda, with TDS co-editor William Galston offering a critique of “Barack’s Too Long Wish List,” and a response by TNR’s Jonathan Cohn, “The Case for Presidential Multi-Tasking.” A couple of nut graphs from Galston:

Roosevelt organized his first term around two principles that the Obama administration would do well to ponder. First, he kept his (and the country’s) attention firmly fixed on a single task: ending the crisis of confidence and restarting economic activity. While he was more sensitive than previous presidents to the links among seemingly disparate issues, these interconnections in his view did not warrant trying to move on all fronts at once. The people and the Congress had to be brought along with an agenda and a narrative that they could understand.
Second, although FDR moved quickly starting on inauguration day, he never believed that his capacity to legislate would wane after his first year in office. On the contrary, he used early momentum to build popular support, yielding further congressional gains in 1934 and a massive landslide in 1936. The creative period of the New Deal continued until Roosevelt overreached in 1937 with his ill-considered proposal to reorganize (or as his detractors put it, “pack”) the Supreme Court.

And a teaser from Cohn:

…Obama’s multi-faceted strategy has certain clear advantages. For one thing, it keeps the right wing unsettled. With so many initiatives going forward, there’s no chance for conservatives to coalesce in opposition to any one issue. Instead of the entire conservative movement hammering away in unison, you have some of them going after health care, some of them going after earmarks, some of them going after cap-and-trade, and so on. In that sort of environment, few attacks resonate because they don’tt get the sustained attention they need.
The converse is true, of course; Obama isn’t giving the affirmative case sustained attention, either. But if neither side can rally its forces, then the most likely result would seem to be status quo politics. And status quo politics right now, I would argue, favors the party that just won a landslide presidential election while building up huge congressional majorities.

An interesting dialogue, and the choices about focus to be made in the weeks ahead may well determine the success of the President — and his party.

As you probably know if you spend any time paying attention to conservative agitprop, Depression Revisionism is all the rage on the Right, where it’s now settled wisdom that the New Deal failed and that Herbert Hoover, like Franklin Roosevelt, was a big-spending market interventionist who helped create the Great Depression in the first place by excessive meddling with the economy. This revisionist point-of-view is obviously aimed at reinforcing GOP arguments that Obama’s economic activism is doomed to fail–you know, just like FDR’s.
More importantly, this rather counter-intuitive if loudly and confidently announced historical axiom seems to have infected MSM coverage of the current economic debate. An anecdote: I was recently awaiting a flight in an airport that featured monitors blaring out CNN, and could not help but be aware of an “Anderson Cooper 360” segment on the economic stimulus package. Nestled in the midst of turgid analysis of the jobs impact of this bridge and that road was an interview with some midwestern economics professor, who was given the opportunity to say, without contradiction, that it was the “consensus” of economists that the New Deal had failed to make a dent in the Great Depression. This is the sort of assertion that has a strong subliminal effect on those of us–a pretty big majority of Americans–who don’t spend a lot of time keeping up with the Dismal Science.
The would-be Copernicus of this Calvin-Coolidge-Was-Right revolution in understanding of the 1930s is undoubtedly Amity Shlaes, a conservative columnist whose best-selling book on the New Deal and the Great Depression, The Forgotten Man, is one of those tomes that is constantly cited as definitive by people who haven’t read it at all.
While the temptation to say we should all actually read Shlaes is offset by my lack of interest in further enriching her, I’m glad to report that Jonathan Chait has laid out the basic issues for us in an important review in The New Republic.
I know that like many bloggers I often link to an article or post and beg you to “read the whole thing,” but with respect to Chait’s review of Shlaes, I really do mean it. That’s because Shlaes’ take on the Great Depression has become very central not only to the GOP case against President Obama’s agenda, but to the “positive” antediluvian economc policies most Republicans are urging upon us as an alternative.
To boil it all down, Chait shows that Shlaes’ account of the Depression is highly anecdotal and doesn’t always support the “lessons” we are supposed to learn from her; that she uses economic statistics in a dubious and very selective way to make her points; and that her interpretation of both FDR’s and Hoover’s reponses to the Depression is one that virtually no reputable historian would support. He also establishes that most economists, regardless of ideology–and contra the assertion of that economist speaking on “Anderson Cooper 360”–would disagree with Shlaes’ basic understanding of the Depression and its causes and remedies.
We should all understand by now that interpretations of large historical events often have a profound influence on contemporary public discourse. “Revisionist” takes on developments ranging from the destruction of Solomon’s Temple and the execution of Jesus Christ, to the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Battle of Tours, the French Revolution, and the Treaty of Versailles, all fed powerful political and intellectual movements many decades and even centuries later. While the Great Depression of the 1930s probably doesn’t match most of those events in its significance, it was undoubtedly an experience that molded political opinions in America for a very long time, mostly in a way that benefitted the Democratic Party. It’s thus not surprising that Republicans want to overturn the popular understanding of those difficult years. And thus it’s important for progressives to challenge them when they are so dangerously wrong. Thanks to Jonathan Chait for firing back with facts, logic, and a compelling narrative of what really happened in America so long ago.

You’d have to say that the atmosphere on and immediately after November 4, 2008, was about as different as you can get from that of November 7, 2000, particularly for Democrats. The latter produced an enduring testament to the perfidious effects of malevolent and incompetent electoral administraton, while the former represented a reasonably decisive choice by an energized citizenry.
But according to a major new study by a consortium of university researchers, nearly as many people had trouble exercising their right to vote last year as in 2000:

Four million to five million voters did not cast a ballot in the 2008 presidential election because they encountered registration problems or failed to receive absentee ballots, which is roughly the same number of voters who encountered such problems in the 2000 election, according to an academic study to be presented to the Senate Rules Committee on Wednesday.
An additional two million to four million registered voters — or 1 percent to 2 percent of the eligible electorate — were “discouraged” from voting due to administrative hassles, like long lines and voter identification requirements, the study found.

The study did indicate that voting technology problems had significantly improved since 2000, mainly due to the abandonment of punch-card ballots and lever machines. But obstacles to the registration of eligible voters and the maintenance of accurate voter registration records may have actually gotten worse:

“Registration issues were for 2008 what machine problems were for the 2000 election,” said Stephen Ansolabehere, a political science professor at Harvard and the study’s lead author.
State and local election officials have had a difficult time keeping voter registration lists current as voters move, change names or become inactive. Updating voter profiles in these lists is estimated to cost about a third of local election offices’ budgets, the report said. Verifying the authenticity of voter registrations by checking the information with other databases is also a burden and has led to people being removed incorrectly.

Registration problems, of course, were a more hidden factor in past elections. Even in 2000, it’s reasonably clear that a screwed-up “purge” of supposed ex-felons by Florida election officials cost Al Gore as many votes as the vastly more famous ballot irregularities and aborted recounts.
Will the latest evidence of a broken electoral system finally motivate Congress to take effective steps to set true national standards for voter registration and other election procedures? Probably not, since memories of 2000 have faded. But the strong Democratic majorities in Congress mean that longstanding Republican efforts to restrict the franchise should no longer stand in the way of election reform, and the costs involved don’t look very daunting at a time of near-trillion-dollar legislative packages.
Let’s hope the new study lights a few fires of outrage in Washington, and that anyone who cares about fair elections works to fan the flames.