Yesterday when trolling regional newspaper websites, I ran across an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution with this depressingly familiar intro:

State government incentives offered to lure technology company NCR to Georgia are worth at least $96 million, according to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis. That is $36 million more than the state estimated when the deal was announced last week.
The $96 million tally does not include another part of the incentive package, a state grant. Officials confirmed late last week that Georgia has offered the grant but refused to say how much money is involved.

Everything about those two graphs is typical of the game of mega-project competition among the states, where taxpayer subsidies of corporations always seem to creep ever upward as time goes by, and with state officials happy to boast about the payoff (in this case, 2,120 jobs split between two locations) for their pinstriped safaris, but less forthcoming about the costs.
The NCR deal was significant because it was the first big Georgia corporate giveaway under a new law designed to cut special deals for big projects–the famous “mega-deals” that get headlines and provide rich press conference opportunities for pols (usually a trifecta of investment announcements, ground-breakings and ribbon-cuttings where the same relative handful of jobs gets feted repeatedly). As the AJC story noted::

Georgia offered the incentives at a time when the state is desperately in need of cash as the recession depresses tax revenues. But economic development experts said it would have been virtually impossible to attract a major employer without a lucrative package of incentives.

Anyone familiar with this issue knows, of course, that the kind of “economic development experts” who perpetually justify big corporate subsidies are often the very people who are paid to put them together, working for elected officials who don’t much think corporations should have to pay taxes in the first place.
The sad thing is that Georgia used to be very proud of refusing to engage in race-to-the-bottom competitions to thrown public money at high-visibility corporate relocation projects. When I was working there in the 1980s, state officials scoffed at our neighbors in Alabama, Tennessee and South Carolina for trading years and years of revenues for foreign-owned auto plants whose owners demanded massive concessions in multi-state negotiations. Indeed, the state’s tradition of resisting special-interest tax breaks was symbolized by a sales tax exemption for purchases of crab bait by commercial fishermen–which was famous because it was the only such exemption that had ever gotten through the state fiscal watchdogs in the General Assembly.
Those days are long gone. The NCR deal almost looks efficient compared to the $410 million package put together by Georgia in 2006 to get a 2,500-job plant built along the Alabama border (and probably employing many Alabama taxpayers) by Kia.
Worse yet, you get the sense that economic-development-via-corporate-subsidies–a practice so ancient and notorious in the South that opposing it was a primary impetus for the original Populist movement–is getting less controversial, even, or perhaps especially, at a time when state government officials are cutting essential services to balance their books.
A separate AJC article yesterday on the NCR deal ought to come with a Raiders of the Lost Ark sound-track to illustrate its tale of swashbuckling GA bureaucrats outpandering those in Ohio, NCR’s previous home. Wonder how it would all come across if the actual costs had to be reflected: “Yessir, we’ll ante up 5,000 kids losing health insurance, and raise you a freeze in school construction. And have we mentioned we don’t like unions around here?”
Check out this 2007 article by John Sugg in the libertarian magazine Reason for a good if intermittently nauseating account of the use of corporate subsidies as a development tool in the South. He managed to find a number of “economic development experts” who don’t think these giveaways pay for themselves, or are actually necessary for development, or are really much more than an especially perverse form of public financing for the campaigns of the politicians who sign the deals and take the credit.

There’s a new Democracy Corps poll out that focuses on the relative success or failure of recent Republican efforts to rough up President Obama. The rough-stuff is going over well with conservative Republicans, but not with much of anybody else:

[T]wo of the most high-profile debates in Washington could damage the GOP further by isolating the party from the vast middle of the electorate as Obama’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court receives better than two-to-one backing, even after the initial onslaught of Republican attacks against the nominee, and former Vice President Dick Cheney’s popularity falls to an all-time low….
Cheney is a deeply divisive figure, popular only with the conservative base of the Republican Party but unpopular with everyone else, including independents (among whom he has net -26 favorability rating) and moderate Republicans. In fact, President Obama (+5) is more popular with moderate Republicans than Cheney (-9). Moreover, by a three-to-one margin (66 to 23 percent) likely voters reject Cheney’s recent statement that he would prefer to see Rush Limbaugh, rather than Colin Powell, set the direction of the GOP. Again, only conservative Republicans side with Cheney, while Democrats, independents and moderate Republicans all strongly prefer Powell….
Sotomayor’s nomination has created a similar dynamic. By a more than two-to-one margin (56 to 27 percent) likely voters approve of the nomination. This level of support is similar to that enjoyed by John Roberts, and exceeds those held by Harriet Miers and Samuel Alito, when they were nominated to the Court in 2005. More important, once again the base of the Republican Party finds itself at odds with the rest of the electorate. While conservative Republicans strongly disapprove of her nomination, Sotomayor earns at least plurality support from moderate Republicans, independents and Democrats.

If you look at the crosstabs for the poll, which break out moderate/conservative Democrats and moderate/liberal Republicans, the risk of self-isolation by conservative Republicans becomes even more apparent. Democrats are largely sticking together with Obama, and the more the GOP adopts attack-dog ideological and personal attacks on the President (and on “RINOs” like Colin Powell), the less Republicans stick together in opposition.

In a post yesterday, I noted in passing that one recent analysis suggested that Florida has been the state hit hardest by the recession. That was based on a chart from the Wall Street Journal showing that the state was in the bottom five in terms of changes in GDP, jobs and housing prices during 2008.
But that’s just one measurement, obviously, and the impact of hard times also can various enormously within a single state. So I thought it was worth mentioning today that a look (also from the WSJ) at current (as of April, at least) unemployment rates for the nation’s metro areas shows some startling variations and concentrations.
On the latter front, thirteen MSAs have unemployment rates over 15%. Nine are in California, mostly in central CA. On the other end of the spectrum, of six MSAs located entirely within Iowa, five have unemployment rates under 5%. Getting back to Florida, of its twenty MSAs, exactly half have unemployment rates over 10%, and half don’t.
The chart’s worth staring at for a while as background for political developments. We are definitely in a national recession. But at least in terms of unemployment, the pain has not been spread equally.

The midterm elections of 2010 are still seventeen months away, but in many states, the cycle’s starting early, in part, no doubt, because everyone is expecting a difficult environment for fundraising.
In my home state of Georgia, the 2010 gubernatorial contest has been actively underway for months, and has been enlivened by two big events that have significantly changed the field. Lt. Governor Casey Cagle, the early frontrunner on the GOP side, suddenly withdrew from the governor’s race in April, citing health issues (he is, however, running for re-election). That decision lured U.S. Rep. Nathan Deal, who shares a geographical base with Cagle, into the GOP field, which already featured two statewide elected officials, Secretary of State Karen Handel (a protege of term-limited incumbent Gov. Sonny Perdue) and Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine.
Then just yesterday, former Gov. Roy Barnes, who lost to Perdue in 2002 in a major upset, jumped into the race on the Democratic side. The field already includes Attorney General Thurbert Baker, former Secretary of State and Adjutant General David Poythress, and state House Democratic leader Dubose Porter. Barnes is the Big Dog of Georgia Democratic politics, and was immediately regarded as the front-runner, even getting a big shout-out from the Democratic Governors Association as though he were the putative nominee. It wouldn’t be a big surprise if one or more of Barnes’ rivals decides to give the contest a pass. Early polling by DKos/R2K in April showed Barnes running ahead of Handel and just behind Oxendine.
Though Georgia has leaned decisively Republican in recent cycles, the recession (which has hit the state very hard), infighting among Republicans, and significant cutbacks in state services and investments, have all given Democrats hope that they can stage a comeback in 2010. Indeed, Georgia may become one of many states where there will be an interesting test about which party gets the blame for bad times: the governing party in Washington, or the incumbent party closer to home.
The same could be true of Florida, which at least one recent analysis called the hardest-hit of all the states, thanks to a massive decline in home prices. Though Obama carried the state last year, Republicans have been regularly winning most other elections of late; gubernatorial candidate Alex Sink, the state CFO, is the only Democratic statewide elected official other than U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, and Republicans control both state legislative chambers.
Sink enjoys a cleared field for the gubernatorial nomination, and Florida Democrats are enthusiastic about her candidacy (it doesn’t hurt that her husband is 2002 gubernatorial nominee Bill McBride, a wealthy trial lawyer). Her almost certain opponent, Attorney General Bill McCollum, has lost two Senate bids since 2000, and he will also have to deal with possible fallout from a bitter, ideologically-driven Senate primary between Gov. Charlie Crist and former FL House Speaker Marco Rubio. Crist will likely win that primary, but hard-core conservatives could decide to sit on their hands on General Election Day. And since Republicans now control state government, the perennial state budget crisis will probably be held to their account by many voters.
Georgia and Florida are two states where Democrats often express optimism early in cycles, only to experience the hard realities of minority status when voting draws near. This is one cycle where Democrats have more realistic grounds for an optimism that could extend right through to election day.

So world traveler Newt Gingrich, apparently polishing the timber of his presidential ambitions, has stopped tweeting and started backtracking. In a column for the movement-conservative journal Human Events, Gingrich has walked back his Twitter references to Sonia Sotomayor as a “Latina woman racist” and is now blasting her in terms that don’t use the “R” word, but pretty much say the same thing. Check out Newt’s wisdom, after extensive writing about Sotomayor’s terrible offense to white people in the Ricci case involving New Haven firefighters:

Has President Obama nominated a conventionally liberal judge to a lifetime tenure on our highest court? Or a radical liberal activist who will cast aside the rule of law in favor of the narrow, divisive politics of race and gender identity?

So we’re not talking about a big shift in Gingrich’s positions on Sotomayor. He’s just realized that it’s stupid and counterproductive to explicitly call her a “racist;” why use a screaming siren when a dog whistle will do? And other Republicans helped him reach that conclusion, as CNN’s Gloria Borger explains:

Republican senators trying to figure out a way to mount real questions about her judicial record were appalled. One Senate Republican told me that the GOP caucus grew increasingly furious at Gingrich’s grandstanding.
“People are really angry,” the senator says. “Newt and Rush have simply made it far more difficult for Republicans to raise the legitimate issues. They’re so quick to throw the word racist around, they look ugly, and make us look the same way.”
And ugly is not a good place to be when you’ve just resoundingly lost an election — with less than one-third of the Hispanic vote. If it stays at that level, Republicans will have a hard time winning elections in key red states with growing Hispanic populations.

So with Rush Limbaugh being pretty much beyond the direct influence of Beltway Republicans, it’s not that surprising that Newt, who used to run one chamber of Congress, and who wants to be the next President of the United States, decided to “moderate” his language about Sotomayor, sorta kinda. No telling which way the wind will next blow for Republicans on this nomination, but I wouldn”t count on much more “moderation,” even if it’s defined by such highly technical retreats from demagoguery as Newt’s.

For the serious political junkie, off-year gubernatorial elections are the proverbial oasis in the desert: critical sustenance between the Big Events of even-year national contests for president and Congress. In the chattering classes, unsurprisingly, there’s a strong tendency to treat these state elections as national bellwethers or referenda on the party in power in Washington. That tendency is particularly strong with respect to the two states holding gubernatorial elections this year, New Jersey and Virginia, since the party controlling the White House hasn’t won a governorship in either state in the last twenty years.
Now maybe it’s because I have a background in state politics and government, but I’m very dubious about the proposition that voters in any particular place vote the way they do, not in order to choose their state elected officials, but instead in order to educate and entertain people in the other 49 states, or to send smoke signals to Washington. And in fact, I have a long post up over at 538.com questioning the predictive value of the “White-House-backlash” theory about New Jersey and Virginia, concluding that it’s probably not very strong.
But still, there will be an enormous amount of national attention paid to the gubernatorial races this year, and it currently looks like both will be highly competitive.
Yesterday New Jersey Republicans chose the candidate that national Republicans strongly favored, former U.S. Attorney Chris Christie, as the nominee to face incumbent Democratic Governor Jon Corzine. Christie won a low-turnout primary by 55-42 over a “movement conservative” candidate, Steve Lonegan, and has consistently led Corzine in the polls by a significant but not large margin. He has one of those corruption-fighting “reform” resumes that Republicans love in an anti-incumbent atmosphere, particularly in a Democratic-leaning state like New Jersey where most of the issues don’t really favor them. But Corzine is, as you may know, very rich, and has yet to lose an election; he is already tying Christie to the less-than-popular national GOP. There’s also a recent history in New Jersey of Democrats seeming to get all the breaks down the stretch in competitive contests. Former Gov. Christie Whitman is the only GOPer to win a gubernatorial or Senate race there since the Reagan administration.
Next week Virginia Democrats will hold a gubernatorial primary, and this one is looking to be a barnburner involving state senator Creigh Deeds, former DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe, and former state rep. Brian Moran. Moran led in early polls, but a couple of months ago, McAuliffe, who raised more cash than his rivals combined, surged into what looked like an insurmountable lead. Just in the last week, several polls have come out showing a very close three-way race: SurveyUSA still had McAuliffe ahead; PPP had Deeds (who was recent endorsed by theWashington Post) surging in to the lead, and one (from GQR for Moran’s campaign) had Moran back up.
There’s still a week to go, with the undecided vote still pretty high, and lots of television ads still to run. Moreover, since a low turnout is expected, the campaigns’ ground game will be important. Almost anything could happen. All three Democrats trail Republican Attorney General Bob McDonnell in the polls. But recent demographic trends are favorable to Democrats, and McDonnell has some pretty wacky friends in the Religious Right with whom swing voters, particularly in vote-rich NoVa, may not be comfortable.
So political junkie or not, you should stay tuned to these two contests. It could be a wild ride to November. And if Democrats win either of these races, we can finally lay to rest the axiom that the party controlling the White House
is doomed to defeat in off-year elections in New Jersey and Virginia.

In a move that places yet another dent in conservative claims that Barack Obama is a hyper-partisan extremist who was lying about bipartisanship during the campaign, the President announced today that he was tapping New York Republican congressman John McHugh to serve as Secretary of the Army. With two other GOPers in his Cabinet (Gates and LaHood), and another recently agreeing to become Ambassador to China (Huntsman), you have to start wondering why so many prominent Republicans are agreeing to join the administration of this Democrat Socialist.
Political junkies are already speculating about the special election to fill McHugh’s House seat; his historically Republican district was carried comfortably by Obama last year.
But in the meantime, it is interesting that Obama is outdoing most of his predecessors in reaching out to the opposition party for high appointments, inside and outside the Cabinet.
Bush 43 had his one token Democrat, Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta (he publicly touted Sen. John Breaux as his personal favorite for Energy Secretary, but that’s probably because he wanted to flatter him for his help in the Senate).
Clinton had Defense Secretary Bill Cohen, and another GOPer, David Gergen, served as his chief of staff for a while.
Bush 41 had no prominent Democrats in his administration. Reagan had a very nominal Democrat, arch-conservative Bill Bennett, as Education Secretary, and another, Jeane Kirkpatrick, as UN ambassador. Carter had a sort-of Republican, Energy Secretary Jim Schlesinger. I won’t go through the whole modern list, but Ford had one Democrat in his Cabinet, as did Nixon (the soon-to-be Republican John Connally); Kennedy and Johnson had two, though one, Defense Secretary Robert McNamera was very nominally Republican.
Democrats nervous about Obama’s Republicans at the Pentagon should remember that FDR picked Republicans for both of his military cabinet positions, Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox. And actually, two other famously progressive figures, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes and Agriculture Secretary (and later vice-president) Henry Wallace, were nominally Republican upon joining Roosevelt’s Cabinet, though both endorsed FDR in 1932.
What makes Obama’s GOP appointments significant is that they are occurring in an era of extraordinary partisan and ideological polarization; none of his Republicans have been nominal types or endorsed his candidacy last year; one of them, Jon Huntsman, was reportedly getting ready to run against Obama in 2012.
Nobody knows, of course, whether any of these appointees will come out of the Obama administration as Republicans after listening to their party-mates apply every term of abuse in the English language to their boss and their administration’s policies day in and day out so long as they serve. If any of them do flip, it will serve as a nice symbol of Obama’s efforts to build a majority coalition on the foundation of GOP ruins.

The vicious circle in which the Republican Party currently finds itself is nicely illustrated by a new survey out from Gallup that looks at the ethnic composition of self-identified Democrats, Republicans and Independents. Democrats are Independents are quite diverse: 36% of Democrats and 27% of indies are Hispanic, African-American or from some other non-white ethnic groups. The number for Republicans is 11%. And of the 89% of Republicans who are non-Hispanic whites, fully 63% self-identify as conservatives. Furthermore, about half of Republicans are non-Hispanic whites who attend church weekly or more (that category represents 25% of indies and 20% of Democrats).
Demography isn’t always destiny in politics, but it matters, and Republicans simply don’t look like the fastest growing categories of the U.S. population. The Gallup survey doesn’t get into age, but a recent Pew poll showed under-30 voters splitting 58-33 (with leaners) in favor of Democrats.
So it isn’t terribly surprising that the faces and voices most associated with the national Republican Party belong to Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich: old, white conservative men. And whether it’s a matter of supply or demand, it’s natural that the latter two of these gentlemen have come to specialize in a sort of white identity politics, representing the smoldering resentment of some white folks–particularly men–towards those uppity people of color with their strange cultures.
Former Republican congressman Tom Davis made an interesting comment recently about the psychology of his party’s base that does a lot to explain its trajectory towards self-isolation: “I think the grass roots right now is in an ornery mood — ‘we are who we are.'”
That’s not a group of people who are terribly interested in greater diversity, demographically or ideologically. And in the long run, the more they insist on being “who we are,” the less anyone else will consider joining them.