You’d have to say that the atmosphere on and immediately after November 4, 2008, was about as different as you can get from that of November 7, 2000, particularly for Democrats. The latter produced an enduring testament to the perfidious effects of malevolent and incompetent electoral administraton, while the former represented a reasonably decisive choice by an energized citizenry.
But according to a major new study by a consortium of university researchers, nearly as many people had trouble exercising their right to vote last year as in 2000:

Four million to five million voters did not cast a ballot in the 2008 presidential election because they encountered registration problems or failed to receive absentee ballots, which is roughly the same number of voters who encountered such problems in the 2000 election, according to an academic study to be presented to the Senate Rules Committee on Wednesday.
An additional two million to four million registered voters — or 1 percent to 2 percent of the eligible electorate — were “discouraged” from voting due to administrative hassles, like long lines and voter identification requirements, the study found.

The study did indicate that voting technology problems had significantly improved since 2000, mainly due to the abandonment of punch-card ballots and lever machines. But obstacles to the registration of eligible voters and the maintenance of accurate voter registration records may have actually gotten worse:

“Registration issues were for 2008 what machine problems were for the 2000 election,” said Stephen Ansolabehere, a political science professor at Harvard and the study’s lead author.
State and local election officials have had a difficult time keeping voter registration lists current as voters move, change names or become inactive. Updating voter profiles in these lists is estimated to cost about a third of local election offices’ budgets, the report said. Verifying the authenticity of voter registrations by checking the information with other databases is also a burden and has led to people being removed incorrectly.

Registration problems, of course, were a more hidden factor in past elections. Even in 2000, it’s reasonably clear that a screwed-up “purge” of supposed ex-felons by Florida election officials cost Al Gore as many votes as the vastly more famous ballot irregularities and aborted recounts.
Will the latest evidence of a broken electoral system finally motivate Congress to take effective steps to set true national standards for voter registration and other election procedures? Probably not, since memories of 2000 have faded. But the strong Democratic majorities in Congress mean that longstanding Republican efforts to restrict the franchise should no longer stand in the way of election reform, and the costs involved don’t look very daunting at a time of near-trillion-dollar legislative packages.
Let’s hope the new study lights a few fires of outrage in Washington, and that anyone who cares about fair elections works to fan the flames.

It’s reasonably safe to say that there are few vital issues on which the United States Supreme Court has been so consistently inconsistent of late than in the area of so-called “racial gerrymandering”–the consideration, in pursuit of federal voting rights laws, of racial data in considering congressional and state legislative districting schemes.
Yesterday’s 5-4 SCOTUS decision on a North Carolina case (Bartlett v. Strickland) continues that ignoble tradition of Supreme confusion. In a majority opinion written by confusion-meister Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Court held that the federal Voting Rights Act in no circumstances dictates adoption of districts in which minority voters represent less than a majority of the electorate. This directly affects the previous practice (particularly during the last decennial redistricting round) of promoting on VRA grounds so-called “crossover” or “minority-influence” districts where candidates favored by minority voters had a good chance of winning by putting together a biracial coalition composed of most minorities and some whites–typically in places where minority voters represented somewhere between 40% and 50% of the electorate.
This means the only VRA-required districts henceforth will be those where minority voters are in an actual majority. The effect, as Justice Souter observed in his dissent, may well be to encourage “packing” of minority voters into some districts, enabling the “bleaching” of others. And the consequences of that approach, as we learned during the 1991-92 redistricting cycle, is often to significantly reduce Democratic representation, and (in the South at least) virtually eliminate white Democratic legislators and Congressmen who rely on robust minority voting.
In other words, if you don’t want to get into all the legal complexities, yesterday’s decision could be bad news for the Democratic Party, and for the biracial coalitions that the Democratic Party so often depends on for success. Indeed, if, as expected, the election of an African-American president heralds a growing willingness of white voters to cross racial lines (as black voters, of course, have so often had to do), reducing those “crossover” districts could reduce the number of minority candidates in office–a rather perverse outcome given the overriding purpose of the Voting Rights Act.
It’s important not to overstate the immediate impact of this decision, however: it only affects redistricting decisions made in order to comply with the VRA ban on “dilution” of minority voting rights. States are perfectly free to draw up maps identical to those at issue in North Carolina, but not as a matter of VRA compliance (to get technical about it, the district in question ostensibly violated a state law against districts that subdivided counties; the Court simply ruled that the VRA didn’t apply, and thus didn’t override that state law). But states, particularly in the South, where Republicans control the redistricting process are quite likely to go back to the “packing” and “bleaching” practices of the recent past in response to this decision.
(Another complication is that the ruling only directly applied to lawsuits under the VRA, not to the “preclearance” requirement that most southern states and a few areas outside the South get Justice Department approval for redistricting maps. But it’s highly likely that a subsequent decision will extend the same logic to that process).
The Democratic-controlled Congress could, of course, moot the whole issue by amending the VRA to make it clear that “crossover” districts are favored; that’s exactly what Justice Ginsberg suggested it do in her own dissent in Bartlett. But Kennedy’s opinion hinted that such a construction of minority voting rights might raise constitutional problems under the Equal Protection Clause (another irony, given the origins of that Clause as a basis for protecting African-American rights).
In the end, the only sure remedy for Bartlett is for Democrats to win as many governorships and legislative chambers as possible in 2010, particularly in states with large minority populations.

There have been some amusing reports lately about earmark-bashing Republicans in Congress themselves securing earmarks. But they represent something more important than just an example of GOP hypocrisy producing a “gotcha” moment for Democrats.
Mark Schmitt gets at the broader issues in a fine TAPPED post today:

Republicans are far more dependent than Democrats on their ability to take some credit for federally funded projects. In the world with earmarks, Lindsay Graham is able to stand against the president on stimulus, on the budget, on Iraq, on health care. And then he’s able to go home, cut a ribbon, get his picture in the paper, and tell everyone that he delivered the money for the new Myrtle Beach Convention Center.
But in a world without earmarks, what does Lindsay Graham bring home? Just words, and great stories about how he fought bravely against health care and economic stimulus.

Schmitt goes on to describe earmarks as an example of what he calls congressional “small ball,” something Members of Congress can do to distinguish themselves in an atmosphere where they have no real influence over big policy decisions, which are, in any event, largely resolved on party-line votes. And as he suggests, Republicans who are in the minority in particular need “small ball” accomplishments to give themselves something positive to talk about in their re-election campaigns, aside from their negative ranting against godless big-government liberals. Indeed, the implicit message a lot of Republican pols send to voters is: “I hate government and government programs just like you do, but by God, until we get rid of them, I’m going to make sure we get our piece of the pie.”
But I think the Republican “small ball” habit goes well beyond earmarks, and when Republicans are actually in power at any level of government, has an impact that is by no means “small.”
One example common at the state level, particularly in the South, is the strong tendency of Republican (and alas, some Democratic) governors to spend a lot of time throwing taxpayer dollars into “megadeals” to secure large industrial investments, most famously foreign auto plants. Such activities sure seem like active governing; they have the same kind of tangible political payoff as earmarks; and moreoever, they can be sold to conservative voters as giving the private sector back the tax payments and control they ought to have anyway. That they also tend to directly and indirectly undermine the kind of “liberal” public investments and policies that are most helpful for long-range economic development strategies is of no concern to most Republican politicians, if they don’t consider it an added bonus. As with those congressional pols who vote against every budget, every program, and every appropriations bill while raking off earmarks, conservative leaders who give away the state revenue base for years to come in order to “deliver jobs” are the position of deploring “pork” while living off the bacon.
Moreover, at an even deeper level, conservative ideology in a competitive political environment almost invariably produces this sort of ostensibly self-contradictory behavior, and with it a great deal of predictable corruption. It’s pretty simple, really: if you don’t believe in the missions of government programs and agencies, but don’t have the guts or the ability to get rid of them altogether, then what do you do with them? Unless you have an unusual degree of integrity, you turn them into patronage and vote-buying systems.
That was a big part of the story of the Bush-DeLay Era of Republican-dominated politics in this decade, and also a source of great confusion in interpreting it. A lot of progressives wasted time arguing about whether it was “ideology” or “incompetence” that caused the disasters of this era. It was both, because the ideology encouraged the incompetence and corruption, from New Orleans to Baghdad and in every corner of Washington. And a lot of conservatives have deluded themselves that Bush and company were “moderates” or “liberals,” when they were really just conservatives who never convinced the public to support massive reductions in government, and then convinced themselves that using government to build a political machine was the next best thing.
To put it another way, when you fundamentally think government spending is a waste of money, then when you are given power over it, it’s not that surprising that you do your best to waste it for your own political benefit, rationalizing the hypocrisy as the shortest path available to that great gettin’ up morning when you have total power and can abolish all those terrible programs once and for all.
Giving conservatives total power would undoubtedly be a horrible disaster for this country. But it’s important to understand that giving them some power, or a lot of power that is limited by the inherent unpopularity of their ultimate goals, is going to help produce precisely the kind of wasteful and corrupt government they claim to deplore. And yes, they’ll protest it all the way to the next earmark announcement or auto plant ground-breaking.

Republican “renewal” strategist Patrick Ruffini of The Next Right published a very revealing post late last night showing that even the most open and innovative of GOP tacticians don’t really favor an open and innovative discussion of the conservative movement’s ideological problems.
Reacting to the flak, some of it from fellow-Republicans, taken by Rush Limbaugh, Michael Steele and Bobby Jindal over the last couple weeks, Ruffini seems to want to designate all three as “made men” whom GOPers are not allowed to criticize. More generally, and dangerously, he wants to make evaluation of the words and deeds of fellow-Republicans strictly contingent on each person’s utility–not, you know, stuff like facts and truth:

Conservatives need to decide who we want to see succeed and who we want to see fail. We then need to calibrate our reactions to the inevitable missteps from either camp accordingly. If someone we want to succeed comes under attack, we hold our fire and close ranks — unless it’s clear they’ve become a long-term liability. If it’s someone we want to see fail — like Jim Bunning — we unload until they get off the stage.

Aside from the coldly instrumental nature of this judgement about wheat and chaff, Ruffini is engaging in some not-very-hidden circular reasoning about who “we want to succeed.” Is Bobby Jindal useful because he’s a smart young GOP politician? Or is he useful because he’s a smart young GOP politician with a strongly ideological background who’s just proven, in his quasi-idiotic response to Barack Obama’s address to Congress, that he’ll subordinate smart politics to the overriding imperative of Being a Real Conservative who will echo the True Faith like a cicada?
Now I know that some folks in the progressive netroots tend to similarly flirt with the feeling that politics is all about Teams and Noise, with not much room for objective reality, and the Team that makes the most Noise wins. Under that rather hammer-headed approach, what you most want to avoid is having anybody on Your Team making discordant Noises. Still, I think the pride in representing what we have often called the Reality-Based Community has kept nearly all progressives from a full surrender of their higher brain functions when it comes to political judgments.
But you will notice something glaring about Ruffini’s hard line against Republican self-criticism: it involves a very blatant double standard. For all the time Rush Limbaugh spends demonizing Barack Obama and Godless Liberals generally, what makes him distinctive is his activity as a commissar policing ideological conformity among fellow-Republicans. So the only rule against GOP self-criticism that Ruffini is really interested in enforcing is one against “moderates” or “centrists” or “reformers” who buck the pre-established party line. To adapt the old Popular Front slogan, there are “pas d’enemi a droite.,” which happens to reinforce the perpetual supremacy of the hard-core ideologues.
I hope progressives reflect on Ruffini’s “thinking” on this subject, and treat it as an object-lesson in the perils of the perennial temptation to idolize or demonize people on “Our Team” not in terms of the Democratic Party’s general principles and strategic needs, but in the pursuit of ideological conformity and “Noise.” Inevitably, this way lies suppression of open discussion and elevates the least thoughtful in our ranks to the status of “made men” who are happy to open up the guns on heretics but cannot be touched themselves.

There’s an important point that has largely been missed (by myself as well) in the debate over Obama’s approach to the budget. Folks like David Brooks (who did a partial recantation today, but not on the issue I am discussing right now), not to mention the entire Republican Party, have been kvetching that Obama is using the economic crisis to sneak all sorts of big-government, socialist ideas into law, instead of just dealing with the economic crisis in a direct and responsible way. My own response to Brooks argued that you can’t divorce the economy from health care and energy costs, or from efforts to restore the progressivility of the tax code to more or less where it was before George W. Bush went on his upper-end tax cut crusade.
But there’s a bigger point to be made: you can’t “do the budget” without making policy choices. If you try to, by simply tinkering with funding levels for this or that, you are making policy choices in favor of the status quo, which in today’s case often means policy choices made by a Republican president and Congress during the period from 2001-2007.
If you want a precedent for policy-based budgeting, look no further than Republican idol Ronald Reagan, whose famous 1981 budget was loaded with all sorts of ideological freight. As Jonathan Chait pointed out yesterday:

Obama is trying to put his imprint on federal policy. I think he’s right to do so. Ronald Reagan governed the country with little worry about its fiscal health. His goal was tilt the structure of the tax code and federal outlays so that conservatives would have an advantage when the bill came due. It worked: when the Democrats recaptured the White House, they mostly played janitor, cleaning up the Republican mess. Not only did Democrats mosty fail to impose their priorities to anything like the degree Republicans had, voters penalized them in 1994 for imposing fiscal pain. And then, when Republicans regained the presidency, they returned to the Reagan strategy.

Jon’s talking about Reagan’s mega-strategy, but highly significant policy decisions were weaved throughout Reagan’s budget. One very good example, which I happened to see up close as a lobbyist for the State of Georgia, was an effort by Reagan to produce Medicaid savings by “capping” the federal share of costs for that federal-state program. In the administration’s one significant budget defeat, the House substituted a provision that produced the same short-term savings by reducing state Medicaid expenditures. The difference was that Reagan and his budget director, David Stockman did not achieve a permanent shift in the share of Medicaid costs to the states, which was part of a broader effort to ultimately devolve both Medicaid and AFDC (a.k.a., “welfare”) to the states.
The point is simply that you can’t divorce the numbers from the policies that produce them. And totally aside from your assessment of various Obama policies, expecting him to fail to pursue them in the context of a comprehensive budget bill makes no sense.

So exactly how angry are wealthy people becoming about the “socialistic” threat of a return to the tax policies of the bad old days of the 1990s? Listen to one of their more fervent advocates, via the Washington Independent’s David Weigel:

Rep. John Campbell (R-Calif.), who gives his departing interns copies of Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged,” told me today that the response to President Obama’s economic policies reminded him of what happened in the 51-year-old novel.
“People are starting to feel like we’re living through the scenario that happened in ‘Atlas Shrugged,’” said Campbell. “The achievers, the people who create all the things that benefit rest of us, are going on strike. I’m seeing, at a small level, a kind of protest from the people who create jobs, the people who create wealth, who are pulling back from their ambitions because they see how they’ll be punished for them.”

As anyone who’s read Rand’s mammoth and monomaniacal novel can tell you, the heroes of Atlas Shrugged are the capitalists who literally go on strike, bringing society to its knees by withholding their talents. Campbell seems to be warning us that today’s rich are getting tired of the terrible “punishment” they are enduring from the greedy parasites around them. We may soon be denied the life-giving talents of stock traders, bankers, mortgage brokers, strip-mall developers, and a whole host of other creative people who are yoked to the top tax bracket. They’ve done nothing wrong, but thanks to looting by the poor, the economy’s collapsed, and the best among us are being asked to pay.
I don’t know if John Campbell’s bought the whole Objectivist package from reading Rand, and privately considers all the nice churches in his California district evil temples of life-hating mysticism and theft. But like Rick Santelli, Cambell’s an authentic apostle of the angry overclass that’s sick of being betrayed by “losers” and then expected to help keep the scum alive.
Here’s hoping that Rep. Campbell’s “strike” begins no later than the end of his current term in the House.

The ever-vigilant Spencer Ackerman alerts us today in the Washington Independent that the President today issued a memorandum ordering the Office of Management and Budget and executive agencies to “restrict no-bid contracts; to rein in outsourcing of ‘inherently governmental activities’; and to, if necessary, cancel wasteful contracts outright.”
Ackerman notes in particular that Obama focuses on the Defense Department:

[Obama called for] processes for ongoing review of, existing contracts in order to identify contracts that are wasteful, inefficient, or not otherwise likely to meet the agency’s needs, and to formulate appropriate corrective action in a timely manner. Such corrective action may include modifying or canceling such contracts in a manner and to the extent consistent with applicable laws, regulations, and policy.

Cost overruns are, of course, endemic at DoD. Thus, says Ackerman:

If I was a lobbyist for Lockheed or Boeing, I’d be dialing my contacts in the Pentagon and the Hill to figure out what the prospective damage to my company was. And then I’d come up with a strategy to fight this forthcoming Office of Management and Budget review.

The announcement of a new general approach to government contractors raises as many questions as it answers. It’s not always obvious what constitutes “inherently governmental activities,” and contracting sometimes saves a lot of money without corruption. Often the big question isn’t “public versus private,” but how much genuine competition exists among potential providers of services or materials.
But after many years of pro-privatization assumptions in public service delivery at every level of government, it is time to deal with these questions upfront. So Obama’s memo can and should become the beginning of a very big debate.

I doubt there’s a Democrat much of anywhere who hasn’t enjoyed the contretemps between RNC chairman Michael Steele and Rush Limbaugh, which ultimately produced an apology by The Chairman for suggesting that Rush isn’t exactly a serious and constructive figure in American politics. It’s always fun to observe the godlike status assigned by conservatives to a man considered despicable by, well, pretty much everybody who doesn’t think he’s godlike.
But the brouhaha is also raising broader questions about Steele, who occupies a singular niche in a Republican Party that doesn’t have any obvious set of consensus leaders this side of Limbaugh.
From his new perch at the DC Examiner, veteran conservative reporter Byron York suggests today that Steele’s drawing a lot of behind-the-scenes flack for spending most of his time making questionably effective TV appearances while a host of key positions at the RNC remain empty:

Shortly after his January 30 victory in the chairman’s race, Steele fired virtually everyone at the RNC — a move many outsiders applauded after the party’s back-to-back losses in 2006 and 2008. But Steele has yet to replace many of the people he sacked. Now, as Steele enters his second month in the chairman’s office, there is no chief of staff for the RNC. There is no political director. There is no finance director. There is no communications director. Many lesser positions remain empty as well.
“I think it’s been a disaster of a first month,” says one Republican who has served on Capitol Hill and the RNC. “He needs to disappear for 60 days, go and staff the building, put his personal energy into making sure he has the people he wants, and go from there. That’s what people are hoping he will do.”
“It’s not good,” says another GOP politico. “People feel that it’s been very erratic at a time when we really need some sort of stabilizing force.”

Over at National Review Online, Jim Geraghty gives a soapbox to an unnamed “Steele ally” who shares the sentiments reported by York, and also to Steele aide Kurt Anderson, who pretty much dismisses and and all criticism as emanating from job-seekers and hacks. Real Republicans, suggests Anderson, dig Steele deeply. This line of argument led a correspondent of Geraghty’s to respond:

What the heck is this guy smoking? It’s one thing to screw up. It’s another to screw up and insist “people love me”. I see nothing but dismay from Steele supporters on the blogs.”

I personally have no idea whether Steele is a comically inept bozo or just the temporary victim of unrealistic expectations among people in dire need of some leadership. But it’s never a particularly good sign when a national party chairman has to spend this much time explaining himself.