This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
The Congressional Budget Office’s semi-annual update on the budget and economic outlook, out on Wednesday, offers sobering news about the next few years. The report’s economic analysis begins by observing that “[t]he slow pace of the current recovery is broadly consistent with international experience of recoveries following financial crises.” The authors cite key impediments to renewed growth–the burden of household debt, the need for financial institutions to restore their capital bases, lack of business confidence, and the glut of vacant homes left over from the construction bubble. Then comes the punch line: Unemployment will barely decline between now and the end of 2011, and is likely to stand at 8.5 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012. Even with more vigorous growth beginning in 2013, we won’t return to full employment (about 5 percent) until the end of 2016. At various points, the authors stress that these unemployment projections are based on the economic outlook as it stood in early July and do not take into account negative events since then. If anything, labor market conditions could turn out to be even tougher than yesterday’s report suggests.
Against this gloomy backdrop, it’s good to hear that President Obama plans to give a major speech on economic growth and job creation soon after Labor Day. While we can’t rule out the possibility that the congressional super-committee may roll some of his proposals into an overall deficit reduction package, it seems more likely that the president will be setting the stage for a general election argument about the best way forward for the beleaguered U.S. economy. It’s all the more important, then, for him to embed his proposals in a credible narrative about the sources of our current predicament and the overall strategy for escaping it. (For purposes of concision, I’ve framed most of what follows in first-person prose, as though the president were speaking directly.)
On the diagnostic front, Obama should stress the following themes:
1. In recent decades we’ve become addicted to consumption at the expense of production. But we can’t indefinitely consume more than we produce. The vast American consumer market has sustained growth in foreign countries, but now it’s time to focus on the investments and innovations needed to make those countries into markets for what we make.
2. In addition, we became infatuated with financial manipulation at the expense of the real economy. Not only did a rising share of profits go to the financial sector, but also many of our most talented young people were diverted from other careers in the productive sectors of the economy. We focused too much on financial innovations, some of which severely damaged our economy, and not enough on innovations in products and services.
3. Homeownership is central to the American dream. But we should see our homes as what they are–places to live and raise our families, not as ever-rising assets that we can use to finance consumption and replace savings. During the past decade, too much capital and debt flooded into the housing market, and prices rose to unsustainable heights. The inevitable crash was devastating.
4. Because growth in wages and household income slowed dramatically, many families resorted to excessive debt to maintain their standard of living. Between 1980 and 2007, the debt burden on average households in relation to their income more than doubled. This line of credit couldn’t go on forever, and when it stopped, millions of families were left exposed.
5. Let’s face it: For decades, income and wealth in the United States have become more unequal. For some people, this is a moral issue; for others, even mentioning it smacks of “class warfare.” But the key point is that it has become a drag on our economy. As far-sighted corporate leaders saw as early as the 1920s, if working families couldn’t afford to buy what businesses were selling, the engine of economic growth would grind to a halt. By the end of that decade, it did. The same is true today.
6. And yes, we lost control of the federal budget. We can argue forever about why that happened. But what matters is fixing the problem so that we can restore confidence at home and abroad.

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With Rick Perry’s sudden surge in the polls, all sorts of scenarios are unfolding in the Republican presidential nominating contest.
Perry looks almost certain to take on Michele Bachmann in a serious way in Iowa. That contingency creates a major new temptation for Mitt Romney to jump into a serious campaign for the First-in-the-Nation Caucuses. If he does, he could theoretically watch Perry and Bachmann split the hard-core right-wing vote, and slip through to a victory that could produce an early knockout blow to the field, a la Kerry 2004. And if he doesn’t, he runs the risk of a Perry win that could position the Texan to pull off an upset in New Hampshire and then deliver his own knockout blow in South Carolina.
But all these scenarios could get weird if the caucus-primary calendar gets weird. And that’s entirely possible.
At the moment, Florida’s poised to hold its primary on January 31, 2012, which would almost automatically push the current early states back into early-to-mid January 2012. But as the reigning expert on these matters, Josh Putnam of Frontloading HQ, notes, Florida is legally authorized to schedule its primary as early as January 3–the first Thursday of January–which because of the holidays could push the Iowa Caucuses all the way back to December 5, 2011. We probably won’t know for sure until October 1, which is Florida’s state law deadline for setting a primary date.
This creates a pretty scary strategic scenario for Perry, and even more so for Romney. Preparing for the contingency of a December 5 Caucus–just three-and-a-half months from now–would force Perry to get a move on to catch up with Michelle Bachmann’s and Ron Paul’s organizational head starts in Iowa, and would also force Romney to fish or cut bait on a serious Iowa campaign. The closer we get to October 1 without a resolution on the caucus-and-primary calendar, the more candidates have to assume it’s all going down crazy early. So the worlds of time, space and strategy are rapidly colliding.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Fifteen years ago this week, President Bill Clinton gave his controversial signature to landmark welfare reform legislation. The anniversary has not gotten a lot of attention, even though the program created to replace “welfare as we know it” in 1996 is up for reauthorization by September 30. A few conservatives have rehearsed their revisionist histories of the 1996 law, according to which Clinton was forced to sign a bill he had vetoed twice (which ignores the rather profound differences in the three measures). A few liberals have either revived their original objections to the law, or have simply noted that an approach to public assistance that worked in the go-go economy of the late 1990s has not worked so well more recently, in part because the jobs that were the linchpin of the new system have all but evaporated, and in part because neither the federal government nor most of the states have kept the funding promises they made fifteen years ago.
But whatever you thought of the law in 1996, or of its performance since then, the biggest surprise has been the rapid erosion, especially during the last few years, of the hopes shared by liberals and conservatives alike that firmly connecting public assistance to a requirement to work would detoxify the social and racial poisons that had grown up around the old system. At first, that actually seemed to happen; the “welfare wedge politics” so common from the 1960s to the 1990s largely abated in the aftermath of the legislation. But now, even as the “working poor” (the bipartisan heroes of welfare reform) are bearing much of the brunt of the Great Recession, they have become the objects of a new and intense wave of conservative hostility that treats them as parasites just like the “welfare queens” of yore.
When Rick Perry paused, mid-tirade against taxes, in his presidential announcement speech to deplore the number of Americans who pay no federal income taxes (a theme also common in the rhetoric of his rival Michele Bachmann), he was implicitly attacking the Earned Income Tax Credit, which offsets (and, for some, exceeds) federal income tax (but not, of course, payroll or other tax) liability for people of limited income. It was a telling moment, as an expanded EITC, Ronald Reagan’s favorite social policy instrument, was central to the design of the 1996 welfare reform law for the simple reason that it helped “make work pay,” in the parlance of that time, providing a smooth transition from welfare to work. The very instrument once championed by conservatives as a way to put welfare recipients back to work was now officially under attack.
Neither the unimaginative Perry nor the shrill Bachmann pioneered this assault on work-based welfare reform, of course. It splashed onto the national scene in a campaign ad by John McCain in October of 2008, which attacked Barack Obama’s proposal for an increase in the EITC as “welfare for people who don’t pay taxes.” The ad marked a significant departure because McCain himself had once joined his 2000 rival George W. Bush in rebuking House Republican leader Tom DeLay for seeking to delay EITC payments as part of a budget proposal.
Today, however, in an environment where Perry is hedging his bets on whether Social Security is, indeed, the first big step on the road to serfdom, it’s perhaps not remarkable that he and other conservatives would suddenly decide that yesterday’s great Republican initiative to help the working poor is now not only fiscally unaffordable but morally objectionable. The transformation is widely observable across the conservative landscape, with Republican fiscal proposals in the states and in Washington going after a host of other key support systems for the working poor with a vengeance: state-level EITCs, job training programs, unemployment benefits, food stamps, Medicaid, you name it. It’s also no coincidence that, in the agitation against the Affordable Care Act, many conservatives deliberately stoked resentment towards alleged redistribution of federal largesse from virtuous Medicare beneficiaries to the uninsured, who are, by definition, working individuals and families who don’t qualify for Medicaid for one reason or another.
Underlying this assault, there seems to be a current of genuine anger at the working families who no longer receive “welfare as we knew it,” but remain beneficiaries of some form of redistribution, even if it’s only progressive tax rates. You can debate back and forth endlessly about whether there is a racial element in this hostility, as there definitely was in the old “welfare wedge” politics. The iron-clad conviction of many conservatives that race-conscious federal housing policies caused the housing and financial meltdowns is not an encouraging sign, in any case. But it is clear that the social peace so many anticipated in 1996–after it had been established that no one receiving public assistance could be accused of refusing to work–has now been broken. Work is no longer enough, it seems, to avoid the moral taint of being a “welfare bum.” And the cruelest irony of all is that, for so many, the work’s not available anyway.

This item is cross-posted from Democracy Corps and Women’s Voices. Women Vote Action Fund.
As the end of Congress’s summer recess nears and Washington prepares to reengage on the debate over the economy, new research makes clear how essential it is for progressives to engage the voters who put them in power in 2006 and 2008 using an economic narrative that connects with their current lives and motivates them.
The Rising American Electorate–unmarried women, people of color, and younger voters–comprises a rapidly growing majority of the eligible voting population in this country. These voters formed a strong base for progressive victories and drove change in 2006 and 2008; however, among some, their support for Democrats dropped in 2010. Regaining that support and motivating these voters to turn out is crucial for President Obama’s reelection and congressional victories in 2012 among those who support an agenda for economic recovery for the middle class.
This is a real challenge. Dissatisfaction with Washington’s inability to make any progress on economic issues, coupled with the fact that these voters are disproportionately feeling the brunt of the economic downturn, creates uncertainty about those currently in office and leaves RAE voters with little motivation to engage in political issues. Key groups including unmarried women and young voters continue to indicate strong support for Obama and the Democrats heading into next year, but a stronger economic rationale is needed to ensure they turn out and support traditional allies who support their public policy agenda.
A more detailed analysis of these results can be found at Democracy Corps and Women’s Voices. Women Vote Action Fund.

With all due deference to the valuable truism that polls far in advance of elections must be taken with a shaker of salt, Gallup’s new presidential general election trial heat is fascinating in terms of what it says about the current lay of the land.
From one perspective, it’s a bit surprising that Barack Obama, who just hit an all-time low (38%) in Gallup’s own daily tracking poll of presidential job approval, is still running essentially even with the Republican candidate usually considered most “electable,” Mitt Romney (Obama actually trails Romney 48-46 among RVs, but that’s a functional tie).
From another perspective, it’s even more surprising that Romney’s not really doing much better than his GOP rivals. Rick Perry’s even with Obama at 47-47. Okay, the Texan is the shiny new penny of the presidential field, and most voters haven’t had the opportunity to read Fed Up and discover what Perry really thinks–or at least authorized his ghostwriter to say he thinks nine months ago–about Social Security, federal aid to schools, and a variety of other topics. In a separate Gallup survey of self-identified Republicans and Republican-leaning indies, Perry is now trouncing Romney and generally walking tall.
But it’s less predictable that Ron Paul–Ron Paul!–is running just two points behind Obama (47-45), with Michele Bachmann–Michele Bachmann!–just four points behind the incumbent (48-44).
There are a couple of major takeaways from this survey beyond the fact that most Americans don’t know a whole lot about the specific views of very zany people like Paul and Bachmann, and dodgy demagogues like Perry. For Team Obama, it’s another indicator, if one is needed, that a campaign focusing heavily on comparisons with the policy course offered by the eventual Republican nominee is essential. (Presidential policies that reinforce this contrast or even, if possible, improve the economic conditions making his re-election so difficult in the first place, would obviously be even better, but that’s a subject for another day).
For Republicans, and particularly for the conservative activists who dominate the early states, this sort of finding will create a powerful temptation to believe they can do any damn thing they please in the nominating process, because Election ’12 will invariably become a referendum on the incumbent that will lift their favorite, whoever it is, to the White House. In other words, if they persist, everybody’s-even poll findings could eliminate “electability” as a major factor in the GOP nominating contest.
For Democrats, that’s scary, if you do think a Republican is destined to win, or maybe promising, if you think persuadable voters will pay at least some attention to the actual views of the candidate facing Obama in November of 2012.

Hattiesburg mayor Johnny DuPree became the first African-American since Reconstruction to win a major-party gubernatorial nomination in Mississippi yesterday, defeating white attorney Bill Luckett by a comfortable 55-45 margin in a Democratic runoff. The contest was notably without rancor, racial or otherwise. DuPress overcame a 2-1 spending disadvantage, and showed significant statewide strength.
DuPree now faces Republican Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant, who won the GOP nomination three weeks ago without a runoff. Bryant will be a pretty heavy favorite, but you never quite know with off-year gubernatorial races. The last Democrat to win a Mississippi gubernatorial contest was Ronnie Musgrove in 1999.
DuPree is actually only the second African-American since Reconstruction to win a major-party gubernatorial nomination in any of the states of the former Confederacy. The first, and so far the only general election winner, was Doug Wilder of VA. African-Americans have won Democratic U.S. Senate nominations in NC (Harvey Gantt), GA (Denise Majette and Michael Thurmond), TN (Harold Ford) and TX (Ron Kirk).
UPDATE: this post was inaccurate in missing the gubernatorial nomination of Theo Mitchell in South Carolina in 1990, and more understandably, the Senate nomination of phantom candidate Alvin Greene in the same state in 2010.

If you are a regular reader of what used to be called Pollster.com (now operated by HuffingtonPost), you may have noticed a new survey device they’ve unveiled in a partnership with Patch that seeks to assess the opinions of Republican political elites in the three most influential early caucus and primary states (Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina). It’s an interesting variation on the “insiders” polls utilized in the past that typically focus on Beltway elites.
The latest edition of this so-called GOP Power Outsiders Poll reports that about two-thirds of these folk (whose names are actually listed at the end of the article) are satisfied with the GOP presidential field as is. Since it’s not clear whether the survey was taken before or after Paul Ryan took his name out of contention, the current level of satisfaction may actually be a bit higher.
This is interesting because it offers a useful alternative to the usual division of opinion between “Beltway elites” and, well, real people across the country. The reality is that in this relatively early stage of the so-called “invisible primary” elite opinion in early states really is important in a distinctive way. As we get closer to the actual voting events, broader-based surveys of likely participants in caucuses or primaries will begin to matter most.