The latest unemployment stats bring a timely reminder about the importance of jobs as a central concern of Americans. In his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ at the Center for American Progress website, TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira, explains just how important jobs are as a public priority in light of the most recent opinion survey data:

There is no question that the public has become more sensitive to the deficit in the last year… The public’s deficit sensitivity does not translate into a view that deficit reduction is a more important priority than jobs and the economy. In a mid-December CNN poll, the public was asked what should be more important for the Obama administration—reducing the deficit even if that slowed down economic recovery or stimulating economic recovery even if that meant less deficit reduction. By 57-40, the public chose stimulating economic recovery.
When the choice was creating more jobs even if there was less deficit reduction or reducing the deficit even if unemployment remained high, the result was even more lopsided. By 3:1 (74-25), the public favored creating more jobs.

Teixeira concludes that “while policymakers should be sensitive to public concern about the deficit, they should not forget that jobs are still the top priority.”

One of the simmering intraprogressive arguments that’s been going on during the last decade involves the responsibiity, if any, borne by the Clinton administration for the economic conditions of the Bush Era.
The standard Democratic take has been that during the Clinton years the country was putting into place the building blocks for long-term growth, fiscal solvency, and real across-the-board income gains. The Bush administration systematically demolished these building blocks and returned to the ecomomic policies of the 1980s, and produced 1980s-style booms and busts, financial panics, big federal budget deficits, and growing inequality.
But alongside this narrative has been a persistent “minority report” arguing that Clintonomics differed in degree rather than in kind with Republican economic policies, and that the tech stock bust at the end of the 90s exposed the pro-corporate illusions of Clinton’s New Democrats and paved the way for the dangerously laissez-faire policies of the Bush administration. This take was especially popular among netroots activists convinced that both parties, or at least their “D.C. Establishments,” had largely been captured by corporate influences.
The revisionist argument has now gained new momentum among some progressives who are unhappy with the Obama administration’s economic policies, which they blame in no small part on the influence of Clinton administration economic advisors back in power in Washington.
This week the inveterate controversialist Michael Lind has published at Salon the most sweeping restatement yet of the hypothesis that today’s economic troubles were largely created by Clintonomics.
Indeed, Lind takes shots not only at the alleged results of Clintonomics, but at the whole notion beloved of New Democrats that a knowledge-based New Economy had emerged in which technology, education and skills had become prized national assets and the key to erasing income inequality:

Here’s what the New Democrats of the DLC and PPI who chattered enthusiastically about the “creative class” of “knowledge workers” in the “new economy” failed to understand: The main jump in income inequality took place in the 1970s and the 1980s, before the alleged new economy created by the tech revolution.
The relative decline of wages at the bottom had little or nothing to do with technology or the global economy and everything to do with the weakening of the bargaining power of American workers vis-à-vis their employers thanks to declining unionization, an eroding minimum wage and the flooding of the low-end labor market by unskilled immigrants from Latin America, both legal and illegal.
Having misdiagnosed the problem, New Democrats, including Clinton and Obama, have consistently prescribed the wrong medicine: sending more Americans to college. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, most of the occupations with the greatest number of openings in the foreseeable future require only a high school education or an associate’s degree, not a four-year B.A.
The most effective way to raise wages at the bottom would be to increase the bargaining power of workers, by unionizing the service sector and by tightening the labor market through restricting unskilled immigration. That would probably spur genuine productivity growth over time as employers substituted technology for more expensive labor.

Lind goes on to suggest that the Clintonians were blind to the damaging effects of the accumulation of paper wealth by tech entrepreneurs as well as Wall Street tycoons, and continued to promote “neoliberal” policies that ignored the real problems and perpetuated them–and now, as Obama advisors, they are making the same mistakes.
Since the Progressive Policy Institute was singled out by Lind as among the villains of Clintonomics, it’s not surprising that PPI president Will Marshall has responded at some length at Salon:

If you lived through the Clinton years, you might recall them as flush times. Some basic facts: The economy grew briskly, creating 18 million new jobs; rapid innovation, especially in information technology and online commerce, bred new businesses and helped to raise productivity in old ones; unemployment stayed low despite a steady influx of immigrants and women coming off welfare rolls; markets rose as the percentage of Americans owning stock jumped 50 percent; homeownership reached a record high (nearly 70 percent); the poverty rate shrank significantly; and the United States ran budget surpluses for the first time in three decades.
Not bad, right? Well, as reimagined by Lind, the 1990s were another “lost decade,” just like the Bush years, with their successive dot.com and housing bubbles, regressive tax breaks, zooming federal deficits and, of course, the grand finale: the near-meltdown of U.S. financial markets in the fall of 2008 along with the worst recession since 1982. If the comparison seems, well, strained, no matter. Lind’s real target is what he calls the myth of the “New Economy,” an illusion conjured by Clintonites (Progressive Policy Institute comes in for honorable mention here) to justify “neoliberal” policies.

Marshall goes on to cite research indicating that the “tech boom” did indeed increase labor productivity, and that higher education and skills do boost earning potential. And he has this to say about Lind’s alternative agenda for reducing economic inequality:

The causes of inequality are a subject of lively dispute among economists, but Lind is not hobbled by doubts. The reasons, he asserts, are to be found in the decline of unions, an eroding minimum wage, and unskilled immigrants. Yet by his own account, inequality really took off in the 1970s, when unions were relatively strong. (Plus, it’s strange to blame Democratic policies for growing inequality since 1980, since Democrats controlled the White House for only eight of those 28 years). Moreover, it should be obvious that falling union membership is the consequence, not the cause, of a massive shift in the U.S. employment base from manufacturing to services.
Because it affects only a small proportion of workers (including lots of kids working at part-time jobs), the minimum wage is a slender reed on which to hang the revival of good, middle-class wages in America. And there’s scant evidence to support Lind’s claim that immigration, legal or otherwise, has exerted significant downward pressure on native workers’ wages. The tide of unskilled immigration does have an impact on workers who graduate from high school, but not a very large one.

For readers who, like me, are not economists, the political implications of the Lind-Marshall debate are what’s really interesting. Marshall unsurprisingly accuses Lind of whitewashing the Bush administration’s record in his rush to blame Clinton for the economic problems of the aughts. And Lind obviously believes a major change in Obama’s economic policies is demanded by the times, though it’s unlikely that many progressives unhappy with Obama would embrace Lind’s call for radical reductions in immigration to relieve downward pressure on wages. (It’s also not clear, BTW, how Bill Clinton, facing Republican-controlled Congresses, was supposed to have pursued Lind’s other major prescription, the unionization of the service sector).
It’s easy to say that this argument would become largely moot if the economy now begins to turn around under Democratic management. But if and when the damage wrought during the aughts begins to abate, an economic policy consensus in the Democratic Party will become more important than ever, and areas of general agreement–the need for progressive taxes, an activist public sector focused on big national challenges, and careful regulation of big corporations–will be worth stressing, even if we disagree among ourselves about an increasingly distant past.

At OpenLeft today, Chris Bowers notes that the efforts of Sens. Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson to hold health reform legislation hostage to their own personal demands have significantly damaged their home-state approval ratings. To put it simply, both supporters and opponents of health reform didn’t like it, and both men have painted big bulls-eyes on their backs when they are up for re-election in 2012.
But Chris goes on to say there’s a lesson in this development for those progressives who favored more aggressive efforts to hold the same legislation hostage:

I think this is a lesson for public option advocates, and our high-profile hostage-taking strategy called The Progressive Block. It seems clear to me now that a strategy like that only works if you build up public support for it (which we most definitely did not do among the Democratic primary electorate), or if the fight is far more low-profile (such as IMF funding in the Afghanistan supplemental). High-profile hostage taking just doesn’t work from the left (or, as polling shows, from the right or the center, either) Voters of all sorts, including those on the left, just don’t like it, and they will punish you given the opportunity. It is indeed small comfort that the mendacious hostage-takers who stopped us are now wildly unpopular both at home and around the country, but it is also a warning that we would have been in the same position if we had become the hostage takers ourselves.

That’s a very interesting, and typically honest, admission from Chris Bowers.

For all the notoriety of the Tea Party Movement, it’s been difficult to get any reliable fix on its fundamental political objectives. Is it a “third force” in American politics that will either morph into a third party and/or burn itself out through ineffectual if incendiary protests? Or is it essentially a hard-right takeover bid aimed at turning the GOP into a mirror image of its ideological obsesssions, ranging from gun rights to anti-immigration sentiment to radical reductions in taxes and spending?
We may get a better understanding of the answer to that question next month, when a group called the Tea Party Nation puts on the first-ever national convention of tea party organizers and activists at Nashville’s Opryland.
TPM’s Christina Bellatoni says the convention’s agenda “sounds a lot like an attempt to form an official third party.” I dunno; the announced speakers list looks a lot like a prayer meeting of the right wing of the Republican Party. The big keynote speaker is Sarah Palin, with Michele Bachman speaking at lunch. Other confirmed speakers include the U.S. House GOP leadership’s resident wingnut, Marsha Blackburn (you do have to admit the Tea Party folks are very good at achieving gender parity in their panelists); Christian Right warhorses Rick Scarborough and Judge Roy Moore; and assorted conservative TV and radio gabbers.
It’s now becoming standard for hard-core conservative candidates in Republican primaries around the country to identify themselves closely with the Tea Party Movement. Nowhere is this more evident than in Florida, where Marco Rubio’s senate candidacy is a cause celebre for Tea Party folk everywhere. There’s a long profile of the Rubio-Crist race by Mark Liebovich in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine that gives the distinct impression that Crist is a goner and Rubio’s about to become a maximum national conservative celebrity. And although there will be elements of the Tea Party movement who want to remain independent, the temptation of an opportunity to conquer, or at least intimidate into submission, one of the two major parties may prove irresistable.
UPDATE: The intrepid David Wiegel reports some conservative grumbling about the cost of this event–$549 for registration, and $349 just to attend the Palin speech–and Palin’s own rumored speaking fee of somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000. Sure, big-name pols often command that much or a lot more for speeches, but it’s not what you’d want to charge to a grassroots activist group if you were thinking about running for president with their support. More generally, this kind of money-grubbing could undermine the legitimacy of the event.

There’s an interesting and potentially misleading theme developing in coverage of the 2010 political season: vulnerable Democrats will try to turn attention away from their record in 2009 and, in the words of a Tom Edsall post today, “make the race about the other guy.” The implication many will draw from this theme is that Democrats, having no popular positive agenda, will “go negative” on the GOP.
This is an interpretation that Democrats should fight tooth and nail. Elections are, by definition, a choice between candidates and parties. The framing that Republicans would like to impose, that the election is a “referendum” on the Obama administration or the Democratic Party, is absurd. Without any question, the administration inherited a recession, a financial crisis, a budget crisis, two wars, and a dysfunctional and gridlocked Congress, from a Republican administration. The views of Republicans as well as Democrats about what to do with that inheritence are deeply relevant to the 2010 elections. Yes, Democrats have a specific agenda to defend and explain; to the extent that Republicans have identified their own agenda, that’s on the table, too, and to the extent that they haven’t, that’s of interest to voters as well.
To the extent that Republicans have engaged in extremist rhetoric this last year, and flirted with atavistic nullification theories and race-baiting conspiracy theories concerning ACORN or the president’s credentials as an American, that needs to be pointed out. That’s not “going negative” or “changing the subject;” it’s a matter of presenting the actual choices, which are not “the status quo” and “something better” but one party and the other, and one candidate or the other.
Another relevant issue is what will happen to the country’s interests in the immediate future if a violently obstructionist GOP is strengthened this November. Will Americans welcome two years of partisan conflict and inaction? Are they prepared to resolve the problem by electing any of the currently available Republican leaders their president in 2012?
These questions are all necessary, if not entirely sufficient, to a Democratic message for 2010. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, Democrats.

Over the last 24 hours, word has been leaking out of four separate Democratic candidates for statewide office around the country deciding to retire from office or otherwise fold campaigns. They are Sens. Chris Dodd of CT and Byron Dorgan of ND, along with Gov. Bill Ritter of CO (up for re-election this year) and Lt. Gov. Don Cherry of MI (running for governor this year).
Republicans are naturally spinning these unrelated developments as part of a wave of discouraged Democrats getting out of campaigns in anticipation of a big pro-GOP November. That’s not surprising. But it is annoying that mainstream political media are so avidly buying this spin. Politico‘s banner headline this morning is: “Top Democrats head for the exits.”
The irony is that these changes of heart could actually improve overall Democratic prospects in November. Dodd was in deep political trouble, and his likely replacement as Democratic nominee, CT Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, will be favored to win. Cherry’s gubernatorial campaign was struggling to raise money, and his withdrawal could open the door to any number of better-positioned Democratic candidates. And in CO, Ritter’s retirement could well draw former state House Speaker Andrew Romanoff out of a contentious primary challenge to Sen. Michael Bennet; if that doesn’t happen, highly popular Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper might run, and there’s even been some talk that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar would like to be governor. Any of these candidates would be considered stronger than Ritter.
Dorgan’s retirement is definitely a blow to Democrats. But he, too, was badly trailing Gov. John Hoeven in the polls, and if Rep. Earl Pomeroy decides to take the plunge, his prospects might be as good as Dorgan’s.
In terms of handicapping the overall contest for control of the U.S. Senate, it’s important to remember that not two but six Republicans have already announced retirements (in OH, FL, MO, KY, NH and KS). I don’t recall any “Top Republicans head for the exits” headlines about them.

On the heels of my post yesterday urging Governor Kaine to restore voting rights to Virginia ex-felons who have served their sentences comes an appeals court ruling that felony disenfranchisement violates the Voting Rights Act. Bob Egelko of the San Francisco Chronicle reports on a 2-1 ruling by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that Washington state law “violates the federal Voting Rights Act because evidence showed discrimination against minorities at every level of the state’s legal system: arrest, bail, prosecution and sentencing.”
Although the ruling applies to the state of Washington, it could apply to 8 other states in the circuit, including CA, which denies voting rights to 283,000 citizens who are in prison or on parole, about 114,000 of whom are African Americans. Egelko explains further:

Among those in Washington state who commit crimes, “minorities are more likely than whites to be searched, arrested, detained and ultimately prosecuted,” Judge A. Wallace Tashima said in the appeals court’s majority opinion.
For example, he said, studies showed that African Americans in Washington were more than nine times as likely to be in prison as whites and 70 percent more likely to be searched, even though a study of one police department found that officers were more likely to find contraband when searching whites…Findings were similar for Latinos and Native Americans, none of which could be explained by differences in crime rates, Tashima said.
The Voting Rights Act “demands that such racial discrimination not spread to the ballot box,” he said.

What is important about the decision, explains Egelko, is that “The ruling is the first by an appeals court to overturn a state’s prohibition on voting by felons, which exists in different versions in every state except Maine and Vermont.” However, three previous federal appeals court rulings have said that the Voting Rights Act does not invalidate felony disenfranchisement laws.
It would also be surprising if the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the ruling, given it’s current conservative majority and their proclivity for shameless political partisanship. On the other hand, the tide seems to be turning regarding felony disenfranchisement, and we are likely just one justice away from consigning racist felony disenfranchisement laws to their rightful place on the dung-heap of history.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
With Republican prospects for 2010, and just maybe 2012, trending upward, it’s worth noting that Mitt Romney, the insiders’ front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, has announced a publicity tour for his upcoming book, No Apology. He’ll begin with two stops in (surprise!) Iowa in March.
Team Romney has tried to suppress in advance any comparisons between the Mittster’s round of book signings and that of Sarah Palin. “We’re not going to match her crowd size or sales. These are two different people with different ways of expressing themselves,” Eric Fehrnstrom, a Romney spokesman, told the Boston Globe. But, even if he’s no Sarah Palin, putative candidate Romney needs to show with this tour that he’s got his groove back.
After losing the GOP nomination 2008, he dropped below most Americans’ radar screens. Yet he retains most of his original points of appeal: the granite visage, the competent-exec air, the economic policy fluency, and the résumé that includes being governor of blue-state Massachusetts and CEO of the 2002 Winter Olympics, which is sure to make him a regular quote machine during the upcoming Vancouver games. Each day that passes takes him further away from the social policy heresies of his earlier political career. And some Republican insiders really do believe that a prior failed presidential bid is an essential box to check, making him arguably “next in line” for the nomination.
More importantly, the likely GOP field for 2012, in comparison to the 2008 crop, looks a bit easier for Mitt to manage. As National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru observed in a smart piece in October, Mitt didn’t fit in 2008 as the conservative alternative to John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, but he will find it easier in 2012 to be the establishment candidate acceptable to movement conservatives:

Romney seems more naturally an establishmentarian than a conservative insurgent, so this strategy would be a better fit for him than his last one. He is not a man to be swayed by the momentary passions of his party’s base; pretending otherwise adds to his reputation for slickness. If he ran as an establishment candidate, the fact that he used to take less-conservative positions would still matter. But it would not matter as much, because he would no longer have to prove himself as a true-blue conservative.

If either Mike Huckabee (strangely undamaged by the Maurice Clemmons firestorm of late November) or Sarah Palin runs in 2012, much of the oxygen among social conservatives will be bottled up. Since the GOP establishment really dislikes Huck and doesn’t have much faith in Palin, other than as a hobgoblin with which to terrify progressives, Romney would be nicely set up to be the “responsible conservative” in the race, competing for that mantle mainly with Tim Pawlenty, who makes Mitt look like Mr. Excitement.
But there’s one major problem with Romney’s positioning for 2012–and it’s a very big one: He may no longer be “acceptable” to movement conservatives thanks to his sponsorship of a health reform plan in Massachusetts that looks uncomfortably like the legislation that Barack Obama will probably be signing early this year.
In his profile of a possible Romney 2012 run, Ponnuru notes this problem, along with Mitt’s rationalizations for it:

Romney makes three arguments in his defense. The first is that a Democratic legislature and his Democratic successor made the plan worse than his original conception. The second is that he has no intention of pushing the Massachusetts plan on the entire country. Health-care reform, he tells me, “should occur on a state-by-state basis.” The third is that the plan has worked out well for his state. “The plan is well within budget and has accomplished its objectives at a relatively modest cost.”
It’s that third point that could get Romney into trouble. The cost to the state government has indeed been modest. But the plan was designed so that the state picks up only a fifth of the costs the plan generates, with the federal government and the private sector absorbing the rest. Premiums are growing much faster than in the rest of the nation. Waiting times are up, too, which imposes costs on people. The plan is losing popularity in Massachusetts. Ideally, Romney would learn from this experience that a reform centered on state governments’ manipulation of federal dollars is a mistake. At the very least, Romney would be foolish to keep defending the plan.

But, given the hopped-up rhetoric among Republicans about “Obamacare” since Ponnuru wrote these words, it may not be enough for Romney to “stop defending” his health care plan. For one thing, right-wing hysteria is now increasingly centered on the supposed tyranny imposed by the individual mandate, which Romney has always championed. But, were he to flatly repudiate his own record, the “flip-flop” attacks on his character would resume with a real vengeance.
Put simply, Romney can’t just recalibrate his 2008 race based on the 2012 landscape and expect to win. This isn’t the Republican Party of two or three years ago; it’s moved palpably to the right. While Romney’s 2008 rivals took some shots at his health care record, it wasn’t that big a deal in the contest. But, at that point in history, conservatives weren’t in the habit of using Slavedrivers-of-Collectivism rhetoric about individual mandates or other features of the Massachusetts system.
With health care policy certain to remain front-and-center in Republican politics for the foreseeable future, the supposed front-runner for the 2012 GOP nomination may face an impossible, disqualifying problem. And, given the choices Republicans look likely to have (any “fresh faces” emerging in 2010 won’t be ready for an immediate presidential race), that’s a very big problem for a party that considers itself on the brink of a return to power in the next few years.