Spiking world oil prices, mainly attributable to the instability in the Middle East, are helping (and I wouldn’t use a stronger word, given the well-known propensities of the oil industry to take advantage of news on oil prices to disproportionately jack up U.S. retail prices and harvest higher profits) boost pump prices.
Can we now expect a return to “Drill, Baby, Drill” rhetoric from Republicans who want to promote the utterly false belief that we can somehow divorce the domestic petroleum market from global markets by expanded U.S. production?
Maybe, but thanks to memories of the BP spill, Republicans are a little hesitant to cry for expanded offshore drilling. For one thing, there are a lot bigger economic problems facing the country and its citizens than $4 gasoline. As the New York Times‘ Caucus blog explains:

[T]he political dynamics surrounding oil exploration are very different in 2011 than they were in 2008, making it less obvious that Mr. Obama’s Republican challengers can use the issue to their advantage.
And despite the consumer pain, most economists from across the political spectrum say that they do not yet expect the price of oil to do significant damage to the economic recovery in the coming months.

Still, the web page of American Solutions, the Newt Gingrich-created group that originated the 2008 “Drill Here, Drill Now” campaign among Republicans, is full of daily attacks on Obama for allegedly abetting gas price increases through his stubborn opposition to maximum domestic oil drilling.
As the 2012 presidential cycle warms up, it wouldn’t be surprising if Gingrich and/or some of his other potential rivals raise the old battle cry again, particularly in states where there’s no immediate fear of the consequences of expanded offshore drilling. It’s not as though anyone in today’s GOP is going to object to dependence on fossil fuels out of concern for global climate change.

When Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour went out of his way in Washington this week to disrespect Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts health reform law, it was understandably covered as a political story. Yes, Barbour’s snark was yet another indication that Romney is going to have to defend “RomneyCare,” and try to distinguish it from “ObamaCare,” virtually every day on the 2012 presidential campaign trail. I’m among the considerable number of political observers who don’t think he’ll be able to successfully pull that off.
But pure politics aside, Barbour’s statement offers a rare candid glimpse into the underlying thinking of conservatives about health reform that is often buried under all the rhetoric about “socialism” and “government takeover of health care” and “death panels” and so forth. TNR’s Jonathan Cohn pointed this out in a very succinct manner:

Perhaps the best testimonial for the Romney plan comes from its most recent critic. That would be Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, who on Tuesday told a congressional committee that his state wanted nothing to do with Massachusetts-style reforms. “We don’t want community rating. We don’t want extremely high mandatory standard benefits packages.”
Community rating, of course, is the practice of charging the same premium to different customers, even the diabetics and cancer survivors. “Extremely high mandatory standard benefits packages” in this particular case means insurance plans that cover what most of us would define as basic care, without gaps and loopholes that force the chronically and severely ill to pay exorbitant bills.
Insurance available to all. Benefits that include the services sick people need. Yeah, why would anybody want that?

Democrats really need to do a better job of focusing on these fundamentals. The whole idea of health reform is to make affordable insurance available to people the private markets have excluded. This idea is, in fact, demonstrably popular. When a Republican leader like Haley Barbour comes right out and says he prefers the status quo ante on health care even if it means no insurance or extremely costly insurance for basic coverage, he needs to be called on it early and often.

So the McClatchey newspapers and the web site The Iowa Republican held a focus group of conservative activists in the First In the Nation Caucus state and came away with some findings that won’t make headlines, but could greatly influence funders and other movers and shakers in national GOP politics. Its big conclusion: Palin and Romney are all but being written off already:

The group was unanimous, or near unanimous, on several topics. The most interesting conclusion is that most of them believe Sarah Palin is unelectable.
All but one of the focus group member felt Palin could not beat President Obama. That is a key factor in determining who they will support in the Iowa Caucus. The group concurred that Palin stepping down as Alaska’s governor midway through her term represents a major problem. Although Palin certainly had solid reasons for doing so, explaining that to voters will not be easy. The field appears it will be stacked with governors who finished more than one term, so Palin will have a difficult time matching her leadership abilities with theirs. Although most members of the focus group like Sarah Palin, they do not view her as “presidential”.
The attendees, including a diehard Mitt Romney supporter, also agreed that healthcare could doom Romney’s candidacy. He must come up with a credible explanation for his support and implementation of statewide healthcare mandates in Massachusetts. Romney has avoided talking about the issue so far. The group loathes Obamacare and feels Romney will have little chance of winning the GOP nomination unless he is able to capably distance himself from the similar plan he installed in Massachusetts. “Until he man’s up on healthcare, he moves way down the list,” said Ryan Frederick, 25, of Orient.

Beyond their less than positive views about Palin and Romney, this conservative focus group offered some additional thoughts on the 2012 field:

-Mike Huckabee will be the odds-on favorite to win the Iowa Caucus if he runs
-None of the likely 2012 candidates that did not run last time have made much headway. However, two members of the group have Mitch Daniels at or near the top of their list.
-Despite numerous visits to Iowa, former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty is not connecting with voters so far. Two of the attendees who have seen Pawlenty speak more than once feel he lacks the charisma necessary to win.
-Rick Santorum stands little chance of emerging victorious. “He is the Sam Brownback of the 2012 election,” said one attendee. “He will be everywhere, all over Iowa, visiting 300 times, and wind up having 12 people in Decatur County caucus for him.”

Ouchy, ouchy!
I’m drawing attention to this focus group because it appeared at a site most readers would probably never look at, and because it rather strikingly contrasts with the conventional wisdom that the folk who will have so much to say about the 2012 GOP presidential nomination are patiently waiting on the DC Establishment to present them with a savior like Haley Barbour or Chris Christie. Political activists in a place like Iowa view themselves as at least as sophisticated as the people who whisper to Politico every day, and more to the point, they are in a position to make their preferences matter.

Yesterday TNR’s Jonathan Chait took notice of a remarkable speech by Tim Pawlenty to a Tea Party Patriots conference, in which the probable presidential candidate indulged in some crowd-pleasing “rise up and take back our country” rhetoric. As Chait indicated, this sort of talk is too rarely analyzed for its underlying insurrectionary themes:

Why do I say this is inflammatory? Because conservatives are writing President Obama completely out of the American political tradition. Conservatives claim not only to have a superior vision for securing American prosperity, which is an understandable thing for a political movement to believe, but to represent the sole legitimate custodians of the Constitution. It follows from all this that Obama represents a unique threat to American freedom, and moreover — a point that is often made explicit — that the threat he poses requires a response that goes beyond normal politics. The whole metaphor of the Tea Party is to re-imagine conservatism as a proto-revolutionary guerrilla response to tyranny, rather than a movement that operates through normal political channels.

I couldn’t agree more. But what’s most remarkable to me about this incident is that it’s Tim Pawlenty stirring up the mob at the barricades. That this quintessentially bland and conventional pol is talking this way is an alarming indicator of the Republican zeitgeist. It’s like hearing someone drop an F-bomb on the Hallmark Channel–just not a good sign of civic health.

Gerald Seib of the Wall Street Journal articulates a reasonable-sounding but completely erroneous notion of the relationship between federal and state governments in a piece today glamorizing governors for wanting to turn down or turn back federal assistance:

For decades, the implicit deal between Washington and state capitals has been that the feds would offer chunks of cash, and in return would get commensurate influence over the states’ social policies. Now that flow of federal goodies has begun what figures to be a long-term decline, as the money Washington has available to pass around to the states is squeezed. Already the funds the federal government offered states as part of the 2009 economic stimulus package have nearly run out, and the budget-cutting that has begun in Washington is curtailing the other money available to dole out.
A loss of federal largess means a loss of influence in state capitals–particularly if states succeed in winning more autonomy in running the Medicaid health program for the poor, one area where money from Washington continues to grow.

Uh, no. In areas like health care the feds aren’t just handing out cash to “influence” what state governments do. Medicaid represents a collective decision that states will deal with the health care and (to a lesser extent) income maintenance needs of low-income families (plus some other categories of the needy like seniors seeking long-term care) with financial help from the federal government, just as the feds deal with the health care and income-maintenance needs of non-impoverished, non-disabled seniors through Medicare and Social Security.
Most recent federal administrations (including the current one) have exhibited great flexibility in allowing states to choose the precise means whereby the program’s goals are met. But that’s not the flexibiity some Republican governors want: they want the flexibility to reduce eligibility and coverage–i.e., to abandon some of the program’s goals.
And that’s not some sort of noble or interesting “experiment” conducted by “laboratories of democracy.” We already know how experimenting with letting the needy take care of themselves will turn out.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
As Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker tries to strip away the collective bargaining rights of public-sector unions, many liberals have latched onto the idea that his real goal is to dismantle the labor movement and the infrastructure of the Democratic Party. That is almost certainly one of his aims, but it’s not the whole story.
Walker also has an economic vision for his state–one which is common currency in the Republican Party today, but hitherto alien in a historically progressive, unionist Midwestern state like Wisconsin. It is based on a theory of economic growth that is not only anti-statist but aggressively pro-corporate: relentlessly focused on breaking the backs of unions; slashing worker compensation and benefits; and subsidizing businesses in order to attract capital from elsewhere and avoid its flight to even more benighted locales. Students of economic development will recognize it as the “smokestack-chasing” model of growth adopted by desperate developing countries around the world, which have attempted to use their low costs and poor living conditions as leverage in the global economy. And students of American economic history will recognize it as the “Moonlight and Magnolias” model of development, which is native to the Deep South.
Just take a look at the broader policy context of the steps Walker is taking in Wisconsin. While simultaneously battling unions and calling for budget cuts, he’s made the state’s revenue quandary much worse by seeking to cut corporate taxes and boost “economic development incentives” (another term for tax subsidies and other public concessions) to businesses considering operations in Wisconsin. This is philosophically identical to the approach taken by new South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who hired a union-busting attorney to head up the state labor department and touted the state’s anti-union environment as a key to its prospects, explaining, “We’re going to fight the unions and I needed a partner to help me do it.” Despite large budget shortfalls, she’s also proposed to eliminate corporate income taxes and pay for it by restoring a sales tax on food. The common thread here is the quasi-religious belief that reducing business costs for corporations is the Holy Grail of economic development, while all other public and private goods should be measured strictly by their impact on the corporate bottom line.
Even before the arrival of Haley, this was the default model of economic growth in Southern states for decades–as the capital-starved, low-wage region concluded that the way it could compete economically with other states was to emphasize its comparative advantages: low costs, a large pool of relatively poor workers, “right to work” laws that discouraged unionization, and a small appetite for environmental or any other sort of regulation. So, like an eager Third-World country, the South sought to attract capital by touting and accentuating these attributes, rather than trying to build Silicon Valleys or seek broad-based improvements in the quality of life. Only during the last several decades, when Southern leaders like Arkansas’s Bill Clinton and North Carolina’s Jim Hunt called for economic strategies that revolved around improving public education and spawning home-grown industries was the hold of the “Moonlight and Magnolias” approach partially broken. And now it’s back with a vengeance, but no longer just in the South.
Members of the modern Republican Party, and the “Tea Party movement” in particular, gravitate naturally toward models of growth that treat public programs and investments as mere obstacles in the path of dynamic corporate “job creators.” Many look South in admiration: Just last week, Minnesota Tea Party heroine and possible presidential candidate Michele Bachmann visited South Carolina and told an audience that she was happy to join them in a “GOP paradise.” And Scott Walker is hardly alone among Midwestern Republican governors in pursuing an agenda that combines business-tax cuts and other incentives with attacks on public investments and Southern-style hostility to unions. That’s also the agenda of Ohio’s John Kasich, and while Michigan’s Rick Snyder and Indiana’s Mitch Daniels have stepped back from efforts to assault collective bargaining rights, they are devotees of the idea that low taxes and deregulation are essential to economic growth, regardless of the impact on public services and investments.
Why is this model of economic growth so appealing to the Tea Party? For one, it tends to jibe very well with the Ayn Randian belief in producerism: the idea that “job creators”–business owners–are the only source of economic growth in society, and that everyone else–the workers, government employees, and the poor–are just “useless eaters” shackling those who exercise individual initiative. While many Democrats are baffled by Scott Walker’s attack on the unions–shouldn’t he be focused on jobs rather than eliminating workers’ protections? they ask–the fact is that today’s conservatives believe this is the right and only way to create jobs. The same delusion is present at the federal level, where House Republicans insist that deregulation and spending cuts are the only ways to create jobs. That doesn’t sound like a formula for job growth, unless you account for the conviction that rolling back the public sector, and in the process impoverishing the middle-class families that depend on its services, is essential to keep any costs low enough for corporations to work their magic. The fact that the “beneficiaries” who get jobs as a result of this corporate development model will have to work for lower wages and fewer benefits, and suffer from poor schools and a violated environment, is beside the point.
The Tea Party’s love of “Moonlight and Magnolias” economics also fits with its disturbing affinity for other Old South concepts, which developed during Dixie’s long era of resistance to unionization, “big government” meddling with economic and social life, limits on natural resources exploitation, and judicial tampering with property rights and state’s rights. Most remarkable is the spread of “Tenther” interposition and nullification theories, which hold that the states should have special sovereign rights to thwart federal policies in ways not considered legitimate since the eras of Reconstruction and the civil rights movement. These have been widely touted by conservatives across the country (notably 2010 Senate candidates Sharron Angle of Nevada and Joe Miller of Alaska) and even by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (who has spoken warmly of the “Repeal Amendment” that would let states collectively kill federal laws).
The problem with this Southern theory of growth is that it won’t work: Economic development experts usually deride “Moonlight and Magnolias” approaches to job creation, noting that they track the outmoded first and second “waves” of basic economic development theory–which emphasized crude economic races to the bottom–as opposed to third and fourth “waves” that focus on worker skills, quality of life, public-private partnerships, innovation, and sustainability. If Wisconsin and other states–not to mention the country as a whole–end up adopting these atavistic economic ideals, they will simply begin to resemble the dysfunctional Old South societies that spawned them in the first place.
So what is at stake in Wisconsin, and across the country, is not just the pay and benefits of public employees, or their collective bargaining rights, or the specific programs facing the budgetary knife. We are contesting whether Americans who are not “job creators,” by virtue of wealth, should be considered anything more than cannon fodder in an endless war between states–and countries–over who can attract the most capital by slashing the most regulations. In this sense, standing up to Scott Walker is a truly worthy fight.

At first glance, this response to Senate Democratic offers to kill several billion dollars in earmarks seems bland and formulaic:

“It sounds like Senate Democrats are making progress towards our goal of cutting government spending to help the private sector create jobs,” said Michael Steel, spokesman for House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio). “Hopefully, that means they will support the [bill] with spending cuts that we will pass next week, rather than shutting down the government.”

But stare at that first sentence for a minute, and ask yourself when, if ever, Republicans have made any sort of case that “cutting government spending” will “help the private sector create jobs.”
The government spending cuts at the state and local level that have been underway for two years now certainly haven’t done anything to “help the private sector create jobs.” Indeed, a new Commerce Department report suggests that state and local spending cuts had a lot to do with lowering GDP growth in the fourth quarter of 2010 from a projected 3.2 percent to 2.8 percent.
But what’s remarkable is that the “spending cuts equal jobs” claims of Republicans rarely involve any sort of coherent argument for this counter-intuitive assertion. Yes, there is a point at which public debt could get to levels that boost interest rates and thus dry up capital for private-sector investment. But that’s not happening at all right now. Maybe some government regulations add to business costs (often for very good reasons, if you value the environment, safe food, or safe working conditions, or fear another financial meltdown), but Republicans have made no effort at all to correlate its budget cut proposals with specific examples of alleged excessive regulation. Occasionally you hear conservatives suggest that the entire social safety net, and particularly unemployment compensation, has somehow made it impossible for employers to find anyone to fill job openings. But no serious person believes, particularly at a time of 9% employment, that the private sector is suffering from a labor shortage.
Democrats need to challenge the “spending cuts equal jobs” nonsense whenever it appears. If the Republican agenda is actually to cut spending on programs it doesn’t like for various ideological reasons (e.g., family planning), or to reduce government as an end in itself, then its advocates should be forced to say so, instead of pretending they are pursuing some sort of strategy for economic recovery, jobs or long-term growth. As New York Times economic columnist David Leonhardt explained the other day, that cuts against everything we know about recessions.