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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: August 2010

Mitt Romney Shudders

Yesterday J.P. Green did a post on the Missouri “ObamaCare referendum,” noting its rather tilted character and echoing Jon Chait’s endorsement of a progressive way around the unpopularity of an individual mandate for the purchase of health insurance, as designed by Paul Starr.
But there’s another aspect of the Missouri vote that ought to be mentioned: the individual mandate that was the target of the the state law ratified by Proposition C wasn’t just a feature of “ObamaCare.” It was also a central element in RomneyCare, Massachusetts’ pioneer health reform effort. And amidst all the rationalizations that Romney has offered in an effort to distinguish RomneyCare from ObamaCare, he hasn’t repudiated his support for an individual mandate.
Even if you don’t think the Missouri vote was a fair representation of overall public opinion in the Show-Me State (and it’s dubious on that front, given the low turnout and the 2-1 Republican tilt among priimary voters), it was sure a good measure of how politically active Republicans feel. And a shudder had to shake Romney when he heard about it, since it’s very unlikely the 2012 Caucus-goers in next-door Iowa are going to feel any warmer towards the individual mandate seventeen months from now, when they once again pass judgment on Mitt’s presidential ambitions.


Creamer: Nine Keys To Democratic Success in the Midterms

This item, by TDS Contributor Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from The Huffington Post.
To hear some pundits tell it, the outcome of the midterms is preordained disaster for Democrats. Not so fast. Much depends on how Democratic candidates frame their efforts – and how Progressives in general frame the political debate over the next three months.
Here are nine keys to Democratic success:
1) The election narrative — the election must be framed as part of a struggle between everyday Americans and corporate special interests.
Everyday Americans believe the economy is a disaster and the country is on the wrong track. They won’t change that view until the economy actually improves.
The Republicans are doing their best to pin the blame on the leadership of Democrats. Democrats are absolutely correct to frame the election as a choice between moving America forward and going back to the failed Bush economic policies that allowed the recklessness of the Big Wall Street banks to collapse the economy, and cost eight million Americans their jobs.
But we need to make certain that we are not only offering a choice of policies – we are offering a choice of leadership. On the one side, those who will fight for the interests of everyday Americans and on the other, leaders who stand up for the interests of Wall Street, insurance companies and Big Oil.
We need to describe a narrative that is about struggle – not policies and programs.
This is especially important when Democrats talk about Congress’ many accomplishments this term. In fact, this has been the most productive Congress in recent history. But if a candidate tries to talk about “accomplishments,” that will not resonate with the experience of everyday voters.
Instead we should talk about “battles won.” Democrats won the battle with Wall Street and the Republicans to rein in the power of the big Wall Street banks. We won the battle to begin holding insurance companies accountable and prevent them from discriminating against people with “pre-existing conditions.” We won the battle to rescue the economy from the death spiral created by Bush administration policies and the recklessness of the big Wall Street banks.
The language of struggle, and “battles won” has enormous advantages:
•It allows us to talk about what Congress has done in terms that everyday voters can understand. It takes their pain and unhappiness and explains why it happened.
•It places the blame where it belongs and creates a narrative with a clear antagonist and protagonist.
•It allows us to be on the offense – not the defense.
•It positions our candidates as outsider champions for everyday voters and their values – not insider apologists for what Congress has “accomplished.”
•It creates the basis for a powerful mobilization narrative that engages the emotions of anger and inspiration.
2). The antagonist in our narrative should be defined as the corporate special interests – Wall Street, insurance companies, Big Oil – and their Republican enablers.
We are much better off doing battle with these massively unpopular special interests than we are engaging in purely partisan warfare.
It is also much easier to convince voters that the big Wall Street banks, insurance companies and Big Oil are responsible for the economic disaster (which they are) rather than simply Republican policies (which are equally responsible). By tying special interests to Republicans we go to their motivation – to whose side the Republicans are on – not simply the effectiveness of their policies. And, of course, it is true that Republicans and the big corporations are, practically speaking, synonymous.
3). Remind the voters that when the Republicans were in charge, they wrecked the economy and created zero private sector jobs.
George Bush and the Republicans cut taxes for the rich and allowed the big Wall Street Banks free rein to engage in the reckless behavior that collapsed the economy and cost eight million Americans their jobs. They said that their policies would “grow” the economy. Yet, every dime of growth went into the pockets of the wealthiest 2% of Americans and, worse yet, Bush produced zero new private sector jobs.
The New York Times reported last year that, “For the first time since the Depression, the American economy has added virtually no jobs in the private sector over a 10-year period. The total number of jobs has grown a bit, but that is only because of government hiring.”
Now compare that to the Clinton administration where the rich paid Clinton-era tax rates. Of the total of 22.5 million new jobs, 20.7 million, or 92 percent, were in the private sector.
Do we really want to give the keys back to the people who completely failed to create jobs and wrecked the economy just two years ago?
4). It’s all about turnout.
We obviously need to do everything we can to move persuadables – but at the end of the day, just as in 1994, this election will be decided by who turns out to vote. That means two things:
•Our campaigns and party committees must make a major priority out of the mechanics of GOTV. No message works better to increase turnout than: “I won’t get off your porch until you vote.”
•The language of struggle must be used to engage base Democrats who have been discouraged or demoralized. Basically, we have to describe the midterm elections as the Empire Strikes Back: “The Wall Street Banks, insurance companies, Big Oil and other wealthy special interests see this election as their best opportunity to reverse the results of the election in 2008. They want to turn back the clock to the failed economic policies of the past so they can undo Democratic victories that will hold them accountable. They want to have free rein once again to siphon off every ounce of economic growth for themselves at the expense if middle-class families. They’re counting on us to sleep through the election. We have to stop them.”


Disarming the Attack on the Individual Mandate

In the wake of the Missouri referendum drubbing the individual mandate, TNR‘s Jonathan Chait makes a couple of insightful points and provides an interesting suggestion in his post “What the Individual Mandate Vote Means.” First, on the Missouri vote:

…First of all, Missouri is not a “bellwether” state right now. It (narrowly) supported John McCain in 2008 when the country as a whole backed Barack Obama by 7 percentage points. Second, Tuesday’s election was a low-turnout primary with a massively disproportionate Republican electorate, accounting for two-thirds of all voters.

Chait says the assault on the individual mandate of the health care reform act is the thread which conservatives hope can be tugged to “unravel the whole structure of health care reform” and he designates it “the Leninist plan to collapse the system.” But Chait also explains that conservatives and insurers don’t really want to pull the plug on the individual mandate, which is the financial foundation of the act, and leave everything else in place, in which case the reform law would likely morph into a single payer system.
Chait also suggests that reform supporters consider an interesting proposal in a New York Times op-ed by Paul Starr, author of The Social Transformation of American Medicine. As Starr Explains, quoted by Chait:

…Let individuals opt out of the new insurance system, without a penalty, by signing a form on their tax return acknowledging that they would then be ineligible for federal health insurance subsidies for a fixed period — say, five years.
During that time, if they had second thoughts and decided to buy health insurance, they would have no guarantee that they could find a policy or that it would cover pre-existing conditions. In other words, they would face a market much like the one that exists now. And while that’s hardly a desirable position to be in, they would have made the decision themselves, and the option to step outside the system would relieve Republican concerns about government mandates.

As Chait concludes, “Democrats should work on implementing Starr’s idea. It’s better than having endless political fights over the single least popular aspect of the Affordable Care Act.” Looking at an even bigger picture, it’s a great example of the type of thoughtful modification of a progressive reform that does no damage, but minimizes public resistance. Dems need more of this kind of thinking.


Perry v. Schwarzenegger: The Broader Ripples

Though most progressives are rightly very pleased with federal district court Judge Vaughan Walker’s ruling in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, a challenge to California’s Proposition 8 ban on same-sex marriages, it’s going to be a while before we know the ultimate implications.
Yes, Walker’s ruling was sweeping, and in its Emperor-Has-No-Clothes explosion of the case for marriage inequality, it had the ring of a landmark decision that law students will examine for many years.
But it’s important to remember not only that this is a lower-court ruling subject to appeal, but also that it involved fact-finding in a situation where the defendants (supporters of Prop 8) offered an insufficient and incompetent case for their point of view. Indeed, that’s why Walker felt compelled to say the case for Prop 8, as presented in his courtroom, didn’t meet the lower “rationale basis” standard for discriminatory actions, much less the “strict scrutiny” standard that would be employed if gays and lesbians were recognized as a class of citizens requiring constitutional protection.
So unless opponents of marriage equality continue to do sloppy courtroom work, the battle is far from over, and most observers expect the case to wind up on the docket of the U.S. Supreme Court, with the outcome probably depending on the unpredictable position of swing-vote Justice Anthony Kennedy (see Nate Silver’s post at FiveThirtyEight for an optimistic assessment of where Kennedy might land).
But judicial proceedings aside, the vast attention accorded this decision will have a more immediate effect in the political arena, with ripples emanating wide and far and into very different contexts. At Politico today, the early banner article, by Josh Gerstein, was a rumination on how the decision might force the president out of his no-to-gay-marriage, no-to-Prop-8 posture. And beyond the White House, the renewed elevation of this issue will create cross-pressures for Democrats in culturally conservative parts of the country.
All that is fairly obvious, but we should also consider the pressure the decision will create for Republicans who have sought to make economic and fiscal issues, not divisive cultural issues, the focus of their 2010 and 2012 campaigns.
The very day after Judge Walker’s decision, Georgia GOP gubernatorial candidate Nathan Deal, locked in a nasty cage-match runoff fight with Karen Handel, launched a new ad blasting his rival for alleged friendliness to gays and lesbians. Those unaccustomed to the current tone of Republican politics in the South may be shocked at the unabashed homophobia in the ad, which brings back memories of the late Jesse Helms. In fact, it’s a theme Deal has been hitting for some time, and I’m sure the ad was in the can before word came out of San Francisco about the judge’s ruling. But if he indeed makes this his signature attack line in the final push towards next Tuesday’s runoff, it’s probably because Perry v. Schwarzenegger has again made the specter of “activist judges” supporting the “homosexual agenda” a lively concern among conservative Republicans.
Whatever happens in Georgia–where Sarah Palin is riding into town the day before the runoff to campaign with Handel–a renewed focus on fighting marriage equality will have a long-term effect on the nature and appeal of the GOP. It’s interesting in that connection that Deal’s most prominent backer, Newt Gingrich, has recently become one of the most avid supporters of culture-war politics, athough his focus has been on the alleged un-American nature of Democrats–and more recently on Muslims–not gays and lesbians. Still, many voters who are in no particular sense progressives may not be fond of a double-down return to the Days of Rage when many Republicans spent most of their time attacking the Enemies Within, even in their own party.


Argument for 60-Vote Cloture Threshhold Busted

Chris Bowers’s Open Left post, “Memo to Chris Dodd: We already have a unicameral legislature” provides one of the more succinct, lucid and compelling arguments for cloture reform yet presented. Bowers does a surgical shredding Senator Dodd’s case for keeping the 60 vote threshold for cloture. First up, Bowers shatters Dodd’s argument that the 60 vote requirement is needed to affirm the Senate’s unique role and the principle of our bicameral national legislature:

…You don’t need different vote thresholds to have a bicameral system. Consider:
1. 36 states have bicameral legislatures where no filibuster is allowed. Would Senator Dodd claim those 36 states do not actually have a bicameral system?
2. The 60-vote threshold is not in the Constitution. It just isn’t. That was never a requirement for a bicameral legislature.
3. If anything, the 60-vote threshold has created a unicameral system where the Senate has rendered the House irrelevant. Getting rid of the 60-vote threshold would give the two legislative bodies more equitable power.

I would add that the 60 vote cloture threshold is the foundation of gridlocked government, which is the primary goal of the G.O.P. I say this as an admirer of Senator Dodd, who has been one of the more reliable Democratic leaders on many key issues, but who, along with a handful of other Democratic senators, is simply wrong on cloture reform.
Behind the unicameral legislature nonsense, Dodd’s case is essentially fear-driven, the old ‘we’re gonna miss the 60 vote requirement when we are in the minority’ argument. And yes, that could happen on occasion. But majority rule — the foundation of genuine democracy — is really the more important principle at stake here, and if we can’t have that, a 55 vote threshold is a step toward it. The way it is now, urgently needed reforms that could help millions of people are being held hostage by the 60-vote threshold, and that is unacceptable for a any government that purports to reflect the will of the people.
Bowers notes some related reforms that merit more serious consideration, and which might be achievable in a shorter time horizon that that which would be required for reducing the 60 vote threshold:

…if we do a better job focusing on the wider range of proposed rule changes–such as making unanimous consent non-debatable, requiring the filibuster to be a real talkathon where Senators have to stay on the floor (as Senator Lautenberg has proposed), or switching the burden of the cloture threshold on the opposition (for example, 45 votes to continue a filibuster, rather than 60 to break it, as Senator Bennet has proposed)-then the interest and momentum for reform could increase as people debate a wider range of possible reforms.

Bowers concedes that achieving any reform is an uphill struggle in the current political climate. But he adds, “Senate rules are not going to stay the same forever. The rules have changed in the past, and will change again in the future” — a key point for progressive Democrats to keep in mind in working for cloture reform. Although the obstacles are formidable at this political moment, we have to begin somewhere.


Move Over, South Carolina!

As viewers of the Daily Show’s occasional “Thank you, South Carolina!” features know, the Palmetto State has continued to burnish its reputation for exceptionally wacky politics this year.
But after writing up a preview of today’s Tennessee primary for FiveThirtyEight yesterday, I’d have to say the Volunteer State is making its own bid for dubious fame:

[Tennessee features] the nation’s most expensive House primary (GOP TN-8), a primary where the Club for Growth accidentally directed readers of a mailer to a phone sex line (GOP TN-3), a primary where a white Jewish incumbent has earned the backing of the Congressional Black Caucus in a campaign against the African-American former mayor of Memphis (Dem TN-9), and a primary where Sarah Palin delved into a crowded GOP field in a staunch Democratic district to endorse her latest “Mama Grizzly” (GOP TN-5). And all that fun doesn’t even include America’s latest viral video sensation, Republican gubernatorial candidate Basil Marceaux.

And that’s just scratching the surface, since Tennessee’s primary field also includes one major Republican gubernatorial candidate (a resident, BTW, of the famous C Street complex run by the secretive theocratic group The Family) who’s been threatening secession, and another who wondered out loud if Islam was not an actual religion but a “cult.” There’s one House candidate under attack because the radio station he owns plays hip-hop music, and another who is battling to protect the citizens of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, from the awful specter of Sharia law.
The sheer nastiness of the Tennessee primaries led one congressional candidate to put out a press release observing: “We’re not picking someone to represent us at the next World Wrestling Federation SummerSlam.”
That’s debatable, I guess. But aficionados of the absurd (and for that matter, Democrats, since most of the fireworks are in GOP primaries) can only regret that Tennessee is the rare southern state without a majority-vote requirement, which means we won’t have the spectacle of runoffs to continue the craziness for another few weeks.


Tea Bags, Windbags, and Moneybags

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
So let’s say you’re a Republican politician who’s been working the far right side of the political highway for years, getting little national attention other than the occasional shout-out in Human Events. Or let’s say you’re a sketchy business buccaneer with a few million smackers burning a hole in your pocket, and you’ve decided that you’d like to live in the governor’s mansion for a while, but you can’t get the local GOP to see you as anything more than a walking checkbook who funds other people’s dreams.
What do you do? That’s easy: Get yourself in front of the loudest parade in town by becoming a Tea Party Activist!
There has been incessant discussion over the last year about the size, character, and intentions of the Tea Party rank-and-file. But, by and large, the political discussion has passed over another defining phenomenon: The beatific capacity of Tea Party membership, which enables virtually anyone with ambition to whitewash his hackishness–and transform from a has-been or huckster into an idealist on a crusade.
After all, to become a “Tea Party favorite” or a “Tea Party loyalist,” all a politician has to do is say that he or she is one–and maybe grab an endorsement from one of many hundreds of local groups around the country. It’s even possible to become indentified as the “Tea Party” candidate simply by entering a primary against a Republican who voted for TARP, the Medicare Prescription Drug bill, or No Child Left Behind. It’s not like there’s much upside to distancing oneself from the movement. Most Republican pols are as friendly as can be to the Tea Party; and it’s a rare, self-destructive elephant who would emulate Lindsey Graham’s dismissal of it all as a passing fad (in public at least).
Here, we’ll take a look at two specific types of politicians who have been especially eager to embrace the Tea Party movement: the fringier of conservative ideologues, for one, and also the self-funded ego freaks who can easily pose as “outsiders,” because no “insiders” would take them seriously. Let’s call these, respectively, the windbags and the moneybags.
By “fringier” conservative ideologues, I mean those who have argued, year in and year out, sometimes for decades, that even the conservative Republican Party simply is not conservative enough. Many of these politicians would be considered washed-up and isolated, or at least eccentric, in an era when “Party Wrecking” was still treated as a cardinal GOP sin. But now it’s as if they’ve been granted a license to kill. One classic example of this type is South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, who was considered such a crank in the Senate that he was often stuck eating lunch alone as recently as 2008. His views, for example that Social Security and public schools are symbols of the seduction of Americans by socialism, were not long ago considered far outside the GOP mainstream. Now, in no small part because of his identification with the Tea Party Movement, DeMint has become an avenging angel roaming across the country to smite RINOs in Republican primaries, his imprimatur sought by candidates far from the Palmetto State.
Then there’s the new House Tea Party Caucus, chaired by Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, best known for suggesting that House Democrats be investigated for treason. Its members include a rich assortment of long-time conservative cranks, including Steve (“Racial profiling is an important part of law enforcement”) King, Joe (“You lie!”) Wilson, Paul (“We’ve elected a Marxist to be President of the United States”) Broun, Dan (Vince Foster Was Murdered!) Burton, and Phil (National Journal’s Most Conservative House Member in 2007) Gingrey. The key here is that these are not freshly minted “outsiders”: Burton has been in Congress for 28 years, Wilson for ten, King and Gingrey for eight. The oldest member of the House, Ralph Hall of Texas, who has been around for 30 years, is also a member of the caucus.
Even some of the younger Tea Party firebrands didn’t exactly emerge from their living rooms on April 15, 2009, to battle the stimulus legislation and Obamacare. Marco Rubio of Florida, after all, was first elected to the state legislature ten years ago and served as House Speaker under the protective wing of his political godfather, Jeb Bush. Sharron Angle first ran for office 20 years ago, and was elected to the Nevada legislature twelve years back. And of course the Pauls, father and son, are hardly political neophytes–they have just begun to look relevant again because the Tea Party movement has shifted the GOP in their direction
And, in addition to the hard-right pols who’ve emerged into the sunshine of GOP respectability, the “outsider” meme surrounding the Tea Party movement has also created running room for well-funded opportunists–the “moneybags.”


Midwestern Primary Gleanings

Yesterday’s primaries in Kansas, Michigan and Missouri didn’t get a whole lot of national attention, but they produced some interesting results.
As I mentioned yesterday, MI gubernatorial candidate Rick Snyder ran a campaign very much at odds with the CW that the only way to win a GOP primary is to loudly and repeatedly proclaim one’s fidelity to conservative principles and policy positions. The self-proclaimed “nerd” won handily, with 36% of the vote as compared to 27% for congressman Pete Hoekstra and a very disappointing 23% for Attorney General Mike Cox.
Since Snyder explicitly appealed for crossover votes, political detectives (myself included) will try to figure out if that was a big factor in his victory. It was rather interesting that turnout tilted 2-1 Republican in a state that hasn’t gone Republican in a presidential contest since 1988. Certainly the idea that Democrats got involved in a Republican primary will be a source of consolation to conservatives who are none too happy with the results.
Meanwhile, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate known for “centrism,” House Speaker Andy Dillon, didn’t do so well, losing to labor-backed Lansing mayor Virg Bernero by a 59-41 margin. Bernero edged Dillon in his Detroit-area base and then waxed him in heavily unionized areas elsewhere.
The other big Democratic news from Michigan was the defeat of Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick by state senator Hansen Clarke, a development generally attributed to the disastrous decline and fall of her son, former Detroit mayor and current prison inmate Kwame Kilpatrick.
Elsewhere Republicans made the most news and the CW pretty much held. In KS, in a contest dominated by conflicting claims of superior conservatism, Rep. Jerry Moran defeated Rep. Todd Tiahrt by a 50-45 margin, mainly by running up a bigger vote in his own House district. In terms of national endorsements, it was a win for Jim DeMint and a loss for Sarah Palin and Tom Tancredo.
In House races, the big winner on the night was probably the Club for Growth, which backed winning candidates in three crowded GOP primaries (MI-3, KS-1 and KS-4). In MI-1, Bart Stupak’s district, where a competitive race is expected in November, add another data point to the Every Vote Counts argument, as exactly one vote separated the two leading Republican candidates (a recount is pending).
And offsetting their bad news from the Michigan governor’s race, conservatives today are crowing about the results of a referendum in Missouri over a proposed state law aimed at blocking implementation of federal health reform legislation. Proposition C, which essentially challenges the U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy Clause by outlawing mandated health insurance, won by a 71-29 margin, which is very impressive until you realize that primary turnout in Missouri was 2-1 Republican. In any event, the referendum will have no practical effect, but that won’t keep conservatives from bragging about it.


TDS Co-Editor William Galston: How To Lower Unemployment

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
I don’t agree with Paul Krugman about everything. But I do agree with him about this: It’s economically stupid and morally wrong to tolerate high unemployment for an extended period if there’s anything we could responsibly do to avoid it.
Current prospects are gloomy. Long-term unemployment is at a post-Depression high, and recovery will be painfully slow. It took a little more than two years to regain the jobs lost during the 1981-82 recession, about two and a half years after the 1990-1991 recession, and more than three and a half years after the 2001 recession. The job loss is much worse this time: six percent from the 2007 peak, versus three percent in 1981-82 and two percent in both 1990-91 and 2001. Even if job creation were to double its current pace, it would take until 2014 to regain the job total of late 2007, and longer still to attain what passes for full employment. In the interim, the economic waste and human misery will be staggering.
So what is to be done?
Setting aside the obvious political obstacles, further Keynesian stimulus would probably prove unequal to the task. Among other problems, a substantial portion of increased demand will leak out of the U.S. economy through higher imports, as it has already begun to do, and households would use some of the rest to pay down debt and increase savings.
Nor would returning to the New Deal–ie. direct job creation and hiring by the federal government–work as well as it did 75 years ago. The cost per job would be much higher, and the vastly more complex structure of regulations at every level of the federal system would bind a 21st century Harry Hopkins with myriad Lilliputian threads.
Fortunately, there is an alternative staring us in the face. Over the past generation, we have systematically underinvested in the foundation of an efficient economy and society–namely, infrastructure. Anyone who has travelled in recent years knows that our systems of transportation and information are no longer world-class. In the Washington DC area alone, the once magnificent Metro is staggering under the weight of deferred maintenance and outdated safety systems. Inadequate roads and highways yield some of the worse commutes in the nation, with negative consequences for worker productivity and economic efficiency as well as family life.
The traditional response is to use the federal government’s taxing authority to raise infrastructure funds, and appropriations to fund specific projects. This model has hit a wall: not only will it be very difficult to raise taxes in current or foreseeable circumstances, but there’s also the problem of how local and special interests influence, even determine, project selection for reasons that have nothing to do with economic efficiency.
We need a new model. Today, we have trillions of dollars of capital sitting on the sidelines earning almost no return, and millions of long-term unemployed workers who would be thrilled to receive a steady paycheck again. The task is to bring these two factors of production together around projects that make sense.
Setting aside details, the new model has three key structural features.
1.To attract private capital, projects must earn a reasonable return, which means increased reliance on user fees (tolls or levies per unit consumed) rather than general taxation.
2.Because most infrastructure projects generate public goods (such as economic growth in the areas it opens up) as well as private goods (such as easier commutes), user fees cannot capture their total worth. The market, then, will undersupply these goods unless public subsidies fill the gap. The new model requires a shift from traditional appropriations to subsidies based on the economics of individual projects.
3.To promote economic efficiency and growth, projects must be chosen on economic rather than political grounds. The new model requires a shift away from congressional dominance of the selection process toward an empowered board substantially insulated from day-to-day political pressures.
An infrastructure bank–versions of which have already been introduced in Congress–is one way of meeting these three criteria. No doubt there are other institutional designs that would as well.
The bottom line is this: Projects selected and funded in the manner I’ve sketched would help build the economy for the long-term at minimum cost to taxpayers while creating large numbers of new jobs that can only be performed here in the United States. Win-win-win, one would think. Isn’t this new model something that elected officials should be able to agree on, regardless of party and ideology? If they can’t, it will be yet more evidence of ideology trumping common sense … and of a handful of veteran appropriators more interested in preserving their own power than in promoting the public good.


Notes On Today’s Midwestern Primaries

Today voters (20-25% of them, anyway) will trudge to the polls in Kansas, Michigan and Missouri to choose candidates for the November ballot. I’ve done a comprehensive preview over at FiveThirtyEight, and another at Progressive Fix will go up later today, but have a few additional thoughts here.
First of all, in terms of Republican primaries, it’s interesting that the main ideological contention in most races isn’t supposed affiliation with the Tea Party movement, but more traditional conservative preoccupations like abortion. This seems to be a midwestern thing to some extent (though the fine gradations of anti-abortion politics are also a big deal in the Republican gubernatorial runoff in Georgia), but it shows that the “uprising” associated with the Tea Party movement has meshed with the traditional agenda of the conservative movement, regardless of what we read about the laser-like focus of the Tea Folk on fiscal issues.
In at least one case, the Kansas Republican Senate primary, both candidates (Todd Tiahrt and Jerry Moran) have pretty much checked each other on association with the Tea Party movement, both having become charter members of Michele Bachmann’s House Tea Party Caucus, and both enjoying endorsements from Tea Folk heroes (Tiahrt’s been endorsed by Sarah Palin and Tom Tancredo, while Moran’s gotten the nod from Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn). So as a fascinating post from National Review’s Kathryn Lopez indicates, those looking for the “true conservative” in the race are getting really down in the weeds of discerning relative levels of commitment to the anti-abortion cause.
Second of all, today’s GOP primaries have an assortment of congressional contests with extremely crowded fields, in states that do not have a 50% requirement. So it’s possible we are going to see some really eccentric nominees who win with relatively small percentages of the vote.
And third of all, as noted in a separate FiveThirtyEight post, we are witnessing a very rare phenomenon in the Michigan governor’s race: a Republican candidate, Rick Snyder, who doesn’t seem to be competing for the True Conservative mantle, and in fact, has pursued endorsements from the state’s two most infamous RINOs, former Gov. Bill Milliken (who in turn endorsed John Kerry and Barack Obama for president), and former congressman Joe Schwarz, who’s set up an operation for Snyder aimed at attracting Democratic and independent crossover votes.
If Snyder wins–and he actually ran first in a recent EPIC-MRA poll of likely Republican primary voters–we could either see emulators of this strategy emerge elsewhere, or, more likely, some seriously angry talk among conservatives about how to make sure it doesn’t.
In any event, the results today will be interesting, and not just to the citizens of the three states directly involved.