I’m sure that some of the Clinton administration veterans now on Barack Obama’s team are having a strong sense of deja vu as the incoming administration and congressional leaders work on an economic stimulus package. This was one of the first priorities of Bill Clinton’s presidency in 1993, and it went down to ignominous defeat in Congress in April of 1993 as Democrats failed to break a Republican filibuster against the package.
For those who remember this brouhaha (I was then a federal-state relations director working to gain stimulus funding for projects in Georgia), a particular evocative moment will occur today, when mayors come to Washington ro present a list of 4,600 “ready-to-go” infrastructure projects that merit immediate federal spending. A similar exercise in 1993, aimed at rebutting Republican arguments that infrastructure investments would take too long to materialize to affect the economy, wound up as a public relations disaster. In particular, Republicans seized on a handful of less-than-urgent sounding projects on the state and local project lists, including most famously a swimming pool in Midland, Texas, and described the whole stimulus package as “pork.”
Could the same thing happen this time around? Probably not, for at least three major reasons: (1) The economic situation in 1993 was not remotely as frightening as it is today. (2) the Clinton administration was self-restrained in pursuing a stimulus package because of concerns about the burgeoning federal budget deficit; as President-elect Obama said yesterday on Meet the Press, nobody’s much concerned about deficits right now. (3) The whole scale of things is vastly different, with the 1993 stimulus package amounting to about $15 billion, as opposed to the half-trillion-and-up estimates for the current effort. Individual projects tend to get lost in a package that large.
You’d like to think as well that the Obama team has learned the lesson of 1993, and won’t get sandtrapped by meaningless demagoguery on symbolic issues like the inclusion of a swimming pool in a large and merely illustrative list of “ready-to-go” infrastructure projects. Any stimulus to state and local government will likely be channeled through existing programs with their own existing eligibility rules aimed at separating true needs from “pork.” This should be made clear if fiscal hawks in either party try to made a big deal out of individual projects on somebody’s suggested list.
Still, at this very moment there re probably people in conservative think tanks or on Capitol Hill who are getting ready to go over the mayoral and other lists with yellow highlighters to identify some howlers. But there’s plenty of reason to think that this time around, it just won’t matter.

One of the most annoying aspects of the MSM’s false-equivalency habit in political commentary is the assumption that both major political parties have their “ideological purist” and “moderate” wings, which are of similar sizes and influence. It’s been obvious for a long, long time that the conservative movement has a hold on the GOP that cannot be remotely compared with any development among Democrats, and this disequilibrium has become if anything more apparent during the period of Republican decline over the last two election cycles.
I’ve already written at considerable length (most recently here and here) about the virtual unanimity in influential Republican circles that there’s nothing wrong with their party that a more rigorous conservatism–perhaps supplemented by use of new technologies and recruitment of a new generation of activists and candidates, but not new ideas–can’t solve. Sure, there are tactical disputes, and generational rivalries, and different loyalties to different conservative politicians, but nothing like real dissent, and thus nothing like real tolerance or openness to debate.
A good example is the call issued yesterday for a movement-conservative-sponsored debate among candidates for the RNC chairmanship battle, which two candidates eagerly accepted within hours, with the others sure to follow.
The original convener is, unsurpringly, the godfather of conservative litmus-testers, anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist. But he immediately reached out to the most active fellow-conservative critics of the Bush-era Conservative Establishment by saying: “We’re going to work with bloggers to develop the questions, and it will be open to CSPAN.”
Conservative warhorse Morton Blackwell of VA quickly chipped in with a suggested questionnaire that RNC chair candidates would have to fill out before participating in their public inquisition. Most of his questions seem to revolve around insuring that the RNC becomes completely sanitized of any sympathy for “non-conservative” opinions or candidates.
Imagine if you will what would happen if any self-styled left-progressive group made similar demands of candidates for the DNC chairmanship (and that’s hard to imagine, since such groups typically demand no more than a well-earned seat at the table, not total dominance). You can be sure that one or more of the candidates would spurn the instruction and run on a Big Tent platform, probably successfully. That couldn’t occur in today’s GOP.
The most interesting immediate objection I’ve read about Norquist’s call for a conservative-sanctioned debate was at the web page of hard-right Human Events magazine. A commenter named Mark said:

NO, it should NOT be televised. Not to the general public. Find a way to restrict viewing to registered Republicans only, and only THEN should it be televised.

Ah yes, that’s the spirit.

So: you think you have it tough with your adjustable-rate mortgage, your credit card balances, your skyrocketing health insurance premiums, and those neat little notes in your pay envelope threatening layoffs? Thanks to Vanity Fair’s Michael Shnayerson, we can now all feel better by feeling the pain of the former Masters of the Universe on Wall Street, who have lost far more than the rest of us will ever have.
Focusing especially on the big wheels of the now-defunct Lehman Brothers, Shnayerson provides a lot of snarkily delicious details about the painful lifestyle adjustments of the newly defunded:

Only months ago, ordering that $1,950 bottle of 2003 Screaming Eagle Cabernet Sauvignon at Craft restaurant or the $26-per-ounce Wagyu beef at Nobu, or sliding into Masa for the $600 prix fixe dinner (not including tax, tip, or drinks), was a way of life for many Wall Street investment bankers. “The culture was that if you didn’t spend extravagantly you’d be ridiculed at work,” says a former Lehmanite. But that was when there were investment banks. Now many bankers, along with discovering $15 bottles of wine, are finding other ways to cut back—if not out of necessity, then from collective guilt and fear: the fitness trainer from three times a week to once a week; the haircut and highlights every eight weeks instead of every five. One prominent “hedgie” recently flew to China for business—but not on a private plane, as before. “Why should I pay $250,000 for a private plane,” he said to a friend, “when I can pay $20,000 to fly commercial first class?”
The new thriftiness takes a bit of getting used to. “I was at the Food Emporium in Bedford [in Westchester County] yesterday, using my Food Emporium discount card,” recounts one Greenwich woman. “The well-dressed wife of a Wall Street guy was standing behind me. She asked me how to get one. Then she said, ‘Have you ever used coupons?’ I said, ‘Sure, maybe not lately, but sure.’ She said, ‘It’s all the rage now—where do you get them?’”

There are thousands of words more about the real estate crisis in Manhattan and the Hamptons, and the personal sagas of Lehman potentates who borrowed heavily against suddenly worthless stock compensation. And there’s even a poignant passage about the shadow being cast on the Xmas festivities of the newly not-so-rich:

Usually, December is the year’s most festive time in New York. Wall Street bankers either have their bonuses or know what they will be. Their wives have bought new gowns for the season’s charity balls—the Metropolitan Museum’s acquisition-fund benefit and the New York Botanical Garden’s Winter Wonderland Ball, and more, at ticket prices ranging from $400 to $15,000. Then it’s off to St. Barth’s for sun worshippers, Aspen for skiers.
But not this year.
Privately, some New York benefit organizers wonder if even half the stalwarts will show up. On St. Barth’s, rental villas are usually booked by early fall; this year, many were available as of early November. At Aspen’s St. Regis hotel, Christmas week was still available, at $13,920 for two.

And so the pain spreads from New York to Colorado and even to St. Barth’s.
There’s some rough justice in the fact that those who leveraged the entire U.S. economy into unsustainable debt also leveraged themselves into trouble, however manageable by most standards. But the real lesson to be learned, for the umpteenth time, is about the fatuity of the hardy American myth, born of a sort of corrupted Calvinism, that personal success is a sign of personal virtue or even of divine favor. As former Rep. Dick Gephardt once inelegantly but accurately put it: “A market is not a morality.” And unregulated capitalism does not create some sort of natural aristocracy of merit.

After watching a media appearance by Fred Thompson, Josh Marshall poses a very good question: do conservatives and/or Republicans actually favor a deep recession as a way to purge the economy of speculative excesses and debt?
While I am quite sure that Republicans are not about to hoist banners reading “Deflation Now!” a look back at the conflicts over the first “bailout” package and some of the GOP rhetoric surrounding the presidential campaign should make it clear that there is in fact a strong undercurrent of conservative hostility to any sort of relief measures that don’t simply involve tax cuts or deregulation. Those who convinced themselves that the mortgage crisis was caused by ACORN and poor and minority borrowers certainly are in no hurry to succor such Obama-supporting miscreants. More generally, there’s always been a large faction of conservatives who favored the occasional “healthy” recession to wring “excess demand” out of the economy. One of the innovations associated with the GOP’s embrace of supply-side economics was a partial abandonment of that point of view as “root canal” or “Hooverism.” But in the face of an actual recession, like the one St. Ronald Reagan presided over in 1981-83, there was no notable conservative support for any economic stimulus that didn’t focus on high-end or corporate tax cuts.
At Open Left today, Matt Stoller argues that conservatives aren’t that interested in economic stimulus because creditors actually benefit from debtors in a deflationary climate. That’s true so far as it goes, though it’s not clear the rank-and-file base of the GOP can currently be described as the “creditor class.” But I think there is a large and important kernal of truth in Matt’s analysis, not on economic grounds, but on moral grounds: conservatives like to think of themselves as sober and self-reliant people who don’t get themselves into the kind of financial trouble that merits government intervention. For those who don’t immediately face personal financial calamity in the current economy, it’s easy and very seductive to think of “economic stimulus” as identical to moral hazard, and deeply resent the use of tax dollars to relieve less worthy citizens of the consequences of their risky behaviors, particularly if a recession is thought of as good for the economy in the long run.
This is an old, old story in American politics. Go back to the convulsions of the populist era of the nineteenth century, and read what “hard-money” advocates had to say during deflationary periods. Economics aside, “goldbugs” constantly justified their views as synonymous with honesty and integrity and the sanctity of contracts. And that was a tradition that long predated Wall Street’s support for a gold standard. One of the bedrock principles of the Jacksonian Democrats was an identification of hard currency policies (and for that matter, opposition to general taxation) with the sturdy folk virtues of American farmers and artisans, who shouldn’t be fleeced by capitalist predators demanding easy credit for their wicked and greedy designs. Jacksonians viewed the Second Bank of the United States with a moral and even religious horror, as a Moloch sapping the vital instincts of the citizenry.
Stir into this ancient tradition the quintessentially American habit of treating financial success as proof of moral worth and even divine favor (the latter being a staple of today’s “prosperity gospel” preachers), and you certainly have the raw material for a robust conservative hostility to any government-enabled economic recovery, particularly now that it will occur under the auspices of a “liberal” Congress and administration.
Perhaps the deepening of the current recession will soon quiet such talk, as the damage spreads beyond the financial sectors and debt-ridden industries and encompasses millions of people who never took out a risky loan or ran up the credit cards (or more likely, for one reason or another, never had to). But just as Republicans like Phil Gramm couldn’t stop themselves from calling economically distressed Americans “whiners” a few months ago, even in today’s crisis there will be a significant group of Republicans betraying an affection for the bracing moral “lesson” being taught to the afflicted.

As the new administration and policymakers generally mull over options for a Great Big Stimulus Package to be enacted perhaps as early as next month, the role of state governments in impediing or speeding recovery needs more public attention than it’s currently getting. To make a long story short, states administer and partially finance a variety of federally-created programs and services that are intentionally counter-cyclical–costs rise as the economy sickens–but also labor under balanced budget requirements and borrowing restrictions that force them to cut those and other programs and services as revenues decline. So they are potentially working at cross-purposes from the feds.
I’m glad to see Matt Yglesias focus on this problem in the context of a column by Paul Krugman that suggests direct stimulus to consumers–e.g., tax rebate checks–or long-term infrastructure investments won’t stimulate the economy deeply enough or quickly enough. Here’s Matt:

This is one reason why I think it’s important for a stimulus package to have a heavy element of aid to state and local government and related agencies. The federal government contains a lot of automatic stabilizers (spending keeps going even though revenues fall) that should act as stimulus, but those stabilizers are offset by the pro-cyclical nature of state and local budget practices. A federal promise of aid will forestall state and local budget cuts, and thus allow the automatic stabilizers to work. All that can be mobilized on a rapid time scale.

I’d go further than Matt on this subject and observe that states have significant control over some of the “automatic stabilizers” that he’s attributing to the federal government (e.g., Medicaid, SCHIP and transportation programs); without some new assistance, states may not only counter-act the “automatic stabilizers” but could actually subvert them. That’s clearly what some Republican governors like Mark Sanford have in mind when they call for abolition of federal “mandates” rather than federal assistance: let us completely decimate Medicaid beyond what we are already allowed to do, and we’ll be fine!
So an effective stimulus package must not only provide heavy assistance to state and local governments; it must also be sufficiently conditional to ensure that the Mark Sanfords of the world don’t use the money to cut taxes as well as services.
As someone who worked for three governors back in the day, I can confidently point to another temptation facing state and local leaders that needs to be taken into account: the natural but completely absurd pretence that they can somehow turn their own economies around in the current global crisis. Sure, states and localities can critically influence their long-range economic prospects through a variety of policies such as educational and infrastructure investments. But their counter-cyclical clout is limited, and any “stimulus packages” enacted in the states, whether it’s Democratic service expansions or Republican tax cuts, will probably only make things worse unless they are carefully coordinated with federal policies.
You can’t take the politics out of politics, so don’t be surprised to see some governors and mayors talk and even act as though they can accomplish economic miracles far beyond their reach. After all, a whole generation of Republican governors and state legislators in the 1990s boasted of their fiscal and economic genius as they cut taxes and expanded services during a national economic boom that they and their own party did virtually nothing to produce. But federal policymakers need to ensure that their friends and enemies in state capitals and city halls are pulling in the same direction, particularly if they are to become, as they should be, the beneficiaries of vast new levels of federal relief.

As plans are made for the new administration and the next Congress, there’s an issue in the background that would have been considered important, oh, say, a bit over a month ago: election reform. Now, as Ben Adler reports in the New Republic, it’s not getting much if any attention in Washington:

[T]he 2008 election was rife with the same problems that have bedeviled others in recent years. It was only because Barack Obama’s margin of victory was so healthy that the country was not waiting with bated breath to see how many provisional ballots were counted. So while the White House will soon be filled with someone who has been a leader on addressing voting rights in the Senate, the public pressure needed to move legislation through the meat grinder on Capitol Hill is noticeably absent.

Adler goes on to provide a useful summary of steps Congress might take to regularize rules for voter registration, including national Election Day registration, and to finally resolve accountability concerns about voting machines. He also notes that the trend towards more stringent state registration requirements might call for national action to protect voting rights.
The time is right for election reform legislation in Congress, for the simple reason that Republicans no longer have the power to block it; some GOP members might, given their political problems, even be reluctant to oppose election reform.
But with all the competing priorities in Washington right now, it would require some serious public support to make election reform anything like a front-burner issue. That could happen, but only if it happens soon:

Seeing as most of these types of disenfranchisement disproportionately hurt Democrats, voting rights advocates are hoping that full Democratic control of Washington for the first time in 14 years will allow some of the recent bills to finally pass. But whatever options the new Congress and White House pursue, they’d be smart to do it soon. Even people who dedicate their lives to studying electoral reform admit that it is not an issue that captures the popular imagination for long. “When it comes to election administration,” says Hayward, “The public cares about it for three weeks out of every four years.”

Democrats should strike while the iron is hot, or at least tolerably warm.

At the New Republic site today, there’s a post from Michelle Goldberg, a perceptive observer of the Christian Right, about a message she got from that perennial presidential aspirant, Newt Gingrich:

As I was walking out the door yesterday evening, the phone rang. On the line was a woman from something called the National Committee for Faith and Family, contacting people, she said, on behalf of Newt Gingrich. She asked me to hold for a message from the great man, I dutifully agreed, and was treated to a recording of Gingrich hawking a full-length documentary called Rediscovering God in America. Then the woman came back on, saying, “Do you think we need to stop the momentum of anti-God liberals and Obama?” She wanted a donation of $35 to distribute the movie, which claims that the United States was founded on religious principals, and that separation of church and state is a myth fostered by devious subversives….
What’s surprising is that, at a time of serious collapse on the right, Gingrich is hitching his bid for renewed relevance to the most exhausted culture war tropes.

I cite this post as a reminder to myself and to other progressives that what may seem obvious to us about the condition of the Christian Right and other conservative factions may not seem obvious to them at all. To a lot of conservatives, the last two elections are speed bumps on the road to glory, or accidents, or indeed, validation that their “exhausted culture war tropes” about the insidious power of the godless liberals are entirely accurate.
I don’t know if Newt Gingrich feels that way himself, or is simply, as he has often appeared, a dedicated follower of fashion, not a real innovator, when it comes to conservative ideology. But Michelle’s right: we certainly haven’t heard the last of “exhausted tropes” like the claim that America was designed to be a “Christian Nation” until the liberals came along. They’ll plow that same old furrow so long as some crops come up.

Well, the Georgia U.S. Senate runoff is finally over, and while the result was no surprise, the margin for Republican Saxby Chambliss–57%-43%–was higher than most people expected.
A quick and superficial look at the numbers confirms the suspicion that Chambliss’ vote came back out for the runoff more strongly than that of Democrat Jim Martin. Total turnout was down about 40% from November 4. But in suburban Cobb and Gwinnett Counties, Chambliss’ margin over Martin actually went up 17,000 votes in each. Meanwhile, in the two largest urban/suburban counties where Martin needed a big vote, his margins declined significantly: by 77,000 in Dekalb and by 62,000 in Fulton. These four counties alone account for a significant share of the bloated Chambliss margin.
Since there was no exit polling, it will take a while to get the demographic breakdowns, but it certainly looks like the indications from early voting that African-Americans were not turning out for Martin as they did for Obama on November 4 held true on Runoff Day. We will also need to wait a bit to determine if Chambliss’s stop-Obama message actually turned some voters.

I was gratified to see that Patrick Ruffini of NextRight quickly responded to my post about the “Rebuild the Party” manifesto that he has been instrumental in drafting and promoting among Republicans. His main argument is that the notable absence of any ideological-debate component in his scheme for the revival of the GOP is a matter of “division of labor”: it’s not his job, and his suggestions for infrastructure building, internet-based organizing, and new faces are steps Republicans should take no matter where they wind up on ideology or policy.
That’s fair enough, though I must take issue with his “so’s-your-old-man” argument that “no such ideological introspection or self-criticism was present in the Obama victory.” Actually, there was a pretty robust debate throughout the primaries about Obama’s ideology, ranging from his “theory of change” to his positions on FISA, Pakistan, and residual troops in Iraq. And there was some distinct unhappiness among a decent number of progressives about his adoption of market-based approaches to both universal health care and climate change, and his refusal to categorically call for repealing No Child Left Behind or systematically overturning existing trade agreements.
But more importantly, the main point of my post was that Democrats have undergone a period of “ideological introspection” that’s gone on for many years, and that preceded and continued during the “netroots” reforms of this decade, while Republicans as a whole haven’t really reconsidered their ideological underpinnings since the late 1970s, other than to accuse GOP officeholders of various forms of heresy or infidelity. And the problem with Ruffini’s “division of labor” argument is that few if any other influential Republicans are dealing with the issues that he considers somebody else’s business.
Indeed, the dominant point of view in Republican circles right now is exactly what it has been since at least 1976: money and mechanics aside, there’s nothing wrong with the GOP that a more rigorous application of an essentially unchanging conservative ideology can’t cure, and if Republicans stray from that ideology, they deserve to lose. Just today, RedState’s Erick Erickson, an early and influential endorser of the “Rebuild the Party” plan, expressed this sentiment very clearly:

The conservative movement stagnated because it became, in essence, a component of the Republican Party and let the standard bearer of the party, George Bush, (not to mention Republican leaders in Congress) drive the agenda. When it became abundantly apparent that Bush was not driving the conservative agenda (hat tip to Rush Limbaugh who for years has been saying Bush is not a movement conservative) a lot of the conservative movement had become entrenched in the bureaucracy.
So we arrive where ostensibly conservative organizations are pushing the bailout scheme and socialized medicine programs.
It’s not a reset that we need. It is not new ideas, per se, that we need. It is a conservative movement that purges the dead wood and returns to pushing a conservative, not a Republican status quo, agenda. The ideas stand the test of time. They may need some dusting off, but time does not invalidate the idea. You do not raze a house with rotten beams. You tear out the rotten beams and support the rest of the house

You’d think by now that conservatives like Erickson would be wondering why they keep arriving over and over at this same juncture, where the “politicians”–whether it’s Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, George W. Bush, generations of Republican congressional leaders, and even Ronald Reagan at one juncture–sell out the “movement.” Is it, as David Stockman suggested in the title of his famous lament over the disappointments of the early Reagan years, just a matter of “the Triumph of Politics”?
I articulated my own theory on this phenenomenon in a post on conservative self-deception a few weeks ago.
Here’s the short version: there is not, and never has been, a popular majority that supports “core conservative principles” as defined by such goals as a major scaling-back of New Deal safety net programs, abolition of the federal role in major areas of governance, an elimination of progressive taxation and/or taxes on capital, the re-criminalization of abortion, or imposition of U.S. world-wide hegemony by force of arms. Republican politicians understand this, so they take what they can get and live with the rest. These “compromises” with basic political realities predictably lead, again and again, to large federal budget deficits, unpopular and poorly waged wars, nasty skirmishing on cultural issues, and above all, a large assortment of big government programs and agencies for which conservative pols can find no useful purpose other than as vehicles for vote-buying and patronage. This isn’t so much a matter of ideological infidelity or personal “corruption” as it is the natural result of entrusting government to people who get themselves elected now and then–typically under false flags of “reform” or “compassion” or “strength”–when Democrats screw up, but then have no real agenda for governing that the public will accept.
So here we are yet again. Every time George W. Bush sought to govern as a “true conservative”–e.g., trying to privatize Social Security, save the life of Terry Schiavo, make the Middle East a pro-Western paradise, leave emergency management to the state and local governments of Louisiana, rely on suppy-side economics to avoid fiscal calamity, govern as though the Democratic Party did not exist other than as a punching-bag–he failed. Had he been more rigorously a “true conservative,” he would have failed even more dramatically. And yet we are being told that he, like his father, failed only because he never bought into conservatism in the first place.
This conservative interpretation of events is getting very old by now. And if they do not at least reconsider it, then all the internet savvy and outreach and infrastructure and money and young, diverse candidates on earth will not save them, and they’ll start the cycle all over again next time Democratic mistakes give them the opportunity to govern.

I’m with Ta-Nehisi Coates on this one: it’s just confusing gibberish to talk, as Fred Barnes has recently, of Hillary Clinton representing the “center-right of the Democratic Party.” I mean, the “center-right nation” argument is ridiculous enough, without exporting that term directly into the heart of the Donkey Party.
In common parlance, the terms “left” and “right” are not purely relative terms. They convey an association with, respectively, liberal or progressive ideology or conservative ideology. Unless party factions are large and hardened enough to split into three distinct ideological tendencies (left-center-right) that completely cross party lines, there’s no good reason to use the term “left” for Republicans or “right” for Democrats. That way lies total confusion.
Sure, there are a significant number (generally a bit over 20%) of rank-and-file self-identified Democrats who also self-identify as “conservative,” given the usual “liberal-moderate-conservative” choices. And there are a smaller percentage of Democratic elected officials who might fit that description; the Blue Dog Coalition in Congress calls itself an assemblage of “moderate and conservative Democrats.”
But applying that term or “center-right” to people like Hillary Clinton, who disagrees with Republicans on virtually every major issue, is absurd. You might as well call John McCain a representative of the “center-left of the Republican Party.”
The truth is that when you hear someone refer to “conservative Democrats” or “center-right Democrats,” it’s almost always intended as an insult if it comes from a progressive or as a back-handed compliment if it comes from a conservative. In the case of Fred Barnes, it’s of a piece with a lot of the praise being currently and temporarily dished out by Republicans towards Barack Obama’s appointments. It’s mainly a provocation designed to increase tensions among Democrats. We shouldn’t fall for it.