This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
On a slow Friday afternoon, I settled in to read two lengthy reports–one from the West Virginia Governor’s Independent Investigation Panel on the Upper Big Branch/Massey Energy explosion that killed 29 miners, the other from the Urban Land Institute on the slow-motion crisis in U.S. infrastructure. On the surface, these reports seemed to have nothing in common. But as I plowed through them, I realized that they were addressing two sides of the same question–namely, what government does that nothing else can or will. We need government to prevent private bads, such as corporate greed that gives short shrift to mine safety, and also to provide public goods, such as infrastructure, that the market, left to its own devices, will always undersupply.

The Upper Big Branch report makes for chilling reading. Massey Energy’s management systematically ignored basic safety practices and impeded regulators’ efforts to correct them. The federal Mine Safety and Health Administration failed to use the tough enforcement tools in its arsenal, even after more moderate measures had failed to turn things around. And not only was the West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health Safety and Training understaffed and outgunned, but also it faced what the report bluntly calls the “politics of the state of West Virginia.” Here’s how the report ends:

Many systems created to safeguard miners had to break down in order for an explosion of this magnitude to occur. … Such total and catastrophic systemic failures can only be explained in the context of a culture in which wrongdoing became acceptable, where deviation became the norm. In such a culture it was acceptable to mine coal with insufficient air; with buildups of coal dust; with inadequate rock dust. The same culture allowed Massey Energy to use its resources to create a false public image …. And it became acceptable to cast agencies designed to protect miners as enemies and to make life difficult for miners who tried to address safety.

In an appendix, the report lists 18 individuals who responded to a state subpoena by invoking the Fifth Amendment and refusing to testify. They include Massey Energy’s former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, as well as its Chief Operating Officer, Vice President of Safety, and President of the Upper Big Branch mine. I don’t know how these people live with themselves. Keep this episode firmly in mind whenever you hear conservatives’ ritual denunciation of “burdensome, job-killing regulations.” Life-saving would be more like it.
Although the temperature of the Urban Land Institute’s infrastructure report is considerably lower, its story is no less compelling. It inventories the vigorous efforts our competitors–established as well as emerging economic powers–are making to upgrade their energy, transportation, information, water, and waste facilities. And it contrasts them with the decades of virtually unbroken decline in the share of our GDP that we devote to these purposes. In 2007, inflation-adjusted federal infrastructure spending was no higher than it had been more than a quarter of a century earlier, in 1981. This investment deficit concerns more than convenience and aesthetics, the report argues; it affects, as well, our long-term commercial productivity and national competitiveness. And there’s no possibility that the private sector alone can take up the slack, because not all potential economic gains from infrastructure investments enter into the calculus of individual private actors.
Not only must the public sector do more; it must act differently. At the federal level, says the report, funding should be allocated in a way that ensures support over extended project time horizons. For their part, states and localities will have to expand and diversify their funding sources. And despite the near-certainly that I’ll be accused yet again of laughable monomania, I’ll quote a key sentence from the report: “At a time when funding is scarce, establishing a U.S. infrastructure bank seems like a no-brainer.” It sure does.
So–to repeat–those of us who reject conservative assaults on government do so for forward-looking, practical reasons, not out of obsolete ideological commitments. We believe that without appropriate government activity, our country will be less efficient and productive as well as less secure and humane. That doesn’t mean that we should resist all proposed reforms, even when they involve long-cherished programs. But we must defend the need for government, staunchly and unapologetically, against the narrow and blinkered attacks that have come to dominate our public discourse.

So you’ve probably heard any number of analysts say that you must take early national polls of presidential nominating contests with a shaker of salt. They mainly measure name ID, and in any event, we don’t have a national primary, so who cares about the early preferences of people in high population states that don’t hold primaries until the field has already been culled or the contest decided?
But the ultimate proof of the limits of such polls is the new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey that shows Rudy Giuliani leading the 2012 field. Yes, Rudy Giuliani, who regularly led the early 2008 polls before (predictably) crashing and burning in the early states. Rudy’s done nothing much since 2008 other than make money, so it’s reasonably clear there’s not some news-driven surge of retroactive appreciation for the man, particularly among the totally dominant conservative wing of the GOP that would never in a million years accept a pro-choice presidential nominee.
The fact that Rudy would lead any 2012 poll, though, even for a moment, is indeed a pretty good sign of how wide-open the race is at this point. His fans should not get carried away and deduce he should actually run again, unless they think everyone else will drop out.

I don’t know if you are attending any special Memorial Days events, but just wanted to wish everyone the chance to spend at least a few minutes today thinking about the supreme sacrifices made by so many–usually very young people who haven’t tasted a whole lot of life–in defense of our country. And since they don’t get their own day, it’s not a bad time to express a thought or prayer for non-combatants killed in war, or those losing loved ones.

You may be aware that Public Policy Polling has been occasionally conducting “do-over” polls–surveys to see if voters would confirm or reverse the results of recent elections–of key states this year. At HuffPost Pollster, Margie Omero has a useful summary of PPP’s findings in eight states, at least seven of them considered “battleground” states–where Republicans won governorships in 2010.
Nevada’s Brian Sandoval would do about the same in a “do-over” contest with Rory Reid. But that’s the exception to the rule: in the other seven states (FL, GA, IA, MI, OH, PA, WI), 2010 Republican wins would turn into losses today.
The most dramatic swings have been in Ohio, where John Kasich’s 2-point win over Ted Strickland would be a 25-point deficit today; and in Florida, where Rick Scott’s very narrow victory over Alex Sink would be a gully-washer of a landslide loss today, by nineteen points.
As Romero notes:

Beneath the surface, these Republicans are losing ground with independents. Nationally in 2010, independents gave Republicans a +19 advantage. In the five states above for which we have exit poll data (FL, IA, OH, PA, WI), the Republican won among independents. Yet in six of these eight re-do polls, independents now say they would vote for the Democrat.

In separate news from PPP, Barack Obama leads virtually all comers in polling from 6 of the 9 “swing states” that went for Bush in 2004 and Obama in 2008.

Campaigns have good days and bad days, but it’s rare to have as bad a single day as Rep. Michele Bachmann suffered through yesterday.
For breakfast, Sarah Palin’s PAC announced the soon-to-be-former-Alaskan was making an appearance at the annual Rolling Thunder biker event in Washington on Memorial Day, and then launching a national bus tour. This came on the heels of the disclosure that Palin had commissioned a movie about herself that will debut in Iowa next month and then be shown in other early caucus and primary states.
No one knows if Palin is doing anything other than keeping her name in the news and reminding Republicans she could change the dynamics of the race if she chose to (though Slate‘s Noreen Malone’s Wasilla-or-the-White-House meter measuring the odds of a Palin campaign has leapt up to 75). If she does run, though, it’s hard to see Bachmann staying in as a serious candidate. Yes, as I’ve said before, Bachmann is sort of an improved version of Palin–more intensely serious, more experienced, more devoted to her day-job, and more deeply rooted in both the Christian Right and the Tea Party movement. But there’s no way she can compete with Palin’s celebrity status, even in her native Iowa. And their constituencies are just too similar.
Speaking of Iowa, Bachmann topped off her bad day with a no-show at a pretty big Iowa event: a fundraiser for the Polk County (Des Moines) Republican Party. Yes, she had a good excuse for a last-minute cancellation–votes in the House–but per The Iowa Republican‘s Craig Robinson, everything about the way she handled it was a “debacle”:

The scheduling conflict arose because of a House vote on extending the Patriot Act. Backup plans were made for her to use a private jet. In the end, nothing worked and Bachmann was unable to make it. Instead, she appeared on choppy and blurry Skype-style video. Local Republicans were extremely displeased.
“It’s awful,” said activist Becky Irvin. “She just shot herself in the foot. She dissed Iowa. You don’t diss Iowa….”
[A]round 40 people who made reservations no-showed the event. Making matters worse, Bachmann’s political organization reserved three tables for the event, at a cost of $750 per table. However, no one paid for those tickets and at least one of those tables remained completely empty. The Polk County GOP had to pay for several dinners for Bachmann’s people that were never eaten.
The Minnesota congresswoman’s speech-by-video only made matters worse. Bachmann made the mistake of name-dropping Donald Trump during her talk. “Donald Trump was right, we are getting our tail kicked by China,” she said. Last week, Trump cancelled his scheduled appearance at a Republican Party of Iowa fundraiser. Bachmann was clearly ignorant or tone deaf to that controversy.

“You don’t diss Iowa”. You’d guess Waterloo native Bachmann would know that. But on what is likely the very eve of her planned official announcement as a candidate, she’s got a lot to distract her right now: First, Herman Cain becoming a media phenomenon and grassroots favorite, and now, Palin potentially on the way into the race.

One of the more interesting back-stage brouhahas of recent weeks has been the effort of Rep. Paul Ryan and his Capitol Hill fans to use a pleasant letter from New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, to indicate church support for, or at least neutrality towards, his increasingly infamous budget proposal.
At TNR, Michael Sean Winters provides the essential background to the exchange of letters between Dolan and Ryan. He describes Dolan’s letter not as any sort of endorsement of Ryan’s budget, but as a diplomatic effort to find something positive to say about a document squarely at odds with Church teachings, as part of a characteristic Dolan strategy of non-confrontation.
In the end, Winters predicts, the conflict between the neo-Randian principles of Ryan and centuries of Catholic teaching about the poor just cannot be papered over. It’s that fundamental:

The Catholic Church, with its vast array of hospitals, shelters, and schools, knows firsthand how nutritional and educational and health programs really do make a difference in the lives of the poor. Most importantly, at the heart of the Church is a gospel that instructs the faithful to care for “the least of these” and sets such care as the price of admission to sanctity and to heaven. No matter how Paul Ryan tries to convince himself that Rome and Rand can be reconciled, they can’t. Ayn Rand despised the poor. The Church is called to treasure them.

One of the classic Beltway memes is that both major parties are equally responsible for lack of progress towards getting federal spending under control. A classic of the genre is a new op-ed by “reasonable” and “responsible” Republican Sen. Tom Coburn, who was a member of the Bowles-Simpson deficit reduction commission last year, and until recently a member of the senatorial “Gang of Six” that many deficit hawks have considered the best avenue for a bipartisan breakthrough.
Here’s all you really need to read of Coburn’s manifesto:

The solution is obvious. Democrats have to accept the reality that structural entitlement reform is necessary. Republicans have to accept the reality that in order to get Democrats to make those changes we will have to agree to tax reform that will increase revenue but not rates. This solution isn’t a betrayal of either party’s values, but a defense of those values on behalf of future generations. Again, doing nothing would be the real act of betrayal that would lead to both higher taxes and the demise of entitlement programs for the poor and elderly.

You will notice right away several oddities about this “obvious” and high-minded solution. There’s no mention of defense spending (to be fair, Coburn himself has in the past suggested that Pentagon spending should not be “off the table,” but that still violates GOP orthodoxy, as reflected in the kid glove treatment defense spending receives in both of the supposedly tight-fisted budget resolutions, Paul Ryan’s and Pat Toomey’s). And there’s certainly no admission that maybe “structural” reforms in defense spending might be under consideration.
Speaking of the word “structural,” use of that modifier to talk about entitlement programs presumably suggests the kind of radical approaches Ryan has talked about: changing Social Security and Medicare from defined benefit to defined contributions progams, for example. You wouldn’t know from reading this that the biggest impetus to increased Medicare spending is a health care cost spiral that the Affordable Care Act, opposed by all Republicans, took the first major steps to address.
And finally, there’s Coburn’s strange treatment of revenues, in which tax rate increases are assumed to violate GOP values but perpetuation of existing rates–due, of course, to expire, which means keeping them will boost the budget deficit even more–somehow do not violate Democratic values, even though most Democrats opposed the Bush cuts initially and have been promising to reverse them ever since.
Even if you put aside such highly germane issues as responsibility for past, present and future deficits, and how different deficit reduction strategies affect a fragile economy characterized by deep and growing inequality, it’s clear that Coburn’s come-let-us-compromise plea is extremely unbalanced. So Beltway pundits should not get too carried away with congratulating him for his courage and generosity.

Even as pundits begin to think about her as a possible presidential candidates once again thanks to the small size of the 2012 Republican field, we learn today that Sarah Palin has quietly been planning a gambit that could be timed to coincide or directly precede a plunge into candidacy.
RealClearPolitics’ Scott Conroy has the clean scoop on this development: conservative filmmaker Stephen Bannon (best known for his Tea Party documentary, Generation Zero) has produced and directed a feature-length movie designed to resurrect Palin’s vengeful magic with grassroots Republicans, entitled The Undefeated, which will premiere in Iowa next month. Here’s part of Conroy’s take on the film, which he’s seen in rough-cut form:

Rife with religious metaphor and unmistakable allusions to Palin as a Joan of Arc-like figure, “The Undefeated” echoes Palin’s “Going Rogue” in its tidy division of the world between the heroes who are on her side and the villains who seek to thwart her at every turn.
To convey Bannon’s view of the pathology behind Palin-hatred, the film begins with a fast-paced sequence of clips showing some of the prominent celebrities who have used sexist, derogatory and generally vicious language to describe her.
Rosie O’Donnell, Matt Damon, Bill Maher, David Letterman, and Howard Stern all have brief cameos before comedian Louis C.K. goes off on a particularly ugly anti-Palin riff.
“I hate her more than anybody,” C.K. says at the end of his tirade, the rest of which is unfit to print here.
Bannon intends to release two versions of the film. An unrated edition will contain some obscene anti-Palin language and imagery, while the other is targeted to a general audience and will seek a PG-13 rating from the Motion Picture Association of America.

Gee, wonder which version will be shown to key Iowa activists who are on the fence about a 2012 candidate?
Whether or not the movie represents a hidden plan by Palin to run for president, or simply a failsafe measure to improve her standing if she later decides to run, it’s pretty clear its objective is to rekindle the sense of common victimization that made the former Alaska governor a conservative folk hero in the first place–a St. Joan of the Tundra who risked martyrdom to defend the “common-sense conservativism” of the hard-core Right against the sneering contempt of elites within and beyond both parties. It’s an approach that actually makes her poor recent poll standings something of a virtue: another sign of Establishment underestimation of the power of her message and the people she represents. Here’s Conroy again:

The film’s coda is introduced with an on-screen caption that reads, “From here, I can see November.” It is here that Mark Levin alludes to Ronald Reagan as a Palin-like insurgent who was also once distrusted by the GOP establishment.
Palin is then shown firing up a rally that occurred just last month on the steps of the state capitol in Wisconsin. “What we need is for you to stand up, GOP, and fight,” Palin, in vintage campaign form, shouts to the crowd. “Maybe I should ask some of the Badger women’s hockey team — those champions — maybe I should ask them if we should be suggesting to GOP leaders they need to learn how to fight like a girl!”
Following an extended in-your-face riff by Andrew Breitbart in which he repeatedly denounces as “eunuchs” the male Republican leaders who decline to defend Palin, the film ends with one last scene from the April rally in Madison: “Mr. President, game on!” Palin shouts before a martial drumbeat ushers in a closing quotation by Thomas Paine, which also appeared in “Going Rogue.” The implication is neither subtle nor easy to dismiss.

Wow. What a nightmare for Michele Bachmann.

Try as they may, national Republicans are having trouble spinning the results from yesterday’s special election in the 26th congressional district of New York, in which Democrat Kathy Hochul defeated Republican Jane Corwin, as anything other than a big setback. Yes, there was a third party candidate in the race running on a “Tea Party” label, but as Nate Silver explains, that’s not enough to account for the loss of this profoundly Republican seat:

Ms. Hochul, with most of the vote counted, has 48 percent of the total…. The rest of the vote was split between the Republican, Jane Corwin, with 42 percent, the the Tea Party candidate, Jack Davis, with 9 percent, and the Green Party’s Ian Miller, with 1 percent.
Suppose that Mr. Davis and Mr. Miller were not running, and that this were a true two-way race between Ms. Hochul and Ms. Corwin. If Ms. Corwin had won all of Mr. Davis’s vote (and Ms. Hochul won all of Mr. Miller’s vote), she would have won 51-49.
That would still qualify as a bad night for the Republicans, however. Based on the way that the district votes in presidential elections, it is 6 percentage points more Republican than the country as a whole. That means, roughly speaking, that in a neutral political environment with average candidates, Ms. Corwin would have won 56 percent of the vote and Ms. Hochul 44 percent — a 12-point victory. A 2-point win instead, therefore, would have spoken to a relatively poor political environment for the Republicans.
Nor is it likely that Ms. Corwin would in fact have won all of Mr. Davis’s votes. He ran in the district as a Democrat in 2006, and polls suggested that his voters leaned Republican by roughly a 2-1 margin, but not more than that. If you had split his vote 2-1 in favor of Ms. Corwin, the results would have been Ms. Hochul 51 percent, and Ms. Corwin 48 percent.

Hochul won, moreover, despite a major financial disadvantage, as noted by David Nir of Daily Kos:

The GOP spent an absolute fortune on this race. Not counting outside money, Corwin alone spent about $2.6 million of her own money to get about 40,000 votes. That comes out to $68/vote. By contrast, Meg Whitman spent approximately $144 million out of her own pocket — a record — to net about 4 million votes in last year’s gubernatorial race in California. That comes out to roughly $35/vote. Kathy Hochul raised very well, but she was most certainly outspent.
As for outside money, the main spenders for Corwin were $700K by Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, $100K by the American Action Network, and $425K by the NRCC (totaling about $1.2 million). For Hochul, it wound up as $371K from the House Majority PAC, $111K from the Communications Workers of America, $75K from 1199 SEIU 1199, and $267K from the DCCC (totalling $824K). Hochul herself raised around a million bucks.

Given the heavy focus of advertising on both sides to the Medicare issue, there’s not a whole lot of doubt that it had a whole lot to do with the results. Even if it didn’t, something’s happened to stop the incredible momentum the GOP had during the last two years, and the already-tense atmosphere among Republicans owing to private divisions over Paul Ryan’s budget proposal is certain to get worse.
Special elections should never be over-interpreted as harbingers of the future, but this one presents lessons to the GOP on the potential costs of extremism that cannot be missed.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
With Mitch Daniels officially out of the race, Haley Barbour and Mike Huckabee now a distant after-thought, and Newt Gingrich’s campaign running on fumes, pundits of all political stripes are finding it hard to shake a persistent belief that there’s a gaping hole in the Republican presidential field. Indeed, the most frequent theme that keeps cropping up in smart analysis of the current state of play is that the contest cries out for a late-entering, credible southern candidate. The figure most often pointed to is Texas Governor Rick Perry, on the grounds that, well, southerners are especially inclined to vote for southerners, and no matter who wins Iowa or Nevada or New Hampshire, the real deal may go down in Dixie. But these analyses all suffer from the same flaw: They overestimate the pull of regional affinity and underestimate ideology. And while, in the past, significant regional differences existed when it came to ideological belief within the Republican Party, that era is sunsetting and, with it, so too are the built-in advantages of the southern Republican candidate.
As a South Carolina native, albeit an expat and something of a liberal scalawag, I’m always intrigued by Confeder-o-centric theories of national politics, particularly if they are advanced by Yankees who seem to be approaching the strange and atavistic characteristics of the region with oven mittens and tongs.
One such Yankee is The Weekly Standard‘s Jay Cost, who comes at the subject while utilizing the highly suspect claim that the South is actually just a subset of a mega-region called the Sunbelt that stretches from Virginia to California, and that has dominated national politics in recent decades. With this axiom firmly in place, Cost can easily demonstrate that Sunbelt voters tend to support Sunbelt candidates for president. But if “Sunbelt” is a time-worn term for explaining political, demographic, and economic trends, it’s not actually meaningful at all when it comes to explaining southern cultural affinity. Southerners, white or black, do not tend to view Californians or Arizonans or Nevadans as part of their family. To the extent that you hear from real people about the Sunbelt in most of the South, it refers to an aspiring college athletic conference that is totally eclipsed by the SEC and ACC. Cost’s suggestion that southerners gravitated to Sunbelt candidates from outside the South like Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and John McCain for reasons of regional solidarity is therefore dubious at best.
From a more defensible empirical foundation, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver looked at regional solidarity in Republican presidential primary contests and concluded that southerners (using a reasonable definition of the term) were more likely to support a local candidate than Republicans (or for that matter, Democrats) in other regions. But in discussing regional affinity issues, Silver underrates the external factor of ideology. Until fairly recently, southern Republicans were ideologically distinct from GOPers in other regions, but that’s hardly the case now. If you did a blind test today of the messages of Republican candidates for president, you would not have much reason to assume that this candidate or that was from this place or that. For decades, southern Republicans have been known for hostility to the very idea of unions. That is now an increasingly entrenched national GOP position, as demonstrated by the agendas of Republican governors in Michigan and Ohio. Hard-core southern conservative litmus tests on abortion, same-sex marriage, federal civil rights efforts, energy policy, and welfare (defined as any measure that redistributes income to help the poor) are now also standard national GOP fare. So do southern Republicans still need a southerner to preach their gospel these days? Not really.
Moreover, one can make a strong case that ideology, more than home cooking, has always been the deciding factor in southern Republican presidential preferences. The two deities of modern southern Republicanism are Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, neither of them southerners in any respect other than ideology. In 1980, Reagan nailed down the GOP nomination between March 8 and March 11 in four southern states–South Carolina, Alabama, Florida, and Georgia–defeating southerners John Connally, George H.W. Bush, and Howard Baker in the process. In 1996, Kansan Bob Dole beat southerner Lamar Alexander throughout the South after establishing himself as the orthodox conservative favorite. And while George W. Bush beat John McCain in South Carolina in 2000, it hardly seems due to the fact that he was southern. Rather, it was because Bush was the candidate of the conservative establishment (especially its religious wing) that considered McCain a deadly threat to its power in the GOP. And did Mike Huckabee’s battle against McCain in the South in 2008 depend on his southern identity (compared to, say, me, Huck has little or no discernable southern accent), or on the fact that he is a conservative evangelical Protestant minister?
It seems likely, in other words, that southern Republicans tend to support the most conservative viable candidate in presidential primaries at least as much as they support fellow-southerners. This hypothesis more reliably explains the results in southern presidential primaries in years when both southerners (Bush 43) and non-southerners (McCain), Sunbelt (Reagan) and Midwest (Dole) candidates, have won. This could play out once again in 2012 if, for example, Rick Perry decides to run, but South Carolina’s Jim DeMint and Nikki Haley endorse Tim Pawlenty, a conservative evangelical beloved of anti-abortion activists. In that scenario, it’s very unlikely that Perry would win in the Palmetto State just because he is from Texas, as opposed to Minnesota. The limited appeal of regional identity would become even more obvious if Perry’s opponent in the South turned out to be Sarah Palin, who is from an area nearly as far away from South Carolina as you can get.
To be sure, it doesn’t hurt a Republican candidate running in the South to show some regional street cred, whether it’s through an accent or a familiarity with what to say in a Southern Baptist Church in Greenville or what to order at Lizard’s Thicket in Columbia. But it’s not enough. More than anything else, Southern Republicans love conservative ideology, and they’ll take it where they can find it, even if it’s articulated in the alien tones of Minnesota or Alaska.