It’s a familiar story by now that a lot of the Republican Senators who led the charge to kill the Big Three Automaker loan package last week happen to represent states with large, non-unionized, foreign-owned auto plants.
But there’s another aspect to this story that’s not very well known outside the South: these foreign-owned auto plants have vastly benefitted from public subsidies as states have competed fiercely to make headlines by landing them.
Mike Lillis provides the pertinent facts in a very useful Washington Independent piece today:

Shelby’s Alabama, for example, secured construction of a Mercedes-Benz plant in 1993 by offering $253 million in state and local tax breaks, worker training and land improvement. For Honda, the state’s sweetener surrounding a 1999 deal to build a mini-van plant was $158 million in similar perks, adding $90 million in enticements when the company expanded the plant three years later. A 2001 deal with Toyota left the company with $29 million in taxpayer gifts.
Alabama is hardly alone. Corker’s Tennessee recently lured Volkswagen to build a manufacturing plant in Chattanooga, offering the German automaker tax breaks, training and land preparation that could total $577 million. In 2005, the state inspired Nissan to relocate its headquarters from southern California by offering $197 million in incentives, including $20 million in utility savings.
In 1992, South Carolina snagged a BMW plant for $150 million in giveaways. In Mississippi in 2003, Nissan was lured with $363 million. In Georgia, a still-under-construction Kia plant received breaks estimated to be $415 million. The list goes on.

If you will allow me a brief tirade based on my own experience in community and economic development work in Georgia back in the 1980s and early 1990s, this is an old, sad story in the South. In dealing with chronic pockets of poverty and unemployment, southern political leaders have eternally faced a choice between long-range efforts to improve educational levels and “quality of life” measurements to attract high-end jobs and stimulate home-grown entrepreneurship, OR short-term efforts to market the region’s weaknesses (cheap labor, exploitable natural resources, hostility to unions and regulation) to individual investors while offering them subsidies that further weaken the public sector. The battle over these two basic strategies has raged across the region for decades, and I’m unhappy to report that the moolight-and-magnolias, come-exploit-us point of view has largely prevailed, particularly, though not exclusively, in states dominated by Republicans.
There’s always been a beggar-thy-neighbor aspect to the corporate welfare game in auto plants, as wily owners up the ante for each plant location or relocation decision. But it’s become acutely evident in the debate over federal subsidies for the Big Three.
But the real outrage for me isn’t so much the hypocrisy of southern Republicans who lead cheers for the despoilation of state treasuries and the abandonment of public priorities in the pursuit of foreign auto plants, even as they self-righteously oppose emergency aid for Detroit. It’s the damage the South has done to itself by choosing the low and fundamentally self-loathing road to economic development.

In the wake of the narrow passage of the anti-gay-marriage Proposition 8 in California, there was a lot of unhappy talk about African-American Obama voters making the difference. But a recent survey by the Public Policy Institute of California looks at the results from various optics, and concludes that educational and income levels, and age, were the most important variables in determining the vote.
Indeed, there’s an extraordinarily strong correlation on these factors. Those with a high school education or less favored Prop 8 by a 69-31 margin; those with a college degree opposed it 57-43; and those with some college but no degree supported it 57-43. It’s the same story on income: those earning under $40,000 supported Prop 8 by a 63-37 margin; those earning over $80,000 opposed it 55-45; and those in the middle supported it by the same 52-48 margin as the electorate as a whole. Least surprisingly, voters under the age of 35 opposed Prop 8 by a 57-43 margin; those 55 and older backed it 56-44; and those in-between split evenly.
For some reason, the PPIC report doesn’t provide a breakout for African-Americans (though a variety of experts have disputed the 70% “yes” findings of the exit polls), but it does show Latinos supporting Prop 8 by a 61-39 margin. Evangelical Christians backed the initiative by an astounding 85-15 margin, while Catholics supported it by a less-overwhelming 60-40 margin. The ideological polarization was typical: 17% of self-described liberals voted for Prop 8, while 17% of self-described conservatives voted against it, and moderates split evenly.
One way of interpreting these results is to suggest that “low-information voters” swung the results in response to superior (and also factually misleading) pro-8 ads, or perhaps superior GOTV operations. But in any event, making it all about race, or about the betrayal of one element of the progressive coalition by another, would not appear to be warranted by the facts.

Even as Americans have focused on the transition to the Obama administration, our friends Up North in Canada have been undergoing a political drama with more twists and turns than a fictional potboiler.
When we last looked in on the Canadians in this space ten days ago, a grouping that included the centrist Liberals, the social-democratic New Democratic Party, and the Bloc Quebecois was poised to topple the minority Conservative government of Stephen Harper and form a virtually unprecedented coalition government. But Harper played the one card he had, and convinced Governor General Michaelle Jean to grant an adjournment of Parliament until January 26, forestalling a no-confidence vote that would have brought down his government. There’s a wonderfully detailed blow-by-blow account of events up to that point now available at Macleans.
As polls showed a backlash against the coalition maneuver, Liberals decided to accelerate their election (originally scheduled for May) to replace Stephane Dion as party parliamentary leader and putative Prime Minister of the coalition government. Former Harvard professor Michael Ignatieff–reportedly not a huge fan of the coalition–won with relative ease.
It remains anyone’s guess what will happen next month. If the coalition hangs together and forces a no-confidence vote, Jean could let them set up a government, or could order new elections (given the passage of a few more weeks since the last election in October), in which the Conservatives might have a significant advantage. Alternatively, the Liberals, with arguably the most to lose in new elections, could blow up the coalition and bide their time. It will be very interesting in Ottawa on January 26.
The one sure thing is that events have forced the Conservatives to backtrack on many elements of the neo-Hooverist and blatantly partisan economic package that precipitated the whole crisis. They’ve abandoned plans to end public financing of the political parties, and to temporarily ban public sector strikes. And they’re now talking about stimulating the Canadian economy, and maybe even helping the auto industry, instead of digging in their heels and welcoming a deep recession as a healthy opportunity to discipline the private and public sectors.
Perhaps the Tories’ counterparts in the U.S. should pay heed to this rethinking of neo-Hooverism, which may ultimately prove to have saved the day for Harper and his party.

I’m not as frequent a disparager of MSM political coverage as a lot of progressive bloggers, but I’ve gotta say, the efforts we’ve seen in the chattering classes to make the Blagojevich scandal somehow reflect poorly on Barack Obama doth smelleth to high heaven.
I mean, everything that’s come out on L’Affaire Blago has fully exculpated Team Obama from any complicity. And indeed, what we’ve learned shows the president-elect in a very good light as someone who never came close to wheeling-and-dealing with the guy, and more generally, had an unusually distant non-relationship with Blago considering that he was, after all, the elected and reelected governor of Obama’s home state, representing Obama’s party. On top of everything else, Obama made a rare intervention in state politics in the middle of his presidential campaign by pushing for enactment of an ethics law that appears to have convinced Blago that the window was closing on his pay-for-play games, leading to his latest and fatal bout of reckless knavery. Other than horse-whipping the governor publicly, it’s hard to say what more Obama could have done.
But as BarbinMD shows at DailyKos today, none of this has kept political reporters from darkly suggesting that the Blago scandal is casting some sort of giant shadow on the Obama presidency. As she explains, the basic media dynamic is that reporters find some Republican to say it’s a problem for Obama, and thus they have a “story” manufactured out of thin air and partisan malice.
Maybe all this represents sheer journalistic laziness, or the cynical calculation of reporters who know they can get serious ink by linking two big stories–the juicy Blago scandal, and the Obama transition. Or maybe it’s a sign that some folk in the MSM, still smarting from endless claims that they are “in the tank” for Obama, want to prove otherwise by coming up with an “Obamagate” before the man has even taken office.
But at some point, it really needs to stop, or get derisively hooted off the front page and the evening news.

The historian Theodore White once referred to the chairmanship of national party political committees as “fool’s gold” in terms of real power. And there’s no question that the DNC and RNC largely let elected officials and presidential campaigns–not to mention actual presidents–call most of the key shots.
But still, the national parties matter, particularly in periods of rapid political change, and especially at times when the party in question does not control the White House and/or Congress. That’s why Howard Dean’s election as DNC chair right after the 2004 elections mattered, and now why the campaign for the RNC chairmanship is drawing a large field and a lot of attention on the Right.
Over the last week or so, the major public buzz about the chairmanship race has involved two African-American candidates. Entering the field was former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, who offers conservatives the psychologically tempting proposition of displaying racial “diversity” while actually intensifying the ideological rigidity of the party. As Sarah Posner explains this week at the FundamentaList, Blackwell has intimate ties to the fringier elements of the Christian Right. And as administrator for elections in Ohio in 2004, Blackwell seemed to go out of his way to legitimize conspiracy theories that he helped Bush steal the state. His disastrous run for the Ohio governorship in 2006, and reports that George W. Bush himself thought of Blackwell as “a nut,” are probably not helpful, but also not disqualifying, to his bid to run the RNC.
But the bigger buzz involved efforts by opponents of former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele to make him unacceptable as chairman because of his ties to a “moderate” group called the Republican Leadership Council.

Read more…

With the holiday season full upon us, it’s time for finishing up gift shopping, negotiating family schedules, stealing some time from work (unless evaluations for layoffs are under way!), and maybe even, from our different traditions, remembering the “reason for the season.”
And oh yeah, it’s time to watch with horror the annual spectacle of Bill O’Reilly and other conservatives whining about the so-called “War on Christmas,” that conspiracy by atheist liberal retailers to persecute Christians by exposing them to non-sectarian seasonal mottoes like the deeply disturbing “Happy Holidays.”
If you’re interested, over at Beliefnet, I’ve done an angry post calling on Christians to wage war on all the “War on Christmas” nonsense, which is an insult to people who have really been persecuted for their faith, and exhibits an appalling ignorance of religious history.
And if you’re really in the mood to think about the intersection of the secular and religious in today’s society, mosey over to the Brookings Institution site and check out the useful study by columnist EJ Dionne and academic Melissa Rogers on how to structure a “faith-based organizations” initiative that doesn’t trample on church-state-separation principles.

Even as Republicans whip themselves up into a balanced budget frenzy, one of their most important constitutencies, the business community, isn’t fishing in. In fact, as Kevin Bogardus of The Hill reports, business lobbyists, who perhaps see a collapsing economy as a bigger concern than Fidelity to Conservative Principles, are cheerleading for a big economic stimulus effort:

Big business is lining up to support President-elect Obama’s plan to stimulate the economy with the biggest spending spree on roads, bridges and other infrastructure projects since the Eisenhower administration.
Business groups believe injecting funds into rebuilding America’s roads and highways could put thousands back to work at a time of rising unemployment. As a result, lobbyists from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) are asking lawmakers and Obama’s transition team to funnel federal funds to “shovel-ready” projects as the best way to stimulate the flagging economy.
“Our view is we need significant investments in the nation’s infrastructure to meet the needs of the 21st century,” said Aric Newhouse, NAM’s senior vice president of policy and government relations.
“Most important to us is that President-elect Obama is focused on putting money into real projects that are ready to go,” said Janet Kavinoky, director of transportation infrastructure at the Chamber.
Support from business groups that generally are aligned with Republicans could help move Obama’s stimulus legislation forward. House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) last week voiced opposition to public spending projects, arguing that “now is not the time to make matters even worse by asking taxpayers to pay for a slate of new government spending in the name of ‘economic stimulus.’ ” He argued for tax cuts to stimulate the economy.

In assessing Barack Obama’s pledges to govern in a bipartisan or post-partisan way, I’ve always assumed that he intended to appeal to rank-and-file Republicans rather than their supposed representatives in the GOP Caucuses of Congress. But it never occurred to me that business lobbyists would join the subversive effort to neutralize congressional Republicans and the conservative movement. Looks like that could be happening if the GOP continues its bizarre drift into aggressive Hooverism.

Via Mori Dinauer at TAPPED, we learn that MN Governor Tim Pawlenty, supposedly a voice of moderation in the national Republican ranks, has joined House Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence in calling support for a constitutional Balanced Budget Amendment critical to the revival of the GOP.
This is just bizarre.
Sure, I understand the powerful psychological necessity for the belief among conservatives that “excessive spending” was responsible for the entire disaster of the Bush Era of Republicanism. And yes, the BBA, now as in the past, is an “idea” with a tiresome and deeply dishonest utility as a way to trumpet one’s lust for fiscal discipline without the difficult and politically perilous task of identifying particular spending cuts.
But still, given the dire fiscal condition of the federal government even before the financial crisis and the onset of a deep recession, this is perhaps the worst time in national history to embrace a constitutional BBA. And that’s why virtually all economists, and such famously fiscal-disciplinary political forces as the Blue Dogs, are urging some serious deficit spending right now to avoid complete economic catastrophe. Yet Pence and Pawlenty seem well on their way to making support for a BBA yet another conservative litmus test for Republican politicians.
Pawlenty’s take on this subject is really deep: a BBA is like “cutting up the credit cards” as a way-station to eliminating debt. Emplanted in this metaphor is the belief that the federal government in seeking to avoid or mitigate the worst recession since the Great Depression, is like a consumer who just can’t stop splurging at Best Buy.
On the positive side, perhaps this sudden outbreak of GOP balanced-budget fever means that conservatives have finally abandoned their previous Big Thought on federal spending: the “Starve the Beast” theory that perpetual tax cuts would, by creating unsustainable deficits, automatically force future spending reductions, thus relieving conservatives of the necessity of identifying them. This is what I’ve called the political equivalent of a bottomless crack pipe.
But given the zero odds that a BBA would ever be enacted, along with the undiminished ardor of Republicans for new tax cuts as the eternal solution to every economic problem, maybe this is a distinction without a difference. Whether they are “starving the beast” or “cutting up the credit cards,” some of today’s “reviving” Republicans seem to be living in a world where basic arithmetic and logic have been forgotten.

For all my skepticism about the conservative “Rebuild the Party” movement, it does appear that its avatar, Patrick Ruffini of NextRight, is offering his party some very good advice. He now has a post up schooling Republicans who are just discovering the internet and the phenomenon of bloggers about the real New Media lessons of the Obama campaign:

The mainstream things people do online are 1) e-mail, 2) connect on Facebook and MySpace, and 3) watch video on YouTube…. [T]he advertising value of all Obama videos watched on YouTube was huge: over $46 million and bigger than the media budget for most primary and general election campaigns.
The difference between the Obama campaign and every other campaign is that they treated the online space as a mass medium, and not just a niche medium for the very interested. They announced online. They did their VP via text message. And they built up an e-mail list that was equal to almost 20% of their voters. They were maniacally focused on building up their e-mail list at every opportunity, requiring e-mail to attend events — and even setting up dummy registration pages late in the campaign for events where an RSVP wasn’t even required.

And as Ruffini points out, Team Obama paid relatively little attention to the blogosphere, and in fact, much of what they did bypassed bloggers and appealed directly not only to self-conscious “netizens” but to a broad swath of the technology-using public. Meanwhile, more traditional campaigns, and the Republican Party generally, still think of blogger-outreach as extremely hip:

I’ve been on numerous campaigns, some more open than others when it comes to technology. But even those campaigns that were more skeptical — and whose bunker mentality caused them to lose — always latched on to blogger relations. Blogger outreach is always the easiest thing to sell to a campaign because it’s like the thing that traditional communications people most understand — namely, pitching to reporters….
While new media is replacing old media, the model is still the same: campaigns passing along information to influential reporters/bloggers/Twitterati, and counting on them to spread the word to the general public. The Obama campaign showed that this model could be superseded. Through its 13 million strong list, the millions of people who would consume content all-digitally on YouTube, and the 2 million tied to the campaign umbilically through MyBO, the campaign built its own in-house messaging engine and didn’t need the netroots, either in the primary or the general. Of the dozens of moving parts to Obama’s online campaign, blogger outreach was probably the only one that got short shrift.

To put it another way, the Obama campaign typically treated bloggers as unnecessary “gatekeepers” that could be bypassed, much as bloggers have treated the would-be opinion-leaders of the MSM. And progressive bloggers were among the first to figure that out, and (to their credit) appreciate it.
I continue to think that Ruffini’s tech-heavy GOP reform effort can only get the party so far if it remains unwilling to reconsider its ideology and policy agenda. But he’s right to worry that too many Republican pols hear the words “new media” and think of it as it existed two or four years ago.

In case you need any more evidence that the Republican Party’s reaction to its 2006 and 2008 defeats has been to grasp more firmly than ever the mast of conservative ideological orthodoxy, check out this op-ed today from Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana, who was unanimously voted to the number three spot in the House Republican leadership recently. Much of it is the usual stuff about America being a center-right nation and the GOP losing because it’s abandoned its conservative principles. But Pence’s definition of a positive GOP agenda for this stricken nation is especially revealing:

We must develop new strategies for strengthening our armed forces and homeland security, and be willing to oppose any effort to use our military for nation-building or progressive social experimentation. We must again be the party of economic growth. The American people know we cannot borrow, spend and bail our way back to a growing economy. Republicans must offer alternatives for restoring growth through tax relief, expanded trade, spending discipline and no more government bailouts. We must detail our alternatives to Democratic plans to raise taxes and expand the federal government in education, health care and entitlements. Ideas like a balanced budget amendment, school-choice vouchers, health savings accounts and welfare reform should take center stage in the Republican agenda. And we must have a vision for defending the cherished values of life and marriage whenever they come under attack from the courts, the new administration or congressional liberals.

It’s hard to imagine measures more out of step with public opinion right now than a balanced-budget amendment, categorical opposition to any sort of “bailouts” (presumably including “bailouts” of middle-class voters in extreme economic distress, and, given all of Pence’s talk about spending discipline, probably any economic stimulus package), the hoary conservative pet rock of health savings accounts (at a time when millions of Americans are losing or will soon lose health insurance), and “welfare reform.” Is there really an outcry right now for private-school vouchers or for expanded trade?
There’s a lot of talk right now about Barack Obama trying to “rebrand” progressive policy goals as “the center.” If so, he’ll be pushing an empty door, because today’s GOP seems determined to avoid any confusion between the two parties by abandoning anything that might look like “the center.”