Lisa Mascaro of the L.A. Times Washington, D.C. Bureau has a wake up call for women political activists and all voters who believe more women are needed in congress. Madcaro’s article, “Women in Washington, Your Seats Are at Risk,” lends veracity to the recent Democratic slogan, “You put it in ‘D’ to go forward and ‘R’ for reverse.” As Mascaro explains:

…With this fall’s midterm elections, the number of women serving in Congress could drop for the first time in a generation — a twist on a political season many had dubbed “the year of the woman.”
If large numbers of Democratic incumbents lose in November, as expected, many women could be replaced by men. Female candidates tend to do better in Democratic years, and 2010 is shaping up as a successful year for Republicans.
Women now hold 90 seats in Congress: 69 are Democrats and 21 are Republicans. After the November election, Congress could end up with as many as 10 fewer female members, prognosticators now say, the first backslide in the uninterrupted march of women to Washington since 1978.

An unfavorable reversal of a three decades trend is a sobering thought for advocates of women’s political empowerment. And it’s not as if Republicans have much interest in making up the slack on their side of the aisle, as Mascaro reports:

In fact, just four women are among the GOP’s 46 “Young Guns,” as the party calls its frontline challengers who are considered future leaders.

So much for the “Mama Grizzlies” hype. The Republican Party remains a bastion of male dominance and if they win big in November, the GOP will further diminish the political empowerment of women in Washington.
All of which should serve as a rallying cry for all activists who believe America would be well-served by more women office-holders to (a.) contribute to the DSCC, DCCC and Democratic candidates and (b.) redouble campaign activism on their behalf.

The political websites are all abuzz about the latest Gallup generic ballot poll, which indicates an all time midterm GOP advantage of 10 percent. If that wasn’t downer enough for you, here’s a couple of nut graphs Harry Enten’s Pollster.com post, “Underestimating the Likely Gallup Voter Edge:

…As noted, a 10% Republican lead on Gallup’s generic ballot is unprecedented, and it will likely get worse once Gallup switches over to a likely voter model. Congressmen and political analysts alike have mentioned that Republicans could possibly do 4% better on a likely voter model. Upon further examination, however, I think it could be worse for Democrats. Why? History.
Gallup has a relatively famous likely voter model that has been in place since 1950. Therefore, we can compare past differences in the generic ballot between registered and likely voter models to give us an idea of how different they will be this year…

Entern then crunches data from final Gallup midterm polls since 1994, comparing rv and lv figures, along with “enthusiasm gap” data, and offers two observations:

First, Republicans have for the past four midterms always done better on the final Gallup likely voter poll than registered voter poll by at least 4%. This deviation is to be expected as midterm electorates tend to be older and whiter than presidential year ones.
Second, the gap between the likely and registered models benefited Republicans greatest in years where they had large leads in enthusiasm. In both 1994 and 2002 (where Republicans held at least a 8%+ edge in Gallup’s final measure of enthusiasm), the Republicans margin was 7% and 11% higher respectively on the likely voter model. In 1998 and 2002 when Democrats had a lead in enthusiasm, they “only” picked up 5% and 4%. The Republicans edge on net enthusiasm was 28% a month ago, which means that voters this year are even more enthusiastic than in 1994 or 2002….

OK, that’s bad. Worse, Enten concludes:

…I believe that it is quite possible that at least on the final Gallup generic ballot (prior ones may differ) the Republican margin on the likely voter model could be 5-10% greater than on the registered voter model.

Polling data for numerous individual races lends cred to the national polls, including Gallup. True, Gallup has had some issues on occasion with accusations of GOP bias. But now that most of the polls have turned quite sour for Dems, it’s hard to deny that Republicans have opened up a big lead in numerous races, whether or not Gallup overstates the GOP lead by a few points.
While there is little encouragement for Dems in recent polling numbers, at least it does appear that Democrats are getting together a decent ground game for the midterms. That doesn’t mean the Republicans won’t match or top it. And not to lard too much lipstick on the pig, but I’m also encouraged that Dems are targeting seniors — the “older and whiter” voters Enten cites above. As Chris Cilliza explains in his ‘The Fix’ post, “Can Social Security save Democrats this fall?” at WaPo:

Democrats, faced with a worsening national political climate and daunting historical midterm election trends, are turning to Social Security as an issue where they believe they can score political points and set the stakes of what a Republican-controlled Congress would look like.
At least a half-dozen Democratic House candidates as well as several Democratic Senators in tight re-election races have featured claims that the GOP wants to either privatize or eliminate the retirement plan entirely in new television ads, and party strategists promise there are far more commercials to come.

Cillizza spotlights an impressive video ad by Indiana Democrat Rep. Baron Hill, who blasts his Republican opponent, Todd Young, who called Social Security and Medicare “welfare programs.” Cillizza cites several other Democratic House and Senate candidates who have launched similar ads, and he adds,

The strategy behind the Democratic attacks is simple. Older voters are deeply suspicious of any changes to the retirement program — it’s not an accident that Social Security is referred to as the “third rail of American politics” — and they also happen to be the most reliable voters in lower turnout midterm elections.
According to exit polling from the 2006 midterms, nearly three in ten (29 percent) of voters were 60 and older; Democrats won that age group 50 percent to 48 percent.

Cillizza cautions that Social Security is a relatively low priority concern in voter rankings, well behind the economy. But with seniors, it’s always a hot button issue. Not all Republicans have attacked Social Security quite so stupidly as has Todd Young, although Sharron Angle and others could give him a run for the booby prize.
Ironically, the Democratic outreach to seniors seeks to tap their conservative (as in ‘cautious’) perspective — the wingnut campaign to eliminate Social Security is a radical idea, and few seniors would volunteer to be their guinea pigs. if Dems can gain an edge with seniors and turn out a larger than usual percentage of Latino and African American voters, and if the voter registration edge Dems now have translates into a better than average mid-term turnout, the much-trumpeted Republican takeover of congress will have to wait for another year.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Ben Bernanke’s “unusually uncertain” may be for our times what Alan Greenspan’s “irrational exuberance” was to the late 1990s–a phrase that captures the dominant mood without providing much policy guidance.
As dissent continued to rise in the ranks of the usually united Federal Reserve Board, unusual uncertainty reigned supreme at the annual Jackson Hole meeting. While the Reinhart-Rogoff thesis that downturns induced by financial collapses differ significantly from traditional cyclical downturns was broadly accepted, there was no agreement on their generalization (based on a large number of historical cases) that public debt-to-GDP ratios above 90 percent necessarily slow economic growth. Indiana University economist Eric Leeper’s call to focus more on fiscal challenges induced by demographic shifts was challenged by CBO director Doug Elmendorf (not exactly a fiscal dove himself): “Fiscal policy is intrinsically about distributional choices. … There is no scientific basis for saying how large the government deficit should be–any more than what my level of savings should be.”
As a non-economist and puzzled citizen, I find Elmendorf’s statement astounding and disturbing. Is it really true that we can say nothing valid about the relationship between the size of deficits in specific circumstances and the level of economic activity? If so, what is the basis for supporting (or, for that matter, opposing) fiscal stimulus during downturns? To say that the issue is “distributional” means that fiscal policy affects how the pie is divided, not the size of the pie. If so, the conservative critique would seem to have some merit: A “stimulus package” simply takes away from some groups and gives to others–usually core members of the political majority. (This is not to say that the distributional consequences of fiscal policy–or any other policy–are matters about which we should be morally indifferent.)
What makes this episode so baffling is that, less than a month ago, the CBO published an Issue Brief (with Elmendorf’s signature affixed) entitled “Federal Debt and the Risk of a Fiscal Crisis.” The minimally alert reader will find the following on the first page:

Although deficits during or shortly after a recession generally hasten economic recovery, persistent deficits and continually mounting debt would have several negative economic consequences for the United States. … A growing portion of people’s savings would go to purchase government debt rather than toward investments in productive capital goods such as factories and computers; that “crowding out” of investment would lead to lower output and incomes than would otherwise occur.

A bit later on, but still on the first page, we read:

[A] growing level of federal debt would also increase the probability of a sudden fiscal crisis, during which investors would lose confidence in the government’s ability to manage its budget, and the government would thereby lose its ability to borrow at affordable rates.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but to me these two quotations (and there are many others to the same effect) don’t sound like “distributional” observations. They are, rather, predictions about the consequences of excessive debt accumulation for the performance of the economy as a whole. If so, what’s the basis for Elmendorf’s disagreement with Leeper?
I may be making too much out of quotations drawn from much more extensive discussions. Or my emphasis may be wrong. If Elmendorf’s point is that fiscal policy can’t be conducted with “scientific” precision, who would disagree? It involves complex judgments about quantities, timing, and the responses of key actions in specific situations that are bound to have some unique features. The challenge is to get the broad thrust of fiscal policy pushing in the right direction at the right time, which means assessing the shifting balance between risks and opportunities. That’s what I took the CBO’s July Issue Brief to be doing.
We may well be in a Bernankean moment of unusual uncertainty, but there’s no need to make it worse with superfluous uncertainty. Will the real Doug Elmendorf please stand up and clarify?

President Obama’s announcement last night that all U.S. combat troops have left Iraq, on schedule, didn’t get much positive commentary. Many Republicans complained he didn’t give credit to the man who once promised to “liberate” Iraq and turn it into a model of democracy, George W. Bush. Many Democrats complained that he didn’t reminisce about the original decision to fight the war, or to stay in Iraq for years after formal military operations had largely ended. All sorts of observers wanted him to talk about Afghanistan, and how and when that conflict might finally end.
One center-left pundit, Mike Miller, seized the occasion to apologize for his own support for the Iraq War.
Personally, the only mea culpa I’m interested in, and the only gesture by the president that has any real value, involves a very simple lesson: don’t make the same mistake again by launching a “war of choice” with no clear justification or any feasible strategy for real victory.. That would apply most particularly to the next war on the agenda of many Middle Eastern warkhawks, the war to prevent a nuclear Iran. We don’t need it, can’t afford it, and certainly haven’t shown we can deal with the shattered country and region we’d soon have to deal with if we actually succeeded,
If the president gets that one right, then I really don’t much care if he succeeds in becoming the definitive score-keeper for Iraq.

The primary defeat of incumbent Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski (confirmed by her concession yesterday) by former judge Joe Miller is generally being interpreted as another scalp for the Tea Party Movement in its assault on Republicans deemed too moderate on this or that key issue. But there’s something going on a bit deeper, if you consider Alaska’s exceptional dependence on the federal government and the past political track record of politicians like Murkowski’s mentor, the late Ted Stevens, who aligned themselves with the anti-government GOP but emphasized their ability to “bring home the bacon” via appropriations.
In endorsing Miller on behalf of his Senate Conservatives Fund, Jim DeMint emphasized this dimension of Murkowski’s defeat:

Joe Miller’s victory should be a wake-up call to politicians who go to Washington to bring home the bacon. Voters are saying ‘We’re not willing to bankrupt the country to benefit ourselves.’

Now it wouldn’t be quite right to accept DeMint’s characterization of either Alaska voters’ motivations or Miller’s ideology at face value. After all, when Miller calls for abolishing the federal Department of Energy, he’s appealing to the rather selfish desire of Alaskans to control their “own” energy resources–whose value is a lot higher than any federal earmark– regardless of what it means nationally.
But it’s true that there’s an element of collective self-denial among those conservatives who are genuinely willing to take on federal spending categories that are popular among their constituents. Miller is just the latest of a number of Republican Senate candidates this year who have called for phasing out Social Security and Medicare. DeMint himself has long described these programs, along with public education, as having seduced middle-class Americans into socialist ways of thinking.
As Republican pols from Barry Goldwater to George W. Bush can tell you, going after Social Security and Medicare is really bad politics. And they’ve yet to come up with a gimmick, whether it’s “partial privatization” or grandfathering existing beneficiaries, to make major changes in these programs popular (I seriously doubt the very latest gimmick, “voucherizing” Medicare, will do any better once people understand the idea). Indeed, Republicans notably engaged in their own form of “Medagoguery” by attacking health care reform as a threat to Medicare benefits.
Yet the sudden Tea Party-driven return to fiscal hawkery among Republicans, particularly if it’s not accompanied by any willingness to consider tax increases or significant defense spending cuts, will drive the GOP again and again to “entitlement reform.” In Senate candidates like Rand Paul and Sharron Angle and now Joe Miller, we are seeing the return of a paleoconservative perspective in the GOP that embraces the destruction of the New Deal/Great Society era’s most important accomplishments not just as a matter of fiscal necessity but as a moral imperative.
You can respect this point of view even if you abhor its practical implications. But there’s little doubt it represents political folly of potentially massive dimensions. Certainly Democrats owe it to these brave conservatives to take them seriously in their desire to free middle-class seniors from the slavery of Social Security and Medicare, and draw as much attention to it as possible.